New Student Retreat

We join you now with live coverage of… last week.

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Ahh, week 2 of IV. We’re in a new room for most of this quarter, but it wasn’t available this week, so we went back to the room that was new from the latter half of last year. Since we’d been there before, we knew how to set up, unlike last week which was in a completely unfamiliar place. So, setup went smoothly.

The first song was new to me. It was O Sacred King, by Matt Redman. I thought it had a different sound to it than what the worship team usually does, though that may have been partly because last year we had neither keyboard nor drums. I liked it. Better yet, I have the recording. I haven’t yet acquired the original version, though.

While I was assisting the speaker set up his laptop, Jesse, who is the other web guy and also knows sound, showed up and started tweaking the mixer. He obviously knows more than me, since he was adjusting the equalizer a lot, which I’ve never really attempted. So he stuck around and kept adjusting during the service, while I tinkered with my computer, which was doing the recording.

During the music he asked if we had anything to put under the speakers to tilt them up toward the audience more. I couldn’t think of anything. Then I spied my flip-flops on the floor. I held one up between my fingers, and looked at him with quizzical/questioning/hopeful look. He then proceeded to crack up. He attributed this not to my suggestion itself, but to my expression, which he then imitated for my benefit.

At one point during the music he pointed out the two RCA tape out connectors on the mixer and asked why I was using a different output instead of that. I explained that this was because I only had a mic input on my computer, and had to use a gadget I made that reduces the volume from line level to mic level, and this didn’t have RCA connectors. From behind my computer I pulled it out to show him — a white cardboard box, three inches long, with two wires coming out the ends, and a volume control. He was intrigued. He tried to open it, but I explained that you had to unlatch it properly first. I grabbed the awl on my pocketknife and poked it into a small hole on the side, allowing the top to open. (I had devised this so that I could open it if necessary without have an obtrusive latching mechanism on it.) He peered inside at the wires, and was still more amazed. It contains two resistors to bring the stereo input down to mono, a 1:1 tranformer to eliminate the electrical noise I was getting when I first started recording at church, and a volume control sticking out the side. I can’t really describe his expression very well, but I found it amusing. Finally, he found it amazing how I had set up my display-off key and keyword searches in Firefox.

Afterward, the New Student Retreat began. I decided to go, despite not being a freshman. I justified my presence with the fact that I’d never been to one as a freshman (I wasn’t in IV until my second year), and perhaps I could get to know people (since that’s hard for me). I drove Ruth and two freshmen (Allison, who was at small group, and another Tim, whom I had met at the ice cream social) over to Gracie’s where everyone was meeting. Once the directions arrived (but not before I had gotten my laptop out to look it up myself) we headed out. Or rather, we tried to. Ruth realized as soon as we got in the car that she’d forgotten her purse, likely back in the auditorium. So we performed a semi-repeat of last week (see below) and drove back. (At least we didn’t have anyone else in the car to delay in so doing.)

[Ed. note: My goodness, six parentheticals in one paragraph. I really need to stop that.]

By then the caravan had long since departed, so we found our way alone. We managed to drive in at the wrong church first, which appeared to be having a funeral, but we soon arrived at Vineyard just a bit further down the road. The church is built out of an old gym, which actually happened to be RIT’s gym before they moved the campus out of downtown in 1968 (or so Evan said later). The’ve got it divided in half, with one half as a gym and the other for the sanctuary and such. Now, there’s one thing you don’t want to do with gym floors, and that’s get them wet. Unfortunately, that’s just what happened, since their baptistry overflowed recently while they were filling it, soaking a large portion of the sanctuary and the corner of the gym. As the wood got wet, it expanded. And it had no place to go but up. Since the floor is made of inch-wide-by-foot-long pieces of wood all lined up nicely, the floor proceeded to grow lumps in the same direction. And not just any lumps. Long humps 20-30 feet long and a foot or more high, as if giant sandworms had been burrowing (to borrow Chris’s explanation). This was an interesting sight, to say the least.

As my first attempt to find something to do, I joined a nascent game of Boggle, preferring that over the basketball also going on. It was, however, completely full of girls, not all of whom knew how to play. And it didn’t last more than two rounds. And I only ended up with two scoring words, despite normally doing well at home. Oh well. At least I tried.

Soon the powers that be herded us off downstairs to a room with couches and chairs. They showed a promo DVD for Urbana, InterVarsity’s triennial missions conference (though deceptively named, seeing as it’s not being held in Urbana this year). Then we proceeded to play a game. Everyone wrote down their name and a quick summary of the craziest thing they’d done on a piece of paper. Then one was chosen by the organizers, and that person and two others selected at random were taken outside. When they returned, each of them told the story as if it were their own, trying to make it as believable as possible. We got to hear funny stories about Tim I. choking on root beer and nearly dying, Evan getting chased by an angry rooster, and Chris Mayers blowing up a palm tree. (I didn’t know he had it in him.)

Following that enlightening game, I found myself invited to a card game that was starting up, called Pitch (or high-low-jack). I’d never played it before, but I caught on after a few rounds. It’s a partner game, so Evan and I, who were across from each other, formed a team. Despite my newness, we ended up winning.

After that, Jon and Evan wandered off to play something else, leaving behind six of us at the table, all of whom happened to be from the freshmen small group, which had started the day before. (Never mind the fact that I’m nothing near a freshman. Ruth has an excuse, being a co-leader, but not me…) We discussed the crazy things we had written down in the previous game, and then decided to play whiffleball.

One of our group didn’t feel up to it, so he sat out while Anna joined us. She’s mostly deaf, but can still speak. (For the non-RITers in the audience, this is perfectly normal around here, since RIT contains the National Technical Institute for the Deaf.) Ruth knows some sign, so they were able to talk better. They and another guy formed one team, while I and two others were the other team. We played for an hour or so. When it was decided to quit after the next inning, we were down 18-22, but we managed to get 5 runs for a win.

During our game, there was a group of people sitting just beyond the 2nd-3rd base line (we managed to hit them with our ball a number of times) playing a game that has been somewhat popular among IV, Kung Fu Fighting. The players collect cards saying what moves they can perform and with what defenses or accessories. Normally you just say what attack you’ve made on the other player, but here they were acting it out. A move like “I kick you while spinning and running up the wall!” had the attacker doing just that (as far as was physically possible, of course). Some of the weapons include a bamboo stick, a fan, and a staff. So they managed to find pool cues, a box fan, and a piece of pipe in various places around the building to use as props.

I went to bed around 4. I wasn’t prepared at all; I didn’t bring a sleeping bag or anything. So, I carried a couch from one room into our sleeping room (it was quite heavy) and then slept on that. There were only three other guys going to bed at the time; the others were still upstairs. Jon Larson and Dave Ortiz were discussing various things relating to IV. Dave noted that downstairs where we were sleeping the men’s and women’s bathrooms were actually connected by a door between them. This was likely due to the roundabout configuration of the hallways, making it hard to get there any other way, but it still a strange thing to have. In fact, it’s lockable on the girls side only. Launching off of this, Dave said that of the people in IV, the girls actually seem to be the sketchiest. As an example, he told of Matt Marsh, who said that he once saw Katlyn and someone else looking in his bedroom window at 2 AM, among other crazy things. The conversation continued with other discussion of weird girl things, including saying that Emily probably hates them both for pulling her hair and doing other such rudely affectionate things. I commented that “you should wait until you find a girl that doesn’t mind when you pull her hair, then that’s the one for you.” They laughed. “Tim, you’re a genius!”

My watch started acting funny when I went to bed. I woke up later when I got cold, but my watch said 5:30. Lacking anything to get warm with, I went out to the car to get my pants. It was light out already, but I wasn’t thinking enough to determine that therefore my watch must be wrong. I took a peek upstairs, where everyone else had wound up sleeping on the chairs in the sanctuary. Then I went back to bed, slightly warmer than before.

I got up around 9:30, which was when they were supposed to start cooking breakfast. Part of the announcement at IV had said the retreat would feature breakfast a la Dave Ortiz, who evidently cooks a lot. He and some others concocted a bunch of pancakes, eggs, and bacon.

When I went outside the first time I woke up, I noticed that there was a chute in the side of the building, with pile of snow under it. This was apparently due to there being an ice rink in the vicinity as well as a gym. Before breakfast Ruth and I took our stuff out to the car. I pointed out the snow pile, and she took some and put it down the back of Evan’s shirt while he was helping cook. Unfortunately, he was unperturbed, and, having been here before, knew exactly where it came from, and proceeded to explain about the ice rink and RIT (which is how I knew what I said earlier about it).

We ate and then quickly headed out, since Ruth was already going to be late getting somewhere else. It wasn’t far to get back to her house. I waited while she got directions and stuff. In the meantime, one of their cats decided to investigate my presence in the kitchen. I sat down on the floor, and she soon sat on me. (The cat, not Ruth, in case you were wondering.) There she stayed for about half an hour, evidently quite content. Ruth eventually came down, and we discussed cats and such. She said the cat must sense that I was calm or something, and thus wanted to stay on me. Her uncle told me of a cat they used to have that could selectively shed its fur. It had a mix of white and black hairs, and if it sat on you you’d only find hairs that contrasted with the color of the surface. If you wore white, you’d end up with mostly black hairs on you, and vice versa.

I left home for work at 7:30 AM Friday morning, and returned at noon on Saturday. That’s 28.5 hours away from home. The last time I did something remotely like that must have been when the church youth group had an overnight thing many years ago, about which I remember little. This was also the latest I’ve stayed up at night.

One final tidbit: Last week Ruth left her cell phone at IV, so while we were walking to the car we had to go back and get it. This week she left her purse, so we had to drive back across campus from where we were meeting everyone. Finally, as she was about to leave with her friend today, she discovered she’d left her purse in my car. Do I sense a pattern?