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December 30, 2008
Christmas Break 2008
[On location in Cumberland, Wisconsin]
It's been a fairly relaxing Christmas break so far. It's been good to see family and friends the last few days. This break I've been making a well-worn path to the Twin Cities too, that's for sure!
We had our family Christmas on Christmas Day here at my parents' place. Around mid-afternoon everyone came over, my younger brother Jake, my oldest brother Nathan & Laura and their four kids, and Eve and her two kids. As has become tradition for our family, we had a Christmas hymnsing before opening presents and whatnot. It was good to have everyone together again, but my brother Aaron's presence was definitely missed. I think it hit me harder than it did at Thanksgiving, because there were so many people at Thanksgiving, and it also was a whirlwind trip somewhere else for the day, instead of having it at my parents' place. In contrast, for Christmas it was a smaller gathering (just our family), and here in Cumberland, where we've had our family Christmas for the last decade or so. So while break has been relaxing, I've also felt a bit down, but I don't think that's surprising or unexpected. For those of you that have been praying for our family, thank you.
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On Saturday afternoon I drove down to Dave's place in Hastings, to carpool with him to the now-annual GAC Physics and Phriends Christmas break get-together. We couldn't find a date that worked for everyone, but the 27th worked for the most people, so we went for that. We all met up at Cory's dad's bar in Osseo (Dick's Bar) -- "all" being me, Dave, Cory, Seth, Carl, John, Brendan, Kate, Jill and her fiancee Andrej (Jolene, Zach, Ben and others were unfortunately unable to make it). While I didn't get a chance to talk to everyone as much as I would've liked, it was still great to see a bunch of my college friends again and hear how they're doing. Seth had to catch a bus in downtown Minneapolis early the next morning, so Carl, Dave & I all shared a hotel room with him downtown, and went out to Brit's Pub on Nicollet Mall. Good times!
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I drove back to the Twin Cities yesterday to meet up with my friend Luke for lunch at Culver's in Hudson. As a little background (because this is a cool story), Luke was my best friend way back in first grade when my family lived in Springfield, MN, and then after a few years we pretty much lost contact. Then in my freshman year at Gustavus, I saw a flyer in the music building advertising a concert with the Southwest Minnesota Orchestra over in New Ulm, featuring pianist Luke Norell. Naturally curious, I drove to New Ulm for the concert. Sure enough it was my friend Luke, and he and his family were sure surprised to see me after the concert! We've kept in contact since then, but as far as we can remember, yesterday was the first time we'd actually managed to get together since summer 2005, when he came to visit me while I was living at Aaron & Eve's. It was great to hang out with him for the afternoon and catch up, and hear how he's doing in his grad program in piano performance at Indiana University (his instructor's Andre Watts!). Hopefully it'll be much less than three and a half years before we hang out again!
I have to say, this year I'm more interested in the NFL Playoffs than I have been for the past several years. I think that has a wee bit to do with the Vikings qualifying for the playoffs for the first time since the 2004 season (and for their first home playoff game since the 1999 season). They've choked over and over again this decade, so I was rather surprised when they managed to beat the Giants 20-19 on a 50-yard game-winning field goal by Ryan Longwell as time expired (despite some horrendous clock management at the end of the game), to clinch the NFC North division title and the #3 seed in the NFC. Their reward? A home date with the red-hot Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday at 4:30pm EST/3:30pm CST on FOX. Well, red-hot if the team that beat Dallas 44-6 this week shows up, but not-so-hot if the team that lost to Washington 10-3 the week before shows up. Either way, I'm rather intrigued by the matchup, and I could easily see either team winning it. As long as Tarvaris Jackson doesn't screw up and Adrian Peterson gets over his recent case of fumble-itis (which are two rather big ifs), the Vikings are built for a deep playoff run, with their excellent rushing offense and rushing defense. And I'll be back in State College in time for the game too, so maybe I'll be able to watch the game with a friend or two who are Iggles fans. I'll be proudly wearing my Vikings gear Saturday night and Sunday out in PA! Hopefully I'll be able to wear it proudly on Monday too. :-)
After watching the Vikings game, I made some good progress on my photo reclamation project. I'd been dreading sorting through the next three directories of photos because they each had well over 6,000 files in them. I'd done an earlier pass with Adobe Bridge, sorting the files by pixel dimensions so I could delete all the thumbnails and everything, but apparently it has a hard time sorting 10,000 photos at once, because I quickly discovered that a bunch of thumbnails were still there. So after another more careful/patient pass with Bridge, I deleted close to 20,000 files (and about 15 GB of disk space) from those three directories alone (thumbnails and also full-size images that were saved on my old external hard drive), leaving just 200-300 to sort (there are a few more directories with thousands of files each to go through though). Now I think I can maybe see a glimmer of light at the end of this long tunnel. Maybe in a couple months, after finding a few more hours here and there to work on it, I'll have everything back to normal.
My car has been fixed! Hooray! We took it over to a shop in Rice Lake, and they looked at it yesterday. We feared that it would need a new heater core, which would almost certainly mean it wouldn't be ready in time for me to drive back to Pennsylvania, since they're only open Mon-Tue this week. Instead, all they had to do was flush the radiator/coolant system, and replace a leaky radiator cap. Now it works like a charm! I'm glad I'll be able to drive my own car again when I go to Scott & Katie's to celebrate New Year's Eve tomorrow, and when Alex & I head to Valpo on Friday, and I continue on to PA on Saturday. It might be old, certain things might not work on it anymore, and it might have 226,500 miles on it, but it's my first car and I'm still attached to it!
Ever since I got up this morning, it's been heavily snowing (three stars and four stars, for the most part). Last night we were only in a winter weather advisory, with 3-6" predicted, but this morning we found ourselves in a winter storm warning, with 8-12" predicted! Shortly after 9am when I brushed 5-6" or so of snow off my car so that I could move it into the garage (before the snow became too deep to move it anywhere), I also took a pretty good spill on our driveway -- beneath all the dry, fluffy snow, our driveway's been coated in ice for days now, and the snow only makes it more slippery. Ahhh, how I've missed real winter!
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Just two more days until the Rose Bowl, featuring the Penn State Nittany Lions and the Southern Calfornia Trojans! The national media's not giving PSU much of a chance because they have a pretty big bias for USC (to put it politely). What a great matchup this should be, though! I think Penn State's underrated, and will acquit themselves very well against USC -- and I think we'll win, too. WE ARE... PENN STATE!! BEAT THE TROJANS!!
Posted by Jared at December 30, 2008 02:33 PM