Wes’s Life

DSC_5003, orig­i­nally uploaded by Wes Baker.

So, its a few days after I’ve gotten back from Europe and I feel that I’m finally back on my normal sched­ule. Over­all the trip was excel­lent, but along with my family, I feel that some places were better then others. Specif­i­cally, I am talk­ing about Ire­land; it was def­i­nitely the best part of the trip for many rea­sons (one of which is in the pic­ture above). The people were friendly and spoke Eng­lish, the food was awe­some and it was non-​smoking every­where! I’ll be post­ing more pic­tures soon enough and you can see all of them on Flickr right now.

I had a com­ment posted yes­ter­day to my post about One Day Blog Silence, and I won’t do you – the read­ers – a dis­ser­vice by let­ting you see what was writ­ten or the person’s web­site. Yet, I’ll give you the gist of his tirade. He felt that this tragedy should and is over­shad­owed by the war in Iraq and that the sol­diers never receive any form of memo­r­ial like con­vo­ca­tions, half-​masted flags and var­i­ous memo­ri­als.

Where this reader has severely messed up his argu­ment is that our sol­diers signed up for a job – where they are com­pen­sated – that they have to real­ize could leave them injured or dead. How­ever, no one apply­ing to go to col­lege ever assumes that they will be put in the same sit­u­a­tion and shouldn’t be. The true tragedy is that these people were only trying to better them­selves through a solid edu­ca­tion.

So, I haven’t writ­ten in a while, I guess I’ve been going through the rota­tions around here. Classes are wind­ing down faster then expected, I went from having five exams to two, and now I only have one. Campus is seeing an exodus of stu­dents and classes are seeing fewer and fewer of it’s reg­is­tered number. Noth­ing like good weather to bring people out of class­rooms and onto quads, lawns and side­walks.

In other news, I won’t be writ­ing any­thing for the site tomor­row. And, to some degree I hope you don’t either. It’s the One Day Blog Silence event in respect for events on the Vir­ginia Tech campus. I guess this is a small con­do­lence to truly affected stu­dents, but in my mind it’s some­thing a lot of people can do.

A lot of people have called me, sent me e-mails, left com­ments on my blog and oth­er­wise made sure that I was still living and breath­ing. To all of those people, thank you. It’s good to know that there are people out there that actu­ally think about you.

We began our first day of school here at Vir­ginia Tech very ten­ta­tively. Some people were still afraid, some people needed a shoul­der to cry on. Yet we still went about campus, weav­ing between the build­ings and uneasily look­ing at Norris every time we stepped foot near it. I wish I could say class went on as normal, that we went to class just like we would every other Monday morn­ing. How­ever, class was dif­fer­ent and most cer­tainly not nearly as well attended.

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This post is mainly for family and friends.

In case you haven’t heard any­thing, there has been a series of shoot­ings on campus today (Monday April 16th 2007). So far there has been one killing. I wanted to let people know that I am safe and from what I hear so far so are my friends.

There have been a few emails so far:

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