Side Trip to Patapsco

The last couple days of the workshop went well. It was definitely more interesting to break up into working groups to discuss things, even if I really didn’t have anything to contribute. For the most part, the workshop was really aimed at operational users in the National Weather Service or in the various national centers within NCEP. One of the most relevant things from the workshop for my research was to hear straight from everyone there that the issue of how best to initialize mesoscale or fine-scale numerical weather prediction (NWP) ensembles is very much an open research question. Basically, that means that my PhD project will be cutting-edge in that area, even if it’s not necessarily the main focus of my dissertation, because I need to create my own high-resolution mesoscale NWP ensembles for use in driving atmospheric transport & dispersion (AT&D) models like SCIPUFF. In fact, that’s a big issue that I have to figure out this summer…
The workshop wrapped up around 1 o’clock on Thursday, so on our way back to State College, Walter & I decided to get a little disc golf in. We found what turned out to be a really nice 18-hole course in Patapsco Valley State Park west of Baltimore. The midges were pretty bad on the first few holes in the woods, but later on they weren’t quite so bad. It was a really long course too (some holes over 600 ft long, which is quite a distance for disc golf … I probably walked over 3 miles during the round in total), and it had a good mix of tough holes in or on the edge of the woods — even one with a double dogleg — and also a few easier wide-open holes in meadows. In the end, I made up two strokes on hole 17, but missed a chance to tie Walter on 18, so I lost to him 97-98. I’d call that a moral victory though. 🙂 And as far as ranking the very few courses that I’ve played, I’d put it:
1. Patapsco Valley State Park (Marriottsville, MD)
2. Circleville Park (State College, PA)
3. Lime Bluff Park (between Muncy & Hughesville, PA, near Williamsport)
Prior to Circleville Park’s expansion and renovation, it definitely would’ve been at the bottom, but now that it’s a 9-hole course, I like it more than Lime Bluff (which wasn’t bad, but was far too flat for my liking when I went, but might be a lot better in ten years when more of the trees grow in).
Because my Amazon order arrived while I was gone, I was able to host a movie marathon at my place with the Bourne trilogy; we donned it the “Bourne” Again Movie Marathon. Pretty clever, eh? Well, I can’t take all the credit for the name. In fact, I can’t take any of the credit for it, because my brother Nathan came up with the name. 🙂 Anyway, a few people from PSCG came over to watch the three movies, and it was a fun time. I definitely noticed a few more cool little details by watching all three back-to-back-to-back, like small lines in the third movie that are quotations from the first movie. I wonder which trilogy I’ll try to have a movie night for next, Ocean’s or LOTR. A couple people have suggested doing an Indiana Jones marathon because of the new movie coming out in a couple days, but those movies have been saturating the cable airwaves the last few weeks.
A few of us also went to see the new Chronicles of Narnia movie that debuted this weekend, Prince Caspian. Mind you, I haven’t read the books in many years, so I couldn’t point out what the movie added or left out compared to the book, but I really enjoyed the movie. There was a good amount of action, and I thought the young actors did better than in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Sure, they were still given some cheesy lines by the writers for some cheap laughs (or groans), but I thought they did a good job overall. I’m looking forward to the release of Voyage of the Dawn Treader in 2010, and I wonder how many of the Narnia books they’ll make into movies. They’ve done a decent job with it so far at least. But I really need to re-read those books again. Maybe I’ll get around to that this summer.
I finally got around to mopping/scrubbing our kitchen floor hardcore yesterday afternoon. I wonder how many more days our apartment will smell like Pine-Sol… I guess there are definitely worse smells in the world, haha. But it’s gonna take a few more times of mopping/scrubbing to get it hopefully clean enough by early August so that we don’t lose part of our deposit on that. Fat chance of CREM letting us have any of our deposit money back, though. The manifesto they sent us a couple weeks back of all the whole big checklist of things that they want done is basically just their way of saying, “we’re not giving you any money back.” I’ll be glad not to have to deal with CREM ever again after August.
This morning I had a dentist appointment to get my first-ever filling. I consider myself pretty fortunate not to have had a cavity or anything wrong with my teeth until age 24. So now I have finally had the pleasure of going through a morning with half my mouth being totally numb. It’s a weird sensation, to be sure. One filling down, two more to go on the other side of my mouth on Wednesday afternoon. Joy.
Finally, in a bit of political news, might Jesse “The Body” Ventura be running for public office again? It seems that he’s toying with the idea of running for the U.S. Senate seat from Minnesota, to give people a “none of the above” option in a race that’s currently between Norm Coleman and Al Franken. Yuck. Given those two choices, Ventura just might win!