the Big day

Well its pretty crazy that the day has finally come, tomorrow at 7:00am I will start the first leg of my journey to Bilbao, Spain. I'm pretty tired right now so this won't be a long post but I felt like I had to write something tonight. I was reading in Romans the other day and came across a pretty cool verse that is somewhat fitting but not really but its cool anyways, Rom 15:24, the second part could only really work for Bertram who is studying in Italy this semester, maybe I'll send it to him to show that it is Biblical that I come visit. Anyways thanks for all of you who are actually reading this, it definitely feels good to know that people care enough to read your stories. If you send me your addresses then I will try and send postcards from whenever I go traveling and also don't feel like I am going to be to busy to hear whats going on back in San Diego or Santa Barbara, I would love to get updates on each of your lives. Whelp, I'm going to bed now, I wish I could just wake up in Madrid but no, it takes like 10 hours or something to get there.

Freefall

So yesterday was the last time Chase and I were able to hang out until December. We were sitting around trying to think of something to do and so we decided to go skydiving. We googled San Diego Skydiving and about an hour later we were jumping out of a plane. It was pretty amazing and something I've always wanted to do, except for a few years ago when I remember watching someone die on RealTV or something and saying, I am never gonna skydive. I think because we just kinda went and did it I wasn't able to be scared or anything, I didn't wake up yesterday and say "today is the day I'm going skydiving...oh crap".

Riding up in the plane was pretty cool, we didn't have seatbelts or anything and the big side door was open the whole time, it was kinda weird but I figured if for some reason we fell out prematurely the parachutes should come in handy. The instructors were very nice and told us that we were gonna f--in die and that I was gonna slip out of my harness, I was very comforted. The view from the plane was really nice, we were only a couple of miles from Mexico and then to the North was all of San Diego. During the flight up there was another guy jumping by himself, he kept asking these really basic questions that I figured you should know the answer to if you were about to jump out of a plane. He was wondering what he should aim for and like when should he pull his ripcord. I dunno, when the light turned green he was outta there. And then it was my turn. You just kinda stand there and then 1....2.....3 jump. The first few seconds were my favorite part of the whole thing, that's when you first start staring straight at the ground which is 13,000 feet below you and I was just like, I just jumped out of a plane! It was also fun to play with the wind which your rushing through at like 120mph. If you open your mouth it immediately is stretched as big as it can get with all the air. After a minute or so of falling and doing spins my instructor started doing all these hand motions at me, I was like "what are you trying to tell me?" I thought he wanted me to go into a spin again so I moved my hands to what I thought was the proper spinning location but then all of a sudden, Wuhhhwuppp, the chute was deployed and we were just cruisin around. Believe it or not the scariest part was yet to come, we started doing these really tight spins to the left for a while, and then to the right and you could just feel the stress that was on the harness. I couldn't help but think, man if this isn't rigged up right or something I am gonna fall a few thousand feet to those rocks right there... but it was alright and the landing was nothing more than a jump off a wall or something. This nice guy with a camera lens the size of a small telescope was kind enough to take pictures of us.

meteor shower schmeteor shower

Alright so last night we went up to lake Sutherland to watch the Perseid meteor shower. I read on a few websites that the show was going to peak last night and so was pretty excited about seeing a nice show. Lake Sutherland is kinda a crazy place and it was hard to get some of the guys to come because frankly, they thought they would die. Not that its dangerous or anything, but after the lazer beam from space and the serial killer outside the car that one time, a few of the boys would've rather not gone back to this "pit of death".
We arrived at like 11:30 with only 1 creepy car following Jonathan on the long and windy road there. The sky looked amazing and not long after laying down on the road did we see some pretty rad shooting stars. Brandon attempted to take a minute-or-so long picture but I'm not sure if holding the shutter button down with your shaky finger works very well. The stars were more alive than normal and we saw the bright white streaks at least once per minute. What I had read before said that the peak of the shower would be early-early Monday morning so I figured that as the night went on we would see more and more meteors, unfortunately things seemed to calm down but with the conversation understandably turning to weird and creepy things I was having a good time. As the night came to a close I did get to see one of the best meteors of my life, it literally skipped across the atmosphere, making a bright streak-dark-streak pattern like a rock skipping on a pond.
It's a pretty cool thing, that space, with countless stars and galaxies and whatever. It's just so weird and hard to comprehend that the Creator of all of that, the guy who made all those little dots of light and set in motion comets and orbits and everything so perfectly, that He not only knows me, my name, my dreams, the good bad and ugly, but that He loves me, like a ton. That's just crazy, and I think we need to stop every once in a while and think about what's going on exactly. I know that in my life at least I so often doubt or disagree with what God has going on for me right now. I can formulate a perfect sequence of events for my life and get disappointed and flustered when they don't fall into place. I need to have more faith I guess, to realize that if God made all those stars so perfectly, stars that I'm pretty sure he doesn't love as much as he loves me, then I can trust that the plan he made for my life is even more perfect. And if he was able to make all those stars and galaxies and planets then wouldn't his thoughts and plans for my life be better than plans that I could even come up with. Anyways, I dunno if this sounds really cheesy or lame, I guess its more for me to reflect back on someother time. I gotta get back to work though, only 1 week left!

Backflop

So this Jonathan has some trouble commiting to things, mainly backflips and backdives