2PC Chancel Choir

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Derrick

Tonight was exciting for me because it was my first “official” night working with the youth of the Second Presbyterian Church’s Chancel Choir as their accompanist. This has been several weeks in the making, but now it’s officially under way, and I’m thrilled. I’ve been singing with the Chapel Choir (another of the church’s six choirs) and playing keyboard/piano for the contemporary worship band at the church, but my friend Amanda and I have now filled in two vacant positions to work with the high schoolers (she’s the almighty director).

The past week or so have been really exciting as we’ve started to pick a lot of the music we’ll be working on this semester. There are piles of music all over my room, but that’s not a bad thing. We’ve got one particular song I’m extremely excited about (and that’s a complete understatement) in the works, but I’ll hold off on posting it until a little later; we won’t be singing it in church until April.

As far as the position, I’m accompanying the choir, so I have some more time at the piano each week, which I’m loving already. I’ll also be an adult counselor (and the accompanist) for their Choir Tour in June… I’m learning more and more each day what an impressive operation this tour is, so you can expect all sorts of updates once the tour starts to come around.

For now, I’m off to bed after a great rehearsal with the youth… I know this semester is going to be awesome!

Syllabus Day

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Derrick

Today is what most people fondly refer to as syllabus day – the day when professors hand out syllabi and everyone knows they won’t have to do anything in class. So far, I don’t think my professors got the message. After a brief 5- or 10-minute syllabus overview, we spent the full class period in my Spanish class discussing Latin America, various region-related terminology, geography, etc. When graphic design class came around, we jumped right into the material, with some quick tasks in Photo Booth, PhotoShop, and InDesign, along with a lot of time experimenting with the website Type is Art. As the website puts it:

All letterforms are composed of 21 distinct parts. Most commonly these parts combine to form the characters of our alphabet. Type is Art allows for experimentation of forms beyond this typical character set.

Some of the things I worked on are below. It’s a really hands-on class and if today was any indication, I think I’m going to like this semester a lot.

2011 in 100 Words (or less)

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Derrick

I’m not one to reminisce much, so this will be fairly brief. 100 words or less, in fact. Ready, set, go:

I rang in 2011 with family in California. Then, I returned to Illinois for a brief time and headed to Chile for a 10-week research assistantship and a family vacation. Back in the US, I visited family in Maine and returned to campus for the legendary Experimental Physics May Term course. June and July were spent working on campus. By the time August rolled around, our Residential Life fall training was back in full swing. The fall semester was really busy, but I enjoyed getting more involved with Second Presbyterian Church. Now I’m home and ready to ring in 2012!

Okay, that’s 98 words. Count ‘em. Happy New Year everybody!

Christmas Light Videos

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Derrick

At long last, I have the videos put together for our Christmas lights this year. The lights were sort of a work-in-progress for a lot of the holiday season; being on campus made it difficult to have all the songs ready in time for the first day they were turned on, but after being home for a week or so of winter break, things were updated for the year. It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas, Deck the Halls, and the Looney Tunes closing theme (played at the end of the night, “th-th-th-that’s all folks!”) were retired from last year, but they might resurface next year. In their place I added “Festive Greetings” and “Heat Miser” (the latter was requested by one of the kids next door this year).

We’ve enjoyed comments from neighbors and friends who stopped by this year to watch the lights – we even saw police cars sitting outside watching all the songs on a couple of nights.

I’m including one of my favorites below, but you can go to vimeo.com/channels/xmas to see all of this year’s songs. Comments are always appreciated – any suggestions for songs next year?

(Nutrocker from Derrick Rohl on Vimeo)

Museum of Science and Industry

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Derrick

Today, I visited one of my favorite places in Chicago: the Museum of Science and Industry. I’ve always enjoyed visiting and my family and I figured we’d be smart and arrive right when the museum opened this morning to beat some of the crowd. It worked out, but the day was still a sensory overload.

On the way to the usual attractions like the U-505 Submarine, I noticed the Circus area on the way to the U-boat had been given a little facelift with some new lighting to dress up the floor:

I couldn’t help but think in my usual tech geek mentality. Specifically, I was thinking about how this is the same effect/technology I might put into use in the near future at Hansen Student Center on campus (again, tech geek – I warned you). This isn’t to say I was distracted from the rest of the museum. One of the new large-scale exhibits I hadn’t yet seen was Science Storms, so I geeked out again. The first thing we saw when we walked in was a giant land slide simulation. Or was it a giant pendulum? The indoor vortex the museum installed? The prisms creating rainbows on the ceiling? Maybe it was the lighting up on the ceiling… I can’t even remember what I saw first because the folks in charge seemed to have thought of everything when they put together this exhibit. All in all, I loved the exhibit and found myself repeatedly thinking, “When I’m a teacher, this would make a cool demo [...] It would be awesome to bring a class here to show this to them,” and the like. The best part was seeing everyone be so excited about what they were seeing, because I’d bet a good half of the crowd didn’t even realize they were actually working with science in action. That’s one of my goals when I’m a teacher – I don’t want physics to be big and scary or overly abstract – it should be fun. Or, in the wording of my own physics teachers, phun.

After returning from the city and grabbing dinner, I finally managed to go outside and film the Christmas lights – I’m hoping to have videos edited and uploaded online in the next few days. Get ready!