Welcome to winter in Minnesota! It’s a bit tardy, but winter finally arrived today, and with a vengeance. It snowed like crazy all day long, by the time it stopped around 9pm we had 6-8 new inches of the white stuff, more than quadrupling our snow totals from the entire pathetic winter to this point. Everyone here is so excited to have snow again finally!
Yesterday went fairly well. The downside is that Ben, John & I had to spend all of class time in C++ completely re-writing our code, only getting back to the functionality of the robots program that we had at the start of the day. Oh well, the code is easier to understand now anyway, and since the profs like our new version better we’ll get a better grade on it. In the evening I went over to Jolene’s apartment to have some absolutely delicious calzones for dinner with her, Zach, Cory & Sara. It was the first time I’d ever had calzones before, and I must say it was a mighty good introduction to them. 🙂 After that Zach, Sara & I went to Nobel and met Josh & Heidi there, to see the campus movie, “The Incredibles.” It was really good! Pretty funny, and lots of action too, it was great. And Samuel L Jackson was in it too (“Frozone”) … man, he’s in everything! After the movie I went to Prepare to wrap up the night. Karen’s talk at Prepare was a bit longer than usual (we didn’t wrap up till almost 11), and on a fairly controversial topic, abortion. It wasn’t your usual in-your-face thing making it only a social issue, she was heavily basing her talk on the Bible to support her viewpoints, it was good. But one really interesting thing that we found out last night that’s actually happening right now, is that the KKK is planning to open family planning clinics (a la Planned Parenthood) in minority and urban neighborhoods, for the express purpose of reducing and extinguishing the non-white population. This is absolutely despicable and needs to be stopped. But it’s not getting much press, and it needs to be brought to people’s attention.
Today was pretty fun too. In addition to all the new snow, in the afternoon Ben, Zach, John & I went over to Lund to play doubles racquetball for awhile, that was awesome. When John left to go play badminton with Megan & Matt, Cory stepped in and started screwing all of us up with his nifty left-handed serves. Gah! Zach & I made a brief appearance at Gaming Night before we were called away to go sledding and traying. We went with a whole bunch of people over to the big hill by South Elementary, and we brought a few caf trays, while others managed to get Dr Nimmo’s (the band director) 10-person toboggan. Man was that fun! Once Zach, Cory, Jolene & I were tired with sledding, we started to make a snow fort. Unfortunately the snow wasn’t all that great for packing, but hey, it’s snow, at this point we really can’t complain about it being the wrong type of snow, hehe. Once the wind started picking up around 10pm we made our way back to Arbor View across the open fields. The blizzard had started! So around midnight Aaron was gonna drive back to his dorm, and drop me, Justin & Dorea off along the way. He was able to back his car up, but he couldn’t drive it forward at all, there was just too much snow. After a bunch of pushing to try to get the car to go forward in the parking lot, we just had to give up on that, and push it back into a parking spot, and then wait for S&S to come give us a ride back to our dorms. The S&S guy said that 50 mph winds had been recorded here in St Peter tonight. And when those winds have 6-8 inches of new powdery snow to blow around and cause whiteout conditions, it’s making travel extremely treacherous, if not impossible. Even the S&S vans with their all-wheel drive are having a really tough time getting around, that’s how bad it is. This is seriously the absolute worst I’ve ever seen the weather here at Gustavus. In fact, it’s probably the worst I’ve seen it anywhere in many years, it’s turned into quite the blizzard. We have blizzard warnings out for this part of the state until 6am currently, but I wouldn’t be surprised if those are extended, since it’ll be frigid (only single digits, the temp’s plummeting there right now) and still really windy for most of tomorrow (25-35 mph winds). And you wanna know what the best part of it all is? I have to work at Admissions tomorrow morning and give tours. Wow I’m a lucky guy. But in reality there’ll probably be heaps of cancellations, so we’ll probably get sent home early. But we still have to show up, sigh.
Oh, and another reason yesterday was a happy day was because Bush was re-inaugurated. But Bush’s speech has off-put many people, including some of his top supporters, such as Peggy Noonan. I’d have to say that I actually probably agree with most of her analysis of the speech. And Mom, just be glad I wasn’t 16.7 pounds like this baby who was just born in Sao Paolo, Brazil.
Well, now that I’ve just talked to Josh for an hour or so, I think it’s definitely time for bed. I’m so not gonna like waking up in the morning, sigh.