Nate's Blog
Nate Langel
Remsen, Iowa
Sophomore
Major: Elementary Education
I love my wife. I'm interested in breakfast, lunch, dinner, Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis, schoolwork (occasionally), Peanuts Comics, geeky computer stuff, loud music, pizza, ice cream, racquetball, and ultimate frisbee. I enjoy long walks on the beach and making sun tea.
This could be real life in a few years
April 19, 2010
On Sunday evening, Susan and I had a two prestigious and honored guests.
No, Susan and I's coats don't hang that nicely on the knobs of the microwave cabinet, and we typically don't have Nesquick bottles and straws at supper time. Our guests were what I gues you could call "babies" and we were "sitting." Little Josh and Sophie played with our Jenga blocks, toyed with the Alpha Baby computer game on my Mac, threw and kicked around a frisbee and soccerball (respectively) out in our yard/west side of campus, and had an all around good time while their mom and dad went out for a movie and a meal. The left picture is of the two munchkins in their natural habitat (where they live), and below is of Sophie and I from yesterday.
As the title alludes to, having two little kids running around our house is quite thought provoking. It hasn't happened yet, but it seems like married couples eventually get to a point where every says "Hey, you guys have been married for awhile, why don't you have any kids yets," and then sure enough, before two much longer, the number of persons in their family jumps up 50% (you know, they start with two, and then all of a sudden its three (50% of two is one, and that plus the orginal two is three) and maybe I'm over-analzing this). In any event...well...I'm excited to have kids. Someday.
Pre-fatherly,
nate
Letter from home
Apr 14, 2010
I was delighted to find this enclosed in a letter with "Emma" as the return address label.
Susan and I are both feeling under the weather today, with stomach aches and fevers, but a letter from your baby sister is good medicine.
My schoolwork has been pretty hardcore lately (mostly because I've been putting it off). In Diverse Populations class today, my group delivered our presentation about teaching African American students. It's really nice to have it done and out of the way. Here's the "prezi"
Well, I've been napping all evening, but I think it's already time for bed. Hopefully I can sleep off this illness; it makes me even less motivated to get schoolwork done.
Social web counter
Apr 12, 2010
It's great to be back in Michigan (I was out of town working for Dad for the last time this spring). I was catching up on all my RSS feeds (see video below), and happened upon the Social Web Counter (below the youbtube viedo)
I think this is pretty amazing.
On Home Fries
Apr 7, 2010
We had left over potatoes from cooking our Easter dinner, so this morning I put together some home-fries. I was hoping to be able to say that
Bob Evans would be proud, but unfortunately mine didn't turn out spectacularly (but combined with some ham and eggs, it made for a decent breakfast). I did the spices well, but I didn't cook the potatoes long enough in boiling water before putting them in the frying pan. Next time...
The home-fries cooking experience reminded me of this scene (I couldn't find a good original in a quick youtube search... but here's a spoof).
Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew... make home fries...
Resurrection Sunday
Apr 4, 2010
Happy Easter!
Christ the Lord has Risen Today
Christ the Lord is ris'n today, Alleluia!
Sons of men and angels say, Alleluia!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!
Sing, ye heav'ns, and earth reply, Alleluia!
Love's redeeming work is done, Alleluia!
Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia!
Death in vain forbids Him rise, Alleluia!
Christ has opened Paradise, Alleluia!
Following our church service this morning, Susan and I invited over two friends of mine that weren't able to go home for the weekend (one's from Minnesota, and the other is from California...). It was great, two guys that would have otherwise ordered a pizza got a full Easter dinner, and Susan and I had an excuse to host a large meal.
After watching Dad cook a ham in the crock pot holiday after holiday, I've gotten pretty decent at cooking them myself. Unfortunately, I had to cut mine up for it to fit in the crock pot, so Dad's ham back home in Iowa probably wins the aesthetic reward.
Susan's stawberry-jello-salad = amazing.
It was a fantastic day of celebrating our Savior's resurrection.
My Summer Schedule
April 1, 2010
I'm finally signed-up/registered/enrolled/for-sure-taking summer classes! After a week long scare of not being able to enroll in my desired community college classes (two out of three were full), I am now officially a student in each of those classes. The payment deadline was Wednesday night/Thursday morning, and that's when a few spots opened up and I got right in.
Here's what my schedule will look like starting in May (actually the first week of summer classes is the same week as Cornerstone final exams...that will be interesting).
After some complex addition, I figured that I will be sentenced to 28 hours of actual in class time. Along with that, half of my Physical Science class is online (well, I think that's how it works). All said and done, it's 11 credits, over a period of about 8 weeks, so I guess that's pretty much full time.
Susan is planning to arrange her work schedule to always include Mondays and Wednesdays (when I'm gone for 13 hours of the day, not including travel), and hopefully we'll be able to do a bunch of mini-honeymoon stuff. We have both never been up North to Traverse City, the bridge, or the island up there. A few trips to Northern Michigan, coupled with beach volleyball on Cornerstone's new sand volleyball pit, evening walks downtown, playing frisbee in Riverside Park, and our church small group camping trip will surely make for quite a summer. I tend to think about all the recreational aspects, and forget about all that homework that I may/may not do...
Stirred but not shaken,
nate
Oh! And happy April Fools Day! Mine was somewhat unfoolish, or I guess I didn't get pranked. Google swapped names with Topeka, Kanasas, which I think is lamesause, mostly because Topeka is supposedly Grand Rapids biggest competition for obtaining Google Fiber. Besides that, the Linux Distro that I run posted a hoax blog entry about partnering with Mattel and Microsoft. If you are familiar at all with Linux or at least slightly a geek, you may find it funny. I was highly amused.
Bike Chains and Heresies
Mar 31, 2010
Over the past few class periods, we've been discussing the person of Christ in Christian Theology class. We've gone over his deity and his humanity, and today we talked about how those two aspects occur together, Christ's unity. Basically, Christianity teaches that Jesus was fully God, and fully man. Both. Simultaneously. This is difficult to understand, then again, I've learned over and over again in this class that when thinking about God, some things are just flat un-understandable. The church fathers (like me) didn't exactly comprehend how this fully God and fully man notion really worked, but they did know for sure what it didn't entail. This is where the heresies come into play; many people tried to explain the person of Christ in a number of ways that either minimized his divinity or his humanity, or separated the two.
I was feeling especially studious while taking notes this morning, and with the help of Gliffy (simple and free mind mapping software that I learned about via @ronhoutman in EDU-262) I made a visual representation of each heresy.
In order to pinpoint exactly what the incarnation is not, the church fathers conceived the Chalcedonian Creed, which was meant to disband those heresies. Our class picked apart the Creed, and figured out which parts spoke against an individual heresy.
I found the concepts to be thought provoking (namely the thought that because of my finiteness, I can't really visualized the possibility of being fully God and filly man), maybe you do as well.
Secondly: my bike is finally ship-shape again. My chain was miserably and hopelessly rusted (that's what I get for riding it in the snow and slush with all the nasty ice melting salts), but it is not replaced. A big thanks to my friend Kyle who made up for my pathetic lack of mechanical skill.
Confusion to the enemies,
nate
Blog Mirror
Mar 6, 2010
Over the past few weeks I've been playing around with my own website, and have begun posting a mirror of this blog on my page. The blog has a subscribable RSS feed, and shows my twitter posts, along with the Cornerstone's twitter and Rocky's (our mascot tweets about athletic news).
Also, the posts are comment enabled, so you can leave a remark if you like.
You can check it out at blog.natelangel.com
Spring break is coming
Mar 2, 2010
I'm in class, but having a hard time paying attention. Spring Break is coming and I have a lot of traveling coming up this weekend. I didn't know until a few days ago that Google calendars were embedable. Here's my itinerary for the next fortnight.
My travel home to Iowa is bookended with two more shows for Dad. I'll only get to stay a few days at home, but I can't wait to see my brothers and sisters, and mom and in-laws. I'm also anticipating a visit with my old band director and playing some frisbee with my best man, Bryce (we would play video ("vigi" in our lingo) games, but he gave them up for lent).
Well, I should start paying attention again.
nate
nets and scissors
Mar 1, 2010
Tonight was a great game to end the Pep Band season on. We took down Aquinas 62-50 to win the WHAC conference tournament.
After the game I witnessed my first net-cutting. It was pretty cool, seeing the whole team and the coach climb the ladder and take a snip at the net. They should have let us Pep Banders have a go.
We are the Champions,
nate
east-side
Feb 27, 2010
Dad and I are working at the Woodworking Show in Detroit this weekend. After surviving two tests on Tuesday, and then two more on Thursday, I entered the weekend feeling like I was scholastically hit by a truck. Dad's weekend didn't start out the best either. His flight from Omaha left late, and his plane wound up waiting for a long time on the ground in Detroit before being able to pull up to the gate.
The show went okay today and yesterday. I've been trying to get some homework done, but it didn't happen last night, and I'm struggling to stay on task tonight. It's hard to believe there's only one more week before Spring Break. This semester has flown by so far.
I took some pictures of our booth and of Dad's cabinetmaking demonstration today.
It was good to see Dad again this weekend. But I'm quite anxious to get back to Grand Rapids and my Susan.
