Weather and maybe etc

It's Sunday here. My first Sunday at L'Abri. We had a chapel service this morning in a little chapel that's on the main floor of the chalet that houses the library. The service was pretty boring honestly. It was just pure exegesis of James chapter five, and if you haven't spent some time thinking about the chapter before you sit through an exegesis it can be pretty hard to engage with. One of the workers here spoke.
By the way, the way things are set up here as far as the hierarchy of people goes like this: students are people that come for a certain time to study and learn; helpers are people who were students once but decided to come back and take on more responsibilities and spend less time studying--there are five helpers this term and they're mostly 23-30 years old; workers are people who probably have some connection with L'Abri (ie came here as a student 20 years ago or something like that) and have come here to work full-time being lecturers, tutors, writers, artists, philosophers, etc. All of the workers except for the artist in residence have Ph.D.'s in their fields. Most of them taught at big universities for awhile and then decided to do something a little more personal. The various disciplines represented here are biology, philosophy, psychology, art and art history, and pretty much all of them are very well-versed in theology. They are, without a doubt, the smartest people I've ever met.

I've been asked to tell you guys about the weather here. Today is a very very nice day. It's probably about 75 degrees outside, maybe a little warmer. Visibility is near perfect which means you can see about 12 mountain peaks around the grounds of L'Abri. Most days since I've been here have been a pretty good mix of weather. Usually in the morning it's a little chilly (maybe 50 degrees) and by 10 or so it will drizzle off and on until a little after noon. After noon the sun usually comes out and it gets up to at least 70 degrees. Last Thursday when we went hiking and paragliding it was probably 85 degrees. The coolest weather-related thing that happens here is when a low-lying cloud will just kind of run into the side of our mountain. You can see it coming through the valley from a ways off and it will slowly creep up to the side of the mountain over the course of 15 minutes or so. When it hits the side of the mountain it looks really crazy because a perfectly clear day will all the sudden become fogged over by a massive cloud and the craziest thing is that as the cloud works its way past us, it moves upwards over the mountain. So, if you look out at the sky you just see fog seemingly going straight up into the air.

Since today is so perfect, a bunch of people are playing volleyball down the hill on our court. I'm going to go play with them. If I keep playing as much as I have so far, then by the time I get back home I'll be able to destroy almost anyone at volleyball and also ping pong--although, once I get a little bit better, I'll start calling it table tennis.

One last note, I think I've figured out a way to let you guys see some pictures. I'm going to try to host them on a friend's site so that you guys can just click a link and check it out. I just have to make sure that he doesn't mind if I use some of his bandwidth. So maybe stay tuned for the chance of some pictures possibly.