Pinkies and Picnics

Another school year is officially underway. Hooray. (Can you feel the excitement?…) Classes began last Tuesday, and this semester I’m taking two classes (Graduate/Advanced Synoptic Meteorology, and a one-credit Meteo Research writing class) while also sitting in on another (undergrad Synoptic). I’m putting a focus on synoptic meteo this semester because it’s very important to understand in order to forecast well, I’ve never taken a course in it before, and it’s supposed to help everything gel at long last (the dynamics/math/physics and the real weather). So we’ll see how all this goes this semester, and if I get out of it what I’m hoping to. In any case, only time will tell if this was the last “first day of the school year” I’ll personally experience, but there’s a pretty decent chance it was.
Thursday evening we had another flag football practice for the meteo grads IM team, and after I took a “TV timeout” to go floor manage for “Weather World,” one of the first passes I saw from Moyer was a bit tough to see, right next to the sinking sun from my perspective. I stuck my hands down to where I thought the ball was coming. The ball ended up being a bit lower than I thought, and I most definitely felt it as the nose of the ball glanced off the tip of my left pinky finger. I just thought it was jammed, but I kept playing. Fortunately the next couple passes Moyer threw to me were overthrown, because in hindsight it wouldn’t have done my pinky any favors to try to catch another ball.
By the next morning I was starting to suspect that maybe it wasn’t just a jam or a sprain. For one, my pinky was all sorts of bluish/purplish shades, it still hurt quite a bit (more than other jammed digits I’ve had before), and most of the pain was above the joint, almost halfway between the last knuckle and the tip of the finger, which is not what I would’ve expected from a sprain. It wasn’t obviously broken or anything, but I had my suspicions. So I managed to get myself a doctor’s appointment at Ritenour on Friday morning, and the doctor said the x-rays were inconclusive; two of the angles from which x-rays were taken showed pretty much nothing, but the third showed what looked like a hairline fracture. So he said he’d send along the x-rays to the radiologist for him to make an official diagnosis, but in the meantime he had me get a stack splint on my pinky. I’ve kept it on most of the time since, but when I accidentally bump my pinky without the splint on there’s a sharp enough pain even still that I’m even more confident that my finger is indeed fractured, and not just sprained. As a result, and to go along with our taking the flag football thing wayyyy too seriously, our team injury report had me changed from “questionable” to “doubtful,” and I think I’m gonna rule myself “out” of this Wednesday’s practice right here and now.
In addition to of course missing football practice time, a broken finger is a bit of a hindrance to piano practice time. That’s somewhat unfortunate since the plan was for me to play in Julian & Suzanne’s wedding on 23 September. I emailed them right away on Friday informing them of my fractured finger. I haven’t heard back from them yet, but I’m sure they absolutely loved hearing that news… Fortunately at church yesterday Sarah said she might be able to step in and do it in case I can’t, which at this point I’d say is a very distinct possibility.
Both Daniel and Petters had birthdays on Friday, and Vic had one today too! Happy Birthday guys!
Was it just me, or did the college football games on Saturday just flat-out bore you all? Penn State-Notre Dame was lame (especially when Charlie Weis showed tremendous sportsmanship by going for a fake punt when leading 27-3 and kept Brady Quinn in there passing in the 4th quarter to go up 41-3 — I never thought I’d say this, but I might be cheering for Michigan to destroy the Irish next week, I’m that bitter about Notre Dame’s lack of sportsmanship). Iowa-Syracuse went into overtime but it was still so excruciatingly and painfully boring that I wanted to poke my eye out with a sharp stick. And then Ohio State-Texas was exceedingly dull for a much-ballyhooed #1 vs #2 matchup. Hopefully next weekend’s games will be more entertaining.
After church on Sunday morning (which Daniel & Katie came along to, yay!) it was time to head to Lederer Park for the Chi Epsilon Pi/Department of Meteorology picnic. It was pretty well attended, though I suspect that many people stayed home because their favorite NFL teams were opening the season at that time slot. Zack, Vic & I were kept pretty busy at the grill, and once everyone else seemed sated I finally could grab a couple burgers and a hot dog for myself. Then right after the Meteo picnic officially ended it was time to head down to Holmes-Foster Park for the Penn State Christian Grads picnic. Yup, back-to-back picnics for organizations for which I’m an officer. At least I didn’t have to worry about paying for food today! We were all really encouraged by the fantastic turnout at the PSCG picnic, and our advertising must’ve really worked because we had quite a few new people show up. Towards the end of the PSCG picnic we had a really interesting talk by Dr. Suresh Canagarajah, a visiting English/Linguistics professor from Buruch College at the City University of New York, about Daniel 1 and what it means to be a Christian grad student. All in all it was a good day, but I’m sort of picnic-ed out!
After getting home from the picnics, instead of watching the Manning Bowl on Sunday Night Football, I elected to watch the docudrama “The Path to 9/11,” which has gotten quite a bit of publicity in recent days. They aired it commercial-free, and I must say that I was quite impressed by Part 1 tonight. On this, the 5th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, it really is frustrating to see all the failures of both the Clinton and Bush administrations between 1993 and 2001 that potentially could’ve prevented the acts of war perpetrated on that fateful day, but it’s also educational to see someone try to lay the events out there, even if they are at times a bit compressed or conflated for the purposes of narration. I would’ve definitely watched Part 2 tonight, but I was way too tempted by the allure of the Vikings-Redskins game, which I watched over at Ryan’s place. It was a good game to watch, though Ryan was a bit sad since he’s a ‘Skins fan and my Vikes won it late 19-16. It was really cool to see most of the 90,000 fans at FedEx Field in Washington waving American flags before the game though, I thought that was a very nice touch.
We will never forget.