Wayne and Erika Pfeiler

Since basketball is about as big around here as football in Tennessee, we had to experience it first-hand. Both the BME students and Food Science club got block seating for the NCSU/UNC game at the RBC Center on Wed, Feb 22. Erika and I got tickets with the BME group, but we showed love for the Food Science club by attending the pre-game at Tri's place.

Technically the BME program I'm in is joint between UNC and NCSU, but since I'm always at State I wore red to the game. Judging by the colors of almost eveyone else around me, I made the right choice. It was fun, although UNC won in the end.

We sat very close to the celing in the arena. You can check out the view from our seats. The people dressed like "Where's Waldo" on the bottom left of the court are the NCSU Band members. The dance team did a half-time show, and some man tried to shoot baskets from around the court to win money. Bless him, he was old and only made one layup shot after many attempts.

Thanks to Carla for these pictures, we left the camera at home.

Posted by Wayne at 01:46 PM | Permalink

Today I went to the dentist...first time in forever. I know, every 6 months is best, but for some reason, graduate programs don't think it's important to include dental coverage for their students.

Rant 1) To be fair, they offer an optional dental plan at additinoal cost. But what they don't tell you until you read the fine print, is that the amount you have to pay in premiums annually is nearly equal to the maximum annual benefit. Wow. So I recently found a "Dental Plan" as oposed to "dental insurance" that gives a discount on rates and for Erika and me works out to save us money so we can be going regularly.

Rant 2) Dental Hygenists. I'm usually pretty laid back, but Renee seemed to get under my skin. So I fill out 10 pages of paperwork and then they want to xray me 80 times. First those awful bit wings - one of which cut my mouth/throat due to how Renee shoved it in there. Then they do the panoramic xray of my whole head. I should probably provide a little detail on Renee. She's about 4-foot nothing tall, blonde, and I've decided she has a naploean complex. So after the stand-up pano-scan xray, she's trying to take off the lead apron I was wearing. Sin'ce I'm about 6'3" tall, and to be nice, I crouch down a little so she can actually reach my shoulders. Somehow that gets her all upset and she tells me "No no! Stand up!" So I do, and she tugs pretty hard at the apron where she can reach it. She pulls and pulls and finally she's able to drag the thing off me. The rest of the session wasn't much better.

Luckily, I didn't have any cavities. Hooray! The tone of the dentist told me he was little annoyed at that, since I hadn't been to see a dentist in so long. Oh well.

Posted by Wayne at 05:34 PM | Permalink

I got a funny comment from IP address 210.21.235.73 early this morning. They used the email address denia@mail.com and were trying to advertise a link for "sports betting ebooks" and another link to "buy horny goat weed cheap".
No Thanks.

If you Google that email address, you'll see a bunch of similar comment spam messages with some variant of the common line "Hello, it's a very good site too".

Posted by Wayne at 09:17 AM | Permalink

So today I saw these chalked all over the NCSU campus. No other message, just "Don't Worry - Be happy!" with a smiley face. As you can see, this one was placed on the side of a dumpster, which is close to my building. Others were on buildings, sidewalks, walls, streets, pretty much everywhere.

Was it national be happy day or something? It's a long time since 1988 when Bobby McFerrin had the hit song, so I'm guessing there's some other significance. It'd be a catchy way to advertise some campus event, but I'd expect some other message to accompany it, or at least a location and date or something.

Weird. Does anybody else have a clue?

Posted by Wayne at 05:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sunday afternoon (before the Superbowl) we hosted a small baby party for our friends Ruwan and Shantha Sumanasinghe who are expecting soon. We had a good time and took several pictures. Erika made a nice lemon layer cake and a citrus punch and everybody else brought something too. It's funny how hosting little parties like this give us a great reason to keep the house clean.

Posted by Wayne at 02:40 PM | Permalink