It’s long been known by people from Illinois that Chicago is pretty much it’s own state. Anything south of Kankakee is Chicago to us southerners, anything south of Chicago is southern Illinois for Chicagoans.
Just ran accross this map on Neatorama. It’s a represenation of what the U.S. would look like if it were divided into 50 equal population areas. Naturally Chicago is on it’s own. I guess the rest would be called Lincoln.
Last Tuesday Melissa and I made the trek back to our homeland, Champaign-Urbana, for an Illini basketball game. Sadly, our beloved were not quite able to take down Purdue despite a valiant effort. The game though was only part of our trip.
Ten years ago, as freshmen in college, Melissa and I shared a romantic evening together and as a part of it we wrote notes to each other, took a few pictures (35mm even!) together. Then we headed out to a local park with a shovel to bury it where it would remain for the next 10 years.
Nine years and 363 days later, we arrived back at that park in hopes of finding our buried time capsule. We had a plan. We remembered (or thought we remembered) burying it 21 days away from a large tree. We didn’t however, remember exactly what direction, or whose 21 steps they were. Note to anyone planning to bury a time capsule…make it someplace easy to find if you don’t want to bring in a bull dozer to find it.
Despite all the odds, and thanks to the help of a great friend who lent us a metal detector, we were able to eventually find our long buried, heart shaped, memory tin. Where did we find it…exactly 17 steps from the tree and in the opposite direction of where I thought. Just call me Mr. Memory.
Our little packaged was double wrapped in Ziploc bags and appeared to be in decent shape, other than the huge dent from my shovel. We took it back to the car to open it up. We found this tin that still had a label on it with my parents address.
Upon opening our tin we were sad to find our folded up notes soaked completely through. We started to try to unfold them but they were so soaked that they were just falling apart. We decided to let them dry and go from there. At this point, we still haven’t had any luck actually reading them but I was pretty excited just to find them still in the ground.
No word yet on if our roll of 35mm film can be salvaged. It was rusted but it didn’t appear to be broken open. We had to search all over town to find somene who could develop such a roll of film. I wasn’t even sure anyone did that anymore. If we do get any photos from it, I’ll be sure to scan them right away (if they aren’t digital, what will I ever do with them right?) and share a few here.
All in all, it was a pretty cool night. And it’s been an amazing 10+ years. I sometimes take for granted how blessed Melissa and I have been. We met in High School and we’ve only ever dated each other. It’s kind of hard to imagine it today’s world but God allowed us to grow together and challenge each other year by year and he’s continued to bless our time together.
I can’t wait to see what God allows us to do in the next 10+ years. There is no one I’d rather spend them with!
I’m looking forward to Lost returning next week. Hard to believe it is the last season. I’m sure lots of stuff won’t get answered and I’ll be amazed if the finale can live up to the hype but I’m looking forward to the ride either way.
A bunch of my friends have done the rewatch, catching every episode between the end of the last season and the start of the final season. Melissa and I started but stopped about half way through season 3. Having a kid will do that to you. (It’ll also slow down your blogging.)
I guess I’ll just have to use this to catch up.
So I hadn’t been to my own blog in a long time, let alone many of my former sources of entertainment. Life in general and Jack Sandel have been keeping me plenty busy (not to be confused with JackSandel.com…which hasn’t seen much of my time either). However, something caught my eye tonight and I wandered over to one of my former favorites, Today’s Big Thing, a video site. This was one they posted a few days ago. Nothing deep but it made me smile and caught me at a good time.
Then I hopped on over to good ol’ ChrisSandel.com and saw that, while I haven’t visited the site in a few months, it appears as if I posted a few days ago. I think I must have predated a post a long, long time ago thinking I’d use in on Halloween. I wonder if I have a stockpile of other old posts coming up. I guess I’ll have to check back and see. Or I suppose I could come up with some new fun stuff of my own. We’ll see.
Like, umm…like, I’m thinking you should stick to tackling people. The PR stuff might not be your thing.
I’ve been away from my blog for quite some time but I haven’t been totally incommunicado. There has been a lot going on with family and ministry but I have been posting to a number of different places.
Don’t take this post as me abandoning the blog. I still hope to post. But I realized I should probably let everyone know how you can keep up with me since I’m actually posting quite a bit. I update Twitter especially often so if you want to know what I had for dinner or what I’m up to with Jack, check there.
Well it’s been over a month since I posted so this one is going to be a doosey…or, more fittingly, it’ll be something completely random.
YSMarko announced yesterday that he’d be backing away from his blog for a while. I’ll miss his daily insights into ministry and other fun stuff but I’m guessing I’ll still highlight a few things he’s posted about in the coming weeks. One post in particular I got a kick out of was this one about a geographical map of the seven deadly sins.
Some university students looked at data relevant to each of the seven deadly sins and then created maps, by county, representing how significant each sin rated. Upon perusing the image gallery of each map I noticed a disturbing trend. Sangamon County, my current place of residence, shows up pretty significantly in envy, wrath and pride. Take a look below and you’ll see a dark spot right in the middle of Illinois for each.
Envy was calculated using the total number of thefts — robbery, burglary, larceny and stolen cars.
Wrathwas calculated by comparing the total number of violent crimes — murder, assault and rape — reported to the FBI per capita.
And pride, lastly, is most important. The root of all sins, in this study, is the aggregate of all data. Vought and his Kansas colleagues combined all data from the six other sins and averaged it into an overview of all evil.
I’m a big fan of photoshop. From the first time I discovered the most basic version that came with our scanner during my Jr. High years, I’ve loved the program. I remember experimenting with it at home and beginning to try my hand at graphic design. It is amazing the graphic possibilities that open up with one simple program.
As photoshop has become more well known, it has become nearly impossible to tell what is real and what is edited. We almost assume that anything amazing has to be edited. But here are 15 incredible images that look altered but aren’t. I guarantee that they were much, much more difficult to shoot but it’s cool to think they’re all natural.
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