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April 02, 2006
Joakim Noah's Androgenous Ponytail
I'm tellin ya, there's not a much better start to the day like I had Thursday, when I woke up and saw that my friend Rob from Australia had emailed me out of the blue, it was great! It'd been a long time since I'd heard anything from him. It's always so great when I hear from any of my friends from Down Under, I miss them all quite a bit, and wish I could go back and see them again. Maybe after I get my degree at PSU I can find a job down there (ideally in Melbourne, but I guess Canberra or Sydney wouldn't be bad second choices) for a couple years. Or maybe longer. Sometimes I seriously wonder if I'm being called to go back there for an extended period of time, or if it's just a fond sense of nostalgia I have for the place and the people. It really is hard to tell these things...
Thursday was also a good day because the weather was absolutely gorgeous out (low 60s and sunny!) and I didn't have to teach either of my Meteo 003 labs this week, which are usually back-to-back at 10:10am and 12:20pm. So I took advantage of my abnormal lunchtime freedom to head down to the India Pavillion for the awesome lunch buffet with Daniel, Vic, Mario & David. I'm tellin ya, the naan bread and nuclear chicken is where it's at! And then in addition to no Meteo 003 labs, there was also no Colloquium, so I was able to use that hour-plus to focus on getting my Dynamics homework done. 
When I wasn't eating Korean food that my roommate Bong Gi and some of his friends made (I guess Thursday night's becoming their traditional time to cook a big meal at our apartment) or watching "The Office," I spent the rest of the evening slogging through a journal article that I'm in the process of writing my term paper on in Dynamics. At the time I didn't think I was getting a whole lot out of it, but this weekend when I've been going back over it to write the paper, I guess I must've done a good job of underlining stuff, because it sure seems like I got the main points (plus a lot of other not-so-pertinent stuff too, meh). Who would've thunk it? Anyway, so yeah, Thursday was a pretty good day.
Friday was another pretty good day weather-wise at 72 degrees, though it rained a bit in the evening. All in all ya can't complain about that for the last day of March in State College! Somehow I got the first two paragraphs of my Dynamics paper written in Walker despite my usual Friday demotivation. I know two paragraphs isn't a whole lot, but hey, the hardest part about writing a paper (or pretty much any project) is just getting started, so I at least accomplished that.
Friday evening brought the usual tradition of team trivia at Sports Cafe, and this time they actually took my suggestion for a team name (though admittedly I rarely have one to suggest), "Joakim Noah's Androgenous Ponytail." For all you out there who don't know what the heck that means, Joakim Noah is a very good basketball player for the Florida Gators, and he's got a very iffy-looking ponytail. At any rate, trivia was very good to us Friday night. Or we were very good at the trivia. Take your pick, because we got a *perfect* score to take home first place. According to Steve the trivia guy, it's only the second time it's been accomplished in the trivia nights he's run. So now that team name is forever retired, thank you very much.
After trivia I had a bunch of people over at my place for a rockin' game of Apples to Apples, it was Daniel, Jacob, Kerrie, Jeff, Vic, Chris, Rob C., myself and my roommate Emre that all played. For a game with that many players the rules suggest playing to four green cards, but we kept extending the win-condition, and finally called it quits when Emre won his tenth green card (a couple of us were right behind him with nine), 
so it was 2:30 before people went home. A very, very fun night to be sure, with lots of laughs. A couple of the best plays when for the green card "Senseless," Daniel played "Helen Keller" (automatic win right there, lol), and when Jeff was the judge for "Violent," some of the entries were "Detroit" (where he's from, he really didn't like seeing that card played for "violent"), "Weapons Dealer," and the winner, "Rosa Parks."
After sleeping in a bit on Saturday I finally got around to working more on my Dynamics paper, and I actually got it about 75% finished before I went over to Jeff & Vic's place to catch the Final Four with Mario & Chris. We were all excited for it, but all of us were quite disappointed with the utter non-competetiveness and boredom of both games, with Florida and Joakim Noah's androgenous ponytail mercilessly slaying the Cinderella team of the tournament, George Mason, and UCLA absolutely smothering LSU. I was hoping that either George Mason or LSU would make it to the Championship Game so that I would have someone to cheer for, but alas, it was not to be. Thought it'll make me slightly less sad to be missing the first 35-40 minutes of the game tomorrow night when I'm watching what's sure to be another riveting episode of "24." I just feel for my cousin Jonathan out in Spokane, he's gonna have to decide between watching the last 20-30 minutes of the championship game or seeing the first half hour of "24." I think it's gonna be a tough choice for him. I totally don't know what I'd do in his situation!
Today was another good day (though unproductive, from a paper-writing standpoint). Went to church in the morning with Daniel (after successfully remembering to put all my clocks forward an hour before I went to bed last night), got some groceries (after not going to the store for two weeks, so I was out or running very low on some essentials), figured out how to install some new (and hopefully non-crappy) windshield wiper blades on my car (my old ones had gotten absolutely horrible, my last two drives back to State College from the Pittsburgh airport were not so fun), 
and then I went up to Jeff & Vic's place in Houserville for a picnic for the meteo grads. It was another absolutely gorgeous day, low 60s and sunny. Perfect weather for an outdoor barbecue if you ask me. And I was able to introduce at least Daniel & Jeff to the joy of Leinenkugel's, which I've only managed to find at one place out here (I was even surprised to find it at all in Pennsylvania, since it's a regional Wisconsin-made beer). I hadn't had it in so long, I figured I could treat myself on such a nice day. :-) All of us at the picnic (and there were quite a few people there, it was awesome) tried to keep conversation from being school-related, but we were never successful for very long, hehe. And then tonight at Penn State Christian Grads we had a really good Bible study, on John 18. It's cool how the timing is gonna work out, how we'll be doing John 20 in two weeks for Resurrection Sunday. :-) It was not planned that way, but with the off weeks (or accidental repeating of a chapter like last week), it's all gonna come out just right.
Well, let's see, do I try to do a little more work on my paper this evening, or should I just relax and go to bed, and attack everything with renewed energy tomorrow? I think I'm all for letting inertia decide this one. To bed I go. After I shed a tear about the chance of snow in the forecast here in State College from tomorrow night through Wednesday night. The occasional springtime snow showers after being in the 60s and 70s are one thing I don't really like about living in the North, but oh well. But hey, that's part of what makes meteorology interesting, particularly in the turbulent and ever-changeable mid-latitude spring!
Posted by Jared at April 2, 2006 11:34 PM