Reasons (well, just one reason) why in the Christmas season...

Angels from the realms of glory
Wing your flight o'er all the earth
Ye who sang creation's story
Now proclaim the Messiah's birth

Come and worship
Come and worship
Worship Christ, the newborn King!

Merry Christmas!

Poor Neglected Blog

Reasons why my blog has been neglected...

1) Commuting takes up too much of my time. I've been reading a lot on the train which is nice and I listen to C-Span now, because I'm a nerd.

2) I live near my family now! This is the most exciting part of my move back to the east coast. I'm working on this post while watching the West Virginia game with my parents and sister.

3) I should also mention that I live near my college friends who are just great.

4) Card games. Tom and Alyson have taught me to play Skip Bo and a bunch of other card games. Skip Bo is my favorite, because I can actually win. Right now I'm slightly disturbed because I can't make sense of the name.

5) Research. More research. Then after that, more research. I should be working on my project right now, but I'm not because I value you few and faithful readers and well, I like to procrastinate.

Maybe my new year's resolution will be to create a new banner. Any suggestions?

Felicidades Brook y Sara

My "little" brother got married last weekend to my wonderful new sister-in-law. It was a really beautiful wedding complete with my brother crying as Sara walked down the isle, to the ring bearer who wanted to know why he wasn't wearing a bear suit. Perhaps ring carrier would have been a more helpful title for a 3 year old.

The pastor, who my brother has known since high school, reminded us that Brook and Sara will never be enough for each other. That no matter how much they love each other, Christ is the only one who will ever completely fulfill them. He also told them to look at one another through the eyes of Christ. It was a good message for all of us to hear, married or not.

So here is a picture of the beautiful bride and the hairy groom.



My brother asked my dad to grow a beard for the blessed event. He has never had a beard in my lifetime, so I had to get a picture. My mom hated the beard, it came off the day after the wedding.



These two are next.



That's my little sister Katy and her fiance Jon, they're getting married in May if they ever decide on a reception site.

Fall is finally here!

Now that I'm blogging about it, the temperature will probably return to 80 degrees tomorrow. But today it was sunny and 65. This is my favorite season! Mostly because there�s no humidity (at least in Maryland) and you know that Thanksgiving and Christmas are right around the corner. I�m still waiting for the leaves to change, which is my other favorite thing about fall.

In other news, I'm inundated with information about newborn hearing screening these days. I'm giving a very brief presentation on hearing screening to a group of undergraduates. Any ideas on how to make them interested in a topic like this?

Time to go enjoy a nice pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks. Happy fall everyone!

Reasons why I'm up so late...

I blew up the kitchen...

Well, almost. I don't get along well with electric ranges. I was boiling some green beans on the front burner and there was a pyrex casserole dish on the back burner. Little did I know there was a DVD inside the pyrex casserole dish. How did I find out about the DVD? Well I heard a loud pop and when I turned around there was glass all over the kitchen, smoke coming out of the stove and burning plastic, from the DVD cover. I hear pyrex isn't supposed to explode, but that was not my experience this evening.

My mom's car was almost "stolen"...

My mom came downstairs at 11:30 this evening because she was sure there was someone in her car. She was getting ready to go outside and confront this car thief (try not to think about how potentially unsafe this might be) when I realized that her keys were sitting on the table and my pseudo-brother was playing with the key tag earlier trying to "mute" me. He managed to not only unlock, but turn on the car using the key tag. Those things work from quite a distance.

I had to watch Grey's Anatomy...

The kitchen incident this evening kept me from getting to my parents house in time to watch The Office. Fortunately, my dad threw in a tape just in time to catch most of Grey's Anatomy. I had to fast forward through an entire West Virginia football game in order to watch, but it was worth it. I was a little disappointed towards the end of the episode. We'll see what happens next week.

What I'm listening to

Last night, at the suggestion of my music guru, some friends and I went to the Rams Head Tavern in Annapolis to hear a band called The Duhks.





You can listen to their music on myspace and facebook, but just skip that part and go buy the CD, they're amazing, probably one of the best bands I've heard live.

Reasons Why St. Louis is so great...

Okay St. Louis readers, you just don't understand how good you have it! I was a self proclaimed East Coast snob when I moved to St. Louis. I missed the ocean and the mountains being a few hours apart, I missed sushi happy hour, and good public transportation. But after living there for almost 5 years, I realized that St. Louis has a lot to offer, especially considering how affordable it is to live there.

So this post is for those who might not be able to find St. Louis on a map (it's in Missouri for starters) and for those who are disillusioned with their city. I know there's no ocean nearby, it's hot and humid, and Pujols didn't play last night in the All Star game, but consider these reasons why St. Louis is a great city:

1) General cost of living, especially housing. When I moved to St. Louis I lived in a two-bedroom/two bath in the CWE for a few hundred dollars less than what some of my friends were paying back in DC for one bedroom apartments.

2) The Pageant- Nickel Creek, Patty Griffin, Sufjan, Death Cab...and a ton of other great artists, all at a small affordable venue.

3) Free parking at the metro lots! The metro system has expanded and is reliable, and you can park for free in the lots there. In DC it's $3.50 a day at most metro parking lots.

4) Summer - I know it's hot and humid. But it's hot and humid in a lot of places and St. Louis offers the Jazz in the Botanical Gardens, Muny Outdoor Theatre, St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, Tuesdays at the History Museum, and all sorts of other free stuff.

5) Salsa Dancing Good venues in reasonably safe neighborhoods. Cover charges are not usually more than $10.

6) Cardinals Baseball!!! I know we haven't had the best season ever, but things could still turn around.



Go Cards!

Here are a few more reasons why I miss St. Louis...

Blood Water Mission

Check out this video, made by a few of my friends in Baltimore. I would write more, but the video speaks for itself.



To find out more go to -

http://www.bloodwatermission.com/

They're more like guidelines anyway...

My pirate name is:

Iron Charity Bonney

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
part of the fidius.org network

Too bad the deadlines and standards for my research aren't more like guidelines. Oh well, a pirate's life isn't easy! I think I like my new pirate name. Here is the description that went along with my name. I might replace that last "Arr" with "Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum".

A pirate's life isn't easy;it takes a tough person. That's okay with you, though, since you a tough person. You can be a little bit unpredictable, but a pirate's life is far from full of certainties, so that fits in pretty well. Arr!

Oh Heavenly Day

I wish I had the words to describe the Patty Griffin concert on Friday night. But since I'm writing this during my "research" time, I'll leave that up to some of the better writers in our little blogosphere who were at the concert as well. Most of you know how much I love the Pageant, so there isn't a better venue for me to see one of my favorite artists. Here is one of the songs she sang on Friday. You can hear this one and a few others from her new album on myspace.

Heavenly Day

Oh Heavenly day
All the clouds blew away
Got no trouble today
With anyone

The smile on your face
I live only to see
It's enough for me baby
It's enough for me
Oh heavenly day
Heavenly day
Heavenly day

Tomorrow may rain with sorrow
Here's a little time we can borrow
Forget all our troubles in these moments so few
Oh we can right now the only thing that all that we really have to do

Is have ourselves a heavenly day
Lay here and watch the trees sway
Oh can't see no other way
No way
No way
Heavenly day heavenly day heavenly day

No one on my shoulder
Bringing me fears
Got no clouds up above me
Bringing me tears
Got nothing to tell you
I got nothing much to say
Only I'm glad to be here with you
On this heavenly heavenly heavenly heavenly heavenly day
Oh all the troubles gone away
Oh for awhile anyway
For awhile anyway
Heavenly day
Heavenly day
Heavenly day
Heavenly day
Heavenly day
Oh heavenly day


To those who missed the show at the Pageant you can catch Patty on the Tonight Show on April 10th or the Ellen DeGeneres show on April 12th. And for you readers out there in the DC area, you can still catch her live at the Warner theatre on April 17th.

Shout Out to the New Blogs Back Home

I've been a little homesick ever since my supervisor corrected my Baltimore accent last week while we were doing some auditory training. I've tried to correct words like "on" and "water" and most of the time I do, but every once in a while the accent comes back.

Anyway, since I've been thinking about home, here are a few additions to the blogs I've been reading.

Check out my brother's blog where he finally posted some new pictures.

http://www.buxtone.blogspot.com

A friend of mine is finishing up a trip to Ethiopia to work on a documentary. You can check out his thoughts and some preliminary video work here:

http://www.dangerding.blogspot.com

Check out my friend Brody's blog for some great music links, and also because he's trying to make people aware of what's really going on in other countries.

http://www.brodybond.blogspot.com

Go Terps!

Final Score:

Maryland 72 Duke 60




Go Terps! See the story at espn.com

Cleaning Tips from 4142

Cleaning Tip #1 - Drink spills on the carpet (stolen from the guys of 715A)

Cover the spill with salt. Go ahead, just dump salt all over it like you used to do to slugs out in the backyard. Leave the salt there for a day and then vacuum over the spot. It worked really well on coffee on our carpet. You do have to pour the salt on right after the spill for it to work.

Cleaning Tip # 2 - Cleaning out residue from the coffee maker (from some website)

The website we looked at gave the following directions: Take an equal number of cups of water and white vinegar and put them in the water chamber. Turn the coffee maker on and let it brew halfway through. Turn it off and let it sit for an hour, then turn it on to finish brewing. After that run one or two pots of water through the coffee maker to clear out any vinegar. Note: I had to run about seven pots of water through the coffee maker to get the vinegar smell out! I don't know if I did something wrong, or if the website just wasn't very reliable. My advice is to use less vinegar. In the end our coffee no longer tastes burned, so I guess it worked out.

Happy Cleaning!

Some Great New Blogs

I wish I new how to make my blog cooler by adding side stuff or changing the colors. But for now I'll have to be content by adding some of the blogs I've been reading to my links section. I also alphabetized them because I'm a nerd...

I was attacked mid-post by my roomate's boyfriend, who is also a dear friend. However, I'm a little scared of him at the moment since he's been belching away all evening. The great thing about it is when Heather tells him how gross he's being but she can burp almost as loud as him. This is probably more personal information than you'd like to know about all of our lives. Perhaps it's more than they'd like me to share...but considering Lloyd took over the keyboard to type "lloyd says hi", I guess they can deal.

Sometimes there's tension living with a roomate who has a serious boyfriend. I don't always love coming and wondering do they want to be alone, or is it okay to spend time with them? There's also the not so pleasant, "wow, I wish I had what they have" feelings of jealousy that creep in more often than I'd like. But then there are the pizza and beer nights, with protective older brother comments, and just laughing and enjoying each other's company. Those nights remind me what a blessing it is to have them both around. It's been a process of having fun, and having deep talks but also being frustrated and annoyed with one another. The process teaches us how to forgive, and accept forgiveness and really learn how to love.

Gotta love YouTube

This is great, hopefully it won't offend any classical music fans out there. I actually really enjoy Pachelbel's Cannon in D. By the way, I couldn't seem to listen to the entire thing on YouTube, it kept stopping every few seconds. Anyone have any thoughts on what's wrong with my computer?

Reasons why you shouldn't put Q-tips in your ears...

We had a lovely lunch after church on Sunday prepared by one of the guys at South City. During lunch one of my engineer friends really tested my memory of anatomy and physiology in his questions about how the ear works. Inevitably, the use of Q-tips will comes up in conversations like that, which brings me to the purpose of this post. Please stop putting Q-tips in your ears!
Here are the reasons why...

#1 - It says it right there on the box: Warning: Do not insert into ear canal, could result in injury (or something to that affect). If that warning isn't enough for you, keep reading.

#2 - The wax is supposed to be there! Ear wax is produced by the ear canal to protect the ear from bacteria and foreign objects.

#3 - You'll just push the wax back further into your ear canal. After it goes back into the bony part of your ear canal, it's much more difficult to remove.




#4 - If you're causing a coughing reflex (like Tanya's friend mentioned in her comment) when you use Q-tips, you are putting the swab in too far. There is a branch of the Vagus nerve that runs just below the ear canal wall. Touching the ear canal near this nerve could cause a coughing reaction known as Arnold's Reflex.

If you're concerned that you have too much wax in your ears, go to a doctor or an audiologist. Your primary care physican or an audiologist can usually remove ear wax for you. Just stick to the idea of not putting anything smaller than your elbow in your ear!

On a totally unrelated note, I just want to say how proud I am of VA Tech for beating Duke in overtime on their court!