So it is time to resume the story again, as dictated by having a long flight, with time for me to write an extensive section. I left off a few months ago, at the point where I was about to start my junior year of college, after having recently formalized my relationship with my girlfriend J.
I moved into a new dorm room at the beginning of the semester, with four other roommates, three of whom I already knew. It was a bit crowded, but overall a MUCH better living situation than the one I had survived the previous year. My roommates were all big sports fans, so they were always watching some game on TV ever night. I ended up watching the Red Sox come back from being 0-3 against the Yankees to win the World Series that fall, which is the most baseball I have watched in my life. Some of my best friends lived across the hall, and J lived 50 yards away, so things were as good socially as they had ever been for me.
Somehow I ended up being on the church council again, for the on-campus congregation. They made me the vice-president/treasurer that year, primarily because no one else wanted the job. So I met with the president of the council and the pastors every week, to plan for the weekly meetings and other events. I was also responsible for counting the offering after service, which usually didn't take long, at the rate college students usually give. I also ended up leading a weekly Bible study with a different co-leader, which once again was the only one in the congregation to last the full duration of the school year. This led me to the logical conclusion that I was a pretty good Bible study leader, a hypothesis that was later strained under test.
A number of my classes that semester involved web design, so I managed to get credit for certain projects from multiple teachers. I was also in a new multimedia class HD Video, which was cutting edge technology at the time. It was designed to utilize the new editing rooms I had built that summer, and was fairly broad in its scope. Our first assignment was to write a 120 page screenplay in the first three weeks. I completed that, but the quality of my work declined as time went on, as is to be expected with any endurance writing endeavor. I am not a fan of the approach of forcing oneself to generate tons of content in the hope that some of it turns out good. I am more deliberate than that, and prefer to only write when I have something worth committing to paper. Once that was done we focused more on the technology aspect, and prepared to do more practical projects.
Now that I had a car for getting up North and back, I had the flexibility to stop and see my grandparents who lived along Highway 99. So I would stop to visit at their retirement community every trip, either on the way there or back, depending on the timing of my journey. That January, shortly after I got back from Christmas break, I received word that my other grandfather had passed away. Considering that he was practically blind and deaf, with diabetes and a previous heart attack, this wasn't as shocking as it could have been. I was glad that I had just seen him the previous week, on my trip back from Christmas at home. The funeral was across the street from their retirement home, and everyone from my dad’s side of the family showed up. I had taken advantage of many opportunities the previous year to videotape my grandparents at family gatherings and such, to capture many of the stories they told and such. So it is good to still have those DVDs to remember them by.
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