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April 30, 2006
Hail to the Term Papers
Many of you have certainly noticed a lack of "bloggish activity" on this site during the last couple of weeks. I've just been swamped with end-of-the-semester stuff, particularly a big term paper.
The first part of last week was absolutely gorgeous, we had a few days in a row even with highs in the 70s and not a cloud in the sky. I really can't remember a stretch of weather quite that nice, it really was amazing. Perfect weather for sitting outside at Sports Cafe during the day for some wings, if you ask me. But that's about all that I really got to enjoy it, the rest of my time was spent inside working on the last couple of homework assignments for Dynamics and Cloud Physics. Springtime is definitely in full swing around here though, pretty much all the trees have leaves out, and after last weekend's rains everything's really green. At least we're not being tortured by having to miss too much nice spring weather with school, since finals are over this week.
Perhaps the most momentous event of last week was late afternoon last Friday when Physical Plant FINALLY turned on the air conditioning in Walker Building. It'd been absolutely unbearable in the building for 2-3 weeks, with temps in the 80s everywhere in the building (Physical Plant still had the HEAT turned on full blast, aaarrgghhh...), and it was especially stuffy and stifling in the TA office since we have no windows and no fan. I hate old buildings with crappy ventilation systems, especially when the heat/air conditioning can only be switched on/off once a season. So lame. In terms of excitement I'd say A/C in Walker even tops when my microwave randomly arced for no apparent reason one night last week. Does anyone know if the papery/plastic wrapping that sticks of butter come in contain any metal? Because that's the only potential cause I can think of, especially since it's been working just fine ever since.
I finally got around to reading through a bunch of journal articles for my Mesoscale paper late last week and on Saturday especially. I was really starting to freak out by Saturday morning when I finished the first stack of articles I'd printed out, and realized that a) not enough of those sources were even potentially useful to me for my paper, and b) of the ones that were useful, I had no idea yet how to tie them in to anything. So after dropping Daniel & Aviva off at the airport Saturday afternoon (they were going to the hurricane conference in Monterrey, California for the week, along with Moyer, Dr Evans & Dr Frank), I printed off a bunch more articles, most of which actually were quite helpful. I spent the rest of Saturday and pretty much all day Sunday locked in my room, reading articles, and then struggling to start thinking of ways to put it all together into a cohesive whole (hence why they were strewn all across my bed, which was basically serving as my table for laying everything out). All in all it was quite frustrating.
Apart from Monday night, when I stayed in my apartment to watch "Stargate SG-1" and "24" while grading labs, every night this week I migrated to Walker with my laptop to work on my Mesoscale paper (and my 8-minute in-class presentation on my paper on Wednesday, that I had to do despite not being close to done with the paper...). If I recall correctly, Tuesday I was there till after 1am, Wednesday till 2am, and Thursday until 3:30am. That's a long time to be spending in Walker, especially the TA office where there are no windows, but I find I'm far more productive in Walker than I am in my apartment, in general, especially when there's nobody else (or maybe a couple people) in the office. Anyway, by Wednesday night I started really getting comfortable with the paper and what I was writing, and my plan for the rest of it really started to gel, which put me a bit at ease. By the time it was all said and done, the text of my paper was 13.5 pages long at 1.5 spacing, with 16 references (15 being "journicles"), with a good deal of my 7-pg Cloud Physics paper appearing in some form or another in the Mesoscale paper, since they were both about hail formation and growth (which was good, because I caught several mistakes in my Cloud Physics paper that way, and also really got a chance to truly integrate and mesh all that I'd learned about the topic). Plagiarizing is okay, as long as you're plagiarizing yourself. :-) I still need to spar with Microsoft Word and add figures to the paper, that'll probably come tomorrow. Hopefully I don't have to get too violent with it when it is inevitably irksome and either ignores or intentionally refuses to comply with my formatting wishes. It'll feel so good when it's completely and totally DONE, but it's very relieving to have all the text written. I was getting so tired of having that hang over my head that I just wanted to get it over with.
Apart from realizing that this week was my very last week of classes for my first year of grad school (!!), this week was also my final week of TA'ing Meteo 003 labs, woohoo! I still have a batch of labs to grade though, which kinda sucks, since I kinda have three tough finals to be studying for. Maybe I'll just give them all A's on this assignment. I probably won't ever have to TA again since now I have research funding.
I really should've done some work last night, but I was rather tired and unmotivated after my marathon Thursday night paper-writing session. I was hoping to relax with some of the usual Friday night trivia at the Sports Cafe, but unfortunately that didn't happen because it was packed out by hockey fans watching the Philadelphia Flyers-Buffalo Sabres playoff game. Stupid Flyers, taking away my trivia night.
Today I've gotten a little bit done at least, though not as much as I'd been hoping. For lunch and into the afternoon I met with Anna, Steve, Kristin & Brendaly, the other officers for next year for Penn State Christian Grads (a couple weeks ago I was elected the new Communications Officer, meaning that maintaining the listserv and website and all that is my primary responsibility). Then I procrastinated further by going to Wal-Mart to find a replacement bulb for my headlight that burned out. I did manage to get in probably 4-5 hours of studying Cloud Physics (i.e., making my cheat sheet, I'm three-quarters done or so), mostly before a really interesting History Channel special about dragons came on. It really is interesting that cultures throughout every non-Antarctic continent have dragon legends, and how similar most of the descriptions are to dinosaurs; it kinda makes it seem reasonable to surmise that perhaps there really was such an animal that all these peoples actually saw... And then a bit after 11 I went to the airport to pick up Aviva & Daniel and bring them back to their respective places. The TA office will at last feel whole again. :-)
As for the WxChallenge forecasting contest that I'm in, the "regular season" came to a close last week, and I finished 1st in the grad student category and 23rd overall or so, not too shabby. As a result of my being in the top 64 overall forecasters in the contest, I was entered into the WxChallenge tournament, which for three weeks has us forecasting for Hastings, Nebraska. It's set up kinda like the NCAA tournament, and I was put as a 6-seed in Region 2. For each round everyone forecasts for two days, and then for each matchup the person with the lower two-day score (i.e., best forecasts) wins and moves on to the next round. I edged out my first-round opponent from the University of Oklahoma, and despite totally blowing my precip forecasts the last two days (I predicted .35" and .41" of rain for yesterday and today, respectively, while there were 1.02" and 0.00" in reality), everyone else blew theirs too, so I'm now into the Sweet 16, having beaten a fellow grad student at the University of Hawaii. Sweet! My next round matchup will be really tough though, another Oklahoma grad student who's been doing really well of late. Check out the WxChallenge bracket and follow the tournament!
While the Vikings are my favourite NFL team, I do love that the Saint Paul Saints are openly mocking them. If I were in Minnesota in late May I'd totally go to the game to get one of those, even though I don't own a bathtub. :-) And I guess the Vikings are getting new uniforms for next year. I'm not sure what to think of them, but I think some aspects of them are definitely borderline hideous. I suppose they'll grow on me with time though.
Tired of waiting at red lights? You could be like this guy who made a "remote" of sorts to change the lights to green as he approached the intersection.
In Pennsylvania apparently the Easter bunny likes to brandish a firearm. I knew there was a reason I never liked the Easter bunny... I bet Jack Bauer could take care of the Easter bunny once and for all, though.
Drugs, nudity and chimneys don't mix. They just don't.
And while tax day has already come and gone, here are party-specific tax forms, both of which are pretty funny.
Well, I suppose I should consider hitting the sack, so I can be awake and alert tomorrow while studying for my finals. I've got Cloud Physics on Monday afternoon at 4:40, Dynamics on Tuesday at 5:30, and Mesoscale on Thursday morning at 10am. Dynamics and Mesoscale are looking very frightening at this point, but Cloud Physics shouldn't be too bad, at least not in comparison. Busy week ahead. I also have to help Dr Nese proctor the Meteo 003 final exam Tuesday morning at 8am, eww. And I'm seriously considering auditioning for "Weather World" on Thursday after my Mesoscale final, as if I need another thing on my plate this week.
Posted by Jared at 02:39 AM | Comments (1)
April 28, 2006
April Showers Bring Walker Hours
Yes, it's 3am and I'm still in Walker. But I did just have an Oreo, so that makes it a little better. And a little bit ago I finally finished writing all the text for my Mesoscale Dynamics term paper, and doing final editing for my Cloud Physics term paper. Woot.
Interested in destroying the Earth? Click here to find out the top ten ways to do it.
Time for at least a little sleep before the final day of classes in my first year of grad school.
Posted by Jared at 03:16 AM | Comments (1)
April 17, 2006
Easter Weekend
This has been a pretty good weekend I'd say. I mean, for one, the weather was absolutely gorgeous all weekend long, especially the second half of Saturday and all day today, it was bright and sunny and in the mid-60s, what more can you ask for for an Easter Sunday?
Thursday wasn't particularly memorable for whatever reason. Though I did get more work in on my Cloud Physics paper, so I was at least moderately productive.
Friday I woke up extra early, as I was planning on getting into Walker about an hour before class along with everyone else so we could finish getting our group presentation put together for Mesoscale about the RKW paper on squall lines (which went pretty well I think). But before that happened Ripka's called saying that my car was ready (yay!). That whole process took awhile longer than I thought, as the guy I was dealing with was quite chatty. Nice and honest and a very good mechanic, but rather talkative. I think I actually know quite a bit about the inner workings of their business and their history now, haha. But anyway, they said the problem with my car was just a temperature sensor, so they got that replaced. They told me it they tried starting it with the engine warm a couple times and that it started right up for them no problems. Which is why I was rather disappointed to find out several times today that my car's still acting up with the same exact problem. So hopefully they'll take another look at my car this week and actually figure out what's going on, I'm gonna call them tomorrow. I trust they'll get it right this time, they're a really honest shop of good mechanics from all indications.
Daniel & I tried out another new place for lunch on Friday, Jamaica Junction, though Daniel had been there once before. Anytime you can order "the jerk" (chicken) it's a pretty cool restaurant in my opinion. That and the served plantains there that were absolutely amazing! I'd only had plantains maybe only once before in my life and a really long time ago, but these were really quite good. I'm definitely adding that to my list of good eateries in and around State College.
Trivia on Friday night went better than last week at least. Our team, "A Good Friday to Avoid Meat," pulled in 2nd place, despite choking on the last question. But hey, 2nd place is better than no place, like last week.
I decided to get a haircut on Saturday morning. It'd been five months since my last one, and I was definitely getting all shaggy/curly/mop-top again, so it was time to get a trim. The rest of the afternoon I focused pretty hard on finishing up my Cloud Physics paper, and I actually did complete it, figures and all, early Saturday evening. I'm so glad to be done with that finally, because now I can start focusing on my Mesoscale paper. Two term papers down, 1 to go. After teaching my roommate Bong Gi and one of his friends a bit with how to throw a frisbee, Saturday evening I went over to Daniel's place where we watched "Ben-Hur." He hadn't seen it before, and I knew he liked older movies, so I figured he'd be interested and would like it, which he did. That's such a good movie, it's up there for sure in my top ten favourite movies. And it's a wonderfully appropriate movie for Easter time. Why can't they make movies like that nowadays? I mean, seriously.
Daniel & I went to Easter services this morning at SCEFC (He Is Risen!), and then afterwards he invited me over to his apartment to have an Easter dinner, which was great and very much appreciated. Mmmm, grilled chicken, potatoes, mint peas (I'd never had mint in peas before, but it was really good) and of course bread. Certainly a better meal than I would've had had I been cooking by/for myself! ;-) The History Channel was airing the 4-part, 8-hour miniseries "Jesus of Nazareth" during the afternoon, so we watched that for awhile before it was time to head to Kerrie's for Easter desserts. A whole bunch of the meteo grads were over there, and I certainly had my fill of sweets and food in general. So full... In fact I haven't eaten anything since then, apart from a couple cookies (now I've really had my RDA of sweets for the day!).
Absolutely zero homework got done today, but who wants to do homework on Easter Sunday anyway? I figure I'll get back to the grind hard-core tomorrow, the frantic stretch run of the semester is here. Just two more weeks of class and then finals. Be afraid, be very afraid.
I hope y'all had a good Easter out there!
Posted by Jared at 12:01 AM | Comments (0)
April 16, 2006
HE IS RISEN!!
"On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, 'Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; He has risen! Remember how He told you, while He was still with you in Galilee: "The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified and on the third day be raised again."' Then they remembered His words."
~Luke 24:1-8
We shouldn't restrict proclaiming that He Is Risen only to Resurrection Sunday, but we should be especially bold about it today. Today is a day for rejoicing, for He has defeated death! Hallelujah to the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords!
I'll write another post sometime later, but for now I'm heading to church with Daniel. Happy Easter everyone!
Posted by Jared at 09:50 AM | Comments (0)
April 13, 2006
My Car's Sick
Ahh, the sights, smells and sounds of thunderstorms in springtime, not much can top that. It's been storming a bit tonight, but at least it's provided some nice background this evening to my slaving away at my computer on some powerpoint slides for the RKW group presentation in Mesoscale on Friday, and more recently, getting a few more paragraphs written on my Cloud Physics paper. I think it's really starting to come together a bit more for me, I've finally decided on a rough course to follow for the rest of the paper, hopefully that'll get me in the target 5-7 page range by the time it's all said and done. I'm really wanting to try to get that done, or at least mostly done, tomorrow night. Then I can start focusing on that monster 15 pg paper for Mesoscale...
I dropped my car off at Ripka's Garage this evening, they're gonna take a look at it tomorrow. Hopefully they'll be able to figure out why my car hasn't been liking to warm start for the past 3-4 months. They had a hunch it might be something like the temperature sensor, but I just hope that whatever's wrong it won't cost too much money to fix.
I officially signed on to Joel Peltier's dispersion research group that I mentioned in my last entry, so I'm no longer unemployed for the summer, which is a good feeling.
Dave mentioned in a comment on my last post that I needed to mention something about global warming on my blog. As luck would have it, I've run across a couple of great articles on the subject this week, so I thought I'd pass them on to everyone. First, a paleoclimatologist from James Cook University in Australia wrote quite an interesting article declaring that, according to the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, there has been NO global warming since 1998. Who'd've thunk it? And second, Richard Lindzen, the Sloane Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal today about how most climate scientists who don't parrot the global warming alarmist line are being intimidated into silence, usually by having their research funding cut. As an interesting side note, both of those articles I linked to mention Michael Mann, who is in his first year on the faculty in the Department of Meteorology here at Penn State.
In some other interesting articles, the man whose real-life story became the basis for the movie "Hotel Rwanda," also wrote an article for the WSJ recently, trying to highlight how the world is ignoring the lessons learned in Rwanda when it comes to the genocide occurring in Darfur, about which Western governments are doing absolutely nothing.
Congress's African AIDS relief plan is being assailed by relativists, despite statistics which back up its effectiveness.
24 fans of the world rejoice! Kiefer Sutherland has signed on for another three years of the show, pretty much ending some rumors that I'd heard going around that this might be the last season. So I guess that kinda takes the suspense out of whether or not Jack's gonna die this season...
Apparently police in LA don't have enough to do, because they issued a citation and fine to an elderly woman for not crossing the street quickly enough.
And finally, salad greens have a whole new meaning Down Under. And to think that I always got all my groceries at Coles when I lived in Melbourne...
Well, I think that's quite enough of a break for tonight. Time to get back to work, and try to get another couple paragraphs of my paper written before I call it a night.
Posted by Jared at 12:35 AM | Comments (1)
April 10, 2006
Chris's Birthday
Last night (Saturday) was a night for some celebration, because it was P. Allen's birthday, conveniently located just a couple days after he passed his Master's thesis defense. A bunch of us meteo grads went out to Chili's for dinner, and then several of us proceeded to go on to the Phyrst for a couple drinks after that. I hadn't ever been there before, and it was very, very full. We didn't even actually get a table for about an hour and a half, it was crazy. It's actually done up to look kind of like an Irish pub, it's got a bit of character to it. At any rate, the table wars were entertaining until the band, Phyrst Phamly, started playing at 10:30. 
They're a fun band to listen to, they play pretty much a bluegrass style of music, with a couple of banjos, a guitar and a bass, and they played mostly songs that people could sing along to, it was definitely a fun atmosphere. During table wars and in between sets Jacob showed off his cowbell skills and on several occasions rocked the house with the Penn State cowbell cheer about 50% faster than it usually goes, which everyone in the bar absolutely loved. I think he does it better than some of the Blue Band members do it at football games for sure. :-)
As for today, which was Palm Sunday, in the morning Daniel & I went to church together again. They weren't handing out any palm fronds or anything, but it was still a good service. What would've made it better, as Daniel pointed out, was if they would've had a couple good hymns, such as "All Glory, Laud and Honour," instead of solely choruses. Hopefully they'll have a couple good Easter hymns next week.
I've pretty much spent the whole rest of the day up in Walker reading journicles for my Cloud Physics paper on hailstone growth and formation. Amongst the batch that I printed out today I've actually found several that are quite useful (including several by a husband/wife research team from NCAR that consistently write short, concise, amazingly easy-to-understand papers - they're my new heroes when it comes to journals). In the evening I took a dinner break with Vic, Jacob, Shannon & Jeff, where we went out to Klemm's outside of State College (it's literally a shack on the side of the road out in the country, it doesn't have anywhere to sit), and then brought it back to Vic & Jeff's place to eat. I'll tell ya, for a little side-of-the-road place, they've sure got some amazing BBQ! Klemm's is now amongst my top five places to eat in and around State College, for sure. But after that I came back to Walker, and I finally got a start on my paper, about three paragraphs written, woohoo! Actually, I'm still at Walker, which is pretty sad, especially considering it's getting close to 1am. I really should just go home and go to bed.
But not before passing on these two bizarre stories. First, in Britain there's a ginormous rabbit that's terrorizing people's vegetable gardens over there. Seriously, this rabbit is massive. And then over the weekend in Oakland, CA, a ginormous chunk of ice (it was really big, about a cubic yard) randomly fell from the sky, basically out of almost clear air, and nobody knows where it came from. I especially love the last sentence in the story, check it out.
Posted by Jared at 12:50 AM | Comments (3)
April 08, 2006
Yay for Funding
I know I haven't posted anything in nearly a week, but there just hasn't been all that much happening this week, and I just haven't been terribly motivated to do much of anything.
Back on Monday after watching yet another thrilling "24" episode, I tuned in to the last two-thirds of the NCAA men's basketball national championship game. For a 16-point blowout it was actually a moderately entertaining game, probably because of the stellar level of play that all the Gators had, especially the Androgenous Ponytail, and the parade of thundering dunks Florida had. I had no problem with Florida winning, I'm actually kinda glad they won their first title, but Chris (a Florida State alum) is really upset, and has said he won't be going back to Florida for quite some time now, haha.
On Tuesday after teaching my lab I went with Kerrie & Caren to a PSUBAMS meeting that featured the VP of on-camera meteorology at the Weather Channel. He gave a really interesting talk on some of the behind-the-scenes stuff that goes on at the Weather Channel, in addition to giving tips for what he's looking for when he reviews people's audition tapes that he gets sent. It was quite interesting hearing about all that, especially since I'm still tossing around the idea of potentially going into broadcasting, though that's not as likely now as it was a year or two ago, when I was pretty set on that.
Wednesday evening after classes a few of us went down to the 'Skeller for a bit of a farewell party for Mark Guishard, who passed his Ph.D. defense last week, and yesterday flew back home to Bermuda, where he's now going to be the top guy running the Bermuda Weather Service. I didn't go along with most of the people to the G-Man to play trivia though, since I actually needed to accomplish at least a little bit grading-wise.
Thursday I had to teach back-to-back labs as usual, so I had to miss Chris's M.S. defense, which he passed (congrats Chris!). Little did I know that it actually would've been quite valuable to go to his defense. While floor managing for "Weather World" like I usually do every Thursday, I was able to witness yet another example of what can go horribly wrong during a live broadcast. This time while Todd was in front of the green-screen doing the forecast, the computer running the show (all the different maps and graphics you see on the tv) completely died, leaving Todd unable to click to the next map (and leaving the people in the control room unable to give me any time cues through my headset to relay to Todd for over a minute, until just 15 seconds before the end of his segment). Fortunately he did a marvelous job recovering from that and kept on going, even though the same map was up for the last two minutes almost. I'd probably freak out and panic if that happened to me, but that's why it's quite valuable for me to be able to witness a lot of these sanfus and glitches that happen and how people deal with them, before I get a chance to start going on camera a bit this summer.
I had to get up early yesterday morning to head over to the Applied Research Lab across the street from Walker for a meeting with Joel Peltier, to talk about research and funding he has available for me. Even though it's probably not my #1 choice of what I'd most like to do, it still seems like some pretty interesting stuff, using mesoscale models to model the dispersion (and the uncertainty in the dispersion) of clouds of nastiness (e.g., nerve gas). It's funded by an agency within the DoD, and they want this research so that if anything were to be released in the U.S. ever, they could accurately predict where it would spread to and in turn evacuate people. There's pretty intimidating-looking physics that goes into the model, so it'll be a challenging but valuable project to be a part of. I'm taking this weekend to think about it and decide if this is the research I'd like to do for my Master's thesis or not, but I'm most likely going to take it, particularly since it's April already and I need to have research lined up by the end of the month for this summer, and since there are probably no other (funded) research opportunities out there for me at this point.
Trivia last night didn't go so well. After getting a perfect score last Friday night, we got rocked by several questions this time around, and didn't place in the top three. Le sigh. I guess the law of averages had to take command at some point and even things out a bit. After trivia quite a few of us went over to Jacob's place to watch the Family Guy movie, "Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story," which was great.
So now I'm here, kinda miserable with a cold, trying to get up the motivation to read more journal articles for my Cloud Physics paper, so that I can perhaps get started writing it this weekend. I hate term papers...
The Australian Football League has begun their season, with this being the second weekend. And it sure looks as if my team, the Geelong Cats, is setting the stage for a huge season. After winning the pre-season AFL tournament title, the Cats have opened up the year with two dominating wins at home, drubbing the Brisbane Lions last weekend by 77 points, and this weekend doubling up the Kangaroos 138-69. The 'Roos coach called the Cats his favourite to win the grand final this year. Hopefully that'll come true, but there's another 20 or so weeks of footy to be played before the playoffs even arrive, so plenty can happen between now and then.
I'll leave you all with a weird story out of the Philippines, where a judge has been sacked because he claimed he was a 'psychic friend of dwarves.' I really don't know what to say to that, other than he might fit in on the 9th Circus Court of Appeals in San Francisco...
Posted by Jared at 11:49 AM | Comments (0)
April 02, 2006
Joakim Noah's Androgenous Ponytail
I'm tellin ya, there's not a much better start to the day like I had Thursday, when I woke up and saw that my friend Rob from Australia had emailed me out of the blue, it was great! It'd been a long time since I'd heard anything from him. It's always so great when I hear from any of my friends from Down Under, I miss them all quite a bit, and wish I could go back and see them again. Maybe after I get my degree at PSU I can find a job down there (ideally in Melbourne, but I guess Canberra or Sydney wouldn't be bad second choices) for a couple years. Or maybe longer. Sometimes I seriously wonder if I'm being called to go back there for an extended period of time, or if it's just a fond sense of nostalgia I have for the place and the people. It really is hard to tell these things...
Thursday was also a good day because the weather was absolutely gorgeous out (low 60s and sunny!) and I didn't have to teach either of my Meteo 003 labs this week, which are usually back-to-back at 10:10am and 12:20pm. So I took advantage of my abnormal lunchtime freedom to head down to the India Pavillion for the awesome lunch buffet with Daniel, Vic, Mario & David. I'm tellin ya, the naan bread and nuclear chicken is where it's at! And then in addition to no Meteo 003 labs, there was also no Colloquium, so I was able to use that hour-plus to focus on getting my Dynamics homework done. 
When I wasn't eating Korean food that my roommate Bong Gi and some of his friends made (I guess Thursday night's becoming their traditional time to cook a big meal at our apartment) or watching "The Office," I spent the rest of the evening slogging through a journal article that I'm in the process of writing my term paper on in Dynamics. At the time I didn't think I was getting a whole lot out of it, but this weekend when I've been going back over it to write the paper, I guess I must've done a good job of underlining stuff, because it sure seems like I got the main points (plus a lot of other not-so-pertinent stuff too, meh). Who would've thunk it? Anyway, so yeah, Thursday was a pretty good day.
Friday was another pretty good day weather-wise at 72 degrees, though it rained a bit in the evening. All in all ya can't complain about that for the last day of March in State College! Somehow I got the first two paragraphs of my Dynamics paper written in Walker despite my usual Friday demotivation. I know two paragraphs isn't a whole lot, but hey, the hardest part about writing a paper (or pretty much any project) is just getting started, so I at least accomplished that.
Friday evening brought the usual tradition of team trivia at Sports Cafe, and this time they actually took my suggestion for a team name (though admittedly I rarely have one to suggest), "Joakim Noah's Androgenous Ponytail." For all you out there who don't know what the heck that means, Joakim Noah is a very good basketball player for the Florida Gators, and he's got a very iffy-looking ponytail. At any rate, trivia was very good to us Friday night. Or we were very good at the trivia. Take your pick, because we got a *perfect* score to take home first place. According to Steve the trivia guy, it's only the second time it's been accomplished in the trivia nights he's run. So now that team name is forever retired, thank you very much.
After trivia I had a bunch of people over at my place for a rockin' game of Apples to Apples, it was Daniel, Jacob, Kerrie, Jeff, Vic, Chris, Rob C., myself and my roommate Emre that all played. For a game with that many players the rules suggest playing to four green cards, but we kept extending the win-condition, and finally called it quits when Emre won his tenth green card (a couple of us were right behind him with nine), 
so it was 2:30 before people went home. A very, very fun night to be sure, with lots of laughs. A couple of the best plays when for the green card "Senseless," Daniel played "Helen Keller" (automatic win right there, lol), and when Jeff was the judge for "Violent," some of the entries were "Detroit" (where he's from, he really didn't like seeing that card played for "violent"), "Weapons Dealer," and the winner, "Rosa Parks."
After sleeping in a bit on Saturday I finally got around to working more on my Dynamics paper, and I actually got it about 75% finished before I went over to Jeff & Vic's place to catch the Final Four with Mario & Chris. We were all excited for it, but all of us were quite disappointed with the utter non-competetiveness and boredom of both games, with Florida and Joakim Noah's androgenous ponytail mercilessly slaying the Cinderella team of the tournament, George Mason, and UCLA absolutely smothering LSU. I was hoping that either George Mason or LSU would make it to the Championship Game so that I would have someone to cheer for, but alas, it was not to be. Thought it'll make me slightly less sad to be missing the first 35-40 minutes of the game tomorrow night when I'm watching what's sure to be another riveting episode of "24." I just feel for my cousin Jonathan out in Spokane, he's gonna have to decide between watching the last 20-30 minutes of the championship game or seeing the first half hour of "24." I think it's gonna be a tough choice for him. I totally don't know what I'd do in his situation!
Today was another good day (though unproductive, from a paper-writing standpoint). Went to church in the morning with Daniel (after successfully remembering to put all my clocks forward an hour before I went to bed last night), got some groceries (after not going to the store for two weeks, so I was out or running very low on some essentials), figured out how to install some new (and hopefully non-crappy) windshield wiper blades on my car (my old ones had gotten absolutely horrible, my last two drives back to State College from the Pittsburgh airport were not so fun), 
and then I went up to Jeff & Vic's place in Houserville for a picnic for the meteo grads. It was another absolutely gorgeous day, low 60s and sunny. Perfect weather for an outdoor barbecue if you ask me. And I was able to introduce at least Daniel & Jeff to the joy of Leinenkugel's, which I've only managed to find at one place out here (I was even surprised to find it at all in Pennsylvania, since it's a regional Wisconsin-made beer). I hadn't had it in so long, I figured I could treat myself on such a nice day. :-) All of us at the picnic (and there were quite a few people there, it was awesome) tried to keep conversation from being school-related, but we were never successful for very long, hehe. And then tonight at Penn State Christian Grads we had a really good Bible study, on John 18. It's cool how the timing is gonna work out, how we'll be doing John 20 in two weeks for Resurrection Sunday. :-) It was not planned that way, but with the off weeks (or accidental repeating of a chapter like last week), it's all gonna come out just right.
Well, let's see, do I try to do a little more work on my paper this evening, or should I just relax and go to bed, and attack everything with renewed energy tomorrow? I think I'm all for letting inertia decide this one. To bed I go. After I shed a tear about the chance of snow in the forecast here in State College from tomorrow night through Wednesday night. The occasional springtime snow showers after being in the 60s and 70s are one thing I don't really like about living in the North, but oh well. But hey, that's part of what makes meteorology interesting, particularly in the turbulent and ever-changeable mid-latitude spring!
Posted by Jared at 11:34 PM | Comments (0)