Shaw Rowe Greenville Goodbye Adventure

Shaw is an awesome character that I wish I had gotten to hang out with more than I did over the last couple years. This weekend, though, I got to visit him in Greenvile, NC and see what he's been up to. Right now that includes putting together an RC plane, which I was privilaged enough to see in the works.

We had amazing pizza and the best sausage dip I think I've had in my whole life at a place called Basil's. To my knowledge there's only one, so you'll have to pilgramage to try it if you're not nearby. When we got back we watched a Bunch of movies that included

• 21,
• Into the Wild,
• Hot Fuzz,
• and Batman Begins;

and on top of all that, we had a mountain of a delicious, mouthwatering cake called Tres Leches. It was so good, we ate almost an entire cake by ourselves. Shaw gave me the recipe, and I might post a recipie for it here if it all goes well. It's very easy to make, but you have to be sure to add the right amount of love.

It was great getting to see Shaw again. Soon, he'll be moving too, so I'm really glad we got to hang out.

David and The Dark Knight

David has been a good friend of mine since my sophomore year at Campbell and a roommate my junior year, which is widely considered to be my favorite one. We had the best room on campus in the best "dorm" of anywhere I've ever seen. You would have to see it to believe it.

So David and I decided to go see The Dark Night in the Imax, and it was spectacular. If there were ever a movie worthy of the Imax and worthy of Imax prices, this is the one (I give it five out of five stars, and Google agrees with me).

After that, we ate at Rockola in Garner (an old haunt), and then I got some silky smooth delicious frozen wonder custard from Goodberrys Frozen Custard. I'm really going to miss that place.

It was great to spend some time with Dave. I'm really going to miss him.

Have you ever seen David and Batman at the same place at the same time?

Virginan Goodbye

I just had a wonderful weekend with my Mom visiting my Virginian grandparents, aunts, uncle, and cousins. We got to go Yard Saling, celebrate my Mother's birthday, eat tons of food, and talk a lot about the old times. My grandparents, MeMama and Papa as we call them, have been two of the most unfailingly loving people in my life, matched for that only by my parents, I think. No matter how much we disagree on things (which we do sometimes), the big thing is that we love each other no matter what, and that's something we definitely all agree on. I'm going to miss them a lot.

Aunt Patty, Uncle David, and Aunt Janice were kind and awesome enough to spend a lot of time with me this weekend, too, coming with us on our adventures. Kenzi and Kyle, my cousins, also added their exuberant energies to the visit, and to top everything off, we all went to the Olive Garden for Sunday supper! I even found a great desk for my Alabama condo at Staples during the trip. This was an awesome goodbye adventure.

Grampa's Stories

One of my favorite things to do is to listen to my grandparents tell me about how things were when they were young. In just the span of a few decades, thewhole world has changed, and so much of common knowledge has been turned on its head. My grandfather told me about the days he worked on the farm with his brothers and how they grew their own food. His family hardly ever had money, he said, but they never went hungry. It's impressive to me to hear about how much respect and knowledge he and his family held for the land they tended and that tended them. I even felt a little jealous of that kind of life. Even though we have technology, comfort, and convenience today that my grandfather could never have predicted back then, I don't think we're necessarily happier. Do we have more fun surfing the internet than my grandfather did playing football with a burlap sack full of rags?

But even though a lot has changed, I think a lot has stayed the same, too, and when I think of things that continue on, one of the things I think about is how happiness always seems to have come from the inside out, not the other way around based on how easy things are. Even though we have a lot more technology and convenience around us today, we still seem to have a lot of the same struggles past generations did before us. Like, for instance, people still judge others for being different than they are. Politics is still confusing. Poverty and hunger still hurts people around the world even though there's enough to go around. These and other things are issues that technology alone can't address; we have to address them in our principles first. As a scientist, I think it's easy for me to put a lot of hope in the acquisition of new knowledge, and that's going to being us a lot, no doubt about it, but we still have lot yet to conquer in the human spirit, and that's something more to do with meditation than experimentation.

Even in my twenties, my granddad's stories still fill my eyes with wonder and really give me a genuine hope that we can still do a lot of good just by the way the act and think, which has very little to do with modernness at all. We just need to remember that to whom much is given, much is expected, and that our time has given us some pretty awesome things.