Carl’s Weekend Visit

Well, even with getting the Cloud Physics test out of the way back on Wednesday evening, the week still had plenty of stuff to get done. Mercifully my Meteo 003 labs on Thursday both ended early without too many questions, which allowed me to get started just a bit earlier on reading that journal article about CSI (not the crime show, but rather Conditional Symmetric Instability) for Mesoscale Dynamics. For all the non-meteorology nerds out there, in case you care, CSI is a stability state that the atmosphere can be in, that often leads to banded clouds/precipitation. It was at times an interesting enough paper, but it was just too long and dense, so that by the time midnight rolled around and I had to write a review of the article, I was in a somewhat punchy and un-objective mood about everything. I wonder if that came through in my review… 🙂
We were all awakened at about 7:40am on Friday morning with the passage of a massive cold front. In a span of 20 minutes the temp dropped nine degrees (from 54 to 45), the wind was gusting over 50 mph (which is what actually woke up everyone) and knocking down limbs and branches off trees and everything. It was quite the impressive front, let me tell ya. So on Friday I managed to finish my Dynamics assignment before class in the afternoon, meaning that I survived my scary, stressful week, hooray! I was so glad to get all that over with before the weekend, because it meant that I had next to nothing that I actually had to get done this weekend. 🙂
That was especially nice since my friend Carl came up from Baltimore for the weekend. (Carl was in my physics class at Gustavus, but is doing Teach for America this year and next, teaching high school physics and chemistry in a public school in inner-city Baltimore.) He was so happy just for the chance to get out of Baltimore finally, and it was great to show him around up here and hang out with him again. Carl got up here just in time for the start of team trivia at Sports Cafe. Unfortunately we weren’t able to place, after pulling off one of our classic choke jobs after leading heading into the final question. Vic, Daniel & I were reasonably confident with the answer, but nobody else was so they wagered zero points, which ultimately doomed us to miss placing at all. Oh well, you win some, you lose some. After trivia Carl, Daniel & I decided to go watch a movie at my place, but we had to make a couple trips back to Sports Cafe, once because Daniel realized he’d forgotten his debit card there, and then after when we were at Blockbuster I realized that I didn’t have my credit card either. It turns out that the server, when she gave us the receipts to sign, neglected to give either of us our cards, and we simply didn’t notice. Man, that’s a horrible feeling though, to realize that you left your credit card somewhere. Anyway, so it was pretty late by the time we finally started watching the movie, which probably didn’t help either Daniel or I to understand what was going on in “Primer,” an independent film that Carl strongly recommended. It’s about a couple of engineers who accidentally build a time machine in their garage, and some of the interesting paradoxes and events that result from that. I’m sure I would’ve been less confused if it wasn’t so late, but oh well.
After sleeping in a bit on Saturday, Carl & I headed out for a walk around downtown and campus, swinging by Bell’s Greek Pizza for lunch, the Lion Shrine and finally showing him the dark, dank prison otherwise known as Walker Building, where I ultimately spend most of my time. For the rest of the afternoon we just hung out in the living room watching a couple basketball games and some Olympics while playing with photo stuff on our PowerBook laptops. But that was all just biding time until the evening, when Kerrie hosted a party for the meteo grads at her apartment. We all had a great time, I think that’s safe to say. 🙂 Maybe the only disappointment of the evening was that Carl didn’t show off the Electromagnetic Jive to everyone. Or maybe that’s a blessing. Guess it depends how you look at it, hehe. After we left at 2:30 or so, Daniel, Carl & I all watched another movie at my place, making last night the latest night I’ve had in a loooooong time. But I had so much fun, it was awesome!
The late night last night pretty much necessitated sleeping in again this morning, so once we finally awoke from our slumbers we just kinda did nothing for awhile, just swapping photos from each other’s computers that we wanted and whatnot. Carl left about 3 or so, and then I went up to Walker for a wee bit to get started on a little grading. I mean, I needed to accomplish at least *something* this weekend. 🙂 And then tonight I went to the Bible study with Penn State Christian Grads as usual every week. So that was pretty much my weekend. I’m actually kinda worn out, I kinda wish I had another day to recover from the weekend before classes start up again tomorrow, oh well.