Recent Doings

I drove down to the coast yesterday to see a room for rent in a fairly large house in Beaufort owned by a Duke Ph.D. It was the downstairs master suite, which would have given me a good amount of room, but I sort of wish there were better arrangements for my dog. No fenced yard, and the dog wouldn't be allowed in the living room because she weirdly thinks the claws are going to scratch the hardwood floors. I think maybe I'll keep looking, but I need to find something reasonably soon. I would have spent more time visiting the beach while I was down there, but the weather sort of sucked, so I more or less turned around and came back.

I've just about had it with college basketball. The fact that the Tarheels lost early in the tournament doesn't seem to have dampened my housemates' enthusiasm for watching, in part because they want to see how their brackets turn out, and in part because the women's team is still alive, and in part because they just love this stuff. I couldn't care less. I know I'm at the wrong school, because basketball seems to me like something you do with your time in the winter when it's too cold to go outside and play a real sport like football or baseball.

I went to play putt-putt, which I haven't done in years, with one of my housemates, his girlfriend and some of their friends, but it was closed. The driving range was open, though, so we hit a some buckets of balls. This was the first time I'd ever hit a golf ball with anything but a putter, except one time as a kid I barely remember, but I did pretty well. I mostly used a six iron and most of my shots went 150 yards or so, and straight as an arrow. I even managed to hit the little tractor thingy running around out there collecting balls near the 150 yard marker, and on purpose. There were some mishits too, of course. It was fun, so now I'm thinking I should take up golf. It would give me one more thing to do down at the coast, though it isn't cheap, of course. I've sort of always wanted to try it, but somehow never got around to it.

Terrorist incident

Some looney-tune Muslim drove through "the pit," a plaza between the student center, a dining hall and the bookstore, yesterday a little after noon. He was deliberately trying to run people over, but fortunately he didn't kill any of them, though six of them wound up in the hospital. Reportedly he said he did it to avenge the treatment of Muslims, which of course means the FBI got involved and it made the national news.

I was on campus, but in class and didn't see any of it. This is less than a week after two students fell out a third-story dorm window, one of them to his death. Apparently they were horsing around, racing through the hall, though it's hard to see how that results in them going through a window.

Morehead City

I'm getting more and more anxious to get out of Chapel Hill and back to the Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City. That'll happen in May, after I finish the semester. In part it's because I'm anxious to get started on some field work again, and partly because I feel a need to settle down somewhere, for at least a few years.

Unfortunately, Morehead City has been described as the "black hole of dating" by other grad students. Most of the complaints I've heard have come from women, though. I think it's worse for them, because there are more girls than guys at the various labs (UNC, Duke, NCSU, NOAA) and women are, perhaps stereotypically, more concerned with dating someone of the same or better educational and socio-economic status, and in such a small town there just aren't that many options.

My advisor is heavily involved with NOAA and the government in figuring out what happened with Katrina, and preventing it from happening again. Our lab is doing much of the storm surge modeling work, and I expect I'll get pulled into that in the summer, which could be fun. I'm not sure it'll lead to my own dissertation, though, because I don't really think that's what I want to do.