Would You Like, To Buy, A Brrrooom??

Thank goodness Arts Fest is over. State College can finally go back to a normal level of activity, without tens of thousands of visitors and hundreds of artists’ booths cramming into downtown and a corner of campus making getting around downtown a nightmare. Which is why I set out a goal for myself to avoid driving downtown at all costs from Thursday through today. I like the occasional easy goal for myself like that. I mean, it’s not glamorous or especially noteworthy (other than apparently I’m making note of it here), but it’s definitely doable and quite practical. And fortunately for me I can put a checkmark by that one.
Anyway, this was my first Arts Fest (the 40th annual Central PA Festival for the Arts) experience here in State College, and I can see why it’s a big deal. On Thursday and Friday after lunch a few of us took the scenic route back to Walker, meandering past a whole bunch of different booths where artists from all over the country were selling their different kinds of work. Some artists were selling photography (much of it absolutely gorgeous), others had paintings, there were glass blowers, potters, sandal-makers, woodworkers, ornamental brooms — you name the craft, it was there. And all of it (that really interested me anyway) was completely out of sight from a price standpoint, at least with what I could reasonably afford. For instance, there were some framed photos that I really liked, but they were being sold for hundreds of dollars. And then there was this super-cool broom booth on Pattee Mall on campus, with these decorative brooms that were some of the coolest things I’ve ever seen, their handles were usually two (or more) branches that were woven together, and most of them were rather tall — and all of them were hundreds of dollars. I don’t know why you’d spend that much on a broom, but it was definitely very artistic. (And I apologize for using a family inside joke for the title of this post, but I couldn’t resist!) A bunch of us got the idea that we’d like to try to pool our resources together and get a booth at next year’s Arts Fest and sell various photos, paintings or whatnot that we meteo grad students created. I mean, I’d totally be up for getting larger prints of some of my best photos framed and trying to sell them, I think that’d be really cool. Unfortunately, I heard from Amy that it probably costs around $2000 to get a booth here at Arts Fest, so that probably puts the kibosh on that idea. I’m still motivated to get some of my pictures framed for myself, however. And I think I picked up some good ideas for photographs (or series of them) to take in the future, and ideas for what sorts of frames look good and whatnot.
Friday evening was Faith Night at the State College Spikes (single-A minor league baseball) game, so a few of us from Penn State Christian Grads got together to go to the game. It was my first time in the brand new baseball stadium, and they really did a wonderful job with it. I’m especially a fan of the views of Mount Nittany and Tussey Ridge beyond the outfield wall, it’s in a gorgeous setting. The game was fun too, although the Spikes lost 6-4 to the Tri-Cities Valley Cats. Following the game Kirk Cameron, the actor who starred in the TV series “Growing Pains” as the character Mike Seaver, gave a fantastic 45-minute message about his conversion from atheism to Christianity. His presentation of the gospel message was quite powerful, challenging and refreshingly blunt. For preaching to an interdenominational crowd that gathered after the game in the stands along the 1st base line to hear him talk, he really didn’t soft-pedal some of the potentially controversial doctrinal issues he got into, which surprised me a great deal (in a very pleasant way). To be honest, my expectations of Kirk Cameron’s talk beforehand weren’t that great, but he really impressed me.
Last night Kerrie, Daniel, Katie, Jeff & I went over to Jacob’s place for a game night, with some Taboo to start it off and then some card games. Katie & I thought it’d be a good idea to teach everyone else a game we both love called “Hand & Foot” (or as Daniel apparently calls it, “hoof & mouth disease”), but as we were working on shuffling the seven decks of cards together we started to realize that we played with some rather different variants of rules (most notably the point structure for laying down initially, what the deal was with red and black 3s, and then the win conditions). So the two of us end up having a rather spirited discussion over the fine points about which rule variants were better for half an hour or so, I kinda lost track of time there for a bit, hehe. Meanwhile, everyone else was totally lost because we hadn’t explained any of the rules to them at that point (because we couldn’t agree on which set of rules to start explaining). Finally we managed to agree on the rules we’d play by (which ended up being mostly the variants I was used to, since they sounded more friendly to beginners — Katie’s rather cut-throat and ruthless when it comes to card games, lol), and though I thought the game was fun and everything, I think everyone else had more fun listening to Katie & I argue about the rules forever beforehand. 🙂 To wind up the night we were introduced to a card game of Jacob’s called “Fluxx” (which has absolutely nothing to do with physics or meteo), a game where the rules and goals change constantly throughout (they’re in a constant state of flux, get it? hehe), making planning strategy useless until it actually gets to be your turn (because you don’t know the rules/goals you’ll be playing with until then, and then your strategy goes out the window after your turn’s done, because the rules will likely change on the next person’s turn). It was pretty zany and fun, I really enjoyed it. We’re such nerds. (And according to that test I just linked to, I’m 78% nerd. Seems about right!)
Be glad you weren’t in Iowa this weekend. Unless you were, in which case I feel sorry for you. Seriously. Particularly if you’re from Webster City, which is about an hour’s drive north of Des Moines or so. Why am I picking on the friendly central Iowegians, you might ask? Well, Shannon was complaining to me yesterday afternoon about how awful the temp/dewpoint combo was where she is in Maryland for a couple weeks on a field project (an incredibly muggy 86/75 — that’s a temperature of 86F and a dewpoint of 75F, which feels downright tropical and oppressive), so I endeavored to find someplace in the country that had it worse. Naturally the first place I looked on the HPC Surface Map was Iowa, since their massive corn fields always bump up the dewpoint a few degrees, and Webster City caught my eye with the “eww” reading of the day — 91 over 82. As many of you know, a dewpoint of anything over 80 degrees is, well, pretty bad, unless you like sweating like a horse just by standing still and relaxing outside, much less doing anything that’s expending calories. So out of curiosity I decided to check back at the readings from Webster City this afternoon (Sunday) to see if they were any better from yesterday, and to my shock it was worse. Much worse. For over an hour this afternoon they were reporting a temperature of 95 to go with a dewpoint of 88 degrees, making for a heat index (apparent temperature) of an absolutely miserable 133 degrees F. (I was so impressed by that reading that I took a screenshot to save for posterity.) I can’t even fathom what a dewpoint of 88 feels like, I’m pretty sure I’ve never even heard of a dewpoint being that high before, at least not in the United States. That’s some absolutely deplorable humidity. We’re gonna be in the 90s every day this week here in State College probably, but thankfully we won’t be getting anywhere near that humid! The dog days of summer sure have arrived, though.