Spring, We Hardly Knew Thee

Summer arrived this weekend in full force here in Happy Valley. After a mostly miserable “spring” here weather-wise, where we couldn’t seem to string together consecutive nice days, we’ve suddenly been launched into a summertime pattern. This weekend has been absolutely gorgeous — mostly sunny all weekend, with mid 70s on Friday, mid 80s yesterday, and upper 80s today (upper 80s forecast again tomorrow)! And the best part of it all is that dewpoints have remained quite low, so it’s not muggy at all.
Before it started getting all hot this weekend, I decided to go for a run on Thursday evening after I got back from campus. I know I’m not in shape at all, but I’d like to be at least somewhat in shape. I started to run fairly regularly in the first part of the summer of 2006, but then have gone for a run maybe once or twice total in the last two summers. So for me to get the itch all of a sudden to go for a run is pretty unusual. I decided to go behind the high school and swimming pool to meet up with the bike path over near Westerly Pkwy, to take it away from the high schools and see where it led. I’d never been back on that path before, so I was kind of surprised when it eventually dumped me out at the corner of Bayberry & Blue Course. So the loop I made wound up being right around 2 miles, which was a bit longer than I’d planned on for a first run. I did have to stop and walk four times briefly, but hey, I don’t think that’s too bad for my first extended run. And then when I’m able to do that loop without stopping at all, I’ll be able to feel good about myself, so I now have a first goal to reach for. Eventually I’d like to get my endurance back up to the point where I can comfortably run 3-5 miles. I don’t want to kill my knees or other joints, so I have no desire to get to the point where I’m running half marathons or anything. And being able to run that distance will only help me in tennis and softball this summer, and flag football in the fall and ultimate frisbee if I ever get back into that (I still prefer ultimate to disc golf by leaps and bounds). That and it’s just healthy for me to be in shape. So we’ll see if I keep up this running thing this time. We’ll see if I go again tomorrow, since it’s still going to be hot.
On Saturday morning I drove up with Isaac, Mindi & David R. to go tailgating for the Blue-White Game! We got there at about 10am, and even though I was in the first group of people to head up there, it was really nice not to be organizing a tailgate for a change; Isaac took care of everything, and made quesadillas and burgers on his grill. (It’s exhausting in the fall to be organizing the tailgates for the meteo grad students, especially when there are so many home games bunched together.) Of course, I proceeded to forget the hurricane flags and my lawn chairs, but oh well. This was just a practice tailgate for the practice tailgate at the season opener on 5 September vs Akron, after all. Several other PSCGers (and friends) came out too. It sure was a beautiful day for a tailgate! A bunch of us went up to the game at 2pm and stayed until halftime. The attendance set a record for the third Blue-White Game in a row, with 76,500 enjoying the free spring football intra-squad scrimmage. There were thousands more people who stayed behind in the lots to keep tailgating too, otherwise we would’ve easily cracked 80,000. The game itself wasn’t that compelling (it was a scrimmage, after all), but it seems like our offense should be fine next year. Our defensive secondary could be another issue though…
Then this afternoon after church I played some tennis with Ben. It was the first tennis that I’d played this year, so I was just hoping to avoid getting whitewashed 6-0, 6-0. I did manage to steal a game in the second set after digging myself a love-40 hole, so I was glad about that. So even though it was 6-0, 6-1, it wasn’t totally lopsided, as there were three deuce games in both sets — I just managed to win only one of those games. I really need to cut down on my double faults, sigh. It was also tricky playing today, because the wind would sometimes be pretty calm, and then suddenly gust to 10-15 knots. It just made it really difficult to track the ball accurately and get set properly to make a good shot, as it’d be drifting to one side of the court by greater or lesser degrees, depending on the wind speed at that moment. Stupid turbulent eddies!
I think it’s finally safe to say that we’re done with snow for the season here in central PA. Later this week when we have a big cooldown, we’ll only drop down to the mid 60s. I actually wouldn’t mind having a little bit of actual spring.