Chris’s Birthday

Last night (Saturday) was a night for some celebration, because it was P. Allen’s birthday, conveniently located just a couple days after he passed his Master’s thesis defense. A bunch of us meteo grads went out to Chili’s for dinner, and then several of us proceeded to go on to the Phyrst for a couple drinks after that. I hadn’t ever been there before, and it was very, very full. We didn’t even actually get a table for about an hour and a half, it was crazy. It’s actually done up to look kind of like an Irish pub, it’s got a bit of character to it. At any rate, the table wars were entertaining until the band, Phyrst Phamly, started playing at 10:30. They’re a fun band to listen to, they play pretty much a bluegrass style of music, with a couple of banjos, a guitar and a bass, and they played mostly songs that people could sing along to, it was definitely a fun atmosphere. During table wars and in between sets Jacob showed off his cowbell skills and on several occasions rocked the house with the Penn State cowbell cheer about 50% faster than it usually goes, which everyone in the bar absolutely loved. I think he does it better than some of the Blue Band members do it at football games for sure. 🙂
As for today, which was Palm Sunday, in the morning Daniel & I went to church together again. They weren’t handing out any palm fronds or anything, but it was still a good service. What would’ve made it better, as Daniel pointed out, was if they would’ve had a couple good hymns, such as “All Glory, Laud and Honour,” instead of solely choruses. Hopefully they’ll have a couple good Easter hymns next week.
I’ve pretty much spent the whole rest of the day up in Walker reading journicles for my Cloud Physics paper on hailstone growth and formation. Amongst the batch that I printed out today I’ve actually found several that are quite useful (including several by a husband/wife research team from NCAR that consistently write short, concise, amazingly easy-to-understand papers – they’re my new heroes when it comes to journals). In the evening I took a dinner break with Vic, Jacob, Shannon & Jeff, where we went out to Klemm’s outside of State College (it’s literally a shack on the side of the road out in the country, it doesn’t have anywhere to sit), and then brought it back to Vic & Jeff’s place to eat. I’ll tell ya, for a little side-of-the-road place, they’ve sure got some amazing BBQ! Klemm’s is now amongst my top five places to eat in and around State College, for sure. But after that I came back to Walker, and I finally got a start on my paper, about three paragraphs written, woohoo! Actually, I’m still at Walker, which is pretty sad, especially considering it’s getting close to 1am. I really should just go home and go to bed.
But not before passing on these two bizarre stories. First, in Britain there’s a ginormous rabbit that’s terrorizing people’s vegetable gardens over there. Seriously, this rabbit is massive. And then over the weekend in Oakland, CA, a ginormous chunk of ice (it was really big, about a cubic yard) randomly fell from the sky, basically out of almost clear air, and nobody knows where it came from. I especially love the last sentence in the story, check it out.