Jared's One Blog

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March 20, 2005

Bracket Busters

Seriously, I'm not dead yet, I promise, it's just that I haven't blogged in a week. Hmm, maybe I'd get more comments if I posted more often. Either that, or finally got around to sending out that mass email letting everyone know that my website's address has changed from seenoevil to www.jared-lee.com.

So what have I been up to in the last week? Well, last Sunday morning I went to church down at First Lutheran here in St Peter with Heidi, to hear Zach and the rest of the orchestra play "Requiem" by Gabriel Faure, which was pretty good. It was a "musical offering," so it took the place of a sermon/homily. In the afternoon I did some astro hw while watching some basketball and then in the evening it suddenly cleared up, so we actually had to do some observing for astro lab. I hate having to be up on top of Olin when it's cold and windy. And our four total lab groups kinda devolved into one big group that watched a couple people mount Chuck's digital camera on the telescope to take a couple pictures of the Moon, hehe. At least astrophysics lab isn't hard. :-)

Monday was Pi Day (3-14, March 14th), so in the evening (after another fantastic episode of 24, Jack Bauer rocks!), we all went over to Carl & Seth's apartment in College View for a Pi Day party. It was pretty cool, around 25 people showed up, and we had a feast of 10 or 11 pies or so, including raspberry, orange meringue, chocolate mousse, and of course pumpkin pie, it was delicious!

Tuesday, what happened Tuesday? Other than Proclaim, I can't remember, so it must not have been too exciting. Oh yeah, I spent a couple hours filling out both of my brackets for the NCAA tournament. I'm organizing one bracket tournament for SPS, which had no entry fee, with the winners getting a free physics t-shirt or two. And then my friend Brian was organizing another pool for $3, so I made both brackets different enough that even if one of them gets totally busted, I might stand a chance to win in the other one. My Final Four picks in my physics bracket were Illinois, Gonzaga, North Carolina and Oklahoma, with Illinois beating UNC for the title, and the other bracket had Illinois over UNC for the championship again, plus Louisville and Oklahoma joining them in St Louis.

Wednesday after class I went down to Mankato to pick up some stuff, including our TripTik stuff (guidebooks, maps, etc) from AAA that Zach had ordered for our upcoming East Coast road trip. Not too much else went on, other than writing a paper for Senior Sem about why the Islamic Middle East just can't seem to get along with the (quasi)-Christian West. It was actually an interesting paper to write, and I snagged some passages from the Koran to support my argument. Now it's just a waiting game to see if Byron & Florence like my paper, or think it's central argument is too controversial or politically incorrect. :-)

With Thursday being St Patrick's Day and all, I kept up my Grandpa Siesennop's tradition of wearing orange for St Paddy's Day. Nobody really noticed though, until Senior Sem class when Byron looked at me and said, "That's not nice," lol. I was just glad that at least somebody could figure out that there was a specific reason I wore orange on that particular day. :-) Thursday evening there was also an SPS meeting, where among other things, we had a final vote on this year's t-shirt design. The official shirt will be red and have the phrase "If this looks blue you're going too fast!" on the front, with a speed limit sign on the back with a complicated equation that really equals c, the speed of light, and below the sign it'll say "relativity enforced." Pretty clever, actually. :-) And then a bunch of us juniors and seniors will also be getting a second shirt that says "Viva la Mechanics" with a picture of Chuck (a la Che Guevara, hehe), and then quite possibly the most complicated and insane mechanics problem I've ever seen on the back. Both shirts will be great, I can't wait till we get them! After the SPS meeting John & I quick wrote up our first astrophysics lab report (lame but easy), and then I went to Prepare, to hear Captive Free lead the worship time and hear Gary Gilbertson speak, it was quite good. And Thursday was also the first day of March Madness, the NCAA tourney. Basketball heaven! It's too bad that I was only able to catch an extremely limited amount of roundball on Thursday though, due to class and stuff.

Friday was an interesting day. First of all, it had started snowing around midnight, and was snowing like mad all day long. So I had Conditioning at 9, but we had a sub, since the regular instructor couldn't make it to campus because of the weather. Then while I was at lunch at noon we got word that all classes the rest of the day were cancelled. We were having a snow day! In college! The campus was actually buzzing with excitement, it was pretty cool. It's too bad that the only class of mine that was affected was my 12:30 Astrophysics class, but something's better than nothing. But that meant that I was able to get to The Dive to catch the rest of the Minnesota-Iowa State game, and then spend the rest of the afternoon watching even more basketball! I love college basketball, even when the games aren't quite going my way. After supper I went over to Olin to watch a movie with the SPS and MCS clubs, called "What the Bleep Do We Know?" starring Marlee Matlin. Strangely enough, it's sort of a comedy about quantum physics and neurology. It had its funny moments, but overall it was just very strange and really not that good. After the movie a bunch of us celebrated our new-found 8-10 inches of snow by going traying over by South Elementary -- me, Carl, Seth, Zach, Jolene, Johanna, Ben, Jess, Paul (aka Frodo), & Emma. We had a bunch of caf trays and Dr Nimmo's ten-person toboggan again, which we managed to fit a full 10 or 11 on, with a bit of double-decking. ;-) We actually figure that for that run we had a full ton on the toboggan! The downside is that for that run I was in front, and my back really felt the full weight when we started going down the steepest portion of the hill. Let's just say I wasn't gonna be riding in front again. :-) Once we were all cold and tired, we went back to Arbor View to Jolene's apartment, and played some Cranium.

This morning (Saturday) I had to work at Admissions, though I didn't have to work very long because it was a rather slow day, with not too many visitors scheduled to begin with, and then a couple of those cancelling due to the weather. The afternoon I basically spent sitting around, doing a couple Astrophysics problems (though incorrectly, as I later found out) while watching more college basketball. I managed to take a break from my hoops addiction tonight for Christian Gaming Night, which was enjoyable.

So as for how the NCAA tourney is turning out so far, I had 15 of Thursday's 16 games picked right, so I got off to a good start (I only mispicked the Iowa-Cincinnati game). Friday wasn't so good for me though, as I only got 10 of the 16 other First Round games right, though I did manage to pick the Vermont upset of Syracuse, woot woot! Today wasn't so good for me either, with half of my Final Four picks dying (Gonzaga & Oklahoma). Curses! My bracket is busted! At least Illinois & North Carolina are still alive, my picks to play for the national title. And because Gonzaga lost, I needed Wake Forest and Duke to both lose as soon as possible, since they were really the only alternatives that most other people had in the Final Four, so my spirits got a lift tonight when the Demon Deacons lost to West Virginia, woohoo! Oh, and yeah, I seriously did pick UW-Milwaukee to make the Sweet 16. :-) So while I'm not in great shape, not many other people are doing well either at this point, so my chances are still reasonable to either win some money or get a free t-shirt.

Oh, and if any of you haven't read it yet, go and check out (or buy) "Men In Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America" by Mark Levin. I read it last weekend on my trip to Colorado, and it's absolutely fabulous. If you want to learn about history or the Constitution, this book is a must. That's all for now, time for homework after church in the morning.

Posted by Jared at 02:15 AM | Comments (1)

March 13, 2005

Visit to Boulder

I'm back from Boulder, and I have to say that it rocks! I was having a bit of trouble concentrating on my classes on Wednesday because of my impending trip, but at least I remembered to pay a couple bills and my taxes before I left. I also got my photo submitted to the Gustavus International Photo Contest, the sunset one (see my last post). And as an aside, I apologize if any of you were intending to leave comments on my last post and were unable to due to the lack of a link to the comment form. That's because somehow some settings got changed accidentally that I didn't notice on my blog, oops. On another note, Josh was abusing his administrator privileges by repeatedly deleting one person's comments from my blog without my knowledge or approval. I finally figured out what was going on with that and confronted him with my displeasure, so hopefully everything will be fine from now on, sorry about that. But anyway, John was kind enough to drive me up to the Twin Cities airport on Wednesday afternoon so that I could catch my 7:20pm flight to Denver. The flight was rather uneventful apart from sitting on the tarmac in Minneapolis for 45 minutes or so, but once in Denver (which is a very nice airport, by the way) I managed to find my way to the Boulder Super Shuttle two minutes before its hourly departure. Boulder's about 45 minutes from the Denver airport, so it was a bit after 10pm before I got to the Millenium Hotel in Boulder. I was surprised to find that I had a super-nice room, with a king-size bed, all to myself! It was just one more sign that PAOS (Program in Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences) was going all-out in recruiting us. :-) But I was kinda tired from travelling, so I turned in a bit early.

Thursday morning all of us PAOS recruits (about 15 of us or so, from all over the country) met for the first time in the hotel lobby. We walked up to campus for breakfast and a presentation of an overview of the department, and then a bunch of the faculty members gave little 10-minute presentations about their research and projects for which they were looking for new students. A couple of the current grad students took all of us recruits out to lunch at a popular student hangout called The Sink; it had a pretty cool atmosphere, with the low ceilings and walls absolutely covered in student murals and signatures. The afternoon was filled with individual meetings with various faculty, to further discuss their research and ask them questions about PAOS. I also sat in on a pretty cool weather forecasting seminar class, but on the downside it seemed like that was about the only forecasting/operational meteorology going on in the department. In the evening PAOS held a dinner party for us in the lounge way up at the top of the Duane Physics building, up on the 11th floor. What a view! It's the (or one of the) tallest buildings in all of Boulder, so it has a fantastic view of the front range of the Rockies to the west, the city and the Great Plains to the east, and it also overlooks Folsom Field, the football home of the Colorado Buffaloes. But the dinner was pretty good, and not just because of the free food and beverages. :-) A bunch of the faculty were there again, and so were most of the current PAOS grad students, so we were all able to talk to them a bunch and get the low-down for what it's really like at CU. Most of us recruits were pretty tired from all the information and meetings, so we headed back to the Millenium by 9 to relax before another early night.

Friday morning we had to pay for our own breakfast, so I eschewed it. Friday was the day for touring the acronyms around Boulder. We started out with an hour or so at LASP, the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. LASP is a group that gets quite a bit of its funding from NASA (but LASP is older than NASA), and among the things LASP has been involved in over the years include numerous satellites observing Earth and the Sun, plus satellites that either have already visited or will soon be visiting every other planet in the solar system, including a satellite that will be departing on a mission for Pluto in the not-too-distant future. LASP also does a lot of cool research into space weather and the upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere.

Then we moved onto the NOAA Boulder Lab, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (they also share a building with NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, home of the Atomic Clock, among other things). NOAA does a lot of research into meteorology, forecasting/computing methods, climatology, plate tectonics/geology, and actually pretty much anything dealing with Earth sciences. Unfortunately we didn't get much of a tour of show of what they're researching, but we still got to see something pretty cool. It was NOAA's new toy, the world's first spherical movie screen. It's a 6-foot-diameter sphere, with four projectors exactly 90 degrees apart from each other, run by four top-of-the-line PC's in parallel, that can visualize different things on Earth, Mars or the Sun. It's pretty cool being able to see yearly satellite loops on a sphere, instead of on a flat distorted projection. I mean, it was a sweet 45-minute presentation, but since we only had an hour there, it would've been nice to see a bit of the research they're doing there, particularly since if I go to the University of Colorado for grad school, I'll likely be heavily involved with NOAA.

But after our stop at NOAA, we took the drive on the Buff Bus up to Table Mesa to see NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The NCAR building, snuggled up on the mesa above Boulder right next to the Flatiron Ranges, is a world-famous landmark building designed by I.M. Pei, which actually made him a world-famous architect. At any rate, all of us PAOS recruits had the privilege of having lunch with the Director of NCAR, which was pretty sweet. He told us about all sorts of stuff that NCAR's involved in, including working with CU/PAOS, LASP, NOAA and other groups on developing WACCM, the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model, which will be one giant unified model of everything from the surface of the Sun to the surface of the Earth (and including the biosphere-atmosphere and ocean-atmosphere interactions). And in addition to all sorts of fascinating climatological research that they're doing, they're also collaborating with NOAA to develop WRF (pronounced "Worf," as in the Klingon dude from Star Trek), the Weather Research & Forecasting Model, the next generation of forecasting models. One problem that NCAR foresees in the next few years is running out of space to store the mind-blowing amounts of data they're collecting -- they currently have a robotic system that moves around quite a few huge data plates (like giant hard drive disks) that each hold several petabytes of data (one petabyte is one million gigabytes) for their networks to access. They're concerned about storage capacity because, among heaps of other things, they have several satellites that each collect multiple terabytes (thousands of gigabytes) of data per week. Needless to say, that's A LOT of data. We also got a bit of a tour of the SCD (Scientific Computing Division) at NCAR, and they showed us some pretty sweet 3D projection visualizations of storms and satellites, in addition to a lava-lamp-like (at least in terms of hypnotic and addictive value, hehe) visualization of a year's worth of global satellite data. That and we got a cool blue-light pen too!

After another couple of faculty meetings back at CU, I went on a walk to Pearl Street with one of the other PAOS recruits. Pearl Street is a cool pedestrian mall at the heart of Boulder that has lots of shops, street performers and the like, it's kind of like a combination of Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis and State Street in Madison, it's pretty cool. Then after a catnap back at the hotel, it was time for a party at one of the grad students' houses, with free pizza and beer, it was pretty sweet. It was quite a valuable part of the visit actually, as we were really able to find out how everything was in PAOS, which professors to avoid, which ones to definitely work for, what classes were good or bad, and all sorts of stuff like that. The grad students whose house it was had two dogs there as well, that were endless sources of entertainment for the night, they were hilarious dogs. One of them, in addition to always having a ball that it was playing with, was also obsessed with lights. For instance, if someone was shining a flashlight on the floor, it would constantly attack the lit area of the floor, it was pretty funny.

This morning I barely made the 7:45am Super Shuttle from the hotel back to the airport, for my 10:40am flight back to Minneapolis. The trip was uneventful apart from the beginning, when it got really really windy in Denver right before we left, meaning that between take-off and about 20,000 feet it was incredibly bumpy and turbulent (almost sickeningly so), but I guess flying into or out of the Denver airport is usually exciting in that way. :-) Carl and Seth kindly picked me up at the airport (in exchange for my picking them up from the airport at midnight next Wednesday night), and on the way back to GAC we stopped by the Apple Store in Southdale to pick up and ogle at some goodies, hehe. But basically since I got back to campus, I've been watching college basketball on TV (plus spending a bunch of time writing this while sitting here on the couch). Man, how I love college hoops. March Madness is my favourite time of the year!

There's actually quite a bit of interesting research going on at The University of Colorado, from El Nino-Southern Oscillation to cloud physics to the effects of high-energy solar particles on the atmosphere (aurorae and upper stratospheric ozone depletion), but not much of anything dealing with operational meteorology (forecasting, etc); CU seems to be focused primarily with the atmospheric physics and atmospheric chemistry sides of atmospheric science, rather than meteorology, which is kind of a bummer. The plus side is that while at grad school at CU in PAOS, you're not limited to CU/PAOS faculty -- you're free to find a research advisor at NOAA, NCAR, LASP, or any of the other institutes around Boulder. It is the atmospheric science capital of the world, after all, with over 2000 atmospheric scientists living in Boulder. So Boulder is still an option that I'm considering, it's certainly in a beautiful area, and has lots of options in atmospheric science to pursue for research. It's definitely an area I'll consider working in after I get my degree, too. But right now I wish I could visit Penn State right away, so I can make the comparison while I have CU fresh in my mind. Two weeks won't be too long to wait though, and at least this'll give me a bit of time to process all the information I got from this weekend, and figure out some other questions to ask the people at Penn State while I'm there. But hey, I had a nearly free three-day vacation to Boulder in the spring when it was in the 60s there, you can't really beat that! :-)

Posted by Jared at 12:49 AM | Comments (2)

March 09, 2005

Scholarship Day

Man, I'm doing a lousy job of posting to my blog more often than just every five days. Oh well, I've had stuff going on the last few days. Back on Friday evening, after some fun games of walleyball with the physics club and followed by a little bit of Gaming Society (woot! I managed to understand the instructions in Italian for the game we were playing, and I don't even know Italian!), I had to update the PowerPoint presentation for the Gustavus Wind Energy Project for Scholarship Day, which was Saturday.

This was the first year that Gustavus has held a Scholarship Day for prospective students, and basically it's for admitted students who are also applying for the Presidential Scholarship (which is replacing the Partners Scholarship). So basically all these high school seniors have to come here to have a half-hour interview with a couple faculty members, and take a half-hour essay test, and the Admissions Office also has half-hour information sessions (on things such as J-term, study abroad, Curriculum II, etc) periodically throughout the day, in addition to current Gustavus students' research presentations, to give the prospies and their parents a feel for what sorts of things they could likewise pursue here at Gustavus. (There was an additional Scholarship Day the previous Saturday, when I was on the CII retreat, with not only Presidential Scholarship applicants, but also Bjorling (music) and Anderson (theatre/dance) finalists, it was a bit crazy on campus that day, especially for the prospies that were finalists for more than one of the scholarships.) At any rate, all Admissions employees were required to work Scholarship Day, so I got scheduled for 10:30-4. I had a couple of presentations for CII plus the wind power thing that I was planning on doing, so I figured I'd probably be giving short tours periodically, or be on "mingling duty" or whatnot. But instead I got added to the J-term panel at the last second (they were one student short). After that it was time for my (planned) Curriculum II session, and then when that was done I decided at the last minute to help out with the Study Abroad presentation, since Amber was the only one doing it and said she could use some help. Then I gave the research presentation on the Gustavus Wind Energy Project by myself (Carl couldn't make it Saturday, normally we'd do the wind talk together). The wind talk went really really well, and there were about 20-25 people who showed up to listen to it. They were all asking great questions afterwards, and were visibly impressed by the work we've done so far, and what we're accomplishing -- we just found out recently that at least one wind turbine is gonna be put up near campus sometime either this summer or next school year for sure! That's huge news that we're all jazzed about, particularly Chuck (our cool physics prof, my academic advisor), Carl, Seth & I, since we're the ones who've been working on the project the most for the last year or two (or in Chuck's case, the last four years, he's really the driving force behind this whole thing). It feels so good to be a part of something that really is gonna make a difference for the college, not just now, but even 30 years from now, when it'll still be saving the college hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in energy costs. At any rate, after the wind talk and some lunch, I jumped in on the afternoon Study Abroad session, since Melissa was the only one doing that talk and also said she could use some help, and then I did the afternoon Curriculum II talk as well. So when it was all said and done, I never technically did anything for Admissions, like giving tours or whatever, during my entire shift. But I figure that doing six presentations and answering lots of people's questions about all sorts of topics was an acceptable substitute. :-) It was fun, but once I was done I was a bit drained of energy, from being so alert, "up" and outgoing for 5-6 hours. Seriously, it was a lot of work to do that.

Right after I was done with Scholarship Day stuff I drove up to Aaron & Eve's house in the Cities for a combined birthday party for my niece Gabriella (who recently turned 4), and my nephew Mathias (who recently turned 2). Mathias in particular was happy that he got "big boy cake" this time, since last year for his first birthday he cried when he saw he was only getting a cupcake, lol. It was good seeing people from Eve's family again too, it'd been awhile. My parents were there too, and Jake even showed up. I needed to see my parents sometime so that they could make the handoff of my tax stuff so that I could sign and pay my taxes (only $1 for federal, $7 for state taxes, woot!), and since I won't be going home for spring break, I have no idea when I'd see them next. They stayed overnight at Aaron & Eve's because they were flying out Sunday morning for a week-long vacation in Arizona (seeing relatives and sights like the Grand Canyon). When I got back to GAC around 12:30am I was dead tired, so I didn't make the trek over to College View for Carl's 22nd birthday party (sorry Carl), and instead just went almost straight to bed.

Erin was down this weekend visiting Gustavus, so Sunday morning I went to church with her and Javen, and had lunch afterwards with them and a bunch of other people, which was fun. It was such a beautiful and warm day (63 degrees!) that I couldn't bring myself to do homework, so instead I tried to narrow down a bit which photo I was going to submit for the International Photo Contest here on campus later this month. Josh had bought some 8"x10" photo paper, so we each printed off (after a little trial and error with various settings) four or five of our best photos, of which now we have to choose only one to submit. I really wish I could submit these five photos, it'd make my life so much easier. There is a photo that I'm leaning towards submitting, but which one of the five photos at left would you vote for in a photo contest? Leave me some comments with your votes. :-) Eventually on Sunday I did decide to do a little bit of homework, and then after dark it was somehow clear enough to theoretically do some observing for Astrophysics lab. The downside is that the wind picked up shortly after we got the telescopes set up, which shook the scopes a bit, meaning that it was even harder than usual to use the CCD cameras due to the shaky images. We were getting very frustrated with the CCD camera, first just being able to locate the Orion Nebula, and then in trying in vain to get it focused properly. Eventually we settled for a crappy picture, but we'll have to go back and get a better one when it's less windy. Either that or just turn in the lab with a crap picture, but at least Chuck's okay with that if the weather doesn't get better in the next few days. Sigh.

Monday was a bit of a long day, particularly since I got only a little over four hours of sleep Sunday night (silly me playing cards till after 2:30am). But I actually got a little bit of hw accomplished around watching "24" and going to another good MCF, so that's a plus. As for today (Tuesday), I can't really say that I've gotten very much accomplished, apart from going to Proclaim (Neo was a guest singer tonight, he's awesome!). I guess I'm just really looking forward to my upcoming visit to the University of Colorado-Boulder. :-) John's driving me up to the airport tomorrow afternoon, and then I'll be living it up in Boulder until Saturday midday, when I fly back to the Cities. A free vacation is always a welcome thing, especially when it's checking out where you might be living and working for the next few years. And especially when it's gonna be in the 60s there, while it's only in the low 30s here, mwuhahaha! And today I also checked out a book to have as some reading material this weekend, particularly in the airport and on the plane, "Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America" by Mark Levin. I believe it's #3 on the NYT best-seller list, and from all accounts I've heard it's supposed to be a fabulous book, so I'm really looking forward to reading it.

At any rate, I suppose I should get packing so I can go to bed. I don't know if I'll get a chance to post while I'm visiting Colorado, but if not, I'll for sure let you all know this weekend how Boulder was!

Posted by Jared at 01:08 AM | Comments (0)

March 04, 2005

Koinonia

There were a couple of times I had intended to post stuff this week, but circumstances defeated me. First of all, sometime last weekend while I was gone the webserver's mySQL database got majorly messed up, Josh couldn't figure out what went wrong. Not that I exactly know what that means, but what it essentially meant for me was that on Sunday night I had to re-upload all the data from my posts from html backups that Josh had managed to salvage, which was very tedious. But at least all my pictures and other data was able to be saved, so I didn't have to go through the exceedingly tedious task of re-uploading every picture from all my posts for a second time. But it's all good now, and everything's just about back to how it was before this weekend. Lol, at this rate I don't know if I'll ever get my website or my photo album collection fully updated.

Anyways, last weekend was the senior-freshman Curriculum II retreat at Koinonia, a retreat center about half an hour south of Saint Cloud near Kimball. The turnout for the retreat was actually the best ever for CII, about 15 seniors and 25 freshman went on it, it was fantastic. It was a very enjoyable weekend as well, and lots of fun was had by all. On Friday evening we seniors cloistered ourselves away in our dorm building for a few hours to begin planning our presentation that we were to give to the freshmen on Sunday morning. What was supposed to be a planning session became more of a reminiscing session, with heaps of laughter as we all recalled funny events and professors' quirks from our CII classes in the last three and a half years. After three hours we did manage to get a skeleton outline of what we were gonna do though, we settled on doing a skit called, "60 Minutes: Cults in America: Gustavus Curriculum II Sequence 17, from Recruitment to Graduation" (we seniors are the 17th sequence of CII, the current freshmen are the 20th), in which Sara & I were the anchors, Betsy was the field reporter, and everyone else acted out various little skits/scenes. After getting that rough outline put together, several of us went to play games like ping pong, pool or foosball, while others relaxed in the sauna. Carl was bragging that for a little while he was the only guy in there with 18 girls, haha! On Saturday morning we had a lecture from philosophy prof Doug Huff (who is, hands down, the best prof on campus) on Kirkegaard, and then another lecture from religion prof Mark Dennis on Buddhism and meditation (wasn't so much a fan of that lecture, it wasn't even well done). We had time for some homework in the afternoon, another practice session for our presentation, and then after some evening games the seniors led with the freshmen, Sara & I went off on our own and pretty much wrote the entire script. Well, at least our parts, which were kinda necessary to be solid, since they contained all the cues for what everyone else was supposed to be doing. Meanwhile Carl had lots of fun doing the "intermission" ... badly photoshopping our heads into various classical paintings that we studied in our CII Visual Experience class. It was hilarious! So then Sunday morning it was time for the presentation, and it rocked hard core! Everyone loved it, and the profs were laughing their heads off, even as we were roasting them pretty good. :-) They said it was the best, funniest and most elaborate presentation that they'd ever seen put on at the retreat, which made us feel awesome. During the panel afterwards, at which the freshmen asked us various questions about CII and whatnot, Carl, John & I tried to teach everyone a physics dance we've (mostly Carl, actually) invented called the "Electromagnetic Jive." Yeah, we're nerds. :-) After a couple crazy games of spoons and yet another fabulous meal, it was time for the two-hour drive back to Gustavus. I'm so glad I went on this retreat, it was so great to get to hang out with everyone again, it had been well over a year since I'd hung out with several of them (since the fall 2003 Blue Cloud Abbey retreat, actually), and it was just overall a very fun and enjoyable weekend. Somehow I question whether visiting the University of Oklahoma instead would've been anywhere near as enjoyable. :-)

Monday I didn't accomplish too much apart from watching another fantastic new episode of "24" and being part of a pretty good discussion at MCF. Tuesday evening a very nice Proclaim service was bookended by studying for Wednesday's Astrophysics test, which I actually think went pretty well for me. You've gotta love it when two of the nine problems on the test are one-liners, it kinda helps ya to finish on time. :-) After class and work on Wednesday I donated the blood at the semesterly blood drive. I can't remember if this was the fifth, sixth or seventh time I've donated, maybe I should call the Red Cross sometime to find out. Wednesday evening we voted on a design for this year's GAC physics t-shirt, went up on top of Olin for an hour and a half in the freezing cold to get the telescopes set up and finally do some observing for astrophysics lab (this has been a crappy semester for observing so far, it's always been cloudy), and write another paper for Senior Sem. Hooray.

Tonight was the NCAA Division III Tournament First Round game, #13 Lawrence at #17 Gustavus. This is the ninth year in the last ten that the Gusties have qualified for the NCAA tourney, and this year they got to the NCAA's by beating St Thomas 68-58 in the MIAC title game back on Saturday night. Gustavus is widely regarded in Division III basketball as one of the toughest places in the country for an opposing team to play in, with our annually great basketball teams and large and incredibly boisterous crowds. Tonight didn't go so well for the Gusties, however. After several ties and lead changes in the early going, Lawrence showed some mettle in going on a 15-4 run to close out the first half with a 34-22 lead over the Gusties. The Vikings held the lead up around 14-16 points for almost the entire 2nd half, each time the Gusties would get a bucket or two, Lawrence would counter with a huge basket or two of their own. Not even two thundering Doug Espenson dunks could rally the Gusties past Lawrence's tenacious defense and the absolutely atrocious officiating. But yes, even though the refs were horrible (a Lawrence player did a WWF take-down of one of our players and it wasn't called, that's how bad the refs were), Lawrence was still the better team. Final score: Lawrence 70, Gustavus 56. It was the first-ever loss at home for the Gusties in the first round of the NCAA tourney, we're now 6-1 in first round games in Lund Center. So alas, this was my last time ever donning the black and gold facepaint for a Golden Gustie basketball game. :-( Sigh. For the d3hoops.com photo gallery from the game, click here.

So my sectionmates and I are starting to plan out a spring break road trip to the East Coast: Baltimore, Washington DC, Penn State University (so I can do my grad school visit for a day), Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, Niagara Falls, and Toronto, before returning to GAC just in time for classes to resume. The awesome part is that we know people in two or three of those cities, so we won't have to pay for hotels every night, and Penn State would very likely pay for at least a good chunk of the gas to drive out there. It should actually be a relatively cheap road trip, for all the places we're seeing.

Well, that's all for now. I think I'm gonna go sleep off my disappointment from the loss tonight. That and I'm tired from exerting so much energy cheering so loud and hard all game long.

Posted by Jared at 12:52 AM | Comments (1)