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February 25, 2005
Accepted Into Penn State!
This week hasn't been anything too overly exciting, although a couple fun and cool things happened. First, I got an email from Penn State on Tuesday informing me that I'm admitted into their Meteorology program, and that they're offering me an assistantship too! I'm probably gonna make a visit out there sometime during spring break in the first week of April to check them out and compare them to Colorado, which I'll be visiting in two weeks. At this stage my top two choices are probably Penn State & Colorado, followed by Oklahoma & Wisconsin (and those were my top four when I was filling out my apps, so now I don't really care too much about the other schools). As for some other fun stuff on Tuesday, I went down to Patrick's with John, Carl, Seth, Cory and a couple other people for their weekly trivia night, although I can't say that I was of any assistance whatsoever on the questions that were asked. Their team is called "The Aviators," and they've been pleading with me since the start of the semester to come down and help get them that extra point or two per round that'd get them into the top three overall, so I decided to give it a shot. I only stuck around for an hour though, as I wanted to go to Proclaim instead, that's more important to me than random trivia. I'll probably do trivia night again, though probably not next week, as next Wednesday we have a test in Astrophysics.
Wednesday evening I went to the Holden Evening Prayer at Christ Chapel. It's a fairly short (half hour) kinda-Lutheran service that's often used during Lent at different places. It's a fairly quiet and reflective service, but with some nice hymns too, it was pleasant. After that a bunch of us physics pholk went down to the Courtyard Cafe to watch Erika (junior physics major) play guitar and sing at Open Mic Night. After that I did a bunch of work on my webpage, including getting more photos re-uploaded, so that now all the other pages on my website actually have four photos at the top of the page again. Also, I fixed the problem with my archives links, so that now they actually work. I only have a little bit more to go, and my website will be back to where it was before seenoevil.org went bye-bye.
Last night was what I'd been looking forward to all week, the MIAC Playoff Semifinal (men's b-ball) match-up between #19 Gustavus and Bethel here at GAC. I got all decked out in black and gold (gold shirt & shorts, knee-high black socks, black & gold facepaint) and cheered so loud in the front row of the rowdy section that my voice isn't doing so hot today. :-) It was a tight game early in the first half, as Bethel led 19-16 after a bunch of lead changes and ties, but then the Gusties erupted for a 28-8 run spanning into the start of the second half to take control of the game. Capped off by back-to-back threes, our lead leapt up to 20 points, 47-27, before the Gusties cruised to a 65-49 victory, the 17th straight for the Golden Gusties. It was the third year in a row that the Gusties have ended Bethel's season in the MIAC semifinals here on our court, and the fifth year in a row they've met in the semis down here. Next up for GAC is the MIAC Championship Game on Saturday night, at home versus St Thomas, the #2 seed in the conference tourney, who we split the season series with. It should be an amazing game with an absolutely electric atmosphere (the winner gets a berth in the NCAA Division III tournament), but I have to miss it. :-( This weekend (and in half an hour or so, in fact) I'm gonna be at the Curriculum II retreat up at Koinonia, a retreat center just south of Saint Cloud. It's for the CII seniors and freshmen, and it was an awesome time up there three years ago, so I'm really looking forward to going back this year again. Carl & I convinced Chuck to let us take one of the schools telescopes up there, so hopefully we'll have a good night or two for observing. And I'm definitely bringing my six decks of cards up there, I'm hoping to get some games of hand & foot going! :-)
Tennis and golf are starting to get more interesting. This week in tennis we learned how to do serve (kinda important), though it's still a bit challenging to routinely get it in bounds without just lobbing it in there. But that's why I'm taking a class, so I can work on these things. And in golf we're finally doing full swings, and hitting some whiffle balls in the gym. I really need to get my body much more into the swing, so that it isn't just my arms doing all the work. But I think I'm starting to understand a bit more what I need to do to swing/hit properly. I'll get it eventually. And jazz dance... well, let's just say that Cory & I are doing the camel thing less and less. On Thursday I definitely started to feel like I was slowly starting to get the drills/moves we've been working on for the last week or two now. It just takes time, patience and persistence. Conditioning, on the other hand, is definitely my least favourite class this semester, the low point of every MWF, but it'll be good for me and help get me into some semblance of shape. St Ansgar's Chorus is also really fun, Dr Aune's absolutely hilarious! And we're starting to have baritones crawling out of our ears in there, so I got moved down to bass, which I feel more comfortable with anyway. Now I just gotta relearn all the songs we've done so far, looking at the bass line instead of the baritone line. And we've got some cool songs we're working on too. Too bad we only have the one concert in May, as far as I know.
Well, time for me to grab my bags, swing by Olin to help Carl pick up the telescope, and then head over to Three Flags to load up the vans for the retreat! Have a good weekend everyone!
Posted by Jared at 03:55 PM | Comments (1)
February 20, 2005
First Assistantship Offer
It's been a fun last couple of days, although not quite as witty around the section as it usually is, as Josh left on Wednesday morning with Heidi for their interviews with JET on Thursday, a program that pays people to teach English in Japan for a year. Then they hung out with Josh's dad in Milwaukee for a couple days, which is where Josh's family will soon be moving to. Yep, that's right, Josh will shortly be able to say that he's from Wisconsin and not South Dakota. A major step up if you ask me, even if it is Milwaukee. ;-)
Wednesday wasn't all that interesting though, unless you count homework as interesting. I can't even remember what I did other than a little astro homework that day. I can remember a couple fun things about Thursday though. In Golf class all we did was learn grip, posture, and how to take our swing to the top of the backswing. Now for a beginner like me that's actually quite a bit, and it's mostly tough for me to keep my left arm straight the whole time. Yeah, I need a lot of work. Sigh. But this is why I'm taking a beginning class in it, so that I can actually learn how I *should* be doing it whenever I happen to go golfing for real again. 
In the evening on Thursday at the SPS meeting, after hearing all the juniors talk about their Electronics II projects (including an interesting humidity sensor that Josh J. & Matt tried to build, I might try to join their research project). Once the talks were all done it was time for some delicious LN (liquid nitrogen) ice cream! Next time when we make LN ice cream though, we need to make sure Kelly doesn't pick up fat-free half & half for it, as we found out the fat-free stuff doesn't congeal or crystallize as much as we need it to. For all of you curious as to what LN ice cream is, it's just half & half mixed with sugar and flavouring of some sort, with liquid nitrogen poured over it and stirred in to freeze it all into ice cream. Mmm mmm good! After that I went to Prepare for a couple hours, it was a really good and reflective time that I think I really needed.
Friday once I was done with class and work I came back to the section for awhile, and instead of taking a nap or doing homework like I had planned, I wound up playing 500 for a couple hours with Ben, Zach & Megan, until it was time for supper and physics dodgeball! For some of the games we'd have 15-20 people on just one of the racquetball courts, which is a crazy amount for such a small dodgeball area. And what's really crazy is that as far as I can remember, it's also the first time I've ever actually played an "organized" game of dodgeball. Sigh, the things I missed out on by not being in public school in elementary or middle school, haha. 
But it was a really fun time, even if it was surprisingly tiring. Then I went to Gaming Society for awhile, where I played a new game (well, new to me at least) called "Power Grid," with Zach, John & Ben. Usually the first time I play any game that requires a fair bit of "strategery" I have no hope of winning, and this time was no different, but at least I managed to beat Zach (quite narrowly) to avoid being grand loser. :-) And for future note, Saturday mornings at 12:30am is an absolutely fantastic time to do laundry around here, all the machines are totally free!
Yesterday morning I had to get up early to work at Admissions. Oddly enough, this is the third year in a row that I've given tours on the morning of Case Day, but fortunately this year I didn't run into any sights along my tour route that would've been a bit awkward trying to explain to the prospie (to the parent(s), more specifically). I'm always nervous on weekend mornings during rush, on Case Day and other such events as to just what I'll encounter around campus while giving a tour. 
In the afternoon we had something like 13 or 14 people show up for pep band, which was fantastic for us. We played at the final regular season game for the men's basketball team, as they beat St John's 83-74 for their 16th consecutive win. The Gusties clinched the MIAC regular season title back on Wednesday night, are now ranked #22 in the country in Division III, and host a MIAC playoff semifinal Thursday night. Despite sporting a 16-game winning streak and the regular season title, they'll probably need to win the MIAC playoff title in order to get into the NCAA's for what would be the ninth time in the last ten years. The downside of the game today was that portions of our crowd were extremely obnoxious today, since it was Case Day and everything. Oh well. After playing a bit of 500 with Zach, Megan & Vicki, I went to the very first "King of Hearts" Christian Game Night over in Linner. Luke & Jenna are the ones that are organizing this, and it'll be a weekly Saturday night thing all semester, which is really awesome. There was a pretty good turnout tonight too, that was cool to see. They aren't specifically "Christian" games that we play there, it's just a group of mostly Christian kids getting together for a night of regular fun and games on the weekend. Maybe it's a bit redundant with Gaming Society on Friday nights, but whatever. Part of why I'm so actively pursuing a bunch of this type of stuff is that I just feel like I really need to start making some more Christian friends here on campus, even though this is my last semester. In particular since I got back to GAC from Oz, there have been quite a few times where I've actually felt quite lonely here, even though I'm surrounded by friends, it's an odd feeling...
It's snowing!! We'd been without snow on the ground here for a little over two weeks, but it started snowing yesterday afternoon, is still snowing now (with what looks like at least 4 inches on the ground, though I haven't been outside yet this morning to check), and it looks like it's gonna keep snowing some more! Yay for the winter being a little less wimpy now!
Sigh, I just found out late last night why my mouse hasn't worked for the last three days or so. I was able to click and use the scroll wheel and everything, but couldn't move the cursor at all when I moved the mouse itself. So I tried restarting my machine a couple times, put my mouse into John's laptop and it worked, and just generally couldn't figure out why it was only partially working on my machine. So I was in here in my room talkin to Josh around midnight, and he wanted to show me somethin on his webpage, so tried to move my mouse around. When it didn't move and I told him it'd been messed up for three to four days now, he started laughing, because he remembered that he'd put a piece of clear tape over the optical sensor on the bottom of the mouse. Curse you Josh! But at least now my mouse works properly again... (sheepish grin)
Oh, and I'm officially gonna be flying out to visit The University of Colorado at Boulder on the evening of March 9th, and flying back early afternoon March 12th. They're even flying me out there in business class, but who knows what that means. It could just be that coach was all filled up on that particular flight to Denver, but it's still just awesome that they're paying for almost my entire visit there. :-) And I also heard from Florida State on Friday that I'm accepted into their Meteorology program, and they're also the first school officially to offer me an assistantship (this one's a research, as opposed to teaching, assistantship)! And they're also offering to fly me down to Tallahassee for free for a visit the weekend after I'm at Colorado. Hmm, decisions, decisions...
Time to go to church, and then it's Olin time. Sigh.
Posted by Jared at 10:11 AM | Comments (0)
February 17, 2005
TSI: Trivia Scene Investigation
My oh my time is starting to go by quickly. It's been a week since I last posted, but I'll be quick with summing up. On Friday afternoon I went over to the College View community room, which Carl had reserved for the entire weekend for the trivia contest. We got everything all set up just in time for the 5pm start of trivia, listening to the webcast of KVSC (the campus radio station in St Cloud) over the internet. Friday night it was basically Carl & I the whole time, with Cory & Seth also chipping in for big chunks of time. It was still a really small team though, so as a result we all got pretty tired and started going to bed one by one. Of course, it didn't help that I was slammed by a massive cold and sore throat that came on after the start of the trivia contest. Seriously, it hit me like a ton of bricks, I was so worn out that I just had to take a break from 1am-8:30am. Carl finally gave up at 4 when he was the only one left, because one person just can't do everything in this sort of a trivia contest, with 2-4 questions open at any given time for 5-25 minutes (depending on point value), having to research them on the net to find the answers (if they could even be found on the net, some of them were impossibly tough and obscure), and call in. You just need a minimum of two people to do it.
So we started Saturday off in 66th place because of taking a few hours off overnight, but Zach came over at 8:30am to join Carl & I. In the afternoon we had some sweet rounds (including a math round) where we totally cleaned up, so that by early evening we were back up to 61st place. Cory came back eventually, and then a couple other people dropped by to help for a little bit, but the lack of people just took its toll, as we all decided to give up for good at 1am. We were all just exhausted (and I was sick and miserable), had homework to do the next day, and couldn't really fathom doing it for another 16 hours. From 5pm Friday-1am Sunday I'd already done about 24 hours of trivia. Ugh. So while our team, "Wee r ay grewp uv reelee smrt peepull," finished in 66th or somethin in the final tally, we consider that we finished in 61st, since that's where we were when we quit. It was still a fun time though, and there were 72 teams from around the country (mostly from around the Upper Midwest and Minnesota in particular) competing, so considering we only averaged 3 people for most of the time, we actually did pretty well. But it did feel good to go back to Wahlstrom and sleep in my own bed, and I slept straight through for nearly 10 hours without waking up even once, which is extremely unusual for me. I must've been tired!
Sunday was homework day. Hooray. And it was really crappy outside, raining and really cold almost all day, until it switched over to a couple inches of heavy wet snow. At least it meant that the observing portion of our Astrophysics lab didn't have to happen that night.
My body is really starting to get sore from all the phy ed courses I'm in. I'm just not used to the 5-day-a-week exercise thing yet, considering I haven't been in that sort of a routine since high school. If I can get my body adjusted to everything in the next week or two I should be doing pretty good. One thing I can say Monday's 12-minute run in Conditioning though: it certainly helped lessen my cold. I've had that sort of thing happen before, so maybe every time I get a cold I should just go on a long run to get rid of it! It seems to be working. But it's still weird how I always seem to get a cold in the second week of a semester... I went bowling with the roommates and a few other people Monday night too. Nobody was able to dethrone Ben this time either, and certainly not me with my two totally crappy sub-100 games.
Tuesday evening was the study abroad welcome home pizza banquet, and there were a couple representatives there from BUNAC, a group that organizes work abroad trips to various countries, including Australia and New Zealand. So now I'm thinking about possibly seeing if grad schools would be willing to defer my admission for a year so I could go back to Oz/NZ for a bit and work. Talking with an Aussie IFSA-Butler rep and a BUNAC rep who'd also been to Australia just made me realize how much I do miss Melbourne. I really do -- A LOT -- and I'd absolutely love to go back. The downside is that I could only work in Australia for 4 months, with how their work visas are set up, so I might have trouble finding anything meaningful or valuable, but I'm asking one of the weather profs at Monash to check into whether I could get into either the Bureau of Meteorology (think National Weather Service) or CSIRO (a huge atmospheric research organization). I'd really only be open to doing this in Melbourne, because I already know people there. I just wouldn't wanna do it in Sydney since I basically don't know anybody. But in the next couple of weeks some of my options there might crystallize one way or the other and we'll see how things are going. It might turn out that it'd be better just to go to grad school straight-away like I've always been planning, and try to make it back to Melbourne some other time. And maybe by then one or two of my friends might be able/willing to either work or travel abroad with me for a bit, because that'd be just infinitely more fun. :-)
I'm starting to hear back from more grad schools now finally. I was already accepted into University of Wisconsin-Madison, but now I've also been accepted into University of Colorado at Boulder and Florida State University! University of Oklahoma had invited me to a prospie weekend the last weekend in February, but it was kinda late notice and I had already committed to the Curriculum II retreat that weekend (which is something I'm actually really really looking forward to), so I just couldn't swing it. Hopefully it doesn't hurt my chances at landing an assistantship. But Colorado invited me to their prospie weekend the second weekend in March, and I think I'll be heading out to that for a couple days, especially since they're paying for my flight and accommodation. :-) Now if only I'd hear about assistantships from anyplace, and if I'd hear anything about my admit status from Oklahoma or Penn State...
Definitely time for bed. Maybe one of these days I'll get around to getting the rest of my website back online, but my Schedule is up at least.
Posted by Jared at 01:08 AM | Comments (0)
February 11, 2005
Touring Week
If you found my website by using my old URL (www.seenoevil.org/~jared/blog/), DO NOT use that anymore. If you do, then come April you will no longer be able to get to my site. My site has moved to its new permanent home, --( www.jared-lee.com/blog/ )--. So change your bookmarks now (FYI, www.jared-lee.com and jared-lee.com will also take you directly to my main site, so you technically don't have to type the "/blog/" part at the end). Josh reinstalled everything on the webserver over Touring Break last week, and in the process ditched the www.seenoevil.org domain name (it expires in April). Josh & I also had a bit of a miscommunication, and I didn't save all the things that I apparently needed to save before he wiped the webserver's hard drive. Like my posts, comments, uploaded photos, etc. Basically everything. Fortunately for me, ecto, the program that I use to post to my blog, had saved my 100 most recent posts on my computer, so I've spent time the last couple nights getting those uploaded and transferred to my new blog, www.jared-lee.com/blog/. That means that my posts going back to late March 2004 still exist, but prior to then (stretching back to my original blog's inception in October 2003) is totally irretrievable. All the comments that have ever been made on my blog were also lost. I still have quite a bit of work to do, such as getting all the photos from my various posts uploaded, along with re-doing all the links on all the other pages on my website (and then upload those as well). It still might be a few days before everything is back up and running completely (especially since I also have some homework to do and a 50-hour trivia contest this weekend), so please be patient. Well, time for bed, I'll try to make a real blog entry about what I've been up to the last couple weeks sometime soon, perhaps tomorrow night.
Posted by Jared at 01:05 AM | Comments (0)
February 10, 2005
Welcome to www.jared-lee.com -- Site Under Construction
If you found my website by using my old URL (www.seenoevil.org/~jared/blog/), DO NOT use that anymore. If you do, then come April you will no longer be able to get to my site. My site has moved to its new permanent home, --( www.jared-lee.com/blog/ )--. So change your bookmarks now (FYI, www.jared-lee.com and jared-lee.com will also take you directly to my main site, so you technically don't have to type the "/blog/" part at the end). Josh reinstalled everything on the webserver over Touring Break last week, and in the process ditched the www.seenoevil.org domain name (it expires in April). Josh & I also had a bit of a miscommunication, and I didn't save all the things that I apparently needed to save before he wiped the webserver's hard drive. Like my posts, comments, uploaded photos, etc. Basically everything. Fortunately for me, ecto, the program that I use to post to my blog, had saved my 100 most recent posts on my computer, so I've spent time the last couple nights getting those uploaded and transferred to my new blog, www.jared-lee.com/blog/. That means that my posts going back to late March 2004 still exist, but prior to then (stretching back to my original blog's inception in October 2003) is totally irretrievable. All the comments that have ever been made on my blog were also lost. I still have quite a bit of work to do, such as getting all the photos from my various posts uploaded, along with re-doing all the links on all the other pages on my website (and then upload those as well). It still might be a few days before everything is back up and running completely (especially since I also have some homework to do and a 50-hour trivia contest this weekend), so please be patient. Well, time for bed, I'll try to make a real blog entry about what I've been up to the last couple weeks sometime soon, perhaps tomorrow night.
Posted by Jared at 01:42 AM | Comments (0)