Day 3

The surprises started right away today. I woke up, said my "Thank you for this day" and "surprise me" prayers, then was surprised to find that my computer was not connecting to the Internet. Surprise! No morning email for Jeremy. I troubleshot for about 10 minutes before finally concluding the problem was with IIT, not me, so I left for breakfast. On the way out the dorm door, I saw a large paper sign from IIT confirming my suspicions: "The campus network is down due to power failure". Later that evening I found out more to the story: the power in the server room failed probably around 4:00 am or so. IIT, being the responsible people they are, actually do have UPSs installed on their servers, and even have a separate UPS on the air conditioner unit. Good for them! Unfortunately, the AC's UPS was drained almost immediately, soon leading to the catastrophic failure of all the servers. IIT spent the entire day reinstalling OSes and restoring from backups.

I arrived at breakfast at about 9:40, 5 minutes before they closed, and was greeted by a most glorious sight of an abundant supply of both fruity turnovers and chocolate muffins. These are quite rare finds after the crowds about 8:30 or 9:00, and in my experience almost completely unheard of at 9:40! I took two of each and stuffed them away for later snacking pleasure.

From breakfast I hiked to Tostrud and started working out, then went to phy ed class at 10:45. But the teacher never showed up. We waited patiently for a few minutes, then everyone went to work out (the format of class is lecture for 15 minutes, workout for 40). I'd already put in my workout time for the day, so I left right away, a full 45 minutes early. Marvelous.

The best part of the day was yet to come. Late afternoon I took a walk over to Ashley's room to see if she had any dinner plans. She wasn't there, but her roommate, one of her new really good friends from Global, who I didn't know very well, was, so I went in and we talked for a few minutes. That was at 4:20. I didn't end up leaving until 6:00. It was just amazing. We talked about so many things, philosophy, people, music... much of the time it felt like we'd been friends for years rather than acquaintances of only a few weeks. What was most amazing for me was connecting with someone else my age who loves the same types of Christian music that I do. It was such a cool conversation all around. I went to Ashley's room looking for my friend, I left having met a new friend, someone who I'm now friends with in real life rather than just on FaceBook. Thank you, God, for that surprise.

The later evening brought me to see Michael Gulezian, a really, really good guitar player, perform in the Pause. Not much else to say other than that it was very impressive. (One odd note: each of his guitars [he brought a standard 6-string and also a 12-string] had two pickups in the bottom... hmm...)

I left the concert during the intermission and spent the rest of the night working on a photography website: www.reflectionsbywendy.com. Nothing too surprising, just a good, fun, and productive evening and night.