Here's some quotes about today's weather from an A.P. story by Roger Petterson:

"Anybody in their right mind wouldn't want to be out in weather like this."

"We have a lot of kids that walk to school. We didn't think it was worth the risk."

"It was so cold that Toledo, Ohio -- 5 above zero at noon, up from 4 below -- even closed its outdoor ice rink. ‘The irony is not lost on us,' said city spokesman Brian Schwartz.

It was not too cold for some mountain biking!  Okay, maybe a little too cold.  When your freehub freezes, that's pretty much the end of the game right there.

So, I realize I haven't written in quite a while.  I mean, the last post was about the October snowstorm, and now there's a huge arctic blast in the Great Lakes in February.  You might think that it's been a really harsh winter.  Not so!  November and December hardly saw any snow at all.  But enough about the weather.

I'm going to brag a little bit because otherwise I become unrealistic.  I hate when people do that, but I need some perspective in the dead of winter in Buffalo.  Around New Year's, I was thinking about the previous year.  I started to think that I hadn't really accomplished anything of note in 2006.  It had something to do with the failure to explore any foreign countries.  But then I went month by month and realized that no, I designed a couple of websites.  I ran a marathon.  I applied for and got into grad school and took a few road (and train) trips around the eastern USA.  I bought a road bike in June and put just over 2,000 miles on it.  I moved to Buffalo and made it through my first semester of grad school: 17 credits of courses, and all A's.  So maybe I did accomplish a few things; perhaps my goals are a little extreme.

Then what will happen in 2007?  I've been in America for slightly over a year and I have a stable housing and funding situation.  That should mean that it's time to get moving.  Therefore, I'm plotting to go to Europe and Africa for the summer.  Meanwhile, I want to do some racing this spring semester with the U.B. Cycling Team.  But, I also want to qualify for the Boston Marathon, so I'm training for a marathon to race just before the cycling kicks in: over spring break in Maryland.  I shouldn't even write that here, because I recently get the impression that I won't be fast enough (yet).  The qualifying time is a speedy 3 hours and 10 minutes.  That's 43 minutes faster than my Buffalo marathon; not an insignificant amount!

Academically speaking, I'm very frustrated this semester.  My courses are all pretty good ones, all very interesting.  Except for Ethics in Professional Development.  The problem is that I decided it'd be a good idea to take 19 credits, and to take multivariate statistics without having taken the prerequisite univariate statistics (or any other statistics for that matter).  We'll see how that one works out... here we go ‘F' unless I start studying statistics as much as I run.  The other problem academically is that there are a bunch of big projects this semester: long research papers, independent readings, environmental modeling project, etc. etc.  You know, they are the sorts of things that are designed to help you on your way to writing a thesis.

That word "thesis" is sort of like a 35 mile per hour gust of cold arctic air finding the little gap between your socks and your pants and shooting all the way up, causing an arresting shock and reflex shrinking reaction.  What am I going to do?  This is worse than choosing an undergraduate major, and I think we all know how that ended up for me.  I should try to quantify how many hours of sleep I lose over this issue, starting now.

Anyway, enough wallowing in indecisiveness and winter cold.  I promise I will write about parties and Fung Wah next time.