This summer from May 22nd to August 8th, I'll be overnighting as a camp counselor! At Camp Royall in Moncure, NC, a cool outdoor camp for kids, teenagers and adults with Autism, I'll spend my time doing anything from swimming and hiking to singing campfire songs and making arts and crafts. Don't be fooled. It may sound like a lot of fun and games, but it will also be a lot of hard work. I'm so excited, though, and looking forward to the challenge!
Backtracking a bit now. For spring break I went home to MD. Not only did I hear about my wisdom teeth (this post), but I got to spend two nights at College Park with Rachael and friends. I'm practically a regular at UMD's juggling club now and here are the photos (and videos) to prove it!
For the past few nights I've been with Rachael. With no classes on Friday, it was the perfect opportunity for me to visit her at College Park. We're perfectly entertained by one another's company, some music or move in the background, and at least a couple deck of cards. However, after hours and hours of completely satisfying, yet sedentary, activity indoors, we ventured out into the cold last night, pedaling our bikes behind Christian, fashionably late for Friday's installment of juggling club.
Gathered in a racquetball court, jugglers of all kinds were, well, juggling. Rachael and I scooted off to a side and juggled with three balls each while the rest confidently tossed pins, blocks and frisbees in the air in groups of five at least. Everyone was juggling more than I could ever dream of handling until Matthew did a back-flip and landed, as gracefully as anyone could, on his nose-ish. The amount of blood that came pouring out of his face was more than I wanted to photograph, so I snapped a later shot.
Here he's cleaned up a bit, but is still red-handed:
We were able to move on, however, with the info that Matthew hadn't done any damage to his nose. He would go on to say, "It doesn't hurt. I just feel like I walked into a wall".
Rachael on a unicycle, able to ride with the wall
After juggling club the gang met up at Potbelly's for better-than-subway-or-even-quizno-sandwiches/subs. Potbelly's is the best because of the screaming employees and the screaming hot hot hot peppers (they've actually just got a nice bite). We decided that we wanted to spend the rest of our Friday with each other and went back to apartment 725 to dance, dance, dance the night away.
This is before we turned off the lights and turned on the disco ball.
Matthew doing "Poi" with glowing balls
sweaty group shot
We all collapsed in physically-impossible ways in the end.
The world's oldest known rocks are found near the Great Slave and Great Bear lakes in Canada. The rocks, which include granite, are around 4.03 billion years old.
Probably the earliest seismoscope was invented by the Chinese philosopher Chang Heng in A.D. 132. This was a large urn on the outside of which were eight dragon heads facing the eight principal directions of the compass. Below each dragon head was a toad with its mouth opened toward the dragon. When an earthquake occurred, one or more of the eight dragon-mouths would release a ball into the open mouth of the toad sitting below. The direction of the shaking determined which of the dragons released its ball. The instrument is reported to have detected an earthquake 400 miles away that was not felt at the location of the seismoscope. The inside of the seismoscope is unknown: most speculations assume that the motion of some kind of pendulum would activate the dragons.
