Jared's One Blog

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June 23, 2006

Many Miles To Go Before I Sleep

Well, I'm about to head out on my solo mega road trip, so it'll probably be a few days before I post again. Today I'm gonna drive 12-13 hrs from State College, PA to Huntsville, Alabama, so that I can attend Daniel & Katie's wedding tomorrow!! I figure there should be at least one Penn State representative at the wedding, and I'm glad to volunteer for that. :-) And don't worry, I'll try to snap quite a few pictures for everyone back here at Penn State, I'll be the annoying person with the camera down there, hehe. Then on Sunday I'll be driving 13 hrs (give or take Chicago, boo Dan Ryan construction) up to Green Bay, WI to visit my buddy Mike. And if that weren't enough, on Monday I'll be driving 6 hrs from Green Bay to the Twin Cities to go to a Twins game (the Twins are red-hot currently too!) with some of my Gustavus friends plus Jacob from PSU and a few of his U of M friends, that should be a lot of fun. So I won't make it home to Cumberland until Tuesday, or at least that's the plan as of now.

Australia advanced to the 2nd round with a thrilling 2-2 tie yesterday against Croatia. I watched it down at the Sports Cafe with Aviva and my kangaroo beanie baby (and in some Australia gear), and it was definitely the most entertaining game of the World Cup so far (for sure more so than any of the USA games, blah). Plenty of scoring, lots of near misses, a penalty kick, three red cards, and a good deal of drama, with Australia coming back to tie it in the 79th minute. An Aussie loss would've put Croatia through to the knockout round, and they did almost lose it. Here's to hoping Australia can beat Italy in a few days and continue their magical run!

Well, I better get going, I've got a long drive ahead of me!

Posted by Jared at 07:14 AM | Comments (2)

June 20, 2006

Outdoor Baseball

Being a baseball fan, it was kind of sad that I'd never been to a major league game in a stadium other than the Metrodome, which is certainly one of the worst baseball stadiums in the country. So I decided to remedy that situation on Friday night by going to Pittsburgh to take in the Twins-Pirates game at PNC Park, which is absolutely gorgeous and widely regarded as the best baseball stadium in the country, with Daniel, Kerrie & Steph. There were a lot more people at the game than I was expecting, and so our first few attempts to purchase tickets in various sections were rebuffed by the "sorry, that section's sold out" mantra. And then here's a funny story: once we were in the stadium and Steph stopped off to get some food on her way to the seat (Daniel, Kerrie & I just went on ahead to our seats in right field), she was having trouble finding the section we were in -- because she was looking at her ticket for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts! Ushers at various sections were giving her a hard time and telling her that the General Admission section was upstairs (yet they also didn't notice that she wasn't even showing them a Pirates ticket), so after she called us to find out what section we were in and then told us all about her ordeal, she finally realized that she had a Boston MFA ticket and that her Pirates ticket was in her purse. Sigh. :-) But the game was a lot of fun, a good pitcher's duel (Francisco Liriano had 11 K's for the Twins) and some late scoring, leading to a 4-2 Twins victory. I had even made a sign for the game too, in the hopes that I'd get on FSN North back in Minnesota, but as far as I know I didn't make a cameo on the tele. And then after the game there was a fantastic Zambelli fireworks show over the river right behind the stadium, with the beautiful Pittsburgh skyline as a backdrop. The whole evening was fantastic apart from PennDOT closing I-376 for a couple miles out of downtown Pittsburgh, causing such a nasty backup that it took us an hour to go one mile, resulting in it being 3am before we got back to State College. I was soooo tired the whole way back...

Saturday afternoon and evening it was time for Chris Allen's farewell party, as he moved down to Raleigh, North Carolina yesterday to take a job. It was a fun time watching the USA-Italy game end in a 1-1 draw, and then doing some grilling and whiffleball games in Jeff's backyard. We're definitely gonna miss Chris around here though, but at least he's promised to start up a blog once he gets an internet connection, so stay tuned for that.

Last night I drove over to Unionville for the church softball game vs Berean Bible Fellowship, and I went 1-for-2 in the first half of an 11-8 loss. It was a fun game though, and at least they didn't have their really tough pitcher I'd heard so much about.

I've really been enjoying watching the World Cup so far this year, and I'm really encouraged by how the USA played against Italy, being shorthanded due to the red-card-happy ref. I think they really have a good chance to make it to the 2nd round too, by beating Ghana on Thursday morning (can you say Sports Cafe?) and having Italy beat Czech Republic. Australia's playing really well too, even in their 2-0 loss to Brazil (the refs and American commentators have been nauseatingly pro-Brazil, by the way), and they're in very good position to move on to the elimination round in their big game coming up against Croatia. If Australia and the USA somehow wind up meeting in the elimination rounds at any point though, I really don't know who I'd cheer for, I'd be in quite a pickle...

Posted by Jared at 11:58 AM | Comments (3)

June 15, 2006

Storm Chasing Wrap-up

Our last couple days of storm chasing were pretty interesting. Back on Saturday we left Grand Island, Nebraska fairly early and headed west toward the panhandle, as it seemed like storms were going to initiate rather early. We made it to Bridgeport in time to deploy and take a look at an approaching supercell thunderstorm. It didn't have a great structure, but at least it was a supercell. That storm even had a tornado warning issued for it, which puzzled us somewhat since it didn't seem like that great a supercell, but we figure the warning was issued because the Nat'l Weather Service radar in Cheyenne was down and they probably just wanted to play it safe. After the DOW scanned for a little while we made a loop around Bridgeport and then decided to try to head south through Kimball and Sidney and intercept a storm northeast of Denver that was looking interesting. Unfortunately it broke apart into several small, junky cells, so when we crossed the Colorado border south of Sidney we called it a day (at 4pm, rather early in the day, but all the multicell/line storms had sucked up almost all the CAPE), with Paul and Herb setting up for some time-lapse photography of some growing cumulus towers to our west. After a little bit we packed up and went down to Sterling, Colorado to stay for the night. Our early end to the evening allowed us the chance to grab a non-fast food meal finally, although it was Country Kitchen with $13 pitchers. Boo that. But the group phone call to Frame out in the parking lot was rather entertaining. :-)

The target area on Sunday was in the same NE Colorado / Nebraska panhandle area, so we just hung around the motel in Sterling until 4pm waiting for something to initiate in the region. Finally a couple storms started popping, so we took off northwest toward Scottsbluff, Nebraska, in the far western Nebraska panhandle. When we were still about half an hour away Josh informed us from the DOW that the storm, which at that point was on the Nebraska-Wyoming border, was developing a hook echo, so I was worried we were gonna miss the best stage of the storm. Fortunately for us the supercell kept strengthening and became very photogenic. Paul, Mario & I stopped at four or five different places over a distance of about 15-20 miles on a highway heading south from Scottsbluff, keeping the heart of the storm to our due west for about three hours or so, so we could take a bunch of pictures of it and just soak it all in. (For a radar loop of the storm, click here, and look for the storm that develops just to the west of BFF.) A couple of the places we stopped in particular were quite windy, with an inflow sustained at 35-40 knots at our backs. The sound of the wind howling over the open Plains was rather strange and almost a bit eerie, I must say. It was sure whipping up the tumbleweed too, which definitely seemed to have a magnetic-like attraction to me. But the supercell had a very striking structure visually, with a lowered "mothership" base, and even dropped a couple possible funnel clouds, but no tornadoes that we were aware of. Fortunately we also managed to avoid the hail as well, as we heard from a passerby that roads near the town of Lyman (west of Scottsbluff, on the Wyoming border) were covered to a depth of four inches in hail! (We later found that the SPC had reports of 1.75" diameter hail in that area.) It was a beautiful storm, certainly the best one I've ever seen, and it was also the best storm that the folks from ROTATE had seen all season so far, so we were quite pleased to have been along with them for that. In addition to the occasional sheriff or other random curious passerby, we also ran into some military personnel along the way, as the last location at which the DOW was parked and scanning was basically on the doorstep of an Air Force Missile Command outpost that housed a nuclear missile silo, which brought a couple of armed 18-year old soldiers down the hill to check out what we were doing, hehe.

The storm on Sunday was the last hurrah for us on our storm chasing trip, as the forecast for Monday was absolutely terrible (i.e., sunny and calm, with no chance for convective storms really anywhere in the Midwest), so when the DOW and the rest of ROTATE headed off to Boulder for the night and declared a down day for Monday, we began our long trek back from Kimball, Nebraska, which involved some really tricky directions to get back to Penn State (east on Interstate 80 for 1500 miles, south on US 220 for about 10 miles), and made it back to North Platte before we called it a night. On Monday Mario & I dropped Paul off at the Omaha airport so he could fly to NYC, and we managed to get to Elkhart, Indiana before we had to call it quits for the day, which enabled us to get back to State College a little after 6pm Tuesday. So much driving... I was really glad to be back in my own bed for the first time in a week though, I must say.

The storm chasing trip was really quite valuable, I thought. Even though we didn't see a tornado, we got a taste of just about everything else in the four days we were chasing. We experienced a clear-air bust on Thursday, some junk multicell storms on Friday after waiting for hours at a gas station for something to develop, a long drive to a tornado-warned supercell and an early-quitting day on Saturday, waiting around at a motel until mid-afternoon and finally seeing a very nice supercell on Sunday. Oh yeah, and lots of fast food. Fortunately we didn't have to have any Texaco dinners along the way, I was really glad about that. :-) I also learned quite a bit, about how chasers use the various weather prediction models to figure out where storms are most likely to form and move, and then to get explanations of the structure of a thunderstorm when you're actually there and can see and feel it all, rather than just reading about it in a textbook. That, and the ROTATE guys were an awesome group to hang out with and get to know a little bit. I'd absolutely love to go chasing again sometime, and I feel like I'd be able to get even more out of the next time I go. Maybe we PSU Meteo grad students will be able to organize a storm chasing vacation next spring out to the Great Plains, that'd be so awesome!

Posted by Jared at 03:10 PM | Comments (1)

June 10, 2006

Moville Magic

By virtue of staying last night in Norfolk, Nebraska, we had put ourselves relatively close to the main target area for today's chasing, meaning that we didn't roll out from the hotel until just after 1pm. We drove a couple hours to a small town in Iowa called Moville, about 15 miles east of Sioux City, where it was time to sit and wait in the 95-100 degree heat for a couple hours wondering where storms were going to initiate. Finally around 6pm there was a line of storms that developed from about Norfolk, Nebraska to around Yankton, South Dakota, so we made our way to Akron, Iowa, and crossed the border into South Dakota a wee bit. We were caught in a heavy downpour, but that really was about it, the storms weren't organized all that well. But hey, raindrops today was major progress from yesterday's severe lack of raindrops.

While we were waiting in Moville though, we did spy this lenticular cloud, which, needless to say, is quite rare for Iowa. Usually you need a mountain or something to set up a gravity wave that could cause a lenticular cloud, so we're not actually totally sure what caused this. Maybe some of the convection that was starting up off to the west, who knows. It's still quite interesting though.

I must say though, the several vehicles of Discovery Channel folks that are tagging along on the storm chasing expedition are, for the most part, completely clueless when it comes to simple things like reading a map. For instance, when we decided to roll out of Moville and go chasing, all the Discovery people were really slow in getting ready (they've been with the chasers for four weeks, you'd think they'd be used to the whole process by now), and as a result were well behind the vehicles with the actual scientists in it, DOW3, Scout, TIV and our car ("Lion"). So the initial destination town and every little turn had to be called out about ten times as each of the trailing Discovery vehicles came across each turn. I mean, is it really that hard to look at a map for two seconds, find where you are and then the only road that goes to the specified destination (which each Discovery vehicle also has to ask about over the radio multiple times of course...) relatively directly? And it's also rather annoying when they all tell one of the chasers exactly what to say for the camera, even if it's not totally accurate. They're definitely not being like a fly on the wall and simply observing and filming what's going on, they have a set storyline to fill and are desperately trying to get shots/dialogue that will go along with that, and are being rather intrusive in doing so. Well, I'll end my rant, at least for the time being. At least they get the group, including us, motel rooms at a cheap bulk rate.

Anyway, we're spending the night in Grand Island, Nebraska, which allows us to hedge our bets on whether we'll head west to the Nebraska panhandle or eastern Colorado/Wyoming, or whether we'll head south into Kansas or northern Oklahoma. At this point the western target is looking a little better, but we'll see what the morning model runs bring.

Posted by Jared at 02:12 AM | Comments (4)

June 09, 2006

Nebraskan Wild Goose Chase

So we drove 700 miles today and saw absolutely nothing (other than a few cirrus clouds), and yet we're in Norfolk, Nebraska tonight, only an hour and a half from where we started the day. We also discovered that most of northern Nebraska has absolutely no cell phone coverage (absolutely nothing west of Ainsworth, anyway), which made our pursuit of the chase group a blind one. Awful construction just west of O'Neill slowed us down quite a bit, so we were flying across US 20 from Valentine towards Chadron, the last place we'd heard they were maybe heading, when all of a sudden 40 miles outside Chadron we saw the TIV (Tornado Intercept Vehicle, it's basically a tank-like armoured car; the owners are trying to drive it into a tornado, for real) going the other way. Then we saw a whole series of vehicles with antennas (after seeing only one car every 5 minutes all day, if that), so we turned around and followed them, knowing they were the chase group even though we couldn't see the DOW (Doppler On Wheels). We were quite puzzled for some time why they were heading east, away from any possible convection (especially since we'd heard they were considering trying to get to eastern Montana, or at least Wyoming ... if you're chasing that far west you're more than desperate), only to find out in Valentine when we all stopped for gas that they'd basically given up for the day. So we hung around Valentine for a little while in case anything initiated (which it didn't, the cap was just too strong), and then drove back with the group to Norfolk.

We got to see way too much of US 20 today, though the Sandhills region of north-central and northwestern Nebraska is really pretty. I'd never been in Nebraska before today, and so was somewhat surprised by the very different regions of the state, with it being rather hilly near the Missouri River, then a lot of flat ag land in the middle, then with a lot of sandhills and pastureland in the northwest. And if any of you have an atlas, take a look at Cherry County in north-central Nebraska. It's bigger than Massachusetts, but only has about three or four roads in it, making it a poor choice for chasing storms. But we got to cross it twice today. Woot.

Tomorrow's looking hopeful for good storms in eastern Nebraska (near where we are currently) and western Iowa. We should see something tomorrow, which would make the ROTATE and Discovery Channel people happy since they've been chasing for over four weeks now and really haven't seen a thing. Hopefully the atmosphere doesn't screw something up overnight.

Posted by Jared at 01:52 AM | Comments (0)

June 08, 2006

A Day is as a Thousand Miles

Well, I've finally gotten out of State College. Way outside of State College. Paul & Mario picked me up at 7:15, we drove up to the airport to rent the car (National gave us an Infiniti, some cross between a small SUV and large sedan, kinda resembling a tank, and we discovered it only gets 22 miles to the gallon - ARGH), and by the time we got back to campus to park Paul's car and everything it was 8:15 by the time we left.

We made really good time, and to make a not-overly-interesting story short, 1030 miles and almost 17 hours later we're at a motel somewhere north of Council Bluffs, Iowa (I think the town is Missouri Valley, Iowa) at a motel on the US 30 exit off of Interstate 29. Paul said it's his second-longest one-day drive ever, and he only drove the first leg of it. :-) Needless to say though, we're all pretty tired.

Paul just took a look at the models, and it's looking pretty sweet for the next few days. We're gonna get up pretty early and head for the Rapid City area, for likely chasing in southwestern South Dakota and northwestern Nebraska tomorrow. We'll try to meet up with the DOWs in the early afternoon; they're staying in Valentine, Nebraska tonight, and we're figuring they'll be heading north towards SD. Friday's looking like eastern Nebraska and central Kansas is looking good for Saturday. Paul's actually quite excited about the setup the next few days, and therefore so am I.

Well, time for bed. (All times of blog posts on this trip are Eastern.)

Posted by Jared at 01:30 AM | Comments (1)

June 06, 2006

Sudden Developments

Well, these have been a rather eventful last few days, and not entirely in a good way, as I'll get to later.

We're starting to notice a trend at trivia on Friday nights at Sports Cafe: when our team name is sports-related, we tend to place higher. Case in point, our team name this week was "Nowitzki & Hasselhoff, Sittin' in a Tree" (which is really funny if you follow the NBA at all), and we easily took first place.

I made a couple runs to the State College airport this weekend, dropping Daniel off on Friday morning and picking him up Sunday evening, so that he could go home to Alabama for a weekend and surprise Katie. Judging from what Daniel said she had absolutely no idea he was coming and was quite shocked when she came downstairs and saw him in the kitchen of her parents house in Birmingham. :-) Kudos to Daniel & everyone else who successfully kept the secret! Less than three weeks to their wedding in Huntsville, it's comin' fast.

After making six visits to Walker on Saturday (but only for a grand total of about half an hour, that's the only redeeming thing about it) to hit start on several runs of my code, it was time to head up to Sue's place in the evening for the "Dispersion Party" for all the students and faculty members working on projects (including mine) that are small parts of this massive dispersion project that's going on here at PSU. It was quite an enjoyable evening, lots of great food and everything. Oh and by the way, congratulations to Chris ("P. Allen") on being offered a job down in Raleigh earlier this week! He'll be leaving PSU pretty soon actually, less than two weeks now, so maybe I should think about trying to absorb some of his SCIPUFF knowledge before then...

I got a rather sad phone call after the party from my friend Mike M., my best friend from back home in Wisconsin. It turns out that a 16-year old Cumberland boy named Marcel drowned in Beaver Dam Lake (the lake that nearly surrounds Cumberland) on Saturday near Eagle Point. Marcel's death meant that Mike's younger sister Amber's two best friends have now both died since the start of 2006 (the other was a girl named Katie who died in a single-car crash), so Mike dropped what he was doing in Green Bay to come home and spend time with Amber for a few days and try to help her cope with it all, especially since he also knew Marcel a bit. (I'd met him once or twice before and given him & Amber rides a couple times when I was driving around with Mike.)

Apparently what happened is that Marcel and his friend Adam were out on a pontoon boat on the lake. Marcel's doesn't really know how to swim, and usually wears a lifejacket, but this time decided to try to be a little bit more independent, and so hopped in the lake without one, intending to hang on to the side of the boat. But it was a bit breezy on Saturday afternoon, and so the boat drifted away from Marcel, and he started to panic. Adam jumped in and tried to help him, but Marcel was panicking and thrashing around so much that he was pushing Adam down underwater in an effort to keep himself afloat. Adam pushed him off and came up for a breath, and told Marcel that he'd quick swim over to the pontoon and throw him a rope or a lifejacket or something to hang onto. But by the time Adam got back to the boat a few seconds later and turned around, he saw Marcel underwater and sinking. Adam drove in and tried to save him, but to no avail. Rescue/recovery dive teams have been searching that part of the lake (which is over 90 feet deep and infested with milfoil) since Saturday afternoon, but they have not yet found Marcel's body, at least as far as I'm aware. It's just a very, very tragic situation, especially since he's now the second person from that grade in my town to die this year. Your prayers for Marcel's family and friends and for everyone involved in the search would be much appreciated in this very trying time.

[UPDATE at 9:20pm: I just got off the phone with Mike and he said that the recovery team found Marcel's body about an hour ago. Pray that this news will begin to bring closure and healing to Marcel's family and friends.]

Church on Sunday morning was a bit different from usual, as several churches in State College banded together for an outdoor community service over at Hills Plaza. The turnout seemed pretty good, with probably around 2-3,000 people in attendance. The weather stayed mostly cooperative as well, only dropping a sprinkle once for about 2-3 minutes. The rest of Sunday was pretty rainy though, but the monotony was broken up a bit by going over to Amber's with a few people for an episode of "Flash Gordon" and "Rocky Jones, Space Ranger." Ahh, ya gotta love 1950s science fiction, it's so easy to make fun of!

I've now moved in to my new office down in Walker 405. I'm loving my sweet new Dell that I get to play with at work now. And finally I'm in an office with a window too! Maybe I should turn in my key to Walker 530 one of these days...

Yesterday there was a great deal of excitement and anticipation amongst several of the grad students here in the department, as we'd gotten word that College Hots, the newest restaurant in town, had finally opened up over the weekend (about 2-3 weeks later than planned). A pretty big group of us went down there, but Vic and Shannon were really excited in particular, as these "hots" type restaurants apparently originated in Rochester, NY, so they're both pretty familiar with them. Their specialty is the "garbage plate" -- I know, that sounds totally appetizing -- which usually has some kind of meat (cheeseburger, hot dog, pulled pork, etc) with optional ketchup, mustard, hot sauce and onions, over two types of sides (macaroni salad, french fries, homestyle fries or baked beans), combined into one greasy slop. It actually wasn't nearly as bad as I had been fearing (especially judging from the lovely garbage plate picture Vic had circulated around the department from the Rochester place), and I even liked it, though not enough to consider going back there more than maybe once a month or so, haha.

Yesterday evening it was time for another church softball game, this time vs Faith Baptist at our "home field" at the CMA church. This week I played in the first half of the game, 9th in the batting order and playing catcher. The infield was pretty muddy yet from Sunday's rains, and I only had one at-bat, grounding out to the pitcher, oh well. At least I caught both pop-ups that I could get to, turning one of them into a 2-unassisted double play with the bases loaded and one out in the top of the 1st inning. The ball was popped up down the 3rd base line, and I ran down to catch it, at which point I saw the runner from 3rd base making a break for home. I stood there for half a second wondering why on earth he was trying to come home, since I had caught a foul pop only a step or two into foul territory, about halfway in between 3rd and home. Once I got over my disbelief I took a couple steps into fair territory and tagged him out as he ran by. But hey, I'll take an unassisted double play any day! Too bad it didn't help us win the game though, as we lost 11-9. It was still a fun evening though.

Ahhh, 25c wings and a Yuengling taste so good any time of the day, especially while sitting outside enjoying a gorgeous day. Even a nice long lunch at 2:30. :-) Chalk up another hour and a half lunch for Daniel & me; we really seem to have a propensity for taking our sweet old time at lunch, hehe.

Now for some really cool news. I got a call from Mario on Sunday afternoon letting me know that one of the other people who was supposed to be joining him and Dr Markowski on their upcoming storm chasing trip had come down with a bout of mono, and so he was wondering if I was interested in taking his place. To make a long story short, my advisor was fine with me taking a week off for this and I'll be going storm chasing! We'll be leaving early tomorrow morning and meeting up with the Doppler-On-Wheels (DOW) people somewhere in Nebraska or South Dakota on Thursday afternoon to go chasing from Thursday through Monday or Tuesday (depending on where the storms are), and then getting back to State College next Wednesday in time for dinner. I was somewhat hesitant about going because of the sudden cost (over $500), but storm chasing is something I've always wanted to do at least once, and I figure that I won't always have the chance to do something like this, especially after I'm out of school and have a job in the "real world," so I'll somehow make my finances work. I haven't ever seen a tornado before either, so I'm hoping that we spot one on our trip, I'm really excited. There are of course no guarantees that we'll see anything, but the weather from Friday-Tuesday seems to be shaping up more favorably for severe weather than anytime in the last month, but then again that's not saying a whole lot, since there's been virtually no "good" weather since April anywhere. Theoretically we'll be chasing anywhere from the Canadian border to the Mexican border, but more than likely we won't end up going south of Kansas, as Oklahoma and Texas are pretty much closed for business as far as severe weather is concerned, with how the patterns are set up. Since chase days can get pretty long, I wonder how many "Texaco dinners" are in my future this week, haha. At any rate, I'll definitely be taking quite a few photos, and if I get a chance I'll post a couple from somewhere in the Northern Plains/Upper Midwest over the next week. Keep your fingers crossed for some good supercells and tornadoes!!

Posted by Jared at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)

June 01, 2006

Accents

So my only goal in the softball game on Monday night was simply not to embarrass myself. I mean, I'd played baseball/softball I think maybe three or four times since middle school, so avoidance of self-embarrassment I though would be a reasonable goal. Anyway, we had quite a few people show up despite the 90-degree heat, so that half the team played until the middle of the 4th, and the other half (including me) played out the balance of the 7-inning game. We quickly fell behind 9-0 to St Paul's Lutheran after two innings, but then slowly started crawling back into it. By the time our team switched halves we'd come back to make it 9-4 after 3 1/2 innings of play. I led off the top of the 5th with an infield single to the 2nd baseman and came around to score two at-bats later, and then scored another run the following inning after getting on with a single dumped into center field. When it was all said and done we (Evangelical Free Church) won 15-9; 15 unanswered runs, now I'd call that a comeback! I was put in at third base and had one grounder hit to me; I didn't field it cleanly, but I kept it in front of me and prevented the runner from advancing past 1st at least, so that coupled with going 2-for-3 at the plate (third AB was a flyout to left) with two runs, I'd say I avoided embarrassing myself. Mission accomplished. :-)

Walker Building didn't have the A/C working the first couple days of this holiday-shortened week, which just happened to coincide with two of the warmest days of the season so far. Great timing. And with no window or fan in the TA office it's been rather stuffy and miserable up there. At least today the A/C came back on full-time again, though since there's no vent in our office we're reliant a lot on cool air seeping in from the hallway, so getting the office more comfortable isn't exactly a quick process.

I can add another new place to my restaurant list in State College, Red's Steamed Cheeseburgers. I went there for lunch today with Jeff, Vic, Mario & Daniel, and it was pretty good. And the fries were awesome too (just way too many of them). I dunno, it still doesn't top Sports Cafe's 25c wing Tuesdays, which Daniel & I took advantage of this week again as usual. Even though it was easily in the mid-80s we still sat outside since we found some shade. Ahhhh, wings and a beer while sitting outside on a beautiful summer's day for lunch, this is the life!

My new computer for work arrived today! I took some time this afternoon getting it put together and set up on my new (temporary) desk in 405, though it's still not on the network yet, and needs a bunch of stuff installed as well. I've gotta choose a name for it too (_____.met.psu.edu), so I'm wrestling with trying to come up with something cool. Other computers in the department have names like snowsquall, heatwave, vortex (and various other meteo-related names), sitka and chaos, so should I continue the weather-phenomena trend? Perhaps with hailstreak, blizzard, willywilly or windchill? Or pick something distinctly non-meteo like shadowfax, jackbauer, viking, fjord, eucalypt, whitsunday, wallaby (Aussie nods), beaver, aurora or borealis? Or even pick some sort of obscure Biblical reference? Or perhaps a Minnesota reference, like hennepin, minnehaha, nokomis, itasca or hiawatha? Comments/votes/suggestions would be welcome, though sometime Friday morning I'll probably have to make an executive suggestion on a name. So many to choose from though, this is gonna be a tough decision... :-)

The other day I picked up the board game "Cranium" and the DVD "Fargo" at Target with a gift card I had. I've only played Cranium once, but really liked it and thought I needed at least a second group game to compliment Apples to Apples. And tonight Daniel & I watched "Fargo" over here at my place. We've both seen it before and really like it. It'd been probably eight or nine years since I'd seen it, and now with more perspective all the "Minnesota Nice" mannerisms (and of course the accent!) seem even funnier because they're so true! I remember when the movie came out a lot of Minnesotans were indignant and claiming they don't talk like that. Hate to break it to ya fellas, but yes you do talk that way. It may not be *quite* that pronounced (though they didn't actually embellish the accents in the movie as much as I thought I'd remembered), but once you get out of the Twin Cities and into the country and the small towns, people really do talk that way. Personally I think it's more charming and enjoyable to listen to than the "hey buddy" central PA accent, but I admit I'm a bit biased here... And occasionally I bust out a word or phrase here or there in the Minnesotan accent (in words such as Minne-SOH-ta, boat, uffda, or roof, for which I constantly get made fun of ever time I say it, hehe). But then again I also do have a tendency to throw in some Aussie slang now and then, just to spice things up.

Posted by Jared at 11:56 PM | Comments (1)