Photos

An interesting fact about State College [yes, interesting. "Surely you jest" I imagine you saying.] is that the official birthplace of Memorial Day is a small town a couple miles south of here called Boalsburg. I even lived for a few months last year. Every year they have a festival on Memorial Day, and Tracy:

had the genius idea of getting the Christian grad students together to bust around for a while at the carnival. Isaac:

told me the night before that he'd call me about carpooling the following morning. However, with gas prices at $4 buckaroos per gallon, and a solemn decision by myself not to drive anywhere that I can bike, we ended up cycling to Boalsburg instead. I was very surprised at the large numbers of people at the fair/carnival:

(There were rides and the whole carnival thing, but they were standard issue so no photos).

After a while of wandering, Isaac and I met up with Jared, Tracy, Tracy's room mate Amanda, Ashley, a whole bunch of people from Ashley's department, as well as Jared's, Ash (PSCG coordinator guy), his wife Heather and her children.

Jared, my future room mate.

Ash and his second child (I forget her name)

(Ash's first daughter, Sarah)

Ashley and Ash's kids, uh... "frolicking"

Part of the fair is a big pie competition. After the judging, the pies are sold for $1 a piece. $1! And the pieces were huge!! I got a giant slab of apple pecan pie. I'm sampling it here. It was pretty good. I guess I've just been conditioned from upbringing to have ultra high standards for this sort of thing. But since I'm on my typical grad student diet, it tasted really excellent.

After doing this sort of thing, we headed over in a big pack to the big park where the car show and all the military equipment was.

For some reason Ashley wanted a picture of her and Tracy "gallivanting."

I took another, funnier picture of them, but Tracy said she didn't want me to post it. Oh well.

Oh yeah, before that, we watched the "Deacons of Dixyland" busts out some, uh, Dixyland on stage. This here is the president of PSU playing the washboard:
He had a very unusual expression on his face the whole time.

And before getting to the military museum/car show, we were stopped by a civil war processional (apparently Memorial Day began in 1866):

Then we got to the car show. It was alright, I've never been really into cars. For someone who likes to build things and take things apart, I suppose this is sort of weird. But anyway, they had Corvettes:

Old looking cars:

Even a smart car:
[I think that's a smart car. Is that a smart car?]

But the most interesting...
A DELOREAN! I checked for a flux capacitor. There wasn't any.

Actually, of all the vehicles on the field this would be my ride of choice.

Then, we sat under a giant tree. Well, everyone else did.

Hmmm about this time, everyone went their separate ways, & Isaac and I biked back. We were really hungry, so we thought we'd go to chopsticks express. Unfortunately, because of Memorial Day they were closed. Hmmm. Aren't they Chinese, though? Hmmm. Still feeling the urge to chi some fan, we headed over to the Big Bowl, (or, "da beeg bough" as my excellent Chinese professor used to call it). Closed. Ok, fine, we decided to head over to the Cozy Thai. A little more expensive, but hey it's a holiday. Closed. All the American restaurants are open on Memorial Day, but the foreign restaurants are closed?! We ended up going to Subway.

I was burnt to a crisp and wanted to just veg for a while. Isaac still wanted to hang out with people. So I ended up vegging and he headed over to wherever John and Ruth were. Then, later that evening, we had a barbecue at Ruth's place. I normally prefer ground beef to meat factory floor sweepings but for some reason that night I only ate hot-dogs:

They were all laughing at me for taking a picture of a hot dog for some reason.

Tracy has a Wii, which is good enough reason too hang out at her place, but this time we just sat around for a couple hours and laughed at each other for various reasons. It was actually really fun. John and I threw an uncooked hot dog at each other. It might have started because he claimed his home brewed ice tea was better than the $1.99 gallon of pre-sweetened store-brand ice tea that I brought. Meanwhile, Jared the walking weather tower was making various forecasts for the next few days, Jen's talking about her exploits in Germany during the world series and Isaac's trying to convince people to eat his steamed Broccoli.



After that, we headed over to Ash and Heather's, where we played this power-grid game that Jared had been insisting the whole day was really interesting. I'm not a huge board-gamer, (though I love Risk), and wasn't expecting much. But it turned out to be a boatload of fun.
Actually, that's probably just cause I won. Heh heh heh.

Anyway, that was my great day yesterday.