Okay, so, yeah, it’s been about a month since I last blogged. Sorry about that. A lot’s been going on. I’ll try to hit some of the January highlights in an effort to get caught up.
Back in early January there was a three-day span in which I got to hang out with three of my best friends, Scott, Alex, and Daniel — that was pretty sweet! On Monday the 4th my friend Scott drove up to Cumberland from the Twin Cities to hang out. We shot some pool at my parents’ house for a bit, and then had a good long lunch and a couple tall beers at Nezzy’s in Cumberland. Lots of good conversation! We also ran into our friend Louis from our high school class when we stopped by Louie’s Finer Meats (Scott’s wife Katie gave him an ultimatum to come back with some hunter’s sausage and other goodies from Louie’s while he was in Cumberland, haha.) I was very glad to be able to have those four or five hours to hang out with Scott. He’s in his last semester at the University of Minnesota, and if he winds up with a job in the DC area after graduation (and it’s likely he will), we’ll get to hang out a bit more often, since DC is only a 4-hr drive south of State College! That might even be the next time I get to see Scott & Katie, who knows.
A couple hours after Scott left, Alex drove up to my parents’ house, and then we went over to Nathan & Laura’s house in Rice Lake for dinner and a game of Settlers of Catan: Cities and Knights. Alex had never played even regular Settlers before, so Nathan took about an hour to thoroughly and carefully explain to him all the rules for first Settlers and then Cities and Knights. Alex did really well for a first-timer, but I managed to come from behind to win the game. As near as I can remember, that was the first time I’d ever won a game of Settlers (regular or Cities and Knights). So it was enjoyable to break through that barrier and finally win a game! I was glad to make it over to N&L’s for a game night while I was home too. On Tuesday the 5th Alex & I drove from Cumberland to Ann Arbor, with a stop in Valparaiso around dinnertime so that Alex could say hi to a couple friends of his. It was a long drive (especially with snow in Michigan making the roads a bit slick), but a good trip. As I always say, a drive that long is always far nicer with a friend.
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Alex’s semester at Michigan started the morning after we got back to Ann Arbor, so I bid him farewell around lunchtime. I took a bit of a detour that afternoon on my way back to Pennsylvania, in the form of a 3-hr drive down to Dayton, Ohio, to visit Daniel & Katie! I hadn’t seen Daniel & Katie since they moved away from State College in summer 2007 following Daniel’s M.S. graduation (Daniel was in my incoming class in meteo at PSU and we became really good friends). They moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, where Daniel was a weather officer at Barksdale AFB, but this past November he was notified that he was being transferred to Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, and that he needed to report in early January. Not a lot of notice, to be sure! So when I visited Daniel & Katie, they had just arrived in Dayton a few days earlier (New Years Eve), and were staying in temporary housing on-base (the Air Force allowed them to stay there for up to 10 days for free while they looked for permanent housing in/near Dayton … a ton of time, I know). They did move into a rental house off-base less than a week after I visited, so I’m pretty sure I was not only their first guest in Dayton, but their only one at their temporary housing. 🙂 It was my first time ever being on a military base as well. It was pretty painless to get on the base, actually. Daniel was in the vehicle ahead of me, and told the soldier at the gate that I was a civilian visitor that he was sponsoring, and the only thing the soldier at the gate asked to see was my driver’s license, and then asked me a couple perfunctory questions about how long I’d be staying and whether I’d be coming and going by myself. Anyway, it was great to hang out for the evening with Daniel & Katie and catch up with them, and to meet their 10-month old daughter Elizabeth Paige for the first time (Katie’s also expecting with another daughter Claire due sometime in March). Before I came Daniel warned me that Paige was teething and therefore not sleeping through the night, but I said I could deal with it. And she did wake up a couple times during the night when I was there, but it was just fine. On Thursday the 7th I finished the drive back to State College (snow from Dayton to Columbus had me wondering at first if it’d take a really long time to get back). I’m looking forward immensely to seeing Daniel & Katie much more frequently now that they’re only a 6-hr drive from State College (and only 3 hrs south of Ann Arbor). Add Ryan & Sarah to the list in Chicagoland and I have plenty of good friends to try to visit on my trips between Pennsylvania and Wisconsin/Minnesota!
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And then the night after I got back to State College I hosted a game night at my apartment. That was a big success, as 13 people came (mostly from PSCG)! So the whole week was basically filled with friends, it was great! That night I also tried to remember a recipe for bars (for those of you who don’t speak Minnesotan, bars are anything that’s remotely like brownies or a cake/brownie mix or something similar) that a family friend brought to our family Christmas this year. Apparently I failed to remember a key step quite correctly, so the bars were a partial failure. But they were still a tasty failure. 🙂
Coming up (hopefully soon) in Part 2: AMS 2010 in Atlanta.