Wet and Wild Weekend

So for those of you who are not part of the Florida Group, the title of this post may make things sound more exciting than they were ;). Wet and Wild is indeed the name of a water park in Orlando. It was Beth's birthday on Friday, so she, Daniel, Justin, Phil, and I all packed into Beth's Civic and drove to Orlando for a day of sunburn and water slides. Well, thanks to Beth's 70 spf spray-on sunblock it was far less of the first and far more of the second, but you all know what I'm talking about.

Of all the water parks I've been to, Wet and Wild was pretty decent. We ended up hitting seven rides, not counting the lazy river, because no one can reasonably say that a lazy river is a ride. The thing that made this park stand out for me was the large number of rides where you rode a tube down into some sort of enclosed whirlpool or giant funnel. Normally water park rides are the standard "ride a tube down a chute" type, but adding the giant spiny rooms definitely added fun. The best, or at least craziest, was one called "The Storm", or as Daniel calls it "The Toilet". Or "The Flusher", I don't remember exactly which, but you get the point. As you might be able to tell from this map (storm in the lower right corner), the ride is basically a chute that you slide down by yourself sans tube into a giant whirlpool that is suspended over basically a really deep hot tub. What the map doesn't convey is that the chute is at about a 45 degree angle and is quite long, so by the time you hit the whirlpool area you're going very fast. Even more so if, like some of us, you're on the heavy side. Once you hit the "bowl" things don't get much better because now you're spinning around with mist being sprayed on you, going fast enough you can barely lift your head, and you don't have a clue in hell which direction you're pointed. Just about the time you do figure out which way is up, you're dumped out of the bowl through a hole in the center that's about 4 feet above a deep pool. You have no control over how you come out of the bowl. I tried to get myself feet-first and managed to come out head-first and backwards both times. Don't let my description of it throw you off, though. In spite of injury to Justin, I think that was one of the most fun rides we went on all day.

After the park it was back into the Civic for the trip back to Melbourne to relax, take a shower, grab some food and great beer at Coasters and head back to Dan and Beth's for gift opening. I hope Beth agrees, but I think it was a pretty great day.

The Joys of Car Ownership

Those of you who know me know that I come from a family that loves British cars. That is pretty much the only reason why I ended up driving a 1994 XJ6 Jag. Now most people's reaction to the fact that I drive a Jag is either "awesome, it's a jag!" or "wow, you must have piles of money sitting around!". Unfortunately the first one is true only some of the time, and the second one has yet to be true ever (I'm working on that one, though). But honestly I have a love-hate relationship with my Jag. On the one hand it's still a very nice car in spite of being 15 years old. It drives well, for the most part, and has done a great job of getting me from place to place in spite of my sometimes spotty maintenance. Anyone who says that Jags have terrible reliability hasn't owned one built after 1990. And if you have a newer one, JD Power and Associates should put your mind to rest! On the other hand, parts are expensive and sometimes hard to come by. I've had more than one part that was only available in re-manufactured form.

Case in point are the new front shocks that I'm in the process of replacing. Now if I had a standard car I might be able to walk out of Advance Auto Parts with a new shock for $15.99 a pop, assuming I'm being really cheap, of course. The Jag, however, needs shocks that run a whopping $185.00 a pop! But I bite the bullet and buy the things because, after all, it is cheaper to fix what you have than to buy something completely new. Of course, that price doesn't factor in having someone install them or, in my case, the time of installing them yourself. Lets just say that last night I decided that I was going to use my new welding setup to finally get the old nasty ones off and get my nice shiny new ones on, and 9 hours later I finally got the right side installed. I love working on cars at 2:30am on Monday (well, Tuesday I guess)! I'm sure my neighbors loved me banging on my suspension with a claw hammer at 2:30am as well. Hey, with British cars everyone gets in on the fun!

Fire!

So although this may not be exciting to you non-mechanical types, I am now the proud owner of a new oxy acetylene welding setup! I set it up last night and had fun adjusting the flame and practicing how to turn it on and off without blowing myself up. Tonight I get to use it to replace the shocks in the Jag :)!

The Latest

Ok, realistically I'm never going to finish the multi-part story that I started about my journey from Clemson to Florida, but I figured the least I could do was finally provide an update of general goings-on. Lets just say that I made it down here with only a minor car mishap in rural Georgia, and I've been enjoying my life, for the most part, these last 8 (almost 9, wow it goes fast) months.

Just to interrupt, I just met some Florida wildlife! I was sitting out on my porch, typing this post, and heard some crunching through the grass outside (in Florida, grass crunches). I ran to get my flashlight and started scanning the back yard for whatever was making this noise. The first thing I saw was a kind of nasty hairless tail, and I thought it was just a possum. But after I got closer and could see the rest of it it turned out to be an armadillo! I know that this is probably not exciting at all for anyone from Texas or Florida, or any other states where they are common, but for me this is exciting. The only place I've ever seen an armadillo is either stuffed or in a zoo. So anyway, here are pictures to document the experience.
Alright, back to normal. As I said, things have been going pretty well here since I moved down. Of course the first few weeks were tough. There were definitely a few days where I wondered what I had gotten myself into, and a few moments where I felt like running, but once I got settled things have gotten much better. My acclimation to the area was helped along by Justin, an engineering friend from Clemson, who just so happened to know a whole group of people down in this area. He started work down here two weeks after I did, so once he got settled in we started hanging out with what has come to be known as "the Florida Group" on weekends.

The Florida Group is made up of four couples and four single guys. Of the guys (coupled and uncoupled), all but two are Clemson grads. One of the non-Clemson guys is, strangely enough, from my hometown back in Illinois! Finally, someone else who knows about Beef-a-Roo ;). Two of the women are also Clemson alums, so you can guess who we're all cheering for during football season. Not like we ever expect to be that awesome. This is, after all, Clemson, and there's nothing that Clemson hates like winning too much. Hey, at least we've got a new coach. Anyway, back to the story...

So over these last months Justin, Phil (another Clemson guy who moved down after Justin), and I have become well integrated into the Florida Group. Most weekends we are at one of the couple's houses (they always host since they know that they can make edible food), either playing Rock Band, which is definitely a group favorite, or some board or card game. No matter what we do, there is always beer and fun is had by all.

Occasionally we do throw something crazy in for the weekend activity. For a while I, and sometimes Justin, would go play paintball on Saturdays. I even bought a used gun from the guy who hosted it, and it's definitely a good time. Not the cheapest weekend activity, but still fun and it gets me out of the house. That's fallen by the wayside a little recently, though, because the new field that they've been playing at is about a 45 minute drive from my house. It's fun, but I'm not that motivated to get out of bed every Saturday.

The other activity that comes up now and then is a rocket launch! One of the benefits of living on the east coast of Florida. Hey, if we can have mountains, or even hills, at least we get rockets. My first ever shuttle launch was a night launch, and it was pretty damn awesome. The only bummer was that we didn't actually hear anything, which was kind of strange because we weren't that far away from the pads. I've also seen two non-shuttle launches, one from the parking lot of the local civic center and one from my driveway. Yeah, yeah, you can be jealous now ;). Of course the Florida group is all engineers, or at least all the guys are, and so we are obligated to love rocket launches.

This last week was fantastic, though. There was a confluence of activities that made it extra fun. First, last weekend was our St. Patrick's Day party. That alone would be enough to make it special, but it was also the start of Clemson's spring break, and a whole bunch of Justin's friends decided to drive down for a Florida vacation. I knew a few of the people, but there were more that I didn't know, so it was fun to meet new people that, really, I should have met four years ago. Daniel, one of the Florida Group, also had his sister in town visiting, so it was fun meeting more of his family. All in all, the party was a wonderful mixture of Beth's (Daniel's wife) excellent cooking, drunkenness, entertaining stories, and Rock Band. Everything that St.Patrick's Day stands for.

To top the weekend off, and to bring my story back to a few paragraphs ago, there was also a shuttle launch! Sunday night I met Daniel, his sister, and Beth out at the beach to watch the dusk launch. Not quite as spectacular as the night launch (you don't get the whole night turned to day effect), but the sun setting made the rocket trail look awesome. See the pictures below for what I mean.

The rest of the week was back to work for me, but Justin took a few days off to spend time with the Clemson Contingent. They did lots of fun things that made me wish I didn't have to work, like go to the beach multiple times and generally run around and have lots of Florida-in-the-spring fun. The highlight though, at least for me, was getting out and using my telescope on Thursday night. You see, most of the Clemson Contingent are astronomy majors, so we got a fantastic tour of the heavens with our guide Ginger Bryngelson. I had never seen a binary star before! Well, at least not as two objects distinct enough that I could say "hey, that's a binary!". The week was capped off with beach volleyball (very bad, windy volleyball) and some attempts at swimming in the very rough surf with the gang, and then it was back to normal life.

So, this post has gone far longer than I expected, and if you're still reading then I applaud you! Enjoy the pictures, and I'm off to bed.