One Head, Two Heads

[On location in Cumberland, Wisconsin]
Congratulations to the Penn State Nittany Lions football team, which clinched the Big Ten Conference championship and an invitation to the Rose Bowl on Saturday! It was cold and snowy and totally AWESOME! Big Ten football weather, baby! So I bundled up with a bunch of layers (six, I think, haha), and went tailgating with Walter, Jeff & Kerrie, and then a few others showed up later. It wound up being the best-attended tailgate of the year, go figure. Sounds like an endorsement of the wintry weather to me! Anyway, we tailgated for about four hours before walking up to the stadium. It snowed pretty hard for much of the Blue Band pregame ceremonies (I’ll try to post some videos to YouTube soon), and I was loving it! I’ve always wanted to go to a football game in the snow! The snow squall made the field all white, but the snow stopped for good just a few minutes into the game. 🙁 Oh well, I guess I can’t be too greedy, since it did snow a wee bit at the beginning of the game. It was a fun game to be at, especially since Penn State’s explosive offense awoke from its three-game slumber, storming out to leads of 28-0 in the 2nd quarter and 49-7 in the 4th quarter, before Michigan State scored some points late in garbage time, to make the final score 49-18. The Michigan State coach drew the ire of all the cold Penn State fans though, when he did some bush-league things like calling time outs and ordering onside kicks and such, in the last two minutes of the game when the Spartans were down by 30-40 points. This has been a fake rivalry game ever since Penn State joined the Big Ten in 1993 (they even created the world’s UGLIEST trophy for the series — the Land Grant Trophy), but I think Spartans coach Mark D’Antonio’s childish actions just fanned the flames and might’ve created a real rivalry. I hope we blow them out again next year, that’s for sure.
Well, I’m finally home at my parents’ house. I’ve flown quite a bit the last few days, a lot more than I anticipated even late last week, and the flights haven’t been completely without a little drama. First, when we got to the airport in New Orleans on Friday, the ticket agent rebooked some of us onto an earlier flight to Philadelphia, because that earlier flight was delayed a couple hours, and he figured that our originally scheduled flight might also become similarly delayed, which would make it iffy for us to catch our connection to State College. The irony? Our new, “earlier” flight left right after our original flight, which departed on time. But hey, at least we got there in time and were able to catch our flight to chilly State College. Speaking of which, I was pretty excited to see snow on the ground when we landed. Even when we were walking around in the sunny 60s in New Orleans, I was jealous when I’d hear that it was snowing back north. I mean, it’s November after all!
After I got back to my apartment, I found out that Alex had to back out of our carpooling plan and drive to Minnesota with his two Valpo friends on Saturday, instead of Monday like was our original plan (I would’ve driven from State College to Valparaiso on Sunday). It turns out that his friends wouldn’t be allowed to stay in the dorms over the weekend (they were closing for Thanksgiving break), so while it was a little frustrating to see my travel plans be forced to change pretty much last-minute, I think Alex definitely made the right decision to leave early with his other Valpo friends. I mean, if he didn’t, they wouldn’t have had a way to get to Minnesota or a place to stay in Valparaiso, and that wouldn’t have been good. The change in travel plans wound up working out really well though, and ended up being more enjoyable for both of us. I looked up the price of flights from SCE-MSP for the week, fully prepared to see everything well over a thousand dollars and give up and drive alone anyway. But there was one flight itinerary available on United at only $354, with layovers at IAD and ORD, which got me to MSP by early afternoon on Monday. Everything else was way, waaaaaayyy more expensive (like well over $1000), so thanks be to God for arranging for that cheap flight to be still available! And the flights on Monday went pretty smoothly overall, because even though I found out while I was at Washington/Dulles that my original flight from Chicago/O’Hare to Minneapolis was cancelled, I was quite easily able to get on the next flight an hour later. That, and there was plenty of room on all three legs of my trip; the planes were all only about half full, and I never had anyone sitting in the seat next to me. I can’t even remember the last time that happened to me on multiple flights! I wonder if it’ll be the same on Saturday morning when I fly back to PA.
As it turned out, I was very glad to have found that flight for Monday, because after the tailgate and football game on Saturday, I was totally exhausted, and relieved that I didn’t have to hop in a car and drive nine hours the next day (and eight more the day after). Alex & I were also able to spend even more quality time together with my new travel plans than with our original travel plans. Instead of carpooling with two other people on Monday from Valpo, Alex was able to pick me up from the Minneapolis/Saint Paul airport, we hung out a bit at his parents’ house in Mahtomedi, and then he drove me up to my parents’ place here in Cumberland. We had dinner up here with my family and he stayed overnight too, before driving back to the Twin Cities on Tuesday morning. But I think Alex got quite the introduction to the northwoods Wisconsin deer hunting culture, because a few relatives were deer hunting at my parents’ place (my uncle Gary, and my sister-in-law Eve’s brother Paul, and Eve’s brother-in-law Scott and Scott’s son Josiah), and there were plenty of deer stories told (much like fishing stories, haha). In years past they’d all be hunting here with my brother Aaron, but they decided to come back here for what will probably be one last hunt on this property. Anyway, everyone had been skunked over the opening weekend (deer season started in Wisconsin on Saturday at morning twilight), but Paul was able to shoot three deer on Monday, a four-point buck and two does! So after dinner Alex & I were persuaded at least to go out to the shed where they were skinning the deer, and little did I know how great a photo op that would be! 🙂 I mean, it’s not every day you can pose for posterity with a severed deer head (or two heads)!
Tuesday was a more sedate day. After seeing Alex off in the morning, I spent much of the day working on my photo reclamation project. My new external hard drive was returned to me with all my recovered photos a couple days before I left for New Orleans, so ever since then I’ve been fiddling around trying to figure out the best way to deal with the mass of data. There were tens of thousands of picture files recovered, but the majority of them were thumbnails of various sizes that were automatically created by iPhoto or whatnot, and they were all jumbled together in directories of 10,000 files each, with all the filenames being random alphanumeric strings. Uffda. Fortunately I have a program that lets me sort the photos by pixel dimensions, so I’m easily able to delete all the smaller-than-full-size photos in one fell swoop. Then comes the process of wading through those thinned directories to get rid of all the photos I was able to retrieve from the most recent backup on my old external hard drive (mid-April 2007, I was so dumb for not doing a backup more recently than that), and once I get that figured out, then will come the process of sorting the remaining photos into directories that make sense, perhaps with filenames that make sense. It’ll take quite awhile longer yet, but I’m making decent progress at this point.
Tuesday evening I went over to Nathan & Laura’s for dinner and games. After hearing all the kids’ piano recital pieces, I played “Rummy Royal” (also called “Tripoley”) with the kids, and then “Rail Baron” with Nathan, Laura, Miriam & Mark. Though we didn’t finish “Rail Baron” (it got late, and that game takes a long time), it was still really fun. Someday if I can find a relatively cheap copy of that game on eBay or someplace, I’ll probably buy it.
Today for lunch I went to Nezzy’s Sports Bar in Cumberland (a nice new place, by the way, if maybe a bit pricey for local standards) with my younger brother Jake, so I got to spend some time with him over a couple beers (and some genuine Wisconsin cheese curds!), which was good. And then tonight I went with my dad down to the house church in Taylors Falls, for a Thanksgiving Eve “prayers, praise and pie” night. It was fun to see them again, as it always is.
Tomorrow for Thanksgiving my family’s going out to Eve’s mom’s place in southwestern Minnesota. It’s nearly a four-hour drive, and we’re going there and back tomorrow, so it’s gonna be a long day. With this being the first major holiday since Aaron’s death, it was gonna be just way too hard for Eve to come up to my parents’ place. So it was arranged for a big joint Thanksgiving dinner for Eve’s family and our family to be hosted by Eve’s mom. It’s going to be pretty hard tomorrow for everyone, no doubt, as all our hearts are still heavy. In a bit of good news though, we just found out recently (and heard over the radio on AM 1500 KSTP on a local news update this afternoon) that Aaron’s best friend Gary will *not* be charged with anything stemming from the jet ski accident that took Aaron’s life. We’re all so glad that all charges have been dropped, and that now there isn’t the potential of that looming over Gary’s head anymore. Accidents happen, unfortunately, but that’s all it was — an accident. Anyway, while tomorrow will be hard, it’ll be good to see everyone again, especially to see Eve and the kids. And despite Aaron’s death, it would be good to take some time and remember the things for which I can be thankful this year, because there definitely are ways that God has blessed me. Maybe if I feel like it I’ll eventually post some sort of (partial?) list. But as for now it’s time for bed.
I hope that all of you reading this have/had a happy and enjoyable Thanksgiving.