Turkey Day!

As promised, here is a post from the glorious Rushville, Illinois. Where 3,300 friendly people call home! :-P So it's Turkey Day, a day to give thanks for everything great in our lives. Make sure you let everyone around you today how much you love them :)

So, after the dorm closed down at 5pm Friday there was one kid left, Howard. Howard is from Oregon. Oregon is not near Illinois. So I adopted him as my brother for the week. We went to a retreat over the weekend called Chrysalis, which was totally a great weekend. We then spent a few days in the dorm, and yesterday we came back to this small little town I call home. Last night was full of DDR (of course) and Dodgeball (the movie). Today, we took Howard out to my uncle's farm. My uncle farms somewhere in the vicinity of 4,000 acres I believe. He has big tractors. City kid + big tractors = good times. Here's some pics :)

Howard in the cockpit

Rollin' on 40's BOYYYYYYYYYYYY


All smiles on the farm adventure



That's all for now. I think the Napping Gods are calling me to join them :)

SLOW DOWN!!!!

So I'm basically just waiting for life to slow down, which is about 3 weeks away. I thought that after Sober Saturday and today's Hunger Banquet were over I would be good to go. WRONG. Meetings keep piling up, final projects of my bachelor career are looming in the future, and much more. On a good note, Turkey Break is very soon and I don't have class again until Nov. 28th. (There I go with my 14 day breaks again). Over Turkey Break I will be working on Jen and I's wedding website, registering for our gifts, spending time with my family (more specifically my brother and his wife, who live in NYC. Sadly, my brother's newly acquired original Pacman arcade game will not make the trip for me to spend time with), and just getting stuff wrapped up around here for 2005.

So, here's what's been going on since I last posted (has it seriously been a week??). After resigning from Blue Crew, which was pretty bittersweet, I thought I would have more free time. Last Wednesday my great friend Kyle and I were asked by the Chancellor to be chauffeurs for the U of I Board of Trustees, who were in town for their Thursday meetings. So we got to take a 15 passenger van downtown to the Hilton, pick them up, and take them to the Governor's Mansion for supper. We returned a few hours later to pick them up, and supper was running long. The lady who was coordinating the rides back to the Hilton at the mansion had the waitress get us some dessert. Enter the greatest apple pie of my life, simply amazing. We got to eat it in one of the study/library areas that are roped off, so we had to be super careful to not spill any on the rug from the 1800's or something like that. So that was cool, and the apple pie was awesome. After that we took a tour of the mansion with the Board of Trustees and got to laugh at a lot of bad jokes. The next morning I was the "security" for parking, making sure they all got their reserved spots. So that was cool, it is always nice to meet and talk to the people who are running the U of I system, even if it is just small talk. It's great to brag about UIS and how great it is to the other trustees from Champaign and Chicago, I think they are really starting to realize that we have something special going on here.

Saturday
Ohh yes, Sober Saturday. Sober Saturday was put on by STARS (Students Talking about Remaining Sober), a Twosouth-driven organization on campus. We had sumo wrestling, 2 root beer kegs, DDR, Karaoke, board and card games, and a lot of great food. I'll let the pictures do the talking here, but it was seriously awesome. There were about 130-150 students there throughout the night. Most events lately have seemed to have low attendance because of bad publicity or events targeted to the wrong audience, so it was good to have something big and awesome.

Me, tapping Root Beer Keg #1


Seriously, how awesome is it to have this 50 ft from your dorm room?


Kyle goin' freak nasty on the DDR pad


Craig and Nathan enjoying the festivities


Julia, Drew, and Yana doing their thing on the mic


You know he means business when he throws the helmet off


Jen doin' the mandatory RA Keg Stand


Sumo in the front, DDR x 2 in the back


Sweet. What a great event, and thanks to everyone who helped plan or came.

Today was the Oxfam America Hunger Banquet, sponsored by Twosouth and the Office of Student Volunteers, Service, and Civic Engagement. The office was impressed with our volunteer efforts at the recent blood drive and asked us to organize, plan, and run this event because they needed some motivated kids to get the job done. So we did it. It was quite a bit of planning since none of us had ran one before, but it turned out great. We had 40-45 people attend the event, which is a part of Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week, going on this week at UIS. And of course, pictures.

60% of the participants were considered low-income, and had to eat their meal here on the floor. And by meal I mean white rice and water.


Looking at the "lunch" of rice.


Keynote speaker and AWESOME UIS BLOGGER ASHLEY ROOK!!!


Me at the podium, fielding a few questions.


Another AWESOME BLOGGER JORDAN HALEY enjoyed the high-income supper, a catered 4-course meal of sparkling grape juice, tea, lemonade, water, salad, chicken with pesto, green beans, potatoes, and a cookie with 15% of the participants.


... While they got rice.


An interesting discussion followed, it was very worthwhile and very educational.


In other news, our men's basketball team won tonight 110-67. Check the stats out here and the story here. Any team who can force a 4:1 turnover ratio and shoot 71% from the 3 point line is going to have a pretty good season I think.

That's all for now folks. The next update will be from Sunny Rushville, IL. See you then!

Go Stars,
Brad

It's Over!

That's right, fall sports are over. And also with the end of fall sports comes the end of my reign of Blue Crew president. Since I am graduating in less than 40 days, I decided to go ahead and hand it over to the new co-presidents, Chad and D Pratt. Chad has been side by side with me since Blue Crew started, and D Pratt has been around since he got here. They are going to do great! I will be mentoring them along the way for awhile until they get things off the ground and going.



Thanks for the memories Blue Crew!

Random Musings

Whoaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
Less than 40 days until I graduate. That is crazy.
I am really glad to be done in 3.5 years, though. I like to get to the point and move on in life, not wait around for opportunities to find me.
Tomorrow I have 5 meetings and a post season volleyball game to go to. I love being involved!
I am beginning a 6 day weekend, and it will be pretty darn good.
I spent the past weekend at an amazing an uplifting retreat for an event called Chrysalis. It was definitely needed. I get to go back in 9 days.
CSF had its Tacky Prom, and I heard it went swimmingly.
The boys soccer team is done, which is no fun.
I am extremely tired after getting about 9 hours of sleep in the past 3 nights.

Good night!

When was Halloween??

So I totally missed Halloween. But it was worth it. :) I went back down to help with Katrina relief and cleanup from Oct. 27-31st. I went with 7 totally amazing UIS students, and we had an absolute blast getting to know each other, helping people out, and working 10-12 hour days.

We left on Thursday, shortly after lunch. I was in charge of stalling Mae Noll, the Resident Director of LRH, because she was selected as Employee of the Month! So we held her until the party was organized, and hit the road.

Let's get this party started!


The ride down was rather uneventful, lots of sleeping, reading, and singing. Mostly sleeping for those of us in the back row.


We got to the church in Mandeville around midnight on Thursday, and went straight to bed. Friday we woke up very early and headed to the church in Slidell that we would be working out of. We got our first house assignment and went straight to work!! We had to tear a hardwood floor out that was on top of another hardwood floor. We had to remove all the walls and all of the baseboards, along with some pretty disgusting linoleum. All in all it went well. We finished the house by noon Saturday, The owner of the house, Russell, built the house himself in 1955. After a divorce, his wife got the house. His kids gained possession of it after she passed away. Russell said he has started going to church for the first time in 30 years after "all these Baptists started showing up to help."

Mold Level = 134202502%

Outside of house #1


Moving on to house #2 Saturday afternoon was quite an obstacle. The house HAD NOT BEEN TOUCHED since the hurricane came through. It was way too much for us; we did not have the proper respirator masks to handle the capacity of mold and mildew. Everything in the house was still wet, it had not yet been aired out. We humbly accepted the defeat and moved on to another house.

Totally overwhelming to see and smell.

I think the house was rather messy to begin with...


So on to house #3! It had a substantial amount of work done to it already, but unfortunately the work was not done well. i.e. The walls and ceiling were removed, however they didn't really take any care or effort in removing them in large pieces or cleaning up after they removed them. So the house was just piles of stuff and the baseboards had not been removed, so basically it was a mess.

Before:

After:


Before:

After (of course the guys are playing on their new hill):


Before:

After:

Gigantic cockroaches were in the wall. They were fast.

Talking with the owners:


We worked there Sat. afternoon and all day Sunday and then the trip was unfortunately over. Just like last trip, we thought "If we just had one more day....". That is why we are going back again :) Dec. 18-23, trip #3. There is so much to do down there, but the news has stopped covereing the situation so everyone thinks things are back to normal. WRONG!!!!!!! That couldn't be further from the truth! People are no better off than they were 6 weeks ago. If you have time, GO HELP THEM!!!

Probably my favorite part of the trip was going back to the house we worked on in September. We got to meet the people who owned it, which was a great blessing. It was so nice to see who you had been working for. Unfortunately, we did not get a picture with them :( :( :( :( :(

And now for some random pictures from the trip, in no particular order:

The team!


Jeff with a gun he found:


Matt claims victory on the pile:


This car got slug-bugged:


Brad is an amazing Axer:


Shelly cleans; Matt looks for souvenirs?


We wanted to try them:


Poor flag :(


Some funny halloween decorations:


The ride home:


And a huge metal barge that was at least 2-300 yards away from the main waterbody:



That's all for this post kids! Go Stars!
Brad