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March 24, 2008
A Mighty Hope
My fingers have earned a good break after the weekend, I'd say. Getting all the music up to par was a lot of work, but it was also a lot of fun this weekend. I mean, it's not everyday that we get four trombones and a trumpet to play with us on the worship team, after all. :-D At the end of the rehearsal Saturday night we were all having so much fun with the music that we decided on the fly to add another song at the end of the service! And everything on Resurrection Sunday morning went well (though the extra rehearsal with the brass between services meant there wasn't really a break for me), but after lunch I just took a nap for a bit; I couldn't even stay awake for college basketball, haha. The choir's song "A Mighty Hope" went very well too (and I didn't screw up toooo badly either ;-). I don't know if I'll continue accompanying the choir unless they're in a pinch and Ray can't do it, just because of the time commitment, but I was still glad I could help them out and serve with my talents on the piano. After this semester we'll also be back down to just two pianists for the worship team as well, so while I'll have a mini-break by playing only once in April, that'll be ramping up again a lot after that.
I had two Easter dinners too, one a lunch at Green Bowl with some other meteo grads, and the other up at Chad & Rachel's in Bellefonte before Bible study with PSCG folks. It felt a lot like Thanksgiving, but minus the turkey. :-) And this was the second year in a row that for Bible study on Easter we've simply read through the Passion narratives in all four Gospels. It's really cool just reading through that much Scripture, reading the accounts of those most important events a couple thousand years ago.
"And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that He raised Christ from the dead. ... But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead..."
~1 Corinthians 15:14-15a, 20a
He is Risen! We have a mighty hope!
Posted by Jared at 10:27 PM | Comments (2)
March 21, 2008
It May Be Friday...
...but Sunday is coming!!
Posted by Jared at 08:57 AM | Comments (0)
March 20, 2008
2008 Bracketology
This week's definitely been busy so far, what with all the piano practicing. But it's been going pretty well, and I think I'm prepared enough. I was at the church on Monday night for about 3 hours to practice on my own, for another 2 or so on Tuesday night for choir practice plus extra solo practice, and for another 3 hours last night for band rehearsal with me, Paul on guitar and Adam on trumpet, to get the three of us in sync before Saturday night's full band rehearsal.
So tonight was the first night this week that I haven't been at the church, and instead I went over to Adam & Leslie's with a few other people from church to watch some of the first-round NCAA tournament basketball games, including an entertaining classic in which tiny Belmont very nearly pulled a monster 15-2 upset over Duke, but fell 71-70 (I always hope Duke loses, so I was upset they pulled it out at the end). Apart from that game though, most of the first-round games today haven't been all that close, and there's only been one modest upset (Kansas State over Southern California). But tomorrow will bring another full slate of first-round games with enormous entertainment potential (Butler vs South Alabama? Vanderbilt vs Siena? Gonzaga vs Davidson? Drake vs Western Kentucky? I can't wait!). :-)
For my bracket this year, I have two different versions, but here are some of my notable picks for the bracket that I paid money for:
2nd Round: Gonzaga over Georgetown, Marquette over Stanford, Drake over Connecticut, & West Virginia over Duke.
Sweet 16: North Carolina over Washington State, Tennessee over Louisville, Kansas over Clemson, Wisconsin over Gonzaga, Memphis over Pittsburgh, Texas over Marquette, UCLA over Drake, & Xavier over West Virginia.
Final 4: Kansas over North Carolina & UCLA over Texas.
Championship: Kansas over UCLA, by a score of 77-71.
That's right, I'm planning to be singin' "Rock Chalk Jayhawk" right on through the title game! Every year Kansas seems to screw me over though, whether I pick them to win or lose, so hopefully they redeem themselves this year, haha. So far today I was wrong on Kent State (vs UNLV), Southern Cal (vs Kansas State), Brigham Young (vs Texas A&M), & Baylor (vs Purdue). Fortunately I didn't have any of those teams advancing past the 2nd round, so my Sweet 16 is still completely intact at this point (pending West Virginia hopefully keeping their lead vs Arizona...). Speaking of which, that game's coming down the stretch, so I'd better go cheer on the 'Eers and my bracket!
[UPDATE at 11:58pm]: Good West Virginia. Now go beat Duke on Saturday so your students in Morgantown can burn some couches.
Posted by Jared at 11:37 PM | Comments (0)
March 17, 2008
Pi, Ides & Palms
'Twas a fun weekend here in SC, with Carl & Betsy visiting for the weekend. Much fun was had, from team trivia at G-Man to karaoke (and a lot of it) at the Saloon with them plus Kerrie, Frame, Kent & Walter. Believe it or not, I'd never done karaoke before, and it's actually kinda fun. Carl tried to get me up there to sing some song from Grease, but I stubbornly refused to go up there because I'd seriously never heard the song before. I proved later that I was more than willing to do karaoke for songs that I was at least somewhat familiar with, but by that point Carl was announcing my name as "Jared sucks," haha. It was a really fun night, and downright jubilant when I saw this highlight for the Golden Gophers on the TVs at the Saloon:
I love March Madness!!! Too bad those heroics were for naught, as the Gophers lost in the Big Ten semifinals to Illinois the following day. And now that the NCAA Tournament matchups have been announced, I've gotta get busy and fill out a few brackets for different pools I'm gonna be in. I'm not totally sure yet whether I'll do a different one for each, or stick with two or at most three different versions of my brackets. I'll have to do a bit more studying to figure out who I'm gonna have as my upset picks.
Anyway, on Saturday we were pretty lazy. Got up at noon, had breakfast (lunch?) at Waffle Shop, watched some basketball, went out for a little bit of a hike on Jackson Trail in Rothrock State Forest (and for the picture I had to set my camera's timer and try to balance it on one of the jagged rocks there, so I think I managed pretty well to get that shot!), came back to watch a bit more basketball, got ice cream at Meyer Dairy, watched a little more basketball (did I say I love March? Betsy's a big college b-ball fan too, as she did her master's at North Carolina), then watched a movie, "The Darwin Awards." It's an indie film about an insurance agent who profiles the people you read about in the Darwin Awards. There were a couple scenes that could've been done without, but overall it was pretty funny. And while I remember reading each of the Darwin Awards cases they dramatized, seeing them re-enacted certainly made them seem a little more... I don't know what the word is... sad? Pathetic? Scary that some people really can be that dumb? At any rate it was a fun little movie.
Betsy & Carl left right after church, as they both had to get down to DC & Baltimore, respectively. It was a bunch of fun to have them up here and show them around and whatnot. It's too bad Seth had to be thesising in Madison, else he would've joined us this weekend as well. Maybe next time!
This week is shaping up to be pretty busy and musical for me. I've known since the beginning of the month that I would be playing piano at church on Easter Sunday, but I found out today that I'm needed to play piano for the choir on Easter as well. I guess Ray found out he has to go out of town or something. So anyway, that's only one additional song I'll have to play on (a gospel song called "A Mighty Hope"), but I'll need to practice a bunch Monday evening, then there's choir rehearsal Tuesday evening, and two worship band rehearsals (since we're having such a big ensemble this week, with a bunch of brass playing and the choir singing), on Wednesday and Saturday evenings. And then there's the early Sunday morning rehearsal before the two regular Sunday services. If playing piano is a bit of stress relief for me, I should be darn near stress-free by the end of Resurrection Sunday, haha!
Posted by Jared at 12:56 AM | Comments (3)
March 14, 2008
In the 'Zona
Well, spring break is nearing its unfortunate end. Even though State College has been a bit of a ghost town this week, it's certainly been nice not having to worry about being awakened in the middle of the night by music one or two floors above me. And to sleep in until 8am. And to have the evenings basically completely free. And to catch up on some work/programming/research a little bit at a more relaxed pace. And finally fulfilling my word that I'd come to meteo poker at least once more (even though I said that right after I finished my thesis last June, haha). And to watch "Snatch" with some PSCG friends on a Tuesday night. And watching some good college basketball at night at home (or in the afternoon, as was the case yesterday for the Penn State game). It's all been really nice, but reality strikes again next week, for the final 7 weeks of the semester.
Another of my tasks that I set for myself this week was to get all of my photos from my trip to Arizona for spring break in 2006 online at long last. I'd been putting that off for a long while (a mean while then? That's just a little central PA lingo there, haha ;-) because some of the photo albums were rather large, meaning it'd take awhile to stick captions on all the photos. I also played around with how to get my panoramics in the albums, so I just settled for having small versions of them online. Unless I run out of webspace, I should be updating the Penn State photo album page with new albums in the near future, too. Now I'm only two years behind on my photo albums, haha. I'm catchin' up!
The Pennsylvania primary election is coming up on 22 April, which means that the deadline for voter registration to be eligible to vote in the primary is coming up quickly, on 24 March (it also means that everyone should be avoiding watching local TV here as much as possible for the next 5-6 weeks to avoid puking during commercial breaks, haha). There are quite a few people like this guy who are switching their registration from Republican to Democrat just for the primary, in an attempt to prolong the Barack Hussain Obama vs Hillary Rodham Clinton feud and chaos that's currently destroying the Democrat party. It's definitely tempting for me to do the same, but I'd still feel so dirty doing that and voting for either of them. More than likely, apathy will take over and I won't bother to change my PA voter registration temporarily. And then maybe I'd still cast my worthless vote for Fred! if his name is still on the ballot.
Well, I'd better get to some apartment-cleaning, because Betsy and Carl are coming to visit this weekend! Betsy's bus from DC will be getting here a bit after noon, and then Carl will be driving down from Cornell in time for trivia hopefully. Hopefully the weather will cooperate enough for us to go on a hike (I just bought several hiking/trail maps yesterday at Appalachian Outdoors), but even if it doesn't, it should be a really fun weekend and a fine end to spring break!
Posted by Jared at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)
March 10, 2008
Rushing the Court
For the final game of the regular season for the Nittany Lions basketball team, I was cautiously optimistic that they could at least keep it close against the #17 Indiana Hoosiers, largely because the game was at home at the BJC (and Penn State almost always rolls over and plays dead on the road). So I went to the game Kent, Grabon and one of his friends yesterday, but still not honestly thinking that we would win. Also, the atmosphere was kinda dead for the first half, because it was spring break and so not many students showed up 
(there was no student section for this game, and what's normally the student section was actually filled with mostly Hoosier fans, blah). And PSU was without their two best players, Geary Claxton (who tore up his knee back in mid-January) and Jamelle Cornley (who finally succumbed to the pain of his injured knee that he's played on all season, and is getting it scoped today), so it was mostly up to our freshmen to see what they could do. And they played a pretty decent first half, taking a 31-30 lead over Indiana into the locker room. 
They extended that to a 36-30 lead early in the second before Eric Gordon and the Hoosiers went on a 14-0 run to go up 44-36. At that point we all thought the Nittany Lions were done, because they've had these prolonged scoring droughts too many times this season. But they started battling back, which really got the fans into the game, and eventually tied the game at 58-58 with 23 seconds left, forcing overtime. It was a pretty tense overtime, but the Lions did just enough, and made enough free throws at the right time (their poor free throw shooting still almost cost them the game though), 
and Penn State sealed the 68-64 upset of highly touted Indiana. So of course we all rushed the court, since we'd just beaten another top-25 team, won our 5th home Big Ten game in a row to close out the regular season, and did it without our two best players. (Ben took the picture above on the left from the upper deck of the fans rushing the court, you can see me kinda in the middle of the picture, on the edge of the crowd, wearing a white shirt, blue hat and waving a white shaker, just above the guy in the orange jacket. Thanks Ben!) 
PSU basketball looks to be in pretty good shape for the next few years, and on the path back to respectability! But that was the first time I'd rushed the court since I was at Gustavus, when we'd rush the floor to celebrate last-second conference playoff wins (68-67 over Bethel in 2003 comes to mind!), clinching NCAA Division III tournament berths (all four years I was there!), and NCAA tournament wins (including when we clinched a berth into the Final Four in 2003, heck yeah!). Ahh, those were the days... This was definitely the first time I've rushed the court to celebrate my team finishing the regular season at .500 overall, haha.
Oh, and I signed a lease for an apartment for next year back on Thursday morning. I'll be living with Tim starting in early August in Imperial Towers. Sure, it's not quite as nice as a couple other places we looked at, but it's still got a decent kitchen (if a bit small, but what apartment's kitchen isn't smallish?), big living room, a balcony (3rd floor corner unit) and two bathrooms, it's still walkable to campus (only a couple minutes further than my walk is currently, actually), and saving $100-200/month per person is a very good thing. I'll even be saving about $30/month from what I'm paying for my current place too (hooray for no confiscatory parking rates at Imperial Towers!). I figure that with the money I'll save next year over choosing one of the other nicer places we looked at, I can pay for my plane ticket to Australia next year just with that. :-)
With it being spring break, I've definitely taken it easy this weekend. I really needed a break to recharge my batteries a bit, I was really starting to get worn down. Other than playing piano in church this Sunday and going to the basketball game yesterday, I stayed in the whole weekend, putzing around with some work on the PSCG webpage and my online photo albums (I might actually get my Arizona pics up this week, from my spring break trip two years ago, haha). Eventually I'll catch up. And eventually I'll upload my movies to YouTube and post them on my movies page, because I don't have much space left on my webserver.
But anyway, even though it's still spring break, I still need to catch up on some actual work, so that's what I'm gonna do now. Off to Walker I go. Hopefully I can get past my coding block and finish up a couple programs I need for my research. Oh, and the drinking water restriction on campus was lifted on Friday afternoon. Now I don't have to be dehydrated at work anymore, hooray!
Posted by Jared at 09:42 AM | Comments (0)
March 06, 2008
Don't Drink the Water
Seriously. If you're in the State College area, officials are recommending (because they're required to by law) that everyone boil their water before using it for drinking, food preparation, washing dishes or brushing your teeth, for at least the next day or two. It seems that after the heavy rains on Tuesday and Tuesday night, the water supply had "high turbidity" levels by Wednesday midday. Basically, that just means that there were lots of particles suspended in the water, making it cloudy. Now, turbid water in and of itself isn't unsafe, but turbid water is apparently harder to treat, so bacteria can grow much more readily in high turbidity levels. So yeah, the substandard water supply is just one more reason that we joke that Walker Building is like a third-world country -- to go along with the intermittent electricity, intermittent heating-A/C systems, intermittently working elevators (you never know when they're gonna trap you between floors or take you on a random ride down to the basement). And now that this is the second time in just over a week that the drinking water in Walker Building has been bad (one day last week the water was rather discolored because OPP was doing work on the pipes in the basement -- it just would've been nice had they warned us not to drink the water), it seems that we have intermittent drinkable water too!
Last weekend (back when we had drinkable water) was a good time, with trivia on leap day (even though we fell from 1st place to out of the money on the final question), the Penn State-Michigan basketball game on Saturday night with Ethan, Dan, Kent and Jeff [Grabon] (and the first time I ever witnessed Penn State win a Big Ten game in person, believe it or not, defeating scUM 69-61), and then my first-ever game of "Diplomacy" on Sunday afternoon, scheming with (and against) Walter, Moyer, Petters, Jacob, Anke & Dave. And while we didn't get to finish the entire game, I managed to get France quite a number of military victories. More than in real life, at any rate. ;-)
Last Thursday night there was a really cool Science & Religion Discussion at my church, and Nat and Tracy both came along to check it out too. It's a once-monthly thing that I've checked out a couple times in the past when I haven't been swamped with thesis or candidacy exam stuff, where a small group of people get together and try to hash out what the interface is between science and religion, and hear each other out on what each other believes. It's an interesting dialogue, for sure. At any rate, for this discussion there was a viewing of the movie "The Star of Bethlehem." Now, I'd never heard of the movie before and had no idea what its premise was, but I definitely came into it with a whole lot of skepticism. I've heard and read of many attempts at naturalistic explanations for the Star of Bethlehem (comet, supernova, etc.), but none have been even remotely convincing to me. But this guy who made the presentation on the DVD laid out a very convincing case for just what it was that the Wise Men saw (seriously, check out the link for yourself), causing them to strike out from Babylon to Jerusalem and then Bethlehem in search of a Jewish King. He lays out an entire "celestial poem" of sorts around the time of Jesus' birth and his death that's absolutely jaw-droppingly fascinating and awe-inspiring. Our God is a most awesome God!
Posted by Jared at 12:28 AM | Comments (0)