Jared's One Blog

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May 31, 2008

New Canon's First Shots

My new camera is here, hooray! It arrived on Thursday afternoon, but I forced myself to do work all afternoon before opening the box and everything. I figured that that was sufficient motivation to finish my tasks at hand, haha. Before our church softball game though, I only had time when I got home to unpack the camera and everything from the box, pop in the batteries and the memory card, take a picture to verify it worked, then it was time to hustle up to Bellefonte First Baptist for the game. I didn't play in the first half of the game, but that allowed me a chance to take some of the first pictures with my new camera. :-) In the second half I played in left-center, making a catch on the only fly ball I could get to (there was another one just a couple feet out of my reach that I was charging, sigh). I was 0-for-1 at the plate, but reached base on an E-6. The other team could club the ball pretty well though, and we just had too many defensive errors to stand a chance, so we lost 29-5. Ouch. But we don't often do well against them anyway. It's still probably my favorite field to play on, because of the scenic setting:

Last night was the end of an era, in more ways than one. First off was the final team trivia show in State College for Trivia Jerry, who got a new job down in Philly. It was a fun show, and we managed to nab 2nd place when it was all said and done. We'll have to wait and see whether Jerry's replacement for the Friday night shows at the G-Man is any good or anywhere near as much fun as Jerry (or Trivia Steve before him).

After trivia it was on to the Lion's Den for Moyer's farewell party, which drew out a bunch of meteo people. Moyer's been here for something like 8 years (counting undergrad), so he's been a staple in the Penn State Meteorology department for quite some time. 4th floor will never be the same without him (or as loud, haha)! But he's only moving down to the Philadelphia area for his new job, so he'll be back up plenty often, especially for PSU football games in the fall.

I had hoped for a chance to take my camera out storm chasing today here in central PA, but the weather never really materialized. Back on Thursday afternoon the models looked potentially promising, but it wasn't to be. As it turned out, central or northern Virginia might've been a good target area, but with gas being $4/gallon we didn't really feel like driving 4+ hours each way just to give us a shot at seeing any good storms. If gas was still $2/gallon, we might've gone down there to chase. Oh well.

And speaking of $4/gal gasoline (well, technically it's $3.95 in State College right now, but close enough), how many of you out there can say that you've only had to fill up your car once since late March? It certainly helps my pocketbook that I never had to fill gas at all during the entire month of May!

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

May 27, 2008

Boalsburg Memorial Day Festival

Good riddance to the cut-off low! Finally, after sitting under a cut-off upper-level low pressure system for about two weeks, with persistently cool, rainy weather (our softball games the last two weeks were rained out/soggy field-ed out, and there were three cold fronts that came through the first half of last week), a ridge built in here in the east and gave us four consecutive days of absolutely gorgeous weather over the long Memorial Day weekend. At long last it feels more like May and less like March or October! I certainly took advantage of the wonderful weather we had around here this weekend, and I have the sunburns to prove it!

Ben & I played four sets of tennis on Saturday morning, with a helicopter occasionally flying around spraying a nerve agent on trees to try to kill off some of the gypsy moths that are plaguing the area this spring. So that was occasionally distracting, but didn't really affect my losing the first three sets 6-0, only starting to play kinda okay in the third set. But in the fourth set I finally got off the schnide (sp.?) to win a game, and then something really strange happened: I won another game. In the same set. I finally accomplished my first tennis goal of winning more than 1 game in a set from Ben, though it sure took a long time (more than a year) to do it! And it also marked the first time I've ever won consecutive service games of mine against Ben, too. So even though I lost the fourth set 6-2, I could walk away glad that I stuck with it and didn't give up even when it didn't look like it would be my day, after starting with three love sets. I think I'll set my next goal at winning four games in a set from Ben, and then have a third goal of winning a set. Maybe I'll be able to improve enough to do that before we both finish grad school in 2-3 years, haha.

On Sunday morning there was a joint outdoor service at E-Free, combined with Unity Church of Jesus Christ and the CMA Church. It couldn't have been a more perfect day for an outdoor church service either, as there wasn't a cloud in the sky and just a light breeze. I suppose it did get a little warm on the blacktop parking lot though. It was at the church service where I really got sunburned, though I didn't really start turning red until the meteo grad cookout at Jeff [Frame] & Vic's place later in the afternoon. I made sure to stay in the shade almost the entire time there, though. I felt like I'd gotten enough Vitamin D already. :-)

Yesterday was Memorial Day, and initially I was thinking of doing work like a good slave grad student, but then I thought better of it and decided to have a little fun. So I joined up with Tim, Isaac, Tracy, Ashley and a couple other PSCGers over in neighboring historic Boalsburg for the annual Memorial Day Festival there. What makes the Memorial Day celebrations in Boalsburg unique is that the birthplace of Memorial Day was in tiny Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, way back in October 1864 (though the "official" start is probably considered to be in 1868 at Arlington National Cemetery). This was actually the first time I'd actually stopped in Boalsburg to walk around or anything, and it's a pretty nice little town. The streets were packed with vendors selling arts, crafts and food, and there were tons of people milling about. There was even a fruit pie contest! I'm pretty sure it's hard to find something that's more quintessentially Americana than a fruit pie contest in a small town on Memorial Day! There were live brass bands on a stage in the middle of town too (even Penn State University president Graham Spanier got in the act, playing his whatchamacallit contraption with the Deacons of Dixieland early in the afternoon). After hanging around in the downtown area for awhile, we checked out some of the Civil War re-enactors in a medallion ceremony (later on they had battle re-enactments and demonstrated firing some cannons), before checking out a bunch of classic cars, and then the 28th Division War Memorial Shrine, and the tanks scattered around outside the Pennsylvania Military Museum. It was a fun afternoon, though I was glad to get out of the sun for a few hours before going over to Tracy's for a cookout in the evening, and then the Hollemans for games. A very enjoyable Memorial Day, to be sure!

And on a completely unrelated note, maybe this is why my dad never really liked Elijah Wood in Lord of the Rings:

I don't know what's worse, the "Puppetmaster" dance or the scraggly beard and goatee... So disturbing on so many levels. What were you thinking, Elijah?

Posted by Jared at 11:04 PM | Comments (1)

May 21, 2008

New Digital Camera

I've been spending a great deal of time in the last few weeks reading up on the features, pros and cons of various digital cameras. I've had my current camera (Canon PowerShot A80) for four years, and it's served me well, and given me a very high opinion of Canon digital cameras. Basically, after all my research it boiled down to a choice between the Canon PowerShot A720, the Canon PowerShot G9, and the Canon PowerShot S5.

I never really considered an ultra-compact like one of the cameras in the Canon Digital Elph series, because they simply don't have enough manual features (or features, period) for my taste. I also never really considered a digital SLR, because while they're obviously the best cameras out there, I don't have any desire to be lugging around a bunch of lenses all the time, and the camera bodies themselves are really expensive (cheapest ones for around $700-$800, but most are well in excess of $1000), not to mention the lenses. Eventually I think I'd like to get a DSLR, but not at this stage just yet. I have enough point-and-shoot in me still that the DSLR would be slow and annoying to deal with currently. But now on to the three finalists I was considering.

The A720 is the one that's most similar to my current camera, but with several advancements, as it's in the same A-series family of Canon cameras. It's an 8-megapixel camera with 6x optical zoom. It's probably still small enough to fit into my pocket, as is the A80. It also has image stabilization, which helps a little bit of camera shake, but of course not excessive amounts. It runs on AA batteries, which I count as a plus because of the ready availability of them pretty much anywhere. Its LCD screen doesn't fold out and rotate like the one on my A80 does, and it's 2.5" in the diagonal. And it has a good deal of manual controls that are pretty easy to access. Unfortunately, it has an utterly idiotic placement of the tripod mount -- way in one corner of the camera. But overall, it's a pretty solid point-and-shoot compact camera, and runs about $200 most places currently.

The G9 is a very sturdy 'prosumer' camera, packed with features (more than a point-and-shoot, but not to the level of a digital SLR). It has a 6x optical zoom like the A720, but has 12 megapixels. It has a fixed 3.0" LCD screen, image stabilization, and a handy dedicated ISO dial, in addition to the plethora of other buttons and dials for quick access to manual features, more than are available on the A720. The G9 runs on a proprietary Canon battery, which has probably longer life, but is also more expensive to replace (and more difficult to find). Some downsides of the G9 are that it'd be too big to fit in my pocket, and also that it's almost twice as expensive as the A720, at close to $400 currently. It seemed like the A720 would be a better value for the money than the G9, overall, especially since the image quality wasn't really any better than in the A720.

The third camera to enter the stage as a finalist was the S5. It's the latest in Canon's super-zoom line of cameras, and features a fantastic 12x optical zoom to go along with 8 megapixels. Unlike any of the other cameras I was seriously considering (or almost any of the ones I even looked at), its 2.5" LCD screen flips out and rotates, and it records movies with stereo sound. Those are both fantastic features, and huge pluses in my book. The movie mode can take 640x480 AVI files up to 4GB in size (about half an hour), and it also lets you zoom in and out while recording, unlike most other digital still cameras. Simply put, its movie mode is the best I've seen on anything this side of a camcorder. Its macro mode also has a 0-cm focus feature, meaning that the lens can focus on objects that are literally touching the surface of the lens. Granted, you'd need to backlight any objects you have this close to the lens, but still, wow. It also has quite a few buttons and dials for manual features, like the G9, it has image stabilization, it runs on AA batteries, and it has extra preset scene modes for snow, fireworks(!), aquariums and foliage, plus other cool modes like color highlight (where everything's black and white except for one color in an image) and color swap. Also like the G9, it has a sensibly placed tripod mount, right in the center of the camera. A couple downsides of the camera are that it's too big to fit in my pocket, and that the image quality is probably a wee bit inferior to the A720, with a little more purple fringing and noise visible at higher ISOs. It seems like that probably wouldn't be noticeable on anything but very large prints or 100% magnifications, though. Current prices on the camera are around $310 at most places (cheaper than my A80 cost four years ago in an opened box!), up to around $350.

So what camera did I choose? The Canon PowerShot S5 IS. The big zoom, awesome movie mode, flip-out LCD, tons of features and well-placed tripod mount sold me. I finally ordered it today, along with a carrying bag/case for it, a "Gorillapod" (a tripod with flexible legs that can wrap around and grip poles, railings, and things, as well as being able to stand like a normal tripod on a flat surface), an 8GB class 6 SDHC memory card and a memory card reader that can double as a jump drive with an SD/SDHC card in it (so I got a 4GB class 6 SDHC card for that too). Sure, that's all a fair bit of money, but I've had my eye on getting a new digital camera for some time now. I think it'll be worth it, especially to get better videos and pictures of everything, from scenery to people to stuff on all the various trips I'm planning to take coming up (including Australia next year!). I'm really looking forward to having my new toy to play with, and to learning all the ins and outs of it over the coming months!

I'll leave you with this SNL spoof of The Office (h/t: Josh). Hilarious! Has a skit that's entirely in a foreign language ever been funnier?

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

May 19, 2008

Side Trip to Patapsco

The last couple days of the workshop went well. It was definitely more interesting to break up into working groups to discuss things, even if I really didn't have anything to contribute. For the most part, the workshop was really aimed at operational users in the National Weather Service or in the various national centers within NCEP. One of the most relevant things from the workshop for my research was to hear straight from everyone there that the issue of how best to initialize mesoscale or fine-scale numerical weather prediction (NWP) ensembles is very much an open research question. Basically, that means that my PhD project will be cutting-edge in that area, even if it's not necessarily the main focus of my dissertation, because I need to create my own high-resolution mesoscale NWP ensembles for use in driving atmospheric transport & dispersion (AT&D) models like SCIPUFF. In fact, that's a big issue that I have to figure out this summer...

The workshop wrapped up around 1 o'clock on Thursday, so on our way back to State College, Walter & I decided to get a little disc golf in. We found what turned out to be a really nice 18-hole course in Patapsco Valley State Park west of Baltimore. The midges were pretty bad on the first few holes in the woods, but later on they weren't quite so bad. It was a really long course too (some holes over 600 ft long, which is quite a distance for disc golf ... I probably walked over 3 miles during the round in total), and it had a good mix of tough holes in or on the edge of the woods -- even one with a double dogleg -- and also a few easier wide-open holes in meadows. In the end, I made up two strokes on hole 17, but missed a chance to tie Walter on 18, so I lost to him 97-98. I'd call that a moral victory though. :-) And as far as ranking the very few courses that I've played, I'd put it:

1. Patapsco Valley State Park (Marriottsville, MD)
2. Circleville Park (State College, PA)
3. Lime Bluff Park (between Muncy & Hughesville, PA, near Williamsport)

Prior to Circleville Park's expansion and renovation, it definitely would've been at the bottom, but now that it's a 9-hole course, I like it more than Lime Bluff (which wasn't bad, but was far too flat for my liking when I went, but might be a lot better in ten years when more of the trees grow in).

Because my Amazon order arrived while I was gone, I was able to host a movie marathon at my place with the Bourne trilogy; we donned it the "Bourne" Again Movie Marathon. Pretty clever, eh? Well, I can't take all the credit for the name. In fact, I can't take any of the credit for it, because my brother Nathan came up with the name. :-) Anyway, a few people from PSCG came over to watch the three movies, and it was a fun time. I definitely noticed a few more cool little details by watching all three back-to-back-to-back, like small lines in the third movie that are quotations from the first movie. I wonder which trilogy I'll try to have a movie night for next, Ocean's or LOTR. A couple people have suggested doing an Indiana Jones marathon because of the new movie coming out in a couple days, but those movies have been saturating the cable airwaves the last few weeks.

A few of us also went to see the new Chronicles of Narnia movie that debuted this weekend, Prince Caspian. Mind you, I haven't read the books in many years, so I couldn't point out what the movie added or left out compared to the book, but I really enjoyed the movie. There was a good amount of action, and I thought the young actors did better than in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Sure, they were still given some cheesy lines by the writers for some cheap laughs (or groans), but I thought they did a good job overall. I'm looking forward to the release of Voyage of the Dawn Treader in 2010, and I wonder how many of the Narnia books they'll make into movies. They've done a decent job with it so far at least. But I really need to re-read those books again. Maybe I'll get around to that this summer.

I finally got around to mopping/scrubbing our kitchen floor hardcore yesterday afternoon. I wonder how many more days our apartment will smell like Pine-Sol... I guess there are definitely worse smells in the world, haha. But it's gonna take a few more times of mopping/scrubbing to get it hopefully clean enough by early August so that we don't lose part of our deposit on that. Fat chance of CREM letting us have any of our deposit money back, though. The manifesto they sent us a couple weeks back of all the whole big checklist of things that they want done is basically just their way of saying, "we're not giving you any money back." I'll be glad not to have to deal with CREM ever again after August.

This morning I had a dentist appointment to get my first-ever filling. I consider myself pretty fortunate not to have had a cavity or anything wrong with my teeth until age 24. So now I have finally had the pleasure of going through a morning with half my mouth being totally numb. It's a weird sensation, to be sure. One filling down, two more to go on the other side of my mouth on Wednesday afternoon. Joy.

Finally, in a bit of political news, might Jesse "The Body" Ventura be running for public office again? It seems that he's toying with the idea of running for the U.S. Senate seat from Minnesota, to give people a "none of the above" option in a race that's currently between Norm Coleman and Al Franken. Yuck. Given those two choices, Ventura just might win!

Posted by Jared at 11:35 PM | Comments (3)

May 13, 2008

Acronym City

[On location in Laurel, Maryland]

Select observations from Day 1 of the 4th NWS/NCEP Ensemble User Workshop:

-- When giving a talk, even to an audience you think is probably entirely populated by experts from your field, please, please define all your acronyms at least once! They've been flying fast and furious today, and not all of them are common, at least in the opinion of this aspiring meteorologist.
-- It's deceptive to say you're on your last slide, when in fact you have links to two or three additional slides from the text on your "last" slide. Especially when they're all full of text. And especially when you're already 15 minutes over time on your 15-minute time slot.
-- Fire alarms are an effective way to cut short a talk that's droning on 10 minutes past the time slot.
-- If, as the moderator, you ask that people hold to their time slots, you must be assertive in telling people that they have to wrap up, so that the agenda can be kept on schedule.
-- 8:00am to 5:30pm is a really long time to be listening to presentations in a dim conference room with a small off-kilter projector screen, while sitting in the same chair the whole time.
-- Despite some of these initial complaints, the workshop presentations this year have been much better overall than at the last workshop a year and a half ago.
-- Who would've thought that jokes about probability could be so funny?
-- All A large percentage of probabilistic warning area names are funnier if you add "of death" after it: "cone of death" (hurricane forecast track), "bimodal cone of death" (hurricanes), "cottonballs of death" (aviation turbulence), "plume of death" (temperature or precip virtual plumes, or chem/bio physical plumes).
-- That one attendee's comment that Rich Grumm is the Dick Vitale of meteorology is very funny, and probably true. :-)
-- It's always a pleasant surprise when you unexpectedly run into a friend at one of these things (Addison's here too!), and to reminisce about all those amazingly tough classes we had together first year.
-- It's also a nice pick-me-up to receive an email during one of these talks that my Amazon.com order has shipped ("Bourne" and "Ocean's" DVD trilogies, 2 Phil Keaggy CDs, 1 Newsboys CD, and a book for research, "Statistical Methods in the Atmospheric Sciences" by Wilks). Having those, plus my order of "Power Grid" from Games By James, waiting for me when I get back will be a nice plus.
-- If I keep up the pace of eating at Outback Steakhouse once a week (I also ate there last Wednesday at the PSCG Leadership celebration dinner), I'm going to get very big very quickly. And I don't mean growing vertically.
-- And finally, the free MLB.tv gameday audio here at Holiday Inn is pretty sweet. Go Twins!

Posted by Jared at 09:19 PM | Comments (0)

May 12, 2008

Lousy Smarch Weather

[On location in Laurel, Maryland]

What is today, May 12th? That may be what the calendar says, but it definitely didn't feel that way. It was chilly (upper 30s-low 40s) all day long, and this morning there was even a half inch of snow on people's cars in State College, at least down around the Orchard Park area. Snow! In mid-May! In central Pennsylvania! It's not like this is Minnesota. When I first heard about the snow, I was pretty disappointed that I had missed it because of sleeping in a bit. But it was definitely a raw, nasty, rainy "spring" day outside. At least the next couple days should be more spring-like.

So what am I doing in Laurel, Maryland? Walter & I drove down here today for the National Weather Service (NWS) / National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Ensemble Users Workshop, which runs from tomorrow through Thursday here at the Holiday Inn. We were at the last one they had back in Nov 2006, at the same hotel actually. So we already had the area all scouted out for good places to eat. That's probably the most important part of going to any conference, in my opinion. :-) But hopefully this time around I'll be able to understand and contribute quite a bit more than a year and a half ago, when I was still a n00b to ensemble forecasting. Also, neither Walter nor I have to present anything at this workshop. It's much more relaxing to be at a conference when your only job is to be a sponge for information and take some notes on what's being talked about.

Yesterday was not the most pleasant day for a picnic, but we had our spring picnic anyway for Penn State Christian Grads. This time we didn't have the picnic at one of the parks in State College itself (like Holmes-Foster), but instead up at Spring Creek Park up by Houserville, largely because it's one of the few places around here that has flowing water (or water at all), with the pavilions right next to a cool covered bridge too. Anyway, we managed to get all the grilling in before the cold drizzle really got going, and it was a good time. I wasn't crazy like Dan and leap-frogging people though (leap-frogging *standing* people), haha. I definitely think I'd injure myself, and probably the person I was trying to jump over as well, if I tried to do that. After the picnic a bunch of us went over to Tracy's place to warm up by playing Wii and some board and card games. There was plenty of Guitar Hero played last night. I'm still not great at it, but gradually getting better (up to 80% on medium). I know there's not necessarily shame in playing on easy, but I'd rather challenge myself and get learn on a tougher (but still mostly manageable) difficulty. It was also fun last Wednesday to play Smash Brothers against people (Tim and Tracy) much closer to my skill level than my undergrad roommates from GAC. It's much more enjoyable to play games when you actually have a chance to win.

Finally, maybe there's a presidential candidate I might consider voting for. I'd definitely consider Bob Barr more palatable than John McCain. We'll see how the campaign shapes up though.

If any of you ever happen to find yourself storm chasing in west Texas, beware of the local cops!

Growing up, I always thought it was cool trying to figure out what shapes or things various clouds resembled. Heck, I still do that. The day might be coming soon when it might not take quite so much imagination to figure out what a cloud looks like. Is there any place safe from corporate advertising?

A friend of mine from undergrad, Nate Lund, was awarded the U.S. Army's Soldier's Medal earlier this month in Minneapolis. What did he do to deserve such an honor? Well, when the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed last August in downtown Minneapolis, Nate & his wife Christine rushed to the scene to give medical aid to victims. I'm proud of what they did, and the Christian witness their lives are (and not only in the aftermath of the 35W bridge collapse). Good on ya, Nate! Congrats!

Posted by Jared at 10:43 PM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2008

Farewell to Anke & Caren

I'm so glad the semester is over! And I didn't even have any final exams, for the first time ever! I only had the one class, Remote Sensing, and the final project for the class was due on Wednesday of last week. For awhile I was pretty frustrated by everything, because the documentation of what's actually in these MODIS data files or how to use them is pretty much non-existent. Fortunately I stumbled upon some University of South Australia student's paper about MODIS fire detection algorithms, complete with their Matlab source code! So I played around with that for awhile, familiarizing myself with a bit of how to access the MODIS data, but then I discovered that aside from that person's fire detection algorithm not detecting any fires in my selected image from southeastern Australia on 12 January 2003 (which I *knew* had quite a few bushfires in it), it was just really convoluted and too-complicated, which caused it to break before it could do much of anything useful. So a couple nights before the project was due, Isaac helped me to write an algorithm that was much simpler and more sensible, and actually worked! In three really simple tests that I coded up, I was reasonably successful in detecting known fires (marked as red pixels in the image above, both northeast of Melbourne in the Australian Alps and on Flinders Island just north of Tasmania) while not having a preponderance of false alarms. So I actually had something to present for the final project, it all went well, and now I might have the basis of something to do as a bit of a side project to my main PhD dissertation research for the next couple years. And with the completion of that final project/presentation, I finished up my sixth full semester of grad school here at Penn State. In some ways it really doesn't seem like I've been here that long.

And with my third year of grad school wrapping up, we're hitting the time of year where some of my friends are moving away to start jobs in the real world (it's a relief to know that jobs seem to be more than just a rumor out there!). Just last week we all said goodbye to Caren, who got a job up in Rochester, New York, and to Anke & Dave, as Anke found a job out in Fort Collins, Colorado. A couple Saturdays ago a bunch of us got together at Beulah's for a farewell dinner for Caren, Dave & Anke. Caren even made three cakes (decorated with knight action figures and the like, haha) and brought it to the restaurant, that was cool. It was a really fun evening, but it's always sad to say goodbye to friends.

Let's see, what else has been going on the last couple weeks... Oh yeah, I finally decided it was high time to go to the dentist for the first time in, well, let's just say a really long time. I had a stellar record going of never having any cavities, or had any dental procedure done other than a standard checkup/cleaning. But sure enough, the streak is over, and they found three really small cavities that'll need to be filled later this month. At least they didn't find anything more serious than that, I guess. It seems I'll be getting quite familiar with the dentist this month!

Last week I also went to see "Expelled" for the second time, but this time it was free because a local company, Good Steward Software (they sell energy-saving software to large corporations), bought out the theater and gave away the tickets for free. Having read a lot of information critical of the movie, both on Richard Dawkins' blog and on the National Center for Science Education's website, "Expelled Exposed," I was watching the movie with a critical eye, to see if their criticisms stood. And I must say, Richard Dawkins' account of his interview (of the parts that made the movie!) really does not jibe with what's shown in the movie. Dawkins, for instance, claimed he was more or less forced into unwillingly mentioning his panspermia hypothesis as the only possible form of intelligent design he could accept, but it sure didn't seem that way in the movie. Comparing what he (and other staunch atheistic Darwinists) said in the film to his portrayal in his blog, his blog account seemed like a frantic backtracking attempt at saving face. That's my take anyway. But having watched the film the second time, I still think it's a good movie overall, and I still think the statements of the scientists in the film build a pretty strong case of intolerance. (And on Sunday I posted a long comment in response to Josh & Jacob's comments on my previous blog entry about "Expelled.") It's not in the theater here in State College anymore, but I do plan on getting the DVD when it comes out. I sure hope there'll be plenty of extras on there (more complete interviews would sure be nice!).

My church has been doing a program called "Overflow" for the last several weeks, centered around having everyone in the church read through a book called "Outflow: Outward-focused living in a self-focused world." The main thrust of the book is to encourage people to overflow with God's love toward family, friends and the community in all sorts of ways. As a result, our church has had several community-service projects recently, including a water bottle giveaway at several locations on Blue/White Weekend, neighbourhood cookouts a couple weekends ago, and culminating this past weekend in myriad other projects around the community by each life/small group in the church. The life group I'm in chose to split up into three smaller groups, go to different places on campus, and give away free orange juice and Dunkin' Donuts coffee at various locations around campus on Saturday, since it was the weekend before final exams. Ryan, Sarah, Matt, Olivia & I first tried the HUB, but there weren't many people there, so then we moved up to the East Halls bus stop on Curtin Rd. There was a steady stream of people there, so that was good, and we were there from about 11:30-3. I was a bit surprised at how many people either didn't want free coffee or OJ, and especially at the number of people who simply ignored us when we asked as they walked by. But I was more encouraged by all the people who did let us serve them with free coffee or OJ, and how surprised and thankful almost all of them were. When we first showed up at the bus stop and asked if anyone wanted free coffee, there were three freshman girls who immediately and enthusiastically said, "Yes! This is amazing, I need coffee so bad, it's like someone sent you here!" :-) It was also pretty funny when a car with three guys drove by, saw our free coffee sign, did a quick u-turn, pulled into the bus stop and made a drive-thru order, haha. When students and other passers-by throughout the day would ask why we were doing this, we just told them that our church was doing a bunch of service projects around the community to show Christ's love in small but tangible ways, and that we decided to give students on campus a bit of a pick-me-up as they were cramming for finals. Hopefully many people came away with a much better image of Christians and the church in general as a result!

Yesterday we had the season opener for church softball, and we went up to Bellefonte to play Calvary Bible Church. Let's just say it was a bit of a rough start to the season. Our team hit into a double play in the top of the 1st to kill any potential scoring opportunity (the first of three double plays our team hit into in the game, ugh!), and then in the bottom half of the inning we had all sorts of defensive lapses, including two would-be running catches that I dropped in left field (can I blame those drops on my new glove not being broken in yet?), and let them jump out to a 13-0 lead with all those extra outs. Ouch. In slow-pitch softball, you can't get away with giving the other team extra outs, especially when the other team is stacked with good directional and power hitters. Oh well. But after that we tightened up defensively and played them tough, eventually losing 19-4. I managed to catch the other two fly balls that came my way (not adventurously either, for a change!), and went 1-for-3 at the plate, with one of my patented squib hits that went about five feet in front of the plate down the 3rd base line for an infield single, before fouling out to 3rd and popping out to short center. I was about an inch away from really driving a couple of those balls, too, it was so frustrating. After the game a few of us went to Chili's to have a margarita and plenty of chips and salsa to celebrate our first loss Cinco de Mayo. I wish we had a real Mexican restaurant closer to us than all the way down in Altoona!

Okay, that's quite enough bloggish activity for now. I have other things I need to attend to. Hopefully I won't have a two-week lag again anytime soon, though. :-)

Posted by Jared at 11:08 PM | Comments (1)