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January 27, 2005
Sore Racquetball Shoulder
J-term is going by far too quickly. Seriously, I only have two days left of J-term. EVER. What's up with that? Why is time suddenly in ultra-high-speed mode?
Saturday was really really cold. I had to work in the morning at Admissions, but fortunately there weren't any tours for me to give, since all but a couple of the prospies cancelled their visits that day due to the still-treacherous road conditions from the previous night's severe blizzard. Many of the sidewalks were completely hidden, including the steps from Ring Road But all the fresh-fallen snow and the clear blue skies made for some very nice pictures from around campus, which I took after I got out of work around midday. In the afternoon I played some cutthroat racquetball with Zach & Seth, playing with three people is definitely a different game from singles or doubles. Then I had a pretty quiet evening, just doing some photo stuff. Oh, and then I had a pretty good and long discussion/debate with Ben and Heidi that started off at terrorism, eventually made it to creation and then somehow on to global warming. It was a bit too wide-ranging to say if either of us "won," but it was still fun to have a little back-and-forth with people about belief systems and such.
Sunday morning I went to church at Christ Chapel with Erin, Zach & Jolene, and heard another good sermon from Brian Beckstrom. I think I'm definitely gonna try to go to the Chapel on Sundays when Brian's talking, he's a really cool guy. After watching a bit of football in the afternoon I went over to Lund to play racquetball for a third day in a row with Zach, this time joined by Seth, Jolene and Aaron. It's really fun, but all the racquetball I'd been playing was really starting to get to my right shoulder -- I'm pretty sure my rotator cuff is messed up, because whenever I throw/swing my arm in an overhand motion (even to throw a snowball), it hurts a fair bit. It even hurts my shoulder to shift my car into reverse, so I'm definitely gonna get it looked at next week while I'm home, especially since I'm slated to take tennis and golf as classes in spring semester. But anyways, after racquetball it was time for a night of problems trying to get iPhoto '05 installed, because somehow my iPhoto library/database got seriously corrupted (which caused iPhoto to crash every time I tried to open it), so I had to re-import all 6000 of my photos. Sigh. I have yet to rebuild my albums of my favourite pictures (such as my screen saver and background albums), that'll be a project for next week probably. But I'm really liking the new things that this new version of iPhoto is doing, it's definitely an improvement on the previous version.
Monday evening I played some IM volleyball with Ben, John, Josh, Nate, Megan & Anna again, though we lost very quickly in two sets. Since it was the playoffs we're done with that now. But Josh, Nate & I were fine with losing because it meant we wouldn't have to miss any of our new favourite show, "24." The first 10 minutes was a thrill-ride, just like the ads said, lol. Jack Bauer came through in the clutch once again, but now the terrorists are in control of all 104 nuclear power plants in the country. I'll have to make sure to tune in next week when I'm home to see what happens next. I admit it, I'm hooked. :-) I also went to MCF, Men's Christian Fellowship, for the first time on Monday night. It seems like a pretty good group, I'm definitely gonna try to find time to go fairly often during spring semester. Meeting some more people (especially other Christians) on campus is definitely a good thing.
Tuesday after class I went down to Mankato to have a short chat with Cecil about grad school stuff, and to check out car decks and speakers at Best Buy. I walked out with a new Kenwood radio/CD player (which I got installed this evening) and a couple pairs of speakers, which will be installed later, since Best Buy didn't have enough time to fit that in today. Also on Tuesday night was the last Proclaim of J-term, and Erin gave a good talk at it. It was also her last Proclaim ever as a GAC student, since she's graduating on Friday. Tonight after picking up my car from Best Buy my sectionmates and I (plus Liisa, Heidi & Anna) went to Trivia Night in The Dive. There was one sports round, and the other six rounds were movie questions (okay, so maybe one of the five rounds was actually TV, but close enough). I mean, c'mon, the questions are obviously pretty easy when all seven teams are in a first-place tie for a round, having all ten questions correct. But we did clean up a bit, our team won four of the seven rounds in total. So... much... food... ResLife is talkin about continuing these Trivia Nights in the spring, with other groups (like the PA's or sports teams) sponsoring it occasionally. We as a section will probably end up sponsoring it some night too, and come up with some really obscure movie quotes, and Josh would undoubtedly have a "Macintosh Trivia" round, lol.
This week I also bought a new domain name, www.jared-lee.com, which sometime later this spring will become the new home for my website. Josh is gonna be letting the seenoevil.org domain name expire this spring, so I had to find another address to have it at in order to continue my blog. When I know the date that my website will change addresses I'll post it well ahead of time. And seenoevil.org will be down temporarily for a bit next week while Josh does a bunch of maintainence on the webserver over Touring Week. Speaking of Touring Week, I'll be home taking it easy from this weekend through next weekend, when I take a road trip over to Green Bay to visit Mike & Kevin. I mean, hey, it wouldn't be touring week if I didn't at least go on a tour somewhere. ;-)
Posted by Jared at 01:02 AM | Comments (0)
January 22, 2005
Snow!!
Welcome to winter in Minnesota! It's a bit tardy, but winter finally arrived today, and with a vengeance. It snowed like crazy all day long, by the time it stopped around 9pm we had 6-8 new inches of the white stuff, more than quadrupling our snow totals from the entire pathetic winter to this point. Everyone here is so excited to have snow again finally!
Yesterday went fairly well. The downside is that Ben, John & I had to spend all of class time in C++ completely re-writing our code, only getting back to the functionality of the robots program that we had at the start of the day. Oh well, the code is easier to understand now anyway, and since the profs like our new version better we'll get a better grade on it. In the evening I went over to Jolene's apartment to have some absolutely delicious calzones for dinner with her, Zach, Cory & Sara. It was the first time I'd ever had calzones before, and I must say it was a mighty good introduction to them. :-) After that Zach, Sara & I went to Nobel and met Josh & Heidi there, to see the campus movie, "The Incredibles." It was really good! Pretty funny, and lots of action too, it was great. And Samuel L Jackson was in it too ("Frozone") ... man, he's in everything! After the movie I went to Prepare to wrap up the night. Karen's talk at Prepare was a bit longer than usual (we didn't wrap up till almost 11), and on a fairly controversial topic, abortion. It wasn't your usual in-your-face thing making it only a social issue, she was heavily basing her talk on the Bible to support her viewpoints, it was good. But one really interesting thing that we found out last night that's actually happening right now, is that the KKK is planning to open family planning clinics (a la Planned Parenthood) in minority and urban neighborhoods, for the express purpose of reducing and extinguishing the non-white population. This is absolutely despicable and needs to be stopped. But it's not getting much press, and it needs to be brought to people's attention.
Today was pretty fun too. In addition to all the new snow, in the afternoon Ben, Zach, John & I went over to Lund to play doubles racquetball for awhile, that was awesome. When John left to go play badminton with Megan & Matt, Cory stepped in and started screwing all of us up with his nifty left-handed serves. Gah! Zach & I made a brief appearance at Gaming Night before we were called away to go sledding and traying. We went with a whole bunch of people over to the big hill by South Elementary, and we brought a few caf trays, while others managed to get Dr Nimmo's (the band director) 10-person toboggan. Man was that fun! Once Zach, Cory, Jolene & I were tired with sledding, we started to make a snow fort. Unfortunately the snow wasn't all that great for packing, but hey, it's snow, at this point we really can't complain about it being the wrong type of snow, hehe. Once the wind started picking up around 10pm we made our way back to Arbor View across the open fields. The blizzard had started! So around midnight Aaron was gonna drive back to his dorm, and drop me, Justin & Dorea off along the way. He was able to back his car up, but he couldn't drive it forward at all, there was just too much snow. After a bunch of pushing to try to get the car to go forward in the parking lot, we just had to give up on that, and push it back into a parking spot, and then wait for S&S to come give us a ride back to our dorms. The S&S guy said that 50 mph winds had been recorded here in St Peter tonight. And when those winds have 6-8 inches of new powdery snow to blow around and cause whiteout conditions, it's making travel extremely treacherous, if not impossible. Even the S&S vans with their all-wheel drive are having a really tough time getting around, that's how bad it is. This is seriously the absolute worst I've ever seen the weather here at Gustavus. In fact, it's probably the worst I've seen it anywhere in many years, it's turned into quite the blizzard. We have blizzard warnings out for this part of the state until 6am currently, but I wouldn't be surprised if those are extended, since it'll be frigid (only single digits, the temp's plummeting there right now) and still really windy for most of tomorrow (25-35 mph winds). And you wanna know what the best part of it all is? I have to work at Admissions tomorrow morning and give tours. Wow I'm a lucky guy. But in reality there'll probably be heaps of cancellations, so we'll probably get sent home early. But we still have to show up, sigh.
Oh, and another reason yesterday was a happy day was because Bush was re-inaugurated. But Bush's speech has off-put many people, including some of his top supporters, such as Peggy Noonan. I'd have to say that I actually probably agree with most of her analysis of the speech. And Mom, just be glad I wasn't 16.7 pounds like this baby who was just born in Sao Paolo, Brazil.
Well, now that I've just talked to Josh for an hour or so, I think it's definitely time for bed. I'm so not gonna like waking up in the morning, sigh.
Posted by Jared at 02:37 AM | Comments (0)
January 20, 2005
J-Term Rocks
I love J-Term! So much free time to do so many fun things, it's awesome! Last Friday evening I went to Gaming Society, and played the board game "Civilization" with John, Ben, Nate, Morgan & Paul (a.k.a. Frodo). It's a fairly complicated and long game, so since it was my first time playing it I obviously didn't win, but it was still heaps of fun.
Saturday afternoon I went to the GAC-Augsburg basketball game, which the Gusties won by 8. Decent game, but the crowd never got too into it, so it wasn't all that exciting, oh well. In the evening I went over to Arbor View to play some Trivial Pursuit with Jolene, Zach, Seth, Johanna, Carl, Stef, and Kate, who had come down for a visit, it was fun seeing her again.
Sunday morning I went to church with Erin, Luke & Jenna, we went down to First Lutheran. It was my first time ever going to that one, but I think whichever church I end up choosing, I think I'm gonna try to make a habit of going to church on Sunday mornings this semester here at GAC. Then after watching the Vikings predictably screw up and lose to the Eagles, Zach, Ben, John & I went to play some racquetball. It seems to be a habit we're starting, playing every couple of days or so, but it's definitely a fun habit. It's giving me a nice and sore right arm and shoulder though, oh well. Sunday night we had a ton of people over here in 202 to watch the extended edition of "Return of the King," since quite a few people haven't seen it.
Monday, being Martin Luther King, Jr Day, was Science Day here at Gustavus, so I was busy most of the day working for Admissions. It was still really cold in the morning when I had to give a tour, but at least there wasn't much wind. For the Admissions luncheon I sat at one of the Physics tables with Seth, and one of the prospies that came to the table was my second cousin Michael from Tomahawk. It was cool talkin to him and his dad David, I hadn't seen them since the reunion. Michael's interested in engineering possibly, hopefully he'll choose GAC. Monday evening was a pretty good basketball game too, between GAC & Macalaster, which the Gusties won by 8 again. It was a pretty sweet, close game the whole way, and the crowd was fired up from the get-go by Doug Espenson's nice two-handed jam. Man I've missed basketball!
Tuesday night after Proclaim, which was a really nice hymn night, I drove down to B-Dubs in Kato with Loren & Laura, and met a whole ton of people down there for a couple hours. I was sane and got some wings that I could handle, but Zach, who was at BW3's for his first time ever, decided it'd be a good idea to get 10 Blazin' wings. Bad idea. :-) He only made it through four before he gave up in a lot of pain, hehe. I also tried one of them, which was more than enough to set my mouth and lips on fire for the next half hour. I was curious to try one sometime, and now that I have, I doubt I'll ever be having one again. They're just too spicy to enjoy. It also got amazingly warm outside yesterday! Who knew that 35 degrees could feel so warm? It was downright balmy after five days below zero. :-) Although I'd still rather take a nice big snowstorm at this point in time.
This evening I played some intramural volleyball with John, Josh, Ben, Matt, Nate, Anna & Megan. Of course we lost the match in two sets, but at least we didn't totally embarrass ourselves. That's a plus, especially for a bunch of people who aren't athletic at all. After that it was time for another edition of Trivia Night down in The Dive. This time we had a fairly large team, including all six of us from 202. There were five rounds, and we won two of them, the Nintendo Trivia and Grab-bag Trivia rounds. The rest of my roommates took charge on the Nintendo round, answering all ten questions correctly, it was pretty sweet (but incredibly nerdy, haha). About the only ones I could even help on the entire night were a couple from grab-bag. For instance, another of the rounds was movie trivia, five questions of which were on "Napolean Dynamite," and another five from "The Big Lebowski," neither of which I'd seen before. So when we came back to the section, Josh decided to pop in Lebowski, since neither Lindsay nor I had seen it. So that's what I'm watching while I'm typing this on my laptop out in the section. The movie's okay, but so far I don't think it's as good as everyone says it is. Maybe if I wasn't occupied by my computer I'd find it funnier, oh well...
I guess I should be getting to bed pretty soon here. Tomorrow in C++ Ben, John & I have to re-write our code a bit for our "Robots" program, we have it doing the right thing, but our profs didn't exactly like how we were doing it, sigh. But for a bit of weird news, check out the story on a Colorado man that nailed himself in the head but didn't notice it for six days. How do you not notice a six-inch nail stuck in your head??
Oh, and I nearly forgot, but I now have several more photo albums online. Over the past few days I've gotten several ready to go, so that now I'm caught up to the night before my parents arrived in Sydney, when I saw fireworks at the Sydney Harbour Bridge! So be sure to check all those albums out, and I'll say it in a post when I get any more albums online. I'm gradually working towards getting some of my New Zealand albums online, I'll get there eventually.
Posted by Jared at 01:08 AM | Comments (0)
January 13, 2005
Back in the States
Some of you might be wondering why I haven't posted at all during the last month. There's actually some pretty good reasons, namely that I didn't get a chance to post at all during my last week and a half in New Zealand, and that by the time I got back to the States, the webserver, because it's sitting at Gustavus, was down for all of Christmas break, and since J-term started up this week at GAC I've been busy seeing friends again and working through grad school apps. But I'll try to sum up what I've been up to.
Let's see, where did I leave off last time...? Oh yeah, Edoras! Back on Dec 11th David Strijbis took his kids, a couple of his friends from town, and me out to Mt Sunday, where the LOTR set for Edoras was built. It truly is out in the middle of nowhere (hence why a nearby sheep station is called Erehwon), an hour from the nearest town that has electricity. No traces of the buildings are left, but it was still amazing to hike up Mt Sunday and stand where the Golden Hall of Meduseld once stood, and see so many grand vistas from the movies. It was amazing to see it from afar, to notice how utterly puny Mt Sunday looks when compared to the mountains that are around it, and then to see just how big it actually was when you got up close to it. That night I went with Strijbis's to a barbecue at one of their friends' houses, where the highlight of the evening was a hysterical couple of games of "Mexican Train," hehe.
On the 12th I went to church with Strijbis's in the morning, before saying goodbye in the afternoon and striking out on my own for my final week abroad. On my way north from Ashburton I stopped in at the International Antarctic Centre in Christchurch, which was actually a pretty cool little museum. At the hostel that night in Kaikoura I met and talked with a few cool people, including a German kid named Simon who was at the end of his year as an exchange student in Wellington. Hostels are awesome that way, in that you can meet so many interesting people from around the world.
The next day I drove up to Picton, dropped off my rental car, took the three-hour Interislander Ferry over to Wellington on the North Island, where I had another rental car waiting for me right when I stepped off the ferry (if any of you ever go to New Zealand and want to rent a car, go with Apex, they're awesome!). I stayed a couple of nights in Wellington, New Zealand's capital city, and I loved it there. "Windy Welly" is a cool city to walk around, there's quite a bit to see. One of the highlights was Te Papa Tongarewa, the national museum of NZ on the city's harbourfront. I spent five or six hours wandering around Te Papa, and I could've easily spent more time there if I hadn't also been wanting to see some other stuff in Wellington, like the National Film Archive.
On the 15th I drove a lot. In the morning I went up to the Mt Victoria lookout in Wellington, and walked a short distance along a couple of trails to the film sites of where the Hobbits were fleeing for Bucklebury Ferry, in particular where they fell down the hill and found a bunch of mushrooms, and also where Frodo told them to get off the road. It's amazing that they were able to film those scenes in a park in the middle of Wellington, a city of 200,000 people. About 45 minutes north of Wellington I paid a visit to Kaitoke Regional Park, the film site of Rivendell. It was really hard to visualize where the buildings once were, because all the trees and shrubs had to be moved back once they were done with filming, so there aren't even empty patches in the vegetation to indicate where the structures were. Then I made the long drive into the Volcanic Plateau in the center of the North Island, taking a little side-trip to Mangawhero Falls north of Ohakune in Tongariro National Park, where a scene was filmed of Smeagol slipping and sliding down a rocky river while fishing. That area is in the shadow of Mt Ruapehu, an active volcano which most recently erupted in 1995-6 (one of its ski fields, Whakapapa, was used for the Emyn Muil scenes, and pretty much all of the Mordor shots were filmed somewhere in Tongariro NP). 
The other two volcanoes in Tongariro NP are Mt Tongariro (which has been dormant for a century), and Mt Ngauruhoe, which last went off in 1975, and since it has the classic "cone" volcano shape, it was used as Mt Doom in LOTR. It was starting to get pretty late when I finally rolled into Taupo for the night, but on the way there I drove on the beautiful Desert Road. It was especially pretty since there were dark blue-grey storm clouds ahead of me, with the sun backlighting the burnt orange tussock grass and soil. Spectacular! Anyway, Taupo sits on the shores of Lake Taupo, NZ's largest lake, which was formed by an immense volcanic explosion in AD 151, the world's largest eruption in the last 3000 years or so. In fact, the eruption was so big that its effects were noticed as far away as China and Rome! It was so catastrophic that it apparently extinguished almost all life on the North Island when it happened.
I had hoped to do the Tongariro Crossing the next day, an 8-hour hike past Mt Tongariro and Mt Ngauruhoe that is labeled as the best one-day hike in all of New Zealand, but the weather was bad in that area, so the track was closed for the fourth day in a row. Oh well. So instead I just made some stops along the way on the short drive to Rotorua, first at Huka Falls and then Aratiatia Rapids, both along the Waikato River, NZ's largest river. Aratiatia Rapids is kinda cool in that every couple of hours they open the dam just upstream of the rapids for half an hour at a time, which causes the water levels to rise rapidly and turns the placid river into a raging torrent. Then I also stopped at the Wai-O-Tapu Thermal Wonderland, which had lots of thermal rock and water formations. It was a really neat place, but because of all the sulphur and other gases and steam, it was really warm and humid, and it reeked horribly. I hadn't ever seen anything like it though, so I was glad I went.
On the 17th I bought a genuine NZ jade necklace at the Jade Factory in Rotorua before heading out to Matamata to take a tour of the Hobbiton film set. It's on private farmland, so booking a tour was required. It was so cool to get to see that place, it's amazingly beautiful land. It's also the only LOTR film site that still has any of the set remaining; 17 of the original 34 hobbit holes are still there. Most of them are just facings on the hillside though, except for Bag End, which has just enough room inside for a couple people to stand and for a couple cameras to be in there looking out the front door (all the interior shots of Bag End were done at a sound stage in Wellington). After that I took the "scenic" route to Auckland via the Seabird Coast, but it wasn't particularly scenic, oh well. When I got to my hostel in Auckland I found a cool place to eat -- Burger Wisconsin! I did a double take when I saw the sign, and I just had to go there. It was super-tasty too. :-)
I kinda hung around Auckland and surrounds for a bit on the 18th, mostly because I was hoping to meet up with CJ, who, as it turned out, managed to catch a flight home to Minneapolis a day early, so I had plenty of time to take in lovely views of Auckland from a couple of the 40-some extinct volcanoes that surround the city. Late afternoon I made the 4-hr drive up to Paihia, the gateway to the lovely Bay of Islands. On the 19th I drove up to nearby Waitangi for a tour of the Treaty Grounds. The Treaty of Waitangi was signed back in 1841 by the British and Maori for the protection of equal rights for all, and is widely regarded as the founding document of New Zealand. Among the sights at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds are the world's largest existing waka (Maori war canoe), and a beautifully carved and decorated whare (Maori meeting house). 
In the afternoon I took a nice three and a half hour cruise through the islands with Dolphin Discoveries, with the highlights being cruising through the Hole in the Rock, seeing a pod of dolphins swimming just a few feet away from the boat, and also seeing where another cruise ship had run aground and sustained serious damage the day before after having engine trouble in stormy seas (it was kinda humorous to see, but only since nobody was injured). Because of my stubbornness regarding applying sunscreen, I sported a really intense sunburn on my face for my return trip to Auckland, oh well. I'll learn one of these days...
To wile away the hours on the 20th before flying out, I went to the Auckland War Museum for awhile with this cool Norwegian kid named Jorgen who I met at my hostel in Auckland the night before (and two nights before that when I also was in Auckland at the same hostel). There were lots of fascinating Maori and WWI/WWII exhibits of course, but the highlight of the museum was the performance by Manaia. Manaia is a group of six Maori (three men, three women) who perform traditional Maori songs and dances. They were all really cool to see, but the most memorable was the haka, the Maori war dance. If it were being performed by more than just three guys, I can definitely see how it'd be extremely frightening and intimidating. But the haka is still performed today by several of NZ's sports teams, most notably the All Blacks, the national rugby union team.
After we were done at the museum, Jorgen & I made our way to the airport (he was also flying to L.A. on my same flight) in time for our 8pm flight. The flight was pretty uneventful, I wasn't able to sleep a single wink the entire 11.5 hours of it. After landing in LA at 10:30am (still Dec 20th) I had to wait around there until my flight to Minneapolis left a bit after 3. By the time I landed in the Twin Cities, it was still Dec 20th and only half an hour or so after when I off from Auckland. Crazy. My parents met me at the airport and drove me back home. I'd say that 22 hours of total travel time for going halfway around the world's pretty good, especially when you can pull it off without suffering from jet lag at all. :-)
So a day or two after I got back I'd been planning on driving up to St Cloud and then on to Pelican Rapids for Seth's golden birthday, but my car wouldn't start or turn over or anything, so that idea was quashed. Instead I just hung around the house, enjoying to be back in Wisconsin just in time for an outbreak of frigid weather right before Christmas, and enjoying being around family again, and familiar faces. After travelling alone for two weeks, you kinda long for being around even one person that you know. So I was excited to get a chance to hang out at last with two of my best mates, Mike & Kevin, during the week, plus going over to Nathan & Laura's for the Vikings-Packers Christmas Eve game and a game of Rail Baron. Ah, good times, good times. And then came Christmas, so I got to see Aaron & Eve and Jake again (plus Nathan & Laura again), it was really nice.
The week after Christmas I really started to crack down hard on getting grad school apps worked on, I got my car back from the shop (they weren't able to find anything wrong with it, so I don't know if I should be relieved or worried...), hung out with Mike & Kevin a couple of nights (including starting to watch the extended edition of "Return of the King" at 11pm one night, hehe), and on New Year's Eve I went with my parents down to Linc & Ellen's for a Chinese night, of food and then photos from Linc's recent trip to China, so that was nice getting to see all the Taylors Falls church people again. I relished New Year's Day and all the football games on TV -- oh how I had missed football! And the Capital One Bowl and the Rose Bowl were both such good games! Needless to say I was pretty happy. :-) And I managed to get basically everything packed up that night too for moving back to Gustavus. I'd forgotten how much crap I had, and how much of it I'd just thrown into boxes in the basement before I left for Australia. After sorting I was able to leave at least three boxes of stuff behind, I was proud of myself. :-)
So when I tried to leave for Gustavus on the morning of the 2nd, I found out my car had another problem ... a broken muffler pipe. Argh! So my dad and I had to put a temporary fix on it (a tin can, a metal shingle, a couple clamps and some wire ... needless to say I'll be making an appointment to replace my muffler next time I'm home), and it was noon before we finally were ready to leave. I could've stuff all my stuff in my car, but since I wouldn't have been able to see out of any mirrors, my parents came down with some of my stuff and helped me carry all my stuff up to the section. I'm back in the same room I was in before, Wahlstrom 202E, and it does feel good to be back at Gustavus, it feels like home. And my sectionmates even made it an entire week before they started forgetting about me being here and neglecting to ask me to join them for things, like, say, watching a movie out in the section or whatever. Oh well. I was busy or had other plans all those times so far anyway, so no harm.
t is kinda weird being back here and in class again though, although easing back into that with J-term (even with my J-term class being Intro to C++ Programming) is definitely helping. It's so fun to get to see everyone again though, including all my physics buddies, and getting back into the routine of going to Proclaim and working at Admissions and stuff like that again. In addition to a couple of nights over at Carl & Seth's or Jolene's apartments, last Friday night I also went up to the Cities with a bunch of people to MN Orch (Minnesota Orchestra), for their weekend performance, headlined by Respighi's "The Fountains of Rome" and "The Pines of Rome," which were fabulous! It was my first time ever hearing a professional orchestra live, and my first ever being at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis. Afterwards we went out to dinner at Brit's Pub on Nicollet Mall, it's a really cool place with darn good food. Last night Josh, Lindsay, Erin & I went to Trivia Night in The Dive, and we won two of the six categories -- both of the literary categories, which is scary since none of us are lit, theatre or English majors. I even missed a couple of questions in the geography round, which cost us that one too, sigh. Can't win em all I guess. :-) And tonight I went over to College View again to have dinner with Loren, Laura & Erin. It was fun seeing Loren & Laura again too, since they were studying abroad last semester as well (Loren in England, Laura in Italy).
Oh and today I also FINALLY got all my grad school application stuff finished! I'm applying to the Meteorology programs at nine schools - Penn State, Wisconsin, Colorado, Oklahoma, Maryland, Florida State, Illinois, Colorado State & Mississippi State. Hopefully everything will get everywhere on time. Now it's just time for me to wait and see what kind of offers I get from places. It feels so good to be done with all that at long last, now I can take some time for other stuff ... like getting my photo albums web-ready, which will be a HUGE project. Goodness knows I'll be spending plenty of time indoors these days, what with it being absolutely frigid, -5 to -10 for daytime highs the next two or three days. But the relative lack of snow is making me sad.
Anyway, this has really gone on for far too long. If you're still reading this, I congratulate you. And I promise I won't have any more posts that are anywhere near this long, because I highly doubt I'll be have anything nearly as interesting to talk about as New Zealand. At least not for quite awhile. ;-)
Posted by Jared at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)