Recycling, Baseball, and a cappella

First and foremost
Sharon got her score back from her boards. She did fantastically well! I'm so proud of her. :)

On Recycling Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs
Compact fluorescent lightbulbs, or CFL's, are fantastic. They are energy efficient, and they last several times longer than normal filament lightbulbs (something like 5 years or so? Amazing). The catch is that you shouldn't throw them away with the regular garbage. The reason is that CFL's contain mercury; it's toxic. Really, throwing away CFL's and letting them collect in landfills and allowing the mercury to seep into the earth or worse would ostensibly cancel out whatever [marginal] environmental benefit you would have reaped from using them in the first place. Everyone's using CFL's, which means that over the next five or so years, everyone's CFL's are finally going to burn out. When this happens, you should go to your local Home Depot, because they have boxes and plastic bags for you to properly dispose and recycle CFL's. So now, you know.

It's one month into baseball season...
My St. Louis Cardinals are 15-7, which (as of 9:21PM tonight) is tied for the best record in Baseball. Moreover, the hated Cubs are piddling at 10-10 (4 games back). Yes, it's a long long season (22 games down, only 140 to go... as Adam would say, Let's Go Cards 155-7 this year!), but life is good. Moreover, the beautiful Busch Stadium just got a glowing review from the New York Times, they of the city of not-one-but-TWO extremely new and less-than-perfect ballparks. It's a good read if you're a St. Louis homer like myself.


Speaking of a cappella...
I pretty much went into a school as a freshman wide-eyed and enthusiastic and left as a senior with bags under my eyes and a healthy dose of jaded cynicism. Hoover High, I first thought, was the coolest thing since sliced bread, until I graduated realizing there was so much I didn't like about it (although, Hoover's still better than Vestavia. Because. Our inferior math/debate/baseball teams notwithstanding.) I came out of WashU a little wiser and perhaps less enthralled with it than I was before... but there were still some things I could say I was proud of or that I sincerely enjoyed. And one of these things, as mentioned in the previous post, was the vibrant and very-much high-quality a cappella community. Well...

Ben Folds has just released a new album of his group's songs as performed live by university a cappella groups all over the nation. My dear alma mater, WashU, is the only school to have two groups chosen: Mosaic Whispers and The Amateurs! A cappella was a big deal at WashU, if you can't tell (again, why it was a little awkward to be a brand new Christian group that needed a little polish, you can probably see). I'm pretty pumped about it all. I don't actually know much about Ben Folds, but I do know that Sharon likes his stuff.