Jared's One Blog

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July 31, 2006

I Love Free Food

[On location at the Hampton Inn in Fairfax, Virginia]

Okay, so maybe I was a little rash in telling Jeff the other day that "I wouldn't be overly surprised if the Twins sweep the Tigers this weekend," because the Tigers nearly turned the tables and were two innings away from sweeping us in the raucous Metrodome. I was getting pretty negative about the Twins chances yesterday as I was listening to the game while cleaning my room a bit, as Bonderman was dominating until a wonderfully wild and weird 8th inning that saw the Twins score 6 runs (including one on a balk by Bonderman) en route to a 6-4 win, avoiding the sweep. Add to that Baltimore's 9th inning comeback against the White Sox and it was a very positive half hour or so for Twins fans everywhere. Being only a game and a half behind the Yankees and a game behind Chicago after we lost 2 of 3 to Detroit isn't bad at all.

Last Wednesday we on the Frameulators kept our playoff hopes alive, and we finally had a game that wasn't decided by the mercy rule too, holding on for an exciting 15-11 win. We had 11 players (meaning no subs), so it was fun to play the whole game, and have the game go a full 7 innings for a change. Unfortunately I won't be able to play this week for "Team Weather" because of the GMU conference. Hopefully we're still alive for playoffs next week.

I spent a good deal of time on Thursday afternoon and evening working on tweaking my poster after getting Joel's revisions. And yes, I was in Walker until 11pm on a summer evening, but that's partly because I went to Wing Challenge for a couple hours in the evening, so I wasn't being completely lame at least. For those of you who don't know, Wing Challenge is held on six consecutive Thursday evenings at the Tussey Mountain Amphitheater. Each week four vendors each sell typically two or three of their best flavors of wings, and then people get to vote on which flavor was their overall favorite. The winners from each week are invited back to the final Wing Challenge, where the overall winner of the best State College area wings is crowned. So which were my favorites this week? Double Dragon from All Seasons Deli, Tussey Mtn Classic from Tussey Mtn Lodge, and then Spicy Tomato (from I forget where) pulled in a tasty third in my book. I'm wishing we could get back from GMU in time for Wing Challenge this week, but it's highly doubtful it'll happen.

I don't know what happened at trivia on Friday night, we pulled in a disappointing 4th. And there were only 4 teams playing. Sigh. At least we had a good team name, "Harold Reynolds Got Caught Stealing Second Base."

Much of Saturday was spent in celebration of Ed & Ellen's wedding. The ceremony at State College Evangelical Free Church was really quite wonderful, and went off without a hitch, apart from the roll of white carpet down the aisle being rather uncooperative. :-) The reception was a good time too, with Matt & Tim playing lots of good Irish music, with various combinations of guitar, banjo, mandolin, violin and dulcimer. And Ed & Ellen had arranged for a few unique things at the reception, such as a little game where you had to go get people's signatures that had done various activities listed on the sheet (e.g., went to elementary school with Ed, gone on a safari, etc.). They also announced that clinking glasses to get them to kiss would not work; rather, they requested that they would kiss only if people loudly sung out a song that included the word "love" in the lyrics. Naturally that led to some entertaining moments -- a couple people even sung the "I Love Twinkies" song, which was good enough, lol.

So this afternoon Walter & I drove the 4 hours from State College, PA down to Fairfax, VA for the GMU AT&D conference, the drive was scenic and mostly uneventful. Walter gives his talk tomorrow right before noon (and he's really looking forward to having it done on the first day before lunchtime), and I'll be trying not to look or sound dumb when people ask me questions about my poster. But let me just throw this out there: I think I'm really gonna like being reimbursed for meals and everything by our research grant. :-) But I think I'm really gonna dislike the lack of swiftness that the "approaching" cold front will have, since it'll be up around 100 degrees with dewpoints in the mid-70s for the three days we're down here. Lovely.

How much you wanna bet that alcohol was involved with this car accident in rural PA?

And believe it or not, there's heaps of good news coming from Iraq.

And what kind of Meteo grad are you? You don't even have to be a grad student or a meteo student to take this test, though some of the quiz answers might be slightly less humorous to you. :-) Props to Jacob for creating the quiz. Such hard workers we are. ;-)

Posted by Jared at 11:27 PM | Comments (4)

July 26, 2006

El Partido de las Piñatas

I'm well aware that Chris "Action" Allen has been putting a fair bit of pressure on me lately in his blog to provide a semi-detailed blog entry on this site about this past weekend so that he wouldn't have to. I call that just downright lazy, but I think I'm up to the task for blogging for both of us. :-P

Last Friday evening Chris, who drove up from Raleigh to State College for another visit, came out to the G-Man to join us at team trivia. We're always trying to come up with a solid and creative team name, and sometimes it's a bit of a struggle, but Jeff thought up an absolute gem: "I Went to the Beirut Zoo, and All I Saw Were Guerillas." The outcome came down to the final question, where our knowledge of Michael Jackson albums was severely tested. Not exactly the ideal question to bid the max of 15 points on to hang on for the win, but it worked out nicely.

Saturday was the big day of the weekend though, with a Mexican/Spanish-themed piñata party over at Jeff & Vic's Houserville Resort. Mid-July is apparently a popular birthday time here in the meteorology department, as Amber, David, Caren & Aviva all have birthdays within a six day span. So each of them (plus Margaret) have been working over the past couple-three weeks to make their own piñatas in preparation for the birthday party. But these weren't your ordinary piñatas; Margaret made a three-balloon "bouquet," Aviva made a green Mrs. M&M, Caren created "Kirby" of Nintendo fame, David built the Hindenburg (complete with some Nazi symbology), and Amber made a beautiful running ostrich, really showing off her artistic side. It seemed like they all built them almost too well, as it was tough for everyone to bash open their piñatas. So tough, in fact, that it required pitching the piñatas like a softball and using the stick as a bat, except in David's case, where he did his best King Kong impression and ripped the Hindenburg in two (it's somewhat unfortunate that he didn't fill the piñata with red, orange and yellow crèpe paper). But in addition to all the piñatas, we had all sorts of Spanish, Mexican and Cuban music, some sangría and margaritas, and plenty of taco fixins, in addition to festive mariachi band wall decorations, so they really went all-out in the planning of this party, kudos to Amber, David, Caren & Aviva for putting together an amazingly fun party!

After a Sunday afternoon round of frisbee golf with Chris, Amber, Walter, Jeff & Vic, on Sunday evening it was time for another weekly Bible study with Penn State Christian Grads, and this week Kerrie came along to the study to see what it was like (last week Fangxing came with me to the study). Afterward she said she was really impressed with the group, so hopefully she'll come back again. Fangxing also really likes the PSCG group and will be coming back again this week and after she comes back from her trip home to China, so it seems like we're developing a strong Meteorology representation at PSCG! Tim & I were also brainstorming this week after the study for ideas for the PSCG men's group, and I think we definitely came up with a winning idea, "theology pub," where a few of us get together at a pub and have a chat about big issues over a good dark beer, listening to each other about what we believe on that issue and why we believe it. I think it sounds like a blast!

In softball we finally broke our Monday losing streak -- by forfeit, because nobody from the other team showed up. It obviously would've been preferable to play a real game and settle our streak on the field, but hey, a win's a win, and it keeps us in the race for the IM postseason.

Yesterday evening before Kerrie & I had our third CNET on-camera practice session (I managed to get on time and have somewhat more confident/comfortable body language, but I still need work), a group of us went out to Dr Frank's house in the shadow of Mt Nittany for a BBQ, as Stephanie is house- and pet-sitting while the Franks are gone. That's a pretty sweet gig if you ask me, they've got a beautiful place!

Oh, and I finally have a few Penn State photo albums uploaded on my webpage. I got myself caught up through the end of October, but I doubt I'll be getting any more done for at least a week. Check them out by going to my Photos page!

You may be wondering why I'm doing a blog entry in the middle of the day. Well, it's because I really can't do much of anything while my code is running. So I'm actually doing work, I promise. I'm just being extra-productive (I'm also listening to the Twins-White Sux game currently) while Matlab is cranking away toward giving me the results I need to put on my poster. And it's definitely getting to be high time that the poster gets finished, we need to get it to Kinko's either this afternoon or tomorrow morning so that they can get it printed and into my hands on either Friday or Saturday (or Monday morning as a last resort). Walter & I will be leaving for the George Mason University 10th Annual Conference on Atmospheric Transport & Dispersion on Monday afternoon, and the conference itself will go from Aug 1-3. Unfortunately Kerrie, Anke and others won't be able to go because their grant *still* hasn't come in, more than a year after the grant was approved by the sponsor. So even though we don't know much at all about their research, Walter & I will do our best to stand by their posters and answer questions about them, while I simultaneously field questions about mine. Should be an interesting few days.

I'll leave you for now with a couple of interesting links. The first is about President Bush's clean air initiatives that have actually been wildly successful in lowering pollutant emissions. Hmmm, I thought we were told by the mainstream media that we were all going to die if Bush got his way on environmental policy... And then I've heard a lot of criticism in the past about Bush's No Child Left Behind policy, but this is one of the best critiques I've heard or read. After being a fence-sitter on that issue, I think now I've definitely come around to be against NCLB. An amazing archaeological find just happened in Ireland, where a psalm book from AD 800-1000 was found buried in a bog. It's amazing how long that medieval book survived buried in moist soil for so long. And at least the Aussies have good taste in music. Residents are upset over the police blaring loud Barry Manilow music every weekend to disperse late-night crowds at a suburban Sydney park. I think that idea's awesome, but I do feel for the residents who are having to put up with it.

Well, I better get back to work, and focusing on listening to the Twins game, at least until my Matlab code gets done running. It sure is a good time to be a Twins fan these days (I've been wearing my "TC" hat with pride these days), coming into today the Twins are 33-8 in their last 41 games! We're currently only ONE game behind the Chicago White Sux (and half a game behind the hated Yankees) in the AL Wild Card race, after trailing Chicago by 11 games earlier this year. There's already some major positivity happening with the Twins, but if they can keep up their torrid pace, especially this weekend vs the Tigers, the positivity will be at a fever pitch! GO TWINS!!

Posted by Jared at 03:17 PM | Comments (1)

July 21, 2006

Learning on the Fly

This has definitely been a week for a lot of learning, about quite a range of things. First off, softball. I don't know what it is about Mondays, but they just aren't kind to Team Weather. Last week we lost 15-2 on Monday, and this week we lost 11-1. What killed us again (apart from basically nobody being able on our team to hit the ball out of the infield) was giving the other team plenty of extra outs with fielding miscues, of which I was definitely responsible for a couple. I was playing short fielder and I completely misjudged a couple of fly balls that were coming straight at me; I jogged in for them, but they wound up going over my head. So when the third & fourth fly balls came my way later on, I learned from my mistakes and adjusted my approaches to the ball, and managed to catch it both times. At least it was a small measure of redemption, and I was able to prove that I'm only a partial (and not a complete) liability on defense out in the field. :-) A bit more practice would certainly help out my depth perception on those liners coming right toward me.

But while we're 0-2 on Mondays so far this season, we must like Wednesdays, because we pushed our Hump Day record to 2-0 in impressive fashion. Last week we won 16-6, but this week we definitely had our best and most complete game as a team, winning 19-1 in 5 innings. Again, fielding was the primary difference in this one, as we didn't make a single error that I can remember. We even conceded the run to turn a 6-4-3 double play in the final inning. Our bats were much more lively too, which always helps. Of note, Nat had two 2-run homers, and I forget who it was, but one of our guys had a 2-RBI sacrifice fly -- you don't see that too often! None of our games this year have even been close, with all four being decided by the mercy rule (twice for us and twice against us), and I wonder if we'll have our fifth straight mercy-rule game on Monday. However it happens, I'd just like to see us break our Monday curse.

On the research front, I've been busy trying to learn from Adam about his codes, since he's leaving for good after this week and I'm kind of taking over his projects. It's kind of tough to keep everything straight, especially since it's all rather interconnected and I'm not terribly familiar with Matlab or especially Fortran just yet. And maybe someday I'll start to become familiar with all the acronyms for variables and other items of apparent interest to us that Joel & Dave were throwing around fast & furious today. Man, I felt so lost, and it was a horrible feeling. But once I get a little more help from Adam on learning his code in the morning, I should be mostly good to go on taking quite a bit more ownership on what's to become really my project. And that'd be good, since I need to get the code working in order to get some results I kinda need to put on my poster that's needing to be finished on Monday. Gotta love scrambling before a deadline.

This week I've also been learning how to put together the graphics for a show and then how to give an on-camera weathercast. Matt had Kerrie & I come in Tuesday night and tonight (Thursday) for our first on-air practice sessions. I've been nervous but looking forward to getting in front of the camera finally for quite some time, and Matt's been a good teacher. So now I've given two "forecasts," both of which I have on a tape that I'm most definitely saving for a good long time. (If you ask really nicely, I might even let you see it!) Tuesday night's wasn't too bad, at least for a first time ever doing that on camera. It really is a bit strange getting used to seeing yourself in multiple monitors and using those to try to figure out where to point and gesture and whatnot, but I'm enjoying the challenge. Tonight I definitely improved on my transitions from slide to slide, but I still need to work quite a bit on making bigger gestures and having a bit more confident body language. With a few more practice sessions I might be ready to go on air for CNET (the local community access channel, for which Campus Weather Service produces a videotaped three and a half minute forecast every weekday that gets aired at 5:55pm) in September! If things go really well I might even be able to get on in late August, but it'll probably be September.

Even though I'd been gradually getting less keen on the idea of a career in broadcast meteorology over the last year or so (for various reasons), I must admit that after this week I'm really starting to think about it seriously again. I mean, ever since I was 5 years old I wanted to be a TV meteorologist when I grew up, and I've kept that as a goal in the back of my mind, even as I was deciding to be a physics major in undergrad at Gustavus (to give myself flexibility in case TV didn't work out). So while that career option has become less appealing to me since I came to PSU, I'd be really disappointed in myself if I didn't at least give it a shot here at Penn State, particularly with all the opportunities that are available here (that's part of why I chose PSU for grad school, after all). I'd like to improve as much as I can in the coming months so that I can have a fair chance to evaluate what my options might be after graduation, but it'll definitely take a pretty solid time commitment to do so; as with most things in life, lots of practice is required if you're serious about improving. But in any case, I definitely think that my previous experience -- working at the radio station, acting in several plays, being in Forensics for four years in high school, paying lots of attention to the weathercasts on the Twin Cities TV news for years while growing up, working behind the scenes for "Weather World" one day a week the past two semesters, having a pretty good grasp on my geography, and even performing in all those piano recitals over the years -- all that experience is a tremendous help to me as I try to learn the ropes and become comfortable with this on-camera stuff. I guess I've always liked being on stage and performing, so this fits right in!

Posted by Jared at 12:56 AM | Comments (1)

July 17, 2006

Would You Like, To Buy, A Brrrooom??

Thank goodness Arts Fest is over. State College can finally go back to a normal level of activity, without tens of thousands of visitors and hundreds of artists' booths cramming into downtown and a corner of campus making getting around downtown a nightmare. Which is why I set out a goal for myself to avoid driving downtown at all costs from Thursday through today. I like the occasional easy goal for myself like that. I mean, it's not glamorous or especially noteworthy (other than apparently I'm making note of it here), but it's definitely doable and quite practical. And fortunately for me I can put a checkmark by that one.

Anyway, this was my first Arts Fest (the 40th annual Central PA Festival for the Arts) experience here in State College, and I can see why it's a big deal. On Thursday and Friday after lunch a few of us took the scenic route back to Walker, meandering past a whole bunch of different booths where artists from all over the country were selling their different kinds of work. Some artists were selling photography (much of it absolutely gorgeous), others had paintings, there were glass blowers, potters, sandal-makers, woodworkers, ornamental brooms -- you name the craft, it was there. And all of it (that really interested me anyway) was completely out of sight from a price standpoint, at least with what I could reasonably afford. For instance, there were some framed photos that I really liked, but they were being sold for hundreds of dollars. And then there was this super-cool broom booth on Pattee Mall on campus, with these decorative brooms that were some of the coolest things I've ever seen, their handles were usually two (or more) branches that were woven together, and most of them were rather tall -- and all of them were hundreds of dollars. I don't know why you'd spend that much on a broom, but it was definitely very artistic. (And I apologize for using a family inside joke for the title of this post, but I couldn't resist!) A bunch of us got the idea that we'd like to try to pool our resources together and get a booth at next year's Arts Fest and sell various photos, paintings or whatnot that we meteo grad students created. I mean, I'd totally be up for getting larger prints of some of my best photos framed and trying to sell them, I think that'd be really cool. Unfortunately, I heard from Amy that it probably costs around $2000 to get a booth here at Arts Fest, so that probably puts the kibosh on that idea. I'm still motivated to get some of my pictures framed for myself, however. And I think I picked up some good ideas for photographs (or series of them) to take in the future, and ideas for what sorts of frames look good and whatnot.

Friday evening was Faith Night at the State College Spikes (single-A minor league baseball) game, so a few of us from Penn State Christian Grads got together to go to the game. It was my first time in the brand new baseball stadium, and they really did a wonderful job with it. I'm especially a fan of the views of Mount Nittany and Tussey Ridge beyond the outfield wall, it's in a gorgeous setting. The game was fun too, although the Spikes lost 6-4 to the Tri-Cities Valley Cats. Following the game Kirk Cameron, the actor who starred in the TV series "Growing Pains" as the character Mike Seaver, gave a fantastic 45-minute message about his conversion from atheism to Christianity. His presentation of the gospel message was quite powerful, challenging and refreshingly blunt. For preaching to an interdenominational crowd that gathered after the game in the stands along the 1st base line to hear him talk, he really didn't soft-pedal some of the potentially controversial doctrinal issues he got into, which surprised me a great deal (in a very pleasant way). To be honest, my expectations of Kirk Cameron's talk beforehand weren't that great, but he really impressed me.

Last night Kerrie, Daniel, Katie, Jeff & I went over to Jacob's place for a game night, with some Taboo to start it off and then some card games. Katie & I thought it'd be a good idea to teach everyone else a game we both love called "Hand & Foot" (or as Daniel apparently calls it, "hoof & mouth disease"), but as we were working on shuffling the seven decks of cards together we started to realize that we played with some rather different variants of rules (most notably the point structure for laying down initially, what the deal was with red and black 3s, and then the win conditions). So the two of us end up having a rather spirited discussion over the fine points about which rule variants were better for half an hour or so, I kinda lost track of time there for a bit, hehe. Meanwhile, everyone else was totally lost because we hadn't explained any of the rules to them at that point (because we couldn't agree on which set of rules to start explaining). Finally we managed to agree on the rules we'd play by (which ended up being mostly the variants I was used to, since they sounded more friendly to beginners -- Katie's rather cut-throat and ruthless when it comes to card games, lol), and though I thought the game was fun and everything, I think everyone else had more fun listening to Katie & I argue about the rules forever beforehand. :-) To wind up the night we were introduced to a card game of Jacob's called "Fluxx" (which has absolutely nothing to do with physics or meteo), a game where the rules and goals change constantly throughout (they're in a constant state of flux, get it? hehe), making planning strategy useless until it actually gets to be your turn (because you don't know the rules/goals you'll be playing with until then, and then your strategy goes out the window after your turn's done, because the rules will likely change on the next person's turn). It was pretty zany and fun, I really enjoyed it. We're such nerds. (And according to that test I just linked to, I'm 78% nerd. Seems about right!)

Be glad you weren't in Iowa this weekend. Unless you were, in which case I feel sorry for you. Seriously. Particularly if you're from Webster City, which is about an hour's drive north of Des Moines or so. Why am I picking on the friendly central Iowegians, you might ask? Well, Shannon was complaining to me yesterday afternoon about how awful the temp/dewpoint combo was where she is in Maryland for a couple weeks on a field project (an incredibly muggy 86/75 -- that's a temperature of 86F and a dewpoint of 75F, which feels downright tropical and oppressive), so I endeavored to find someplace in the country that had it worse. Naturally the first place I looked on the HPC Surface Map was Iowa, since their massive corn fields always bump up the dewpoint a few degrees, and Webster City caught my eye with the "eww" reading of the day -- 91 over 82. As many of you know, a dewpoint of anything over 80 degrees is, well, pretty bad, unless you like sweating like a horse just by standing still and relaxing outside, much less doing anything that's expending calories. So out of curiosity I decided to check back at the readings from Webster City this afternoon (Sunday) to see if they were any better from yesterday, and to my shock it was worse. Much worse. For over an hour this afternoon they were reporting a temperature of 95 to go with a dewpoint of 88 degrees, making for a heat index (apparent temperature) of an absolutely miserable 133 degrees F. (I was so impressed by that reading that I took a screenshot to save for posterity.) I can't even fathom what a dewpoint of 88 feels like, I'm pretty sure I've never even heard of a dewpoint being that high before, at least not in the United States. That's some absolutely deplorable humidity. We're gonna be in the 90s every day this week here in State College probably, but thankfully we won't be getting anywhere near that humid! The dog days of summer sure have arrived, though.

Posted by Jared at 12:51 AM | Comments (8)

July 14, 2006

Practice Makes Perfect

Okay, so maybe not perfect, but certainly much improved. At least that was the case for the intramural slow-pitch softball team, "The Framulators," that a bunch of us meteo grads put together. Our first game of the season was this past Monday, and the first pitch of the game was definitely an omen for how things were to go. Walter lobbed the pitch in there, and their batter (who had the black marks on his cheeks that you always see football players wear in particular) absolutely CRUSHED it. I mean, this was a total moonshot to ultra-deep left field. So after one pitch we were trailing 1-0. We held the score to that until the second inning, when the wheels totally came off. Long story short, we lost 15-2 in just 5 innings. Ouch. I managed to go 1-for-2 with an RBI. But it's just rough when you run into a team with several legitimate power hitters, especially when your team hasn't had much of a chance to practice fielding beforehand.

So after the game Monday we spent another hour-plus doing fielding and batting practice, and the extra practice really showed itself in our game last night. It was pouring when we started the game, and when we fell behind 4-0 in the top of the 1st I was wondering if we were in for a repeat of Monday. But the rain abated and then our bats (and gloves) came alive. We didn't give up a run after the 2nd inning en route to a 16-6 victory in 6 innings. Pretty much everyone played well, it was good to see. Frame even had a double! I was again 1-for-2 with an RBI (I think I had an RBI anyway) before I was subbed out halfway through, though on my hit I was thrown out trying to stretch a single into a double. I really should invest in some cheap cleats so that I can turn corners on wet grass...

So tonight I finally caved into peer pressure. Massive peer pressure. You see, every week there's a Meteo Poker Night, and a bunch of people have been trying to get me to come out and play with them ever since September or whatever. I resisted their charms until now, when I decided just to give it a shot since I had nothing better going on tonight. So it was a small 6-player game with me, Jeff [Frame] (to mimic Action Allen's notation), Robert, Jacob, Walter and Siewert over at Walter's place. But I actually had fun tonight, and only lost $5 in the process. I was doing pretty well for quite awhile, but had a couple of "bad beats" and then had bad luck a third time when I was all in with a very good chance for a straight, but it was not to be, so I finished 4th. I doubt it'll be as long as another 10 months before I go back for another poker night. :-)

I've spent a fair amount of time the last few evenings working on making improvements to my webpage. The first and most noticeable change was to my Photos page. Previously it was basically just a big long list of photo albums separated by some section headers or whatever, but I've totally changed that up and created a bunch of postcard-style photos to click on to take you to a listing of the albums in that gallery. I really think it looks much, much nicer and more professional. And along those lines I did get a few albums from last summer created and uploaded, so I'm about half done with those, and then I'll get a few Penn State or Arizona albums up eventually. Apart from a couple of other very minor new things, the other main addition I made to my website was sticking on a BBClone stats counter, which actually caused me a lot more trouble than I thought it would be; in fact, I still haven't quite worked out all the little issues, but it's working well enough for now. I still have the StatCounter counter tallying like it always has, but BBClone provides some interesting little stats that are visible to you, the viewing public, such as what countries visitors to my page are coming from and whatnot. The link to that is on the left sidebar right below where the counter is (at the bottom of the content in the left sidebar). Let me know what you think of these changes if you feel so inclined, I always like to hear feedback, good and bad.

This morning I got an email from my Mom with a link to the results of the 2006 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. It's a really funny contest in that the goal is for entrants to invent the worst possible first sentence of a story that they can possibly dream up. A bunch of them are so delightfully awful first sentences that I highly recommend you all check it out! You'll see what I mean after you read a few of them. :-)

Also, kudos to my friend Greg down in Dallas, who sent me a link to this television advertisement from Argentina this morning. It's extraordinarily clever and thought-provoking -- and this is the truth: somehow I doubt you'd see such an ad in the US. (You'll know why I say that if you watch the ad, it's only a minute or two long at the most.) I'd also be quite curious to hear what your thoughts are on it.

Many areas in the Midwest are going through a pretty bad dry spell this summer, with my home county in northwestern Wisconsin being hit pretty hard by drought. And the short-term forecast calls for more mid-upper 90s the next couple days at least, they could really use some rain.

And I have one more cool weather link for ya'll, with some pictures of lightning and a rainbow together in the same shot. Now that's not something you see everyday!

Posted by Jared at 12:37 AM | Comments (0)

July 10, 2006

Overtime

Team Trivia at the Sports Cafe has been a Friday night tradition for us here in State College for quite some time. In fact, I think I've made it there just about every Friday since last September when I started grad school out here at Penn State. It was something I looked forward to every week, and we really kind of adopted the Sports Cafe as our own, even though it was a bit of a dump. So you can imagine my shock a couple weeks ago when Jeff let me know that Friday night trivia, at least at the Sports Cafe, had ceased to exist, with virtually no warning. So after a couple Fridays of no trivia on Friday nights (for which I was mercifully out of town), this week Team Trivia was resurrected at a new location, the G-Man. While it doesn't have quite as many video screens on which to watch various sporting events while we have a beer and ponder the answer to various and sundry trivia questions, the Gingerbread Man has several advantages over the Sports Cafe. Let me list just a few: 1) it's not a dump, 2) there are actually paper towels in the bathrooms, 3) there's more than one food option (wings) that's actually good, and 4) there are actually quite a few food/drink specials (including a 16" pizza for $5 after 8pm!), as opposed to only one at Sports Cafe. Oh yeah, and Friday night trivia at the G-Man is also at a much better starting time (7pm) than it was at Sports Cafe (8pm). At least we continued our winning ways, taking first place this week with the team name "Kim Jong-Il Can't Get His Missiles Up," which we thought was rather clever. And Vic has some pretty sweet sunglasses that sure made the rounds; they were so cool that everyone wanted to try them on! Now is trivia really this big a deal that I needed to write this big long exposition about it? Well, perhaps, but I pretty much just wanted a good excuse to get a few of these sunglasses pictures posted. ;-)

This afternoon I went down to Champs with Jeff, Vic & Robert to watch the World Cup Final, between perennial powerhouses Italy and France. Now, I was a bit torn on who to cheer for. Typically on principle I don't ever cheer for France in anything, mainly because I like to make fun of their cheese-eating surrender monkey ways, but I was chatting online this morning with my Aussie friend Simon, who studied abroad in Lyon, France last year, and he was lobbying for me to barrack for France. And that, when added with cool player names like Zinedine Zidane and Thierry Henry, and I decided to become a marginal France fan for the day. And it was a great game, up until Zidane decided to freak out and viciously head butt an Italian player in the chest, earning him a direct red card. And this was mere minutes after he very nearly won the game in storybook fashion (to wrap up a stellar career) with a spectacular header that was acrobatically saved in an equally spectacular manner by the Italian keeper. Zidane, what were you thinking?!? I mean, seriously, how could anyone be so STUPID to do that, especially in the FINAL of the WORLD CUP?? Argh. As most of you probably already know, Italy wound up winning in a penalty kick shootout, after the thirty minutes of overtime ended scoreless. And it's not like I'm sad that Italy won or anything, I really don't mind. Well, at least the rest of the world can go back to being sane, and ordinary Americans like myself can go back to mostly ignoring soccer, until 2010 in South Africa. Bold prediction: a European team will NOT be crowned World Cup Champion in 2010.

Church this morning was really cool. I didn't think it would be initially, as the youth pastor and teens from the youth group were sharing some of their experiences from a conference they were at in Indiana last week. I thought it would be just another group of kids getting up front and saying "yeah, we had lots of fun last week, it was a cool trip" and whatnot. When I got there they were basically carrying straight over from the first service, and after listening for a little while it became clear that the Holy Spirit was really working in these youths, they were genuinely on fire for Christ. It really was amazing and so encouraging to hear how God was working in their hearts this last week at the conference, with the light bulbs finally turning on for so many of them, and their Christian faith becoming real to them in their hearts for the first time. The congregation was so captivated by the revival taking place amongst the youth group that pretty much everyone who came to the first service at 9am stayed right on through most of the second service, which "started" at 10:30. Pretty much the whole way through the second service Daryl, the youth pastor, was letting people know they were free to leave whenever if need be, but basically nobody left! Normally the second service ends around 11:45 or so, but all the youths (and when was the last time you heard of *everyone* from a group of middle and high schoolers taking their turn getting up in front of a church and speaking??) had so much to share that the worship set was still going after 12:30 when people finally started trickling out! Church definitely went overtime today, but nobody cared -- the Spirit really was at work during the entire service today! Hopefully the entire congregation will catch the fire of revival that these youths came back from Purdue with.

Posted by Jared at 12:30 AM | Comments (3)

July 05, 2006

My Summer Vacation

I've heard some complaints about the lack of bloggish activity on this site in the last week or two during my vacation. Sorry about that, I just never got around to it. I was somewhat busy and having fun (or enjoying relaxing) during most of my vacation when I wasn't driving. And boy did I do a lot of driving by myself, over 3200 miles in 11 days! I guess it's a good thing I like to drive, and that my 1991 Mazda 626 is still going strong after 213,000 miles. Anyway, I'd better get to it, and I apologize in advance for the length of this post. Hopefully all the pictures will break it up a bit.

My drive two Fridays ago from good ol' State College, PA to Huntsville, Alabama went well, and somehow I really wasn't sleepy-tired at all. A couple comments about the drive: I-79 between Morgantown and Charleston in West Virginia is a beautiful stretch of highway; and Kentucky took entirely too long to drive through. Daniel's family had arranged for me to stay with the Sieja's, a family from their church in Huntsville, so I managed to wend my way at night rather successfully through the city, arriving at their place at around 10pm or so, about 15 hours and 830 miles after I left State College. Boy was I ready to get out of the car! I was *very* grateful for being able to stay with the Sieja's on Friday and Saturday, they were amazing! Aside from being given a free place to stay in a home, I was most glad about getting the chance to know some people before the wedding, particularly since I didn't know anyone beforehand apart from the bride (a little bit) and the groom. They were so kind to me, and I'm very thankful I had the chance to stay with them and get to know them; they really made my stay in Huntsville tons more enjoyable than if I would've been by myself at a motel.

Daniel & Katie's wedding last Saturday was wonderful. The service was about half an hour long, seemed to go off without a hitch (apart from the flower girl literally throwing -- not tossing -- handfuls of petals as she walked up the aisle, hehe). A thunderstorm actually rolled in right as the wedding was about to start too, and a loud rumble of thunder caused a bit of commotion during one of the last prelude songs; I thought it would've been cool if Daniel's entrance would've been accompanied by thunder, but I guess that was close enough. :-) After Daniel & Katie were proclaimed man and wife (yay!!) it was time to move downstairs for the reception, and in the course of mingling around I met a few of Daniel's friends & relatives, including his parents and his brother, which was nice. I got to talk with several of them a good deal more at the afterglow party a couple hours later at someone's house, they were really a bunch of interesting and really cool people. Daniel's friends Tuan, Gavin & Matt were even inviting me out for a couple drinks at the Thirsty Turtle after the party, which I really appreciated and I totally would've taken them up on their offer if it weren't for needing to be up and driving by 6am or so the next morning so that I could make it to Green Bay at a reasonable hour. Though as it turns out I wouldn't have gotten any less sleep by doing that, but hindsight is 20/20... At any rate, I was very glad that I decided to stay at the afterglow party until things were winding down, instead of leaving way early and staying at a motel at least a couple hours up the road (to give me a head start on my Wisconsin drive), since I got to meet and talk for awhile with so many cool people. I'm wishing I had more time to get to know them, but oh well. And I offer my apologies here to my fellow Penn Staters, since I really didn't get very many pictures taken during the afterglow party -- two, to be exact. I was just too busy having fun! You'll all just have to live with the ones I took during the ceremony and at the reception I guess.

After getting only a couple hours of sleep (maybe, and that's being generous ... gosh, I hate the nights when my mind's just racing about every thing imaginable and I can't get it to slow down so I can sleep, argh! -- and why do those nights seem to happen so often the night before I have to wake up early to go on a trip?), I said goodbye to the Sieja's and hit the road a bit after 6am, heading for my buddy Mike's place up in Green Bay, Wisconsin. I was pretty tired early on in the trip in Tennessee, but after getting another dose of caffeine in me I was good to go the rest of the way. The detour through the city streets of downtown Chicago around the torn-up Dan Ryan wasn't too too bad either (well, my standards are a bit different in Chicago, a city I absolutely loathe for trying to drive through or around at any time of the day). At any rate I made it the 800 miles to Green Bay in 14 1/2 hours altogether, which I guess isn't too bad. That drive tuckered me out a fair bit, especially on the heels of so little sleep, so when I was hanging out and playing cards with Mike and his friend Sarah who came over for a bit, or watching "Super Troopers," I was obviously quite mellow, much more so than usual.

After being awakened by Mike's fiesty little kitten I watched Australia fall 1-0 to Italy in the World Cup while Mike was at class. I really don't think that was a penalty in the 93rd, but obviously the referee had a different opinion. Following the game we grabbed some lunch together, and I stayed as long as I possibly could to keep chatting with him and whatnot before I had to leave to make it to the Twin Cities in time for the Twins game. I've really missed being able to spend time with Mike, and while I really wish I had more time to spend out there, that was way better than nothing.

The Twins-Dodgers game last Monday night was tons of fun. Quite a few of my friends from Gustavus that are still around the Cities these days came out for it too, including Jolene, Zach, Dave, Ben, Mueller, Al and his fiancee Katie, Brendan, Vicki & Scott. Add to that Jacob from PSU (who was also home in the Twin Cities last week) and two of his friends, and we had a pretty sizable group at the Metrodome to watch the Twins trounce the Dodgers 8-2 in very entertaining fashion. I brought my PSU Meteo sign that I'd made for the Twins game at Pittsburgh back in mid-June, and then my physics phriends had another two signs that were classically nerdy. I can say I've never seen anyone else say "Circle Us Bert" in a more creative way on a sign at a Twins game before, that's for sure! After the game a few of us went to Town Hall Brewery to meet up with Andy, Nate and his girlfriend Christina, it was really good to see them again. Jolene & Sara were nice enough to let me crash at their place for the night.

Tuesday I did a little shopping at the Mall of America and then drove over to Eden Prairie to pay a visit to my former co-workers at Choice Auto Rental and then I dropped in at Bergin's, my brother Aaron's body shop, for a quick surprise visit. I wish Aaron & Eve could've had some time some evening for me to drop by for a longer visit, but oh well. And I'd only seen pictures before, but Aaron had his newly souped-up golf cart on display at the shop. Check out the picture, it's pretty sweet! The one thing he has yet to finish is getting some cushioned arm rests put on there, but other than that it's all done. Finally on Tuesday evening I made it home to Cumberland, but right after supper I bopped over to my brother Nathan & Laura's place in Rice Lake for a good long game of Catan.

Wednesday & Thursday I basically just relaxed at home for a bit, enjoying the sights and sounds of nature around our house, reading a book out on the sun porch, and just taking a breather from all my running around, though I did go to Bible studies with my parents on Wednesday evening in Taylors Falls and Thursday evening in Rice Lake. Then on Friday evening Nathan & Jake came over for supper, so we had some good family time at my parents house, with Aaron being the only brother unable to be there.

Saturday I made an appearance for a couple hours at my 5-year high school reunion. Most of the people I hung out with in high school weren't there, but it was still fun to catch up with the people who showed up, play some volleyball and enjoy a couple of free brats (we love Louie!). After the reunion I hung out with Kevin for a bit, going out on Beaver Dam Lake on the homemade double-decker pontoon boat he (along with Mike and some other people from their grade) helped make for an hour or so. It was so relaxing just to sit up on the second deck (which also is a putting green, hehe) and enjoy a beautiful evening on a quiet part of the lake. My one major complaint about Pennsylvania is the severe lack of water, I've been spoiled while growing up by the abundance of lakes in Wisconsin and Minnesota. After that we went back to my place for a little while to play some pool, and I managed to hold my own, eking out a 1-1 draw. I was glad to get to see KG for awhile, and I'm really hoping that Mike & Kevin can make it out to Penn State for a visit sometime in August.

Both Nathan & I went along with my parents to church Sunday morning in Taylors Falls, which was really good. They're such good people, and it's always quite enjoyable to go down there and see them again. And it just happened to be a week where everyone went over to Cliff & Joyce's afterward for a grill-out. The only downside of all that is that I didn't end up leaving Cumberland until 4:30 or so to begin my long, 1000 mile trek back to State College. It was really nice to be home for a few days, but I have so much to do research-wise in the coming weeks that I had to make it back. I made a two-hour stop in Madison at 8:30 to pay my friend Claire a visit, where we grabbed some ice cream on campus (at UW's equivalent of the PSU Creamery) and caught the last half of the fireworks show that was off in the distance across Lake Mendota. I only made it to Rochelle, Illinois, about half an hour south of Rockford, when I had to stop for the night. I was really hoping to make it further, but oh well. That left 700 miles for me to drive on Monday to get back to State College, which I did in about 13 hours. I really think caffeine is a must to make it through the Ohio Turnpike. The western half of it in particular is so dull...

For the 4th of July yesterday, I was awakened at 10:30 to the sound of the transformer blowing out less than a block away. Nothing like a few extra fireworks to start off the 4th! After we'd been out of power for an hour I decided to walk down there to see if I could see anything, and I definitely spotted the offending squirrel that caused the outage -- he was fried and flayed, and actually laying next to the skeleton of the previous squirrel that last bit the dust and caused the transformer to blow earlier this summer. Stupid squirrels. Fortunately by noon the power was back on at least. If you wanna see a zoomed in photo of the squirrel, just let me know!

Then yesterday afternoon Shannon, Ken & I helped Daniel & Katie move Katie's stuff into their apartment from the Uhaul, and then there was an Independence Day BBQ over at Frame's place with a bunch of the other Meteo grads. Several of us decided to watch the State College fireworks (which according to fireworksguide.com are rated as the 5th-best show in the entire nation) from a bit closer up, so we went into campus and got a spot pretty close to the baseball stadium. The show was pretty impressive, choreographed to 40 minutes of music. While the show was really good, I'm not sure it's top-ten quality; but then again, I haven't seen any of those other top-notch displays for comparison.

Today it was back to reality, the harsh reality of Walker Building. And surprise! Joel said that in addition to making a poster for the GMU conference August 1-3 in Virginia, he wants to bring me along to a conference in Albuquerque (also in early August), and he wants me to give a talk there. Gulp. Ummm, let's just hope I can be super-productive in these next 3-4 weeks!

El fin. Time to give my fingers a break!

Posted by Jared at 11:22 PM | Comments (2)

July 03, 2006

I'm Back...

...and I'm really really tired. Maybe that has something to do with driving 700 miles today, but the thing is, that was only the third longest drive I had on this mega road trip/vacation! I only got back here to State College about 45 minutes or an hour ago, I got all my stuff lugged up from my car, and I think I'm just gonna put just enough stuff away so that I can get adequate space cleared off my bed so I can collapse. I'll get around to typing a real post about the last week and a half (including a couple photos from Daniel & Katie's wedding!) hopefully tomorrow before the July 4th festivities begin in earnest.

The Twins just won their 11th game in a row tonight, 6-5 over the Royals!! Now if we could just get the Tiggers and/or the White Sux to lose a few more games while we keep on winning... :-)

Happy Independence Day everyone!

Posted by Jared at 11:52 PM | Comments (0)