the rest is just whatever

the last blog post

2011-06-02T22:00:00.005-04:00

I've decided to start a new blog to mark the post-defense, pre-employment interim period right here.In the last couple days I've simply been packing for Louisiana and running errands (such as helping a new summer student settle in, and returning Knut's monitor and Physics of Glaciers book since he just got back from Norway). I met Myro and Mike for lunch at Cozy Thai yesterday, and had lunch with Atsu and Kat this afternoon at Magaritas Pizzeria. Kat and I then went for a wild romp around Rothrock - literally. I got lost (yet again) and the trusty little bumblebee car survived like, ten miles of off-roading from Bear Meadows to Whipple Dam via the Gettis Ridge trail and then some. 4WD saves the day again. We finished off at Meyer's Dairy for refreshing orange pineapple sundaes with whipped cream and cherries.

Kat at David K's Vista

Whipple Dam State Park

The latest Gnome in the forest.

Onward!

The good times roll

2011-06-02T10:02:00.008-04:00

Memorial Day Weekend, and this past week, was highly enjoyable and memorable on at least two fronts. We will do this in chronological order.

Becca went to Lancaster over the weekend so I had the apartment to myself. I spent Saturday preparing for my defense. The guys told me I didn't have to sweat it, but I decided to be prudent and take the time to cover all the material anyway. Having already had a smooth practice session on Thursday, I spent the day tweaking my powerpoint and reviewing papers and my thesis. Emily H came over and lounged around with me in the afternoon so I had pleasant company while reading.

We had our PSCG summer cookout at the Hollemans' on Sunday. My contribution was a full carload of people and cupcakes. I still haven't quite figured the terminology out - I think it's called grilling in the south, cook-out in the northeast and bbq in the midwest, and of course bbq means something different in Texas altogether. Good times were had by all. After eating we went on a hike (since the sun sets at 8.30pm now, and twilight lasts till 9.15pm) and got 'lost' on the way to a vernal pond in Patton Woods. It was really hot even in the evening and there were lots of bugs out; fortunately I had brought my bug spray and we were a-okay. And we managed to find our way to the pond after a quick phone call.

Sitting on the Hollemans' back porch. I should have taken a shot with the sky as it was a great picture perfect sunny afternoon.

At the vernal pond.. or should I say swamp..

More importantly, Joachim and I got baptized on Monday at Colyer Lake.

I decided not to make a big hoo-hah out of it so I didn't invite the entire town out. We had our witnesses. I think all my Christian friends all assume I've been baptized. Partially true, I was baptized as an infant, and for a long time now I have been highly skeptical of infant baptism. Water baptism is not a pre-requisite for salvation, but it is considered a physical testimony of your belief in Christ's death, resurrection, the forgiveness of sins and your salvation. You have to make the choice, and infants can't do that. Everything just fell into place perfectly in terms of timing.

The crew - Ark, Jim, Joachim, Don, David, Paiti, Me, Christina, Matt, Cecelia and Ernest

We celebrated with a cookout at Jim's afterwards

Thirdly, I successfully defended my Masters' Thesis (A characterization of basal roughness at Thwaites Glacier using signal processing and fractal methods) on Tuesday afternoon to a most excellent crowd. If you missed it, that's okay, there was no room for you anyway. An hour before my defense I was loading smoothie supplies into my car, and our neighbor Garrison, who was getting on his bike to head to school for my defense, hollered, "Isn't your defense in an hour?!" 45 minutes before my defense I'm driving down Burrowes, heading to the Frase Street garage to park after having dropped off the smoothie supplies with Heather T, and Randy waves at me from the street and gestures at his watch. Ten miutes before my defense, Ben (whom I was pleasantly surprised to see) comes along, looks at the fruit juice and frozen yogurt I'm dishing out in the mailroom, and says, "Your defense is in 10 minutes and you're making smoothies?" Becca said it best, that's how I roll! I still can't fully pinpoint who was at my defense, but I appreciate every single person who showed up. We celebrated with a cookout at Luke and Lana's in the evening.

Kat W. made me a most excellent cake with miniature sugar penguins all over it.

Sridhar, me and Luke

Grillmaster Atsu

Our hosts, Luke & Lana

For now, I'm going to be taking a break from State College and heading to Louisiana to help with disaster rebuilding. I'll be back to clean up my thesis revisions, and Knut and I plan to shape things into a paper for a JGR publication by August. Hallelujah! Praise the Lord and let the good times roll.

2011-05-27T12:31:00.003-04:00

I anticipate baking at least a hundred cupcakes this weekend for the 2 cookouts, baptisms and my upcoming defense! For my practice defense yesterday I made 3 types of cupcakes - applesauce, nutella & peanut butter, and strawberry.

rappahanock tappahanock chugachugapookapanock

2011-05-22T23:34:00.005-04:00

This past weekend felt like a month-long vacation, and I feel like I need another vacation to recover from it. The primary mission objective was to attend the wedding of Mr. and Mrs. R.J. Franklin in Tappahanock, Virginia. As the people who introduced Becky and Robby to PSCG where they met, Isaac and I were invited to be readers at the wedding, so it was a pretty exciting big deal for me.

I initially thought this would be a wedding in the middle of the boonies, but Isaac, the Hollemans and myself somehow had a gazillion adventures in 3 days. This included

- stopping in Warrenton, VA on the drive down for a crisp yet succulent veggie burger for lunch at Foster's Grill
- having peach tea and scrambled eggs with bacon for breakfast at Jacks Java and crabcakes and shrimp for lunch at Lowry's Seafood Restaurant in Tappahanock
- laughing about the world not ending on Saturday
- partying it up at the reception at Belle Mount Vineyard in Warsaw and the after-party in one of the bridesmaids' rooms

- exploring the Rappahanock River Wildlife Reserve and being treated to a feast of the senses, from the sweet aroma of honeysuckle and mountain laurel to the delightful sightings of 3 turtles, 2 deer and a lizard and the pleasant chirping of birdsong

- going to the Tappahanock Farmers' Market

- walking along the Stratford cliffs on the Potomac and down to the beach,
and being given shark teeth by locals

- seeing close to a hundred motobikes in a weekend
- exploring the grounds at Stratford Hall and being recognized as readers by a gentleman who had also been at the wedding
- having the cook at the Virginia Deli in Fredericksburg forget my bacon-lettuce-tomato hotdog and give me chocolate in apology
- accidentally sitting on the chocolate and smearing it all over the car seat (oops)
- driving through the sweet, sweet towns of Culpeper and Sperryville

- cruising up the northern track of the Shenandoah Mountains Skyline Drive

- chatting up an elderly couple in Breezewood, PA while in line for dinner who were at the Preakness
- using the last daylight hour on Sunday to investigate paranormal activity on Gravity Hill in Bedford County, PA

Good times. Unfortunately I have to defend my thesis next week so I need to hunker down. Did I mention that in the last 2 weeks I've been in 11 states?

County Counting

2011-05-17T23:31:00.008-04:00

Chris K. and Nate A.'s crazy addictions to tracking how many counties they've been in finally rubbed off on me. After being in the same car with the latter for who-knows-how-many-hours, you should not be surprised. Some people tally their counties by considering whether they drove through, or stopped and did something, or lived there, etc. After 7 years of being here it is too much trouble to differentiate, so I've kept mine simple - if I drove, or have been driven, through the county, it counts. If I was in transit in an airport, it doesn't. Here's my tally:

I've been in 476 of the 3141 counties in the US, which beats Nate, but Chris has 845. You can make your own Counties Visited Map here.

MGM 2011

2011-05-16T22:47:00.003-04:00

Had a very productive weekend. With the good company of Nate, one of the PSICE geographers, I gave my last conference presentation at a regional glaciology meeting (somewhat misnamed so I will refrain from naming it) at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire; drove down to Cape Cod to visit my old couchsurfing host Marga, whom I stayed with last year when the same conference was held at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute; went up to Boston to help my sister move out of the dorms (sort of - we helped her pack but not move out) and spent a night at Yewlin's, who is doing her med school residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. Nate is obsessed with beating Chris K's counties-visited count, so we drove all over the northeast US. His goal for the trip was to drive through as many counties as possible between Boston and State College. At Port Jarvis we drove through 3 states in 5 minutes (New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania).

Nate and Nora at Dartmouth College, on the way to lunch. The undergrads at Dartmouth are way more conservative than our Penn State kids. It was a pretty warm day but all the kids on the lawn were wearing t-shirts and shorts. Back at Penn State the kids have been taking everything off (guys shirtless and girls in bikinis).

Down on Cape Cod

Dinner at Marga's

We showed up in Boston just in time to help Tabby pack

The USPO in Beacon Hill

No roadtrip is without misadventure

Yup we got stuck in the sand at the White Horse beach parking lot. Felt very good to have 5 good samaritans stop to help us out! A lady gave us her broom to whack sand out of the bottom of the car too.

Ah well. I had dinner at Kimchi with Celine tonight. On getting home I turned on the tv to look for news on the Mississippi flooding and instead stumbled onto a broadcast of a community action forum on the Marcellus Shale on the Pennsylvania Cable Network (PCN). Senseless statement of the day :
"It's like carbon dating, but with isotopes" - Katy Martin, the Environmental Specialist in Hydraulic Fracturing... are you kidding me !?!?!! Even without context that is a silly statement. Carbon dating is based on isotopes!

spring things

2011-05-10T00:27:00.014-04:00

We are in spring, or perhaps summer. The weather has been spectacular and a great respite from the rain of the last few weeks.

I stole this photo of West Halls from Boon, who is now back in Singapore. She took it during the tail end of finals last week, and you can see a solitary dude walking back to his dorm. We had our last lunch together in Waring Commons and she gave me a ton of stuff she didn't want to take home with her, such as her Brita water filtration system, a huge jar of nutella, milo packets and peppermint patties. I would have taken her bed sheets too if her flight hadn't been at 6am - she insisted on taking a cab.

A lot has been going on, as befitting of summer - softball practice, biking, baking, hiking, attempts at tennis, going to parties/dinners/gatherings - so there's a lot to be thankful for. Even though some of those dinners were farewell dinners.

Despite many of my undergrad friends leaving, there are still lots of people (ie. grad students and working friends) in town to hang out with. April and I celebrated her belated birthday at the Mt Nittany Inn. Now, when one thinks of high-class dining with a view, one usually conjures up images of sweeping views of city lights at night. This is what you get in our part of the world:

Speaking of alluring landscapes , April flew off to the Florida Keys the next day, where she is currently mapping coral reefs as part of her Marine Biogeochemistry class. Envious? I am.

The Hatz, or should I say Metz, crew, is smaller now that the undergrads are gone, but we still have saints from out of town popping in and out for visits.

Ark, Dimitri, me, Annie, Esther, Jodie, May and Jim
The great outdoors have also been calling. After Harvest on Sunday we took off to Black Moshannon for an afternoon of fishing and hiking.

Vanilla Nilla

Jin, Nilla, Hyeri, Kristen, Mike, Myro, Me and PDan

Baking has also been going well. I started making cupcakes to bring to the dinners we've been attending. So far I have made bacon cupcakes, strawberry cupcakes and Nutella cupcakes. I need to improve on my frosting though.

Strawberry cupcakes on the left, bacon cupcakes with strawberry frosting on the right. and in the center - no, I did not make the cheesecakes.

Myro has recently been trying to teach me tennis. This is the view from the tennis courts at Tudek Park - certainly a slice of heaven on earth (pun intended).

And the last pretty spring photo is from Dan M's chili kick-off party on Sunday (since it was a summer kick-off party, I guess it is summer, not spring anymore). I couldn't resist taking this photo from his deck of the sunset.

Well, thanks for tuning in. If I stay up for 3.5 more hours I'll get to see Venus, Jupiter, Mars and Mercury align in the sky, but no thanks. Nate and I are checking out of town for the MGM Conference at Brown University, Rhode Island on Wednesday, so talk to y'all next week.

ding dong, the witch is dead?

2011-05-05T13:57:00.004-04:00

I forgot to blog about the reaction here at Penn State to Osama bin Laden's death, which was announced on Sunday night. Becca and I watched the news in our PJs. The kids at East Halls marched out, headed downtown to Beaver Canyon and went ahead and had a rally/riot that was captured on CNN (photo 22 or thereabouts). You'd have thought it was Cairo, Egypt last month. Or something like that.

Now, I understand this is a significant and historic moment, and Osama is responsible for thousands of deaths, so sure, feel good about it, but I don't think it's right to be gleeful that he is dead. Also, I bet most of the kids were using it as an excuse to party. My officemate Jamie thought it was fine to celebrate and said it was just like "going ahead and taking the piss anyway", although I'm not sure what exactly his literary analogy was supposed to imply.

memory lane

2011-05-03T23:16:00.011-04:00

I've been thinking about doing something different this summer.

Just for nostalgia

Back on the farm - Pete, Ted, me and Ed.

just too late

2011-05-02T20:52:00.014-04:00

I was honestly feeling extremely blindsided today, with only myself to blame, and therefore feeling somewhat disappointed with myself. Not because I did something wrong, but because I failed in a particular way to live up to my potential, and I was totally and completely oblivious to it till this past weekend. But I really can't do anything about it now. I rarely wish I could go back in time, and hindsight is 20/20, but I know this would have changed the world. I don't understand why this happened, or how I missed the boat, or failed to see what was right in front of my face. Total failure to register. I just never felt motivated nor compelled to take a more active role. And what makes it all the more crumbly is the fact that this would not have changed my world, nor benefited me at all, but would have made a difference in the lives of other people. My life has been fantastic (not that there haven't been difficulties, but I rose above all of them) and lacking for nothing (except perhaps a spiritual mentor). I didn't think I'd miss something like this, this early on - guess I got too comfortable with life. I've earnestly tried to be helpful to others and supportive of people but this fell completely off my radar when it was in plain sight.

The problem extends itself to the fact that one of the key tools we use to discern whether we should act is whether we have peace with that decision to act; and I have never had any nagging thoughts or conscience pangs from not attending to this particular situation. From a logical point of view, I think I ought to be highly disappointed with myself, and I think I'm psyching myself to be, but I don't actually feel bad about it, simply because my inaction hasn't negatively affected me. Which has led me to feel even more perplexed. You are talking to the most self-centered person you know. I thought if this was something I was supposed to have acted on, at least my gut, or spirit, or conscience, would have compelled me to act on it. Did I totally ignore? I think I made a decision very early on that I wasn't going to act on this, and then it just got ingrained in me to ignore it.

This reminds me. People have been disappointed in me before for not rising to the occasion. Like years and years ago, when I didn't run to lead an organization I was in because someone else wanted the position, and it was fine with me for that person to have it. A very close friend came up to me after the fact and told me he was disappointed I hadn't run. That was disappointing. I felt like I had let him down. Different situation now, same feelings.

Sometimes, in your time of need, when one of life's hiccups may not be totally unbearable but still unpleasant enough to perturb you, God will send you a friend. When you think you least deserve it.

Thanks Nola for calling me to get lunch when I least expected it, and most needed a friend to talk to. Life goes on.

I am also thankful for the covert support of Mr. P. I cornered him in his lab this morning, sulked somewhat and then sent him a completely useless, long and messy email, to which he replied with some very sound advice.

Rebecca-

I'm sure that the very near and real end to your time at PSU is prompting this. Prior to this point, there was always and opportunity for you to do more or be more involved somewhere down the road. Now that your time here is coming to an end, that is no longer realistic. So it's natural (and I think) good to look back at your time here and be reflective. What could have gone better, what should I have done but didn't, what did I do that I shouldn't? There is a time and a place for that and I think that time and place is now and over the next few weeks. But don't let it become self-induldgent could-a, should-a, would-a, self-flaggelation without any benefit. I think what you are going through should be focused on what's ahead, not what's behind. All our experiences make us who we are ("Being is becoming"). So take this experience and learn from it.

Thanks.

My thesis mentor Joe is in town, so Fegs, Christine, Tarun, Leo, Andrew and I went to get ice cream at the creamery with him at the end of the day. Although the weather was gloomy, it was a nice distraction. I sent LaMichelle a text too. Thinking back to the days when she and Joe were still here made me miss those days. Ok ok, enough about turning back the clock.

the end is near

2011-05-01T18:26:00.004-04:00

This was the last week of classes. The number of undergrads in town is going to plummet continuously with every passing day of finals week. While it's a celebration for many, especially the graduating seniors, it's quite tragic really. Once you've accumulated some time at any university, it starts to seem like every semester some people you've gotten to know leave. Some people you will never see again for the rest of your life.

Earlier this week bLess had our last meeting of the school year. We went to Texas Roadhouse for dinner. I am thankful for what I have had and what I will never have again.

Christian and Adam pigging out

If I could stay in school forever and not age, I would. But it is right and proper that we move on. Goodbye undergrads, I will miss you. You have been boisterous and loud at times but the spirit was vivacious.

Friday evening Harvest had the senior send-off banquet. I may be old, but I have never seen so many grown men cry. It was quite touching. Unfortunately it made me question my involvement with Harvest, as I never got very involved in anything asides from Sunday service and family group. I could analyze this to a fault but it's too late now; as Dorian would say, "it is what it is", and there's no choice but to leave it as that.

Saturday was highly enjoyable. It was sunny and in the 70s. I woke up at 9, had a leisurely breakfast and at noon went for softball practice. Yup, I joined our department's summer team. We spent 2 hours on the field at Radio Park Elementary school and all twelve of us got to bat. It was a great day with wall to wall sunshine and lots of cyclist were whizzing down the bike trail right next to the softball field. After practice I went to meet Myro and Rosalyn, an alum who was back in town for the weekend, at Dairy Queen where we enjoyed toffee-crunch caramel blizzards (ice cream desserts). We caught up for an hour - Roz's life has changed a lot since she left.

Then I went and got Heather T and we went hiking on one of the ridge trails up at Joe Hays' Vista. It was a perfect afternoon and we had a great time. We got back into town (it's only 7 miles out of town) in time for me to change clothes and head over to Jim's for a scrumptious dinner and prayer meeting. Saw some 'old' pals and met some new ones. All good. By the time I got to bed at 11pm I was so tired I slept like a log till 10am this morning, when I woke up with a slightly sore shoulder from softball.

I wrote a long paragraph reflecting on some things I've been thinking about this weekend but decided they are not appropriate to blog, so they'll go into my private journal instead.

This semester we endured, or should I say enjoyed, a particularly long and harsh winter. The snow lay on the ground long into March, and there was an afternoon when I thought to myself that the last time I had seen the green grass was a long, long time ago. It also never broke above freezing for a solid 3 months in a row. But I enjoyed winter. We had a very good season. Ironically, this week has been the first week we've had sunny skies and temperatures above the 70Fs (the 2 weeks I was gone it rained continuously). The southern US sadly experienced a severe tornado outbreak this past week and many towns have been destroyed, ravaged to the point that the photos of the destruction resemble those from Japan. Sam, a friend who used to be a post-doc in the department, survived because the tornado missed her house by 1/4 of a mile. I checked in on my old couchsurfer, Paul, and he was in the southern part of Alabama which was not badly hit and is alright. Vying for the headlines on Friday morning was the Royal Wedding in the UK, where Prince William and Kate Middleton got married in a fairytale wedding that hasn't been had, and probably won't be had, for a while. It is a national holiday in the UK, and a million people showed up in London to celebrate. I think it is nice for people to have an event to be happy about (even if it is the monarchy). It is however kind of rubbishy sad that people "have to be" relieved there were no terrorist attacks.

NYC & Easter

2011-04-25T06:50:00.007-04:00

There's something to be said about friends who let you stay with them on short notice, borrow their warm clothes because you just flew in from a tropical island, and give you their spare house keys and unlimited-fare metrocard. And that's a big thank you. I stayed with Camay, MaryAnne and their new roommate Michelle, in their 3rd floor apartment in Hell's Kitchen, a couple of blocks from Times Square. Although my stay was brief, I got to see Natasha and Geraldine again, as well as Camay's new beau. There were probably more people I know in the city but with such short time there was no point looking them up.

This time round I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art (yeah I was cheap and gave $4), the Cloisters, the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and the Brooklyn Museum. The city was bursting into bloom. Earlier this month I had been a bit disappointed at not being able to see the cherry blossoms in Washington D.C., but I got my fill in New York. My favorite blooms, though, are the magnolias. They were beautiful. Here are some photos of New York City in the spring.

Central Park

This little girl is climbing on a beautifully foliated Manhatten schist outcrop, with 5th Avenue skyscrapers in the background. Some of the outcrops in Central Park have glacial striations on them.

The Cloisters

Around town

Greeley Square

Easter at the Rockefeller Plaza

Camay & Russell - dinner at Oh Taisho in St Mark's Place

The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens

I got back into State College in time to spend Easter Sunday with everyone. We had Easter Luncheon after service at Harvest, and in the evening Dan and Kerrie hosted PSCG's annual Easter Dinner. Easter is a big deal in the Christian and Catholic traditions but personally, as with Christmas, I don't see the particular dates as holding any significant meaning. They are all dates based on pagan festivals, after all. I do however appreciate being able to celebrate our salvation in Christ with fellow believers, so I although I wouldn't miss it if I skipped it, I consider taking part in Easter festivities as a blessing.

Nom nom nom.. what a spread...

Sarah's traditional lamb cake. She made it last year too.

I got this at the store before church. The old lady who was in front of me at the check-out told me it looked too pretty to eat. Kate and Sarah claimed their pieces (and the plastic bunny) before I could take a photo.

Good times

Kate and her 3-pronged marshmallow stick

I woke up early enough to see my roommate go running this morning. Usually I wake up about the time she's leaving for school but jet lag is tailing me like a shadow. Right now I'm making a pot of wheat berries for my lunch. I discovered wheat berry salad at the Brooklyn Museum cafe and really enjoyed it, so I got some yesterday at the store. They are whole wheat kernels and remind me of barley.

glacial geomorphology

2011-04-22T22:58:00.003-04:00

I'm in NYC. But just as a break from city blogging I'm going to post some photos from the glacial geomorphology fieldtrip we went on the weekend immediately before I left for Singapore. We drove all around northeastern PA, to Erie and back, on a grand tour of landforms such as drumlins and eskers created during the Wisconsin (110,000 to 10,000 years ago) and Illinoian (310,000 to 128,000 years ago) glaciations. We also popped into a couple of quarries, visited a winery, ate good seafood and brownie sundaes in a bar in downtown Erie, slept at Penn State Berks, and even visited the location of the world's first oil well, the Drake well, in Titusville on the way back.

Inspecting fluvial erosion in a quarry

Fantastic sorting and layering of pebbles on a past shoreline of Lake Erie.

Lake Erie beach on Presque Isle State Park. The western beach we are looking at is undergoing severe erosion, hence the breakwater attempt to stop it. If a beach is going to go, let it go! No point spending all this money on what is inevitable.

Oil Creek State Park

Living in SINg - Part 2

2011-04-21T20:25:00.003-04:00

Managed to squeeze a little bit more into my stay. On Monday, after lunch with my grandparents, I went downtown to sort out some business, then met Janee at Orchard Central. We went to check out the old shophouses that are surrounded by the urban jungle, and then had a relaxing tea at Bakerzin in the Paragon before taking the bus home together. The Paragon is frequented by an older crowd, and Bakerzin is a really nice cafe for old men to hang out while they wait for their wives to shop.

The shophouses downtown

Janee and her waffles... and my bailey's irish cream souffle

We had a prolonged discussion about social integration, expatriates, national identity, and argued about whether Singaporeans are racist. Singapore is trying to attract lots of foreign talent because we are purportedly going through a brain-drain. I have seen a lot more western expatriates on buses and trains this trip than the last time I was back.

Another change that is apparently happening in the country is the western side of the island is developing a different character than the eastern side. Janee takes the MRT everyday, and told me that when she's on the east-west line, the behavior and dress of the commuters changes noticeably as the train heads from east to west. Another friend said this week that the west is becoming more and more like Malaysia (what a way to describe things!), whereas the east has a much more charming kind of character. Friends from Malaysia, don't take offense. Neither of them were able to pinpoint the differences as quantitatively/descriptively as I would have liked (back off, I'm a scientist). In the east there is the beach and the east coast parkway cycle/running track, which stretches from the central business district all the way to the airport, while in the west the "beach" faces the refineries*. In the east there are more coffeeshops, eateries and parks scattered around the neighborhoods, but in the west, housing is much more crowded, and apart from pockets like Holland Village and the landed housing estates (ie the neighborhoods that are comprised of houses, not HDB apartments/flats), the feel is more surburbian and mall-oriented. I have not however ventured that much outside of the east so I can't really say this with any certainty.

*There is a nude beach somewhere north of that neck of the woods..

Tuesday was my last day in town and I went to the tourist sites with my grandma and mum. We took a 3-minute monorail ride across to Sentosa, Singapore's resort island, from VivoCity. It was just $3 a person. Going to Sentosa used to be much more expensive because you either had to take a ferry or a cable car to get there. Now there is a mile-long bridge that you can walk or drive across. There are travellators on the walking section just like those at the airport! That was sort of weird but I guess it's in keeping with the whole massive resort theme. We didn't go to Universal Studios or the casino but just walked around.

View of VivoCity from Sentosa

At night we played our last rounds of drawing pictionary. Dad wrote "pride comes before a fall" as his phrase, and when it was grandpa's turn to draw that phrase, he drew an election booth on voting day with a man (representing the current reigning party) in spectacles tripping over a block and falling into a hole. Parliament had been dissolved earlier in the day and the date for the General Elections is set for May 7th. May I repeat that due to an irrationally early deadline to register as an overseas voter, I am not going to be able to vote in this election. Is any government watchdog reading this???

Wednesday morning I got on the 1055 to Newark. I'm actually writing this on the plane, since we're only 5 hours into our 18-hour longhaul. Dad used his frequent flyer miles to get me on the non-stop flight, which has huge seats all of the business class variety. I have never been on this type of flight before. It's really empty too. There are, at my best guess, 20 passengers and 10 flight attendants on board, so it's really like being on my own personal jet! This is probably as good as it gets, unless someday I get invited on Air Force One (HA HA HA!!! LOL!! WHAT A JOKE!). So thanks, Dad, if you're reading this.

Another of my old friends, YJ, is now working at the airport, and she showed up to say bye. She helped me with some check-in hiccup, and after I said goodbye to my family, she hung out with me inside the departure lounge till my flight. How nice, it's the first time someone has been able to see me off all the way to the gate. YJ has seen me off thrice now, and I bet the last time she saw me off she didn't think the next time she'd be working at the airport! I always thought it would be fun to work in the airport. She's hoping to get posted to Beijing with her airline soon.

I'm going to stop by Camay's in NYC for a couple days to get readjusted. I'm looking forward to getting back to State College and going for lunch / happy hour with Nate and everyone. Ultimately, although it was nice to catch up with old friends & relatives (I don't care much for local food, nor shopping, nor seeing the new resort and downtown areas), the main reason I went on this somewhat unneccessary trip was being able to see for myself how my grandpa is doing. He is doing okay, and hopefully his hip replacement surgery in July will go well.

2011-04-19T02:21:00.005-04:00

The best thing that has ever come out of the CNN Comments trash-list : Your "moral math" is ... flawed, as BP donates more to charity than you and I, [but] they are still incompetent ****s who flooded the ocean with crude oil for months at a time.
- in response to whether lying is acceptable if it helps a good cause.

visiting SINg

2011-04-17T21:41:00.014-04:00

I bet some people get a kick out of the Changi Airport code being SIN. Anyway, I'm here for a short 9 days to visit my grandparents. It took me a grand total of 34 hours door-to-door to get here. I can't remember how long it took our PSICE crew to get to Christchurch last time we flew (the other way) but this trip is probably on par with that one. The weather here is sweltering, 90+F/30+C, a far cry from the rainy and cold weather the northeastern US has been getting.

The first day I arrived I managed to find stuff at the grocery store similar to what we get in PA and made everyone dinner. Of course, the more "western" ingredients/produce are more expensive here since it all has to be imported. Dinner consisted of

Salmon-topped butternut squash with tomato & garlic couscous

Chicken crepes with stir-fried veg, inspired by Chris & Rebecca T.

I also made lunch the next day, which was

a chicken-pasta-mixed-veg-casserole dish with nut crust

In the twilight zone where it was between meals on both side of the planet I ended up baking

date cakes (which were supposed to be cookies) and apple cookies

I've been doing a shoddy job at calorie counting while eating local food.

Grandpa and Grandma with their roti prata and chicken curry.

Grandma's kueh pai ti (fried radish in a crispy shell) and chicken satay. Kueh means cake but refers to a broad variety of snacks, both sweet and savory. Should I spell that as 'savoury' since I'm now in a country that uses British English? ehhh

Zai Mee Fen (vegetarian noodles)

Huat kueh (steamed cupcakes) and lychee cake which Aunty AiTin and Aunty SoongPang bought from a bakery near my other grandma's place.

If you're interested in Singaporean or Southeast Asian cuisine you should check out this wonderful cooking blog of a local lady - The Momster's Kitchen.

Managed to round up some of my old school friends to catch up with them. Most of my friends are already working and doing pretty well. The hottest conversation topic is, for good reason, the upcoming General Elections and all the carrots/gimmicks the reigning party is pulling out of the bag. Our neighborhood itself has been subjected to several rounds of gerrymandering through the years. I did not register to vote as an overseas voter before the deadline (even though there isn't even an election date yet) so I won't be voting this year (not that it will make a difference).

The other hot topic, directly related, is the candidacy of a 27-year-old female by the current reigning party. The moment I heard about that I wondered if the reigning party was trying to pull a Sarah Palin gimmick.. but no.. people are more upset because of her age rather than her gender. 'Blocks' of people are voted in as Group Representation Constituencies; the winning party gets all available seats in a constituency regardless of whether an opposition candidate was more popular than any one of the candidates in the winning party. People are unhappy that this younger female will get a seat instead of a better-qualified, more experienced opposition candidate, and a lot of people have been smearing her online by posting her cheesy facebook photos. There is nothing wrong with having cheesy photos of yourself, but she really should have made her facebook private before her candidacy was announced. As for myself, since I have so many facebook photos and blogs, I will just have to run for World Dictator. Anyway, it's great to be getting updated with what's going on down here, not just in terms of politics but also in terms of the lives of my old buddies.

Amelia, Shawn and our Chinese teacher Pan Lao Shi at a Watami, a Japanese restaurant in Ion, one of the newer malls* downtown. We are eating, from left to right, shabu-shabu beef, udon, potato pancakes, salad, fried chicken, vegetable tempura and hot-pot rice. Amelia is now tutoring and Shawn is finishing up his last semester at university.

Kavita and Rachel having breakfast at the Dome Cafe in Parkway Parade, a mall* near my grandparents' house. Kavita is now a full-time French teacher and Rachel is working at one of the big banks downtown.

*Due to our population density, Singapore malls are not like US malls. If you could imagine Universal Studios or Walt Disney World in a mall, that's what Singapore malls are like, with everything from restaurants, grocery stores, libraries and shops to even the post office in them. US malls are pretty crappy in comparison, which is a number of my American friends hate going to malls (and as you can tell by now I'm having some problems writing for a mixed audience).

Huifen, me and Yiling at the Starbucks on the main street in my neighborhood. Huifen, Yiling and Yiling's fiancee are all working for the government now. The government is a big employer here.

Although I'm not motivated enough to check out the new museums and attractions in town, I have been able to roam through some new parts of the city in the process of meeting up with people. Dad and I went to City Harvest Church on Sunday with Aunty Lucy and Uncle Charles.

Aunty Lucy was a bit nervous that I would have a 'culture shock' as the service is quite charismatic, but I've had an extremely broad exposure to all sorts of worship and I'd say this was quite in the mainstream. It would be nice if some of my friends Stateside could see what is going on here, with dozens of people coming up and accepting Christ at every service. The congregation was big, 7000 people in one service (it's held at the convention center downtown), but I've been to much bigger, and also much smaller. They also speak in tongues, which I find very rare in the US. Some people I know are hesitant about the spiritual authenticity of that. My take is very simple - Jesus has many flocks, and it is not our place to say who is His and who is not.

Some other random shots

At Uncle Paul's house for dinner one night.

The headquarters of the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts. According to a friend's fiancee who works there, this is the Singaporean equivalent of the America's CIA. Who would have guessed it would be in such a pretty building?

I found out all on the same day that 3 girls I know are getting married, and I met 2 of their fiancees. I won't be around for any of their weddings.

out the door and on the way

2011-04-11T18:47:00.003-04:00

I'm at the JFK airport. It's been a bus, 4 trains and 8 hours since I left my apartment and I'm still.. here..

By the way, check out Earth : The Operators' Manual, a new tv series on climate change and renewable energy hosted by our very own Richard Alley.

2011-04-07T22:21:00.004-04:00

Today, a large aftershock hit Japan. Not good. Yumiko's mum is still in Sendai. We hope she is okay. My dad and I decided to re-route my upcoming flight to Singapore to transit in Frankfurt instead of Tokyo. Yes, Singapore is so far away from here that it doesn't matter whether you fly over the Pacific or the Atlantic. I have never lived through a war, natural disaster or other catastrophe, and in light of everything that is happening in the world, it's surreal to realize the world is not, and has not always been as peachy as it seems.

On a lighter note, I took two undergrads to a cheap asian buffet for dinner tonight, and my fortune cookie said "YOU WILL SOON CROSS THE GREAT WATERS". Finally, a real working fortune cookie!

the kitchen is closed

2011-04-06T13:39:00.003-04:00

Apparently the US government is going shut itself down. This has happened before in 1996, so it's not the end of the world. I just hope I get my tax rebate before the IRS shuts down.

The upcoming government shutdown is aimed to curb excessive spending. The budget crisis, entirely brought on by the sloppy mismanagement of the country, reflects the flamboyant culture here. This brings to mind words from a book I'm currently reading (The Palgrave Companion to North American Utopias by J.W. and V.L. Friesen) -

... from a cultural perspective, other than reacting to terrorist acts, we [in North America] almost have nowhere to go in the twenty-first century. Why is this so? Because we have done it all. We have permanently achieved overproduction, waste, and grotesque consumption; religious and cultural banality (if not disinterest); art without effort; low if not contradictory moral standards of all kinds, privilege without responsibility...

wicked weekend

2011-04-04T15:24:00.004-04:00

This morning I woke up feeling like I needed another day to recover from the weekend. I had no plans for Friday evening apart from my weekly climbing class at the YMCA, so I spent Friday night making a video for my upcoming presentation to the National Science Foundation. The presentation is part of the 2011 assessment of the Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS). Essentially we have to tell them how we've been using the funding money they've given us.

Check out the vid - it's wicked!

On Saturday afternoon Anne and I dug our skirts out of our closets and went to the Mt Nittany Pow Wow. The pow wow is an American Indian cultural celebration, and it reminded me of the cultural events we used to have back in secondary school, where our schoolmates would perform Chinese dances and the Chinese Orchestra would play traditional songs. Just a different, and enjoyable insight into another culture you don't get to see everyday. I found the variety of clothing and regalia fascinating!

We were even invited to take part in an inter-tribal dance. It was a lot of fun and simply involves bopping around the floor in a circle. I was rather concerned that I would do something terribly offensive but everyone was having a good time, and Anne said I had a ridiculous smile on my face.

After we had seen and danced enough, we went to Myers' Dairy and enjoyed maple walnut sundaes with butterscotch fudge in the sun.

In the evening Elizabeth D (btw, I happen to know 2 Elizabeth D.'s) and I went to Jim's for bible study. Jeremy and his wife Abby were in town visiting from Baltimore, and Daniel had come in from Lancaster. I think we had 9 people for dinner; the guys made salad and brussel sprouts and bought a chicken dinner and rosemary potatoes from Wegman's, Keisha brought Creamery ice cream and Elizabeth brought brownies so we had quite the spread! Bible study was simple and covered the distinctions between the body, spirit and soul; Don, one of the undergrads, felt it really clarified the issue of the spirit for him and was very happy.

After that, I thought about going to check out the Khmer and Latino Cultural Nights at the HUB, but felt I really didn't have enough time; the Harvest girls' night was also on that evening and I had already decided to skip that. So off I went to Becky M's toga party with the perfect birthday present for her - a toga teddy!

Now the last toga party I went to, I was awarded the Worst Toga award (thank you, thank you, LOL). This time I made Elizabeth help me do it right before heading over. Had some good mixes, caught up with some folk and headed home around midnight.

I woke up on Sunday at 7.30am to head out for our glacial geomorphology field trip. We headed off to Williamsport to look at periglacial paleosoils and I dare say we drove through every small town between Williamsport and Port Matilda. I will admit I felt pretty sleepy throughout the morning. Smashing rocks is always fun though, and we did the usual amount of exploring (aka "trespassing" aka "geocaching" aka "is this where the tea and biscuits are being served?") that comes with any geology trip. Most geology trespassing is on state lands or quarries, although sometimes we ramble onto private grounds (or gun club property like last time). According to Dr P., our PA locals are usually friendly and even interested in our work once we explain we're geologists with the university, but once you get into New York State, all the city people whose vacation properties we end up on get all flustered and call the police. By the way, we stopped in Jersey Shores, PA along the way. Jersey Shores in New Jersey, and on tv, seems like a really superficial place, but our Jersey Shores is a beautiful historic town with charming brick buildings lined along the riverside.

I like getting out into the countryside because it reminds me of the 'bigger picture' outside of our comfy town.

Investigating the soil profiles on the slopes along the railway

Stopping in the middle of the road on a quiet Sunday to admire the 1800's-era farmhouses

Steph with a view of what I believe to be the Susquehanna river

Tramping around looking for charcoal burning sites above Port Matilda

A typical windgap along the Appalachians

I got home in the evening with barely enough time to have dinner and then head to PSCG. We had some really good discussions about churches and whether religion has any place in politics. I realized that I will really miss the intellectual discussions I have with the PSCG group when I move to Houston. Basics are important but we all need to grow. I love listening to Sarah, Kristen and Josh's arguments, because they make me think about my own position on certain issues, and I love that our group is open enough that people can disagree without worrying about offending anyone. I love the fact that every week I learn something new about bible history from Kristen and Nate, such as the fact that the name Jehovah is a 15th-century mistranslation/concoction of the Lord's name. It's not wrong to use it, since obviously it holds great meaning to many, but it's wrong to say it's in the original Hebrew. A lot of Christians don't know who wrote what books of the bible, nor how the books were selected, which writings have been excluded, nor how different translations came about, and I myself am guilty of that, so having other people around who know more than I do and who can voice their thoughts and opinions has been great.

A couple other cool things that happened Sunday night were that Sarah P. made chocolate mint cookies and we celebrated Chris' birthday at our place after PSCG. Becca made him an excellent whole wheat blueberry chocolate cake.

Yes, there were more and they were delicious

I think Chris gave up reading blogs for lent (?!) but if you are reading, Happy Birthday Chris! You have been a good friend to us and we almost failed to celebrate your birthday.

coffeeshops and communes

2011-03-31T21:38:00.008-04:00

Today was fairly pleasant. There was class, then facilitating of some social networking over lunch, and then I met one of my pals, who is going through a rough patch, at Saint's. Saint's is a small coffeeshop downtown. Because it is an independent coffeeshop, it is automatically ascribed to be bohemian, making it worthy of the intellectual clientele one finds in a college town, and each table has an elusive real estate value.

I hope you picked up on the sarcasm in that sentence.

I hate crowded coffeeshops, because they are chock full of bodies, noises and odd smells. It's like being on the bus, packed like sardines in a tin can. I can't understand why people enjoy studying at coffeeshops like that. When I was in Atlanta, my couchsurfing host, Kanika, took me to a cute coffeeshop called Dr. Bombay's Underwater Tea Party. There was lots of space to sprawl out and enjoy your cupcake. Not at Saint's! To their credit the staff were friendly and my raspberry hot chocolate was lovely, but I dare say our apartment is a much worthier nexus of social interaction.

When I got home I wrote a postcard to Ted, one of my friends back on the Koinonia Farm. With a potentially free summer ahead of me I've gone back to the drawing boards of couchsurfing, workaways and helpX to see what I can get myself into. It spurred me to search the library for books on intentional communities, and I skimmed very quickly through a quoteworthy book by Ron E. Roberts called The New Communes : Coming Together in America. It's actually quite an old book - so old Amazon has no picture of its cover - and I was not surprised to find the K-Farm mentioned in it.

One of the things I admire about social science authors is their powerful ability to express far-reaching concepts in a concise and elegant manner. Here are some quotes I found noteworthy:

It is a sociological axiom that individuals as members of a community can endure great privation and difficulties. Conversely, individuals without strong primary group ties are prone to a number of varieties of personality disorganization.

Individuals who have dropped out of straight* society may have a tendency to drop out of hip communities when the going gets rough, as it inevitably does.
* "straight", here in its 1970s usage, refers to mainstream, not heterosexual, society

Communalists do not have to emulate the waste, greed, and unhappiness so evident in the marketplace, but they should not regard all technology as evil. If they were to do so, they would probably find their dreams of freedom ossified with the rigidity of the horse-and-buggy Amish.

To be left alone in this or any other country, one must seek a certain degree of political influence. Seeking influence, of course, lessens the possibilities of being left alone.

...communal failure usually revolves around one of four issues: lack of leadership, lack of means for handling internal disputes, lack of ideology, and external repression.

Prolific sex and drug use occurred (and still occurs) in some communes, seen as the ultimate exercise of free will. Their disruptive potential was aptly addressed by Griscom Morgan in the book:

with [the extensive use of drugs] ... there is some increase in spontaneity but also a general pattern of demoralization, basic economic incompetence, and failure to keep house and to maintain essential sanitary conditions. Behind all this lies the common observation that under drugs individuals tend to increasingly 'turn off' their relationship to society...

Cheese and sheep. That's the answer. Cheese and sheep.

Williamsport seismic shoot

2011-03-30T17:20:00.007-04:00

It's time to stop posting my calorie counts, although I'm still going to be monitoring how much I consume.

Yesterday CXY oil and gas company took about 20 of us out to see a seismic survey in the Williamsport area. We stopped at a restaurant where they bought us lunch, and I had the healthiest thing on the menu - cottage cheese, fruit and jello. Everyone else had burgers with chips and fries, and most people didn't finish their food!

Seismic surveys involve sending waves of energy into the ground. The energy waves reflect at interfaces, or layers, where the waves move from one material into another (eg from a layer of shale into a layer of limestone). Receivers at the surface pick up reflected energy and allow us to visualize the subsurface based on the arrival times of the reflected energy. It's analogous to taking an ultrasound of a baby. The source energy is usually from explosives. There is very little surface damage as the explosives are buried in a narrow drill hole that is drilled several meters into the earth. The drill hole is backfilled with gravel so nothing actually comes back up the hole, ie, you can't see an explosion.

I couldn't bring my phone to the shot location because the radio frequencies can set off the explosives, so I have very few photos.

We had to abandon the vehicles and walk to the shot site due to the muddy roads. The countryside half an hour north of Williamsport is covered in snow and the windchill yesterday was zero degrees. It's still winter up there (and down here, apparently)!

Elizabeth D. took this shot of the drill

The forests closer to Williamsport were clear of snow. These are vibro-seis trucks that send sound waves into the ground. They are alternatives to explosives. It's all very Star Wars like.

Asides from watching the explosive holes being drilled and seeing the vibro-seis trucks, we went to visit one of the doghouses which monitors the activities of the seismic shooting teams. It's all very similar to what our seismic crew did in Antarctica. I was watching the seismic teams laying out geophones in the fields and realized it's such manual labor, and it's kind of surprising to think that I've worked on a seismic crew for over a month.

It's the last week of March and it's snowing. Ha ha. A couple of my friends who are from Texas have lamented the sad irony of having to "scrape snow off the cars while it's 90 degrees back home".

Emily H had her music recital today in the Palmer Art Museum, and I stopped by around lunchtime to check it out. One of the women in the recital was a fantastic singer; her voice resonated through the galleries in the west wing of the museum. The quality of the sound was just fantastic. Highly enjoyable.

Later in the evening, a moderate snowfall saw us brushing off our cars and saying goodbyes in the street outside Jim's house after a hearty dinner, singing and reading. The snow covered every surface in sight and rested quietly on high branches. And the ease that time and experience bring, coupled with the warmth of company and the confidence that one is never alone, mean that the cold winter nights have shed their lonesomeness, the same way death has lost its sting. LOL! Sorry, that was an attempt to be poetic by someone who really isn't bothered by snow and darkness anymore. I personally enjoy jumping around in the snow at all hours of the night.

Jim's house on this dark snowy night

In other news, the latest book I am reading is The World According to Monsanto : Pollution, Corruption and Control of Our Food Supply by Marie-Monique Robin.

Monsanto is America's largest agriculture and biotechoology company, and the world's largest producer of genetically-modified soybean seeds. The company has a history of cronyism with the Food and Drug Association. You know how the tubs of Ben and Jerry's ice cream have labels that say "not from cows treated with rBST"? That all has to do with Monsanto. I first heard about Monsanto while watching Food, Inc. in Lancaster with a family whose farm I was visiting for the weekend. So far I am a third of the way through the book and it is a highly interesting read, with Monsanto sharing lots of similarities with oil majors. The term "revolving door" keeps coming up. This refers to when people in industry move into government positions in regulatory boards that are supposed to keep an eye on industry moves, and vice versa. Granted the technicalities of biotechnology and petroleum extraction are not trivial, one essentially has to be an expert in either field in order to regulate it properly. How do you attain that level of expertise? By working in those fields. What to do?

2011-03-28T19:34:00.005-04:00

I think I broke my calorie count scale today..

Breakfast - 241 calories
Muffin, Carrot cake - 1 item, 181 Cal
Pear - 1 unit, 60 Cal

Lunch - 800 calories ??
My advisor took a bunch of us to lunch at Kaarma for his annual treat... it's an Indian buffet.. the naan I had was probably 200 calories alone. I have no idea how to guesstimate how much I ate; hopefully this is in the ballpark.

Dinner - 721 calories
1/2 a sub - 300 calories
1 Jimmy Johns cookie - 421 calories
XYZ oil and gas company was in town and gave a presentation on seismic acquisition which I didn't really need to go to, but I went to check it out. They ordered Jimmy Johns' subs for dinner. I really should NOT have eaten all of that cookie. Guess I'll have some cabbage tonight as a filler.

Total Calories - 1762 calories

In other news, Ali Saks and I scheduled our defenses today. May 6th here I come!!! Shari said, "I can't believe you girls are graduating!" Well, it's actually been a while. No regrets though, this has been the best time of my life so far!

weekender

2011-03-27T14:14:00.006-04:00

Saturday

Breakfast - 227 Calories
Cereals, Honey Oat - 1 cup, 108 Cal
Milk - semi-skimmed - 0.5 glass, 34 Cal
Pears, Raw - 1 unit, 85 Cal

Lunch - 1058 Calories *
Juice - 0.5 cup, 58 Cal
Spring roll - 3 unit, 450 Cal
Couscous, Cooked - 0.25 cup, 43 Cal
Desserts, Apple Crisp - 1 cup, 454 Cal *
Sherbet, Orange - 0.25 cup, 53 Cal

* Bethany came over for lunch and we made spring rolls! I have been wanting to make them for a while. Bethany also made an apple crumble dessert - I hope it didn't have as many calories as we think it might. Also, I had a slice, not a cup of it. I went for a 1.5 hour walk and did aerobics in the afternoon, so I'm not too bothered.

Dinner - 338 Calories
Rice noodles, stir-fried - 1 cup, 220 Cal
Vegetables, Mixed - 1 cup, 118 Cal

After-Dinner Dessert - 148 Calories
Chocolate Syrup - 1 tbsp, 53 Cal
Cream, Whipped - 2 tbsp, 15 Cal
Crepe - 2 units, 80 Cal

Chris came over and the three of us made stir-fry noodles with vegetables for dinner. It was delicious! We then walked to Weis and rented Despicable Me, which we watched after making dessert crepes. Being able to rent DVDs from a vending machine is a sure sign of the times.

You used 1771 calories
Target daily amount: 1600
Argh, this is probably an overestimate because of the apple crisp.

Sunday

Breakfast - 333 Calories
Couscous, Cooked - 0.125 cup, 21 Cal
Apple Crisp - 0.25 cup, 113 Cal
Pear - 1 unit, 60 Cal
Tangerine Juice, Raw - 1 cup, 106 Cal

Lunch - 425 Calories*
Cheese, Cheddar - 0.5 oz, 56 Cal
Cookies, Cranberry & White Chocolate - 3 cookie, 144 Cal
Egg, Hard-Boiled - 1 tbsp, 12 Cal
Salad - 1 serving, 33 Cal
Ham Honey Smoked Cooked - 1 oz, 34 Cal
Flour Tortillas, Soft Taco, 8 Inch - 1 serving, 146 Cal

* I judged the Graduate Exhibition in school and they provided wraps for lunch, so this is a guesstimate. The posters were, with the exception of one, all pretty good and I enjoyed talking to all the presenters and learning about their research.

In the afternoon Becca, Emily H and I went for a short hike up at Jo Hays Vista (not sure where the apostrophe goes in that). It was chilly but quite pretty.

It's still winter up here

David Kaufman's Vista. This is pretty much in our backyard, just under 7 miles from home plus a short hike.

Ice. Just amazing.

Dinner - 268 Calories
Couscous, Cooked - 0.25 cup, 43 Cal
Rice Noodles - 0.25 cup, 122 Cal
Tofu, Firm - 0.25 cup, 44 Cal
Mixed vegetables - 1/2 cup, 59 Cal

Misc - 512 Calories
Fruit juice - 1 cup, 112 Cal
1 cupcake - 151 Cal *
1 muffin - 1 item, 181 Cal
Hard pretzels - 68 Cal
* Paige and Sarah baked cupcakes for our Sunday night bible study. They were snickerdoodle cupcakes, and they were delicious. I estimate ~150 calories.

You used 1505 calories
Target daily amount: 1600
Pretty good! Ben corrected his calorie estimate of the fudge he made on Thursday. It's 5800 calories in a 8x8 pan.

2011-03-25T22:51:00.002-04:00

Ok, I know you guys must be getting bored of me posting my ridiculous calorie counts every day, but let me maintain my momentum for at least a week.

Breakfast - 330 Calories
Blueberries, Raw - 0.0625 50 berries, 2 Cal
Mixed Nuts, Dry Roasted, with Peanuts, with Salt - 0.25 cup, 203 Cal
Pears, Raw - 1 unit, 85 Cal
Tangerines, Raw - 1 fruit, 40 Cal

Lunch - 424 Calories
Flour Tortillas, Soft Taco, 8 Inch - 1 serving, 146 Cal
Asparagus, Cooked - 1 spear, 3 Cal
Cheese, Lofat, Cheddar - 1 oz, 48 Cal
Lettuce, Romaine, Raw - 1 cup, 7 Cal
White Radish, Raw - 0.5 cup, 7 Cal
French Fries In Vegetable Oil - Medium - 0.5 medium, 213 Cal

Dinner - 228 Calories
Flour Tortillas, Soft Taco, 8 Inch - 1 serving, 146 Cal
Cabbage, Cooked, Boiled - 1 cup, 34 Cal
Couscous, Cooked - 0.25 cup, 43 Cal
Parsley, Dried - 1 tbsp, 5 Cal

Misc - 337 Calories
Grass Jelly drink - 1 cup, 112 Cal
Cookies, White Chocolate and Cranberry - 2 cookie, 96 Cal
Marathon Energy Bar - 1 bar, 169 Cal*

* I wasn't even hungry but thought I'd better eat some protein and I had this bar that had been sitting around in the pantry for a while.

You used 1359 calories
Target daily amount: 1600

This evening I was one of the judges for the Graduate Exhibition Performances at the State Theatre, and Elizabeth D. and I got to sit in the balcony right smack in the middle. It was a great night with very diverse displays of talent ranging from opera singing to marmiba-playing. I have to say this is the first time I have concentrated hard on every single aspect of every single performance. It really makes a concert much more enjoyable and meaningful when you make yourself notice all the subtle nuances of stage presence and technicality. This has totally ruined me. I normally just sit back, listen and vegetate. I will never be able to pay as undivided attention to any other performance unless I get to judge it. LOL! That's also where the white chocolate and cranberry cookies came from.

more food

2011-03-24T23:01:00.004-04:00

Today's calorie counting was all going quite well.. until we went to Dan M's place for game night and I had wayyyy too many snacks, including Ben's homemade bacon-peanut-butter-maple-chocolate-fudge.

Breakfast - 259 calories
Blueberries, Raw - 0.125 50 berries, 4 Cal
Cereal, Honey Oat - 1 cup, 115 Cal
Milk - semi-skimmed - 0.5 glass, 34 Cal
Snacks, Pretzels, Hard, Plain - 1 oz, 106 Cal

Lunch - 638 calories *
Noodles, Chinese, Cellophane Or Long Rice Dehydrated - 0.125 cup, 61 Cal
Prawns - 1 handful, 103 Cal
Rice - 1 portion, 238 Cal
Vegetables, Mixed Stir-fried - 2 cup, 236 Cal

* I introduced my undergrad friend Steph to Monica, one of Dr Wilf's grad students, so that Steph could get to learn more about what their research group does. We went for lunch together at Green Bowl and it was the healthier choice, but I ate a lot!

Dinner - 783 calories *
Lime Juice, Raw - 1 cup, 60 Cal
Flour Tortillas, Soft Taco, 8 Inch - 2 servings, 292 Cal
Asparagus, Cooked - 3 spear, 9 Cal
Cheese, Low-Sodium, Cheddar Or Colby - 1 oz, 111 Cal
Mustard - 1 teaspoon, 7 Cal
Nuts, Mixed Nuts, With Peanuts, Oil Roasted, With Salt Added - 0.25 cup, 219 Cal
Pears, Raw - 1 unit, 85 Cal

* Interesting how this is a fairly large number for a simple dinner

Misc - 436 calories, snacks at game night
Candies, Fudge, Peanut Butter, Prepared-From-Recipe - 1 piece, 61 Cal*
Chex Mix - 2 oz, 238 Cal
Sunchips, Multigrain Snack, Original - 1 oz, 137 Cal

* According to Ben the 9x9 inch pan of fudge contained 8000 calories. I had like, 0.8 cubic inches so this is probably an underestimate

You used 2116 calories
Target daily amount: 1600

atypical wednesday

2011-03-24T00:04:00.003-04:00

Ok Day 2 of Calorie Counting. It all went very well until dinner. Fortunately I kind of knew I was going to eat a lot for dinner so I practiced more restraint during lunch.

Misc - 73 calories*
Asparagus, Cooked - 4 spear, 13 Cal
Mango Juice, Raw - 1 cup, 60 Cal

*today's Misc category was very lean

Breakfast - 431 calories
Blueberries, Raw - 0.25 50 berries, 9 Cal
Cereals Oats, Corn Puffed Mixture, Presweetened - 1 cup, 129 Cal
Milk - semi-skimmed - 0.5 glass, 34 Cal
Nuts, Mixed Nuts, With Peanuts, Oil Roasted, With Salt Added - 0.25 cup, 219 Cal
Tangerines, (Mandarin Oranges), Raw - 1 fruit, 40 Cal

Lunch - 515 calories*
Flour Tortillas, Soft Taco, 8 Inch - 1 serving, 146 Cal, containing
Asparagus, Cooked - 3 spear, 9 Cal
Pears, Raw - 1 unit, 85 Cal
Cheese, Lofat, Cheddar Or Colby - 1 oz, 48 Cal
Campbell's Golden Butternut Squash Soup - 2 serving, 181 Cal
Ice Creams, Breyers, 98% Fat Free Chocolate - 1/4 cup, 46 Cal

* I had lunch with Nola and Kristen at the Creamery. We brought our lunches and the ladies got ice cream, which I had a little bit of.

Dinner - 1001 calories*
Bread, Wheat, Toasted - 1 slice, 75 Cal
Salad, Tossed, no Dressing - 1 serving, 33 Cal
Cheese, Feta - 0.5 oz, 36 Cal
Italian Salad Dressing, - 1 tbsp, 43 Cal
Pasta - 2 portions, 496 Cal
Pasta Sauce - tomato - 5 tablespoon, 60 Cal
Pie, Apple - 0.5 piece, 148 Cal
Frozen Yogurts, Flavors Other Than Chocolate - 0.5 cup, 110 Cal

*Esther, Joe and Shepard were in town and we had a home meeting at Jim and Arcotti's house with some others. Ariel and Mark, who I happened to have interacted with on couchsurfing but never met in person, showed up, bringing an undergrad, Mark D, and Keisha came a little later. It was a highly enjoyable time. We ate, sang, had bible study, and ate some more. And as you can see I broke the calorie scale.

You used 2020 calories
Target daily amount: 1600

After leaving their place around 10pm I headed over to Northland Bowling Alley where my officemate Jamie and some other geosci folk were celebrating his birthday. Although I decided against bowling to save money, I still hung out for about an hour, then came home. And I have a 9am class in the morning. Fortunately I did not consume any more calories at the bowling alley =)

food

2011-03-22T22:44:00.008-04:00

I found this nifty Calorie Calculator app on iGoogle that I started using today to keep track of my calorie consumption. Since I don't exercise regularly, apart from walking to and from school (1.3 miles each way), I thought it would be prudent to make sure I don't consume more than necessary. Calories are measures of amounts of energy. Excess calories = fat. The average person uses 2000 calories a day. For someone of my activity level and body mass, the suggested intake is 1600.

What I ate today

Breakfast - 193 calories
Blueberries, Raw - 10 berries, 4 Cal
Cereals, Honey Oat - 1 cup, 115 Cal
Milk - semi-skimmed - 0.5 glass, 34 Cal
Tangerines, - 1 fruit, 40 Cal

Lunch - 333 calories
Flour Tortillas, Soft Taco, 8 Inch - 1 serving, 146 Cal, containing:
Apples, Raw, With Skin - 0.5 cup, 32 Cal
Asparagus, Cooked - 3 spear, 9 Cal
Cheese, Lofat, Cheddar Or Colby - 2 oz, 96 Cal
Macadamia Nuts, Dry Roasted, with Salt - 0.25 oz, 50 Cal

Dinner - 297 calories
Rice - 1 portion, 238 Cal (this is sort of fudgy because I have this multi-grain asian rice mix that isn't in the list, and doesn't have nutritional facts on the package)
Vegetables, Mixed - 0.5 cup, 59 Cal (this is just a guesstimate.. this was 1/3 of a stew of cabbage, rutabaga, and mixed frozen veggies. I also used beef broth which is unaccounted for.)

Misc - 947 calories, holy guacamole, with explanations
Snacks, Potato Chips - 4 oz, 306 Cal*
Frozen Yogurt, low fat - 1 cup, 220 Cal**
Alcohol, Amstel Bock - 2 glasses, 191 Cal***
Pie, Banana Cream - 1 piece, 230 Cal****

* This was during lunchtime. I thought that I had lots of calories to spare, especially after deciding not to get Indian food for lunch with my officemates, so I ate a bag of chips that I had at my desk.
** I decided to head out a bit earlier than usual and as I was leaving I bumped into Aubreya, an alum friend who is in town for a couple days. To catch up we went to Kiwi Yogurt where I had 6.4 oz of thin mint, peanut butter, chocolate, strawberry and cheesecake yogurt at ~ 30 cal/oz.
*** I sent a text to Nate, one of our ice group guys whom I first went to Kiwi Yogurt with, to let him know I was at Kiwi, and he convinced me, since it was a really nice day outside (mid-50Fs with clear skies), to join him and his friends at Cafe 210 after Aubreya and I were done. We have a storm rolling in so he wanted to enjoy the last sunny weather for a while. We sat outside in the patio and he bought me a couple beers.
**** At bible study at night, Laura whipped out the banana cream pie she had bought for my belated birthday (LOL) and that pretty much pushed me over 1600 cals.

You used 1770 calories
Target daily amount: 1600

Who knew junk-food could contribute so many calories to your day??? WOW! Anyway, I'm not trying to lose weight. Just want to keep a moderate diet that doesn't fluctuate too much from day to day. I'll set my target as anywhere between 1600-2000 cals/day.

I will never forget the day during field camp in Montana when Julie and I ate not one but two gargantuan, guy-sized burritos for dinner. We had both finished one each, thought about it for a couple seconds, exchanged glances and then started on seconds. I'm pretty sure we were burning 5000 calories a day back then so I don't feel bad at all.

weekend recap

2011-03-21T20:51:00.003-04:00

Happy belated St Patrick's Day... I have discovered a new love for rutabaga, the Swedish turnip. Jamie had a party at his place on Thursday and he made an Irish stew of corned beef, rutabaga and cabbage. Wow! It tasted so good I plan to incorporate it into my diet. In fact, I have suddenly become so inspired to try different vegetables that I bought rutabaga, turnips, asparagus and daikon (Japanese radish) on my recent trip to the grocery store. For lunch today I had a tortilla with asparagus, cheese, apple slices and mustard. Köstlich! I wonder where I can get Kohlrabi (German turnip).

While the rest of the department was spending the weekend attending the graduate colloquium, a select handful of glacial geomorphologists were out in eastern Pennsylvania doing actual geology (LOL). Had a great but tiring time sinking into mud, bushwhacking, getting thorns in the pants, bashing up rocks, scrambling up scree slopes ,trespassing on quarries and gun club property, navigating a boulder field and breaking out the good old sleeping bag.

At the Hickory Run Boulder Field

Great outcrops for taking strike and dip measurements

Not to say I skipped the department graduate colloquium weekend altogether. On Friday evening I went rockwall climbing, attended both poster sessions, went to part of an event my church organized, and had dinner (Austrian food at Herwig's - best meal I've had in a while) and dessert (creme brulee and bailey's cheesecake) at the Allen Street Grill) with Elizabeth and her prospective student, all seemingly at the same time!

After we got back into town last night, I cleaned up and went to watch the free late night screening of Disney's Tangled with Elizabeth and Nate. It was awesome! I am so glad I went. It is officially my favorite Disney movie.

Jersey and so on

2011-03-15T22:18:00.010-04:00

On Friday morning I woke up and read the news before heading to Jersey. As the whole world already knows, a magnitude 9 earthquake struck Japan while I was sleeping - the 5th strongest earthquake in recorded history. Unable to access the internet during the weekend, I managed to get glimpses of the devastation from the headlines of newspapers in stores - "Japan Destroyed" - in bold capital letters. Until yesterday I thought I didn't know anyone in Japan but I was wrong. Dr Hiroshi, Jamie's advisor, and his assistant scientist Yumiko are back in Japan on vacation. Fortunately they are both okay; it just might take them a while to get back stateside. Aunty Gek, a lady from Aunty Lucy's church back home, is also in Japan and is okay but stuck in the outskirts because the trains are not running. I also realized I know two Penn State alums who are in Japan right now; from facebook it seems that they are both alright. Fortunately my good friend Chelsey from undergrad left Japan 3 weeks ago. She had been teaching English as a second language there for the past 2 years. That's the line up. The country is under the threat of a nuclear disaster and there are about 50 people, true heroes, in the nuclear plants right now trying to salvage the situation. Looking at the photos of shear devastation in the news makes me realize how little material things mean. Hundreds of thousands of peoples' homes have been lost, and they now have nothing. Let's keep praying, donate money if you can - Japan before this earthquake was the world's 2nd largest provider of international aid after the US - and keep tabs on the situation.

Anyway I still went to Jersey.

Eastern Pennsylvania in late winter. See that ridge in the distance? I drove from beyond that, and was about halfway to my destination at this point.

I figured if the world was going to end, I ought to visit Jersey before it does. Scientifically speaking, this earthquake should not be treated as a sign of the times. We expect earthquakes to happen in Japan. The high population density near the earthquake is the reason so much destruction and so many deaths occured. Interestingly, Chuck, our resident expert seismologist, gave a talk on the earthquake today and he mentioned that the number of large-magnitude earthquakes has increased over the past 50 years, while the number of small-magnitude earthquakes has gone down. Still, we can't interpret that, and we don't have a long enough record to observed any meaningful trends.

Back to Jersey. Jersey gets a lot of flack from everyone, but I had a great time there. Earlier in spring, when the Bibles for America/Living Streams Ministry folk were in town, I met an old lady, Sister Paiti, at one of their meetings. She and her husband are empty-nesters and she told me anytime I wanted to visit Jersey I could look her up and she would show me around. As I've only driven through Jersey I decided Spring Break was an opportune time to take her up on her offer. And she was true to her word. Besides eating copious amounts of food for every meal, admiring the pretty houses and manicured lawns in Edison, touring two of the SUNY Rutgers University campuses, going to a home meeting (a combination of dinner, praise & worship and bible study) on Friday night with 20+ Rutgers students in Piscataway, a mandarin home meeting on Saturday night in New Brunswick and going to the Church in Franklin on Sunday, we also went to the Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton and spent Saturday afternoon in Princeton. I met a ton of young adults whom Paiti and her husband knew, as well as some friendly families. I also got to meet up with my primary school classmate, Jane, who is a grad student in Architecture at Princeton.

Paiti, Vicky, Lisa, Esther and I spent Saturday morning at the Grounds for Sculpture, a big outdoor sculpture garden. Highlights of the grounds were the J. Seward Johnson scultures, which was amazingly realistic.

I recently watched a Courage the Cowardly Dog episode where Granny gets stuck in a painting.. this was kind of like that. This is a J. Seward Johnson scene based on Monet’s painting, Terrace at Sainte-Adresse. Vicky and Paiti are in blue and green jackets by the river.

Another of J. Seward Johnson's masterpieces based upon French Impressionist Pierre Auguste Renoir’s painting, The Luncheon of the Boating Party.

After that, we headed to Princeton where we met up with Jane and a bunch of the Rutgers church guys. We got Pastrami hoagies for lunch from Hoagie Heaven. We sat at the tables of a nearby restaurant that operates only at night and basked in the sun. One of the working couples who also joined us was so generous they bought all ~ 12 of us lunch and bubble tea! The hubby happens to be a famous ophthalmologist and I think his wife is also a doctor. Following lunch, everyone dispersed. Jane took Paiti, Vicky and I on a walking tour of Princeton. It's such a quaint town; the downtown reminds me of State College. All the girls I met on the trip said their favorite town in Jersey is Princeton. The University itself is much grander than Penn State, with buildings that would feel at home in Oxford.

The engineering quad gates

The library

Arts Center

One of the mansions on dining club row (their version of frats)

We finished off our tour of Princeton with ice cream at the Thomas Sweet Ice Cream store. Every good college town must have an ice cream store, and this did not disappoint. I would have liked to spend more time with Jane but the situation did not permit. Still, the visit was excellent and we were blessed with both good company and good weather.

On Sunday morning, as Paiti and her niece Angela were driving me to church after a hearty breakfast, completely oblivious that it was my birthday, I was feeling on top of the world, simply because I was enjoying the fact that I don't need to be getting birthday attention from people to be having a good time. My drive back to State College in the afternoon was uneventful, except it took a while to get gas. Jersey is the only state in America with this law against fueling your car yourself. The attendant must do it for you. It was a 4 hour drive but I had left late enough to avoid the end-of-spring-break traffic. I made it to the Holleman's in time (actually, an hour late) for my surprise (LOL) birthday party which my most excellent roommate had planned.

Me and Becca and the birthday cheesecakes, which she concocted herself. She should start a food blog.

The crew

I certainly could not ask for more.

This week happens to be a prospective student visitation week, meaning we've been wining and dining prospectives. Monday I had lunch with Jamie, April, Ramses and their astrobiology prospective at Spatz; I had a portabello-eggplant-mozzarella dish. After 5pm I went with my advisor, Knut and a psice prospective to Pickles for happy hour, then Knut and I took him to dinner at The Deli. Today for lunch the guys (O.J., who is back briefly from Germany, Leo, Atsu, Knut, Randy and Luke) and I took another psice prospie to Spatz; this time I had the pan-fried gator. After a draining afternoon spent working on formatting my bibliography and attending Chuck's talk, April gave me a ride home. I had leftovers for dinner and then went to our Harvest meeting at Chris and Moon's place where we caught up, and then the gang went bowling. I hadn't felt very good earlier in the evening; it was raining and I think I had a slight chill, so I didn't really want to go bowling. Instead I looked up Randy and got him, his prospie and Knut to go to the Creamery with me where I had a very good marshmallow chocolate ice cream. And then I came home and sorted through my Jersey photos and here we are.

moose dumplings

2011-03-10T21:32:00.006-05:00

Today was rainy. I don't mind. I'd rather it rain during break and than when school is in session, so we don't have to go to school in the rain. I walked to the post office in the rain today anyway, with my rain pants and rain jacket on, just to get some exercise. Picked up a package containing a guitar tuner my mum sent me for my birthday. Score. In the evening Cynthia hosted a potluck at her house. I brought Aloo Palak, a north Indian spinach gravy with potatoes, and naan. I brought naan to Bruce's on Sunday, I brought naan for our picnic lunch on Tuesday, and I still have naan!! I ate soooo much and enjoyed meeting her friends.

You know you live in one of the most rural parts of America when someone shows up for a international-food-themed potluck with dumplings filled with moose and deer meat.

I got to give these guys credit. They have certainly put a redneck spin on an asian dish, and a good job too. Moose meat has a chunkier texture than deer. I know you can't tell from the photos.

Well, hopefully the rain lets up so I can drive to Jersey tomorrow. I just read Lauren's blog post about her terrifying drive back to State College last Sunday during the big snowstorm. If it is snowing up here on Sunday I am staying in Jersey. Gas is really expensive right now, $3.59 a gallon. Gas prices are a mysterious black box. Trouble in the Middle East is not a good reason for the spike in prices because all the petrol at gas stations today was bought months ago. Bah, humbug. GasBuddy.com is your friend (but not when you live in a small town like ours where every station is within a couple cents of the others).

You know if this old couple in Jersey hadn't invited me to visit them I'd actually be very happy to just stay here in State College and continue doing nothing (hey! of course I have gotten some work done). I've gotten to catch up on watching TV in the evenings. Becca has been home too and it has been relaxing to just chill at home. It's nice to go to bed at night and not have to be anywhere the next day. I feel like I still haven't fully recovered from my Christmas antics. Well as they say, you only live once...

Snow hikes and an early birthday

2011-03-09T22:56:00.003-05:00

Yesterday Becca, Tracy, Chris, Bruce, Nate & I went to Prince Gallitzin State Park for the day. The park is about an hour away from town and the lake is much bigger than Black Moshannon. Gallitzin (1770-1840) was an Austrian noble who immigrated to America. What?! Why on earth would European royalty move to a new nation? As it turns out, fancy destinations in Europe for the standard aristocratic world tour had to be replaced by America due to the French Revolution. Once in America, Prince Gallitzin joined the Catholic priesthood and ended up founding a settlement in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, where he advanced local agriculture, transportation and education. The rest is history. Goes to show having a State Park named after you really keeps your name alive after 250+ years.

It was a nice day to go to the beach.

The guys, being guys, threw rock after rock onto the frozen lake in attempts to break the ice. They threw them really hard, too!

Chris pretending to be pulling very hard on the dock rope

We had a good picnic

Hiked on a couple of trails

The Point Trail

And stopped periodically(ie every 5 minutes) to have snowball fights

The snowball is right at the tree.. see the white splotch..

The crew

Good times. Our 2nd carload of people got lost on the way back and was somewhere on the wrong side of Altoona when we called them after making it back to State College. They turned left out of Phill's General Store in Fallen Timber when they should have taken a right. LOL.

Today I stayed home and worked on my thesis. In the evening I went over to Hwasung's place to give her an English lesson. She had also invited me and our mutual friend Celine to have dinner with her. She made a sumptious Korean soup with rice and steamed mackerel. Wow! I felt like I ate the equivalent of 3 meals. To top it off, Celine insisted on celebrating my birthday (early) and brought a fruit tart for dessert! What a charming surprise. Friends warm the heart.

The tart was sooo good and light that we ate all of it!!

I was actually planning to skip town this weekend in an attempt to avoid celebrating my birthday. I know too many people in town, even during spring break. I like to tell prospective students that our department is too big to invite everyone to your birthday party but small enough that people will find out and get offended. Last year, I thought I celebrated my birthday 3 times, which was a hassle (and of course a huge blessing, I am not complaining about having too many friends), but Celine reminded me about a mini-party she had thrown me that I had completely forgotten about (oops) so I really celebrated 4 times. Well, this year for my birthday I am going to JERSEY. LOL. There is nothing worth visiting Jersey for except friendly old couples who invite you over! But, just so I can celebrate my birthday with my roomie, I have been persuaded to drive back Sunday afternoon. We'll see how the weather works out.

When I got home, I turned on the TV and The Man Who Lost His Face was on TLC. It was a documentary on the surgery of a Portuguese man who had horrifically massive tumors on his face and was quite incredible. I was glued to it. The tumor had gotten so big that if he had not flown to America to have the operation he would have probably died. It was a very complicated surgery and he could have bled to death on the operating table, but he and his family thought a new life was worth the risk. He made it!

The issue of mortality has come up thrice in the last 2 days. During our snow hike we started talking about mortality because of Mardi Gras and Lent. I questioned the need to be reminded of our mortality because we all know we're going to die someday; the response was that some people live like they're not going to die. During my lesson with Hwasung this evening, we were discussing an article I assigned her to read about couchsurfing. We were talking about how you can't be sure if you're going to be harmed by your host when you couchsurf, and her opinion was, if God wills you to die then that's what's going to happen. Becca and Chris went to the Ash Wednesday service at the Lutheran church in town this evening and she told me that when they put ashes on their foreheads the priests tell them "for dust you were created and to dust you will return". Why, that's mortality in your face! On the bright side, the body is created from dust, but the soul belongs to the Lord.

Probably a good reminded even for myself.

strawberry splash

2011-03-07T23:46:00.006-05:00

The National Weather Service snow tally for our area this morning was 10 inches! Walking outside is like plunging into a sea of snow. Beautiful sunny day. I spent most of it working on my thesis, except for a quick run to the office to get some cream cheese out of the office freezer. We have wall to wall windows at home so staying in is more than tolerable.

At least the main road has been cleared of snow!

Tracy and Elizabeth joined Becca and me for dinner tonight. I made a 3 course meal. Keeping everything warm is sort of problematic with a small oven.

Appetizer : poached pears
pears, halved and poached (simmered) in a pan with some juice, water, sugar and nutmeg
top with feta cheese and chopped nuts

Main : Strawberry Chicken

Marinade for chicken : basically whatever was on hand and seemed good
chopped strawberries
minced garlic
honey
sprinkling apple vinegar
sprinkling soy sauce
raspberry tea
marinate overnight and simmer in pan till cooked

Sides
stuffed peppers with couscous and veggies
stir-fried/steamed bean medley with spices

Dessert : Strawberry Tarts

tart crust
1 c. flour
pinch salt
splash milk
sprinkling vanilla essence
1 egg
1/3 c. butter

tart filling (whip together and pour into tart crust after baking, then chill)
cream cheese
yogurt
splash milk
chopped strawberries

Drink - Indian pale ale

My cooking protocol so far:
Use what is available as much as possible
Haven't actualy been following any recipes completely.. more of selecting bits and pieces from here and there and throwing everything together.

Ok bedtime.

"Spring" Break?

2011-03-07T00:20:00.003-05:00

Just got back from Bollywood night at Bruce's house. Shin-deep snow. Dan helped me unbury my car. Demonstrated utility of 4WD on unploughed roads. I am now adept at fishtailing. Becca had to shovel out my parking spot. Town is buried under a foot of snow with 4" more on the way, and the power has tripped 6x while I was writing this. Merry Christmas! Break out the eggnog! Woohoo spring break!! The police department has even declared a "snow emergency". Tracy thinks the snowploughs are on spring break.

6.30pm outside Bruce's

11.45pm in our parking lot

As for the movie, I'll just cut and paste the description Bruce wrote -
Endhiran - the most expensive movie ever made in India, highest grossing Indian movie, and biggest opening weekend Indian movie. It is epic in every sense. It has everything: Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles... Just to be argumentative, the movie is a Tamil production, so it's not technically Bollywood, which makes Hindi movies.

LOL! It's actually hardcore science fiction. It was fun to watch but really weird, especially since most Indian films are not sci-fi. Bruce made curry, Tracy brought couscous, bread and cake, we brought naan and Dan brought frosting. A night well spent.

There wasn't even any snow on the ground this morning.

week in review, cake 2

2011-03-05T00:51:00.012-05:00

Spring break is here! I'm not going to do anything exciting this weekend (the forecast is rainy too) so I'll just do the week in review now!

Monday - our friend Ben, now a phd candidate in Horticulture, passed his comprehensive exams so Tracy and the gang threw him a party at her place. We ate way too much - chocolate chip cookies, dessert crepes, chocolate covered strawberries, chips, salsa, typical party snack food.. Tracy said it was the most nerdy party she had ever been to because we were celebrating someone passing his comps by drinking strawberry liquor cocktails and reciting Shakespeare.

Tuesday - Jin and Hyeri invited our bLess group over for dinner at their house. We had lasagna and garlic bread and a good discussion on 1 Corinthians 10:23. Since last weekend was State Patty's Day it was kind of apt that the discussion turned to alcohol. The undergrads who wrote the devotionals for this week also specifically addressed drinking. Penn State is a party school and there is a lot of underage drinking going on. As long as none of the undergrads in our group have drinking problems, which they do not, I am not going to bother about this issue. As for myself, I drink somewhere between 4-10 drinks a week (really very minimal), and I don't do it in front of underage undergrads, I don't flaunt wild and flamboyant party pics on facebook and I do not get wasted. I don't see a problem with it, so don't be surprised if you see me at the bar. I do socialize with people who engage in practices I would not, such as casual sex and excessive drinking. Some of these people I consider my friends and I care about them. Being separatist and shunning them would only reinforce negative stereotypes they have about Christians being prude and holier-than-thou. I'm not trying to impress people or join an 'in-crowd'; I know who my friends are and I know who I don't need as friends. I do, however, draw the line at loose talk (slander/gossip/bitching). Somehow, attitude choices tip the scales more than lifestyle choices for me. Sure, we can argue about whether it's 'wrong' to sleep around, or 'wrong' to drink alcohol (obviously I don't think it's wrong), but is it wrong to slander? Yes, it is. Is it wrong to say unkind, uncalled-for things about other people behind their backs? Yes it is. Sure, you have the right to your own opinions, but if you wouldn't say something to someone's face, your opinion means nothing so don't say it.

Wednesday - Had dinner at Penang with Celine and Hwasung. We had curry noodles, mee goreng and char kway teow. Good, but nothing like back home. Brought the curry home and made a ton of rice, veggies and tofu to go with it for lunches. After that I joined April, Jamie and James for team trivia at the Gingerbread Man. We actually had more than the usual crew because one of the undergrads (who was of age, yes) and one of the new grad students joined us. We did pretty well. The Leinenkugels girls were giving out freebies earlier in the evening and the Jameson girls did their rounds at the end of the night. Last week I got a free cap, which is really cute; this week I got a flashlight. Wednesday nights are good nights for freebies. I enjoy team trivia a lot and it has become our regular office activity.

Thursday - Had my brain scanned in the name of science. To be precise, I got an MRI because one of my friends getting his phd in psychology needed a guinea pig. In the evening I baked a cake to bring to Atsu and Kat's dinner party on Friday. Thursday also happened to be Lana's birthday so it turned into her birthday cake.

CAKE TIME!

You can do a lot with a couple of layers. This cake has lots of fruit in it. A chunk of it fell off during its creation, and I have found that yogurt is a great way to stick pieces of cake together. We'll call this a spiced fruit cake.

Cake Mix:
1 box spice cake mix
3 eggs
3/4 a bar of butter
1 and 1/4 cup raspberry tea

Frosting:
3 cups confectioner's sugar
1 stick of butter
1 tbspoon raspberry tea

Extra:
Yogurt, fruit and breadcrumb crust, more sugar

Slice the strawberries

Similar to the previous cake, bake a mix of breadcrumbs, crackers, egg and crushed nuts to make the crust, and spread yogurt over it. Put down a layer of strawberries.

Slap the first layer of cake on it

Next slice up some pears

Caramelize them (ie fry them in butter and sugar)

Layer the pears over the first layer of cake. If you poke holes in the cake with a fork the syrup will soak into the cake better.

Now, if you're up to making a larger batch of frosting you can add a layer of frosting; I did not make enough so I slapped on the second layer of cake over the pears. I drizzled a quick syrup made of butter, honey, sugar and raspberry tea into this layer.

Coat the cake with frosting and if your frosting is terribly unslightly, arrange lots of strawberry slices over it in a pseudo-artsy manner

So yeah.

Friday - the start of Spring Break! I successfully bribed Knut with food to make me some GMT maps before doing all the other work he had in line. An unusual, rather unfortunate thing happened in the morning which I can't blog about, but it made me appreciate my advisor's laid-back, approachable, non-stressful manner of doing things. I sent him an email to let him know how wonderful he is, because I'm usually always complaining about how he doesn't read my work in a timely manner.

Left work early so I could bring one of my undergrad friends a suitcase for her to use during spring break, then picked up Becca and drove her home. While I was waiting for Becca in the parking lot I was listening to a very interesting news report over the radio about the London School of Economics accepting huge donations of Libyan money while one of Gaddafi (the Libyan dictator who is bombing his own people)'s sons was a student there. This son's phd thesis, on global democratization, was apparently ghost-written, and the son is now fully supporting his father's reign! Talk about buying yourself a degree. Earlier this week, the German Minister of Defense, Guttenberg, resigned because he plagiarized parts of his phd! Unbelievable! Can you believe this? Why? Why? Why? It does not take a super-smart person to get a phd. You just need hard work and patience! Phdcomics should do a satirical take on all this.

Anyway after that I went for my climbing class at the YMCA, which was great, then Becca, the cake and I headed over to Atsu and Kat's for their dinner party. Atsu is our research group's newest post-doc, and he and his girlfriend Kat moved here from Colorado. He is really social and has been, in Singlish, very "on" about hanging out with us. I think it's great. Being a guy, it is so easy for him to do so from the get go.. I am the only female in our research group (22 males at the last count) so getting to know everyone to the point where I could organize a successful kayaking/picnic outing took a couple of years.

Anyway, he and Kat have a pasta-machine so we made home-made pasta for dinner! To be precise, Kat and Atsu did all the prep work and cooking, we just operated the machine. We had fettuccine carbonara, ravioli and yakisoba. Delicious! Yum yum. Kat made lemon-butter cookies too. Way too much food - Luke and Lana had also brought olive bread, and Ryan and his wife had brought a salad. Good thing no one else brought food because it would not have gotten eaten. Didn't feel like drinking so I just had a tasting of their Japanese fermented rice whiskey. So yeah. Good times.

week in review

2011-02-26T23:40:00.009-05:00

I made a Chocolate Peppermint Schnapps Cake for Becca's birthday based very loosely on this recipe. Actually I really didn't follow that recipe at all, but it showed me my idea was doable. Becca likes mint and so do I, so it was pretty much a no-brainer. I was originally going to use peppermint essence but Tracy happened to already have a bottle of peppermint schnapps so we went with the latter.

Cake Mix:
1 box chocolate cake mix
3 eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
1 cup water
1/4 cup peppermint schnapps

Frosting:
1/2 cup butter
3 cups confectioner's sugar
1 tablespoon water
1 tablespoon peppermint schnapps

Glaze:
I don't know what I did. When I was on the Koinonia Farm, Sarah-Beth imparted to me the mysterious power to concoct delectable dessert sauces from the basic staples of butter, raw sugar, confectioner's sugar and flavor essences.
Butter
Sugar
Honey (raw honey from my beekeeper couchsurfing host)
Confectioner's sugar
Peppermint schnapps

Crust:
Crushed, peanuts, walnuts and breadcrumbs with a drizzling of egg. Mix well and shape.

The nut and breadcrumb crust. Bake.

Spread strawberry yogurt over the baked crust to hold the cake in place.

So, I presume you know what to do with the cake ingredients. Make a couple of pans (I made 3). These happened to be Adrienne's cake pans which Tracy also let me borrow since Adrienne is in Argentina.

Poke holes in the cake and drizzle the glaze over it. Make sure it soaks into the cake. Layer the cakes on the crust, using more yogurt and frosting in between each cake layer.

Spread the frosting over the cake. Decorate it. As I told Dan M, the cake ended up looking like the circus on crack.

Happy Birthday to my awesome roomie if you are reading this :) From Dan M, Dan V, Bruce, Tracy, Emily, Paige, David D, Isaac, Pikachu, Becky W, Robby, me and the Jenns! And Chris who could not make it as he was on the other side of the continent.

It's been a great week. Work-wise, I've been editing my discussion section based on feedback from my two profs, and it's going pretty fine and dandy. I've done something interesting every day this week.

Monday - Becky M's potluck

Tuesday - Becca's birthday party

Wednesday - Grotto meeting and then Emily C's birthday happy hour at Inferno. In keeping with the mint theme I had a Mint Chocolate Chip drink. My Hero Zero, a local guitar duo, have a Wednesday night gig at Infernos and they played all our song requests because we were the only big group there. They were really good and did unbelievable renditions of Lady Gaga and Keisha.

Thursday - I took my undergrad friend Boon to Far Corners, an Asian grocery store, and Walmart. We also had a delicious dinner at My Thai.

Friday - I met my English student at 8am at Irving's, a cafe right on the edge of campus. It was a soggy, rainpants-kind-of-morning and if I didn't have that appointment with her I would probably not have made it into campus till noon. She insisted on buying me breakfast so I had an extremely filling bagel with peanut butter spread and orange juice. I gave her an assignment but she was too busy to do it, which isn't a problem because we really just want to improve her communication and speaking skills, so as long as she gets a lot of conversation into our sessions I think that's fine.

In the evening I went over to the House pizza party (ie, the pizza party for prospective students at Dr. Chris House's house). I'm glad I went, even though I wasn't hosting a prospie this weekend, because asides from prospies, I got to meet a lot of first year students whom I either met only once last year at the department picnic, or whom I didn't know existed. I also got to catch up with some of the other geos outside of my research group whom I don't see as often. The cohesion of the graduate students in the department has sort of crumbled; the incoming classes have been big so people hang out in smaller groups, rather than all together. A couple years ago, there'd be a geosci grad party at least every other weekend. Hardly anyone uses the social listserv now. Size is no excuse though; I told one of the prospectives that the social character of the department all really depends on the group dynamics and personalities that come in every year. With the transitory nature of school, the core group that existed two years ago (which I was on the fringe of) has dissolved. It can be a good or bad thing. Things change fast. Last year, or when we were younger, I used to go for lunch frequently with a regular gang of geo girls who started grad school with me. Nowadays, the geos I hang out with are my office mates and the PSICE guys. I talked with Brett about it and the conclusion we came to was that we don't care who hangs out with who, as long as people are happy and no one is feeling ostracized or lonely. I gave a carload of people rides home.

Saturday - Stayed in. Did some work on my thesis, practiced the guitar, did aerobics and read a bit. Emily H and I went to Revelation Blockade's Murder Mystery performance in the evening and then hung out with Becca for the rest of the night in our apartment. Today is actually State Patty's Day, the local drinking holiday. It started 5 years ago when St Patty's Day fell during Spring Break and students decided to celebrate a week early. Every year since then, the weekend before Spring Break turns into a big boozefest downtown. Lots of drunkards take to the streets. This time last year I was driving up Allen Street at noon and this drunkard rolled (yes rolled) into the street; fortunately his friend pulled him to safety before I rolled over him. The attractiveness of the event is shown in the fact that last year, 60% of the citations for DUIs and public intoxication were to out-of-towners! Hummph, I don't like these out-of-towners coming to town and messing it up and giving students a bad rep! A couple of my undergrad friends said they were going to lock themselves in their dorm rooms and avoid the madness. When it comes to alcohol my personal opinion is people can do what they want as long as they don't harm others and clean up their mess. I enjoy a good party myself, and if you have a good time, good for you, but if you intend to get wasted and out-drink your limits then you deserve it if you die of alcohol poisoning. Our tax money will clean up the mess you leave behind and I will not feel sorry for you.

on a beautiful snow day I wrote

2011-02-22T14:31:00.016-05:00

(by the way, that's snow, not snowy; there's 4 inches of fluff on the ground but the sky is clear as a bluebell and it's not snowing)

So I had a good weekend, and the kids at THON had an even better one. THON is the largest student-run philanthropy in the world. It is short for dance marathon, where a year of fund-raising culminates in 708 students dancing non-stop (or at least not sitting) for 46 hours. This year Penn State raised 9.5 million dollars towards combating childhood cancer. THON is probably the sole reason I'd say Penn State students have more camaraderie than Longhorns. You'd be hard pressed to find an undergrad who wasn't in some way involved with THON. The lyrics to this year's very clever line dance lyrics can be found here.

That's some dance floor

We (Sarah, Paige, Emily H, Boon, Dom, Stephanie and I) went to THON on Saturday but did not feel inclined to take on the 14,000+ strong Sunday crowd. I watched the finale online with 9500 other viewers. Here are some tweets; FTK means For The Kids:

@SCMProfessor: #THON and PSU Students jumped RIGHT OVER 8M, going to 9.5M. Amazing. Again, Humanity can be wondrous, even in tumultuous times.

@TheSchoolPhilly: @THON separates #PennState from every other big state, party university. #NoDryEyes #FTK #THON2011 #WeAre"

@jsbeers: #PennState is the number one party school because we have a weekend long party #FTK #THON

@PSUMatt2005: There are a lot of things I don't like about #THON, but at the end of the day, I have $9.5 million more reasons I'm proud to be a PSU alum.

One of the things some people don't like about THON is how it can become simpy a big competition between organizations to see who raises the most money. We hear a lot of "it's all about the love" during THON itself, but the rest of the school year people don't always act that way and often separate THON from the rest of their lives, the same way some people separate Sunday church from the rest of their lives. It's quite odd, actually, that you could say THON weekend is to some students what Christmas is for people who only go to church on Christmas.

We celebrated David D's birthday at Rey Azteca, and yes, with Rey Azteca in town, we won't be needing to drive 40 minutes to Altoona to eat at El Campesino anymore. They have found their niche in the regional market. Emily H had a fun birthday party too; she gave it a "moon" theme so we played some good games, read moon poetry, listened to her moon-music playlist, had moonshakes, cresent rolls and mochi, and watched Wallace and Grommit's A Fine Day Out in which they go to the moon. The only thing missing was moonshine.

Last night I went over to Becky M's for a potluck dinner party. She had about 13 people over, comprised of her usual crew and some other new faces I got to meet. I ate way too much - we had mussels, jambalaya, salad, chili and cornbread, more bread, pasta salad, chips and salsa, and the peanut-butter pie I had to finish my meal off almost finished me off. I didn't even touch the brownies and ice cream. I also had a concoction of white grape juice, Bacardi mango and Dekuyper's Triple Sec orange. The guy who made the peanut butter pie told me the filling consists entirely of chunks of peanut butter and cream cheese. At midnight, 3 hours later, I still felt like it was going to take 20 more years to digest it. There were great discussions on national service, welfare systems, the budget, what programs to cut and keep, and although Jon gave up and left halfway through the night because he hates such debates, I had a great time because I haven't had such intellectual conversations about important political issues for a while. And then I realized everyone in the room was in their mid-twenties, and I felt old. I was at Becky's for a good 4 hours, during which 2 inches of snow buried my car.

Today happens to be my roommate's 25th birthday, and although I am younger than her, it makes me feel old. This is the time of my life when I should be doing things and making a different and .. well.. here I am, not being particularly useful. No complaints though, and a lot to be thankful for. I do my research, get paid enough to live comfortably and have a good time, save a couple hundred a month, give a little bit away. I do enjoy living in this town and being able to appreciate it as a resident, enjoying how safe it is and how splendid the outdoors are, at the same time facing all the terrible trials such as having my car almost towed away from my own lot, and losing my tax documents in the mail (that in itself is an investigation in progress with a police report already filed).

All that said, I probably need to move on. Life's not about making sure you have a comfortable and easy life. It's about living and experiencing different lifestyles. And somehow God has to be an integral part of that equation. I'm sort of in the "sails up, let's go anywhere the wind blows" mode.

------------------

A 6.3 magnitude earthquake hit Christchurch, New Zealand yesterday. The city looks destroyed. Having visited many of the sites now photographed in piles of rubble, and having been in some of the buildings that bodies are now being pulled out of, does make it a bit more personal than just another piece of news. So you might be wondering why this earthquake has caused more damage than the bigger 7.1 September one last year. A lot of people assume the Richter and Moment Magnitude scales are like the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, where the value is based on some human-observable physical quantity (wind speed for the latter). With earthquakes, the scale is actually a measure of the amplitude of energy that is sent out, so we need to take into account other factors to translate the magnitude into its effects on the human environment.

The main factor is location within the earth of the earthquake. When the media says an earthquake strikes a city, it does not mean the heart of the earthquake happened in the middle of the city. The hypocenter, the location where the earthquake originates in the earth, is the source of the energy. This recent earthquake had a hypocenter about 3 miles below the surface, half as deep as the September earthquake, meaning this earthquake's energy had less time to dissipate before reaching the surface. An earthquake of smaller magnitude near the surface can cause greater destruction at the surface than an earthquake of larger magnitude much deeper in the earth. Also, the epicenter, the surface location, of this recent earthquake was 12 miles from the city, whereas that of the September earthquake was 35 miles away. These figures may change as seismologists reconstruct the earthquake more accurately.

3. Time of earthquake
This earthquake hit during the day, when people were out and about, making them more vulnerable to falling debris.

Christchurch is the kiwi-side base of operations for the USAP. I am kind of trying to ignore the little feeling in the back of my head that people I know may be in trouble in Christchurch. This is just about the end of the austral-summer season for everyone and a lot of Raytheon and USAP people were very likely in Christchurch during the earthquake. I'm also trying to ignore the other fact I know, which is that the kiwis who run our Christchurch logistics are right there. Could someone I've met, someone who has been kind to me, be dead? Let's not go there.

integration and terrorism

2011-02-17T23:33:00.012-05:00

Apart from finishing the first complete draft of my thesis, running around feeling like I own this town, and sending friends off with people they don't know on wild adventures that I can't join because of other social obligations, I've recently had in mind to write a short piece on integration.

The latest Global Lion, a newsletter of the University's Office of Global Programs, features an article on the International Student Council cookbook. Now, I usually just skim the headlines of the newsletters, but because I'm planning to buy both this ISC cookbook and the Outing Club camping cookbook, and was in a cookbook-supportive mood, I decided to read the entire article. One of the lines stood out to me -

So-and-so thought, “Why don’t we address the problem of segregation we have at this school and use the cookbook to help us integrate the communities?” By segregation, so-and-so means the divide between American and international students at Penn State.

"Segregation problem" is way too strong a phrase to use. Not very diplomatic of the interviewee considering her position on the Council. I don't believe it has any scientific basis either - show me the statistics! You can do a lot of damage by perpetuating an unfounded assumption.

Granted, I can see how some people may have that perspective, since our school, as one of our prospective students pointed out last weekend, is predominantly Caucasian, and it's common to see people hanging out with people of similar ethnicities or races. But still, I find that phrase annoying, because when you have 42,000 students, you can't make generic statements like that. I have tons of friends, both American and international. I don't even differentiate between the two. Case in point – today I had sushi at the HUB with April, my Texan officemate who has blond hair and blue eyes, and Hwasung, a Korean international student to whom I will be giving voluntary English tuition this semester. Kiss my ass segregation problem. Pardon my English.

I think anyone who makes an effort to socialize should have no problems. English can be improved. Small-talk is a skill that can be developed. Opportunities to socialize abound in class and student organizations. There are a plethora of multicultural student groups. Yes, there are some pricks and bitches, but they are a minority. But socializing outside your comfort circle takes guts, which some people don't have. And some people prefer to just hang out with people with people who are like them. That's not a *problem*.

The real *problem* however, can stem from such perceptions, and can certainly lead into some very bad business. Segregation, seclusion, isolation, ostraci-zation, whatever you choose to call it, when left unchecked by society, can lead to angry radicalization. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), the day before the newsletter came out, I read through a section on "The Atlantic Divide" in my current library book, Marc Sageman’s Leaderless Jihad : Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century. According to the author, Muslims in Western Europe are more prone to radicalism and considering themselves as part of a global fight against the war against Islam than American Muslims. As of 2008, the time of publication, more than 2,300 terrorism-related arrests had been made in Europe since 9/11 compared to ~60 in the US, and both entities have roughly similar population sizes (350 million in Western Europe and 300 million in America). Many of the terrorists arrested in Europe were European nationals of Middle Eastern heritage, so we can't attribute these figures to it being easier to travel into Western Europe from bordering nations than it is to cross the ocean to get to America.

The answers to the Atlantic Divide statistics lie partially in the fact that while America is considered a melting pot, European countries are defined by a "national essence" that includes impressions of ethnicity and "stock", even though many nations are comprised of immigrants. If you're Italian, you're Italian; if you're German, you're German; if you're Dutch, you're Dutch! And if you're an Englishman, well, I really don't know, but you're probably thinking white Caucasian male. Point made. Rarely do we see terms such as Dutch-Hmong or German-Thai; when we hear that we think, oh, a Dutch person married a Hmong person, and not of Hmong people of Dutch nationality. Because of these ideas of who comprises the national heritage and who does not, 2nd generation Muslims or young Muslims in the diasporas* feel ostracized and withdraw from mainstream society into more radical groups. In America, diversity is part of life and we fling all these American-suffixes around like it's nobody's business. Americans Muslims are more likely to see themselves as American first, and Muslim second, whereas European Muslims are more likely to see themselves as Muslim before anything else. Based on my own personal experiences traveling in Italy, Austria and Germany, I would never want to settle down in a country where nationality is equivalent to ethnicity, as much as I enjoyed my time with great people I met there.
*Diaspora : a way too intellectual word for a geophysicist which means expatriate community.

I should point out right now that the Muslim students I know at Penn State are mostly Malaysian, and they are wonderful. They mostly hang out with each other because of their common language and religion, but they are always friendly to others and enjoy meeting new people. The Malay girls are extremely sweet, and the guys, though they will not shake your hand if you are female, are friendly and chatty. Of course, I've only known the Malay-Muslims (to distinguish them from the Malaysian Chinese, and Chinese-Muslims) who have been in my geoscience and International Student Council activities. I assume there are some who totally keep to their own social circle, which occurs with any ethnic group. At our Shell Camp in Louisiana last year, the Saudi Arabian students were rather cliquish in that they kept talking in Arabic to each other, which shut everyone else out. But when I approached them to converse with them they were always willing to talk. As I said previously, some people are content with the friends they have and aren’t as social as the rest of us. Comfort with the English language is another integration issue too, as some people are embarrassed to speak English if theirs is not good, so they end up not speaking, and not improving, and this applies to everyone, Germans, Israelis, and the like, as I’ve seen in hostels in New Zealand.

Another reason ethnic tensions are worse in Europe than America is the diversity of police forces. Police forces in America are very diverse and representative of their locations - I think instantly of Heather Fong, the former Chief of Police in San Francisco who was Chinese American - whereas police forces in Europe are predominantly Caucasian, creating an 'us against them' stigma in immigrant communities. This leads to minorities feeling unjustly represented. A third reason is the perception of The American Dream - where you can achieve success regardless of what, or who, you are. Even if it's flawed (which I think it is), it makes people take personal responsibility for their successes and failures. I've never heard of a European Dream.

The point is, integration is important. Humans are social creatures and everyone needs to feel like they are part of our communities. Otherwise, they get mad at the world, and people who are mad at the world are trouble. My conclusions are

1. There is no "segregation problem" at Penn State. Bullshit, each individual is responsible for his or her social network.
2. We need to be kind to everyone, regardless of whether or not we like them
3. Must buy cookbooks

This discussion has reminded me of an old friend from Singapore who thought that "American" was a race. I still have issues with the real meaning of ethnicity and race. Next time I'll just ask people what their heritage is.

Alright.
Earlier this evening, I was at the Alehouse with some PSICErs and a visiting scientist chowing down a delicious Alehouse Burger for dinner. Ever since getting home I've been sitting on our couch watching back-to-back episodes of Extreme River Monsters on the Animal Planet while writing this entire post. They're in Thailand and just caught a monster manta/sting-ray with a 10 inch sting. Holy cow! It's 6 feet across (1.91 meters) and 400 lbs AND just gave birth to 2 live young in their net ?!? And now on screen we are looking at a sting-ray ultrasound? Wow! The river in Thailand where these fish live is called Area 51 by the locals and is in a totally urban area.

I've wondered what every single fish on this show tastes like.

schedule

2011-02-15T12:20:00.008-05:00

Just had leftovers from last night's dinner for lunch. I rarely eat seafood so it was a treat! Here's the revised schedule for the week since I can't go caving; I expect to have the discussion of my thesis done by Friday.

Today - the Graduate Student Association is having an office party from 3-6pm. I might swing by.
Tonight - bLess at Laura's apartment
Wednesday - early dinner and a couple of pitchers with Nate at Cafe 210, evening glacial geomorphology class followed by team trivia at the Gingerbread Man with the regular crew
Thursday - PSICE group dinner with a visiting speaker at either the Alehouse or Otto's
Friday - David's birthday dinner then maybe contra-dancing
Saturday - thinking lunch with Boon followed by THON and Emily's birthday party in the evening

I watched a bit of Jeopardy where humans are facing WATSON the supercomputer. Hilarious! I don't think any of the humans expected to win. Obviously WATSON can't actually think; it uses a search algorithm involving keyword matching, best-fit and least-misfit routines to produce answers based on certainties. For the US Cities category where WATSON answered "Toronto" incorrectly, it knew the possibility of Toronto being the right answer was 11% (or something like that) and would not have given an answer but was forced to because it was a double jeopardy round. The benefit of being a supercomputer is that without emotions, it can't think irrationally or give in to whims.

a blustery valentine's day

2011-02-14T23:12:00.002-05:00

The temperature broke into the 40s today and I left my winter jacket at home. It was however extremely windy and my head was quite cold during the walk to school. There was a wind advisory for gusts of up to 51 mph, and tonight it is supposed to plummet down to 17F/-8C with a windchill of -1F/-18C !!! I don't think we've had negative windchills yet! I had a stash of clothing in my office that includes a beanie and I wore it home. Our office is level with the top branches of the elms that line Burrowes Street, and the wind wailed through the leaf-less branches like a dying animal.

The second half of last week was extremely hectic. We had 5 prospective graduate students visit our department, with 2 girls coming specifically to visit our ice and climate group. Luke & Lana hosted one of them and I hosted the other. Sometimes we get oddballs but all five prospectives were wonderful - social, confident and got along well with everyone. It would be great to have all of them join our department. The organizing committee did a pretty spotty job but fortunately our prospectives still had a good time. After lunch at the Skellar, dinner at Rotelli's, our Friday pizza meeting, raspberry parfait ice cream at the Creamery, a pizza party at Dr. Patzkowsky's house on Friday night and brunch at Green Bowl on Saturday, I was totally food-ed and host-ed out. Once our prospies had all left on Saturday I took a two hour nap in the afternoon. Hosting the prospies made me wish I was a first-year again. Life is great now, but back then, life was exciting, with the starry-eyed, bushy-tailed high of starting a brand new adventure.

Becca and I hosted a game night at our apartment Saturday night. Paige, Sarah, Dan M, Dan V, Chris, Bruce, Nate, Roman and Emily came over and we played QuipIt, Flux, several rounds of Four on a Couch and the nameless Telephone-drawing game. People stayed till midnight and we were quite surprised at the turnout! I guess it was just one of those cold winter Saturdays in small town PA where everyone had nothing better to do. Good times. Becca made delicious mint cookies and I ate too much. The Harvest guys actually were hosting a Valentine's dinner for the Harvest girls that night but I wasn't comfortable going since the guys are all undergrads so I just skipped that.

Sunday morning I went to the Bibles for America meeting as well as Harvest and spent the afternoon decompressing at home. See the week was so busy I had to take Sunday off, meaning while Tracy and David were out hiking and Becca out running, I was sitting on the couch playing computer games and it didn't even bother me that I was inside on a sunny warm day.

By evening I was feeling much better and after PSCG I went with some of the gang to the Creamery for (yes more) ice cream. I shared Death by Chocolate with Sarah and it was scrumptious. Saw some of the Bibles for America folk at the creamery and got to say goodbye to them, since they are leaving town today. I actually really enjoyed PSCG last night because Robby came up with very insightful and though-provoking questions, plus having Dan V and Kristen at the same table makes for very good intellectual and theological arguments. Did you know that Jehovah is an erroneously concocted mistranslation of God's name? So if God appears to you in a dream and says his name is Jehovah.. go figure.

Anyway, the last couple of weeks I have been meeting new people every single day! I love being at Penn State. The only bad thing that has happened recently is I fell on ice and injured my knee. I have a huge bruise now that is only painful when I kneel, but that means I can't go caving with the Grotto on Wednesday, which is disappointing because I was looking forward to it. Oh well, what to do.

By the way, today is Valentine's Day. I decided to invite Tracy over for dinner and successfully pulled off a 3-course meal.

For appetizers, we had a small plate of cheese-stuffed tortellini with pickled vegetables. It was too unsightly for me to bother taking a photo of. For our main course we had crusted herb-baked salmon with a honey mustard base, garlic-butter prawns, tomato-basil couscous and a bean medley.

and for dessert we had yogurt parfait made with vanilla yogurt, strawberries, blackberries and honey.

Wahh! I wish I had someone to cook like that for me every night!! I made Becca a parfait too; she had a night class and couldn't join us for dinner. That's okay because I can plan another dinner for her soon.

dreaming

2011-02-10T09:42:00.003-05:00

I was woken from a particularly good dream yesterday morning because, halfway across the planet, one of my Antarctica pals, Tommy, had gotten lost in the Marine Parade neighborhood while trying to make his way to my grandma's house for Chinese New Year dinner. He found it eventually and everything worked out, but I was barely able to grasp the fleeting images of that particularly good dream (and I rarely have, or recall, good dreams nowadays).

This dream involved my advisor driving myself, two of my pals in our research group, a guy I used to have a crush on, and my old neighbor from my childhood. We were driving in the Marine Parade neighborhood on the way to lunch, and my advisor dropped us off at the HDB blocks and said something along the lines of, "I'll park and meet you guys there!" and we were like, "ok, see ya!" and then we started walking to lunch, and something was said and something else was said, and then I heard my phone and in this half-dreamlike state immediately mourned the interruption of a particularly good dream.

Right. Last night I went to the grotto meeting and got a nice used pair of coveralls for caving; Bon Jovi was in town and traffic was a mess around the BJC/stadium area. I walked 2.2 miles home from that end of campus in 14F/-10C. This morning was even colder! I decided to walk instead of taking the bus because it's sunny outside. Wasn't too bad except my face got cold; should have brought my balaclava along.

in Farenheit

in Celcius

what I ate this weekend

2011-02-07T17:54:00.006-05:00

ok, I spent this past weekend eating lots of food. I won't say I stuffed myself senseless, but food was the focus of the weekend. You could say it started on Thursday, when we had an International Student Council social at the Golden Wok restaurant. Our side of the rather long table decided to share our dishes (which is the proper way to eat asian food) and had stir-fried beef and scallions, mushrooms and bok choy in garlic sauce and a chicken with peanuts dish, with rice. I met a lot of people at dinner, some new and some old whom I haven't seen in more than a year. Time flies because the sophomores I worked Fall Orientation with 2 years ago are now graduating seniors!

On Friday night a couple of the chinese ministries threw their annual Chinese New Year party at the Assembly of God Church. I brought Boon, an exchange student from Singapore whom I met at Thursday's dinner, with me. It was a free event and we ate a lot - rice, dumplings, chicken stew, etc. After dinner there were choral and skit performances, and after the party ended I took Boon to Meyer's Dairy so she could try their ice cream. I probably could have done without the ice cream but had a maple walnut sundae.

Saturday morning I gave Emily H a ride to work and then walked over to Josh's for brunch with him, Bruce and Paige. We had scrumptious chocolate and blueberry pancakes, coffee cake and chocolate milk. It started sleeting outside so I spent the afternoon at home. We have been having absolutely miserable weather just hovering around freezing, meaning there is lots of ice and slush everywhere. The snow melts a bit during the day and then freezes over when the temperature drops at night. If it's going to be winter please either be cold and way below freezing or go into spring already! Akk. Chris came over to work on one of his projects with Becca. I read a couple of journal articles and quite a bit of my latest library book, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century by Marc Sageman. Title speaks for itself.

In the evening Knut, Luke & Lana and I went to Otto's for dinner with Atsu and his girlfriend Kat. Atsu is our new postdoc and just moved to town last month. He is really on-the-ball about socializing with us, which is great. I had a fantastic meal - a crab-cake burger with an arugula salad and a Mt Nittany pale ale. Yum! Saw some other guys from the geo department having dinner too. The roads were nasty but we didn't skid or anything. I felt extremely satiated right around bedtime because I had spent the day just eating with good company and reading.

Sunday after church we (the Peculiar Older People) went for lunch at CC Peppers, a sub shop near Walmart. I tried to be healthy and got a veggie wrap, but also ended up getting an order of cheese fries. So much for that. It was delicious!!!

Sunday was also the Superbowl, and I brought Boon and 3 of her friends (so a full carload) to the PSCG party, where we ate so much food (Nate's jambalaya, blueberry cheesecake crepes, salad, chips, brownies, home-made pizza, Becca's fruit salad, KFC, and other decadent desserts, urghh) and watched the game on the Holleman's huge HD projection screen in their basement. There were so many people there were people watching the game upstairs on their small tv too. Around the start of the 2nd quarter when the Packers called their 1st time-out I took off and headed to the other side of town where, after slipping down a hill of snow and ice, I made it to April's Superbowl party and ate even more. They had macaroni and cheese, peanut brittle, chips, beer, and her mum even sent her chocolate-covered fruit!

Wow! I hung out with that gang through halftime and headed back to the Holleman's when the Packers scored their 4th quarter touchdown. I was supporting the Steelers and they did end up losing 25-31. I think everyone had a good time. At the end of the night I had consumed so much sugar I knew I wasn't going to be able to fall asleep so I watched Glee back in our apartment before retiring.

This morning I was still feeling full so I skipped breakfast.

At lunch after church today we looked up the Chinese zodiac on Myro's iphone just for fun (Jin made some joke about us being a very new-age church). I was born in the year of the tiger, and according to the website we were on, I would be excellent as a boss, explorer, race car driver, or matador. LOL.

Josh made brunch yesterday and said that nothing much has changed in his life since high school even though he lives in a different place - goes to school, plays video-games, works, goes to church. Which can be a good thing. I'm having such a good time that the thought of my college career ending this year makes sigh.

Hello Obama!

2011-02-03T16:20:00.004-05:00

President Obama's speech this morning totally threw off my schedule and I haven't accomplished much else today. Dan M, Luke and I sat in Rec Hall from 9am till 12.15pm when he arrived and by 1pm it was over. I brought my laptop and a book but spent most of the time yakking away with the guys; the atmosphere was noisy and distracting anyway. The main purpose for him coming was to announce the Better Buildings Initiative, which is a long-term plan to improve the energy-efficiency of buildings; the speech was in line with the construction of a new Energy Innovation Hub that Penn State will run in Philadelphia. Apart from that it was mostly rhetoric about the need for America to out-innovate the rest of the world; he also announced that he would be withdrawing subsidies and assistance to the oil and gas sector because "they'll do fine without it", which is true.

Being President of the world's most powerful nation is a tough job, and I have utmost respect for that, regardless of who is President. Although I am very pleased to have been able to attend the speech of a current U.S. President (we were quite close to him too), I have 2 main caveats with his message.

Firstly, he talked about how America is a place where an idea can be developed and then brought into marketable fruition because we have grants that will fund the ideas, patents to protect them and a private sector to develop them. BUT the U.S. economy is no longer a free-market economy; there is huge corporate influence in the government from the energy and agriculture sectors, which have huge companies acting like monopolies, sort of like an oligopoly. These huge companies have a lot of weight they can throw around to block or buy out smaller innovators. The campaign money they give their preferred senators means their voices are louder in the White House, influencing what types of policies are crafted which often benefit them and not their competition. Granted these industries are high-expense industries where the capital required to succeed is huge, making it difficult to start out from scratch as an independent, but financial prowess should not equate to political influence.

Secondly, his talk seemed to imply that energy innovation is going to be *the* answer to America's energy security. WRONG. Lifestyle changes are going to be equally, if not more important - get rid of the American dream of single family housing! The world needs to encourage more community-friendly resource pooling, like multi-family housing, cooperative living/intentional communities, better-planned walkable cities, better public transportation, and increase local food production to cut down on transportation - is that bag of organic cherries really organic* if it required burning carbon halfway across the continent to get to your grocery store? Innovating energy 'solutions' to keep up with the current wasteful society is not going to solve anything.

*Organic: food produced using cultural, biological, and mechanical practices that foster cycling of resources, promote ecological balance, and conserve biodiversity. - US Department of Agriculture

Alrighty. After his speech Dan, Luke, Knut and I walked down to Margarita's Pizzeria to grab lunch. It's such a whole in the wall that it wasn't crowded like everywhere else would have been, but great food nonetheless. After that Dan and I walked over to Life Sciences to try and get him a bible from the Bibles For America folk, but they had run out, which is a great thing. I have a suspicion that as long as you don't look like an old hell-fire and brimstone street preacher with a broad-rimmed hat, students are happy to talk with you about religion. We were surprised that Obama's visit started with the Lutheran Minister leading everyone in prayer. Probably not Kosher but if you want to make a statement that's the way to go.

Having a discussion with Jamie now on political theory -

Jamie : True freedom is the freedom to starve, the freedom to fail, the freedom to attempt to climb a mountain and fall down a cliff. The freedom to do that requires refusing social safety nets, and only in America do we have that.

Me : Oh, so that's why there are so many homeless people in America? If people are happy to not have these freedoms that's still fine.

Jamie : Yes, and that's fine. They just don't live in America. If (homeless) people fall through the (homeless support) system it is because they either are mentally handicapped or just don't want to work. There is free section 8 housing offered to everyone and if people really wanted to they could reach that standard where they can get that. There is enough help from soup kitchens, private citizens and Christian organizations to help. Americans give the most money to charity and we give from our own free will rather than mandatory taxes for social welfare.

caving

2011-02-02T22:47:00.007-05:00

I've gone totally nuts. I just came back from a caving trip with the Nittany Grotto. Cynthia, one of Isaac's caving friends, set me up but didn't end up going, so I did what I do best - found the group at the meeting place with a blatant disregard for self-consciousness, introduced myself and off we went! They have a good mix of experienced folk and newbies like myself, and about a dozen people were on tonight's trip. It helped that I had met a couple of them last semester at on a camping trip in Rothrock.

Oh boy what a good time, I have never done anything like that in my life! We went to Miller Cave just outside of Pine Grove Mills. I was handed a hard-hat with headlights, and we spent 2.5 hours crawling, crabwalking and mucking our way on our bellies through through tunnels and 'rooms' that had muddy snowmelt streaming through them. One of the older guys showed up to let people borrow his gear and let me take his knee-pads, which were lifesavers! Near the entrance of the cave there were lots of tiny cute little brown bats, and the duo right at the entrance had white frost all over them. When we finally emerged into a windchill of 10F/-12C, we stripped off our wet and muddy clothes in the open and changed into clean clothes. I have never felt the sharp burning pain of a cold frosty wind to that extent! Nope not even down south, because I never ran around wet and naked in the open down south. Accuweather says the temperature is 23F right now with a real-feel/windchill of 2F !!!

The mud from my clothes

The night gave me enough excitement for the rest of the week. Woo hoo. Now to get my clothes out of the laundry and prepare for the big day tomorrow (yup, Obama's visit got postponed by a day due to the massive winter storm we're having - go figure, I'm nuts). So this will be a week of several firsts -

My first time sledding
My first time building an igloo
My first time caving
My first time attending a speech given by the President of America
(and my first time rockwall-climbing since high school)

The last time I had a ticket to see an important figure I tore my ACL (it was Secretary of State Madeleine Albright).. I was hoping I wouldn't damage myself now that I have another ticket to see an even more important figure. Tomorrow happens to be the anniversary of my accident. Lots of things to be thankful for.

off to see the wizard

2011-02-01T12:53:00.001-05:00

In other news -
Thanks to Penn State's subscription to Press Display I can now read all 5 Egyptian newspapers online for free! Well, actually I can only read 1 because I can't read Arabic (the online pages of the Arabic newspapers even turn from left to right). But still, newspapers from 96 countries at my fingertips = awesome news database. Apart from reading about current affairs, I get to learn about all the exotic foods people eat in other countries by looking at the grocery ads. Not to say that the regime change in Egypt is trivial at all.

no day like a snowday!

2011-01-29T21:40:00.004-05:00

Turned out to be quite a nice day after all.
And quite a pleasant week, too.
Our world has become a snow globe. Snow everywhere, up in the air...

Right now Becca is sitting on the carpet watching Chris play my guitar. He is much better at the guitar than I am. We just spent the evening making crepes with chicken, veggies and tomato marinara, followed by dessert crepes with yogurt, chocolate chips, honey, chocolate fudge, strawberries and syrup (!!). This is really hilarious, I gave Becca the lyrics and we are trying to get her to sing to Chris' rendition of Yesterday by the Beatles. I am really full. That was a great dinner; we lit a vanilla candle and listened to French music while eating (I requested the Amelie soundtrack from Pandora). Earlier in the afternoon we were at Isaac's house building a super igloo with his neighbors and their kids. It was hilarious.

Oh so happy

And then we went sledding.

On Tuesday our bLess gang came over to our apartment for bible study. We are smaller now since 2 of the guys have evening classes this semester, but it's good because more people can talk more, if you get what I mean. Moon brought his guitar over and we had a good time singing and discussing 2 Timothy.

On Thursday Dr. Barnes, one of the emeritus professors, popped into our office and gave Jamie and me free tickets to the John Schfield and Joe Lovano Quartet jazz concert that night. Awesome! What a windfall. We really enjoyed it. I have been listening to a lot of house jazz recently, which is not at all like traditional jazz, but as Jamie said, calling something jazz is meaningless because there are so many different styles.

On Friday evening I went for the Winter Jam concert with Myro and a pack of the church kids. It was pretty cool as there were 5-6 acts including the Newsboys, the David Crowder Band, Francesca Battistelli and even a rap group, Red. Although I'm not too familiar with popular Christian music, I was familiar with some of the songs we sing at church, as well as some I've heard on the radio. During the concert, there was a 15 minute message by Tony Nolan on how accepting Christ changed his life, as well as information on a charity they were partnering with called Holt International that helps orphans. I was quite impressed at the stage displays they had; Red had pyrotechnics and the Newsboys had a rotating drum set and elevating platforms. Wow! To see so many people come together to 'make a joyful noise unto the Lord' was great; I'm sure a lot of people came in from the surrounding areas to attend the event.

Bethany has gone nuts about Crazy, I mean, COZY Thai. I had Cozy Thai for lunch last Thursday with some of the geo girls, and last Friday I had Cozy Thai for lunch with Bethany, and yesterday Bethany and I had Cozy Thai for lunch again with Anne. The thing is, every time we eat there Bethany decides that she likes what I'm having and decides to order it "next time" so we go back and she orders what I had last time. I feel like I have eaten at every restaurant in town > 10 times already. LOL.

Tomorrow after church Cici is going to teach some of us geo girls how to rock climb at the YMCA, and then Becca & Chris & Isaac and I are planning to go sledding. Hopefully the weather pans out. And by that I mean hopefully it snows a lot tonight.

snowman

2011-01-22T16:46:00.003-05:00

Yeah I hauled 3 loads of snow through the apartment using our trash bin. At 1am last night while I was making the snowman I started talking to it and trying to reassure it that its head would not fall off.

2011-01-22T01:30:00.003-05:00

It's a full moon tonight, -4F/-20C outside, and I just finished building a big snowman after a night of contra dancing. Woo hoo! He has a scarf and sunglasses and gloves and all, I hope they don't get blown away in the 40 mph wind gusts. It's going to be really cold this weekend. I'm going to wake up really late tomorrow.. er.. today..

cold weather ahead

2011-01-21T10:48:00.003-05:00

Christmas should be in February in the northern hemisphere.
We usually walk or bike into school. Can't bike with all this snow on the ground. I'll bike when it's above 29F. Below 25F I'll take the bus. Today I missed the bus and decided to just walk. It's about a mile and today with the snow it took 30 minutes. I got online once I got into the office and found out the windchill is 2F/-17C!! HAHA Like I said, I've walked in 0F before so this comes pretty close..

In Farenheit

In Celcius

2011-01-20T10:48:00.002-05:00

Today my car almost got towed. Fortunately my neighbors alerted me to the fact. Unfortunately I had to pay to have my car taken off the blocks. Better than no car. Still, this happened because I let a friend borrow my car a week ago and she forgot to put the parking permit back on the rear-view mirror >_< and I did not realize it till today, obviously. The permit was sitting quietly in the glove compartment. Amazing how visual this system has to be... the parking lot monitors have our license plates and car models, why should the lack of the permit be reason to call the tow-truck? They could have left me a note or something. The tow-truck driver said stickers are much easier and would prevented such a MEANINGLESS situations from arising. Sigh. Still, it's a good thing I decided to stay home this morning!!! I totally do not feel bad about not going in to campus anymore. A bit flustered so I might get up and head into town and work at the library. There must be some metaphysical or philosophical analogy to this.

books, games and the only things missing are tea and a home for the homeless

2011-01-18T22:27:00.014-05:00

My work has been hitting several road blocks. Over the weekend I completed Traveling Light and also failed to perform normal-moveout corrections on my seismic data because the software I'm trying to use keeps crashing when I try to execute what was previously-executable workflow. I emailed my advisor and the department IT wizard and so far nothing.. I can't really do anything so I went to Schlow Public Library in the afternoon and read a ton of graphic novels.

The Schlow has an extensive, though popular and hence elusive, collection of Neil Gaiman's works, and today The Dream Hunters was sitting quietly on the shelf waiting for me. Another elegant book by the master of stories and illustrator P. Craig Russell. I also read Arab in America by Toufic El Rassi, where the author outlines his experience growing up surrounded by whites in a country which doesn't understand the difference between Iraqis and Iranians, Pakistanis, Palestinians and Persians, which made me ..er.. realize how good life is for the rest of us. A drawback of the novel was his complete misuse of the word 'nationality' where he should have used 'ethnicity' instead. I also felt he was casting a big generalization on America being a totally white nation - there are parts of America that are extremely diverse, the facts of which he ignores in his book. He never once mentions blacks, and has probably never been to predominantly hispanic or asian communities. A lot of misunderstandings are caused by insularity on all sides of the color lines. Oh well. At home, I've started reading another book on the homeless, titled Land of the Lost Souls: My Life on the Streets by Cadillac Man. The book is the compiled scribblings of a homeless man in Manhattan.

I've had a couple of run-ins with homeless people on the street that were more than just 'no', 'sorry', or 'here you go' but I'd still like to sit down with some one day and just talk and learn more about them. I also know some in more than just a 'hi and bye' sense. One of the ladies at the K-Farm who was homeless and just there because she had no where else to go. She told me her story over dinner my first night on the farm, but my brain didn't process it very well as I was distracted by my new surroundings. I think the gist of it was that her husband threw her out,and I didn't ask why her daughters wouldn't take her in or send her money. She has since gone to a women's shelter in Florida. Oddly enough, in this day and age, being homeless does not mean you are technologically impaired, and we've been keeping in touch, extremely sporadically, on facebook. Of course, going back to what the previous book I was reading mentioned, being homeless is not an identity - for the people who choose to try and get out of it, it is just a phase of life they are passing through.

S, a younger homeless man with a grisly blond beard and curly locks, walked into the Abba Java coffee house in the basement of the Wesley Presbyterian church one cold evening and joined us for dinner and our Alpha class. He was living at the local shelter and was counting the days he'd been off alcohol. I used to see him occasionally when I walked into school on Allen Street. Sometimes he'd be fine and chatty, and other times he'd be plain stoned with no shirt on, glazed bloodshot eyes, flies buzzing around his dirt-encrusted mouth and the police asking him questions. It seemed to be an up and down ride for him. One day when I ran into him I asked him if he had found a job yet, and he told me his parents were sending him some help so I decided not to worry about him. He falls into that category of homeless whom I think need to have their families take them back in. The thing about America is you have the freedom to leave and be homeless.

That reminds me of C, who was once appointed to the board of the YMCA in Austin because he used to be homeless and they needed someone who had that experience. He told me long ago that he had been homeless by choice. Both his parents would have taken him back anytime.

Oh, oh, oh, and let's not forget my traveling companion Ms. B who quit her job as a Montessori teacher 2 years before we met in New Zealand and is spending her life roaming around the world living off her savings and temp work. In her backpack are her sleeping bag, supplies and a folded paraglider. She never sleeps anywhere she has to pay, meaning she sleeps in her sleeping bag in playgrounds, parks, beaches, and she has this riveting story of how when she was in America she was walking up a hill next to a highway trying to find a place to sleep for the night, and came across an encampment of homeless men who upon seeing her hollered her over, and seeing as she was homeless like themselves invited her to stay with them. She was terrified but they treated her like their own and did not at all insult her dignity. Unbelievable, kapeesh, what do you say to that? You don't forget those kinds of stories. We spent a night sleeping in another girl's van on the beach in the full moon shadows of the Kaikoura mountains and the next day hitch-hiked into Picton, the gateway to the Marlborough Sounds. I wonder where she is now.

As we can see not all homeless people are involuntarily homeless. But of those who are, not all are beggars. The Cadillac Man considered himself a canner (he makes his money from recyclables he finds), and could never bring himself to panhandle. Even panhandlers have their dignity, which involves different degrees of what they will and will not do to get by. On my latest trip I offered a black panhandler in Manhattan the remaining half of my cheese biscuit, and he flatly refused, asked me if I would eat off a tray and to my response of "I would if I was hungry" said he wasn't that hungry. I'm sorry I insulted his dignity but I'm used to a different... er... class(?) of homelessness, however terrible that may sound. In Houston, the highway panhandlers take leftovers all the time, and outside the Old Siam restaurant in San Francisco a homeless man took Becky M's leftovers with great glee and appreciation, and when she used to live in the city she would give her leftovers away all the time. I'm glad he refused the cheese biscuit though. It taught me something. Every story is different and the homeless culture varies from city to city. Why are you homeless? Why don't you go to family members for help? The American government weaves a complex web for these people. What would things be like if religious organizations and charities did not exist to provide additional help for the down and out?

Note that my experience with homelessness has been entirely in America (with the exception of Ms B). I did not see a single homeless person my 18 years growing up in Singapore. Why? Firstly, Singapore has a very structured and well-managed system of government-subsidized housing. Secondly, Asian culture dictates not caring for family members to be a shameful thing. With such a small geographic extent, and a very closely knit society, if a local person was to be homeless, the whole world would know about it and their relatives would be in trouble. (note I exclude migrants). In America, individual mobility increases the distance between family members and it's easy to lose people in such a large continent. Singapore also doesn't have unemployment benefits or welfare handouts so people are forced to make do (but there are some shelters). Unfortunately, that doesn't mean the homeless don't exist - we just don't see them. Here are some other quick reads on the subject. I can't comment meaningfully on this much because I don't live there anymore. The first article is about where we are currently, and the following 2 address caveats with the public housing program.

Singapore's growing homeless problem
Homeless in Singapore due to technicality
Singapore Homelessness
And this final one is about a homeless man being taken advantage of sexually.

In the evening our bLess gang (minus Danny, who has flown off to Beijing for his semester abroad, and John & James who have night classes this semester) headed over to Adam's apartment for bible study tonight. We did a review of passages we covered last semester, and then we played Apples to Apples. His two roommates and one of their boyfriends hung out with us too. So I'm getting more than my fill of games this week. I don't actually like Apples to Apples - you can only play it so many times before it gets old. I guess the appeal of it is its simplicity - anyone can pick it up easily - and you don't need any fixed number of players to play. Did you know that legend has it Parker Brothers originally rejected Monopoly because of 53 fundamental game design flaws? I say legend because no one can come up with what the flaws are, with the 3 main ones being an unspecific timeframe of gameplay, complicated rules, and no clear ending point. You can probably tell by now that I dislike games that take forever! I've played Monopoly once and Risk half-a-time. Anyway, if you want to read more about the history of Monopoly just click here.

2011-01-17T09:20:00.002-05:00

It is 9.20am and 13F / -10.5C right now! You've got to be kidding me. The wind chill is 6F / -14C.. oh well.. I've walked home from school in 0F before with my balaclava on..

MLK weekend

2011-01-16T16:50:00.006-05:00

Normally on a clear weekend we go hiking or biking, but since it's below freezing outside with snow on the ground, I've taken up a slightly more sedentary lifestyle. Lots of people are going skiing/tubing tomorrow evening at Mt. Tussey. I would go if it wasn't Tussey ... There are some good slopes nearby to sled on but the snow is getting very thin because the sun has been out a lot.

On Saturday I

- woke up mid-morning and ate a late breakfast
- read my books
- read the news
- fiddled around with my data
- did yoga
- baked cookies
- listened to music
- went for an hour-long walk around town
- ordered girl-scout cookies from a little girl and her mum who were doing door-to-door sales
- made dinner (tofu and bean stir-fry with brown rice)
- and then we went for game night with the PSCG crew. We played Phase 10, the new card game I got from the Christmas gift-exchange back on the farm, and then Trivial Pursuit. Those games both take a while to get through and by 10pm we were itching to be done. When I was a lower-classman, board games were a much bigger deal to me. Back in the days of flaky social networks and peer pressure, being invited to a board-game-night symbolized inclusion, an active social life, and elevated your worth as a person. Years later, at this advanced stage of the game, my social circles have proven their worth and I don't need interactive games to tell me who my friends are.

This morning at church I said hi to all the old faces and realized I've been at Penn State for quite a while now! It is my goal to finish my thesis this semester. If I really wanted to I could have done it last year. I also volunteered to be a ESL (English-as-a-second-language) tutor. I don't know why I never did it before. I have this problem with apathy when it comes to service - I'm willing to serve and help out if needed, but I don't usually actively volunteer. Well, this is my last chance to do it and the excuses that used to hold me back (I'm too busy) did not materialize in my head. Guess I'm just looking for a new friend to make life interesting. Isn't it bad that it all comes back to how I can make my life better?

In the afternoon I

- made lunch (eggs fried with a bean-medley and tofu, finished off with jalapeno chips and cookies)
- played my guitar
- read my books
- read the news
- perused facebook
- wrote a letter to one of my friends back on the K-Farm. No internet or email means you have to do it the old-fashioned way. Which is nice because they get something tangible, but not so nice because I will eventually forget everything I wrote in the letter, just like how it is with Christmas cards.

Alison and her boyfriend invited me over for dinner, but we have bible study tonight so I'll be hanging out with her later this week. Time to cook dinner!

home entertainment

2011-01-14T21:04:00.006-05:00

For our Friday night home entertainment, we are watching Flying Wild Alaska on the Discovery Channel now because my roommmate's cousin, a pilot, is in it. Wow! $600 per hour to fly a bush-hunter and his clients around. What a totally different world. Check out this write-up on Sue Aikens, who runs a one-woman camp in the middle of nowhere.. there is a great article in the New York Times on men living in isolation; they should feature her.

Before the show, I was reading a book I borrowed for the long MLK-weekend, called Traveling Light: On the Road with America's Poor. It is about the people the author meets on the cross-country greyhound buses. Of course, as she states, not everyone who takes the bus is poor, but for most poor, the bus is their form of mobility. I'm about halfway through and it's a very interesting read, possibly because I've been through many of the places on her route and have had my own greyhound experiences.

I'd recommend it. Earlier in the day when I got home from school, I started and finished Neil Gaiman's Coraline, illustrated by Craig Russell. Dang! That is one scary graphic novel - even in broad daylight (and the sun is setting later now) I was gingerly flipping pages. Good thing I didn't watch the movie - some people (I think they were male) told me they found it pretty scary for a children's movie.

Restrung my guitar yesterday and have been playing some easy snippets. And I did some yoga before dinner. Alright back to the show.

2011-01-13T08:29:00.002-05:00

That's the weather in Farenheit... go figure, 17F is -8.3C.
I took the bus in yesterday and April gave me a ride home. We stopped for Qdoba burritos on the way. It's not real Tex-Mex at all but a hot burrito on a cold day = win

Frigid

2011-01-09T21:40:00.006-05:00

Currently thawing out my face after getting back to Camay's apartment from a big dinner at Shake Shack with her, Maryanne, Natasha, Geraldine & Marvin and 3 Aussies. We spent the day at High Line Park and Chelsey Market. Camay lives a stone's throw (ie 2 blocks) from Times Square. Looking out her window, framed by Christmas lights, I can see the W Hotel, Worldwide Plaza, Bank of America and a bunch of other hotels from my vantage point on this poof on her wood-tiled floor. The BoA spire has turned blue, green, yellow and white as I've typed. Maryanne, who made us creme brulee this morning, is sitting on a large red couch watching tv and Camay is in the shower. It is 19 °F (-7 °C) outside! WTH, Antarctic temperatures!! Hopping on a fast bus back to State College tomorrow, in good time too because a winter storm is rolling in on Wednesday. Brrr!!! I am recovering from what I believe was a flu bug; fortunately since it is not my first time in NYC I was content to spend a couple of days resting in Natasha's apartment while she was at work. I don't believe I was seriously sick all of 2010.. just had an occasional close shave but nothing like a full blown sickness.

I'm glad I don't live in New York City. It's great to have friends who work and live here so I can visit and get a glimpse of their lifestyles. They've told me it's just another city to them now. A convenient city because everything is so close, but the appeal of the NYC stereotypical life of going out late, eating out and partying has worn off. As the song goes, live in the city once in your life but leave before you get jaded. It's such a small geographic area too. And expensive. San Francisco has the most visible homeless population of all the cities I've been to this trip. It is too cold to be homeless in NYC.. we saw a car full of newspapers on the street. I hope no one is having to sleep in that car with the newspapers for insulation.

I'm looking forward to sleeping in my own bed, wearing different clothes, doing laundry and not living out of a backpack. Somewhere around this time last year I recall being in New Zealand having adventure burn-out. Heather H wrote a great piece on the odor-absorbing abilities of soap recently and I applied the same principle to my stinky clothes - just break up a bar of soap and wrap it up in your smelly items and pack them away in your backpack - the soap will take away the smell!

2011-01-06T18:17:00.002-05:00

Good news and bad news.

The bad news - I lost my MTA transit card today! I put it in my pocket to avoid having to take my wallet out in the city but it must have fallen out when I took my phone out. Should have put the two in different pockets. Garh. And I got the unlimited 7-day pass too, which cost $29. Arhhh...

It is, however, made up for by the good news - I received an unexpected email from the bursar's office notifying me that I'm getting scholarship money deposited into my bank account tomorrow! Hooray! Ding! What a windfall. I hope someone uses that MTA card well... I've been saving money by making my own meals at Natasha's anyway.

Are you taking frugality too far?

Goodbye Atlanta, Hello NYC

2011-01-05T19:09:00.007-05:00

Union Square, NYC

Decided to finally count because I've been traveling for a while. Today is day 26 of living out of a backpack. Right now I'm in the apartment of my old college buddy Natasha in New York City. I'm glad the first half of my trip was paid for, because NYC is always expensive. Let me recap Atlanta.

I was on a greyhound bus on New Year's Eve headed up to Atlanta, and we were rolling along the interstate when I thought about what Carl, one of the guys on the K-Farm, said to me when we were saying goodbye - "headed back to the open road, eh?" Guess what - the term "the open road" loses its romanticism and doesn't really excite when you've already been up and down it (I drove through Atlanta on I-75 during my drive from Texas to Pennsylvania). I did enjoy the ride though; it was smooth and the company was pleasant. I have both heard and experienced unpleasant greyhound occurrences, but this time things were surprisingly uneventful with the minor exception of the bus running 20 minutes late. The people on my bus were the standard diverse mix.

Atlanta is a predominantly black city and I have been impressed with the friendliness of the locals and the cleanliness of the MARTA rail system. I revisited Kanika and Rajat, my couchsurfing hosts from before heading to the K-Farm, and had a blast at their New Year's Eve party. Shreenath, a college friend now working in the hispanic marketing department of Coca Cola, was my second host. The neighbors in his condo all exchange pleasantries in the elevator and tell each other to "have a good day". In the MARTA station across from his place, a kindly black lady in the crowded elevator yelled, "come back here sweetheart, there's room for you in here" after I had turned and started to walk away. Walking around downtown at night I haven't been heckled or harassed once, with the exception of an eerie "hello" which I at first thought was directed at me but didn't bother to find out. I didn't see a lot of homeless people on the streets of downtown Atlanta; they have a "stop panhandling" campaign going on and I assume the homeless have good shelters and resources. Then again, no reason to panhandle in the financial areas over a holiday weekend.

View from Shreenath's condo of north Atlanta

I spent most of my time this time round at Passion 2011 with some friends from Penn State. Passion 2011 is a huge Christian conference for college-aged young adults. One year older and I would not be allowed to go (sort of a hint that I should graduate). Check out the website.

I was challenged by some of the messages and the overall experience. To cut a long story short, I will list 2 key points:

1. I personally felt it is very difficult to follow Jesus because even with salvation secured, we still have to strive to live lives worthy of calling ourselves His followers. Nobody is perfect and we all make mistakes, and it seems like I make more mistakes and have a greater, though unseen, shroud of darkness and selfishness than other Christians I know. The thought even occurred to me at one point of time during the event that I should not be there because I'm much lower down on the morality-walkthetalk-ladder than everyone else. Of course I know that Jesus was sent to save sinners and if we were perfect we wouldn't need God. Once you accept Christ, you don't automatically stop sinning, but you try to. We're all human and we all make mistakes. Unfortunately this is where we run into the problem of non-believers watching Christians fail and then immediately calling them hypocrites. This is a fundamental error in their understanding of Christianity. Christians ARE failures, which is why we believe we need Christ's salvation. We are not moral benchmarks or moral guides. Just people who acknowledge they fail trying to live better lives. Unfortunately, there are Christians who deliberately do things they shouldn't, and that gets the rest in trouble.

2. God has a divine plan for everyone's life which involves making full use of the abilities and talents He gives everyone. Most people MISS it. They fall into the standard accepted mold of what is considered a successful or good life. Not to say that that's wrong, but it's not making full use of what you've got to advance God's glory. It's the whole "anyone can be president" thing. I've got to make sure I don't miss it.

So yeah. Good experience and I met some new friends. I was initially going to ride back up to PA with the Penn State Harvest crew but one of the vehicles they were going to take is unavailable so I flew up to NYC instead. I was looking for an excuse to visit my friends Camay and Natasha who are working in NYC anyway, so that works out.

Apart from the above, I am pretty exhausted and way too lazy to shake out my brains and blog further.

The Washington Square Arch

2011-01-01T23:37:00.001-05:00

Here I am, just where I expected to be a year ago (not).
Happy New Year from Atlanta!

Woodshop

2010-12-30T17:45:00.003-05:00

I haven't been able to sit down and summarize the journal entries I've written offline. It'd take too much time to synthesize the pages into a short coherent post. I could do an entire workflow write-up with photos on how a tree is turned into a staircase, or how pecan-stuffed dates and chocolate bark are made, or how the farm came to be, or how to extend the table (cooking for large numbers), or about the daily operations of an intentional community. To be succinct - life is good. I'm getting a ride out from the farm folk to a nearby town to catch a bus up to Atlanta tomorrow. See y'all in the New Year!

p.s People who say the countryside is boring are completely out of their minds and are the same people who run into quarter-life and mid-life crisis because they are inherent boring people unable to seize opportunities. Also, people need to realize that sometimes, you don't just wait for opportunities - you create them.

Briefly, I'm going to show y'all how a sawmill on the K-Farm works.

This shows a yellow loader with a tree trunk on it. Trees on the farm include pine, pecan and hickory. The trunk is loaded onto the orange sawmill.

This shows the sawmill slicing through the trunk. High powered jets of water are sent down the saw to help prevent it from getting stuck.

You can see the flat top of the wood now. This trunk is going to be turned into

planks

Which are used to build the stairs outside the dining/guest house.

Farm Photos

2010-12-26T15:23:00.003-05:00

The pecan grove at sunrise

Pigs

We make the calves really happy when we feed them

Oliver the cat is my favorite animal so far

2010-12-23T22:17:00.003-05:00

Post-farm plans for the near future, primarily my ride back to Pennsylvania, have hiccuped, so I temporarily contemplated hitch-hiking back, but based on my somewhat extensive traveling experience I know that's not a good idea. I would like to think of some novel, exotic way to get back.. the plane-bus plan is affordable but boring.

2010-12-22T23:02:00.003-05:00

I always wanted to be a farmer, and this farm is all that and more. I remember the excitement I felt while reading the Koinonia newsletter, which showed up unexpectedly in our mailbox after I sent in an inquiry. This farm was founded by Clarence Jordan and a group of radicals in the 1940s - radicals simply because they believed in equality. Blacks and whites lived and worked side by side and were paid equally, to the horror of many people in town. In 1954 the entire farm, save Jordan's house, was completely burned to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan. Now you know you're talking serious business when the KKK sees you as a threat. More tomorrow.

Georgia on my mind

2010-12-20T22:31:00.003-05:00

"I've gone totally nuts."
-theme of the year.

I'm on a pecan farm in South Georgia. Less than 24 hours ago I had no idea who would be picking me up from the greyhound drop-off in Cordele, GA, which gives you an inkling of the non-existence of expectations I had for the farm. I've been quite blown away since.

But first, Atlanta.

I got off the plane on Saturday night at 8.45pm, grabbed a sandwich and my backpack and took the 9.20pm MARTA(Atlanta's public transport) train through downtown and to Brookhaven Station, where my couchsurfing host Kanika picked me up. I was suitably impressed by the cleanliness of the train but Kanika says the frequency could be improved. Kanika and Rajat, an Indian couple, were my hosts in Atlanta, although Rajat had an MBA exam to study for so Kanika did most of the hosting. On Sunday she cooked us an Indian-style brunch of idlis and coconut chutney and invited her friends over. Then she drove me all around north Atlanta on a grand tour of the neighborhoods. We stopped for cupcakes at Dr.Bombay's Underwater Tea Party.

My CS host, Kanika

Me at Dr. Bombay's

The weather was sunny and clear and wonderful so we picked up her friend Agi and went for a stroll in Piedmont Park. Following that we met up with the rest of her girlfriends and watched the recently released Dark Swan, a psychological thriller that had me on the edge of my seat the whole way through and made me quite happy with my life. We then went to Agi's house for tea and chit chat, and then returned home for a dinner of Masala burgers.

This morning I let myself out, left the key in a secret spot, took the bus to the MARTA station, took the MARTA to the greyhound bus station, and took the greyhound 2.5 hours south to Cordele. The station was packed with Christmas travelers so I did not have any sketchy experiences. Kat and her son (who actually live in Americus and not on the farm) picked me up and after a 45 minute drive into the heart of the countryside, here I am! There is lots to talk about but I will leave that for another day. It is an intentional Christian community and I am reminded a lot of the coop here. This is a vastly different world from the big cities I've been in but my life flies so fast the transition barely affects me; in fact I enjoy it.

Atlanta Bound

2010-12-18T18:07:00.002-05:00

I'm currently 37,000 feet in the air using AirTran's free in-flight wi-fi. WOW! Incredible!

So Long San Fran

2010-12-18T00:33:00.004-05:00

The grandest view for miles and miles... Twin Peaks

People normally drive up to the top, but I got public transport directions from the tourist office and it was easy peasy - BART train, bus and then walk to the highest point of the neighborhood and take the unmarked trail to the top. I gotta say the view was made so much more spectacular unfolding before me as I popped up at the top of the ridge than it would have been if I came by car. Or maybe it's just a spectacular view anyway - comparable to that of Athens from the Acropolis.

In other news, AGU is officially over.

It has been an extremely tiring and busy week. There is so much activity going on. Our schedules have been like work schedules with each of us having different early morning presentations to go to. While this is by far the largest (the attendance count was ~18,800 people), AGU is the least professional conference I have ever attended (and I've gone to quite a few - Ocean Sciences, Midwest Glaciology, Society of Exploration Geophysicists and Geological Society of America). At other big conferences on par with AGU (SEG and GSA), people would be networking and swapping business cards like their lives depended on it. Here, the lack of industry presence and more academic orientation means some people don't even know they should bring business cards! It's also very hard to get to know people with the huge crowd; at smaller meetings like MGM where it's only 40-odd you spend a lot of time with everyone and it's much more intimate. AGU seem to be good for people who have a lot of connections (like me) to revisit (ie I'd never otherwise see my Alaskan and European peers from Karthaus).
Even then, everyone has such a packed schedule it's nearly impossible to meet up outside of meals. I don't know what I'd do if I came by myself. At GSA and SEG there are tons of student activities like student icebreakers (AGU had a 'general' icebreaker open to everyone) as well as student volunteers (so you'd get to meet other students like yourself while working with them) and mentor-matching (so your mentor would take you around and introduce you to their connections). Of course there are always friendly people everywhere, eg on her first night here Alison walked into a Thai restaurant for dinner and because she was by herself, the 3 other girls ahead of her invited her to join them (yes, they were attending AGU - we literally took over San Francisco and yes, one of them turned out to be someone I know from Karthaus and the world became much smaller). So people have to take a lot of initiative here.

The less 'formal' atmosphere of AGU probably stems from the fact that it really is a big science conference and not an industry or business event. The big brains like RAlley and SAK would get more from it because they can assimilate material much faster - when each and every single presentation is so different from every other, I really need a science writer to interpret all the science for me. Just to drive home my point, here's a random list of some of the thousands of presentations this week:

Dynamo action with inhomogeneous magnetic diffusivity
Magnetic Monitoring of Serpentinization Reactions, Experimentation vs Oceanic Rocks
Stable carbon isotopes in bivalve shells as a salinity proxy
Extending the calibration of marine barite Pb isotope records
Vegetation Dynamics of NW Mexico using MODIS time series data
Quantifying Ammonia Emissions from High Elevation Grassland and Forest Soils
A new inventory of glaciers and supraglacial debris for the Alaska Range with a case study of rock avalanche loading
Groundtruthing Ground Penetrating Radar Measurements of a High Arctic Glacier Using Glacial-Speleology
Asymmetric impacting on the Moon and its dependence on debiased NEA models
Climatic variation on Mars as seen from the polar region layered deposits

While my strategy for picking talks to listen to is entirely based on my research and side interests, when it comes to posters I usually just walk up to any poster presenter with no one at their poster and get them to present their poster to me. They appreciate the audience and I get to be lazy and not read the poster as thoroughly (I guess I'm a more interactive & audio learner than a visual one). My poster presentation went well. I did realize that sometimes people can have a specific question in mind that might not get verbalized properly, and then both parties go away thinking the other isn't making sense.

But hey, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it wasn't fun. This week has been A LOT of fun. Asides from attending numerous talks, scavenging the exhibitions, presenting my poster, perusing lots of other posters, going to my alumni reception, and bumping into old friends from other conferences and workshops, I went gallivanting a lot. And by A LOT I mean a lot. As the old Chinese lady who cleans the hostel in the day said to me, "zhe li hen hao wan" ie "this place is a lot of fun". Fun = exploring San Francisco neighborhoods, taking the cable car to Fisherman's Wharf, taking the ferry across to Sausolito, taking the bus and then walking up Twin Peaks (did that and Sausolito on Thursday because it was the last rain-less day of the week - pouring today!), window shopping in the Haight and Ashbury district with Becky, yakking up traffic wardens in Chinatown, strolling through the Golden Gate Park, and dinner and lunch with every single day of the week with different people each time, though mostly drawn from the Penn State crowd. And when I say Penn State 'crowd' I don't even mean everyone from Penn State who was there. I saw some people (eg Cici and Jessica) only once the entire conference because it is such a huge event. It's a bonus that so many people from our department come to this conference, because if I don't have anyone to eat with I just send out a couple text messages, and wah-lah, 10 people show up for dinner like just now.

The Penn State group also got together at the Edinburgh Castle Pub in the Tenderloin last night... the Tenderloin is a really bad neighborhood and it beats me why we have it there - apparently a decade ago AGU was much smaller and held in that part of town and it's been a tradition to go to the Castle. Eh, stupid. There were swarms of shady characters and homeless people loitering on street corners and sleezy neon-lit bars everywhere.

I've taken more notice of the issue of homeless people because they are in our faces all the time here. Some of the local CS-ers told me a decade ago San Francisco welcomed homeless people to it as a refuge/haven. You'd think not to give panhandlers anything because they are on welfare BUT the mentally retarded ones (and I've seen a number of them, those who talk loudly to themselves, invisible friends or trashcans) are for all we know "off the grid" and unable to reach those forms of support. Becky and I suspect there's a cultural role in homeless-ness since in Asian countries not taking care of your family members is frowned upon - I'd not be surprised if some of the mentally retarded homeless were kicked out by their families. And then you have the people who choose to be homeless.. like someone I know.. do you help those? Becky usually gives her leftovers to them, which is better than giving money. More later.

Anyway, a musing I had while at the Jackson School lunch reception on Wednesday was it's not surprising so not a single person (with the exception of Nabiel) from my graduating class came to AGU - everyone has gone into industry! Emily, Casey, Erica and Stephanie (as well as Beth and Ryan) were the only people I cared to hang out with there.

Think I'll go to bed now. Catching a flight to Atlanta tomorrow where I will be couchsurfing and then on Monday heading to a farm. 180 degrees of difference huh..

2010-12-16T00:39:00.001-05:00

Just watched a homeless man kick, punch, verbally abuse, berate, shake, rattle and repeatedly try to get into a green scion boxcar. If he could have rolled it he would have. Working in the San Francisco police department must be exciting! Now we know what zombies in computer games and movies are based on... kinda sad

Hello San Francisco

2010-12-12T12:36:00.006-05:00

"For those passengers going to the geo-u-o-logy-eh-geo-lo-physical conference, please remember to take your tubes with your artwork when leaving the aircraft."

It's Sunday morning and I'm sitting in the lounge of our hostel, the Globetrotters' Inn, on a loud and noisy street in San Francisco. By 'our' I really mean 'my', since my roommates won't fly in till later in the weekend. The floor is made up of black-and-white checkerboard squares; the walls are a limey green, a homely contrast with the stale grey and brown walls of the much higher hotel buildings we see out the window. An unruly bamboo plant is decorated with shiny green, red and silver Christmas balls. Old bronze colored plush chairs and a futon face a simple tv which was earlier being watched by my two dark-haired counterparts (German? Israeli? I suspect the latter) now perusing the internet, whom I have exchanged simple pleasantries with (and hence will not ask). It is a small 2-storey hostel sitting above a Chinese restaurant with about 15 rooms capable of housing 15 guests. Directly across the street are the Hilton and the Parq 55 luxury hotels. An odd juxtaposition indeed, especially with the supposedly rougher Tenderloin area just a couple of blocks away.

My advisor and I caught the same 1020 flight out of State College yesterday and after a stop in DC and a loooong 5 hour flight across the continent, arrive in sunny San Francisco on a balmy Saturday afternoon. When we left State College, it was covered by a blanket of snow and the temperature was a still 29F. When we landed in San Francisco at 3pm Pacific Time, it was warm - 59F - too warm for Christmas! It is fortuitous that we chose to fly out yesterday, because the northeast is being hit by a giant wintry-mix snowstorm today and I've already heard that all the flights transiting through Chicago are canceled. Lots of people are flying in on Sunday, which is when AGU officially starts, and by that I mean they are probably going to get delayed and fly in on Monday. I finally got to meet Mike Mann, who was the subject of the nefarious ClimateGate scandal. He's a Penn State prof so we were in the 'lil Penn State taxicab that we all shared into the city. Great thing about traveling with your boss is he pays for everything.

My advisor is staying at a hotel and I decided to stay in a hostel even though he's paying for my accommodation and I could have stayed somewhere posher. It really makes no difference to me; I wouldn't spend my money extravagantly and I apply the same principles when I spend other people's money. I'm not couchsurfing this time because I usually don't surf when I travel for work, since that reduces the amount of time I can hang out with my hosts. It is, however, still one of the great marvels of couchsurfing that I can land in a city where I know no one and at night find myself bar hopping with a mixed group of ten to twenty locals and visitors and feel like we've been party buddies for ages. If my boss knew what I was going to get up to after he said bye when the cab dropped him off at his hotel.. he.. well, that's probably why he said bye.

Evening on Market Street

The Christmas tree at Pier 39

Dinner at Inn-and-Out with the special secret menu thanks to the local couchsurfers I met up with, Rigel and MJ

MJ and Matt at the NorthStar Cafe, which is really a bar

I'm meeting up with a college friend, ZD, and his wife for brunch today. They live somewhere outside of San Francisco. I haven't seen him for years and I don't even know his wife. AGU starts tomorrow, but there is an ice-breaker session tonight I will go to. Alison, whom I'm sharing the room with, gets in tonight, and Heather on Monday morning. The weather this weekend has been unusually foggy, so say Mike, who has come to many AGU conferences in the past, as well as Pito, a couchsurfer who lives in the East Bay. The last time I was in San Francisco was 8 years ago on a school trip so I don't remember much. I do remember that we walked across the Golden Gate Bridge and visited Alcatraz, so I don't plan on doing those.

I was told that Fisherman's Wharf was quite a hike from the Powell Street Station but I walked there (and back) anyway instead of taking the bus to meet up with the CS gang! I took about 40 minutes one-way because it was really crowded in Union Square and I walked up a hill instead of through it, and stopped for some photos. I got to see the crowded and bustling Chinatown, the dead-quiet but clean and safe Telegraph Hill neighborhood and North Beach, aka Little Italy. MJ, one of the local CS guys who organizes socials, is leaving for South America in January and our outings were part of his farewell weekend activities. We met at the Rainforest Cafe and decided to go to Inn and Out burgers instead, where he ordered from the 'secret' unposted menu for me and Rigel. On the way we saw the Bush Man, this guy who dresses like a bush at a bus stop and jumps out and scares people and is apparently a Fisherman's Wharf icon. We then went to Tope and the Northstar Cafe, all good fun, and met up with lots of other couchsurfers. Good fun. We had people from France, Saudi Arabia, a couple of Belgians, a Canadian-Texan-transplant, someone from Portland, a girl from Singapore whom I contacted beforehand, and lots of locals and SF-transplants too. I left around 0030 PCT, which is 0330 EST, and walked all the way down Powell unscathed. I ran down Nob Hill in the process, because that hill can't really be walked down.

Gotta go.

off the grid

2010-12-10T15:38:00.002-05:00

SAN FRANCISCO BOUND for the American Geophysical Union's 2010 meeting tomorrow morning, a day ahead of the imminent east-coast-snow/rain/wintry-mixer. I think this is the largest geology meeting in the world with at least 10,000 attendees.

Anyway there is a bunch of stuff going on tonight and I don't know which to show my face at. Myro's birthday, John M.'s farewell meetup, dinner and Narnia with Zartman and Biova, 809 black-tie Christmas Party... could probably do all of them if I *really* wanted to.. but I don't. Heh.

See you next year.

tis the season

2010-12-04T17:52:00.007-05:00

We are now the proud owners of a 1.5-foot-tall blue plastic Christmas tree. Upon returning from Thanksgiving break we saw our upstairs neighbors' flamboyant Christmas lights on their balcony and immediately had a case of the Jones-es.

About Thanksgiving. It was great! The cover of the November issue of the New Yorker has a large turkey on it, divided up into portions representing all the odd people who show up at Thanksgiving dinners, like myself. So I didn't feel bad at all about attending Thanksgiving dinner in the extravagantly furnished home of a charming couple I had never met before in my life. All they knew about me was I am the roommate of their son-in-law's younger sister. Hey that wasn't too complicated!

Becca's family was a lot of fun. Here's a photo of them playing jump rope, or double dutch, at Becca's older brother's house up in Massachusetts.

They are extremely outdoorsy and we went on a number of hikes. This photo is from Table Rock, on Hartwick College property in Oneonta, New York.

I enjoyed joining their family for a week, and see a bit of what Becca's 'home' life was like. We played lots of board games and watched Saint Ralph, which, while not a great movie, had a short, fair,nerdy boy with thick glasses tell his beanpole, dark-haired, tan ragamuffin of a best friend, "My mum said we could adopt you" after said ragamuffin's house burned down, to which he replied, "That's very kind of you.. but I'm too old to be adopted."

These are the last couple of weeks of the fall semester. Most of the undergrads are gearing up for their final exams. My 'final' involves giving a poster presentation in San Francisco the week-after-next for the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting 2010, which is the biggest deal both sides of the continental divide for geologists - about half our department is going, and the expected attendance is 10,000 people. It's gonna be one big party. I've never been to AGU before and might not get the chance to go again, so this is another good reason to be in the land of the living this season. The European Geophysical Union 2011 meeting is in Vienna next year, and I might try and see if I can get funding to go to that one. That would be sweet.

One of the things I've enjoyed about this semester is I've been hanging out with my office mates outside of the office. They are both very opinionated and informed about politics and are also good at what they do, which is astrobiology, so I always learn a lot from them. Last night we went to the 'Skeller for drinks and dinner and had a good time, following which I met Becca and Chris to go watch Revelation Blockade's last improv comedy show of the semester. They're funny but I really only go because I know everyone in the troupe and Becca and Chris were going. At 10pm Anne S. and I went to the HUB to watch Mike Super's magic show. We both had no idea who he is but found out he's a big deal, something like America's most popular new magician. Student funds going to good use right there. It was a full house and they had to even put up more chairs for people. I do enjoy the Late Night activities they put up, it's much better than the stuff at UT (then again, Austin is a big enough city that kids can find their own entertainment. Late Night Penn State activities are intended to be a non-drinking alternative for kids on weekends). So a good time, especially since I hadn't seriously planned to do anything!

Still, I have to say it's a pretty low-key weekend in town because
1. it's cold and snowy
2. football season is over
3. it's a THON canning weekend, so lots of undergrads have left town for the big cities of Philly and Pittsburg (and probably Baltimore and NYC) to get donations for THON (in Singapore we'd call it a 'flag day' because students give stickers with the 'flags' of their charities on them to people who drop money into the cans).

This morning I woke up late, walked across the street with Becca and had brunch at Josh's, and by the time we were done there were only 3 remaining hours of daylight left. Here's a photo from the breakfast we had before Thanksgiving.

Tracy, Sarah, Chris, Becca, Josh (our chef), Dan and Bruce

Haha a typical 'low-key' winter weekend. We are going to Gerg's house for a Christmas party tonight!

In other news... Outdoorsy Types Wanted!
Holy guacamole!
I was just perusing the Outdoor Adventure Professional Network (see my link list) and there is one particular job for which I easily make the cut. In another world I would drop everything and go work for them:

Insight Adventures is looking for guides for the spring 2011 season (March to June). Spend a season leading, teaching and inspiring students in some of China’s most beautiful destinations. Our specialties are international school excursions and individual adventure activities in remote and wonderful places around Asia. Insight offers a range of activities from sea, water, land and vertical which include climbing, abseiling, kayaking, hiking, biking, surfing and exploring Chinese culture.

Our guides should
• Have one year experience in a related field or a degree in outdoor education (check)
• Have basic skills related to the activities we provide (basic? I could get away with this)
• Be in excellent health and physical condition (sure...)
• Be a minimum of 21 years old

Insight prefers guides to
• Be available for training by March 1st 2011 (well.. it wouldn't be *impossible* for me to finish my thesis by then...)
• Have a Wilderness Advanced First Aid (WAFA), WFR, EMT, or WEMT certification (we offer WAFA training in March for those who are not certified).
• Basic Mandarin Chinese (ho ho ho!)

http://www.insight-adventures.com/

Another great seasonal job posting that is drool-worthy is the Glacier National Park geologist position, part of the GeoCorps 2011 job listings :

The GeoCorps participant will serve as a front-line park interpreter responsible for researching, developing and presenting original interpretive programs to the visiting public on the geologic history and resources of Glacier National Park including: guided hikes, boat tours, interpretive talks and audio-visual programs. Interpretive programs will focus on the geologic stories of the park and have an emphasis on the impacts of global climate change on the park’s glaciers, water resources and biologic communities and natural processes. The participant will also be responsible for providing informal interpretation of park resources along park trails, overlooks, and other locations; plus staffing park visitor centers providing orientation and information on park resources to visitors. At the beginning of the season, the participant will participate in two weeks of interpretive skills, resource, bear safety, and park operations training.

2010-11-30T15:35:00.003-05:00

It's amazing how things can change in half a decade. Just 6 years ago I was spending Thanskgiving in Monterrey with the Villarreal family and it was clean, safe and a fun city to hang out in. Now...

From CNN: Just five years ago, Monterrey was dubbed the safest city in Latin America and the commercial hub of Mexico. Now, it's fallen victim to the lawlessness and violence spreading throughout the country -- a cartel battleground where grenade attacks, shootouts and kidnappings dominate headlines.

happy thanksgiving

2010-11-26T12:24:00.003-05:00

Last night, on the way back to Oneonta,NY from Stockbridge,MA after Thanksgiving dinner, crammed in the backseat of the Toombs' small car with Becca, Keith and a mountain of pillows, I thought I must be the most privileged person in the world.

Not one of the most. The most.

Thanksgiving Begins

2010-11-19T23:35:00.009-05:00

Thanksgiving is the new Halloween. I've already been to 3 Thanksgiving potlucks and it's not even Thanksgiving yet!

The Very Merry Geologist Thanksgiving Potluck was on Wednesday. It was hosted by Jamie at his, Steph's and Dan's house, which is affectionately called the Teabag because it is on Teaberry lane. There was tons of food and they had 30+ people show up. It is nice to be Stateside for Thanksgiving - last time was a couple years ago. Not that Thanksgiving in McMurdo isn't fun.

Turkey #1 makes its appearance

Wow and this doesn't include dessert

Heather G made this fantastic Tofurkey~

The 3rd Thursday CS meetup was a potluck at Chris' place. Chris is studying Tourism and Recreation and his thesis is on nightlife.. he told me a while ago that I'm the only person he knows who has as much free time as he does.. We had a good mix of 'regulars' and new faces.

Turkey #2 made its appearance at tonight's White Course potluck, organized by a hodgepodge of student consortiums. I actually crashed the Turkish Students' potluck because I got misdirected before I found the right location. I went knowing I wouldn't know a single person but that was fine; I met and ate with some friendly Iranian and Chinese scholars. I'm quite nuts like that. I was extremely impressed with two of the male Chinese visiting scholars (one is a Fulbright fellow and the other is a Humboldt fellow) who brought their young sons, but not their wives with them - their wives both hold jobs back in China and they wanted their sons to get exposure to America and pick up some English, so they are single-handedly raising their kids here! Very impressive.

Another nutty fact - I brought the same dish to all 3 potlucks.. and I'm actually bringing it to a breakfast tomorrow.. it's potato and pasta salad and I just have too much of it.

Turkey #3

After that I went to Zenos and met up with some friends for drinks. Town is clearly deserted. All the undergrads have been kicked out of their dorms and gone home! Zenos however, still had a decent-sized older crowd chilling out to the bluegrass band. At the bar, one of my friends who shall not be named found out that his roommates (also our friends) had a party at his house and he didn't know about it - he just didn't happen to be there when it took place... he was infuriated because our other friend who was at the party took a video of them drinking his beer, which she didn't know was his, and she didn't know he hadn't been invited to a party at his own house either.. it's like something you'd only see on tv. He'll get over it.

Becca and I head off to her parents' place in upstate New York tomorrow. Should be a good time. Hopefully I'll get some work done.

2010-11-17T09:40:00.002-05:00

This is a new weather glyph that I have never seen before. At first I thought it meant hazy, but now I know it means windy! 59 mph wind-gust warning till 6pm.

Bear Meadows

2010-11-15T18:07:00.005-05:00

I don't think I can support Habitat for Humanity anymore. Yes, they have good intentions, yes, they 'help' the poor by providing them with better accommodations, and yes, when I was a freshman I had a great time volunteering with the campus chapter. BUT single-family housing is the most inefficient waste of resources on the planet. Encouraging the erroneous so-called American Dream in this way is wrong. Therefore, I'm not going to have anything to do with H4H anymore based on that principle. IRONICALLY I will be spending Christmas break working on the Koinonia Farm, the birthplace of Habitat for Humanity...

In other news.. well, nothing much has been going on. Becca and I had people over to watch the Ohio State game on Saturday, and on Sunday we went hiking in Bear Meadows.. apart from that and my routine weekly engagements there is nothing much to comment about. Actually I take that back. Becky W turned 24 on Wednesday and we went for lunch; on Thursday the PSCG group wrapped giftboxes for Operation Christmas Child and we all hung out after that, and Friday night I went for drinks with April, Sarah and some others. Got a couple of Thanksgiving potlucks to go to this week and then Becca and I are heading off to her place.

You're probably wondering what it looks like here now that we're into the heart of fall (supposedly). Here are some pix from the hike

Kind of barren. Winter approaches.

The rhododendrons are keeping their leaves. This would be a great spring hike when they are flowering. Unless you have allergies, of course.

Becca and Tracy. We sure don't let the weather keep us indoors.

Right.

35:21

2010-11-07T00:40:00.004-04:00

Paterno earns 400th career win with victory over Northwestern

Yeaahhhhh

S-Zone + Scott Pilgrim + 1 extra hour of Sleep = Super Saturday

I love sitting in the S-Zone

2010-11-05T16:47:00.002-04:00

General Mills announced today that the price of cereal is going up. This is a bad sign, because as a basic commodity, cereal is supposed to be a price standard for the economy. An increase in price standards is an undeniable sign of inflation... OR price fixing... not sure to what degree there is a monopoly in the cereal market. I've been reading about oil and soybeans, but cereal?

Also - don't fly Quantas. The A380 fleet was grounded yesterday because an engine blew up mid-flight, and today one of the A747s had engine trouble mid-flight. Remarkably no casualties, but I'm starting to suspect foul play. Andrew embarked on his trip down to Antarctica today, but somehow I don't think he is going to make it to Australia this weekend since the US Antarctic Program usually flies Quantas.

Wow! Can you believe that in 4 days it will mark the 1 year-anniversary of us leaving for Antarctica last year? Totally insane. I will always remember November 9th; it seems like it was just yesterday! It's been a brave new world. Although I would have liked to have gone again this year, this time round the guys are all going down on different flights, for separate projects, with very different schedules, and my advisor isn't even going, so the camaraderie and fun probably won't compare to last year's season. Hee. Just trying to make myself fell better about being left behind. We'll organize a left-behind party for everyone staying in town at the end of the semester. Huw finally called in for his huge Sorrell boots so I tucked a couple of notes saying hi into them before Knut packed them up. Can already imagine his distress upon finding them - all the way on the other side of the planet and he still can't get away from my bad jokes!

2010-11-03T13:54:00.001-04:00

29F/-1C this morning? Guess who cycled in to school? Yeah...

Age of Empires

2010-11-02T21:14:00.010-04:00

Last night I took April for dinner to introduce her to my favorite drink in State College - a 14 oz chocolate kahlua mudslide. This morning I woke up with a fantastic idea for my research that I will have to bounce off my advisor. In the course of this afternoon I also came up with a brilliant categories idea for King's Cup (the drinking game also know as Ring of Fire/Circle of Death/Sociables): great civilizations that no longer exist today. I don't know how I came up with that; I think my officemate and I were talking about politics since America's midterm elections are today. We (or should I say Jamie primarily) listed off a whole long string of civilizations. Pardon the noun/adjective disorder: Phoenicians, Venetians, Greeks, Romans, Mayan, Olmec, Aztec, Babylonian, Assyrian, Celts, Vikings, Gaul (remember Asterix and Obelix?), Hindu Kush/Verdic/we got confused on that, Macedonia, Mongols, Qin, Turks/Ottomans, Egypt, Zulu, Macedonia, Shang... check out Wiki's List of The World's Largest Empires.

Jamie's knowledge base comes from extensive reading as well as playing Age of Empires. Anyway, I thought it was remarkable there are so many fallen civilizations which we know extremely little about, and these civilizations all had their own hero stories, their own Mark Twains', their own versions of you and me, and so on. What sets America apart is that America has provided its people with the best standard of material living ever seen in history, primarily because the country was founded on personal ownership.

On a darker note Jamie referred to Jared Diamond's book Collapse for a scary tidbit - societal collapse would be far more detrimental for America than any other society in human history because majority of the population has absolutely zero ability to live off the land (besides the Pennsylvania Dutch). Why do you think I've taken such an avid interest in farming??

Yet another point of interest is that with the singular exception of the Greeks, all civilizations have had monarchies or some kind of tyrannic rule. And even Greece eventually turned into an empire. America is currently a republic but may soon end up as an empire if things fall apart. Did you know that America has gotten booted off the list of the world's top 20 least corrupt nations? I suppose the best thing America has going for it is not having to worry about being invaded - life is somewhat easier when your country takes up almost the entire continent. Canada is not going to invade the US anytime soon, while Mexico is on the verge of erupting into civil war.

Anyway, one last note for the blog. On Saturday night I went to a halloween-themed dinner party hosted by the Ritters, which was a lot of fun and 'old-fashioned' because the kids had dinner at a separate table by themselves (most people nowadays leave their kids with babysitters). After that I went to Becky M's halloween party, during which not one but two guys asked me within minutes of striking up a conversation whether I had a boyfriend followed by why not, which is impossible to answer without insulting all mankind. And this was not at all pre-empted by any sleezy outfit on my part; rather, I was a pizza slice for halloween, which led the Cat-in-the-Hat to warn me to watch out because I might be tackled by drunks.

2010-11-01T23:26:00.002-04:00

I went to talk the my advisor today. He said the equivalent of "your thesis is in great shape and you can take 6 weeks off"...

deep in the heart of fall

2010-10-30T15:44:00.007-04:00

Did some research and found out that I get paid less than the maximum amount people on unemployment benefits in California can get. That's okay, because the cost of living here is low, and life is rich, bubbling to the brim and overflowing! Anyway, my job next year is going to pay me 5-6 times more than now.

I left off my last post in anticipation of spending the weekend in Milroy with Harvest and Penn State Christian Grads. It was a very encouraging time. Sheer providence that both groups had their retreats on the same weekend in the same place. Here are some photos.

The Hartman Conference and Retreat Center

Laura, Adam and Josey during breakfast

PSCG folk having lunch

Becca checking out a bird box

It has been unseasonable warm this fall. Central Pennsylvania is benefiting from global warming (I say that entirely in jest). It's been a good fall, with great colors. Since I don't take classes I've had the opportunity to be outdoors a lot.

This weekend is Halloween. Halloween is actually on Sunday, October 31st, but because it falls on a weekend, we consider the entire weekend from Thursday to Sunday Halloween. 'We' not just referring to students - the borough officially assigned 'Halloween Trick-or-Treating hours' for kids to fall on Thursday evening this year, because the Michigan game is tonight and they don't want our costumed youngsters getting ploughed down by drunk drivers while trick-or-treating (not to mention many parents probably want to watch the game). Although it is the biggest student party event in State College in the Fall, Halloween on 6th Street in Austin still takes the cake. In keeping with tradition, we carved up some squash on Thursday. It almost didn't happen this year, but Becca decided to take the night off so we had some friends over. Despite a pumpkin shortage, Chris and I managed to find the last 3 orange pumpkins on the south side of town.

Mine, Becca's, Emily H's, Chris' (We Are Penn State!!!)

As usual, there are too many parties this weekend to attend them all. Isaac, David and Jared had a party at their house and also had an outdoor campfire - it was cold, but hey, if I can still feel the warmth of the blood in my cheeks, it's not cold.

Adrienne was the night's knight

Laurie was the Statue of Liberty, Isaac was Robin, Emily was Agent 99, Amanda was a Dalek and Josh was one of the Dr Whos.

Emily H and I left their party at 11pm to go to the IJM fundraiser party at the Beta House, and then went to catch the end of the Acappella Showcase at the HUB. Following that we found ourselves a posse of big guys to follow and walked downtown to see the sights.. Lots of people out at midnight, way more than during the day, but nothing compared to 6th Street's halloween. State College features way more halloween house parties though. We could have gone to 2 other parties but called it a night. The one thing I'm not doing this year is going to a haunted house/mansion/granary/helicopter-lab, but no biggie. More parties tonight...

In other news, my not-so-little-anymore friend Lynette recently posted Adrian Tan's speech to the NTU graduating class of 2008 on facebook. No surprises as to what he says, and here is my favorite excerpt:

You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much. That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste. If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them.

Farms and more

2010-10-22T14:40:00.010-04:00

I could have spent Monday preparing for my geodynamics colloquium presentation, but I went to work on a goat farm instead. The previous weekend had me tied up in town with Jubilee Night practice and performances, so I didn't get out into the country as much as I'd have liked, and Monday made up for that. I've been so busy and I'm glad the presentation is over. It marks the end of a hectic first part of fall semester. Finally I can get back to doing actual research (ha!) and reading my peak-oil books. Actually, I still have a lot of stuff going on - for instance I haven't made my halloween costume yet. I also am going to 2 retreats in Milroy this weekend with the 2 student ministries I'm in.

The farm I went to was Southview Farm, run by Wanda and Mike. Mike used to own Mike's Video Store in town and ran the State Theatre. They live outside of Centre Hall, which is a 15 minute drive from town. Although I showed up on a cloudy day, the views of the country from their barn were still spectacular. They are currently rearing 47 goats for meat. I helped sweep out the goat poop and clean out a section of the barn. It was the first time I've interacted with goats in my life, and after visiting with them I felt like I would really like to have pet goats sometime in my life. Goats are so cute and cuddly. They are like the friendly version of cats.

I spent most of my work-time this week preparing for my geodynamics lecture. On Monday evening our department chair invited the whole department over to his house for dinner, although only a fraction of us showed up - he has a huge house tucked away in the bowers of Park Forest, which, with its humble furniture and haphazard mess of toys strewn all over the place, is clearly entirely devoted to his 4 young children. Tuesday evening my Harvest group came over to my apartment and hung out and played games. Wednesday I took a break from practicing my presentation (hour-long lectures are extremely time-consuming to practice) to have lunch with Biova at Hunan Wok and then got a haircut at Supercuts. On Thursday I drove up to the Mt Nittany Inn just to take in the views. My presentation was in the afternoon and went very well.

Thursday night I went with my officemate April to Zenos to join a Couchsurfing meet-up. We hung out there for 4 hours with 8 to 10 other CS-ers and had a good time. It's been a long time since I've had intellectual conversations with people in a bar, and couchsurfers are just that unique breed of people who are highly interested and in-tune with current political and social affairs. To my surprise, there was a belly-dancing performance on that night and one of my friends from PSCG was in the troupe! Another girl we know also showed up at Zenos to support her. It was a great performance and I was impressed with the line up of live music Zenos had apart from the belly-dancing.

I've decided that the best way to conserve energy is to get rid of single-family housing. Emily H. agrees with me.. she made the very good point that sometime in the past, someone decided that the American Dream should involve owning your own house, which is ridiculous. 1 lightbulb used for a single person can provide light to 10 other people. We need to shift to more communal forms of living, but that will take a couple of generations because people here have grown up with the notion that they should aspire to settle down in houses of their own. One of the couchsurfers I met last night, Tulga from Turkey, is an environmental engineering phd student, and he agreed with me 100%. Also, I think the advertisements we see on tv about 'clean/green' fueled cars are marketing gimmicks meant to keep single-owner car consumption up, when they really should be developing clean/green and efficient forms of public transportation instead.

The more I live, the more I think our civilization is headed down a dark path towards collapse. The way the developed world lives is unsustainable and individuals have very low prospects of making a difference. The most powerful government in the world has its hands tied by lobby-money and bipartisanship. We are screwed. Gotta live now and enjoy it while you still can.

2010-10-20T22:49:00.001-04:00

TOO MANY THINGS TO DO

Being a Good Friend, the IAH Film Fest & Jubilee Night

2010-10-17T00:54:00.008-04:00

Are you a good friend?

The good friend test involves making sure your drunk friend gets home safely. Even if it means risking having them puke in your car. Of course, make sure you can drive properly before even considering driving an impaired friend home. Bonus points if you can fit their bicycle in the back.

Text, this morning: Hey! Thanks for driving me home last night!

Text, half an hour later: Hey! Found my bicycle here. Guess I cycled home!

Voicemail, 2 hours later: Hey ___ here, give me a call when you get this. We're going ice skating later today if you want to join us. I'm still trying to figure out what happened last night, if you gave me a ride or if I biked home, it's all quite foggy, blah blah blah

Anyway. This week, Friday ended early. My officemates and I got free student tickets to the Bad Futures Film Festival in town, so we left the building at 3pm and went to watch Fahrenheit 451. Fun.

Bad Futures- IAH Film Festival Schedule:

Friday, October 15
1:00 pm Blade Runner (1982)
3:30 pm La Jetée (1962) / Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
7:00 pm Children of Men (2006)
9:15 pm Brazil (1985)
12:00 am A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Saturday, October 16
1:00 pm Sleeper (1973)
3:00 pm Gattaca (1997)
7:00 pm District 9 (2009)
9:30 pm Code 46 (2003)
12:00 am The Matrix (1999)

Sunday, October 17
12:00 pm Fail Safe (1964)
2:30 pm 28 Days Later (2002)
5:00 pm Metropolis (1927)
8:30 pm 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

For dinner we went to Chili's and I had a great soup-salad combo which I really enjoyed. At 9pm our Hickory Farms musical team got together for a short practice, then I went off to Kildare's Irish pub to meet above-mentioned friend and others.

Today was a fine day in State College with wall-to-wall sunshine, great weather for the Tussey Mountainback 50-Mile Race although a bit nippy. Know some people running it. I pottered around the house all morning trying to start working on the geodynamics lecture I'm giving next week. We had our stage rehearsal at 3.30pm, afterwhich Emily H. and I went to Starbucks for a quick chat about her new date over pumpkin spice latte and lemon cake. At 6pm I scuttled back to the auditorium and the Jubilee Night performances were soon underway.

Honestly considering we only practiced twice, it was a good show.. but we could have been much better. No worries though; someone came up to me at the end and told me it made them cry (because the message touched them, not because it was horrific). So that was good, and seriously, everyone did their best, which is what matters.

Just a photo

We had lots of post-show pizza, and after that I went downtown to join one of my officemates and a guy I met at the bar last night to watch Code 46. The storyline was great, but they could have developed the alternate future society portrayal more. Fun show.

Well, I have been sitting around snacking and doing nothing since getting home around midnight. My housemate is out of town this weekend and I have turned into a complete slob. "Stuff" is everywhere and it is just too demoralizing to try and clean up the mess. Haha just kidding, I'm not going to be on Hoarders anytime soon. Man, this 'sleep' thing just totally messes me up. I'm a total mess when it comes to sleeping. I don't even want to go to bed right now. I hate sleeping! Arghh it totally throws my entire day off. *flails around*

thursday

2010-10-14T13:08:00.004-04:00

Been having a good time. Just listened to a broadcast on the #1 Party School on This American Life while picking seismic multiples. By the way, yours truly happens to attend the #1 Party School. I was told about this podcast by my friend Chris, a fellow grad student here in the Tourism & Recreation department. His thesis is on nightlife and he pretty much goes out most nights of the week. We were walking from Mad Mex, where we had dinner, to the Gingerbread Man bar to join my trivia team (we placed 3rd that night). Most of the talkshow revolved around drinking. To me, drinking is a personal choice. Some kids are just dumb and have to learn the hard lessons in life. Ethics, on the other hand, is sadly not taught as part of a well-rounded education in most universities. I'm not talking about copyrights and obeying the law; I'm talking about character. You can have someone graduate with a great GPA, be really 'popular' and still be rotten to the core (see 2 posts ago). Anyway. I had a chance to be part of an 'avocado diet' study where the school would provide me with all my meals for 17 weeks of the year and $200 every month.. however.. it included a limit of 2 drinks a week.. which is quite unreasonable! Just rambling right now. I'm giving the geodynamics lecture next Thursday and feel like writing a 15 minute stand-up comedy act to incorporate into it. This Saturday, the undergrads in my church group are performing a comedy-musical type skit I wrote while on the flight from Houston to Washington DC. It will either be terribly embarrassing or outstandingly fantastic. For all our sakes I hope for the latter.

I've recently been reading a lot of books about peak oil and alternate energies, and I recommend them to you all (whoever 'y'all'' happens to be), although a big reason why I can actually critically digest them is because I've worked in the oil and gas industry twice already. They are:

The Tyranny of Oil: The World's Most Powerful Industry--and What We Must Do to Stop It, Antonia Juhasz

The Last Oil Shock: A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man, David Strahan

Energy for the 21st Century: A Comprehensive Guide to Conventional And Alternative Sources, Roy L. Nersesian

autumn has just never looked better

2010-10-13T00:09:00.004-04:00

The Penn State Ice & Climate team

post graduation job : check

2010-10-09T09:47:00.009-04:00

Ahh finally a chance to sit on the couch and eat a leisurely breakfast and not think about the 101 things I want to do. I can't recall the last time I was actually at home enjoying a fine Saturday morning on the couch.

QWE oil and gas company flew me to Houston on Wednesday for a site interview. I was there till yesterday. It was awesome; they put me up in the Doubletree Hotel downtown and I had a personal driver shuttle me from and to the airport! Unfortunately they could not give me an offer immediately despite saying my presentation was great; there were other candidates they wanted to interview before making a decision. After being told the number of positions they were hiring for and the number of interview candidates they were considering, I decided the odds were not worth losing my current job offer (which expired yesterday) over, so I signed on with my existing job offer. It's all a game to me. I'd rather work for the other company because they have a larger international portfolio, but it's not the first time I haven't gotten what I'd prefer (ie. not getting a National Geographic internship 4 years ago, and getting rejected by MIT for grad school, which translated into going into a more lucrative industry, and going to Antarctica with Penn State). The nice thing is that a lot of people at company I signed on with are looking forward to me working there next year.

While I was in Houston I also got to catch up with my old (and now future) boss and another guy I worked with over summer. The weather in Texas has finally stopped boiling and we had a great time sitting out on the deck of the Front Porch Pub during happy hour. A couple of my friends who work in Houston took me to a Greek Festival for dinner, and that was pretty sweet too. So it was a really good trip. When we flew back into State College the skies were clear for miles and it was absolutely gorgeous watching the Appalachian foothills stream into view beneath us, and during our descent into Happy Valley the view was just spectacularly beautiful. One of those wish-I-had-my-camera moments.

Back in town it's Homecoming weekend and the parade was Friday evening! Murat, Travis, Emily H, Devin, Beth and I scored the best seats in the house outside PNC bank, directly facing Old Main. This sorority girl was extremely mean and rude to a poor old man who was sitting in "their block" in his camp chair; she was very loud and antagonistic to him and coerced him into moving away. We were all appalled by such disrespectful behavior - you can be assertive but not obnoxious, and trying to secure a spot for your sorority sisters by tramping over senior citizens is NOT leadership, even if you always sit in a particular area every year. You want a spot, get there early and sit there; don't expect your chalk drawings to "book" your regular spot for you. I went up to the old man later and personally apologized to him on behalf of the student body and told him to enjoy the parade. Seriously, what a _____. And I never call other girls bitches, so you can tell this was really repulsive to me. To make matters more ridiculous, she even had this small chihuahua that she was babying. I have nothing against chihuahuas but when you treat dogs better than humans - go figure.

Anyway that aside, we had a fantastic time. The last two years it has either snowed or been extremely cold during the Homecoming Parade, but yesterday it was in the low 60s and sunny (highly unusual). Lots of creative floats and energetic dances. It was sort of like the student version of the Chingay Parade. We play Illinois today but a lot of my friends have gone hiking at the PA Grand Canyon. I decided not to join them because they left at 8am and I wanted to sleep in a bit.. it's a 2 hour drive so they are probably just getting there now. I've been there before and it is pretty but I just thought I should take it easy. Emily H and I will go hiking later today instead.

the life idyllic part 2

2010-10-04T23:57:00.006-04:00

If you've ever wanted to live in the pastoral, slower-paced past, maybe you should move to Lancaster.

Lancaster County in Pennsylvania is full of Amish and Mennonite farms. This region is considered Pennsylvania Dutch Country, the 'Dutch' being derived from 'Deutsche' for German; the people are descendants of the German and Swiss Ana-baptists who settled here. I'll just quote wikipedia now:
"The Amish represent Christian religious denominations that form a very traditional subgrouping of Mennonite churches. The Amish are known for simple living, plain dress, and reluctance to adopt modern convenience."

This is a photo of the Amish horse-drawn buggies by Andy Starnes of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I drove past tons of them in Lancaster, especially on Sunday when they were all out and about.. The Amish take offense at having their photos taken so I didn't even try.

As part of my desire to milk living in Pennsylvania for all it's worth (pun somewhat intended), I spent the weekend couchsurfing with a Mennonite family, the Beilers, on their 82-acre dairy farm. Enjoyed raw milk and shoo-fly pie, weeded the strawberry patch, mowed the lawn (that took a while), cleaned Thursday's flood-debris off the fences over the creek, and gathered up hundreds of acorns from a single tree. Even squeezed in a trip to the surprisingly clean Lancaster Landfill, the top of which happens to be the highest point in Lancaster county (where they put the trash from New York City, mind you). Mr. Beiler's parents were New-Order Amish, meaning they used electricity but not vehicles. Their ageing congregation had shrunk so much over the years that they decided to join the Mennonite church instead. So now they own a truck! Many Amish are 'off-the-grid' and do not use electricity, but the rules differ from subgroup to subgroup.

As you can see I made some adorable little friends, and learnt a lot about the Pennsylvania Dutch cultures. I could have spent the weekend preparing/studying for my upcoming site interview in Houston, but some things in life are more important than others, and it was good to be reminded of that.

Farming, and farm-ins

2010-09-30T16:33:00.007-04:00

Heading back to Over the Moon Farm this evening to help load up their final batch of chickens for the year. It feels like it's been months since I was last there - and indeed it's been a month! So much has happened since. The rain, which has been relentless for the last 12 hours, seems to have finally stopped, just in time for me to drive over the hill and to the next valley where the farm is. It's getting cooler up here.

Next week I'm getting flown to Houston for a job interview and I'll have to make a decision on Friday as to which company to work for - already blowing off beyond petroleum. Alison will be working for them in Alaska next year and I am definitely going to show up on her doorstep late summer.

Been outside a lot.

Leaves are changing color

We went for a hike at Black Moshannon State Park
a couple weeks ago

Lake levels were pretty low

David and Becca dragged me up a ridge in Bear "Meadows".
We ascended 150 meters in 3 miles.. urgh

Last week we had the West Antarctica Ice Sheet Initiative workshop
at Lake Raystown, PA. I forgot that I was presenting a poster and made it in 6 hours on Monday. It was very well received.

The meeting involved a lot of sitting, listening to talks
and having a good time.

After the meeting ended on Saturday morning, I explored
Trough Creek State Park by myself with my bike.

In the afternoon drove over to West Chester, outside of Philadelphia

I couchsurfed with a lady in town and the next day we went on a 27-mile fundraiser bike tour through farms and countryside. It was organized by the Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture.

Somehow in between Lake Raystown and West Chester I acquired a new bike.

I will be spending this weekend on a farm in Lancaster, the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country.

Apart from those developments, my office mates and I have started going to team trivia nights at the Gingerbread Man, a local bar in town. Last night's performance was spectacularly terrible. But we remain undaunted, and I have diversified my portfolio of bacardi cocktails.

2010-09-25T20:44:00.003-04:00

Doing one thing that scares you every day is quite difficult.
Every other day is much more reasonable.

Aircraft Assembly

2010-09-16T00:42:00.007-04:00

Lots of things going on this week. Recruitment dinners, old boss came up to visit, impromptu meetings with visiting scientists, spectacular spontaneousity, etc. Today for instance -

0920 : Today was the first day I successfully biked the entire stretch from home to the office, which includes two terrible hills, one of which I usually have to walk my bike up.
0930 : Emails. 'Housekeeping'. Not much work, mostly just tidying of manuscript.
1015 : Distressed, ask advisor what to do about job offer. Not much help. Shelve it.
1230 : Lunch at Big Bowl with Emily H and Nola.
1330 : Sitting outside on the main lawn eating peanut butter frozen yogurt with Nola. Weather is absolutely fabulous, wall-to-wall sunshine.
1410 : Back at work. Discuss bed reflections and amplitude-vs-offset analysis with Leo.
1545 : Leave office. Print out glider specifics in library.
1550 : Get free student tickets to massive October Sci-Fi Film Festival at the State Theatre.
1600 : Take bike to Freeze Thaw where I get the seat angle adjusted (did not have tool to do this myself).
1605 : Cycle back to apartment. Potter around.
1650 : Drive to campus, pick up Mark.
1710 : Decide not to wait around for unreachable 3rd club member. Drive to Mifflin County Airport.

1750 : Assemble glider*

From this

To this

1930 : Leave Mifflin County Airport. Drive back to State College.
2010 : Pick up April, head to Gingerbread Man.
2030 : At G-Man. 3 barcardi cocktails + dinner = good
2045 : Jamie arrives
2100 : Trivia night begins
0012 : Well, after a while there's no point trying to reconstruct events. James, Stephanie and Chris showed up. We placed 10th out of 20+ teams, which was pretty good. Sent everyone who was left at the end of the last round home. Head home
0015 : Check email. Farmers going to football game this weekend (us vs Kent State) so no farming on Saturday. No problem. Will find something else to do. Listen to Aerosmith.
0054 : Sleepytime.. another fun day in Happy Valley

* this begs the question. Would I dare to fly something I had a hand in assembling??

drops of jupiter

2010-09-06T00:21:00.008-04:00

If you ever want to write a book, go live on a farm.

Life is beautiful at its best, being in the middle of a classic Central Pennsylvanian valley, surrounded by rolling fields of hay and maize, with a sea of sunshine blue above, and funneled in to the north and south by the gorgeous Appalachian foothills draped in their summery green glory. The milky way gazes wistfully down at night, and the shooting stars cast fiery streaks so bright and true that they are impossible to mistake for any twinkling illusion.

Farmville 101 : Eat this Facebook!!

View of the garden

Turkey

The chickens.. they did not know what was coming..

Free-range chickens with the egg-mobile in the distance

The hogs

An abundance of simple, commonplace philosophical questions popped into my mind as I was working out there, drenched in the fierce heat of the day, circumstance giving a new life to rhetoric, the likes of which never ever feel “real” or “relevant” in the normal urban world –

“What am I doing here?”

“Am I completely out of my mind? I’ve clearly gone totally nuts.”

Why do we do it?

A WWOOF(Willing Workers on Organic Farms)-er said it best –

Life Experience.

Some people work on farms to learn more about the land; to learn more about rural life; to be more informed consumers; and some just for a change of pace. Increasingly I’ve felt drawn to learning more about the different ways of life in this world; a curiosity partly encouraged by couchsurfing and extreme travel. The great thing about farms is that a lot of people are willing to let you do ‘work exchanges’ on their farm, which is what wwolfing is all about – working on the farm in exchange for room and food. My two hosts fed me a delicious dinner of garden fresh vegetables, soups, local cheeses and bread. Not only did I get to hear the farmer’s life story and spend a night in their charming farmhouse, but I also learnt quite a bit about how agriculture is regulated and subsidized in America and the shortcomings of the system. I also picked up on the challenges of farming – 4/5ths of local farmers are necessarily supported by a spouse who works in town. I helped feed the chicks, chickens, turkeys and pigs. We collected 8 dozen eggs which I washed, sorted and packed. I cleaned out 2 meat coolers. We caught and crated 178 free-range chickens and drove them to the butcher’s 18 miles away. I spent Friday morning shoveling a mountain of chicken poop taller than your average 7-year-old out of the chicken coop before rolling back into town for our research group’s lunch meeting, where my colleagues showed out-of-this-world photos from their recent helicopter-supported fieldwork on the rapidly melting ice sheets of Greenland. I couldn’t help but smile throughout the slideshow; the photos of cutting-edge science equipment being deployed across the staggering landscape of ice and snow reminded me of good times in Antarctica. I did not come to grad school with the intention of working on farms, but sometimes the first hand you’re dealt affects the way you play your next round. There’s a whole world out there to experience, and I’m going to milk it for all it’s worth. Maybe I should try volunteering on a dairy farm next.

Friday evening back in State College Becca and I had Nola, Sarah, Kristen and one of our neighbors over for ice cream and table games. Saturday I went with Adrienne, Tracy, Dan and Jared to South America

Just kidding. Knowing that Penn State would destroy Youngstown in the opening game of football season, we decided not to stick around town and instead headed to Ricketts Glen State Park in northeast Pennsylvania, which has more waterfalls than you can count with two hands, and the easiest hiking trails I have ever been on in my entire life as a geologist. Not surprisingly there were tons of people out enjoying the park. It was a great day to be alive – the weather was a breezy just-right; a cold front had come in overnight but this merely tempered the heat of summer; the sun broke through layers of clouds and though it drizzled slightly at one point, it drizzled sunshine. We hiked for 3.5 hours and stopped at a diner in a small town on the way home for perogies and coleslaw. Back in town, I hit up our POP potluck hosted by Mike & Myro, whose apartment I haven’t been to in eons! Following that I went to the free screening of the Prince of Persia at the HUB on campus with Zartman, Becky, Robby and the other Kristen. It was a fun movie to watch with good company.

Sunday was cooler and I had to take my fleece around with me. We had a smaller congregation at church since people are out of town for Labor Day weekend, so I joined the merry band of undergrads for lunch at West Halls. Dorm food is not very healthy but the string bean and potato salad was heavenly, and the jolly spirits of the undergrads was lovely to be around. It would have been awesome if I had had so many friends to eat with (20 at a sitting!) when I was a freshman! Don't get me wrong; I had lots of friends when I was a freshman but very few of them lived in my dorm. Later in the afternoon Becca, David D and I went on a Tour de State College on our bikes.

Note the endless cornfields to our right. The air was crisp, cool and fresh and it was indeed an undeniably awesome day to be alive. We finished our evening with PSCG and hanging out at the creamery; I have been uploading photos and am looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow.

chicken run

2010-08-30T21:13:00.004-04:00

Alrighty.. since my advisor has neglected to read my drafts, which have been in his hands since the beginning of summer, I'm going on strike and am going to go off to a small farm with a cute name (Over-the-Moon Farm) on Thursday. I will be helping to take the chickens to the butcher and cleaning out the chicken pens. It should be an interesting life experience. And hard filthy work!! Tomorrow I will brush up on an abstract I plan to submit for the American Geophysical Union conference, and once that is done I should be good to go. Will have to put my social activities on hold for a while.

2010-08-30T00:29:00.003-04:00

I would like to live on a farm for a while. The Grange Fair was neat.

I did double-picnic today. It was exhausting, and then I watched the Emmys with Heather.

I would like to go to Patagonia. There are 5835 miles separating me from it. I don't even know why I specifically want to go to Patagonia. Just because it sounds exotic, I suppose. And because it's very hard to get to for someone like me. I like going to very-hard-to-get-to-places.

Nonetheless,
Herding cattle on a farm here would be an equally meritorious experience.

2010-08-29T00:15:00.002-04:00

You won't believe this.. I was biking back from Becky's party and telling myself how funny it would be if someone was biking home drunk at night and smashed into a pole or something and made the news, then I looked up at the sky to admire the stars and promptly ran up a curb and almost fell off my bike.

Friday!

2010-08-27T21:45:00.004-04:00

It's Friday night! Considering I have gone out every single night since we moved in till today, it's mighty fine to not be out partying (and I had the option to go to the Harvest game night too). I went for an hour-long bike ride in the evening and called it a day. In fact I cycled past what I'm pretty sure was the Global Programs picnic at Tudek Park, which I'm sure I could have crashed if I wanted to. It's also EMS Grad student night at the Spikes' game, but I'm not interested in baseball at all. I saw a huge purple and orange hot-air balloon flying over town while I was biking and they were close enough to the ground to see the people in the basket!

Last Wednesday - moved into our new place
Thursday - party at Jin & Hyeri's
Frday - Beth & Em's Gaga party
Saturday - Jenna's potluck dinner with new geog students and Isaac's patio 'lounge'
Sunday - PSCG
Monday - Becky M's "Independence Day" Grill/cookout
Tuesday - dinner at the Alehouse with the ice group and our visiting scientist
Wednesday - Sharkies' pool bar with the girls
Thursday - Biking and then Hanging @ the Hollemans
Friday - today! biking..

Tomorrow we are going to the Grange Fair, and in the evening there is a party for the 1st year grads that we are going to at Becky, Tom & Bryan's place. On Sunday there are 2 picnics going on in the afternoon; since I am on the picnic committee for our department picnic I am probably not going to be able to double-picnic but who knows!

Another notable thing that happened this week is... I turned down a big signing bonus.. the job offer still stands. Just trying to buy more time and interview with some other companies to make sure I make the best decision...

In the news again

2010-08-27T10:10:00.006-04:00

Wow, Elizabeth just told me we're on the cover of the EME Newsletter!

Check it out

and then turn to page 7 for the details! It's not a very flattering photo. We were doing our Helicopter Underwater-Evacuation Training (HUET) in that photo and they actually have a simulator helicopter-frame, which you can see on page 7, which they submerge in the pool and then flip upside-down and we had to swim out of it.

Back to School again

2010-08-22T22:41:00.003-04:00

Wow I really like our new place. We have a nice balcony and I got a beach chair for $1 at a yard sale and could sit out there all day just watching the world go by. Our view isn't much - the sky, the trees, the street and the parking lot, but man, it's so enjoyable to just be outside, which is something I couldn't do much in Houston because I didn't have a patio or balcony and because of the heat!! Today I figured I was as happy as I'd be overlooking a river-cut valley up in the mountains. We've got all our stuff and have just decorating left to do.

Anyway, State College is back in swing; 42000 of us have returned and re-taken town (including the 6000 new freshman who are taking over town for the first time). Beth and Em had a Lady Gaga themed party on Friday night which was hilarious and very well attended; on Saturday Becca and I went to a dinner party with the new geography grad students; our hostess Jenna made a fabulous Indian curry that I was really impressed with. We had a lot of new freshman at church today and also a lot of new grad students at the evening's PSCG meeting. Looks like it will be a good semester.

moving day

2010-08-18T23:01:00.003-04:00

Today was moving day. It marks another chapter in my rather unusual life. I moved from our old house across from the gas station into an apartment up the hill. Thank God for friends. We moved all my stuff in just over an hour.

My moving crew minus Adrienne

I'm glad. I need this change.

2010-08-15T17:46:00.001-04:00

I want to go to Patagonia