So far, there has been some amount of physics, but the majority of my time has been spent coding — a wonderful development, all thing considered. I worked in web programming all throughout high school and college, writing the back end structure for a handful of projects including a prior version of Port City Community Church’s web site, so programming is pretty natural to me. It’s also given me a chance to expand my programming comforts a shade to include Python and Fortran 90. I quite like Python as it gives me a great new way to write scripts to run locally, but Fortran is the devil. Why must physicists still use languages invented in the 50’s? It makes sense, but it is truly inconvenient.

However, despite the nonsense of Fortran it’s been a pretty good summer so far. I’ve gained a new appreciation for OS X (as if I needed one), mainly because it gives me a great UNIX platform. Half of my job is writing Fortran, the other half is working in command line, so I get all the goodness of UNIX with a UI that doesn’t suck. Some of my fellow students are stuck on these awful department-controlled Linux boxes which are truly terrible, and I am grateful to have a laptop I control that can do everything I need to do and more.

Having said that, there has been a bit of news that I’ll share.

• Martha and I celebrated our first anniversary this past weekend, which is crazy and exciting. We celebrated by leaving the apartment at 5 in the morning to go on a pair of trips (her to Atlanta, me to Wilmington).
• My love for football (soccer) managed to scale up to full-on obsession with the passing of the 2010 World Cup. Spain defeated the reckless flying Dutchmen (with spikes up) to win their first Cup, which was pretty exhilarating. Now I wait for the start of the Premiership while catching the occasional MLS game on ESPN2.
• On a related note, Martha & I became obsessed with the wonderful Off the Ball Podcast produced for ESPN over the last month. Truly a class podcast and we were terribly sad to see it go — only to hear that it may indeed resume for the English Premier League season!

Additionally, I am still working with a professor in Chapel Hill on some nuclear physics projects. All in all I still don’t know that I want to do this kind of thing (research) for the rest of my life — it has the distinct feel of settling. It is a good opportunity, though, and I’m getting paid to learn new programming languages (Fortran, Python) so that’s fun.

Finally, I’m still playing music a bit which is bittersweet. I play a couple of times a month at The Summit Church, and my homies at Port City Community Church are nice enough to let me jump back into the rotation every now and again. This is sweet because I like playing music, particularly at Overflow. This is only bittersweet because I underestimated how much I crave a sort of total immersion into playing; trips to Wilmington these days are a much-needed shot of class and a diversion, not the norm.

Still, it is indeed summer time and the weather and general mood have been quite good (as I write this, of course, my weather widget reports storms the next six days). Looking ahead, Martha & I have her birthday coming up (!) a sweet Paramore show, a music date at the Summit Church, and a week-long vacation getaway extravaganza with the Paschals! Oh, and then I get to kick off the new semester with the Overflow crew. Gonna be a great month. Except for the weather, which really is unbearably humid up here.

I can’t think of a more boring and unenthusiastic way to convey a student’s success in continuing toward a Ph.D. and never having to go through that hell again.

Not that I’m complaining, mind you. That email, received while lounging in the green room at Port City Church last Sunday, means I instantly graduate from sorry first-year student to fatherly second-year student. Of course, such a transition is not without responsibilities such as updating the wonderful incoming student handbook.

Awesome.

I feel old — we have a cat now. It’s name is “Cat” because we thought it was clever. In retrospect, that may not have been the case. Still, we’re pretty stoked about having him around and he likes being fed so it seems to be a win-win-win.

Special thanks to Kirsten for helping Martha pick him out.

Three and one-half weeks of studying 10-12 hours per day and it’s finally over! It’s still hard to believe, it feels like it lasted so long, but I have finished my first year as a graduate student. I was able to take most of this week off from school & am incredibly fortunate to have the oportunity to go home and play at Overflow and Port City Church several times over the next two weeks.

I also have a backlog of posts from this last semester that hopefully I will be able to publish over the summer. Here’s hoping this blog turns back into a useful way of updating how Martha & I are doing and what we are up to out here in the Triangle!

Tom

Hopefully I’ll be able to write soon.  For now, though, this has wrecked our worlds in Phillips Hall 118.

Today I spent the better part of my afternoon in Barnes & Noble working on class schedules and trying to resolve scheduling quirks that have me teaching and sitting in a class simultaneously. While the similarity of the situation is comforting (it reminds me of those 4 years of school, music, and work), it also reminds me that the workload of a graduate student is about to come back.

I don’t think any of the eleven of us would say we’re ready for this.

I miss writing music like crazy, but I’m hoping things will all even out in the next few months.

I have so much to put up from camp this last week (it was really a great week), but the first thing I wanted to upload was our complete set list for camp. I put this list together initially for all the kids and youth leaders, but it’s a very interesting deal to see how the songs flowed together over the week – all 47 of them!

It’s also interesting to see how the “old songs that hopefully everyone knows” list changes (and did change) year-over-year. This year it was as if we were finally at a point where the well-known songs were more “Hosanna” and “All Because of Jesus” than “Sanctuary” and “Pharaoh, Pharaoh.” That made everything immensely easier and more productive; in general, we were teaching songs like “Spring of Life” and “Beautiful the Blood,” not “Hapy Day” or “Marvelous Light.” All in all, I thought the whole endeavour was immensely successful and I know we all came away lifted a bit.

The List…

Complete Songlist from Fits 2009 at Jekyll Island

Session 1: Sunday PM

1. Everything – Lifehouse
2. Happy Day – Fee
3. All Because of Jesus – Fee
4. Spring of Life – Kristian Stanfill
5. Mighty to Save – Hillsong United
6. How He Loves – Eddie Kirkland
7. Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) – Chris Tomlin

Session 2: Monday AM

1. Salvation Is Here – Hillsong United
2. Spring of Life – Kristian Stanfill
3. Sing to the King – Candi Pearson
4. Beautiful the Blood – Fee

Session 3: Monday PM

1. We Shine – Fee
2. Marvelous Light – Charlie Hall
3. Hosanna – Hillsong United
4. How Great Thou Art – Charlie Hall
5. Jesus Paid It All – Kristian Stanfill
6. Hungry – Kathryn Scott

Session 4: Tuesday AM

1. Happy Day – Fee
2. Everlasting God – Brenton Brown
3. Beautiful the Blood – Fee
4. From the Inside Out – Hillsong Australia

Session 5: Tuesday PM

1. Salvation Is Here – Hillsong United
2. Here Is Our King – David Crowder*Band
3. Hosanna – Hillsong United
4. Center – Charlie Hall
5. How Great Is Our God – Chris Tomlin
6. You Alone – David Crowder*Band
7. How He Loves – Eddie Kirkland

Session 6: Wednesday AM

1. All Because of Jesus – Fee
2. Cannons – Phil Wickham
3. Mighty to Save – Hillsong United

Session 7: Wednesday PM

1. We Shine – Fee
2. Cannons – Phil Wickham
3. Marvelous Light – Charlie Hall
4. Jesus Paid It All – Kristian Stanfill
5. Lead Me to the Cross – Hillsong United
6. From the Inside Out – Hillsong Australia

Session 8: Thursday AM

1. Spring of Life – Kristian Stanfill
2. Your Grace Is Enough – Chris Tomlin
3. Lead Me to the Cross – Hillsong United

Session 9: Thursday PM

1. Happy Day – Fee
2. Marvelous Light – Charlie Hall
3. Cannons – Phil Wickham
4. Hosanna – Hillsong United
5. From the Inside Out – Hillsong Australia
6. How Great Is Our God – Chris Tomlin
7. We Shine – Fee

Great camp… good fun. Lot’s more coming later, but I am exhausted.

UPDATE: Some more interesting-but-possibly-meaningless statistics. We played 25 individual songs which break down as follows: 7 songs were played 3x, 8 songs were played 2x, and we threw another 10 in as one-offs. I find statistics interesting, but I don’t really know that these mean anything.

Finally!

Martha and I just got our diplomas back all framed & nice — crazy. It’s still a little surreal that I’ve graduated, but on to the next thing — we’re getting married in 4 days!