Brass Pass Down

Brass Pass Down
Originally uploaded by orfearing

So it seems that I need to change subjects if I am going to maintain this blog...I'm just not that great at at talking about me. So seeing as I enjoy photography and I just got a new camera (Cannon Digital Rebel XSi, very cool), I'm gonna start posting and commenting on pictures I take. I should post once or twice a week, so if I don't, feel free to bombard me with hate comments or something. I am no posting on flickr so if you want to check out some more pictures take a look at http://www.flickr.com/photos/fearing/. You can also friend me on facebook if you want...just search for Ross Fearing in the Texas A&M network.
I decided to start off with one of my favorite pictures from March to the Brazos. Here my buddy (on top) is wrestling with her replacement for a hat. After this some pushups will be done and the other girl will be the 2nd wing XO.

1 Month to Spring Break

Sorry I missed posting last week. I had drill and left my computer in College Station because the Internet in our hotel costs, and besides a weekend without a computer can be a good thing.
I spent this rather rainy Valentine's Day watching an indoor track meet and the women's basketball game. We got to see the men's and women's 60 meter hurdles and dash and stand in awe of their speed and later watched the first few heats of the 1 mile. All I can say to that is I wish I could run a 4 something mile. Since the beginning of the school year I have now attended 49 events...only 23 more to go to get get my Adidas 12'th man branded watch (in addition to the 12'th man t-shirt, backpack, and softball jersey, I have already earned).
Yesterday I had my first exam (World Literature). It wasn't very hard, out of 6 pages of questions there were only two 1 point questions I couldn't answer. That is one of the big pluses of taking a freshman/sophomore class--they don't like to fail people.
This last week I also arranged to visit Westminster Dallas Campus next month. Hopefully it will go well; so far it is the only seminary I have been able to get much information from or contact with.
Other than that, not much going. As I said above, 1 month and three exams to spring break.

Another Day Another Dollar

Two weeks down, 10% of regular school days completed (according to my friend Daniel). This week took the dive into Luke. So far we have completed the first 39 verses and have the next 27 assigned. As I'm not that good at Greek, that translates to about 3 hours of translating for each assignment. Having 8 o'clocks has turned out well just because it gets me up in the morning and I get a bunch of homework done. Last night I even had time to go out to the Texas Hall of Fame (the best dance hall in BCS). I had a good time, now just time to learn to dance :)
Today was the last swim meet. The men swam against SMU. We ended losing by one point, heartbreaking considering that night our best diver both of his previous score records. Tomorrow we have basketball games against OSU (men) and KU (women). The men have to win; after playing OU, KU, t.u., and some others our record is rather weak. At least we beat tech.
My buddies, some friends, and I made an intramural soccer team and out first game is this Wednesday.
Well not much else going on this week so here's to a couple of good basketball games.

Aggie Athletics Day

Yesterday I spent most of the day at various sporting events. First we went to the joint swim meet against LSU. The women swam really well and when we left we cruising to any easy win. The men's side was a lot closer but they ended up losing by 10 points. After swimming we went over to the tennis stadium to watch the first women's event of the semester. It was very cold out there, so after about 45 minutes we moved on to the joint track meet.
This track meet was the first meet in the new indoor track stadium. Its so big they can run all the track events under the same roof. Both of our track teams did really well and won their meets.
Church today was pretty good. We had out first college lunch of the semester and that was a lot of fun. Its nice to be able to hang out instead of rushing back to the dorm to get things done.
Here's to an easy week (I hope)

I'm Back

I'm posting as I watch another episode of Battlestar Galatica Classic. For a 70's show its really quite enjoyable. I really like how they launch their fighters out of launch tubes, giving them the ability to scramble very quickly as opposed to the Star Wars notion of launching out of hangers. Right now Baltar is organizing a prison break. He's quite a clever schemer.
This week hasn't been a bad first week, minus the excess homework for a first week of school. New Testament Greek is the main culprit-I've already spent about six hours translating forty verses from John and all of Second John. I must admit his Greek is (thankfully) very simple. Most of his verse construction is along the lines of one person said "..." and another replied "...". We are supposed to start Luke and do some Acts eventually. Yesterday we also talked about textual criticism and the manuscripts from which the New Testament was compiled. It turns out that there are four main groups of manuscripts that are used. The Western, Byzantine, Alexandrian, and the Neutral. Its all rather interesting; I hope I can survive the workload.
This evening we went to the women's swim meet against the 'sips. They lost by twenty points or so, but still swam quite well. Two of the swimmers go to RUF so its always fun to support them. One of them swam a solid leg in the freestyle relay. She held us neck and neck with a very fast swimmer. A bunch of my buddies and some other friends all went so we had a good size group. Tomorrow we will be going to a swim meet, tennis meet, and indoor track meet. It should be quite a good day, and after all the events we might go play a bit of volleyball.
Well here's looking to a fun weekend.

Back Again

Sorry its been a while. The last couple of weeks have been really busy between exams, projects, and Corps Trips. I have decided that Texas A&M football will not be a subject of conversation except to say that we are going to BTHO t.u., embarrassing them on national TV -- a least the soccer team has already made it to the Sweet Sixteen, and the volleyball team beat Baylor at Waco. I have eight more days of class before finals, but many of those days will have fewer classes than normal, so the semester is winding down. I am registering for classes this evening, but it looks like I will be taking eight o'clocks every day of the week next semester. Ugh. The sophomores got their brass this morning, so one more milestone down for them. I guess that's about it.

Pressing on

Not much of interest has happened this past week. After a very busy week turning in several large reports this week has been fairly laid back. I guess there was the election, but I cast my vote several weeks ago and have not really paid attention since. We have our last home football game as cadets this weekend. From here I can count on one hand the number of times I will pass in review in boots. I must admit I will be ready to get out of the Corps, the drama and tail chasing does get old after awhile. In general, this week had been about the usual, trying to get set up for next week, and waiting.

Report Completed

My MEEN 360 full report-all 23 pages, 10 figures, 3 table, and 24 equations-is turned in. I finished up at 11:00 pm and it was due at midnight giving me an ample cushion. So now I am sitting here on something of a caffeine high from that coffee I had around 6. I think I will write the spiritual journey part of my Pine Cove application and call it a night.

Crunch week

This is it! Sunday starts the most important week of my semester. I have two full reports due, one on Tuesday, one on Thursday, a presentation on Monday, and a Greek quiz on Tuesday. If I can do well this week, my grades will be mostly set for the semester. Tomorrow, today by the time y'all read this, I will be staffing a land nav course for the Army FTX. I get to sit at a water point for eight hours. I am going to be so ready for next Friday to roll around.

Drill!

Another extremely productive weekend at drill is over. Mostly I did inventory and paperwork. This next couple of weeks will be busy because most of my major coursework is due next week. Right now my focus is just on staying close to being caught up.
Yesterday I went to the MSC to set up an interview with Pine Cove. Turned out they had time right then, so I did the interview then. The interview seemed to go well, so hopefully they will want me to work this summer. I guess I'll find out later. I'm going to an informational with Camp Ozarka this week to see about applying there, to help keep my options open. This is my last summer before I graduate, so if I want to work at a summer camp, this is my last chance.

Greek

My journey through classical Greek has begun. I just spent the last hour translating four of assigned six lines from the opening of Plato's Crito. The vocabulary is much larger than mine, and the grammar is rather complex, to say the least. I am finding at bit easier to get hints from the context, so hopefully as my skills increase, the translating won't be quite so hard.

I'm still here

Due to popular demand, a.k.a. Mom said I had to, I am again posting.
I have reached the start of the hump of this semester. I am beginning to get a little overwhelmed by school, received my first "F" test grade (17 out of 35 in Greek), and started to not care that much about school. It happens every semester and it just means that the end of the semester will be here before I know it.
In happier news, last weekend was fun. I brought up three friends (Brianna, Sarah, and Esther) for the football game. They all came to yell with me and Esther went to the game with me while Brianna and Sarah "sat" with Andrew. After the game my grandparents took the whole group to an Italian restaurant. After my grandparents went to the hotel the rest of us went to Brianna's aunt and uncle's house where we talked, made smores, watched "Iron Man", and then talked some more. I think I got to bed around 0230. All in all it was very enjoyable and nice to spend time with people much more like myself than here at A&M.
It is strange, for someone so ready to leave home and do my own thing, I find myself more attached to home, and the people and places there, than I ever have been before.

Another day

The scout committee is having a meeting over in the other room so I figured I would make good on my time and write another blog post.
Not much had happened since last I wrote to be entirely honest, but I think that is more related to my living in Nac. On the eventful side, one of my good friends got married this weekend and the next day half of my siblings went to camp. It is nice to be down a couple of girls, as this leads to a much quieter house (go figure Mary doesn't shriek when she doesn't have two sisters egging her on). Other than that, there has been little change for us.
On the less eventful side, I completed the painful task of ordering books for my brother and me. I managed to spend $500 on Amazon in fifteen minutes, but I think we still managed to save several hundred dollars. There will be a few books he and I will have to buy in College Station so we will be visiting Lupot's. I really like Lupot's for a couple of reasons. First it was founded by Old Army Lou who was a Cadet and was famous for doing things like bailing out cadets when the Corps went on Corps trips. The second is that Lupot's has the best cadet supplies department I have found which greatly simplifies my life. Finally Lupot's gives back money to the outfits of cadets who buy books from them.
All in all I am ready to start school (break out of the dulls) and look forward to wearing my boots.

Travelin'

I have spent the last several days visiting here and there. First I had make-up drill on the 24-26. Besides my unit not getting me a place to sleep the first night (I ended up staying with a friend on the other side of Houston) it went well. I was able to stay busy most of the time doing paperwork, so it went pretty fast. On Friday I drove down to College Station to visit some of my buddies. I stayed with Lans, saw "The Dark Knight" twice, and celebrated one of my "Q" (band) buddy's 21'st. On Sunday after church I drove home, just to turn around and drive with my family to Dallas. I was able to enjoy visiting with my Grandparents and Aunts and Uncle. All in all the travel was time well spent.
One of the coolest things I learned while in College Station was that my outfit is dominating the recruiting this year and we are looking at having as many as 32 freshmen. I hope that this bodes well for the efforts of our underclassmen and will lead to a strong year for our outfit.

Lazy Days

I have been enjoying getting to kick back and relax for the past week. Yesterday we had my birthday dinner of spaghetti and a strawberry cream cake. The centre piece of the meal was clearly the cake. It was a three layer chiffon cake with whole strawberries, a sweetened strawberry filling, and whipped cream (the real deal, not that "whip" stuff) in between each layer. I have never tasted a cake that has so much strawberry flavour and creaminess.
Also last night, my brother had his eagle scout board, completing the final requirment toward attaining the rank of Eagle Scout. It was quite and accomplishment and I congratulate him. While he was sweating it out at the board, I stayed home and enjoyed a few episodes of Dr. Who. The Doctor is the last of the time lords and spends his days hoping through time, "troubleshooting" time. Its a fun show because The Doctor lives to go see and explore the universe throughout time and he give one the greatest thrill to go see new things.

Lazy Days

I have been enjoying getting to kick back and relax for the past week. Yesterday we had my birthday dinner of spaghetti and a strawberry cream cake. The centre piece of the meal was clearly the cake. It was a three layer chiffon cake with whole strawberries, a sweetened strawberry filling, and whipped cream (the real deal, not that "whip" stuff) in between each layer. I have never tasted a cake that has so much strawberry flavour and creaminess.
Also last night, my brother had his eagle scout board, completing the final requirment toward attaining the rank of Eagle Scout. It was quite and accomplishment and I congratulate him. While he was sweating it out at the board, I stayed home and enjoyed a few episodes of Dr. Who. The Doctor is the last of the time lords and spends his days hoping through time, "troubleshooting" time. Its a fun show because The Doctor lives to go see and explore the universe throughout time and he give one the greatest thrill to go see new things.

I'm Back from LDAC!

Just a few days ago I completed the biggest training event I will participate in until after I commission. LDAC (Leaders Developing and Assessing Course, I think) also known as Warrior Forge is a 33 day long training session designed to help prepare future officers in the ROTC program to lead as well as to determine if they have the potential to be an officer in the US Army. Honestly it wasn't that hard to complete, but it was a good learning experience. We did a bunch of training including such events as BRM (Basic Rifle Marksmanship), Cultural Awareness (training focused on what it takes to operate successfully in a foreign culture), Land Navigation, and a ten day "deployment" to the field where we did battled drills, patrolling missions, and patrol base ops.
The weather was perfect. The entire time I was there is rained three times, and none more than a drizzle. As Ft. Lewis is only 39 miles from Mt. Rainer, we often had great views of that mountain. It was impressive how there were small mountains around Mt. Rainer, but Mt. Rainer was so much larger that they all looked like foot hills. While we were in the field, we were operating in single canopy rain forest which was pretty, if not that different from the swamps in East Texas. The most notable differences were that there was moss on almost all the ground and the monster ant beds. The state of Washington decided that they needed some way of controlling the pine needles other than routinely burning the forest, so the introduced these monster ants. These ants build mounds several feet tall out of pine needles and twigs. From the mound they will travel back and forth in "superhighways" collecting building material and dead insects. Invariably I would be in the prone behind some decent cover only to find one of these superhighways running over of under me. Thankfully these ants are fairly harmless, requiring a significant amount to provocation before they sting, and not possessing an especially painful sting. All in all the training was good, but it is nice to be home, sleeping in a real bed and largely off a schedule.

Greek

I got my Greek exam back today. I made a 76, which isn't bad for me-engineer taking language-but I really thought I was going to make a B on that exam. This week our prof introduced principle parts of the verbs. The principle parts of a verb are the first person singular conjugation of the present, future, imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, and aorist tenses of that given verb. Surprisingly enough this is one of the few things we have learned in the past month that really makes sense to me. I think I understand it because the parts change one section at a time, so that I can see a clear progression in forms from the present through to the aorist. On a completely different not, three exams till spring break!

The Weekend

Aggie Eagles is done! I just not a big fan of being a herder for an entire weekend. This weekend I was in charge of moving and keeping accountability of 38 high school eagle scouts through a series of events and a basketball game. It really wasn't that bad, its just that, not only did out basketball team play a completely limp game and lose to Nebraska, but this weekend was one of those weekends where there is an explosion of homework all due on Monday. After we sent the Eagles home (we were done by about 6:30) I did a bit of homework and then went and saw a the Spiderwick Chronicles at about 11:30. The movie was okay, the story was pretty weak, but the company was great. It was also my last weekend at Westminster for about a month as I have an FTX this weekend, and then I am going home for both weekends in spring break. If I go home for Easter as well, then it will be an entire month of which I will be absent.

The music to which I listen

Music is an important part of my life. At any given moment I am usually either listening to it, or it is playing itself back inside my head. The band that had managed to make it to the top of my list right now is Relient K. Relient K plays music in a style similar to blink 182 and is on those bands that, while all the members are Christians and they look at life from a clearly Christian perspective, stay away from the CCM label. I didn't begin to start liking Relient K until my second year in college, probably because I needed to grow up some to appreciate much of what they sing about. One of their most common themes is the emotional ups and downs in life (being guys a lot of them are about girls-who woulda' guessed?) and how many times, even when we strive to live our lives doing the right thing, it still seems like we are messing up stupid things and getting just about everyone mad at us. I have to say it is a welcome dose of reality compared to much of what I see in CCM, even some of the groups I like.