I was also a part of the BSU traveling praise band, Drawn Together.  I plugged up my violin to an amp and provided some nice backup.  We played at Disciple Nows, Wednesday night youth services, revivals, a youth Super Bowl party, a couple of times at the BSU, and a retreat in Kosciusko.  It was a lot of fun using my musical talent for God by traveling around the state playing music.

I also held my job at the MSU TV Center.  Most of you know that I put up graphics on the jumbotron during football games.  This past semester, I also put up graphics and ran camera at baseball games as well as did graphic work at basketball games.  I doubt I’ll work for the TV Center this coming year.  Having income is nice, but I want to really enjoy my senior year and be able to sit in the stands with my friends at all those games…not in a control room manning a computer.

And on top of all of that, I had classes.  I am proud to say that I maintained a 4.0 GPA throughout the entire 2009-2010 school year!  Oh yeah, I also tried to hold onto a social life.  Ha.

I was selected, along with seven other students to go on a storm chasing trip for two weeks during May (peak part of severe weather season) with two professors in the Great Plains.  Many people applied for a spot, so I am thankful all of my academic hard work paid off!  On average, we spent about 4 hours in a van day…some days it was 10 hours, some only one.  We traveled all over Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota.  We were SOOOO close to Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota, but our professors wouldn’t take us.   In total, we saw 5 or 6 tornadoes, storms with awesome rotation, hail, heavy rain…I could go on.  It made for some great photo-ops!  We also went to Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota.  Pretty neat!  Click here to watch a short film I made while on the trip!!!

Oh yeah, and the first week of May (or maybe the second?) I went with Amy to Athens to meet up with a friend of ours from high school and we went to Florida for a mini road trip.  St. Augustine is my new favorite place, by the way!   We also went to Daytona (home of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (where I almost went to college)), Jacksonville, some towns in between, and Savannah.  It was a lot of fun to relax after my busy semester!

And Jordan, my older sister, got married June 5th at Ocean Springs Yacht Club.  It was a nice, simple wedding.  ‘Still weird I have a married sister.  I provided all of the music on my violin and doubled as a groomsman.  Ha.

The rest of the summer, I have been playing tennis, doing a lot of running, biking, and swimming (I wan to start being in triathlons).  I am also playing on West Heights’ church-league softball team!  I watched a LOT of Wimbledon, College World Series, and of course followed the NBA free-agency.  And I have been going to my grandparents’ for lunch!

August 7th I am flying out to Charlotte to meet up with my twin sister, Amy, who is there interning for the month of July and part of August.  I’m going to drive her back.  On our way home, we are either going to make a stop at Myrtle Beach of Nashville so she can look at Vanderbilt.  (That’s where she wants to go to graduate school.)  You can keep up with her and her internship at http://aksimmons.blogspot.com/  (I set that up for her.)  She is there working with developmentally delayed kids.  (Her major is speech pathology.)

And school starts back August 18th for me.  I am only take 13 hours, but I am in charge of the 2010 Southeast Severe Storms  Symposium.  I have contacted numerous broadcast meteorologists across the nation to come and speak to those of us in the weather/geoscience program at MSU.  There will be students there from other universities as well.  It’s a BIG deal! Ha.  ‘A great way for us to make contacts in the business.  That is in September.  I’ll probably continue to intern at WCBI in Columbus as well as fill-in for the on TV some.  I also want to keep all of my athletics up (running, tennis, biking, swimming, intramural softabll…seems like I am leaving something out) and just enjoy being around my friends for 9 more months before we all go out and get jobs.   Ha.

As far as what I plan to do after graduation April 30th, 2011 at 10am, you ask?  Well I think I am going to take a break from weather and pursue for dream job for a while: flying.  (Weather was always a fall-back.)  I got my pilot’s license in 10th grade, but I want to go to this Mauna Loa flight school in Hawaii! I want to add helicopters to my license and teach other people how to fly.  We have been to Hawaii twice on vacation, and I LOVE the place.  It would be amazing to fly planes and helicopters there!!  So I am going to do it! Ha.  And once I do that for a while, I can see myself getting a job as a TV weatherman and flight instructing in my spare time.  Sounds like a good plan, right?

I’ll add pictures of my storm chasing trip and Jordan’s wedding later.  Maybe.  It takes a long time for the to upload and most all of you are on Facebook now.  If you are not, click here for a few of Jordan’s wedding pictures.

Thanks for making it all of the way through this.  You’re the best.  And please call me if you’re in Starkville this week or next week and we can make plans to do lunch.  Outside of interning and all of my athletic stuff, I’ll just be at my apartment playing the piano.  I’m going to start working on a new offertory.  And I don’t feel like proof-reading all of this. Ha.  If you have never been here, sign my guestbook, please!  And feel free to comment on this post above and to the left. 

God bless!

Shortly after my last post on the 16th of October, Amy and I flew to Baltimore to see a good friend of ours that we went to high school with, Zachary Patterson.  (He attends the prestigious Johns Hopkins University and is going to be a neurosurgeon.)  We left on Friday, November 6th after classes.  After the taxi ride to Inner Harbor, we ate at a nice restaurant in Little Italy.  Saturday was cold, but we still got up to go eat breakfast at a place called Mrs. Shirley’s.  It was AMAZING.  Get the pancakes.  They’ll knock your socks off.  (Excuse the out-dated cliché.)  We then toured the home Edgar Allen Poe grew up at–and it’s not in a great part of town!  As always with those literary types, he grew up in poor conditions.  I believe the rest of Saturday night was us going to a mall at Towson.  Zachary and I watched Amy shop.  We then headed back to Baltimore and ate at L.P. Steamers.  Wow.  Great steamed crab!!  We actually took mallets and knives and got the meat out ourselves.  Don’t worry.  There are pictures!  The next morning we stopped at the Barnes & Noble bookstore and stocked up on Johns Hopkins apparel.  Go Blue Jays!  We then made our way back to the Inner Harbor (very nice place) and watched a street performer ride unicycles and juggle and make bad jokes. But hey, it was fun.  And a tradition of mine and Amy’s…. we always eat at The Cheesecake Factory if there is one near-by.  There was!  It was delightful.  We then went and saw Charm City Cakes.  Yes, the place of FoodNetwork’s Ace of Cakes!  And then we had a tour of the Johns Hopkins’ campus.  Oh yeah, somewhere in there we went into some Baltimore Museum of Art of something like that.  It was…interesting.  There was a Monet exhibit, so that was kind of cool.  (I wasn’t that impressed, though.)  That night we three could be found in the library at Hopkins studying.  Zachary had a Chemistry lab report due, and Amy and I had schoolwork as well.  See, we are responsible!  And we awoke Monday morning, took a cab to BWI, and then flew home.  Mom and Mimi met us at the airport to take us home.  (Mom and Dad took us.)  It was a very fun trip, and I hope it becomes a yearly expedition.  Be sure to check out the Baltimore album on here or Facebook (which has captions under the pictures).  I’ll take this time to say that Amy picked most of the restaurants. 

Okay, point #2: Gulfport!  We decided to spend Thanksgiving break down on the coast instead of in Pontotoc.  Jordan was down there with her fiancé, so Amy, Mom, and I got a hotel room and stayed a few days.  (Daddy chose to work.)  It was filled with eating good seafood, getting good shopping deals, and Hard Rock.  Mine and Amy’s birthday was November 18th, and apparently at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, you eat for free during your birthday month!  We took advantage and had traditional Thanksgiving cuisine in a non-traditional environment.  (Ooh, that was nice wording!)  Oh yes, we also had a nice photo-shoot on the beach and at a marina.  (Christmas card pictures!)  For the first time ever, Amy and I went out and did some Black Friday shopping.  We were at the outlet mall at 11:15 pm and finished up about two in the morning.  It was actually pretty fun!  (And our purchases were all for us!)  We left Friday and stopped at Academy where Amy got all of her apparel for her Peru trip that’s coming up, and I got everything for my trip to East Asia.  The story had things for all climates! 

And finally, the Egg Bowl!  I went into the day not expecting a win, honestly, and I am a VERY optimistic person.  I spent the game in the Jumbo-Tron control room running graphics, but you better believe I was doing some fist-pumping in my nice leather office chair!  After we maimed Ole Miss–excuse me….When the game was over, I helped set up for a post-game show with Coach Dan Mullens and Jack Cristil.  They wanted the Egg Bowl trophy in the background, so I definitely took a couple of pictures with it while it was just sitting there!  

Those are the big points.  I have to go back to school for a test Monday morning, and then I am done for the semester.  This was really the easiest semester for me since I have been in college.  It was great!  Next semester, though…. I’ll be interning at WCBI (look for me on TV and the webcasts!), working basketball and baseball games for the TV Center, traveling with the praise band for the Baptist Student Union, and, oh yeah, taking a full class load.  It’s going to be CRAZY busy.  And I leave for my missions trip very soon.  I can give more details when I return.  For security reasons, I have to be non-detailistic right now.  (Yes, I made that word up.)  I would like to thank everyone that contributed to my trip whether prayerfully or financially!!  You’re amazing.

I’ll leave you with a verse I came across today that really spoke volumes to me:  “Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm.  Let nothing move you.  Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.“  1 Corinthians 15:58

God bless!

The Chapel Choir had their summer gospel program today as well.  It was AMAZING.  I love that kind of music and I think everyone there was touched by it.  In fact, I know they were.  It was very moving and the Lord definitely showed out.  I am hoping I’ll be able to join them singing next summer. 

Here is the album from today’s pictures.  Choir, I included y’all in the “Family” section of my photos.  My church family means the world to me. 

My second summer class, calculus-based Physics II, is winding down.  I have to drive back to Starkville Tuesday to take the final.  All I am going to say is to be in prayer for me!  It’s the toughest college class I’ve been in and probably will be in.  It’s the most retaken class for most majors.  Tough stuff.  But Thursday Amy and I will be leaving for a white water rafting trip with our college Sunday School class.  That should be fun!  Next week is open and then classes start August 17th at MSU.  Woo hoo.  One week of summer for me!  What will I be doing during my one off week?  I’ll either be at home reading, the church playing the baby grand, or at my grandparents’ eating.

We then walked a couple of blocks to the Orpheum for the show.  It was SPECTACULAR!  It was a little long, but I would have set there for a lot longer.  The cast was amazing.  They were very energetic and played the parts well.  During intermission I made conversation with a guy sitting next to us.  ‘Turns out that he is from Bruce, Mississippi and works in an office at Ole Miss.  So, basically, I made Amy another connection!  Never meet a stranger.  The second act was just as magnificent as the first.  The performance was actually better than when Amy and I saw it in New York City in December of 2007.  Have you seen that album??  We made an ice-cream stop in Southaven on the way back and ultimately got home around 1:30 am.

This weekend was also the wrap-up of Wimbledon.  (Just in case you aren’t familiar with it, it is the most prestigious tennis tournament there is.)  I was up just a few hours after we got in from Memphis to watch the live all-American Women’s Final between Venus and Serena Williams.  Serena won.  Andy Roddick, an American man, played Sunday morning against a guy who has won the tournament 5 times already.  Well, LONG story short (longest 5th set in the history of the Wimbledon Championships), Andy lost.  I am still upset about it.  He should have had it in the bag.  Oh well.  Don’t cry over spilt milk.

And Saturday was obviously the Fourth.  After the match that morning, I pretty much slept the rest of the day since we were out late the night before.  But we went to my aunt and uncle’s house that night to eat and see family that came down from Charlotte.  I got to play soccer and baseball with my cousins, too!  And later we had Marshall’s 8th? Annual Firework Show.  I managed to take a few good snapshots of the display.  Check those out in my 2009 Miscellaneous Album. 

In some other news, I finished my June summer class, Differential Equations, with an A.  :)  I started calculus-based Physics 2 Monday, and I am already looking forward to it being over.  That’s why I love summer classes: as of tomorrow I will be 25% done with the class and it just started! 

I have been playing a good bit of tennis lately.  It’s been nice.  Hopefully I’ll be able to play for many years to come.  After all, who wouldn’t want to play tennis with the weatherman?

And lastly, but definitely not least, I finished reading through Psalms last week.  I recommend everyone take a little time out of each day to do that.  Pick out a few key words and focus on them.  To me, unfailing love, shelter, refuge, and God is my Rock stuck out.  A lot of times I think I live in a wicked, godless generation.  Reading through Psalms reminded me that David thought that, too.  Psalms 14 and 53 even say there is no one who does good- not even one.  But you know what?  We serve the SAME god that delivered David though his iniquitous generation.  Why would we ever doubt that He isn’t in control this time?  Our worries aren’t knew to Him! 

Psalms 48:14:  For this God is our God for ever and ever; he will be our guide even to the end. 

I’m now reading through Proverbs and it has some awesome stuff so say about fearing the Lord and wisdom.  Check in to that, too!  And I started reading Crazy Love for a summer Bible study Amy and I are in.  I can’t really write a review yet, but it seems like it’s going to be thought-provoking and also encourage us to love God relentlessly. 

-wrs

I went skydiving with Amy and a few other friends yesterday, June 20, 2009, in Cullman, Alabama! We got there around 9:30 and didn’t leave till around four. They were pretty packed! We had tried to go twice before but the weather wouldn’t cooperate with us. I guess the third time really is a charm! After ascending to 13,000 feet in a King Air… I jumped out.  It was amazing! We free-fell one minute at around 120 mph and then floated for another four minutes to the ground. The instructor even let me steer the chute.

I paid extra to get a video and pictures of the experience. The woman who did it was pretty new at it.  Very few of the 99 pictures she took actually turned out. (Her camera was angled to far up and she just got pictures of sky- not me!) Needless to say, they gave me my money back. The video is pretty good. You can’t really understand the dialogue, but you get the idea!

I FULLY intend on going back. I already told two groups of people I would go with them. I loved it! Hmm, maybe I’ll become a skydiving instructor…. Mom said that is the only way she would jump…. If I jumped attached to her! It was a GREAT experience and I recommend it to anyone!!!

Check out the pictures here. I also uploaded Amy’s video in addition to mine.

Sunday we pretty much lounged around on the beach and in the hotel rooms until that afternoon when we all met Jordan’s fiancé‘s parents for the first time that night.  Nice couple!  We ate at a very nice Italian place called Salute.  Amazing lasagna!  Mom, Dad, Amy, and I then made our way to Ben & Jerry’s at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino.  That is definitely my favorite brand of ice cream.

And today, Monday, we came home after making another stop at the Polo store and eating at some placed called 49.   My shrimp etouffee was pretty good. 

It’s nice to be home.  It’s my last free week before summer classes start next Tuesday.  Amy starts tomorrow at Ole Miss.  So, summer is basically over for us.  Haha. 

Oh yeah, I finished two books over the weekend: Blue Like Jazz by Don Miller and More than a Carpenter by Josh McDowell.  Both were great and I would recommend them to anyone. 

The picture to the left is at the marina and parking garage next to Hard Rock.    

-wrs

My mom’s parents were there as well as my older sister, Jordan, and her fiancé, Will.  (They had to cut out early, though, to drive back to Hattiesburg.)  The Simmons and grandparents- Mimi & Gran-Gran- got to eat at Olive Garden afterwards.  It was a nice meal.  Nice company and conversation.  I did feel bad about missing Sunday night church, however.  Oh well.  The children’s choirs sing next Sunday night.  I’m excited! 

Now Amy just has a couple of years at Ole Miss left then grad school at Vanderbilt, she hopes.  (Speech Pathology)  Check out my photos for the day’s complete album. 

Today was also Mother’s Day.  I’ll give a quick shout out to you, Mom, and tell you how much I love you and appreciate EVERYTHING you do for me.  You’re awesome!  And I realized today that MOM is WOW upside down…. I know, I’m behind.  But I think it’s a cool coincidence.  Today was also the baby dedication service at church.  It’s definitely near the top of my Favorite Service List.  (You just can’t beat Christmas.)

-wrs       

As always, I love your comments!  It makes me feel that all of this was worthwhile.  Just click on ‘Leave a Comment’ above the post to write what you think.  Last thing: it’d be nice if you’d go to the extreme bottom of the page and, ‘Register’ first.

Take care!   

-wrs