Edward's stuff

well, another major speed bump on my road to getting my master's degree has been cleared. I did my thesis defense today, and i got through it OK. now all that stands between me and being completely done are a few more revisions and some paperwork. i feels really good to have the defense finally out of the way.

in other news got my official job offer from the National weather service for the Juneau, AK job. so here are some more details. as i have said before i was hired as a GS-9 with a pay of $39,975 per year and a 24% cost of living allowance. this is a permanent full time position so i can get health and life insurance through them if need be. i also found out specifically what they mean when they say that travel and moving allowances authorized in the job announcement. it means that the government will pay all or part of you getting to your destination. this includes ferry bill, $0.19 per mile for driving and 70 per night hotel cost. Plus they will also hire a moving company to move all of your household goods to your new place of residence this includes up to 90 days of temporary storage of said goods. so in other words no Uhaul trailer required. no apartment yet in Juneau, but i am in the process of trying to finalize one.

weather here has been hot recently highs have been in the high 80s to low 90s for the past few weeks, with a few passing storms.

well if you haven't guessed what news i have just by looking at the title then there is no hope for you. i got a phone call this morning, turns out it was someone calling from NOAA. it was to inform me that i had been selected to get the General Forecasters position in Juneau, AK. so all the schooling i have been through has paid off so far. they hired me at a GS-9 pay level which translates into about $39,795.00 - $51,738.00 annual salary. also since the cost of living is so high there i will also be getting a Cost of Living Allowance of about 24% of base salary and is not taxed. so now it falls to me to get paper work filled out, find an appartment up there, and work out how i am going to get there. one bad thing about it is that there are no roads going to Juneau what so ever. the only way into the city is by plane or boat. thankfully there is a vehical and passenger ferry run by the state that travels up and down the coast on a regular basis. even better is that the southern port for this ferry is in washington state. the disadvantage is that it will cost me over $1000 dollars for me and my vehical to travel one way on the ferry from washington to juneau. oh well can't complain too much when my moving expences are autherized to be paid for. tentitive start date in early September.  i am really looking forward to this.

of course with the promise of a job on the horizon, the push is now on to get my thesis done before i leave. my major professor should release my thesis to my committee by the end of this week. depending on whether or not we hear back from Dr. Price on getting a stand-in for her (she is on my committee as the out-of-department rep and she is also in Turkey till August 8th) my pre-defense meeting should be next week or the week after and the defense itself will be a week or two after that. if all goes well i should be done with that by around my birthday. crossing my fingers that i get this done in time.

weather here has been warm with temps hovering in the 70s and 80s with sunny skies. vegetation is still green out here, but it is slowly starting to dry out. the wildfire danger out here has gone up to high resently and may go higher as the summer wears on.

Was in Boulder, CO this past week attending the WRF Workshop. as with most conference some presentations were interesting and others were down right boring. the main point of the workshop was to bring together everyone that is working on the WRF model and talk about what would like to be done with it and show research that has been done with it so far. the most interesting of the talks involved modeling eddys that are in the eyewall of hurricanes. Boulder itself is a rather nice city. bike paths all over the place, and can't beat the view. Boulder is right up against the front range. so just on the western edge of town are mountains that are a few thousand feet tall. all in all it was a good trip.

on the job search end, i received an e-mail from AWS Truewind. i made it through the second cut. so that means that i am in the top three to get the position. this time they would like to meet with me personally. how that will work, i don't have the details on that yet. in addition to that, i received an e-mail today (monday) from the NWS in Juneau, AK in regards to the "General Forecasters" position that i applied for. i have a phone interview with them tomorrow (tuesday) morning. so two good possibilites.

weather here is currently clear. highs have been in the 80s. no really hot weather as of yet. it is still very green out here.

only two things to report so far in this topic. the first is in regards to the AWS Truewind meteorologist position i applied for in Albany, NY. I just had a phone interview with them Sunday evening, and through this found out how well my application is doing there. they apparently got over 70 resumes for the position in the three weeks since the opening was first posted. they conducted phone interviews, like the one i just did on Sunday, for their top ten. they told me that they will be narrowing it down to three by the end of the week. those three they will be bringing in for personal interviews.

the other possibility is in the national weather service. my application for a "General Forecaster" position was referred to the hiring official for the NWS office that the position is open at. oh and did i mention that this position is at the Juneau, Alaska forecast office.  the only reason that i know that i was referred is the site where i applied for this position stated that was the case. most of the other position in the NWS that i have applied for, i did not score high enough to be referred.

Crossing my fingers that either one of these works out.

well starting with the blizzard that we had in early may, it turned out to be one really wet month. Rapid City set a record for precipitation during the month of may receiving about 9.71 inches of rain. that not only makes it the wettest may on record, it also made it the wettest month ever since records began. and we are still getting more rain. just in the past 3 days we have gotten over 3.5 inches of rain here. flood warnings are up all over the place. except for the southern hills where they have received little rain. it has also been a rather cool month as well. i think we have only gotten into the 80s maybe 6 or 7 times. no 90s yet. currently it is cloudy here with drizzle and temps in the 50s.

thesis is coming along. i have got the basic structure down and written. i am to the point of inserting more graphics and other things into it and sending it back and fourth between me and Dr. Capehart for revisions. job search isn't doing so hot. applied for several intern postions at national weather service office around the country but have not gotten anything yet. according to Shawn one of the reasons is that there is currently an influx of people coming out of military service that are applying for these jobs and they get priority over us for these jobs. have applied for other jobs outside of the government as well. no dice there so far.

my parents and sister came out to visit me in early may. they liked the area. forgot to ask them if they liked the school i choose for grad school. anyway they, with me as a guide, got out to many of the sites around the hills, including: deadwood, wind cave, mt. rushmore, crazy horse, and several of the sites in rapid city. this was also the first time any of my college friends have met my sister. their first impression was there were surprised at how short she was.

a week later was Quest for Camelot, an SCA event hosted by the shire of Shattentor in Nemo, SD. i day tripped this event on saturday, and ended up spending most of the morning at the archery field and thrown weapons field. did rather well on the archery field considering that i haven't shot since Dub Dub 2006. shot my war point for archery which consists of 30 shots. did not win the war point for that though. the afternoon was spent on the rapier field. the war point tourney was short since all the fighters with the exception of one was from Northshield. so to determine war point the one Artemisia fighter had to fight all of the Northshield fighters one on one. the kingdom with the most wins got the war point. she put up a good fight getting four of our fighters to up getting her five times. so the war point went to Northshield. after that were various melees and pick up fights. the day continued with court that evening where we had not only the current king and princess of Northshield in attendance but we also had the king and queen of Artemisia in attendance as well. for me the highlight was that i received an Award of Arms. don't have my scroll yet, it is still being composed, and will be mailed to me eventually. the rest of the evening was spent talking and singing around the campfires. some new photos have been added to the SCA gallery.

the number of geocaches that i have found so far is at 101. find number 100 was at a very nice overlook about five miles west of rapid at a place called Buzzard's Roost. that cache became find number 100 after i tried to get to the cache "Lost Railroads: Dark Canyon" as number 100. scraped finding "lost railroads" after considering the creek crossing a little too risky after the resent heavy rains.

blizzard is over now. just have the winds left. storm total here in rapid is 13 inches of snowfall. the northern hills got hit harder with lead getting 32 inches, deadwood got 28 inches and one report near harding had 4 feet of snow on the ground. sun is out now and it is already starting to melt away.

no classes today and with my paper for scaling done, i have some time to update this. the reason for classes being canceled is because of the weather. Rapid city and the Black hills are getting pounded by a late season blizzard right now. looking out my window (the parts i can see through, all the windows are plastered with snow) right now i can barely see the NWS building. snow is falling and being blown around by 35 to 45 mph winds with higher gusts. Rapid City has effectively been shut down by the storm. all schools are closed including the universities, most businesses are closed, I-90 between Wall and the Wyoming state line is closed, a general "no Travel" advisory is out for the entire black hills and for highway 85 from the north dakota boarder to custer. it is very hard to tell how much snow we have right now since it is getting blown around alot. storm is suppose to lighten up later today and be gone by tonight. storm totals so far are around 8 inces of snow in and around rapid with upwards of 2 to 3 feet or more in the higher hills also a 62 mph gust was reported here in rapid as well. and just think we hit 80 degrees on tuesday.

other news: this week was the last week of the semester. finals are next week. i only have one final which is Radar on monday at 2 pm. due to the blizzard one of the final presentations for scaling has been moved to the time that was set asside for finals for this class which will be tuesday at 2 pm. have started applying for jobs. sent out my application for intern positions at the NWS offices in Nevada and in Kansas. still have to get my transcripts faxed to them thought. also it looks like i will be heading to a conference in bolder colorado in june.

two weekends ago got out to pierre to attend Provost's Challenge, an all rapier event. that was the most fighting i have done in a while. only won about 6 of the 30 or so boughts i fought so i need to improve my offensive game a bit. my defence was good as most people commented that i was rather hard to kill.

Geocache total has gone up to 99 finds. i also have found nearly all the caches in rapid city. of the ones that i wanted to find i only have three more to find. well it is time to continue watching the blizzard raging outside. good thing my parents didn't decide to come out this week instead of next week.