Fanfares & Flourishes

Last night was date night for the Pinkerts! We started with dinner at Buraka, a great Ethiopian restaurant on State Street, then we headed to the Overture Center for Fanfares & Flourishes: Music for Organ, Brass, and Percussion. It was fantastic! The best part was getting to see the 32-foot pipe organ in all its glory. All the musicians are members of the Madison Symphony Orchestra, so their musical resumes were pretty impressive. David's favorite part was the low, feel the rumbling in your chest, organ notes and Jocelyn really enjoyed the song "Praise the Lord with Drums and Cymbals". With a title like that how could it not be great?! We were really impressed with how well the brass and the organ complimented each other, which isn't a typical instrument pairing. We decided we need to own more instrumental music (which pretty much always happens after a great concert)!

We HEART Bucky

We love going to live sporting events! Soccer, volleyball, track, swimming, tennis, basketball, hockey, baseball, you name it! Being here in Madison has given us many opportunities to see fantastic athletes play their heart out for only ~$5 a ticket. Yeah Badgers! Plus they are always giving away free stuff at the games. And since we tend to go to the less "popular" sporting events there is enough stuff that we end up with some of it. We have gotten at least 3 T-shirts, 2 pairs of crocs (shoes for those who don't know the lingo), and a flashlight! Here's a picture of us with some of our winnings:
We are still trying to snag a picture with Bucky, but we're sure our persistance will pay off eventually. Since we're such science nerds it would be fun to get a picture with Chemistry Bucky (he is wearing safety goggles), but we'll take what we can get. So if any of you reading this post are also sports fans we would love to connect and go watch a game together!

Stuart in Cyprus

Jocelyn's brother Stuart just left for 6 months in the Republic of Cyprus, a small island country off the coast of Turkey. He will be taking part in Discipleship Training through Youth With A Mission (YWAM) http://www.ywam.org/contents/get_dts_purpose.htm, specifically focusing on bridging cultural divides by sharing the gospel with people who have no knowledge of Christianity. Stuart has a heart to serve God in the missions field and he hopes that this program will equip him to do so. All our prayers are with him. On a less serious note, you should know that Stuart brings craziness wherever he goes, so if you take a look to the left the top video clip is Stuart jumping into the Mediterranean Sea. Just click on the video and it automatically starts playing at the top of our blog. He says that if you play the video slowly enough (frame-by-frame), you can see where his expression changes from one of glee to panic. Go Stu!

So we started a blog...

Apparently all the cool kids are doing it. Now we will have to go on all those adventures we always talk about so we will have exciting things to write about in our blog. But right now the thing that takes up most of our time is school. Who would have thought that we would still be in school at 26? David works at Oregon High School teaching Physical Science and Adaptive Science and Jocelyn is student teaching at Abundant Life Christian School in Chemistry, Physics, and Physical Science. Boy are we nerds! But thankfully we both enjoy our jobs and are attempting to get back into the swing of things this semester after summer break. That's right, we still get summer break. But during the school year it can be pretty hectic and stressful. But someone has got to teach the next generation!