Hello everyone! The semester is winding down, but finals are rapidly approaching. We have only about 15 more days before we’re off for the summer. As the weather gets better and better, it is becoming more and more difficult to study and thoughts turn to summers fancies. The view up here just keeps getting better as well. It’s very hard to sit in a philosophy class and not stare at Mt Hood shimmering in the sunlight all day. Alas, I still have papers waiting to be written, so I must be patient for a little while longer. In the mean time, I’ve been trying to keep in shape by running and having fun by playing the guitar outside on our patio while chatting with the other guys. My summer assignment will not be Cornelius as first thought, but Holy Redeemer church in North Bend, Oregon which is basically Coos Bay. It’s in the southern part of the state, right on the coast and the parish is on a big hill overlooking the ocean. I’ll be living with and helping the local parish priest. It’s unclear what that’ll be right now, but it’ll probably be visiting the sick, helping with the teen group, and whatever other summer activities they have going on. I already have plans to helping with a summer vocations retreat down in Grants Pass for a week. I went to visit the parish last weekend and it’s a beautiful parish full of wonderful people. It’s only an hour or so drive from California and the redwoods, and the whole area is chocked full of natural beauty. I’ll be moving down there to live there around the middle of June. Why not right away? Well... As another fine example of how God provides - I just had a windfall come my way. A fellow seminarian has a friend in the airline industry and they had some soon to expire first-class passes. Well, needless to say I snatched one up for DIRT cheap and will be flying in style to Italy on May 16th for half a month. This will be my second trip to Italy, but as a seminarian I’ll be able to see and stay a lot of places I couldn’t before. So far it’s just me and my friend and our plans are to leisurely tour the country visiting a lot of the pilgrimage sites in Rome, Assisi, Florence, Sienna, Venice, Milan and so forth. He lived there for a year, so he knows all the great places and has a number of friends still there. We’ll be doing a good deal of relaxation and sight seeing as well. More on that as it approaches. After months (really years) of promising, I have put all my photos up on a web site. It is quite a web site. I sifted through 10 cd’s of digital pictures and have around 1000-2000 pictures up from the past few years. This work was predominately accomplished after I wrote some automatic page generators and image manipulation scripts and let them run between classes. It was nice to know that even after a year, my programming skills haven’t gotten rusty yet. Needless to say, head on over to: http://www.math.purdue.edu/~mpf and check it out. The server is back east, so sometimes the bandwidth isn’t so great, but it’s very reasonable most of the time. Please let me know what you think and if you have trouble. I’ve done some preliminary testing and everything seems fine. I’m not quite done with it yet, but it’s good enough for now. The rest I’ll do at my leisure. Keep an eye on it because from now on I’ll be keeping it updated with the latest pictures. In other news, I have been doing a number of interviews with the Oregonian (the local newspaper). They have been following me around trying to get an impression of what an average student’s first year is like. So I’ve had reporters come give some pretty long interviews. They’re interviewing a number of the faculty and staff as well; so I’m not sure what exactly they’ll use from my interviews (maybe nothing!). I’m not sure when they’ll be running the article or what the focus will be; but it looks like it’ll be on Sunday in two weekends. Life on this hill has been very exciting. We had a big international food festival where everyone cooked up things from their home countries or traditions. We had Vietnamese, Irish, Hispanic (various Central American), Brazilian, Italian, Samoan and a whole slew of other foods. We’re currently gearing up for a big appreciation dinner tomorrow night for the faculty and staff – black tie and suits. The tulip fields around this area are TOTALLY in bloom right now. I have a set of photos on my web site, but if you live in the area – I highly recommend the Wooden Shoe bulb company just north of Mt Angel. The guy that took pictures from the Oregonian loved it and so did my brother-in-law who came to visit. Picture acres of tulips of every conceivable color. It’s like heaven came down and kissed the hillside. Since they have just about finished restoring Anselm hall, we’ve been going through huge room lotteries. The college guys are moving back up to the hill, the graduate students are moving to the new building, and we’re moving into the old building. With all this moving, the only good way to be fair was by lottery. Being the oldest class in our building, our names were picked first and a bunch of my close friends squared away rooms right next to each other. The archbishop of Portland came down to congratulate our deacon Angel Perez on his immanent ordination to the priesthood (end of May). We all went out to a small family-run Hispanic restaurant and ate tons of awesome Mexican food. They were friends of Angel’s and it’s been absolutely wonderful to see how the Hispanic community has been getting behind him and supporting him. I hope you are all doing well. Please send me some emails telling me how you all are. I love hearing from you all. After classes let out, I’ll have a week in the area to goof around before I leave for Italy. I’d love to come visit you all for lunch or whatnot; so let me know if you’ll be around. God bless, |