Jared's One Blog

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March 28, 2010

Vic & Lindsay's Wedding

There's nothing quite like a wedding to force a reunion. For a few days late last week it was like old times with so many friends who'd graduated back in town. They'd all returned to State College to celebrate Vic & Lindsay's wedding.

The fun started with Vic's bachelor party on Thursday the 18th. Eight of us (Vic, Vic's friend Joe, Jeff, Robert, Rob, Bob, Walter and me) went over to Clearfield to have dinner at Denny's Beer Barrel Pub. Why Denny's? Because they have the world record for the largest hamburger, and while it's obviously far from a world record, Vic wanted to order a 6-pound burger for all of us to attack. And yes, it was as ridiculously as it sounded, although it would be more accurate to call it a six-pount meat loaf on a bun, with a plate on the side full of condiments. We cut the burger into eight equal 3/4-pound segments, and each of us finished ours except for Vic. That was rather surprising to all of us because in the past Vic has downed a one-pound burger and fries all by himself in just ten minutes. We made sure to give him grief for that.

After dinner we all drove back to Bob's house in Pine Grove Mills to watch some of the late-evening first round NCAA games, and have a special wedding edition of the Bad American Swill Festival, the fourth one we've had. We didn't have enough of each beer (often just one can or bottle) to do both a warm and cold taste test, so we did just the smell and warm tests. As an indication of the quality of beers in the contest, a previous winner, La Crosse Lager, finished 8th out of 9. There was some truly awful beer. The winner was Clear Creek Ice, in second place was Schlitz, in third place was Steel Reserve, and then Koch's Golden Anniversary once again finished in fourth place. There was a lot of variance in this BASF compared to previous editions of the BASF. There were two beers that were both ranked best and worst by different people. It was still a fun time, even with the lingering aftertaste/aftersmell of all the bad beers. :-) On Friday the 19th the weather was so incredibly gorgeous that a bunch of us took some time off in the afternoon to go play 9 holes of disc golf at Circleville Park. I think we had a nine-some and even a small gallery following us around, haha. While the wedding party was at the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner, I played some tennis with Ben and watched some more NCAA tournament games. Later at night we all met up at Bar Bleu. The really neat thing about that is that there were probably about 30-40 meteorologists at the bar. Quite a few of the younger grad students were out to celebrate Caroline's birthday, and a bunch of others were out because of Vic, and then a bit later on Lindsay's bachelorette party bar tour made a stop at Bar Bleu also. It was cool to have so many meteo grad students in one place, from first years all the way up through alums. That was fun, I'm glad I decided to go out.

Vic & Lindsay's wedding was on Saturday the 20th at 4:30pm at Eisenhower Chapel on campus. The day couldn't have been nicer, sunny and close to 70 degrees. The weather was far nicer than I'm sure any of us ever imagined it would be when we found out they'd scheduled a wedding for mid-March in State College. I guess Vic & Lindsay just had one heck of a long-range forecast! Anyway, the ceremony itself was nice and pretty small (about 70 people in attendance??). I was also taking some mental notes of the setup since I'll be playing piano at Eisenhower Chapel one month from now for Dan & Kerrie's wedding. After the ceremony we all provided a "bubble tunnel" outside for Vic & Lindsay to walk through. Of course several of us had plenty of fun playing around blowing bubbles.

The reception was at Toftrees Resort, with people assigned to tables that had pictures and stories of different locations that were significant to Vic & Lindsay (Grand Forks, ND, Barrow, AK, Grand Rapids, MN, State College, PA, etc.). They also had one-pound burlap bags of Moose Lake wild rice with a mini-recipe book of Vic's favorite wild rice dishes. Very Minnesotan. :-) After the meal and before the dance floor was opened up, Vic & Lindsay presented a fun slideshow about their lives from when they met in Walker Building until their lives now in Minnesota (they now both work for Wind Logics up in Grand Rapids). Then there was lots and lots of dancing (the sappy ballads were kept to a minimum, but even Dr Lamb came out onto the dance floor for one or two songs!). I was even out there dancing about 70-80% of the time, by far the most I've ever done that. I was pretty worn out by the end of the night, but I had a blast, and so did everyone else, it seemed. It was fun to see so many people again too, who had come from all over, including Hawai'i, California, Texas, Oklahoma, Illinois, North Carolina, New York, New Jersey, and even Scotland. Like I said, there's nothing quite like a wedding to force a reunion! Then on Sunday morning eight of us (Dan, Kerrie, Chris, Amber, Caren, Kent, Walter & I) went out for breakfast at Waffle Shop, always a favorite place. I think I've been to Waffle House way more frequently since people started graduating and moving away, because now whenever people come back into town we try to get breakfast there one morning. Then after church I watched some more basketball with Kent over at Walter's, and then had lunch with Kent & Walter on Monday before Kent flew back to Oklahoma.

It was so much fun to hang out with everyone again all weekend, it was just like old times! I wonder if we'll ever be able to get such a big group back together again. I sure hope so! Maybe someone else will just have to get married. :-)

Posted by Jared at 05:36 PM | Comments (0)

March 23, 2010

Published Hobbies

In the past several weeks I've become both a published photographer and a published videographer!

First, my published photos appear in the book Design Through Dialogue: A Guide for Clients and Architects by Karen A. Franck and Teresa von Sommaruga Howard. Two of my photos are included (one in its entirety, one cropped), on p. 176 and p. 194 (the last photo in the book):

They are both photos I took while visiting Te Papa Tongarewa (the National Museum of New Zealand) in Wellington, NZ back in December 2004. Back in February 2009 Ms. Howard stumbled upon my photos on my website while doing an image search for Te Papa, and asked if I would be willing to give her permission to print the photos in her upcoming book. I said yes, and asked if she'd send me a free copy of the book when it was published, which she kindly did back in February.

Second, my published video (a 7-second clip of it, anyway) appears at the end of this PSA for Big Ten Conference men's basketball, called "Magic Number":

Yep, that video of Talor Battle swishing a game-tying three-pointer at the end of regulation vs George Mason in the 1st round of the 2009 NIT was taken by me. :-) Back in November a representative from TeamWorks Media, an ad agency in Chicago, contacted me because they'd stumbled across my video of Talor Battle's shot vs GMU on YouTube. They asked if they could use a clip from it, but said that a) they couldn't give me any credit line because they have a policy of not doing that for PSAs, and b) they couldn't pay me because ESPN owned the rights to all video from that game (and mine was technically not legal, I guess, or at least it wouldn't be legal for me to profit from it), but would instead make a donation on my behalf to the charity of my choice (Voice of the Martyrs). I didn't hear anything for the longest time, and was wondering if the PSA ever got made or not. I didn't see it on TV during the regular season, but then again I watched far less basketball overall this season compared to previous seasons. And then while I was watching the Big Ten men's basketball tournament a couple weekends ago on CBS, I saw it!

Needless to say, I've found it pretty cool to be a published photographer and videographer, as well as a published scientist. :-) Maybe this will serve as motivation for me to get more of my photos and videos online someday.

Posted by Jared at 11:22 PM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2010

Happy Feet

For most of the last two weeks here in central PA it's been ridiculously nice outside, especially for March. After such a snowy February, and a stretch of more than a week and a half straight of cloudy days in late February and the beginning of March, we got six straight days of brilliant sunshine to brighten our moods and melt the snow cover. That stretch of sunny days bled into the start of spring break here, so Monday and Tuesday last week I took off work early to go play some tennis with Ben, to test out my new Slazenger racket for only the second time (believe it or not, I was able to play a couple sets with Anders back on 23 January, the earliest in the year I've ever played tennis!). Part of the challenge for us was to find a court in town that 1) was snow-free and dry, 2) had the nets up, and 3) wasn't occupied by people already playing, but we found a court over at Suburban Park. On the first day I lost 6-0, 6-0, 6-2, only the second time I've ever taken multiple games in a set vs Ben. I really played a whole lot better in that third set. The next day I lost all four sets 6-0, but there were several tight, multi-deuce games we had. I just couldn't seal the deal in any of them, oh well. At any rate, after seven sets of tennis in two days (with a workout session in between), I was definitely pretty sore the next day! It felt good though.

And then you don't always appreciate life's simple, routine things like walking until it's suddenly painful. Last Thursday I went to Health Services to have a couple warts on the bottom of my left foot frozen. I'd been meaning to do that for quite awhile (like a couple years), but finally decided to do it now before we got further into the nice-weather season, so that it wouldn't interrupt running, tennis or other outdoor activities. But that afternoon and evening after having the procedure done, my foot hurt so badly that I had to ask Isaac for a ride home from campus; with how badly I was limping, walking home two miles wouldn't have been the best plan. I worked from home last Friday too, because while it hurt a little less, I was still walking fairly gingerly. It was still uncomfortable for me to walk (and I was still kind of limping a bit) through Tuesday this week, and I was starting to wonder how long the pain would last. Finally on Wednesday the pain really started to subside noticeably, and by yesterday I was walking completely normally again. It felt great not to be all gimpy and everything! This evening I even played another few sets of tennis with Ben (unfortunately my right wrist suddenly started hurting late in the third set, hopefully that won't become something serious or chronic). And hopefully I won't have to go back for another wart treatment, hopefully that one freezing got rid of them.

Now that the weather seems to have turned the corner to spring, I'm hoping to get back to running a couple times per week (while still lifting weights twice a week too). That'd probably require a little more re-dedication to going to bed and waking up early, something I've started to slack off on lately. I haven't gone running since I did my 5-mile leg of the Tussey mOUnTaiNBACK race in October, and I want to be able to get to the point where I can run 5-7 miles fairly comfortably, occasionally maybe doing up to 8-10 miles. Last fall was the first time I'd really started running routinely since high school, and I started late enough that I only ran as much as 5 miles exactly twice: once with Alex when he came here to visit the weekend of my birthday (5.5 miles), and once the following weekend for the Tussey mOUnTaiNBACK (5.1 miles). I'd definitely like to improve my conditioning more.

Now it's time to take it easy the rest of the evening and watch the last bit of the first round games of the NCAA tournament! My bracket's hurting a bit (not a great record in first round games as usual, and I've already lost Georgetown, Temple & Siena from my Sweet 16), but this has been a really entertaining first round so far, so that makes up for it!

Posted by Jared at 09:14 PM | Comments (0)

March 08, 2010

New Habits in a New Year

For large portions of 2008 and 2009 I often felt like I was in a bit of a rut. I felt like while I certainly knew a lot of people, and probably had a lot of friends in the modern American definition of the term, but that I didn't have many actual friends. You know, people who you'd spend a good deal of time with and often call up if you wanted to hang out. I felt kind of disconnected from people here at PSU, and that led to me not being nearly as social, and spending lots of nights at home, not really doing a whole lot. I don't know quite how to explain it, but life just wasn't as much fun as it had been my first 2-3 years here.

There were several contributing factors to life not being quite as enjoyable, or being frustrated with how my life was going. Many of these factors are related. One factor was quite a few of my friends from Meteorology, with whom I'd often hang out quite a bit, had graduated and moved away. That's just a fact of life when you're a fifth-year grad student, I guess. A second factor was that I've been trying to focus more on my own work, resulting in less "wandering the halls" to go talk to people (or maybe I've wandered the halls less because I know fewer people here). Right along with that, I've been spending increasing amounts of time working not in my office in Walker Building, but in my office in the ARL-Water Tunnel Building, where most of the time I'm the only person in my small, windowless office (for several weeks now I've worked almost exclusively in the WT). Another reason that can't be discounted is that my research has been really slow-going for most of the last couple years, and running into constant problems that have often been beyond my own ability to solve, thus forcing me to rely on other people's schedules to get help. When research isn't going well, it really affects my mood in a negative way. When I'm not able to be progressing as much as I wish I were, I get a serious case of "grad student guilt," and don't feel like I deserve to go have fun on evenings or weekends. For whatever reason I've also felt kind of disconnected from Penn State Christian Grads, even though I'm the president of the group. I just wasn't taking nearly as active a role in leadership or in the group in general as I previously had. There were other factors contributing to my general dissatisfaction, too, but I think you get the gist.

So I decided that I needed to shake things up to try to change my attitude. I decided that I'd be more open to invitations from people to go do things (basically, to be more social). And I feel like I have done a better job of that, and that that's one reason why I haven't blogged nearly as frequently so far in 2010 (I haven't been spending quite as many evenings at home). I've been much more open to saying yes to last-minute or spontaneous invites to dinner or bowling or hanging out or whatever. (And taking up the invite to go bowling with some of the first years back in January allowed me to have quite the set of scores: 73, 99, 137 and 172. Guess I just needed to warm up a bit, haha. It felt great to beat my previous high score of 156 and get my first-ever turkey to start out the fourth game!)

I decided that I'd start working out at the gym, both to improve my health and strength and to improve my mood (hooray endorphins!). So I worked out at the hotel in Atlanta with Andrew one night at AMS, bought a spring semester PSU Fitness student membership for $52, and since AMS I have worked out basically every Tuesday and Thursday morning at Rec Hall (less than a 5-minute walk from Walker or the Water Tunnel, so it's really convenient). I usually lift weights for 40-60 minutes or so, and then ride for 20 minutes on the exercise bike to get some cardio work in, since it's been too chilly for my liking to run outside. I convinced Walter to come start working out too, though the last few weeks I've mostly been going by myself, while he's been either too busy or going in afternoons by himself. With the weather starting to get warmer, I'll probably mix in some running a couple times a week too.

I also decided that I'd start taking ballroom dance lessons. Yep, ballroom dancing. Kinda surprised myself with that one, too. I figured that'd teach me some useful skills (I do have at least four weddings to attend this year, for example), and also help me gain more social confidence. And maybe I'll be able to meet some new people, who knows. (A few months back, Alex, trying to get me to think about taking ballroom, told me [mostly] jokingly, "If you take ballroom, you'll be married within a year," haha.) The Penn State Ballroom Dance Club has beginners ballroom lessons every Tuesday evening (almost every night they have lessons for some type of dance or level of difficulty, too). I've been there every week this semester except for when I was at AMS in Atlanta, and we've learned the rumba, cha-cha and waltz so far, spending 2-3 weeks on each one. I don't have particularly great coordination (and often find it hard to simply relax!), so it's often a bit of a struggle for me at first to put everything together and get my body and feet to do what they're supposed to, but I've always been able to notice quite a bit of improvement, especially on the second week of learning a particular dance. I'm not taking ballroom lessons with anybody that I know, but I'm genuinely enjoying them, and look forward to them every week.

So are all these new habits and mindsets helping me out so far this year? In my opinion, definitely. I do feel much more positive in general, and am enjoying life a bit more this year. And I really have to thank Alex for that in large part, because he's the one that really encouraged and inspired me to try and do all this to help change my attitude this year. Am I totally satisfied with how everything's going in my life currently? No, far from it. But I am much more satisfied than I was late last year, and it feels great.

Posted by Jared at 11:42 PM | Comments (0)

March 03, 2010

Jan 2010, Part 2: AMS in Atlanta

And now it's been another month without blogging. Sigh. Again, sorry about that. Spring break is almost upon us, and I'm still blogging about something I did six weeks ago. Time for another main highlight of January, complete with heaps of photos!

In mid January I went to Atlanta for the 90th Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), where I presented a paper in the 16th Conference on Air Pollution Meteorology. I had a week to get ready for the conference after returning to campus from Christmas break, and there was enough to do that I didn't quite get my talk or my manuscript finished before I left for Atlanta. I think this was the first time I left for a conference without having my talk completely put together, prepared and practiced, and this actually caused me to stress a bit. And my talk wasn't until Thursday the 21st, the last day of the conference, so I had plenty of time to simultaneously put off prepping and fret about it, but also enjoy being in Atlanta and hanging out with friends. In the end my presentation went really well though, I was happy with it and Sue was happy with it.

Originally I was going to fly down there on Sunday the 17th with all the other Penn Staters, but back in December the Department of Meteorology asked if any grad students would be willing to go down to Atlanta a couple days early to represent the Department at the AMS Career Fair during the AMS student conference the weekend leading up to the main conference. Basically, they decided that it'd be better to have grad students instead of undergrads man the table to talk to prospective students about our graduate program -- a very wise decision, in my opinion. So Andrew & I volunteered for that duty. It was enjoyable to talk to so many students who either had applied to PSU this year or were thinking of applying next year and give them advice on how best I thought they could strengthen their applications. There was a fairly steady stream of visitors to our info table during both the Saturday and Sunday evening sessions. Andrew & I had a little bit of an adventure in trying to set up for the Career Fair on Saturday -- the shipment with all the stuff for the Penn State table didn't arrive at our hotel until close to 2:30 or 3pm, just 2-3 hours before the Career Fair started. That definitely had us nervous for awhile, as it was supposed to have gotten to the hotel the day before. It certainly would not have looked good for Penn State to have an empty table!

The hotel Andrew & I stayed at was the Omni Hotel at the CNN Center in downtown Atlanta, and which was right across the street from the Georgia World Congress Center, the site of the conference. At last year's AMS conference in Phoenix, Alex & I stayed at a hotel that was a half-hour train ride away from the conference center, so it was pretty different being right across the street this year. (Of course, last year Alex & I were both pretty much paying our own way to the conference, and so stayed at a budget motel, whereas this year both Andrew & I had our entire trip to AMS paid for by Meteo & ARL, so a closer, nicer hotel was feasible. :-) And the view from our hotel room was pretty sweet too, a 4th floor view of Olympic Park and the Atlanta skyline.

Saturday the 16th was a very rainy day in Atlanta, but I spent most of the day hanging out with my friend Paul. I knew Paul from the State College E-Free Church, and I hadn't seen him since he moved to Atlanta in summer 2008 after getting his Master's in Acoustics. Paul took Andrew & I to lunch at The Varsity, a very famous fast-food joint. I believe it's the largest fast-food restaurant in the U.S. -- the place is enormous. Even at 2pm the place was absolutely packed too. Their trademark greeting (when you finally manage to get to the counter) is "What'll ya have?!" I think I got a chili dog, chili cheeseburger, onion rings and a fried peach pie. They sure know how to fry food in the south! We dropped Andrew off at the hotel after lunch (after which point the shipment for the PSU Career Fair table finally arrived, so Andrew set up the table by himself), then Paul & I went to the World of Coca-Cola. The World of Coke is a museum dedicated to all things Coca-Cola (which is headquartered in Atlanta): history, advertising, pop culture and art, a mini bottling plant, free samples of Coke-brand soft drinks from around the world, and of course a kitschy gift shop with more Coke-branded items than I've ever seen before in my life. Admission was $15, and I'd say it was a fair price. A small first part of the tour was guided, but the vast majority of the tour was self-guided. Paul & I even got pictures with the Coke Bear (which had a silly, stupid grin on its face), and got a chance to hold Olympic torches. So that was pretty cool. In the taste test area, they had "totems" set up for each continent, each having eight different Coke-bottled soft drinks, and each brand labeled with the country of origin. Some of these other soft drinks were quite good, while some others were pretty bad. In this blogger's humble opinion, the highest percentage of good drinks were at the Africa totem (South America had some pretty good ones too), while the highest percentage of poor-tasting drinks were at the Europe totem (I think Fanta was the only one I liked). It was a pretty cool 2-3 hours at World of Coke, I'm really glad I went. And I've noticed that ever since I went to the World of Coke, I've been much more inclined to drink Coca-Cola. Hmmmm... After doing the Career Fair table for a couple hours, Paul came back into the city to pick up Jeff [Frame] & I (Jeff was in town for the student conference and career fair, trying to recruit students to the University of Illinois, where he just started teaching), to go get dinner and watch the Colts-Ravens playoff game at a Mexican restaurant up in Buckhead, a northern suburb. Then we finished watching the game at Paul's apartment, so it was cool to see where he lived.

Before getting picked up by Paul, however, I may have gotten hustled. I was walking to Paul's car in the rain, when a guy came up to me asking if I was from the area. I said no, but he asked if I could help him out anyway. My initial reaction was to ignore him as I did all the other numerous panhandlers in Atlanta, but something about this guy seemed legit. I had a feeling like I was supposed to help him. He told me the story of what happened to him -- something about his car getting broken into, then having to wait two hours for the cops to show up, and now in need of $10 for gas to get back home. He gave me all sorts of reasons as to why I should trust him, and promised that he'd pay me back. I asked him how he'd do that, and he said he'd take down my name and cell phone number and meet me at the CNN Center Starbucks at 9am the next morning. I told him I didn't have a $10 bill, so he asked if I could spare a $20. Like I said earlier, I just had a feeling that I was supposed to help this person. Anyway, the next morning I waited at the Starbucks for a good 45 minutes with no sign of the guy. So maybe he wasn't being genuine about his situation or his need, or his intention to pay me back. Or perhaps he really was in need, but for whatever reason couldn't make it to the CNN Center the next morning. Maybe the reason he didn't call me back was that the piece of paper on which I wrote my phone number got soaked in the rain. Who knows. Whatever the case, I hope my $20 met a genuine need of his.

So after waiting around at Starbucks for awhile, I hopped on the MARTA (the metro/subway) up to Buckhead to go to church with Paul at Peachtree Presbyterian Church. Peachtree Pres is such a huge church, they have multiple church services going on simultaneously. When I was there, there was a traditional service happening in the main building, while Paul & I went to the contemporary service in the building across the street. They even had a couple traffic cops on the street so that parishoners could cross the street between buildings, and turn into/out of the parking lots. And for the service we went to, there were multiple remote locations in that building in which one could view the service and watch the sermon (such as a young children's/families area). It was probably the biggest church I've ever attended. Then after church Paul & I drove back to downtown Atlanta to watch the Vikings-Cowboys playoff game at a place called Stats. Stats is unique in that it's one of the only establishments in the world to have a table-top tap -- some of the tables have their own taps, where you can pour your own beer. It keeps track of how many ounces you pour yourself, and then generates a bill when you're done. Pretty slick! It was also a fun place to watch the Vikings dominate Dallas. :-)

On Monday night the 18th, Harris Corporation threw their annual GOES (Geostationary Orbiting Earth Satellites) party. Last year it was at a hotel in downtown Phoenix, but this year it was at Atlanta's Georgia Aquarium, just on the other side of Olympic Park from our hotel. The theme, naturally, was "Harris GOES Fishing." The GOES party is awesome because of the free admission, unlimited free food and drinks for conference attendees, but this year there was the extra attraction of wandering around the aquarium. It was fantastic, the whole aquarium was open to us! While there I ran into my friend Laura (both a Penn State and Australia connection there, bit of a story), who then was about to introduce me to her friend Monica, when Monica & I laughed and said, "Oh, we already know each other -- we went to high school together!" Yep, there were two graduates of Cumberland High School at the AMS Conference for the second year in a row. Small world! It was fun catching up with both of them. I meant to get a photo of all three of us, but there were so many people everyone knew at the party and so we got distracted.

Overall throughout the conference there were a fair number of interesting talks, and there was only session all week I skipped out of due to a complete lack of talks that interested me, which was on Thursday afternoon, the last day. I spent the majority of my time in either the Air Pollution Meteorology conference, Energy conference, or the Probability & Statistics conference, and then going to scattered talks that caught my eye in random other conferences. One of the highlights of the conference for me was going to hear Dr John Christy (U of Alabama-Huntsville, Alabama State Climatologist) speak on the effects of modernizing historical climate network temperature stations in Alabama. The main gist of his talk was that microclimates rule the roost when it comes to temperature observations, and stations a mere 600 meters apart can exhibit a bias of a couple degrees relative to each other on average. That makes a big difference, especially when many of the stations that have been going into the climate record are near buildings or pavement, which leads to warmer observed temperatures than they actually should be. The room got pretty full for his talk, and it was quite the interesting presentation. I went up to him later, introduced myself, and told him that I really appreciate the work that he & Roy Spencer (also of UAH) do with regards to issues related to climate change research (and John Christy's emphasis on getting good data and observations into the climate record). He said he doesn't think too many people at AMS appreciate what he has to say, but I told him that there are people like me who do. So anyway, that was a bit of a thrill for me. :-)

Getting home from the conference was kind of interesting too. Fog delayed our departure from ATL on Friday morning the 22nd, so that our connection in IAD was really tight. We landed at gate A2, and were immediately hustled to the front of the line at gate A1 to go straight onto the plane to SCE, the doors of which were closed as soon as we were on board. We were literally in the terminal for no more than a minute -- that's the tightest connection I've ever made. Needless to say my luggage did not make the connection with me, but was instead delivered to my apartment the next morning.

Posted by Jared at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)