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May 24, 2010

Wedding Rehearsal Attire Poll

I'm playing piano at a wedding on Saturday at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The attire for the rehearsal is "Packers jerseys and apparel." Should I sort of play along and wear a neutral green or gold t-shirt (but not a Packers shirt), or should I wear my Cris Carter jersey, or some other Vikings t-shirt? Or should I really twist the knife and try to find a Vikings Brett Favre jersey somewhere along the way to Green Bay? Please vote and discuss. :-) I should add that one other member of the wedding party, who's a Bears fan, has been "banned" from wearing Bears gear, so will supposedly wear a Bears jersey underneath a Packers shirt so that the Packers shirt doesn't burn his skin, lol.

Also, if anyone by some slim chance knows of chords/music to "Skol Vikings" for piano/keyboard, please let me know. I've been Google searching for them but coming up empty!

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

May 21, 2010

Going Back, For Real

Last Thursday night I bought plane tickets to Australia for this August!! I've been talking about going pretty much every summer the past few years, but things would just never work out. It got to the point that some of my friends like Walter said they wouldn't believe that I was going until I actually bought the tickets. Anyway, the way that this worked out is pretty cool.

For a year and a half or almost two years I'd been hoping to go on a three-week vacation with Alex, and for awhile before I met him I had hoped to make a trip work with my cousin Jonathan. Those plans just never got off the ground though. When I visited Alex in Ann Arbor in April, I asked him how interested he really was in going to Australia someday. He said he was interested, but not interested enough to spend a couple thousand dollars of his own money to do it, at least currently. This summer was already totally booked up for him anyway, with three months at NCAR in Boulder and one month at UMBS in northern Michigan. I was disappointed to have that door shut (for now), but on the other hand it's good not to keep hoping and waiting for something that's probably not going to happen.

Also, the weekend before I went to Michigan is when I had my dreams about my expired passport. So I filled out the application, got my photos taken, and mailed in the renewal application the day before I left for Ann Arbor. I mentioned in my blog post about my passport dreams that I wondered if God had something planned for me a few weeks down the road, a reason for which I'd need my passport. I was mostly joking with that, but in the back of my mind was honestly wondering if anything might come about.

The Thursday after I got back from visiting Alex, I went to Hollemans in the evening for the usual PSCG hangout time. When I got there Ash told me that he and Tracy were planning to go to Australia in August, and asked if I wanted to join them. I basically stopped in my tracks. Dreams about my expired passport, then a week later being told by Alex that he doesn't really want to spend the money on traveling, and then being presented with the opportunity for this trip, all within a two-week span. I pretty much became convinced that it was not simply a coincidence, but that God was working on closing one door for me while opening another.

Here's the other reason that I was so surprised when Ash asked me if I wanted to go with him & Tracy in August. This trip has been talked about for quite awhile, and back in the winter they asked if I wanted to go with them. At that point they were thinking of tagging along with a group from Campus Crusade for Christ to do some ministry work at universities in Melbourne; that trip was slated for June or July, and so by sometime in January or February I had to give them an answer. At that point I was still really hoping to go with Alex, and wanted to do more of a sightseeing trip as well, so I told them no. I thought that was pretty much the end of it, and hadn't really heard anything about it again until Ash mentioned it that night. That was the first I really knew that they'd totally changed their plans and pushed them back into August, and were still hopeful that I would come.

I told Sue about the trip the following week and she was alright with it, especially since I'm planning to arrange to give two or three seminars about my research, hopefully at Monash University, the University of Melbourne, and at the Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre in Melbourne. It'd be nice to get my name out there a bit and get a feel for whether I'd be interested in applying for a post-doc at any of those places when I'm finishing up at PSU in about 1.5 years. By giving some research seminars, it'll at least help cover for me missing 3 weeks of work. I should make those contacts soon to let them know that I'm coming, and to see if they can fit me into their schedules... Anyway, with those upcoming seminars, that's really lit a fire under me to make some herculean progress on my research project in the next couple months, so that I can have a nice piece of work to talk about. That would be a main reason why I've been putting in some really long days in the office lately (12 hours yesterday, after having been gone from the office for only 10 hours the night before, ugh). It's good to be making progress though.

So what are we going to be doing, you ask? The primary impetus for the trip is to investigate the feasibility of helping to start or coming alongside a Christian graduate student ministry at the University of Melbourne. Ash has been in contact with a Campus Crusade staff member at the University of Melbourne, and they're interested in trying to get something started. UniMelb is in the process of changing their enrollment structure, and they're planning to have an even larger focus on research by having grad students be 50-60% of their enrollment. The University of Melbourne is one of the top 15-20 most prestigious universities in the world too, and certainly the most prestigious university in Australia. One possibility we'd be looking into would be to encourage some of our members to try to get post-docs down there, and help out with the ministry while they're at Melbourne; it certainly wouldn't harm one's resumé to spend a couple years there. :-) So we're planning to talk to a lot of professors and grad students down there, and just try to get a feel for how to do ministry to/with grad students in Australia, since its culture is different from the U.S.

For me, in addition to the ministry opportunities, there's also the huge draw of being able to see so many of my old friends that I made down there during my semester at Monash University in 2004. I'm really looking forward to that! My friend Paul has already said he'd organize a group of people and get us tickets to the Geelong Cats-Collingwood Magpies footy match at the MCG on the night of Sat 7 Aug. That'll be sooo sweeeeet! I need to send an email out to everyone soon too, and start trying to figure out who I'm going to stay with on what nights (I'm assuming that I'll be able to stay with any number of my friends, while Campus Crusade folks will be able to host Ash & Tracy). And then when Ash flies back to the States (he can only stay for two weeks because of family obligations), Tracy & I will be doing some independent traveling for a few days -- Tracy to Auckland, and me to Perth. I decided to go to Perth because my friend Bob from here (he currently works at AccuWeather as a forecaster) has accepted a job as a forecaster at the Bureau of Meteorology in Perth, and in theory will be moving down there in late June (when his work visa is accepted will determine that). I figured there might never be another time when I'd be down there and know someone in Perth who could show me around a bit. Regardless of how much time he can get off, I plan to rent a car and do some exploring, as I've never been to Western Australia before. I tossed around the idea of trying to fit in visits to two new places in the few days I had, but in the end decided that since I was spending the time and money to fly to Perth, that I may as well take the time to see as much as I can over there. There are a lot of cool national parks and things to see over on that side of the country (Kalbarri NP was highly recommended to me while I was studying abroad, a 7-hr drive north of Perth), but Perth is just so far from anywhere that it's kind of hard and expensive to get to (it's closer to Singapore than Sydney, and not exactly close to Singapore). So that'll be my "new place" on this trip. As great as Melbourne is, and as many friends as I have there, I at least wanted to go see one new destination at a minimum.

So the three of us booked our flights through Qantas a week ago. On Mon 2 Aug we'll all take Ash's car down to DC and fly out of IAD (Washington Dulles). We'll have one 6-hr stopover at LAX (Los Angeles), and from there it's a 15.5-hr flight to MEL (Melbourne), which lands on the morning of Wed 4 Aug. Then on Mon 16 Aug we'll all depart Melbourne, Ash back to the States, Tracy to AKL (Auckland), and me to PER (Perth). I'll be in Perth from that Monday afternoon until very early morning on Sat 21 Aug -- my flight leaves at 1am local time, and arrives back at IAD at 5:30pm local time also on the 21 Aug, but after 29 hours of travel (layovers in MEL and LAX). Tracy & I will be on the same flight from LAX to IAD, and after we land we're planning to rent a car one-way to go back to State College. So, factoring in the driving, that'll be roughly 34-35 hours of traveling on the 21st of August. Talk about a long day!!

So I have my new passport, and I've officially purchased my IAD -> MEL -> PER -> IAD itinerary for $1600! I'm going back to Australia, for real! It's going to be fun planning (if my research push doesn't kill me), and then even more fun going!

Posted by Jared at 12:11 AM | Comments (2)

May 12, 2010

April in A2

Time to start clearing out the blogging backlog while I have a chance; more posts coming soon, I promise...

Back in mid-April I took a weekend to go visit Alex in Ann Arbor again. We hadn't hung out at all since Christmas break, and Alex was due to leave for Colorado for the summer barely a week later, so time was short to fit in a visit. I had hoped to go a couple weekends earlier in the semester too, but they didn't work out. But fortunately Alex had a weekend where he was going to have a manageable amount of work to do, so I eagerly made the trip on the 16th. It was a really good, enjoyable visit, and we had a great time hanging out.

I got pulled over about five miles after I got on the Ohio Turnpike, though. I was in the left-most of the three lanes, approaching an overpass. There was a cop car sitting off the left shoulder underneath the bridge, as if he had just recently pulled someone over. When I was still about 100-200 feet from the cop, his lights went on, and I knew he was pulling me over for something. I couldn't figure out why though, because I was going just 72-73 mph (in a 65 mph zone). So I pulled over, and the cop (I think he was a state trooper) asked if I knew I was going 75 mph. I was really surprised, and told him I thought I was going only 72. He said, "If you were going 72 I wouldn't have bothered you, but you were going 75." He asked if I'd like to come see the radar gun, so I said sure. He invited me to walk back to his car, and then motioned for me to hop in the passenger seat (after he cleaned some stuff off of it). He showed me the gun, and sure enough, it said 75. While he was running my license and registration, he started talking about how the rain was unbelievable, how it seemed to be following him everywhere he went that day. I mentioned that I'd gone through three bands of rain since PA. I wasn't sure what else to say. I mean, a cop being chatty while I'm sitting in his passenger seat? It was kind of odd, and I was a bit nervous. Anyway, then he asked me if I had any other speeding tickets. I mentioned that I had only one, back in 2003 in Minnesota. Then he asked me if I had ever been cited for any moving violations in the state of Ohio. I told him no. Then he said he was just going to give me a warning, and that I should slow down a bit and be aware that my speedometer might be a little off. That was close, but I was really grateful that I didn't get a ticket. It did have the effect of slowing me down a little bit the rest of the time I was in Ohio, that's for sure! This wasn't my first close call with speeding in Ohio either; in November the lady right ahead of me, who I'd been tailing for an hour because she was the fastest car on the highway, got pulled over. Ohio cops LOVE to pull people over on the Turnpike, that's for sure.

So anyway, I made it to Ann Arbor without getting pulled over again, fortunately. Alex & I went out to dinner at The Original Cottage Inn, and got some great pizza. Then after that we watched "Return of the King." Alex hadn't seen the LotR movies, so over Christmas break we watched the first two movies, and then completed the trilogy on this visit. It seemed like he enjoyed them, even though they were "long." :-) On Sunday his girlfriend Anne said that while she was glad I got him to watch the movies, she was dismayed that he saw the movies before reading the books, hehe.

On Saturday after we got up we decided to go on a good long run. I'd been working hard on upping my mileage in the weeks leading up to my visit so that I could go on a long run with Alex, and we planned out a route of 6.8 miles. For me it was ambitious, as earlier that week I'd just done my longest run since high school, of 5.8 miles. Alex routinely does 7-10 mile runs, but he hadn't gone running in 3 weeks because he was so busy. It was a cold, windy morning, too, and for a couple miles in the middle of the run we were going straight into a 25-mph headwind, which totally sapped my energy. As soon as I stopped the first time I knew I was doomed to stop several more times. I was disappointed with myself that I had to stop to walk so many times, especially on a run I'd been working hard toward being able to do, but I was still glad I ran the longest distance I'd ever run. And it was fun to run a completely different route (in a different city) than I usually do. Hopefully next time I go on a run with Alex, it'll be for a good distance *and* without any stops.

Alex needed to do some homework, so we spent most of the afternoon in his office in the AOSS building on campus, which I hadn't seen before. I knew a homework party was coming, so I also brought along some work to do, mainly a couple "journicles" to read. We went back downtown for dinner late that evening, to Prickly Pear. It's a pretty small but popular southwestern restaurant, and the host said it could be a 45-minute wait. Compared to the 2.5-hour wait when we tried to go there last October the night before the PSU-Michigan football game, 45 minutes was not bad at all. They must be used to customers being willing to accept long waits, because they gave us pagers that could range all over downtown. So we took advantage of the freedom to roam and grabbed a beer at Conor O'Neill's in the meantime. But oh man, Prickly Pear was awesome -- the best margarita I've ever had, plus excellent mahi mahi fajitas. Mmmmm!! And it was the first time Alex had been there either; I didn't know this until he told me that night, but he said he deliberately held off going to Prickly Pear until he could go with me, since we tried to go that one time back in October but were turned away by the really long wait. It was a small thing, but I really appreciated that gesture by my best friend. :-)

On Sunday Alex was playing keyboard with the worship team at his church, so I tagged along and spent the whole morning there -- for the rehearsal, and then both services. I might've considered leaving after the first service, except I needed to get Alex's keyboard, which was being used in the service. (Alex graciously agreed to loan me his keyboard for the summer so that I could use it at Mike's wedding in Green Bay.) Having been on the worship team at my church for 2-3 years with two services, I'm not unaccustomed to spending that much time at a church, hehe. After the service Alex invited a few of his friends over to his place for lunch, so I stuck around for that too.

When I was loading up my car though, I noticed that my rear driver-side tire was low. Really low. So low that a tire pressure sensor wasn't registering anything. It's not a comforting feeling to have a tire down around 10 psi right before leaving on a 400-mile drive. Alex & I drove down to a gas station a half mile away that had free air, so we pumped up my tire. I was rather paranoid about it, so I stopped fairly frequently early on just to check on it, but fortunately it didn't lose any air the whole way back to PA. It still hasn't lost any more air since then, actually.

So I guess I had an "interesting" drive both on the way to and from Ann Arbor on this visit, but I'm very glad not to have gotten a speeding ticket or a flat tire on the interstate! I think I could do with a little less excitement or stress on my next road trip!

Posted by Jared at 11:17 PM | Comments (1)

May 04, 2010

Dan & Kerrie's Wedding

So what have I been up to that led to me blogging only once in all of April? Well, for one thing, I was busy learning some piano music for Dan & Kerrie's wedding, which was Saturday! They asked me to learn "Canon in D" for the processional, "Wedding March" for the recessional (they wanted to keep it pretty traditional in those respects), and then several other hymns and praise choruses for prelude music. It took a lot of time, mostly "Canon in D." That had me nervous enough that I'd usually take most any "free time" that I had in the evenings in April to go practice it for an hour or so.

By last week "Canon in D" still wasn't to the point that I'd hoped it would be (perfection), so I was stressing out about it. I was maybe even stressing out about it so much that it could've contributed to me coming down with a sore throat and cold late last week (the cold came on full strength Saturday morning, just in time for the ceremony). I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to play "Canon in D" perfectly, because I knew that Dan had been dreaming for years of hearing that song as his bride came down the aisle, and I didn't want any mistake of mine to distract people's attention from Kerrie as she walked down the aisle. Along with that, I figured that if nobody noticed my playing, then I would know that I had done a good job. :-)

Anyway, part 2 of Dan's bachelor party was Thursday night at Daryl's place. It was pretty low-key, we just hung out and chatted, told some embarrassing stories about Dan, then the married guys who were there gave some advice to him about marriage, and then we all prayed for him. It was definitely much lower-key than part 1 of the bachelor party two Saturdays ago, when Daryl and one other groomsman took Dan skydiving! That caused quite a stir, and got Kerrie somewhat upset at Daryl. In fact, Daryl didn't even show his face to Kerrie from then until the wedding rehearsal on Friday night, hehe.

The rehearsal was on Friday night, and didn't last very long. Basically just one run-through, and then they changed how some stuff was going to happen (and thus what I'd have to play at the beginning, and for how long), but they didn't do another run-through to give me and everyone else a chance to make sure we knew exactly how it'd go. Oh well, it was really warm in the chapel anyway, and so everyone was eager to get outside again and get to dinner. That was at the Allen Street Grill, and it was the first time I'd ever been there, even though I've lived here for almost five years now. Excellent food. It was a fun to be a part of that and celebrate with the rest of the wedding party. I was definitely getting sicker and could feel the onset of the cold coming that evening, though.

The actual wedding was on Saturday morning at Eisenhower Chapel on campus. It's pretty small, and only seats about 125. It was quite warm in there even before 10am, it felt like it was over 80 degrees. It just didn't cool off overnight. I didn't need to start playing prelude music until 10am (ceremony started at 10:30), but I wanted to get there plenty early to have more time to practice on that particular piano in that space. Because I was rather out of it due to my cold that I'd come down with, I forgot that I'd taken my music up to my apartment the night before, so when I parked on campus, only then did I realize I didn't have it in my car with me. Fortunately there was plenty of time to drive back to my apartment and get it, but it cost me 20 minutes of practice time, only leaving me with 20 minutes. But hey, it all worked out. The piano playing went just fine, even with a few flubs during "Canon in D." At least I was able to keep going and didn't have to go back and restart a phrase or anything. One of the places I messed up was when Kerrie appeared at the back of the church. Tracy (one of the bridesmaids) said it seemed totally natural since everyone had a collective gasp (a good kind of gasp) when they saw her there in her wedding dress, so it seemed like I had the same reaction (even though I couldn't see her at that point). :-) And nobody else claimed to have noticed my mistakes. Go figure, all the attention was on Kerrie. ;-) I think I overestimated the distracting effect that a couple minor mistakes would have in that situation, but in any case, I'm glad it all went well overall. The ceremony was short and sweet, a whole 15-20 minutes or so. In fact, I think it took longer for Dan & Kerrie to dismiss each row individually than it did for the whole rest of the ceremony. Dan & Kerrie wrote their own vows, and instead of the pastor reciting a phrase and them repeating it, they had their vows written on pieces of paper and simply read them to each other. And of course they both shed some tears during that part. Some people said that several people in attendance, and even some kids, started crying too. The wedding went off without a hitch, and now they're married! [I obviously didn't get any photos of the ceremony itself, because it would've been tacky for me to snap some pictures from my perch at the piano up front. I only had a good view of Dan and the groomsmen from where I was anyway.]

The reception was at the Days Inn downtown. Because of the early wedding, the reception featured brunch food, like crepes, yogurt/granola, eggs/sausage, potatoes, and even an omelette station with two chefs making omelettes made-to-order. I've definitely never been at a reception with brunch food before, but I've never been to a morning wedding either. There also wasn't any alcohol apart from the champagne flutes for toasting, so it didn't turn into a dance party or anything. There was also a live jazz trio instead of a deejay, which I actually enjoyed. Dan studies honeybees (he's an entomology grad student), and Kerrie loves songbirds, so the reception theme was "the birds and the bees," with the favors being small jars of honey labeled for their wedding with "Thanks for bee-ing here!" Despite being rather miserable with my cold, I had a great time hanging out with the other meteo people that were invited/could make it: Caren and Shannon & Jerry came down from New York; Chris & Amber drove up from North Carolina; and Jon & Steph flew in from California. Unfortunately Dave & Anke and Daniel & Katie couldn't make it, but they both have very small children that make traveling difficult, so they had a very valid excuse. Anyway, the reception was all over by 3pm, when Dan & Kerrie had a last dance to James Taylor's "Mexico" -- they chose that song because their honeymoon is in Cancún. With the whole afternoon ahead of me, I went home and laid down to rest a bit -- I was exhausted!

It was a great wedding, and I'm really glad I had the opportunity to be a part of it. I'm really happy for Dan & Kerrie, they really are great together. I'm also glad to have a chance to relax a bit and stop worrying about "Canon in D." :-) The next wedding is coming up in under four weeks, but I'm strangely not nervous about that one, even though it's in Lambeau Field. Maybe the nerves will come when the date approaches (or at least for the rehearsal and/or ceremony itself), but if I learned a lesson here, it's that I shouldn't let myself stress out as much as I did. It's good to strive to do something to the absolute best of one's ability, but there are certain situations when a couple small mistakes simply won't be noticed, so it's not worth it to agonize over them. That can be applied to many areas of life, not just music/piano, that's for sure.

Posted by Jared at 11:59 PM | Comments (2)