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It’s that time of year again! This weekend marks the beginning of the first of two weeks of workcamp put on by the Arlington Diocese.

Here’s a quick description of what workcamp is:

WorkCamp is a week-long intentional Christian community for high-school aged youth. We begin each day with the celebration of Mass before going to work sites where we serve those in need by making their homes safer, warmer, and drier. The evening program consists of Christian entertainment, songs, and speakers. A reconciliation service is always a part of the week and Eucharistic adoration is frequently the way we close the day.

It’s basically a week of fun, hard work, and getting to know some awesome individuals. While personally as a member of St. Mark’s I haven’t been to the Diocesan workcamp before, I’m already more than ready for it to begin and prepared to have a fantastic time during the week. We (volunteers) will be arriving at the location tomorrow morning and getting it all set up for the students graciously giving up a week of their summer to help those in need!

It should be a fantastic week, and perhaps I’ll even update the blog during the week – who knows.

So there comes a time when one feels he/she is too skinny and skeleton-like, and should do something about it. I’ve decided that now’s a good time to start building a little muscle since we’re still at the beginning of the summer, and so I don’t feel like any other person could just snap my arms in half (or something like that; I’d have to actually have that happen). While stretching many muscles may require the need of a machine with weights, I’m attempting to create a workout for myself that doesn’t require any so that I could get exercise in anywhere without needing to bring anything along. I’m still experimenting with what I’m going to be focusing on and how I’m going to be getting the “burn”, but here’s what I have so far:

• 3 sets of 5 full push-ups, holding down 5 seconds on the last one of each set
• 4 sets of 5 full sit-ups, holding 5 seconds on the last of each set
• 3 sets of 5 full push-ups, holding down 5 seconds on the last one of each set
• 2 sets of lunges, holding for 5 seconds down on each one with your knee an inch or two off the floor
• 3 sets of 5 full push-ups, holding down 5 seconds on the last one of each set
• 2 sets of 15 kneeling side kicks
• 3 sets of 5 full push-ups, holding down 5 seconds on the last one of each set

You can tell I’m focusing on arms mostly for these, as that’s what I need most work on. This is designed to be challenging for me currently, but I’ll tweak and add things to it as time goes along and some of the exercises become easier.

Fairfax County School Board Adopts FY 2011 Approved Budget - The Fairfax County School Board has adopted the Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) FY 2011 approved budget of $2.2 billion, which establishes new fees for athletic participation and for Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) tests; eliminates more than 200 positions, nearly half of which are from central office support; freezes all employee salaries for the second consecutive year; and creates a three-year priority schools pilot program that designates 30 schools to receive special staff support and financial support to help improve student achievement. [FCPS News Releases]

This blog post is for week 5 of RIT’s Human Communication course.

I found this comic online a few days ago and thought I’d share it:

Being in a Human Communication class, this made perfect sense to put on my blog (even though I only found it through StumbleUpon). As you can probably tell, it plays off of the connectedness that many people feel must be present in order to rationally communicate with others. Through the use of social media sites and technology, we have become more “connected” with each other on a certain level that hasn’t been seen in the past. The depth of the interactions we have online, however, seems to be quite different. Many people on Facebook, Twitter, etc. share the type of information shown in the comic and may feel they have an intimate bond with others they talk to online. Does this really mean we’re great friends with those people though? Sharing these types of extraneous physical ideas is a much different beast than sharing actual personal feelings, which is viewed more as what people did in the past. Is there a paradigm shift happening here in the way and manners people communicate? It certainly is happening as far as platform – phone, email, letters, etc. – is concerned.