The Goodrums

Once again, I find myself sitting on a plane heading home and writing a blog post. Fortunately, this is my first trip for work in a while; unfortunately, it is my first blog post in even longer. I still have a 7/8 written Christmas letter that I intended to send before we left for Africa. But, that is what happens when you are highly overambitious like me and you contract a bad stomach bug the day before international travel. I am going to adopt the idea of one of my co-workers and friends that she expounded while riding a chair lift during her vacation in Vail and send out an Easter letter in place of the Christmas letter that didn’t happen. It will probably catch people by surprise, but hopefully it will be a good break from the norm, almost like making resolutions in August rather than January.

For those who actually still read our blog, we apologize for the lack of posted content in the last nine months or so. Part of it is because we have been busy with trips and visitors and all manner of things like that, but part of it is due to the great, but blog killing phenomena of Facebook. Facebook is the lazy man’s blog. Really. I mean, why spend a few hours writing a whole blog post consisting of multiple paragraphs complete with well placed and interspersed pictures, links, and sometimes even a video when you can throw a bunch of pictures up in no particular order, tag all your friends, relatives, and acquaintances so they look at them, include a description on one or two, and then change your status to “Sandra is thinking that her vacation was great.”? It’s like choosing between reheating your leftover pizza in the oven or the microwave. You could reheat it on the oven, on the pizza stone at that, for a nice uniformly heated, slightly crispy crust. Almost like when it was first baked. Oh, but you’re hungry and man, if you do ALL that, you’ll have to preheat the oven, find a snack while you wait, then put the pizza in for like fifteen minutes and then there will be a dirty pizza stone to clean up afterwards, and dang, that will probably take like thirty minutes by the time you’ve done everything. Geez. I’ll just put it on a plate and stick it in the microwave for a minute or something. Yeah, it’ll have that slightly soggy crust thing going on because of the condensation, and it will be really hot on the ends, but then all cold in the middle, and the cheese will be more kind of rubbery than meltyish, but hey, it’ll only take like two minutes tops. You could even use a paper plate and not have to clean up anything. That way you can get back to other important things like uploading those pictures from last weekend onto Facebook and changing your status.

Anyway, things have been going well this year. Jennifer began a new job that is going well and appears to be much calmer than her previous one. I have not had to travel quite as much for work, and I am awaiting responses from the graduate schools that I applied to for fall of 2009. I began the graduate school pursuit last summer, and am at the stage where I just have to wait for letters of congratulation or unfortunate rejection. I am looking at masters programs in what is essentially, energy efficient/sustainable building design. There are not a great number of these programs in the US, and each one has a different name (i.e. building systems, building technology, building science, etc.) which makes it somewhat difficult to explain what I am applying to. After doing some research, I applied to four different programs spread around the country. I applied to Master’s programs at the University of Southern California, University of Colorado, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I chose to ignore the complications of going to school not in Denver as well as the fact that I (we) like Denver and don’t want to move when I selected schools. Part of this was due to the lack or response obtained from the University of Colorado when I contacted them early last summer and a casual comment by Jennifer about school shopping. I have been praying about attending school, so that I can make a wise choice if I have to decide between schools. I know God will take care of us whatever the decision is; we just hope that we can return to Denver if we are called away for school. I am a little nervous because it has been a while since I was in school and I think it will be a rough transition back into homework and tests, not to mention the fact that between school and work I would not have a lot of extra time. I just need to make sure that I make smart choices with my time so that Jennifer is not the one who suffers for my being busy.