Groveling

Not too much to report from the last couple days for me. I’ve taken the initiative the last couple days to go around and talk to a few faculty members, to find out if they’re looking for any grad students to do research for them. In essence, I’m groveling for funding, that’s pretty much what it comes down to. For most of the professors I’ve talked to so far, especially the ones I’d most like to work for (researching severe thunderstorms, hurricanes or something like that), they either *might* get some grant money late spring, or have no prospects at all, which is kinda depressing. But at least today I found out that at least one prof will almost surely have money and a spot for me to do research, now it’s just a question if I actually want to do that or not. I’ve got a few more people to talk to first anyway, just so that I get as complete a picture as possible of what the prospects are here in the department. But I figured I’d put forth some effort now to do this, because it’ll just get harder once I get busy, and also because Dr Clothiaux basically told me that he’s gonna get out his matches in 2-3 weeks to turn up the heat on me to find a research group. Sigh. It’s a tough call between trying to wait a bit longer in the hopes that a more attractive project will come along, or just taking what I can get now, but almost certainly by spring break I’ll need to have made a commitment.
Last night I went out to eat with some of the guys (Ed, Matt, Rob, Shane & Craig) from Penn State Christian Grads. I figured I should make at least one Wednesday night men’s group before I get terribly busy like last semester, when I could rarely make them in the second half. We wound up deciding to head down to Fat Jack’s BBQ Shack, which I must say was a good choice. I’d never been there before, but they have some really good bbq. While we were there, something rather amusing happened. A youth tried to buy some beer from the adjoining bottle shop, and the guy running the shop was comparing the kid’s ID to a book of ID’s from each state. The shopkeeper told the young man to get outta there, that he couldn’t accept his Florida ID. So while the kid was in his car trying to turn onto Atherton, the shopkeeper just calmly walked outside and took a picture of the kid’s license plate with his cell phone right before the kid pealed out of the parking lot. Then we overheard him calling the cops saying, “yeah, another fake Florida ID.” I’m sure that kid’ll find a ticket in the mail pretty soon, because the cop came to take a statement from the shopkeeper, and was made aware of the video surveillance in the bottle shop that got a real good look at him. We were all heartened to see the shopkeeper actually call police about the fake ID, we’d figured that most people would just kick the kid out and then forget about it.
There was a bit of a bomb scare yesterday in Madison, Wisconsin. That wouldn’t be all that noteworthy to me, except that my friend Allison lived right by where one of the “suspicious packages” was dropped off. Allison was quoted in this article and also apparently was on the local TV news in Madison. Fortunately none of the suspicious packages were actually bombs.
And apparently flying shrimp can be deadly. Or at least an infection resulting from a surgery needed for a neck strain suffered while trying to avoid the airborne shrimp. I’ll have to watch out for that next time I’m at a Japanese habachi restaurant. But seriously, why are you ducking out of the way of a measly shrimp? It’s not like it’s a brick or anything that’ll actually hurt you. I hope that $10 million wrongful death suit gets dismissed, it’s ridiculous that the family suing, especially for that much.
And since tomorrow’s Mario’s 30th birthday, I figure I may as well give an early shout out to him. Happy Birthday Mario! We’ll all be celebrating tomorrow night, it should be fun!