A few notes today (I seem to be getting back into this blogging again). First I had a meeting this morning I forgot to tell you all about yesterday. Another thing I’m involved on here at campus is a design comittee for a new residence hall. You can find our meeting notes (and architechtual drawings when they get posted in a few days) here we had a finial design development meeting today and will be picking interior and exterior finishes on May 2. I’ll post again when I see that the building design plans have been uploaded because those will be more interesting than the meeting notes that are on the site now.

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In an effort to do something interesting and different today I kept track of the totally (mostly) unrelated to what’s going on things that went through my head today while I was doing other things, you know the things you think about in the back of your head. Some other day I’ll keep track of and talk about the things actually related to the events of the day. Anyway maybe you’ll gain some insight into my insanity or head; maybe you’ll just be amused. Either way it was a very interesting activity to occupy my day.

This morning at work we had about 550 middle school student council members from the region at a workshop and motivational speaker. Part of my job was to help separate them into groups and direct them around the building for their breakout sessions. As I was down in the room standing, leaning against the doorpost, waiting to do this and looking over them I considered how much I love working with kids who are excited about learning. I thought maybe I should go into teaching after all. This is a struggle in me every time I get a chance to interact with students. I do seem to know I wouldn’t like the politics or the bad attitudes of teaching either though. As much as I like the idea of inspiring and leading future generations of students, exposing them to the wonders of the world I don’t think I will actively pursue a teaching career at this time. Maybe at some point in the future I’ll pick up a teaching certificate and do it on the side or in retirement. Anyway I was just struck by the influence I can have on a young person’s life seeing this group of students today.

The next thing that ran across my mind was sitting in speech class. We had to turn in these montage projects I spoke of last time, and yes I did just fine on mine. Anyway I was awed by the power of non-verbal communications and my ability (from what people in class were saying) to drive a point home in a short paragraph. Another thing I thought about in speech class today was how much I would have liked to get up and do an semi-improv informative speech. While my professor was talking about visual aids for our next speech I was looking at his Aquafina water bottle and was thinking how easy it would be for me to get up, use that as a visual aid and talk for several minutes about how plastic pop bottles are made, just using the knowledge in my head. Gosh I love talking to people, teaching them about science, technology and the world around them. How many of them have ever really looked at a pop bottle and wondered how it’s made?

Later in the day, during lit class in fact, I had a “college moment” as I like to call them. These are when I realize that I really am in college; you know what you look towards for your entire schooling career. This time I realized that I will be graduating with a real college degree, which is an amazing thing, to think of how much I’ve learned in the past twenty years and how this really is a landmark to that. The next two things I thought about in Lit are totally unrelated to that, first I was thinking that next time I’m home I’d like to go out on a night drive of the cities and do some night photography, I’ve decided I really like dusk and night pictures, and I’d like to take some of them myself, also take some winter scenes and winter night scenes. I also decided I’d like to do some portrait photography sometime soon as well.

Then later in the evening I did a Compline night prayer with some people from the Newman Student Association here. This was a great time and I really enjoyed it. Once I got back from that I was sitting down for a moment and I realized that in December I’m turning twenty years old. For some reason this seems to be a major step from youth into adulthood at least on a symbolic level and it just struck me for a minute.

So now you’ve had some insight into what goes on in the back of my mind, maybe you learned something, or had a chuckle, maybe both. In any event please share your insight because I am certainly still learning about myself and appreciate all input. Well many Minnesota races are still undecided but it’s time for me to get some sleep, we’ll see how this all turns out tomorrow.

Well, all the snow melted, but it’s now fridgid here again. I’m told this is the third coldest October on record. I feel like I have so much to blog about but then again I don’t know what I should or can say because who knows who reads this thing so I’ll probably stick to the safe stuff for the time being.

I got two big things out of the way this week, nevermind there seem to be way too many more coming down the pipe yet this semester. I must say this is definately my busiest semester at school yet, and I don’t know why that is I had more credits last semester. Anyway I got an A- on both a speech and a Modern American Lit midterm this week, which made me pretty happy. I was worried about the midterm becuase the format was very open and directions were very lacking in direction.

The first bad news in the pipe is I have a montage due for speech class on Tuesday. What that has to do with speech I have no idea, but it’s going to be a big pain. I think I’m going to do it on the DMCA because we’re supposed to pick a topic that we’re passionate about. The trick is to figure out what I’m going to put on this “3-d collage” I have few ideas, maybe a video tape, cd and floppy disk that show somehow the inablility to use them as you like. I’m desperate for resources and ideas people, so please post any in the comments section right here. Remember I’m at school in a dorm so I have very limitied resources, another thing that makes this so frustrating. I also have an extremely limited amount of traditional creative ability, again very frustrating to be forced into doing a project like this.

I have to stay here at school this weekend to work Friday night and Sunday night. We have to work one weekend a semester, I guess I’m lucky to not have any morning events but both my events run late into the evening so we’ll see how that all goes. luckily the work is not too demadning so it’ll probably be mostly browsing the web time.

On Saturday morning I’ll also be taking my Technician Licence Ham Radio Exam on campus. As I mentioned before I think this is something I’ve been interested in for quite a while and I finally got around to doing something about it. I have been studying pretty well I think, and I should pass I hope. I’ll be sure to let you all know. I already bought a handheld transceiver on ebay so I’m all ready to go now except for the licence. I love talking about it with “the profs” but that’s another story for another time.

Happy and Safe Halloween Everyone!

So I’m stuck in a Student Association (Senate) meeting right now and thanks to 802.11b wireless networks I’m able to browse the net; it’s a lifesaver I tell you. Anyway I realized that it’s been a long time (almost a month!) since I updated my blog and I must say I’ve been extremely busy.

School has been going well for me this semester so far. I have a number of very interesting classes this semester and can honstly say I’m learning quite a bit. Thanks to my superior scheduling skills I have no classes before 12:20PM and no I don’t sleep in every day, but it is a nice option.

I again have two jobs on campus this year. I’m working two days a week in the Ameritech Telecommunications Lab and a few more days a week as an event service technician in the student center.

I seem to have more reading this semester than I have had before, this is not neccecarily a bad thing as I tend to enjoy most of the reading, but it does stress my schedule just a bit more than previous semesters have. Hopefully I’ll be able to update this more often as the semester progresses, I know that the second quarter will be less stressful as I’ll be through two more industry certicfications by that time.

I feels like it’s been a really long time since I’ve blogged. Probably because it has been. My summer turned out to be a lot busier than I had origianlly invisioned and the time just wasn’t there to blog, hopefully now that I’m back at school I’ll be able to get one in at least weekly if not more often. Better catch you up on my summer first though.

I got home towards the middle of May and jumped right in with the upcoming Current Jam concert at that time. I’ve already blogged quite a bit about that I think so I’ll leave that as is. For the last month of school though I had been looking for an interesting summer job and hadn’t found that yet. I didn’t want to be one of those average college kids home for the summer painting houses or whatnot. As luck would have it one of our vendors for Current Jam which is responsible for the intellegent lighting rental was looking for some extra work as their business was growing rather rapidly and they also needed someone with a bit of computer experiance to straighten out the network at the office. After a lunch meeting with them I was offered a job that would provide me with around 15 hours of work a week, which sounded pretty good to me, plus it was doing something I really enjoyed. As it turns out we were even busier than we had imagined and they ended up needing me for 40 hours a week which was fine with me because it was a blast working there. I got some great experiance and got to work on some interesting projects for them. If you’re ever looking for intelligent lighting rental or installation in the Twin Cities be sure to give the great folks at Light N Trax a call.

This kept me pretty busy weekdays after Current Jam so things at home piled up for me and I spent most weeknights and weekends dealing with those times, leaving little time for, yu guessed it, blogging about the summer. You must be saying to yourself that even with all this work I must have had a little time to myself or I’d go crazy. You’d be right, I did and it did stop me from going crazy. Now you’re asking yourself well great, but what did he DO with that time? I’ll tell you that too.

Towards the end of June the lake my Grandma lives on where we usualy have the boat and go waterskiing was flooded out. We quickly got the boat and dock out of the lake, anticipating it would stay out for the rest of the season. After haveing the flooded engine cleaned and checked out we kept the boat in our garage at home, this made it very convenient for us to go and chaeck out the skiing on a number of lakes near our house, specifically Bryant Lake in Eden Prarie. I got to ski more than I probably would have otherwise which is great because it’s something I love to do. The last few weeks of August it actually got low enough we took the boat out twice on my Grandma’s lake and I got in a few more ski runs. There are some pictures of me skiing on Bryant Lake in the Ben and Family Galleries located at http://ben.franske.com/gallery/ be sure to check those out.

I also got a girlfreind this summer, something I haven’t had before, it was never quite right until now. Katie and I have been good friends for a few years and over the first part of the summer we grew closer as we learned more about each other and spent quite a bit of time together. Towards the end of June we both got honest with each other and admitted we liked each other a lot and agreed to start dating. As the summer progressed we spend even more time together, walking around some of the lakes and parks in the cities. We went out to see the Music Man at Chanhassen Dinner Theater, and to see Sum of All Fears. At the beginning of August we took a one day trip up near Duluth to a camp where I usually spend a week during the summer but didn’t have time this year. We also started whittling down the James Bond movie series, Katie admitted to only having seen one or two and since they are such a look into the periods of American history since the 50s I thought we should watch all of them, we got through most of them and have just a few to finish up. Just before we left for school we decided together that we didn’t want to see anyone else, so we’re keeping up our relationship via phone, email, letters and occasional visits. It’s interesting that only 30 minutes by car seperates you a lot more physically when you don’t have a car. In any event we’re doing quite well and both have a great outlook on our future together.

I moved back to school right at the end of August, but after visiting the fantastic and unparalelled Minnesota State Fair. Classes started the day after labor day and I came back home for labor day weekend for one last ski run. More on that and my first week of school to come in a future blog, this one got long enough!