football and ghost hunting

I reckon it’s time to catch everyone up on what’s been going on the last few days.

Kentucky beat LSU

In the football game last night, UK (rank 17) beat LSU (rank 1) in triple overtime, 43-37. I hadn’t been watching the game till the third quarter because everyone was expecting LSU to just roll over us. I caught glimpses of it when Todd and I went to dinner last night, and was pleased to see we were holding our own. When we went to the mall afterward, I made Todd go to Dick’s Sporting Goods with me, where I told him, “Honey, we can’t go shopping, we have to watch the game.”

So we stood around with a crowd of customers and store employees, clustered in front of the groups of TV’s mixed in with sports apparel and shoes, and watched as UK stomped LSU’s tail. When we got a delay of game penalty in the second overtime, I think it was, I was all depressed, but Todd commented, “It may not even matter, we may get a touchdown right here.” And then, holy crap, we did.

I bet Lexington was torn apart last night; this is the biggest win in decades for UK. I know the goal posts got torn down when the fans swarmed the field, which is supposed to cost UK $50,000 in fines; our football coach commented that it was worth it. While Todd and I were walking out of the mall, some random guy held up his hand for a high-five, and Todd couldn’t leave him hanging. We saw some nice fireworks being shot off on the drive home. Then when we went out later to hang out with Eric and Kelly, traffic was terrible but everyone was honking in excitement. There was a car in front of us, waving UK flags out the windows, and I leaned over Todd, who was driving, to join in the honking. After I did so, one of the guys leaned out in front of us and cheered, saying, “I salute you,” as he saluted us. The police force was out in full last night, looking for riots, vandalism, and probably lots of drunks. Man, what a heyday.

get-together at Jessica’s

Yesterday during the day, Todd and I went down to Jessica’s parents’ farm for a Halloween celebration. There was a lot of food, pumpkin painting, a lot of family, and a hay ride (Todd’s first). I carved a pumpkin to have a frowning vampire face with a bow-tie, then plunked a candle in it and left it on their stoop.

leadership class

UK’s College of Engineering is starting a new class next semester that will focus on enhancing leadership abilities. Various speakers will come and talk, including some Fortune 500 company executives, which sounds nice. There will also be an expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C. to meet with Kentucky delegates. To get into the class, you had to be nominated by one of your professors; two students from each major in the college were supposed to get in. Dr. Jaromczyk nominated me, and after an intimidating meeting with the Dean’s Advisory Board, I was notified on Friday that I got accepted. I’m very excited about it because it sounds like a big honor, especially since there are only 15 other students that got accepted out of the whole college. The trip to D.C. sounds really exciting to me, too.

ghost hunting

Friday night, I went ghost hunting with my cousin Gina and three of her friends. Apparently, there are licensed ghost hunters in a neighboring city; who’d have thunk it. So we go out there to a historical preservation where there had been a fort in Civil War times. Our tour guide shows up, an older man wearing all black, and tells us about the fort and about the equipment. I speak up, announcing I’m a skeptic, and ask if there’s any scientific proof he’s aware of to explain some of the phenomena he was talking about. For example, his thermometer would read drops in temperature of 7+ degrees in some areas, and I asked if maybe there were natural gas vents in the ground, or something like that (I don’t know!). He said they’ve surveyed the area and haven’t found anything like that. *shrugs* I didn’t find it convincing, but hey, I went into this expecting it to be a crock.

So we go out into a field where one of the forts stood and got to use dowsing rods to talk to the spirits. (I asked our guide before we left the parking lot if we were searching for water; he replied with a long ‘nooooo’.) So these dowsing rods were L-shaped metal rods that had beads around the crook of the L so that you could grip the rods without gripping the metal and preventing it from turning. You were to hold two of the rods, one in either hand, and ask a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question. If the rods rotated inward, it was a ‘yes’, and if they rotated outward, it was a ‘no’.

I was the first person to volunteer to use the rods, and I asked questions like, “Are you a male?” and “Were you from Tennessee?”, which is where a lot of the soldiers who were supposed to have been there were from. I noticed that if you relaxed your hands, the rods tended to go inward, and if you had a tight grip, they would go outward. So I figure the ‘ghosts’ were all in our heads, and we were subconsciously choosing the answer we wanted. Our guide carried around an EMF meter the whole night and the thing never went off, so no crazy magnetic fields were detected, apparently.

It did get down to the 30’s that night, so we got darn cold; my knees were sore from the cold and I couldn’t feel my toes too well. When the tour was over, we ended the night by going to a Starbucks for an hour or more, talking about the tour and other things. One of the Starbucks employees was awesome, bringing us free samples of their raspberry scones and later of tiny little raspberry frappuccinos. I had a good time, despite the silliness of our hunt.

CSS presentation

That presentation Dr. Jaromczyk asked me to prepare on CSS design is over and done with, thankfully. I got up at the butt-crack of dawn this morning (read: 6:30) in order to get showered and awake in time for the 8 o’clock class in which I had to present it. We had projector troubles such that the projector in the room we were in had a bulb going out, so you could barely see anything. Then when we went to another room and got a projector from somewhere else, we couldn’t find a hookup on my PowerBook for the video cable. Fortunately, we got an adapter that allowed us to hook it up, and away I went. I had to shorten my presentation by talking less about each slide, since we’d lost about 20 minutes with projector troubles, but it turned out fine. One of the students in the class turned out to be in my next class, and he told me it was a ‘really good’ presentation, which was nice to hear.