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July 31, 2006
I Love Free Food
[On location at the Hampton Inn in Fairfax, Virginia]
Okay, so maybe I was a little rash in telling Jeff the other day that "I wouldn't be overly surprised if the Twins sweep the Tigers this weekend," because the Tigers nearly turned the tables and were two innings away from sweeping us in the raucous Metrodome. I was getting pretty negative about the Twins chances yesterday as I was listening to the game while cleaning my room a bit, as Bonderman was dominating until a wonderfully wild and weird 8th inning that saw the Twins score 6 runs (including one on a balk by Bonderman) en route to a 6-4 win, avoiding the sweep. Add to that Baltimore's 9th inning comeback against the White Sox and it was a very positive half hour or so for Twins fans everywhere. Being only a game and a half behind the Yankees and a game behind Chicago after we lost 2 of 3 to Detroit isn't bad at all.
Last Wednesday we on the Frameulators kept our playoff hopes alive, and we finally had a game that wasn't decided by the mercy rule too, holding on for an exciting 15-11 win. We had 11 players (meaning no subs), so it was fun to play the whole game, and have the game go a full 7 innings for a change. Unfortunately I won't be able to play this week for "Team Weather" because of the GMU conference. Hopefully we're still alive for playoffs next week.
I spent a good deal of time on Thursday afternoon and evening working on tweaking my poster after getting Joel's revisions. And yes, I was in Walker until 11pm on a summer evening, but that's partly because I went to Wing Challenge for a couple hours in the evening, so I wasn't being completely lame at least. For those of you who don't know, Wing Challenge is held on six consecutive Thursday evenings at the Tussey Mountain Amphitheater. Each week four vendors each sell typically two or three of their best flavors of wings, and then people get to vote on which flavor was their overall favorite. The winners from each week are invited back to the final Wing Challenge, where the overall winner of the best State College area wings is crowned. So which were my favorites this week? Double Dragon from All Seasons Deli, Tussey Mtn Classic from Tussey Mtn Lodge, and then Spicy Tomato (from I forget where) pulled in a tasty third in my book. I'm wishing we could get back from GMU in time for Wing Challenge this week, but it's highly doubtful it'll happen.
I don't know what happened at trivia on Friday night, we pulled in a disappointing 4th. And there were only 4 teams playing. Sigh. At least we had a good team name, "Harold Reynolds Got Caught Stealing Second Base."
Much of Saturday was spent in celebration of Ed & Ellen's wedding. The ceremony at State College Evangelical Free Church was really quite wonderful, and went off without a hitch, apart from the roll of white carpet down the aisle being rather uncooperative. :-) 
The reception was a good time too, with Matt & Tim playing lots of good Irish music, with various combinations of guitar, banjo, mandolin, violin and dulcimer. And Ed & Ellen had arranged for a few unique things at the reception, such as a little game where you had to go get people's signatures that had done various activities listed on the sheet 
(e.g., went to elementary school with Ed, gone on a safari, etc.). They also announced that clinking glasses to get them to kiss would not work; rather, they requested that they would kiss only if people loudly sung out a song that included the word "love" in the lyrics. Naturally that led to some entertaining moments -- a couple people even sung the "I Love Twinkies" song, which was good enough, lol.
So this afternoon Walter & I drove the 4 hours from State College, PA down to Fairfax, VA for the GMU AT&D conference, the drive was scenic and mostly uneventful. Walter gives his talk tomorrow right before noon (and he's really looking forward to having it done on the first day before lunchtime), and I'll be trying not to look or sound dumb when people ask me questions about my poster. But let me just throw this out there: I think I'm really gonna like being reimbursed for meals and everything by our research grant. :-) But I think I'm really gonna dislike the lack of swiftness that the "approaching" cold front will have, since it'll be up around 100 degrees with dewpoints in the mid-70s for the three days we're down here. Lovely.
How much you wanna bet that alcohol was involved with this car accident in rural PA?
And believe it or not, there's heaps of good news coming from Iraq.
And what kind of Meteo grad are you? You don't even have to be a grad student or a meteo student to take this test, though some of the quiz answers might be slightly less humorous to you. :-) Props to Jacob for creating the quiz. Such hard workers we are. ;-)
Posted by Jared at July 31, 2006 11:27 PM
Comments
Our hot weather finally broke...we got over an inch of rain yesterday and more this morning. Temp down into the 70s, but with matching dewpoints.
Hope all went well today and will go well the rest of the week.
Mom
Posted by: MERAmanuensis at August 1, 2006 07:32 PM
Jared, your Iraq news comes from a website called RedState.com. Its like trying to get unbiased medical studies from the American Tabacco Institute. Maybe the mainstream news is reporting all the bad things because American soldiers and regular people being blow up, killed, kidnapped, or otherwised harmed seems to be a bit more important then if some kids get candy. Its like throwing a sandbag in front of a flood. Sure, it does actually hold back some water. But the rest of it flows right on past.
Posted by: Joshua at August 1, 2006 10:44 PM
Josh, yes it's from RedState.com, but unlike most news stories (both good and bad news), this has links to most of the events and statistics that it claims, which is the main reason why I linked to it. It's not making blind claims. If the good news was reported in proportion to the bad news, it would likely be seen that the bad things are nowhere near as common or as prevalent as the American mainstream media is leading us to believe.
Posted by: Jared at August 1, 2006 11:37 PM
Lee, did you actually click any of those links? The vast majority go to government and military webpages. A good number of them go to very conservative webpages. Heck, the conservative webpages cite the same government wepages RedState.com does. I wouldn't call government department webpages the best source of war information, seeing as how accurate the government has been about this war thus far.
Posted by: Joshua at August 2, 2006 05:45 AM