Another Trip to Clemson

Hello again. I'm back after not too long away, with more fun stuff to report! Last weekend I flew back to Clemson again for the long weekend. However this time was less for friends and more for family. My brother, who has been down in Mexico for the last several months managing a plant there, was back in the States for his birthday and to see his new baby girl, Kirklyn. Thankfully his time off managed to coincide with a long weekend for both me and my parents, so we all met in the beautiful upstate to have a family weekend.

It must be a Dunkel trait to have kids 20 years apart. My brother, who is about 17 years older than I am, has an 18-year-old son who is attending his first year of college, and now he has a 3-month-old daughter too. It will definitely be interesting to see how the upbringing of the two differs. No matter what, though, she is very cute (I would say "what baby isn't?", but I have seen some not-cute babies, haha), and her brother takes very good care of her. Brad (my brother) also seems to be having a good time. I never thought that I would see him wearing a babybjorn around his shoulders.

As with the last time I traveled up there I flew in on Thursday afternoon. I missed almost an entire day of work, but it was worth it to be able to spend an extra day with the family. Even with the extra time, though, it was a mad dash. Thursday night I managed to meet up with Dan and Daniel and we, along with the rest of the family, went down to downtown Anderson for some live music and good food. I'm surprised by how much Anderson has improved since I was last down there. I would never have wanted to walk around after dark, but now it's almost fancy! After some good homemade pizza and way too much 80's music we headed back to Clemson. The parents hit the sack and Dan, Daniel, and I drove back to Clemson with the idea that we would watch a movie. Daniel chose "Erik the Viking", which I would have enjoyed much more if I weren't freaking tired. So we got through about 90% of it before giving up and heading back to the hotel for bed.

As far as the rest of the weekend goes, it was an interesting mix. We spent some time looking at houses, since mom and dad are always on the lookout for a good reason to leave the frigid north and move to Clemson, and I managed to connect up with Jason and Lisa. The three of us are traveling to Portland, OR, this July for a wedding and a week tour around the area. I had bought a guidebook and we all wanted to do some planning as far as places to go and things to see. I've wanted to explore that part of the country for the last 10 years, so to finally be going is very exciting! If only I had a month to just tour around and see the sights. Of course, I would be out of cash well before then, haha. Silly money.

My one regret was that I didn't get a chance to see Dana and Diana. Of course, as per my law of the universe, Dana's sister was getting married that Saturday, so they were off to Greenville for a large chunk of the time. As I told them, now they'll just have to come down and visit me in Florida ;). Plus, I have real beaches!

To top off the weekend we did have some great food. Saturday night we ended up at a place called the T-60 Grille. It's way back on Lake Hartwell where you'd never find the place. In fact Jason and I impressed my parents with the iPhone's ability to guide us on some crazy back roads and still make it there in one piece (unfortunately we hit a washed-out road on the way back, and I don't think the rental Focus would have survived). The food and the view was awesome. The specialty of the house is a seafood boil, and that was some of the best crab I've ever had. Corn on the cob is also included, and it soaked up so much of the juices that it was the juiciest, and spiciest, corn I've ever had. The guy who runs the place is quite the business man. Apparently his wings, spices, and a bunch of other concoctions are being sold at Bi-Lo and on QVC.

Sunday morning we ended up at another great restaurant out on the lake for Easter brunch. It was an excellent buffet, with everything from prime rib, to grits, to squid salad, and sushi. Of course, my favorite part was the deserts ;). I just have one thing to say: 4 food chocolate fountain.

After brunch it was time to go do a little more touring. We got to see Stacy's parent's awesome log home that they're building on 30 ancestral acres near Anderson. The house overlooks a lake and a large field, and I would love to come and take a vacation there sometime. Then it was back to the airport and back to the real world. Definitely a great weekend!

For those of you more visually inclined, I did take pictures, and I will try to get them posted here in the next day or so. Until then, goodnight!

Working in the Sun

So what I didn't get around to talking about yesterday was the fun we had on Sunday. Now after you hear what we did you're going to think that I was being sarcastic when I said "fun", but I really did have fun. After all, if you know me then you know that I'm one of those strange people that likes doing things like installing ceiling fans, so this was right up my alley.

First, some background. Kristi, and integral member of the Florida group, or the Florida family as it's usually called, had her birthday this past weekend. Since there are so many of us, we can usually pitch in $10 or so on everyone's birthday and get something pretty substantial (I got $100 worth of Barnes & Nobel gift cards, which was insane). Kristi has made it pretty well know that she hated the bushes sitting out in front of her house, so for her birthday some of the group decided that the best gift would be to let her pick out new plants and then the male half of the group would re-do the garden while the female half did fun birthday stuff with Kristi. As it turned out this was a great idea.

The fun started at 1:30 on Sunday. Kristi had already chosen her plants and where she wanted them, so all we had to do was bring her vision to life. The old bushes ended up coming out so quickly that we ended up cleaning up part of the yard we weren't supposed to! Four short sweaty hours later and the new plants were in, a new boarder was installed, and there was fresh mulch everywhere. 110% better, no question. And, best of all, Kristi was happy. We were all rewarded with showers, cold beer, and excellent BBQ chicken on the grill, courtesy of Grant. Follow all that up with a (somewhat shortened) game of Risk, and it was a pretty awesome day.

For those of you who would like more detail, and some great pictures, I direct you to Grant and Kristi's own blog over at The Florida Gatchel Daily. The little guy is Noah, their 10-month-old son. He's about the cutest baby I've seen, and very well behaved. However, the picture of him about half way down is priceless. Arthur was spraying water on the window as Noah watched, and apparently that was a bad move. Haha, I feel bad about laughing at a crying baby, but it's still funny :). I'm sure there was no lasting trauma.

The Law of the Universe

While there are, of course, many real laws of the universe, there is one in particular that always seems to bite me in the ass. That is the law that if there is something you really want to do, there will always be at least one other thing you really want to do on the exact same day. Usually this happens with things like having two good friends invite you to come to their lake houses on the exact same weekend. Both trips would be awesome, but since no one that I know can split into multiple copies of themselves (yet), you have to pick. This time the law is showing up in the form of a wedding.

For any of you that have not been through this yet, there is a time around the end of college when everyone you know will decide that they need to get married. In the span of about six months you will have to remember that all the women your friends spend time with are now "wives" not "girlfriends". I'm now on the tail end of this marriage spree. Everyone I know is now either married or hopelessly single. Well, hopefully not hopelessly single, at least for my sake. But, of course, of all the dates that could be chosen for weddings, two of the as yet un-joined couples I know have decided to get married on the same day on opposite sides of the country. One is getting married in Vermont, the other in Oregon.

Thankfully, this one was pretty easy. First, I am not in either wedding, which is nice for a change (yay, no tux rental!). Second, I've been planning to go to the Oregon wedding since long before I heard about the Vermont wedding. I like both couples a lot, and both trips would be fun, but I'm happy with my decision. This is especially because I have wanted to go see the pacific northwest for about the last 10 years! The plan, as it stands, is for Jason, Lisa, and myself to attend the wedding on Saturday and then spend the next week touring around Oregon and Washington on our own. To start the week off right, the couple couldn't have chosen a better wedding location! The wedding is taking place at the Timberline Lodge, near the top of Mt.Hood, just east of Portland! You really have to see the lodge to understand what I'm talking about. For anyone who loves mountains (and I have been going through serious mountain withdrawal here in flat Florida), this is about as good as it gets. If the lodge looks at all familiar to you, that's because it was used as the exterior for the Overlook Hotel in "The Shining" (the one with Jack Nicholson, not the miniseries). Even more fun!

I'm not sure where we're going to go after that. I picked up a pacific northwest guidebook with the remains of my birthday Barnes & Nobel money, so I can spend a few weekends finding interesting nooks and crannies to check out. I'm going to be meeting up with Jason and Lisa in Clemson this weekend, so we can do some planning then. Hopefully we'll all find interesting things to do without a horrendous amount of driving. And even if we do spend a large amount of time in the car, the scenery is going to be so awesome that I'm sure I won't mind. If nothing else, I can daydream about the trip while getting through a long Monday morning.

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.