Monterey and Beyond

My 2 1/2 week stay in Monterey was, well, lengthy. I learned a lot about tropical forecasting, but the experiment itself was rather boring while I was there. There was a typhoon before I got there and one after I left. My main duty was helping with the forecast and making/uploading graphics for the daily weather briefing. I helped present the briefing three times. The lead forecaster was from Australia and a great guy to work with. There was really only one other student there when I was (from Germany), so it was kind of lonely. Several students from Naval Postgraduate School (host location) were helping out, but they weren't around much. I ate dinner with my adviser the first week, but after she left (and turned in the rental car) I was kind of on my own.

I was able to do some touristy things though. My adviser and I went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium one morning. It was really nice but soon got packed with people, making viewing difficult. The obvious highlight of the entire trip was my visit with Kristin. Davis is only about 3 hours away, so she came down one day. We chose a Thursday because I believed the forecast that it would be warm and sunny (some days it was cloudy and in the 60's). The warm part worked out, but some pesky fog lingered over the ocean, which served to limit our views. We drove down 17-mile drive through Pebble Beach (where we ran into someone from the Raleigh area) and then stopped by a deli in Carmel and got sandwiches to take to the beach. We then continued south to Big Sur, where we got some nice views, and eventually made our way to a quiet rocky beach. After returning to Monterey, we found a restaurant that was showing the NC State football game, but it wasn't really worth watching, so we ended up making phone calls to Casey and Lydia. It goes without saying that we had fun, and I appreciated her driving down since we only get to see each other a couple times per year now, and I definitely miss hanging out with her and all my other NC State friends. One great thing about Monterey was the weekly farmer's market, so I was able to get some good California produce. Afterwards, a large group of us went to a bar for trivia night, but weren't very successful. I also went whale watching one day by myself. We saw some sea lions, maybe a dozen dolphins, and five or six whales (humpbacks I think). We didn't see any acrobatics... Sea World raises expectations too high. I had hoped to go swimming in the Pacific, but it was discouraged due to freezing water, rip currents, and hazards, so I had to settle for feet only. By random selection, it turned out I uploaded 107 pictures of these adventures to Webshots as well.

I had surgery on my gum on Friday. The gumline had receded too far and was revealing the root, so they took some off the roof of my mouth and grafted it on. I think the procedure went well but I was completely conscious during the whole thing (Novocaine only), which was a little freaky. Now I have two giant wads of putty over the two wounds, which is extremely uncomfortable and makes it difficult to eat and talk. I'll be glad when those come off on Friday. The pain was kind of bad the first day, but now they're only sore if I put pressure on them.

I'm back into the school routine now (took me a while to catch back up). I am taking Numerical Weather Prediction, which has been a little dry so far. I'm also sitting in on the tropical class lectures. Ed Zipser is a great story teller. We did talk to a woman in Monterey who has started sending us data from the Navy computer model, so my research is going to be slowly shifting over to how it predicted the cyclogenesis during this field experiment. I actually don't have any trips planned until Christmas, although I'll have to see what to do with my week for fall break.