Jared's One Blog

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February 25, 2007

CDs, Chairs & Concerts Anew

New things and new experiences are usually fun. I've had actually quite a few this week, more than usual, I'd say. Not all of them are new, mind you, but some just don't happen very often.

Take, for instance, purchasing CDs. I'm not sure how many years it had been since I last bought a CD... maybe three? At any rate, it'd been a long time. On Monday I decided to order the CD "That's That" by Blue James Band, a fairly new, West Coast-group I discovered on Pandora.com. I'd say their music is kind of a mix between Guster, Jack Johnson and Dave Matthews, fairly acoustic, and the lead singer's voice is very pleasant to listen to. The first time I heard one of their songs, "Remember Me," I absolutely fell in love with their music, and after hearing a couple other songs by them, they became one of my favourite bands right away. Their CD wasn't available on Amazon or anything, and it was only $10 including shipping directly from their website, so I got it from there. I had it shipped to Walker Building, and it arrived on Thursday. I opened it up, and there was a handwritten note on a post-it note from the lead singer. Since "Dept. of Meteorology, Penn State University" was in the address, he made a few weather jokes and thanked me for supporting their music. Totally cool! And unexpected!

This is a pretty mundane new thing, but I got a new chair for my office. Well, again, not new, but a used chair from the Weather Station. Diane from the office was letting people swap those chairs in exchange for tossing out a corresponding number of old/broken chairs, so that the number of chairs in each office would remain the same. So Walter & I swapped out four from our office. Yeah, it was that bad. It's so nice having chairs that actually work, though. And reasonably comfortable too. As word spread around 4th floor several other people did the same, so there were quite a few chairs put on the dumpster by the loading dock. It definitely seems like the grad student's offices have previously been treated as places to store junk by the department, judging from the number of broken chairs/furniture scattered about.

I also don't often go to live concerts very often. If I discount all bands that I've heard in bars/pubs and other free concerts (like student groups, which is pretty fair, I think), then the only live concert I'd ever been to before was Weird Al Yankovic at the Minnesota State Fair three summers ago, believe it or not. Well, this Friday night I went to the Chris Tomlin/Matt Redman concert at the Bryce Jordan Center here on campus, as part of their national "How Great Is Our God" tour. It was absolutely fantastic! Very moving, powerful stuff. There were several points through the evening when I got a couple tears in my eyes, but especially during Chris Tomlin's version of "Amazing Grace," which he also recorded for the new movie "Amazing Grace" that just came out in theaters this weekend (about the life of 1800s European abolitionist William Wilberforce). That song always gets me. :-) The concert lasted three hours, but it was less like a regular concert and more like a big long worship service, it was awesome! It even had a sermon-type message given in the middle by Louie Giglio, a really amazing speaker who gives some awe-inspiring messages that really try to convey how big and powerful yet loving and caring a God we serve. I also bought three albums (four CDs, one Matt Redman, one Chris Tomlin, and a two-CD multi-artist compliation) and a poster for $35. So now after not buying a CD for almost three years, I've suddenly bought four albums in a single week. Totally wasn't expecting that.

In the also-new, but definitely less fun category would go learning about finite element method and doing an assignment on it for my Numerical PDEs class. I even went to the Engineering Library over in Hammond Building on Wednesday to check out a couple of books on the topic, to help give me a clue what's going on. (Incidentally, that was the first time I'd ever checked anything out from a Penn State library.) The assignment's taking tons of time, and Andrew & I aren't making as much headway on it as we had hoped. I even spent 12 consecutive hours in Walker today (Saturday); I didn't even leave the building for lunch, we had a pizza delivered. Kind of pathetic, I know. But I'm not gonna complain about the course, that's what I'm endeavoring to give up for Lent, hehe (doing something special for Lent is also a new thing for me).

And speaking of Lent, I'd be remiss if I failed to mention that I went with Kerrie, Andrew, Jeff, Bob & John to the Ash Wednesday service at the Catholic church this week. I'd been to a couple of short Lutheran Ash Wednesday chapel services back at Gustavus, and I was curious to see how the Catholics did it. I left before communion though, because I had to meet people for "Theology Pub" at Otto's for PSCG Men's Group.

Anyway, now that I've caught up on most of the new things that have been happening with me recently, I think it's time for bed!

Posted by Jared at 01:20 AM | Comments (0)

February 18, 2007

Tubing at Tussey

I never thought I would ever in my life be disappointed by a 10-inch snowfall. Yet last week's snowstorm managed to do just that, entirely because the snow switched over to sleet at 9pm on Tuesday, and didn't switch back to snow until 10am Wednesday (stupid warm air aloft, grr...). Much cursing could probably be heard from the denizens of Walker Building on Tuesday evening when the snow became sleet, because that amount of sleet (we got 1-2 inches of it) certainly robbed us of at least 5-6 inches of snow. By the time it was all said and done on Wednesday evening, we'd gotten about 10-11 inches of total accumulation here in State College. Not too shabby, but it could've (and should've!) been so much more! C'est la vie. At least it finally looks like winter around here.

When I finally got around to digging out my car on Thursday night, it took 15-20 minutes just to get all the snow off of it so that I could try to ram/back it through the piles of snow surrounding my car in the parking lot. The snow was level with the base of the door frame on my car, it's been a long time since I've seen that, hehe. I had to use my scraper as a lever to bust through the middle layer of sleet, the snow was just too much to push on its own. It was actually kind of fun to do that, since I hadn't needed to dig out my car since December '05, and that was pretty minimal. I guess the last major snowstorm I had to dig out from was way back in January '05 at Gustavus. Wow, two years between significant snowstorms is way too long. Though I think I'm glad I'm not up in Oswego County, New York, where they had around 150 inches of lake-effect snow a week or two ago. That's a wee bit too much of the white stuff.

To take advantage of our newfound snow, on Friday evening a group of us (Kristin, Isaac, Stephanie, Daniel, John, Ruth & Caleb) from Penn State Christian Grads met to go snow tubing over at Tussey Mountain! They have a special on Friday evenings there, where you can get a pass for $10 to go tubing from 7-10pm, but of course the special combined with fresh snow meant the crowds were rather large, and hence I only made it down the hill 7 times in the 3 hours. It was a bit chilly out, and occasional wind gusts were most unwelcome, but I braved the cold the entire three hours to get the maximum amount of tubing in (I have a reputation to live up to after all, being from Minnesota/Wisconsin and everything, hehe). It was a blast though, I had heaps of fun! As much as I love playing trivia on Friday nights, tubing was way more fun. :-) After we warmed up in the lodge for a bit we went to Isaac's place to play with his chinchilla (it's soooo soft!) and watch a movie. We wound up watching "Running With Scissors," which is very bizarre, to say the least. Definitely not a wacky comedy like the trailers might lead you to believe, it's very dark.

Oh, and then last night after worship team practice (I played piano in church again this weekend), I went up to Houserville to join the Fat Saturday/Mardi Gras party already in progress. Walter was doing a great job playing bartender, mixing awesome hurricanes, hand grenades and mint juleps, among other yummy things. Daniel & Katie also made some awesome gumbo (first time I'd ever had it!), and someone else brought some jambalaya, so it was definitely a New Orleans-themed party way up here in the snowy north. After awhile everyone somehow got in the science-experiment mood. I drove Jeff, Vic and Trivia Steve (yes, the guy who runs team trivia Friday nights at G-Man came out to our party, it was awesome!) to the store so we could pick up two things: Mentos and a few 2-liters of Diet Coke. It wasn't quite as cool as this video, but it was still fun. :-) Other experiments involved lighting a 1-dollar bill completely on fire without it being singed at all. Never trust a bunch of science nerds gathered together in one place, things might get slightly out of control, hehe.

Posted by Jared at 11:58 PM | Comments (0)

February 13, 2007

Early Spring? NOT!

I know I'm way behind, so I just thought I'd start to get at least a little caught up and try to hit some of the highlights. Cootie Brown has played a couple of Fridays recently at Bar Bleu, and several of us have gone out to hear Jacob on the congas and have fun and a couple drinks. Oh, and I'm mainly mentioning this because certain people really, really wanted me to put this picture on my blog (including Katie, who took the picture). Ever since I made the mistake of letting my PSU friends know that I took a jazz dance class at Gustavus, they've been trying to get me to dance at every turn. So this particular night Aviva dragged me and Luna pushed me up to the dance floor. I decided to oblige them, but not with jazz dancing, haha. But anyway, back to Cootie Brown. Apparently their bass player is moving to Vermont, so they're gonna stop doing regular shows around State College after spring break. Now I'm very sad.

For Groundhog Day way back on the 2nd of February, a bunch of us (a few meteo grads - Nat, Caren, Walter, Steph, David & Amber - plus my two South African friends from Bible study, Daniel & Stephanie) got up ridiculously early (how does 1am sound?) and made the trek over to Punxsutawney. It's only about an hour and a half away, so why not have some fun and take part in this incredibly cheesy but integral part of American culture? I mean, who wouldn't want to stand out in the pre-dawn cold for hours, waiting for a large rodent to be yanked out of a hole? Especially when the rodent is Punxsutawney Phil, the world's most famous animal weather forecaster! Anyway, we all had a blast, even though it was a bit chilly for just standing around. They had all sorts of music and games going on the loud speakers, and then they had fireworks before dawn too, set to Star Wars music (except for a random Indiana Jones song at the end), so that was fun as well. When trying to roast marshmallows for s'mores at a huge bonfire that was also roaring, I nearly burned myself even though I was still several feet from the flames, it was that hot. When my pockets started smoking I felt it was time to back away, I didn't want my coat to melt, haha. Anyway, 15,000 people gathered at Gobblers Knob outside Punxsy to witness Phil not see his shadow - a fairly rare occurrence in the history of this tradition (I think he's seen his shadow 90-some times, compared to only about 15 no-shadow proclamations) - meaning that spring will come early. (HA! Mind you, this was a day or two before temps plunged and we had windchills around -20F! And now we're gonna have a massive snowstorm, but more on that later...) We eventually got back to Punxsutawney, where we had some pancake breakfast at the Salvation Army (so many places around town have pancake breakfasts, it's crazy), though it wasn't all that great. But hey, it's only 5 bucks and it's supporting Sal Army. We wandered around town a little bit more but had to make it back to Penn State by around noon. Getting up and driving that early in the morning made me tired, but I still managed to force myself to do homework that night till around 11:30pm (math sucks, by the way). But even though it was tiring, it was really fun! I just may do the whole Groundhog Day thing again next year. :-)

The next day I went to a Penn State Icers hockey game with Ryan, John, Steve & Daniel from Men's Group. I hadn't been to an Icers game before, and it was a lot of fun. We were down by where all the crazy fans were, who do all sorts of spontaneous and crazy things during faceoffs and whatnot at particular points in the game, it was great. The game was really good too, Rhode Island jumped out to a 2-0 lead, but Penn State came back to tie it, aided by a furious 3rd period, where the Icers outshot the Rams something like 25-to-1. Luckily for us, all the action was at our end! After a scoreless overtime, the game went to a shootout, which Penn State won 3-0. I even got a nice photo of the winning goal in the shootout too! :-)

Oh, and Ryan flew down to Los Angeles the week before last to do appear in a taping of Jeopardy! He can't say how he did, but he will be appearing in the show on April 16th at least, so make sure to watch for him! He also sent me a Jeopardy! referral, I really should do something with that one of these days. I guess I've just been a tad busy. But it'd be sweet if I could find my way to be on Jeopardy! someday too, I'd love that!

The day after the hockey game was Super Bowl Sunday, and Petters & I hosted a party for the meteo grads. We got a turducken all ready (technically Steph & Kerrie cooked it upstairs because our stove's too small and ghetto), in addition to all sorts of other food (I made a broccoli salad from my sister-in-law Laura's recipe, yum). Everyone had a fun time watching the game, but afterward I was completely exhausted from the past few days (which also included many hours in Walker doing math hw). As for the game, a Super Bowl title couldn't have gone to a nicer person than Tony Dungy, I was really happy for him, even though I was somewhat conflicted over who to cheer for during the game. And the commercials were overall fairly disappointing (way too many car ads and other lame ads), though there were definitely some good ones (CareerBuilder.com, the Budweiser ESL classroom ad, to name a couple). It's been a few years since we had a Super Bowl with a slew of great commercials, oh well.

Okay, well, that gets me mostly caught up, at least through what I have pictures of (I may do another catch-up post if I feel like it in a couple days). :-) That, and I'm getting pretty tired. But I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the big snowstorm that's gonna wallop State College and the rest of central PA through Wednesday afternoon (Winter Storm Warning!). We've all been "honking" since Saturday or Sunday, when the models started bringing the storm back up our way (it'd been running south for a few days), and started agreeing with each other. So on Saturday evening I made a prediction of 6-10" of snow for Tue/Wed. This afternoon I upped it to 8-14", with the caveat that if there wasn't sleet mixed in with the snow at all during the storm, then 20" or more was very possible. Well, now it's looking like sleet is a bit less likely than even earlier today, so I'm gonna up my forecast again to 12-18", with some areas around here (especially to our west and north, in the Laurel Highlands and the Allegheny Pleateau), receiving 20-24". I'm betting that Penn State will close on Wednesday. :-) Hooray for snow! This'll be BY FAR our biggest snowfall of the season, I don't believe we've had more than about an inch so far this winter in one event. The snow will start mid-morning, and then continue all the way to Wednesday mid-afternoon (hence why I got groceries tonight, because the roads are going to be atrocious Tue & Wed). This is going to be quite the winter storm! All of us in the meteo department have been absolutely giddy the last couple days about this storm, we can't wait!

Posted by Jared at 12:46 AM | Comments (2)

February 07, 2007

Levenia

Some of you out there are probably wondering why it's been so long since I last posted. Well, it's been both a difficult and very busy last couple of weeks, in more ways than one. In the coming days I'll write up a post or two about some of the fun things I've been up to and other less fun things that have been taking up some of my time lately, but for this post I'd like to focus on Levenia.

Levenia Adom was a grad student here in the Department of Meteorology at Penn State. I TA'd Meteo 003 with her in my first semester, Fall 2005. She came in to the department a semester before I got here, and was due to earn her Master's Degree after this current semester, researching climatology under Paul Knight. Unfortunately she fell ill last spring and was diagnosed with rather advanced-stage colon cancer. She underwent six months of chemotherapy, and she seemed to be responding well. She was back on campus often, keeping up with classwork, research and her TA responsibilities. She was a very private person, and so very few people even knew she was sick; she only told her closest friends, because she didn't want anyone's pity or sympathy, and didn't want to be treated any differently than anyone else. She was also always extremely positive and strong, to the point where you wouldn't have a clue that anything could possibly be wrong. I knew she had been sick in the spring, but that was it. I didn't know that she had cancer until October, when Kerrie asked for prayer for her at Bible study one evening.

Levenia really seemed to be doing well until mid-December, when a couple of medical setbacks landed her in the hospital for a period of time. She got well from that and was released before Christmas, and so was able to spend the holidays at home with her family in New York. Unfortunately, a week or two into the new semester here at Penn State, she fell ill again with other complications and had to go back to the hospital. Initially it seemed like it would just be another relatively short stay, but she started going downhill over the course of the following week. During the week the doctors found out that her cancer was back and spreading aggressively, but that she was not well enough to begin the aggressive chemotherapy that was needed. The prognosis wasn't good. Then sometime on Sunday night the 28th or Monday morning the 29th, Levenia's health started to take a dramatic and unexpected downturn, and there was nothing the doctors could do. Family members were called on Monday, and her father tried to get here from New York City as soon as he could, but couldn't arrive until nearly 11:30pm. Her mother, who had been in State College for the almost two weeks since Levenia was re-admitted to the hospital, had a diabetic episode sometime on Monday and herself had to be admitted to the hospital; Levenia's sister (an undergrad at PSU) went to be with their mom. That left Levenia's closest friends here at Penn State, Amy, Kerrie, Amber, Maria C. & Maria H., along with the hospital chaplain, to be at Levenia's bedside in the hours before she passed away, at about 9:45pm. I'm so glad that they were all able to be there with her and for her.

Kerrie had called me from the hospital around 4:30 or 5pm to let me know that Levenia was dying. After crying for a bit in my office with that sudden news, I went around 4th floor Walker and started breaking the news to whoever was still there and hadn't left yet for the day. Then I started calling as many of the other grad students as I could, to let them know. The news was a extreme shock to everyone, because almost nobody knew that she was even sick. (The professors were notified the next morning at a faculty meeting, and they were equally shocked.) I spent some time over at Daniel & Katie's place, called some more people, and also got a call there from Kerrie letting me know that Levenia had passed away. I know I didn't get around to calling everyone (or calling everyone back after that point to let them know), but by that time I was emotionally and physically spent. After I left Daniel & Katie's to drive to Walker to let Andrew know (and Meaghan, who also happened to be doing homework late), I flipped on the radio (it was on KLOVE, the Christian station in town), and the first lyrics I heard went something like:

"Don't cry for me
For now I'm free
To dance with the angels
...
And worship the Creator"

That really struck me and gave me comfort. Somehow I don't think it was a coincidence that that particular song was playing at that particular time. I think God was answering a prayer of mine.

So last week in particular was a very sad one in Walker Building. I know I didn't get much work done, though I did manage to force myself to do homework for awhile on Wednesday night.

Levenia's funeral was this past Friday evening in the Bronx in New York City. Kerrie, Amber, Dr Clothiaux and Dr Nese all made the five-hour drive to attend. Here is Levenia's obituary, which was in the bulletin that Kerrie brought back:

~~~~~

"Sunrise, November 30, 1981.
Sunset, January 29, 2007.

Levenia Lacole Naa Amerley Adom, affectionately known as Leve, was born on November 30, 1981, in St. Luke's Hospital in Harlem, to proud parents Eben and Ruth Adom. She was the older of two children.

Leve attended the Children Storefront in Harlem, New York, from kindergarten through 8th grade. She then attended high school at The Masters School, an elite private school in Dobbs Ferry, NY, where she studied theatre. During high school, she attended Barbizon Modeling School in White Plains, where she wanted to pursue a modeling career and even did a modeling show with other models at the age of 15.

In 2000 she was accepted to Connecticut College, where she received her Bachelor's Degree in Meteorology in 2004. Continuing her education, Leve was accepted into Penn State University's graduate school program in Climatology, where she was to receive her Master's Degree in May 2007. She worked as a teacher's assistant for Dr. Jon Nese, a top meteorologist for The Weather Channel. For her first time on TV, she did forecasting for Penn State's campus. Last semester, her GPA was an amazing 4.0. Levenia loved acting, and performed in many plays from elementary school through college. Her performances were always spectacular, receiving standing ovations.

Although Leve achieved a lot academically, she was equally spectacular outside academia. Leve was a giving person, and loved by all who were blessed by her presence. She was an amazing woman who had a kind soul and loving heart. She was indeed an African Queen.

As she walks into the Kingdom of Heaven, she will forever be missed by her parents, Ruth and Eben Adom, sister LaMonique Adom, grandfather Paul Plowden, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, numerous loved ones and admirers. Her aunt, Leola Ballard, grandmother Rovenia Ballard, and grandmother Dorea Adom preceded her in death."

~~~~~

Levenia truly was an amazing person. I didn't know her all that well, but I never once heard her say anything bad about anybody, or complain about anything. Nobody else here can ever recall any such things coming out of her mouth either. Even when I would gripe to her about how much work grading a particular Meteo 003 lab was, or a problem on one of our Rad Tran assignments or this or that, she would just shrug it off and smile. She was always positive. Always strong. Always smiling. Always kind and friendly. And she will always be missed by all of us who knew her.

Posted by Jared at 11:54 PM | Comments (2)