Greetings and Salutations

Yesterday morning in the shower I was thinking, probably about something shower related like shampoo or washcloths, and had one of those stream of consciousness things where you start at one thing and end up at something completely different and it makes sense to you at the time, but you can't really explain it to yourself later, and certainly couldn't explain it to anyone else. The thing that I ended up at from shampoo, or whatever it was that began it all, was the difference between the phrases "Good morning" and "Good afternoon." Have you ever noticed (or maybe it's just me) that saying "Good afternoon" seems way more formal than saying "Good morning?" It is perfectly acceptable to wish someone a good morning without seeming overly formal or cold, but wishing someone a good afternoon just seems awkward in everyday conversation. The only times I have ever actually spoken the words "Good afternoon" they were closely followed by "Vincent's. Can I help you?" or "Century Bank." Why is it that switching the word "morning" for "afternoon" suddenly makes a phrase something you only say when answering the phone at your place of employment? Or am I just crazy and people wish each other good afternoons without formality all the time?

Relief

I just found out that a physics quiz originally scheduled for after spring break (so I hadn't been working on the homework to prepare myself yet) that was moved to tomorrow (so I was frantically beginning to work homework problems this afternoon) just got moved back to after spring break, so I find myself in a very good mood this fine day. Much better than the mood this guy is about to be in anyway:

Ridiculousness

Last week, my Natural Hazards class was assigned a project about tornadoes. We were given a state and told to go to this website and download an Excel file of all the tornado data for our given state from 1950-2007. We were then told to plot all the F1 and F2 tornadoes on one map, all the F3, F4, and F5 tornadoes on another map, and on yet another map to plot the track of all tornadoes, regardless of magnitude on the Fujita scale, from 1970-2000. This meant plotting two dots for each tornado since we had to have a touch down and lift off location to get the track.

I lucked up because a friend of mine ended up with the same state as me, so we decided we'd work on it together. It didn't seem like it would be that hard until we sat down to start working on it last night and discovered that there were over 800 F1 tornadoes alone. We split the work to make it a little bit faster, but still spent about 4 1/2 hours sitting at his kitchen table last night putting dots on maps, and still didn't finish all of the maps.

This morning, when we got to class, our lovely teacher informed us that he had decided that 57 years gave too much data and that we should just filter it until we got about 100 tornadoes to work with. Why, oh why, could we not have waited one more day to start on it, or why couldn't he have told us one day sooner that he was making it easier? That's 4 1/2 hours of tornado plotting monotony that I will never get back.

Anti-Snow

So you all saw my snow pictures from last Sunday (and if you didn't, just scroll down a little farther and you will). Well this Sunday it is 78 degrees and I've been wearing shorts all weekend. Isn't Mississippi weather the greatest?

SNOW!!!

It snowed this weekend! In Mississippi! And I was there for it! (Everytime it snowed or there was even a chance of snow here last year, I was somewhere else.) It started snowing late Saturday night and by Sunday morning, we had about 3 inches. Naturally by the time I left for church most of it had melted, but I have a wonderful friend who woke me up really early so we could walk around in it. Naturally after about 5 minutes and 5 pictures my camera died, but I'll share what I have:

This is just outside my building. That's Butler Hall in the background.

This is taken from just about the same spot by my building, only from a different angle and with a different setting on my camera so it looks a lot better.

For you fellow Staters, this is just behind Suttle Hall and you can see most of Zacharias Village and Critz Hall in the background.

Chapel of Memories.

This is just before my camera died. There's lovely Suttle in the background and at this point it was still snowing (note the flakes on my hat). As you can see, everything I'm wearing here matches wonderfully, and you didn't even get the full affect. I still had my p.j.s on under this jacket. Oh, and after it stopped snowing and we were heading back to the warmth of our rooms, we walked back by the hill seen behind me and watched some people "snowboarding" down it. Quite entertaining as none of them made it far at all.