[On location in New Orleans, Louisiana]
I always like to take the opportunity to write “on location” posts from new places, and this week is no different! I have had some down time today because the talks scheduled for today at the CBD Conference didn’t look interesting at all. As one conference attendee put it, “The atmosphere is an afterthought to these people.” I can’t really disagree with that sentiment, considering the sheer volume of chemistry and biology talks compared to the miniscule number of atmosphere-related talks.
Before getting into how the Crescent City has been, I’m gonna rewind to last weekend, when one of my good friends from high school, Mike M., flew out from Green Bay to Penn State to visit me! He had originally planned to come out on the weekend of the Penn State-Oregon State game in early September, but when Aaron died he managed to get it rescheduled to last weekend. And he almost wasn’t able to come out this time either — Mike works at a Sherwin Williams paint store in Shawano, WI, and last Tuesday his boss was fired, which left Mike as the only employee at the store. Fortunately the regional manager was able to pull someone in from another store to cover for Mike for the weekend, so that he didn’t have to cancel his visit. That would’ve been a major bummer.
After Mike’s flight landed on Friday afternoon, I gave him a tour of the town, including the Lion Shrine, Walker Building (always a highlight of any tour of Penn State!), and the shops along College Ave (so he could buy his fill of Penn State stuff). Friday night we had dinner brinner with Kerrie, Dan, Tracy, Amanda, Daryl, Jenn & Ashley as a pre-celebration for Kerrie’s birthday (brinner = breakfast for dinner), since she also had the CBD Conference this week in New Orleans, and with Thanksgiving week immediately following. Mike was more than happy to oblige Kerrie and the others by regaling them with embarrassing stories about me, haha. After playing a couple games with everyone, we just hung out and stayed up pretty late, catching up on everything. It was fun.
Saturday was the main event, with the Penn State vs Indiana football game. Even after the game was announced to be a noon kickoff, we still had hoped to tailgate before the game, but in the days leading up to the game, it became clear that the weather wasn’t going to cooperate. And sure enough, it was very rainy on Saturday morning, and would not have been enjoyable tailgating weather for anyone. The rain continued during the game too, but fortunately we all had ponchos to keep us reasonably dry (because of the rain I didn’t bring my camera to the game either). With all the rain though, the Blue Band wasn’t allowed to march on the field at all, either for pregame or halftime, which was a bummer (it’s my understanding that Joe Paterno doesn’t let the band march on the field when it’s rainy). I had really hoped that Mike would get the *full* Penn State football gameday experience when he came out here, especially because he’s loved Penn State since he was a little kid, but there was still plenty of gameday experience. As for the game, Penn State’s offense was sluggish and sloppy in the first half once again, only nosing out to a 10-7 halftime lead. Finally in the second half the Nittany Lions started exerting their will over the injury-depleted Hoosiers, and won 34-7. It also would’ve been nice to have a slightly more exciting game to get the crowd into it, but with the noon kickoff, all the rain, playing lowly Indiana, and having lost to Iowa last week to ruin national championship hopes, there wasn’t a whole lot of electricity in the student section and the crowd in general. This Saturday will be very different, when we host a good Michigan State team at 3:30pm, with a trip to the Rose Bowl on the line. The Indiana game was still fun though, and we stayed till the very end. By midway through the 4th quarter, the rain had stopped anyway! That night I had a bunch of PSCG people over to play games and whatnot, but everyone was having fun just hanging out and talking and everything, so no games got played. That was fine though. After everyone left Mike & I got in a quick game of Lord of the Rings.
Mike & I went to church in the morning, and after that went to lunch at Damon’s with Kerrie, Tracy, Chad & Rachel so that we could catch both the Packers-Bears and Vikings-Buccaneers games (I think Mike would’ve gone into withdrawal had he not been able to watch the Packers game, haha). We only stayed till the end of the 3rd quarter, and then I took Mike to the Creamery to top off his Penn State experience before he had to fly out mid-afternoon. It was great to have him in State College for a weekend, and to catch up with him and everything. I really hope he’ll be able to come out again sometime!
On Monday morning I had to get up early so I could catch my 7:50am flight to New Orleans (via Philadelphia). We got to New Orleans around noon, so after we checked into the Hilton Riverside downtown, those of us who came down that day (me, Kerrie, Sue, Andrew, Luna, David & Lili — Dave, AJ, Glenn, Brian & Brian all came down Sunday) grabbed lunch at a cool place called Mulate’s, just a couple blocks from our hotel (and across the street from the Riverwalk mall and the Convention Center). The blackened alligator and jambalaya were really good, I must say. 🙂 After lunch, Sue, Kerrie, David & I wandered around the city for a bit, going down to the French Quarter, Bourbon Street, Jackson Square, Cafe du Monde (where we had some delicious cafe au lait and beignets!), and then along the riverfront for awhile. There were appetizers served at the welcome reception that evening at the hotel, and that was more than enough for us considering the huge lunch we’d had.
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Our hotel is pretty nice. I mean, what would you expect from the Hilton? My room is on the 17th floor and overlooks the Mississippi River, it’s been cool to see all sorts of riverboats, tugboats and barges go by. And the food that’s been provided as part of the conference here has been fantastic too. The downside is that despite being an expensive, swanky hotel, they charge for just about every little extra item that’d typically be complimentary at more mid-range hotels. For example, something that’s now as standard as wireless internet? $15 for 24 hours, or $6 for 1 hour. That’s outrageous! I bit the bullet and paid for it my first night here though, because I absolutely needed to get some forecasts done for class, and to get some other work done that required the internet. Since Tuesday evening I’ve been fairly successful with leeching internet from someone’s wireless in a nearby room. It’s not a fast connection, but it’s been relatively reliable at least.
With Kerrie’s birthday happening this week, I had been trying to arrange a surprise visit from Daniel on Monday afternoon/evening. But on Monday morning while we were in Philadelphia I got a call from him that his Air Force bosses dumped a bunch of work on him that had to be done by Wednesday morning, so he wasn’t able to make the trip down from Shreveport. 🙁 It would’ve been so fun to see him again, but such is life.
I gave my presentation on Tuesday morning, the first talk in the first set of parallel sessions. It went really well, too! I wasn’t nervous at all or anything, either. I think after being so stressed out a few weeks ago about whether I’d even have anything to present, there wasn’t anything left to be nervous about when it came to giving the presentation, haha. Dave & Sue were really glad to see that I’d implemented (nearly) all of the nitpicking suggestions that they’d made the night before when I did a dry run of my presentation for them. I got quite a few compliments about my talk from various people, including the NCAR folks that were there. I was very glad to get it out of the way! All the talks in that first session were really good, with a couple other NCAR talks (which were very well-done as usual) and then Dave giving Walter’s presentation too. From my (biased) point of view, it was easily the best session of the whole conference. And it’s definitely been all downhill from there, as the rest of the sessions have gotten further and even completely away from meteorology. That night most of the PSU NWP group went out to a place across the street from the hotel called Gordon Biersch’s, which had some excellent beer. I’d really never hung out with many of them in a social setting before, but we all had a great time. AJ & Glenn in particular are so funny, even before having a beer. 🙂 For instance, before Glenn mentioned it at dinner, I never knew that AJ learned English from Beavis & Butthead, haha.
I set my alarm for Wednesday morning, but forgot to turn it on, and so I got downstairs a bit late for some of the morning talks. Oh well. By afternoon there wasn’t anything I was interested in anyway, so I skipped out for a bit after lunch to work on some other homework and whatnot. I tried going to another couple talks late in the afternoon, but I couldn’t make it through a third (even though that would’ve been the last one of the day).
Last night after the poster session wrapped up, for Kerrie’s birthday Sue, David, Kerrie & I went out to eat at the Red Fish Grill on Bourbon Street (right by Canal Street, and right across from a Krystal — are you jealous, Jeff [Frame]?), on Daniel’s recommendation. It was fantastic! I got the black drum (with a side of gumbo, of course!), which was very good. I probably haven’t had fish that good since my brothers & I took my mom out for her 60th birthday to the Oceanaire in Minneapolis. 
Dave and the NWP group showed up a little later, and Dave even got her a big piece of banana cream pie with a candle in it. After dinner Kerrie, David & I walked down Bourbon Street to Pat O’Brien’s (another of Daniel’s excellent recommendations), where we met up with Andrew, Luna and a few NCAR people, where we had a couple of their famous hurricanes. Pat O’Brien’s definitely seemed to be classier and more pleasant than a lot of the places we walked past on Bourbon Street, and it had an awesome courtyard in the back with a flaming fountain.
But as for the rest of Bourbon Street, let’s just say I’ve never seen so many bars in one place before. Or strip clubs. All around the French Quarter there were tons of voodoo and occult shops/museums too, and there are tarot card readers all over the place too. There’s some of all that in any big city, but New Orleans sure seems to be a distinct hub of hedonism and demonic influence. 
Just today in a local gift shop we spotted a book called “Christian Voodoo.” And it wasn’t a joke, it was written to be a serious book. There really is a lot of weird stuff down here. One thing there’s been less of than I expected are street musicians. There were some by the riverside and in front of Cafe du Monde, but apart from that they’ve been pretty notably absent. I had expected the sounds of jazz and zydeco to permeate the air.
Today I didn’t even make the pretense of going to any talks. None of them were of any interest to me, pure and simple. I walked around after lunch with Kerrie & Sue for a bit because it was an unbelievably beautiful day outside, and then Kerrie & I went back to Cafe du Monde to hang out for awhile (and I got myself a souvenir mug from there). In the evening we all went to the Awards Banquet, and AJ won an award for “Best Scientific Collaboration,” for a paper on which he was lead author. We knew AJ was a finalist for some sort of an award, but getting that particular award was quite a pleasant surprise! He got a really nice crystal trophy too. It was nice to see DTRA recognize at least one atmospheric paper at this heavily chem/bio/medical-dominated conference.
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We have just a half-day of the conference left to go tomorrow, but the talks tomorrow morning look interesting again at least. Sue also gives the last talk of the conference right before noon, so she & I basically bookend the conference sessions. Our flight leaves New Orleans at 3pm, and we get back to State College a little after 10pm. It’s been a fun week in New Orleans, and unlike back in July when I found out I won the scholarship, right now I’m glad I won it and was able to come down here (and even back then I knew I’d feel this way now). It was a lot of work and a lot of stress, but it worked out quite well in the end. It’ll be good to get back to Penn State though, if only so I can go stand outside all day in the cold on Saturday, tailgating and going to the game (it’s only gonna be in the 20s, but unfortunately it probably won’t snow during the game, sigh…), and so that I can start driving home for Thanksgiving break on Sunday morning!