« October 2008 | Main | December 2008 »
November 26, 2008
One Head, Two Heads
[On location in Cumberland, Wisconsin]
Congratulations to the Penn State Nittany Lions football team, which clinched the Big Ten Conference championship and an invitation to the Rose Bowl on Saturday! It was cold and snowy and totally AWESOME! Big Ten football weather, baby! So I bundled up with a bunch of layers (six, I think, haha), and went tailgating with Walter, Jeff & Kerrie, and then a few others showed up later. It wound up being the best-attended tailgate of the year, go figure. Sounds like an endorsement of the wintry weather to me! Anyway, we tailgated for about four hours before walking up to the stadium. 
It snowed pretty hard for much of the Blue Band pregame ceremonies (I'll try to post some videos to YouTube soon), and I was loving it! I've always wanted to go to a football game in the snow! The snow squall made the field all white, but the snow stopped for good just a few minutes into the game. :-( Oh well, I guess I can't be too greedy, since it did snow a wee bit at the beginning of the game. It was a fun game to be at, especially since Penn State's explosive offense awoke from its three-game slumber, storming out to leads of 28-0 in the 2nd quarter and 49-7 in the 4th quarter, before Michigan State scored some points late in garbage time, to make the final score 49-18. 
The Michigan State coach drew the ire of all the cold Penn State fans though, when he did some bush-league things like calling time outs and ordering onside kicks and such, in the last two minutes of the game when the Spartans were down by 30-40 points. This has been a fake rivalry game ever since Penn State joined the Big Ten in 1993 (they even created the world's UGLIEST trophy for the series -- the Land Grant Trophy), but I think Spartans coach Mark D'Antonio's childish actions just fanned the flames and might've created a real rivalry. I hope we blow them out again next year, that's for sure.
Well, I'm finally home at my parents' house. I've flown quite a bit the last few days, a lot more than I anticipated even late last week, and the flights haven't been completely without a little drama. First, when we got to the airport in New Orleans on Friday, the ticket agent rebooked some of us onto an earlier flight to Philadelphia, because that earlier flight was delayed a couple hours, and he figured that our originally scheduled flight might also become similarly delayed, which would make it iffy for us to catch our connection to State College. The irony? Our new, "earlier" flight left right after our original flight, which departed on time. But hey, at least we got there in time and were able to catch our flight to chilly State College. Speaking of which, I was pretty excited to see snow on the ground when we landed. Even when we were walking around in the sunny 60s in New Orleans, I was jealous when I'd hear that it was snowing back north. I mean, it's November after all!
After I got back to my apartment, I found out that Alex had to back out of our carpooling plan and drive to Minnesota with his two Valpo friends on Saturday, instead of Monday like was our original plan (I would've driven from State College to Valparaiso on Sunday). It turns out that his friends wouldn't be allowed to stay in the dorms over the weekend (they were closing for Thanksgiving break), so while it was a little frustrating to see my travel plans be forced to change pretty much last-minute, I think Alex definitely made the right decision to leave early with his other Valpo friends. I mean, if he didn't, they wouldn't have had a way to get to Minnesota or a place to stay in Valparaiso, and that wouldn't have been good. The change in travel plans wound up working out really well though, and ended up being more enjoyable for both of us. I looked up the price of flights from SCE-MSP for the week, fully prepared to see everything well over a thousand dollars and give up and drive alone anyway. But there was one flight itinerary available on United at only $354, with layovers at IAD and ORD, which got me to MSP by early afternoon on Monday. Everything else was way, waaaaaayyy more expensive (like well over $1000), so thanks be to God for arranging for that cheap flight to be still available! And the flights on Monday went pretty smoothly overall, because even though I found out while I was at Washington/Dulles that my original flight from Chicago/O'Hare to Minneapolis was cancelled, I was quite easily able to get on the next flight an hour later. That, and there was plenty of room on all three legs of my trip; the planes were all only about half full, and I never had anyone sitting in the seat next to me. I can't even remember the last time that happened to me on multiple flights! I wonder if it'll be the same on Saturday morning when I fly back to PA.
As it turned out, I was very glad to have found that flight for Monday, because after the tailgate and football game on Saturday, I was totally exhausted, and relieved that I didn't have to hop in a car and drive nine hours the next day (and eight more the day after). Alex & I were also able to spend even more quality time together with my new travel plans than with our original travel plans. 
Instead of carpooling with two other people on Monday from Valpo, Alex was able to pick me up from the Minneapolis/Saint Paul airport, we hung out a bit at his parents' house in Mahtomedi, and then he drove me up to my parents' place here in Cumberland. We had dinner up here with my family and he stayed overnight too, before driving back to the Twin Cities on Tuesday morning. But I think Alex got quite the introduction to the northwoods Wisconsin deer hunting culture, 
because a few relatives were deer hunting at my parents' place (my uncle Gary, and my sister-in-law Eve's brother Paul, and Eve's brother-in-law Scott and Scott's son Josiah), and there were plenty of deer stories told (much like fishing stories, haha). In years past they'd all be hunting here with my brother Aaron, but they decided to come back here for what will probably be one last hunt on this property. 
Anyway, everyone had been skunked over the opening weekend (deer season started in Wisconsin on Saturday at morning twilight), but Paul was able to shoot three deer on Monday, a four-point buck and two does! So after dinner Alex & I were persuaded at least to go out to the shed where they were skinning the deer, and little did I know how great a photo op that would be! :-) I mean, it's not every day you can pose for posterity with a severed deer head (or two heads)!
Tuesday was a more sedate day. After seeing Alex off in the morning, I spent much of the day working on my photo reclamation project. My new external hard drive was returned to me with all my recovered photos a couple days before I left for New Orleans, so ever since then I've been fiddling around trying to figure out the best way to deal with the mass of data. There were tens of thousands of picture files recovered, but the majority of them were thumbnails of various sizes that were automatically created by iPhoto or whatnot, and they were all jumbled together in directories of 10,000 files each, with all the filenames being random alphanumeric strings. Uffda. Fortunately I have a program that lets me sort the photos by pixel dimensions, so I'm easily able to delete all the smaller-than-full-size photos in one fell swoop. Then comes the process of wading through those thinned directories to get rid of all the photos I was able to retrieve from the most recent backup on my old external hard drive (mid-April 2007, I was so dumb for not doing a backup more recently than that), and once I get that figured out, then will come the process of sorting the remaining photos into directories that make sense, perhaps with filenames that make sense. It'll take quite awhile longer yet, but I'm making decent progress at this point.
Tuesday evening I went over to Nathan & Laura's for dinner and games. After hearing all the kids' piano recital pieces, I played "Rummy Royal" (also called "Tripoley") with the kids, and then "Rail Baron" with Nathan, Laura, Miriam & Mark. Though we didn't finish "Rail Baron" (it got late, and that game takes a long time), it was still really fun. Someday if I can find a relatively cheap copy of that game on eBay or someplace, I'll probably buy it.
Today for lunch I went to Nezzy's Sports Bar in Cumberland (a nice new place, by the way, if maybe a bit pricey for local standards) with my younger brother Jake, so I got to spend some time with him over a couple beers (and some genuine Wisconsin cheese curds!), which was good. And then tonight I went with my dad down to the house church in Taylors Falls, for a Thanksgiving Eve "prayers, praise and pie" night. It was fun to see them again, as it always is.
Tomorrow for Thanksgiving my family's going out to Eve's mom's place in southwestern Minnesota. It's nearly a four-hour drive, and we're going there and back tomorrow, so it's gonna be a long day. With this being the first major holiday since Aaron's death, it was gonna be just way too hard for Eve to come up to my parents' place. So it was arranged for a big joint Thanksgiving dinner for Eve's family and our family to be hosted by Eve's mom. It's going to be pretty hard tomorrow for everyone, no doubt, as all our hearts are still heavy. In a bit of good news though, we just found out recently (and heard over the radio on AM 1500 KSTP on a local news update this afternoon) that Aaron's best friend Gary will *not* be charged with anything stemming from the jet ski accident that took Aaron's life. We're all so glad that all charges have been dropped, and that now there isn't the potential of that looming over Gary's head anymore. Accidents happen, unfortunately, but that's all it was -- an accident. Anyway, while tomorrow will be hard, it'll be good to see everyone again, especially to see Eve and the kids. And despite Aaron's death, it would be good to take some time and remember the things for which I can be thankful this year, because there definitely are ways that God has blessed me. Maybe if I feel like it I'll eventually post some sort of (partial?) list. But as for now it's time for bed.
I hope that all of you reading this have/had a happy and enjoyable Thanksgiving.
Posted by Jared at 11:48 PM | Comments (1)
November 20, 2008
CBD in the Crescent City
[On location in New Orleans, Louisiana]
I always like to take the opportunity to write "on location" posts from new places, and this week is no different! I have had some down time today because the talks scheduled for today at the CBD Conference didn't look interesting at all. As one conference attendee put it, "The atmosphere is an afterthought to these people." I can't really disagree with that sentiment, considering the sheer volume of chemistry and biology talks compared to the miniscule number of atmosphere-related talks.
Before getting into how the Crescent City has been, I'm gonna rewind to last weekend, when one of my good friends from high school, Mike M., flew out from Green Bay to Penn State to visit me! He had originally planned to come out on the weekend of the Penn State-Oregon State game in early September, but when Aaron died he managed to get it rescheduled to last weekend. And he almost wasn't able to come out this time either -- Mike works at a Sherwin Williams paint store in Shawano, WI, and last Tuesday his boss was fired, which left Mike as the only employee at the store. Fortunately the regional manager was able to pull someone in from another store to cover for Mike for the weekend, so that he didn't have to cancel his visit. That would've been a major bummer.
After Mike's flight landed on Friday afternoon, I gave him a tour of the town, including the Lion Shrine, Walker Building (always a highlight of any tour of Penn State!), and the shops along College Ave (so he could buy his fill of Penn State stuff). Friday night we had dinner brinner with Kerrie, Dan, Tracy, Amanda, Daryl, Jenn & Ashley as a pre-celebration for Kerrie's birthday (brinner = breakfast for dinner), since she also had the CBD Conference this week in New Orleans, and with Thanksgiving week immediately following. Mike was more than happy to oblige Kerrie and the others by regaling them with embarrassing stories about me, haha. After playing a couple games with everyone, we just hung out and stayed up pretty late, catching up on everything. It was fun.
Saturday was the main event, with the Penn State vs Indiana football game. Even after the game was announced to be a noon kickoff, we still had hoped to tailgate before the game, but in the days leading up to the game, it became clear that the weather wasn't going to cooperate. And sure enough, it was very rainy on Saturday morning, and would not have been enjoyable tailgating weather for anyone. The rain continued during the game too, but fortunately we all had ponchos to keep us reasonably dry (because of the rain I didn't bring my camera to the game either). With all the rain though, the Blue Band wasn't allowed to march on the field at all, either for pregame or halftime, which was a bummer (it's my understanding that Joe Paterno doesn't let the band march on the field when it's rainy). I had really hoped that Mike would get the *full* Penn State football gameday experience when he came out here, especially because he's loved Penn State since he was a little kid, but there was still plenty of gameday experience. As for the game, Penn State's offense was sluggish and sloppy in the first half once again, only nosing out to a 10-7 halftime lead. Finally in the second half the Nittany Lions started exerting their will over the injury-depleted Hoosiers, and won 34-7. It also would've been nice to have a slightly more exciting game to get the crowd into it, but with the noon kickoff, all the rain, playing lowly Indiana, and having lost to Iowa last week to ruin national championship hopes, there wasn't a whole lot of electricity in the student section and the crowd in general. This Saturday will be very different, when we host a good Michigan State team at 3:30pm, with a trip to the Rose Bowl on the line. The Indiana game was still fun though, and we stayed till the very end. By midway through the 4th quarter, the rain had stopped anyway! That night I had a bunch of PSCG people over to play games and whatnot, but everyone was having fun just hanging out and talking and everything, so no games got played. That was fine though. After everyone left Mike & I got in a quick game of Lord of the Rings.
Mike & I went to church in the morning, and after that went to lunch at Damon's with Kerrie, Tracy, Chad & Rachel so that we could catch both the Packers-Bears and Vikings-Buccaneers games (I think Mike would've gone into withdrawal had he not been able to watch the Packers game, haha). We only stayed till the end of the 3rd quarter, and then I took Mike to the Creamery to top off his Penn State experience before he had to fly out mid-afternoon. It was great to have him in State College for a weekend, and to catch up with him and everything. I really hope he'll be able to come out again sometime!
On Monday morning I had to get up early so I could catch my 7:50am flight to New Orleans (via Philadelphia). We got to New Orleans around noon, so after we checked into the Hilton Riverside downtown, those of us who came down that day (me, Kerrie, Sue, Andrew, Luna, David & Lili -- Dave, AJ, Glenn, Brian & Brian all came down Sunday) grabbed lunch at a cool place called Mulate's, just a couple blocks from our hotel (and across the street from the Riverwalk mall and the Convention Center). The blackened alligator and jambalaya were really good, I must say. :-) After lunch, Sue, Kerrie, David & I wandered around the city for a bit, going down to the French Quarter, Bourbon Street, Jackson Square, Cafe du Monde (where we had some delicious cafe au lait and beignets!), and then along the riverfront for awhile. There were appetizers served at the welcome reception that evening at the hotel, and that was more than enough for us considering the huge lunch we'd had.
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
Our hotel is pretty nice. I mean, what would you expect from the Hilton? My room is on the 17th floor and overlooks the Mississippi River, it's been cool to see all sorts of riverboats, tugboats and barges go by. And the food that's been provided as part of the conference here has been fantastic too. The downside is that despite being an expensive, swanky hotel, they charge for just about every little extra item that'd typically be complimentary at more mid-range hotels. For example, something that's now as standard as wireless internet? $15 for 24 hours, or $6 for 1 hour. That's outrageous! I bit the bullet and paid for it my first night here though, because I absolutely needed to get some forecasts done for class, and to get some other work done that required the internet. Since Tuesday evening I've been fairly successful with leeching internet from someone's wireless in a nearby room. It's not a fast connection, but it's been relatively reliable at least.
With Kerrie's birthday happening this week, I had been trying to arrange a surprise visit from Daniel on Monday afternoon/evening. But on Monday morning while we were in Philadelphia I got a call from him that his Air Force bosses dumped a bunch of work on him that had to be done by Wednesday morning, so he wasn't able to make the trip down from Shreveport. :-( It would've been so fun to see him again, but such is life.
I gave my presentation on Tuesday morning, the first talk in the first set of parallel sessions. It went really well, too! I wasn't nervous at all or anything, either. I think after being so stressed out a few weeks ago about whether I'd even have anything to present, there wasn't anything left to be nervous about when it came to giving the presentation, haha. Dave & Sue were really glad to see that I'd implemented (nearly) all of the nitpicking suggestions that they'd made the night before when I did a dry run of my presentation for them. I got quite a few compliments about my talk from various people, including the NCAR folks that were there. I was very glad to get it out of the way! All the talks in that first session were really good, with a couple other NCAR talks (which were very well-done as usual) and then Dave giving Walter's presentation too. From my (biased) point of view, it was easily the best session of the whole conference. And it's definitely been all downhill from there, as the rest of the sessions have gotten further and even completely away from meteorology. That night most of the PSU NWP group went out to a place across the street from the hotel called Gordon Biersch's, which had some excellent beer. I'd really never hung out with many of them in a social setting before, but we all had a great time. AJ & Glenn in particular are so funny, even before having a beer. :-) For instance, before Glenn mentioned it at dinner, I never knew that AJ learned English from Beavis & Butthead, haha.
I set my alarm for Wednesday morning, but forgot to turn it on, and so I got downstairs a bit late for some of the morning talks. Oh well. By afternoon there wasn't anything I was interested in anyway, so I skipped out for a bit after lunch to work on some other homework and whatnot. I tried going to another couple talks late in the afternoon, but I couldn't make it through a third (even though that would've been the last one of the day).
Last night after the poster session wrapped up, for Kerrie's birthday Sue, David, Kerrie & I went out to eat at the Red Fish Grill on Bourbon Street (right by Canal Street, and right across from a Krystal -- are you jealous, Jeff [Frame]?), on Daniel's recommendation. It was fantastic! I got the black drum (with a side of gumbo, of course!), which was very good. I probably haven't had fish that good since my brothers & I took my mom out for her 60th birthday to the Oceanaire in Minneapolis. 
Dave and the NWP group showed up a little later, and Dave even got her a big piece of banana cream pie with a candle in it. After dinner Kerrie, David & I walked down Bourbon Street to Pat O'Brien's (another of Daniel's excellent recommendations), where we met up with Andrew, Luna and a few NCAR people, where we had a couple of their famous hurricanes. Pat O'Brien's definitely seemed to be classier and more pleasant than a lot of the places we walked past on Bourbon Street, and it had an awesome courtyard in the back with a flaming fountain.
But as for the rest of Bourbon Street, let's just say I've never seen so many bars in one place before. Or strip clubs. All around the French Quarter there were tons of voodoo and occult shops/museums too, and there are tarot card readers all over the place too. There's some of all that in any big city, but New Orleans sure seems to be a distinct hub of hedonism and demonic influence. 
Just today in a local gift shop we spotted a book called "Christian Voodoo." And it wasn't a joke, it was written to be a serious book. There really is a lot of weird stuff down here. One thing there's been less of than I expected are street musicians. There were some by the riverside and in front of Cafe du Monde, but apart from that they've been pretty notably absent. I had expected the sounds of jazz and zydeco to permeate the air.
Today I didn't even make the pretense of going to any talks. None of them were of any interest to me, pure and simple. I walked around after lunch with Kerrie & Sue for a bit because it was an unbelievably beautiful day outside, and then Kerrie & I went back to Cafe du Monde to hang out for awhile (and I got myself a souvenir mug from there). In the evening we all went to the Awards Banquet, and AJ won an award for "Best Scientific Collaboration," for a paper on which he was lead author. We knew AJ was a finalist for some sort of an award, but getting that particular award was quite a pleasant surprise! He got a really nice crystal trophy too. It was nice to see DTRA recognize at least one atmospheric paper at this heavily chem/bio/medical-dominated conference.
 |  |
We have just a half-day of the conference left to go tomorrow, but the talks tomorrow morning look interesting again at least. Sue also gives the last talk of the conference right before noon, so she & I basically bookend the conference sessions. Our flight leaves New Orleans at 3pm, and we get back to State College a little after 10pm. It's been a fun week in New Orleans, and unlike back in July when I found out I won the scholarship, right now I'm glad I won it and was able to come down here (and even back then I knew I'd feel this way now). It was a lot of work and a lot of stress, but it worked out quite well in the end. It'll be good to get back to Penn State though, if only so I can go stand outside all day in the cold on Saturday, tailgating and going to the game (it's only gonna be in the 20s, but unfortunately it probably won't snow during the game, sigh...), and so that I can start driving home for Thanksgiving break on Sunday morning!
Posted by Jared at 11:33 PM | Comments (0)
November 12, 2008
Hard Drive Progress
There's promising news about the photos on my dead hard drive! I finally sent in my hard drive to Ontrack Data Recovery Services a couple weeks ago (on their dime via UPS, but I'm sure that's rolled into the $495 photo recovery fee), and last week I got word back from them. My hard drive needed to be taken apart in a clean room (which I figured would be the case), but they were able to image 87% of the drive. With the method they had to use in order to retrieve the files, they said they weren't able to retain any of the filenames on my photos, but they were able to recover 83-84 GB of photos! I don't remember how much total space all my photos occupied when my hard drive crashed, but that's gotta be the vast majority, if not all, of my photos! Ordinarily, Ontrack would just burn the recovered photos onto DVD and mail them back to me for free (again, included in the total cost, no doubt), but because there was so much recovered data, they asked me either to ship them an external hard drive, or to buy one from them, onto which they could put my recovered photos. So on Thursday night last week I went down to Best Buy and bought a 500-GB Iomega firewire/USB2.0 external drive for $160 (I was gonna buy that anyway pretty soon), and then shipped it to Ontrack (on my dime) on Friday morning. They got it today, so while it's possible I could get my hard drive and my photos back before I leave for New Orleans on Monday morning, I'll almost certainly have them by the time I go home for Thanksgiving! It'll be quite a relief to have my photos back. It'll take awhile to go back through and rename the photos that weren't backed up on my other external hard drive over the past year or so. That reminds me, I still need to pull those back over to my laptop...
And for some various countdowns I have going on:
2+ days until my friend Mike M. flies in from Wisconsin to visit for the weekend!
5 days until I fly to New Orleans for the CBD conference
6 days until I present at the CBD conference
9+ days until I fly back to State College from the CBD conference
10+ days until I witness Penn State hopefully beat Michigan State at Beaver Stadium and thereby clinch at least a berth in the Rose Bowl!
11 days until I start the drive home for Thanksgiving break (and see Alex again)!
12+ days until I arrive home in Wisconsin and see my family again!
Posted by Jared at 12:41 AM | Comments (2)
November 04, 2008
Election 2008 Is Finally Over
While I am disappointed that Obama won today's presidential election, I'm not disappointed that McCain lost. I'm glad that we'll finally be able to turn the page on the Bush years though; maybe now the GOP will finally get back to being conservative, something it hasn't been since the '90s (and recall, unabashed conservatism is why they won in 1994). In any case, I will still pray that Obama would lead our country well, like I would for anyone who is elected President of the United States. Though I may disagree with him on almost every issue, I am not among those who childishly say, "He's not *my* president." Obama is evidently the man that God has ordained to lead the US for the next few years. No leader, good or bad, can be in power for one second longer than Yahweh allows as part of His sovereign plan.
Posted by Jared at 11:57 PM | Comments (2)
November 02, 2008
Political Rallies and Halloween Parties
It feels sooooo good to be finally past my super-stressful couple-week stretch. I got a power-point presentation put together and submitted on Monday evening last week for the CBD Conference, which was a huge weight off my shoulders. I'm allowed to bring an updated presentation on a memory stick to the conference, so while I still am pushing forward to get some additional results, I can work at a much more relaxed pace. Don't get me wrong, I'm still busy, but I'm not frantic or freaking out anymore, like I was a week and a half ago. That wasn't fun. And then I had a 2-3 page "research paper" on flash flood events for my forecasting class that was due on Thursday, so when I finished that at 12:30am Wednesday night, I knew I'd be able to relax a bit. And that I have!
Before I finished my paper I did take a break on Tuesday evening to go hear Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin speak at Rec Hall, here on campus at Penn State. While I obviously did still have work to do, I figured that work could wait, but that it's not every day that a VP candidate comes to your town to speak, especially within a week of a presidential election! I'd never been to a political rally before either, so I figured I should take advantage of the opportunity. I heard there were still tickets available Tuesday morning (they were free), 
so I quickly walked all the way down to the GOP campaign headquarters at Allen & Waupelani, about a mile and a half from Walker Building. They only let me get two tickets, so I got the extra ticket for David. The doors were slated to open at 6pm, country music singer Hank Williams Jr was scheduled to begin a concert at 8pm, and then Sarah Palin was supposed to begin her speech at about 9pm. Since neither David nor I really cared to get there super-early to get a prime spot or if we missed some of the concert, we got in line at 7:30pm. 
Thing is, the line was already halfway across the IST bridge! The line moved reasonably quickly, but it was still an hour and a half of enduring the cold wind until we got through the Secret Service metal detectors inside Rec Hall, just in time for Palin to take the stage. Rec Hall was sold-out, with between 7500 and 8000 people in attendance. We managed to find a spot at the top of one of the aisles, so while we may have been a fire hazard technically, we at least had a decent spot from which to stand and watch the speech.
I think Sarah Palin did a much better job at the rally on Tuesday night than she did in the VP debate. *Much* better. She really showed that she can actually be a good public speaker, something that didn't come across in the debate. I'd chalk her shaky debate performance up to a combination of her being nervous and trying to remember all of the lines that McCain's advisers were coaching her to remember and recite. But when she was here in State College, she just seemed so much more loose and natural, so if she is indeed "going rogue" and being herself, rejecting the advice of McCain's handlers, I say good for her! We need more politicians who are willing to be themselves anyway, not not who the focus groups are telling them they should be. 
While I didn't agree with everything she said, I thought she did a really good job, and I was glad to see her go on the offensive, both in making the case for McCain and against Obama. She put me at least a little more at ease with the concept of voting for McCain, but I'm still undecided between McCain/Palin and Bob Barr, the Libertarian candidate. Barack Hussein Obama is getting even more frightening these days though, especially with his recent comments about the Constitution. I still don't think John McCain would make a great president, but I honestly don't think this country can afford even four years of an Obama presidency. Obama sure would provide change, but not all change is good change.
There were also a bunch of Obama supporters outside Rec Hall. A group of them were on the other side of Curtin Road, just chanting "O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!" and "Yes we can! Yes we can!" I had no problem with them. There were quite a few Obama supporters with signs on the Rec Hall side of Curtin Rd, who really demonstrated their intellectual and rhetorical prowess. [/sarcasm] Seriously though, they were quite a bit more testy, vocal, and snide. Oh, and condescending and rude too. (None of this is by any means to claim that there aren't McCain supporters who exhibit these same lovely traits, I'm merely reporting what was publicly on display Tuesday night with these particular Obama supporters.) Anytime David or I would try to have a reasoned exchange of ideas with them, they'd only shout back with a slogan (if they'd even deign to pay attention when we'd answer one of their questions), to the point that it was impossible to talk to them. One of them even said to us, "You sound like you're intelligent. Why on earth are you going in there [to see Palin]?" And yes, it was dripping with condescension. One of the best parts of engaging the Obama supporters was when David talked to a couple girls who had signs that said something to the effect of "Nothing Is Certain" and "Question What You Believe." After a couple minutes, David got them to admit that their position was based on circular logic (if nothing is certain, then is that statement even certain?), and they just walked away! At any rate, I know that there are plenty of intelligent and reasonable Obama supporters, but all these sign-holding and argumentative youths were not among them.
Oh, and I don't think I'm alone when I say that I'll be extremely glad once Election Day is over. Whoever wins, it'll be good to move on finally, after this ridiculously long campaign that's been going on since Election Day 2006. All these political ads, for federal, state and local candidates, have been a bit much (even when they're hilariously pathetic). So this is what it's like to live in a battleground state...
Friday night Tracy & Amanda hosted a Halloween party at Dan, Luke & Noel's place (their own place was a bit too small). For a long time I wasn't all that keen on going, largely because I'm not a big fan of Halloween, even though Tracy & Kerrie were encouraging me to go dressed as a Mormon, "Elder Lee." I still wasn't excited about the party though. I just don't like the history of a celebration of evil that's associated with the holiday. I recognize that most people nowadays don't view or celebrate it that way, and treat it as just a fun excuse to dress up in costumes and have a party. My family never celebrated Halloween growing up, though, and I just haven't ever been that interested in the holiday. I went to Halloween parties my first two years of grad school, first year going as one of a group of Pac-Man ghosts, and second year going as a vector (in both cases the costume decisions were pretty last-minute and just some marker drawn on a t-shirt ... not exactly elaborate). But I didn't go to a Halloween party last year, and I didn't feel like I missed out on anything. In any case, by Friday afternoon I was leaning toward going to the party, at least to put in an appearance, if nothing else. Then I got a great idea for a costume -- televangelist Joel Osteen!
I mean, I already had a suit/tie and plenty of hair gel, though admittedly I lack Osteen's blindingly white teeth. I even found a couple hilarious posters that are parodies of two of Osteen's books, and taped those pictures to a couple books, and used them as props. Basically, I thought it'd be fun to tap into my acting skills and try to be in character as much as I could (though I knew I couldn't smile as much as Osteen). My attitude about going to the party changed pretty quickly around then. 
I think part of why I was suddenly looking forward to going to the party was that I finally had a costume idea of my own (that, and I decided I wasn't gonna be completely antisocial). So when I showed up at the party, people were surprised that a) I showed up, and b) that my hair was pretty much slicked back. :-) It was a fun party though, and I'm glad I went. There were a bunch of people from PSCG there, and then a bunch of entomologists too. There were some great costumes too, including Dan as Michael Phelps, and Adrienne as a Christmas tree (she even plugged herself in a few times, haha). Toward the end of the night Ruth H. showed up too, and she was able to guess on the first try that I was a) a televangelist, and b) Joel Osteen. Most impressive! Here are some more pictures from the evening:
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
Maybe now I'll be a little more interested in going to a Halloween party next year, and a little more motivated to think of a costume before the day of the party, haha.
Posted by Jared at 11:13 PM | Comments (2)