In the ‘Zona Again, Part 1

And finally, I’m getting around to writing about my week-plus in Arizona earlier this month. It was the second time I’ve visited Arizona, the first time being back in March 2006 over spring break, and I had an amazing time the whole week! And don’t say that I didn’t warn you that this is a really long post!
One theme that I noticed throughout the trip was things not happening quite like we’d planned, but still managing to work out fine, or often even better than planned. The first of those changes of plans happened right after Sue, Kent & I landed in Detroit on Friday the 9th. We saw that Alex’s flight from Chicago O’Hare was delayed due to snow, which would’ve left a very tight window for him to catch our flight from Detroit to Phoenix. I called him, and it turned out that he’d already been rebooked on a flight from Chicago to Minneapolis, and was going from there to Phoenix. At least I was still sitting next to Kent on the flight to Phoenix.
Aside:
Reason #1 (on this trip) that Detroit sucks: The airport lied to us. They advertised that they had a Little Caesars, but when Kent & I went to go find it, it definitely wasn’t there anymore. It’d been replaced by something else, which means it was a disappointment.
Reason #2 that Detroit sucks: Our plane sat on the tarmac for a long time, and our flight to Phoenix took off about 45-50 minutes late because the lights along one of the two departure runways at DTW went out, forcing all departures to be routed through a single runway.
/Aside
When our flight landed in Phoenix about 11pm Mountain time, Kent & Sue were able to catch a ride to their hotels, but I waited around for Alex’s flight from Minneapolis to arrive. Fortunately it came in a bit early, and because ours arrived late, I only had to wait for about half an hour. Not too bad! By the time we got our luggage, got a rental car, drove out to Avondale, it was already quite a bit later than we’d originally planned to get to my cousin Melissa & Jeremy’s place. Matters weren’t helped by the fact that we ran into some awful road construction at 1am on I-10 right before the exit we had to take (three lanes down to one lane, and then the exit was closed too, argh!), so after getting through that and finding a drive-thru that was still open to get some food, it was nearly 2am before we arrived at Melissa’s. I felt bad about getting in so late, especially since Melissa waited up for us, but there wasn’t anything we could’ve done.
We didn’t get much sleep that night, because I drove Alex into downtown pretty early on the morning of Saturday the 10th so that he could go the AMS Student Conference. I chose not to go to that because I’d heard that it was aimed primarily at undergrads, and that there wasn’t much there that’d be worthwhile to grad students. For lunch I went with my cousin Melissa and her two kids, my cousin Marci and her three kids (Melissa & Marci live literally next door to each other in Avondale, it’s a pretty cool arrangement) to a nearby restaurant, where we met up with my second cousin Linda, her mom (my dad’s cousin) Judy, and my 101-year-old great aunt Mae, who all live on the opposite side of Phoenix, over in Mesa (Alex & I stayed with all of them for a night at the end of the week). Basically a mini Lee family reunion! It was good to be able to get everyone together. It was actually Melissa’s idea way back in November to get everyone together for lunch or dinner while I was in Arizona, and I’m really glad she thought of it. After lunch while everyone was visiting over at Marci’s house, I drove back into downtown to pick up Alex about mid-afternoon, and we got back just before Linda, Judy & Mae left, so Alex got to meet them briefly. Then after supper with everyone at Melissa’s house (homemade tacos!), Melissa & Jeremy kindly offered to drive into downtown with us so that we could drop off our rental car at the airport a day earlier than we’d planned and save some money! They even volunteered to drive us over to Tempe the next day to our hotel for the conference!
Aside:
Renting a car from Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport is ridiculously expensive. Even with being on Penn State’s Emerald Club contract with National, which gets me almost 25% off, it still cost us about $58/day to rent a normal mid-size car –and that was only with having me listed as a driver, because it would’ve been another $25/day plus tax to add Alex as an additional driver, since he’s under 25– because the taxes, fees and surcharges that they add at Sky Harbor are about 65%… Talk about gouging the consumer! Here’s a tip for anyone who might ever be traveling to Phoenix in the future: if you need to rent a car, and if you have any choice or flexibility in the matter, rent it from someplace other than the airport, especially if they let you return it to the airport for no charge!! You’ll be able to have a nice dinner, or several nice dinners if you have the car for a few days, with the money you’ll save!
/Aside
After getting back from dropping off the rental car, Alex & I spent the whole evening hanging out with Jeremy (Melissa’s husband) and Marc (Marci’s husband). First off was some blackjack, playing with some Shrek Monopoly money. It was fun, but afterward Alex said he’d learned he should probably never to take me to a casino, haha. Then the four of us got the ping pong table set up in Melissa & Jeremy’s garage, and had an absolute blast having a couple drinks and playing ping pong for probably 2-3 hours. We played doubles for a long time, then some cut-throat (three-person ping pong), and then decided to do a double-elimination singles tournament. Alex & I both lost our first matches against Jeremy & Marc, respectively, so we squared off for the right to keep playing. It was an awesome match, a match for the ages, haha. We were both hitting some ridiculous shots, with Alex winning the most impressive and tense rally at 19-19 on his way to the 21-19 upset, with Marc & Jeremy cheering us both on the whole way because it was such a fun match to watch. At least I’ll call it an upset, because he hadn’t beaten me yet that night until then, haha. 😉 Alex falling into a laundry basket while chasing a ball was pretty classic too!! We laughed a good long time about that one! And then we finished off the night by playing some SingStar on the PS2, but singing very quietly so as not to wake up Melissa or the kids, since it was 1 or 2am at that point. 😀 It was such a fun evening, and quite honestly it was probably the highlight of the trip for both Alex & me (certainly at least one of the biggest highlights anyway), especially all the ping pong.
On Sunday morning the 11th Alex & I went to church with Melissa & Jeremy and their kids, at West Valley Bible Church in Surprise. I’d been to the church once before when my parents & I visited back in March ’06, and once again I was impressed with the incredibly solid Biblical teaching of the pastor there. He had to have gone over something like 40 passages during the sermon, it was awesome! This was also the morning after the Cardinals had upset the Panthers in the Divisional Round of the NFC Playoffs, so everyone was excited about that, maybe no one more so than the pastor. He was pretty funny about it too, because when he was encouraging everyone to host a neighborhood Super Bowl party, he said, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if the Cardinals were to make it to the Super Bowl? Of course, it wouldn’t matter, because the Cardinals making the Super Bowl is a sure sign of the Apocalypse, so none of us would be around to see it, and the Cardinals wouldn’t have a quarterback [Kurt Warner] anymore either!”
A bit later that afternoon Melissa & Marci drove Alex & me over to Tempe, and dropped us off at our hotel we’d reserved for the nights during the AMS Conference. The best part of our motel was that it was at the same intersection as a station on the new light rail line that had just opened up. Seriously, we only had to walk across half a street to get to the station! Talk about convenience! We promptly took the train into downtown to catch some of the poster session at the Student Conference, since a few of Alex’s Valparaiso friends were presenting there. It was fun to meet some of them finally. Then when we went out to dinner with a couple Valpo people, we ran into Kent and a group of other people from Purdue and Nebraska at the Old Spaghetti Factory, so that was cool.
Monday the 12th was the first day of the AMS Conference, and the day that Alex & I caught the most of, in terms of going to various talks. It was fun throughout the whole conference to go see talks by other Penn Staters (the first morning, there was an entire session of PSU talks), and to meet up with alums like Carver and Yorks. I also met up with my friend Monica from high school at the conference — how random is that? I had no idea she was down there until she sent me a text message. So that was cool too.
On Monday night there was an awesome party at the Hyatt downtown, the GOES party. This is apparently an annual extravaganza, where companies like Harris Corporation, Boeing and all the other corporations that work together on the GOES project (Geostationary Orbiting Earth Satellites, a series of satellites that have provided crucial meteorological observations over the last three decades) get together and just throw a party for everyone at the AMS Conference. Apparently they cut back this year because of the economic downturn, but they still had unlimited free alcohol, free food (the best prime rib I’ve ever had, plus mashed potatoes, salad and quesadillas), free “casino cash” (where you could play various casino games like blackjack and roulette, to try and win raffle tickets for prizes at the end of the night), free olde-time photos (Kerrie got one taken with our project’s sponsor and a few other people, and Alex & I got one taken together, which was cool … if I get around to scanning in a copy, I’ll add it here). If that was “cutting back,” I’d love to see what a “normal” party is like!!
On Tuesday the 13th we didn’t make it in for the morning sessions, partly because there wasn’t that much that interested us, and partly because even though we went to bed at a decent hour, we just kept talking for a long time, as we seem to be very good at doing. 🙂 But on Tuesday evening was the Penn State AMS reception in one of the Hyatt ballrooms, for PSU students, faculty, alums and guests. That party was pretty fun too, with free appetizers and two free drinks per person. At the reception Alex was also able to meet Yvette (PSU prof) and we both talked with Sue for about half an hour, which was really good. And it actually turned out to be a good thing that Alex hadn’t finished his personal statement or PSU grad school application just yet, because of some of the things Sue said to Alex.
On Wednesday the 14th we barely caught any of the conference, because we stayed in the hotel room pretty much all day so that Alex could finish his application to Penn State, which was due on the 15th. After he came up with a draft of his personal statement, we both spent a few hours editing it together. In addition to incorporating a couple things that Sue mentioned the night before, it also turned out well that he waited until then to do his personal statement, because then we were able to edit it simultaneously, and bounce ideas off each other. That wound up taking less time than if we would’ve taken turns editing it long-distance and emailing it back and forth. And I think it turned out better in the end because of it, too. The final product was a very good personal statement, in my opinion, and better than the one I had in my application. After tweaking a few other things, Alex submitted his Penn State app! It’s exciting that it’s finally gotten to the point where his application has been submitted, but it’s also makes us both a bit anxious, in that there’s no more that Alex can do — it’s all in God’s hands now as the department’s admissions committee considers all the applicants to the grad program here. Hopefully he hears back relatively soon…
The AMS Awards Banquet was on the evening of Wednesday the 14th, and Alex, Kent, Kerrie & I all sat at a table that we later found out was “reserved” for awards winners and their guests. But hey, in our defense, Dr. Zhang from PSU and the other people who were sitting here motioned that it was totally okay with them that we sat there, so I think it was fine. 🙂 The banquet wasn’t all that thrilling in and of itself, it was like a typical banquet in that the food was good but the portions were rather small. They had some rather odd live entertainment though, a group of youth from the local Hohokam Nation tribe, performing some of their “traditional” songs (while they were wearing blue jeans and sneakers, mind you). One of the youths who introduced the group was pretty clearly winging it and seemed totally unprepared — he even forgot the name of the songs they were performing. Maybe it was just me, but I thought the whole thing seemed incongruous with the whole rest of the evening. I thought jazz playing softly in the background would’ve been better dinner music. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that the AMS hired them to perform largely for diversity and political correctness reasons, and so that they could soothe their consciences, that they were actually “doing something” to support indigenous cultures. But to me it just kind of came off that they were being put on display. I kind of felt bad for them too, because it didn’t seem like that many people were even paying attention to them. I don’t know, maybe I was reading too much into it.
After the banquet Alex & I met up with some of his other Valpo friends at The Big Bang, a piano bar on Mill Ave in downtown Tempe. I’ve never seen a bar that had two pianos set up before, much less featured. They had a group of musicians that rotated through, almost always having two pianists, and sometimes a drummer or bassist too, but they’d play all sorts of classic rock standards. It’s a pretty cool concept! They also had monitors scattered around the bar, so even if you were at a place that didn’t have a good view of the stage, you could always be watching the two pianists play the night away.
We got into the conference about mid-morning on Thursday the 15th, leaving all our luggage and stuff at the front desk of the motel. My talk was at noon that day, the last talk before lunch in the Atmospheric Chemistry conference, and it went well. I wasn’t at all nervous about it because it was essentially the same talk that I gave at the IPR back in mid-December. I practiced it once on Tuesday morning at the motel just to make sure it was around 12 or 13 minutes, but that was it. As a result, I felt like I gave a presentation that wasn’t quite as smooth or polished as some others that I’ve given, but Kerrie, Alex and some other people said they thought that actually worked quite well, because my pauses and whatnot gave them some time to think and catch up with what I was saying. I guess you could say I had a more conversational tone than some of my other presentations, where I’m pretty polished and somewhat scripted on what I want to say. But hey, given the reactions I got, maybe I’ll start incorporating a bit more of that approach in my future presentations!
I’ll write about the last part of our visit a little later, including our trip up to the Grand Canyon. As text-heavy as this post was, the Grand Canyon post promises to be picture-heavy! It might be a couple days yet though, since I have a bunch of stuff to do for my Advanced Forecasting class today and tomorrow, as I’m in the group responsible for putting together the verifications for yesterday’s forecast for 30-some counties in southern Missouri that were under Ice Storm and Winter Storm Warnings. Fun!