sunrays and saturdays

-44 As a 1930s wife, I am Very Poor (Failure) Take the test!

And Jeremy is (at least according to what I think)...

40 As a 1930s husband, Jeremy is Poor Take the test!

Ha, Jeremy only gets to do the convective outlooks by himself when there's nothing going on. What a boring weather day. Maybe that means I'll get to go home early! :D

Jeremy and I decided to get out of the house this afternoon since the weather was gorgeous, so we drove in to Norman and played a round of disc golf. I have a habit of getting disgruntled because I can't aim for shit and usually end up about 15 or 20 shots behind Jeremy, but it's good exercise. After our game we stopped at Braum's for dinner and waited FOREVER to get mediocre food. 15 minutes might not seem like a long time to wait for food, but at a fast food place it seems like an hour. I suppose the wait was worth getting my chocolate almond malt, though.

It boggles my mind that there are only three weeks left of this semester. At the same time, though, I am extremely ready for it to be over because of my Radiation class. Two homework assignments a week really blows, and that's even a reduction in the work load! Back at the start of this semester we had three a week.

This ice storm has horrible timing. It started today and will last right up until almost the freakin' minute that my flight is scheduled to take off for San Antonio on Sunday. Most of the precip has been sleet so far, fortunately, but there will be a lot more freezing rain before this is over. All flights have been canceled into and out of Will Rogers Airport through at least tomorrow afternoon, but probably longer. Shiiiiit.

Now I just have to sit here and hope that a) Jeremy can make it home and back to work over the next couple of days, and b) I don't lose power here at the house. No power means no heat, no internet, and no phone. It also means my garage door will stop functioning, so I won't be able to leave the house even if I want to. This does make me somewhat tempted to put my car outside now just in case I do need to leave for some reason. Stupid ice storm. I don't even get school canceled for this, because I'm still on break! What a waste.

So I dropped my sister off at the OKC airport yesterday at around 11:15 am so that she could make her flight to Nashville that was supposed to arrive at around 4pm after a layover in Dallas. She did not even make it to Dallas until 5:30pm (I could have driven her there faster than that!), and she didn't land in Nashville until about 11:30pm. That's 12 fucking hours for 2.5 hours of being in the air. Fuck you American Airlines. My poor sister has horrible luck with flights.

Last night Jeremy decided on a whim that we needed to drive to south OKC at 9:30 to pick up an external hard drive case that he ordered on Circuit City's website. We did that, had a late dinner at Outback Steakhouse, and then went shopping at Wal-Mart. It was midnight before we got out of there, but we did pick up some super-cheap Christmas decorations that were all 75% off. He even bought a Christmas stocking for the cat so that she can get gifts too. I also got Egg Nog and Pumpkin Spice flavored coffee creamers for a dollar each. Hell yes! I love the week after Christmas.

It's time for a cool down/hydration break after working outside for the last two hours. The builder of this subdivision brought some topsoil fill dirt in a dumptruck but left it in a huge pile so that it's our job to spread it around. You see, instead of laying down sod for the lawn, he just left bare ground figuring that the grass would fill in on its own. Well that was a stupid idea. We have more weeds and stickers than grass, and a few good rainstorms have washed huge ruts downslope to the ditch. The natural soil here is mostly clay, and the recent drought has made it rock hard so the grass is not only drying out but is also having trouble getting established in the areas that are still bare. The purpose of the rich top soil is to fill in the ruts and hopefully give the grass a chance to quickly grow into it to prevent more erosion. Jeremy and I have spent several hours in the past two days getting the dirt where it needs to be. Now Jeremy's at work all day, so the job falls to me. Woo. Hoo.

On an unrelated note, today is my journal's fifth anniversary. Yay!

This wasn't a garden variety line of thunderstorms today! Three friends of mine in the meteorology department apparently spotted a tornado on the ISU campus near our department's building. There's a swath of pretty extensive tree damage extending from near Science I (far left, half of it's cut off in the picture) to the ISU power plant (right side). Guess where the meteorology department is? Agronomy Hall, right smack in the middle! All the trees in the Agronomy courtyard are a total mess. One of them (about a foot and a half in diameter) fell against the east wing and blocked the exit on that side, and another one of about the same size also came down. There were about six or eight trees there, and only one or two of them escaped any major damage. There were rumors going around that a tree fell on someone in front of Science I, but I also heard that the guy was able to get out of the way just in time. A huge two to three foot diameter tree on central campus was pretty much cleaved in half, and another meteorology friend of mine got pictures of it on her camera phone.

There has been some argument over whether that was all just straight-line wind damage instead of a tornado, since many have correctly pointed out that all the trees fell in the same direction. However, Eric (a met grad student here) did see a tiny little rope tornado form near the power plant, and there was a very nice hook echo that passed directly over campus on radar ahead of the main line, so I believe that there was actually a tornado. However, the winds were severe strength on their own, and most of the damage was probably a combination of the tornado and winds together. In fact, our little weather station on top of Agronomy measured a peak gust of 83 mph around the time of the tornado report, so it all adds up.

I'm disappointed that I didn't see anything. I was here at the apartment having lunch with Jeremy, and we were watching the shelf cloud move in ahead of the storm, but I'm blocked on all sides here to where I can't see much. Now I've come home from lab early to find that Jeremy's not even here anymore, so he must have heard about the damage from somewhere and went to check it out for himself. I wish I could have gone with him, but meh. I saw it all on my walk home. Now there's going to be some kind of mad media blitz. When I heard that a tornado was reported (no matter how piddly it actually was), I laughed right then and said, "Oh, I can see it now. The media's going to go nuts over it and say 'TORNADO STRIKES ISU CAMPUS!!!'" Sure enough, I saw a KCCI van, and WHO van, AND a fucking helicopter flying overhead as I was coming home.

I cannot possibly study any more for atmospheric physics tonight, so now I listen to Mars Volta and chill.

I guess I can lay out my plans for the summer while I'm at it, so here goes:

In one week, I'll be in Washington, DC. I'm giving myself just enough time after finals to get my shit together, and then I'm gone. It is going to be so nice to get away, especially since I'll be with Jeremy.

God damn I miss that boy. More than anything, I just miss touching him. I need human contact after going without for so long, even when it's as simple as a hug, a back scratch, or a hand to hold. I never felt like I needed it when I was single, but I've developed an appreciation for it over the past year.

Anyway, back to the summer. I'll be in DC with Jeremy for three weeks until May 31st. We've already begun making plans for things to do. He saved all of his sightseeing of the area for when we're together, so we're trying to figure out when we want to do what. For May, I think we're going to explore northern and western Maryland a bit more. We're going to go camping (CAMPING!!! It's been years, so I'm stoked as hell) in the mountains somewhere where we can do a lot of hiking and exploring. I believe he has already reserved a campsite at one of the Chesapeake & Ohio Park sites. He also mentioned something in passing about heading east to the Chesapeake Bay and doing a little fossil hunting. I think most people would rather do more touristy stuff than that, but come on...I'm a geology minor! He knows how to appeal to my interests. :) He does still have to work during the week, so those are primarily weekend plans. Since he'll be gone during the day so much, I'm bringing my senior thesis research stuff so that I can get a jump start on it. I have a full load next fall, so I want to get as much out of the way as possible during the summer.

Once I get back to Iowa, I'll be participating in a research project just south of Ames. They're going to fly planes over a watershed and calculate soil moisture and whatnot from the air. They need a student to gather data on the ground, so that's possibly what I'll be doing through the first part of July. It's in the same watershed that my senior thesis focuses on, so I thought it was a good opportunity to have involvement with. Plus, it's paid experience, which is precious in my field of study. Most student work is volunteer-based.

By July 4th I'll be back in DC with Jeremy for a couple of weeks. I think at this point we're planning on heading out to the far western portions of Maryland (in the panhandle) to camp since it's supposed to be very scenic and beautiful out that way. Plus, I'm a sucker for mountains. What can I say....when you're from somewhere as flat as Kansas, mountains are fascinating. I also spent a lot of childhood family vacations in Colorado. Hopefully I'll see the ocean at some point, too, since I've never seen one before. Yes, I was in Connecticut a year and a half ago and never saw the ocean once. Long Island Sound, yes. Atlantic Ocean, no. And no, the Chesapeake Bay does not count in my book as ocean. I'm always on the wrong side of the plane when we land, so I never get a good look. I'm also told that DC is a hip place to be on the 4th of July by a native of the area, so we may have to catch the fireworks from the nation's capital for a cool memory and good photo-op.

I'll probably have to be back in Iowa by mid-July so that I can pack up my shit and be out of this apartment by the 31st. I'm hoping that my new apartment will open up early so that moving will be easier.

Anywho, that's my plan. It's not nearly as interesting as my sister spending the next six months in JAPAN, but meh. She better send me cool souvenirs or take pictures or SOMETHING. I'll get out of the US someday and see the world. It's just not happening anytime soon.

It's fucking freezing in here, Mister Bigglesworth. Leave it to the weather to cool way the hell off right after the heat gets shut off in my building. Such is my luck.

Yesterday was one of the laziest days I've had in months, and it was glorious. I did absolutely nothing that would be deemed productive except to try to help Jeremy with a tech issue over the phone for about two hours. His video card is not sending the display to the tv correctly (or at all, for that matter) even though it was working perfectly fine yesterday. When he tries to do it he loses the display on his primary monitor, too, so he has to reboot into safe mode to uninstall the drivers and get his display back. Then he reinstalls the drivers and tries to send the display to the tv again only to end up back at square one. He was pretty much going in circles for about three hours last night....all to play MLB 2004. Guys and their sports...

I did manage to replace the memory in my computer yesterday, and HOLY FUCK THE DIFFERENCE IS AMAZING. I had no idea my poor system was struggling so much with the 256 mb it had. Now it has 512 mb of DDR PC 2700 (I know it's not 4000 or something extremely top of the line, but it's a drastic improvement), and it is one happy camper. I reduced the page file size, too, so believe me when I say that the zippiness factor is very high with this computer. It's like the force in a way. Best Buy has those memory cards on sale for like $40 after a $30 rebate, so I'm sort of tempted to run back down there and get another one. If I were to upgrade to a gig of memory, I could cut down on the HDD's page file work even more. Plus, my webcam is still giving the computer fits. I have a decent processor in this thing (AMD Athlon XP 2600+), so I don't think that's the problem. I guess I could always be wrong, though. OH, and Best Buy is selling 80 GB hard drives for $30. That's CHEAP. I called Mom and told her about it while I was there, and I ended up picking two more up for her and Marty. :p Eventually I'm going to get around to putting a fresh hard drive and OS in this machine (hopefully set up a dual boot of Windows XP and Linux Red Hat). Now I have the hard drive, so I'm one step closer!

God I'm a geek, but it's so much fun to be me sometimes!

Jeremy has to write about 40% of his 80-page Master's thesis by Monday morning. It's really his fault for procrastinating to the last minute, but I can't help but feel bad for him. I'll be helping him by revising and checking for grammar mistakes tomorrow evening before he sends the final copy my way for printing and distibution to his committee people. His anguish over the thesis makes me kind of glad that the University of Maryland's graduate meteorology program is a course-track instead of thesis-track. If I stay at ISU, I'll end up writing a thesis like Jeremy. Bah, who knows what I'll do.

Speaking of papers, I have a 10-page term paper about glaciers due in a month for my Paleoclimate class. I should take a lesson from my boyfriend and start on it NOW. However, I too have the affliction of procrastination. Symptoms include extreme laziness, avoidance, and hearing voices that tell you things can always wait until next week. There is no cure for procrastination, but a swift kick in the ass is the best treatment. Please apply liberally.