April 2024 - College Visit #2 - PSU Altoona

Our second college visit was to Penn State at Altoona, a smaller campus with specialized programs.  Nick wanted to see the Rail Transportation Engineering program, so of course after sending three separate communications to prepare they weren't ready for us, and we'll need to go back again later. We viewed the 2024 Solar Eclipse with school-issued 'glasses' while on our tour, peeking around the young tour guide Brandon who was hopping around like he was on fire himself (nerves, I assume.) OK campus but old and tired, the Engineering Director is a good guy, and the lousy cafeteria food is expensive, those are the main takeaways.

We made the five-day trip into an adventure visiting local family, trekking thru heavy rains and flooded roads on Wednesday to arrive in the evening and get our first duck (a drink at Primanti Bros.) Our hotel was a little tight with two beds, but we made it work with minimal difficulties (not counting the traffic light out front that hated us.)
Thursday started with Brandi and Nick visiting the local train museum and seeing the famous Horseshoe Curve in Altoona where we stayed. Then lunch with Aunt Val and Uncle Vito at their restaurant, where we swapped car photos, caught up on the gossip before we saw everyone else, and had a good meal. Day one of pizza.
Friday was early dinner with Andy, Michelle and Grandpapa, who is more limited now, getting around with less ease. The new place on Washington St in Huntingdon was good food, and good company. Nick and I rode with Andy out to see a 1955 Ford F-100 that was a military bid spec vehicle at a guy named Travis' home. Rough shape, but an interesting story, I'll share the find when I see the F-150 guys later this month for the P800 clinic in Long Beach. It was an eye-opening experience for Nick to hang with the locals. Caught a movie in the evening as the theater was walking distance from our hotel, the latest Ghostbusters passed a couple of hours.
Saturday we spent four hours with Bobby and Jeanette at their home, just chatting at the dining roon table, before heading to Paesano's for dinner to see everyone else.  Nick made pizza with his Pap, ice cream with Grams, and we saw the rest of the gossip firsthand. Day two of pizza.

Sunday was one more visit with the grandparents, first the Perows, the Grandpapa Nicholson. Nick and I hung on the porch while Brandi chatted with her family, then he and I walked the campus at Juniata College, and saw a little soccer, then four innings of the baseball team against the Wilkes-Barre Colonels. Last day of pizza, please make it stop.

Brandi got to make a stop at the candy store in Tyrone as we wrapped up the weekend, loaded up on $35 worth of penny candy.  The drive home after the PSU school visit was against the eclipse traffic, I estimate a four-hour backup on the Ohio Turnpike going east as we headed home west. 

Photos here from Spring 2024.

March 2024 - College Visit #1 - Indiana Tech

College visits are underway, our first one was to Indiana Tech in Ft. Wayne.  Brandi scheduled it for a Saturday, so as not to disrupt his school days, then snow was forecasted and we snuck out on a Friday night. Awesome dinner at Salvatori's, an Italian joint on the north end, couldn't have been better.  And nearly a good night's sleep, except for me roaring briefly at the cheerleaders partying in the hallway at 10 PM.

It was a visitation event, roughly 100 families or so gathered for the tour. Nick's selected major is Mechanical Engineering, one of three colleges at IT. It was a sunny but cold tour, our guide Haley was outstanding (and chatty), taking us through several buildings, including the dorms (where we temporarily evicted four co-eds and their Dots Pretzels). Ever prof was passionate, and the equipment was impressive. Nick lit up at the mechanical areas of the new facility, dreaming of what he could do with a million-dollar 3D printer. Afterward, he impressed a prof at the tables by explaining thorium energy, and bragged about the cafeteria food, which from what I could surmise was pizza and chicken nuggets (Gen Z food.) Given the reasonable driving distance, the small campus, and the facilities in Nick's area of focus, IT is a real possibility; we have more homework to do, more visits, and Nick will be focused on his GPA for the coming weeks, as things get real.

Before returning home, we stopped a railroad historical society about ten minutes outside of Ft. Wayne, where the project manager Andrew, and one of the 80 volunteers, Tom, took us thru the facility, where Nick hopes to volunteer while he's at school a year from now. I must admit, the idea of him learning in the IT environment, and applying it in this train 'garage' where they refurbish real locomotives, it's an applicable skillset, and real impact. I can see the vision better now.

This was the month for the 'socks of terror', which was a simple shipping error from Amazon, a package that was not ours, but Brandi called the local Sheriff, who came out, and filed a report, all while I was in the shower.  Nick and I discovered a new pizza place in Dundee, River's Edge, and we've already been there twice. He was able to repair a taillight bulb in his car while I was gone on a work trip, in between his fling tests in G-Mod, I assume, and eating his Chernobyl-grade peeps leftover from Easter.

Photos here.

Energy Matters on WGAU

I took a short trip around the south for work, with a workshop in Nashville for the aftersales team at Nissan, a stop in Pinehurst to visit family, and then swung back south to Athens for a weekend.  While in GA, I was invited onto the Energy Matters radio show on WGAU by my colleague from work, my first time on radio.  The fun is keeping up, four segments of eleven minutes each, no prep, the time fills fast.  Here's a link to the show that day in podcast form where we discuss cars, and then specifically alternative powertrains in commercial vehicles.  Link here to Episode 276 from March 2024. 

 

February 2024

Nick drove us out to the Cleveland Auto Show, which was better than anticipated, they combine a new vehicle display with some classics in an adjacent conference center, and the vehicles were well organized. We made a stop at Citizen Pie, Nick's favorite pizza joint in town, as usual.  Was his first long drive on the expressway, he handled the Turnpike well.

Bran bought Nick some new Ikea furniture for his room, the first time she purchased was unsupervised, and she came home with little-people dressers that looked small even next to her. So we made a date night of it and returned to pick up some large cubes, which work much better.  It's tough for Nick to sift through stuff and weed-out what's old and can go in the donation bin, but we cleared out a little.  She setup files for his college paperwork, including one labeled 'Other Shit', which is accurate, just seemed interesting to me for a teenager's room.

January 2024

Nick's birthday was a low-key affair, a pookie and a few balloons.  I had a trip to LA for a clinic this month, so I was gone for a short week, dinner on the beach and a successful clinic in Pasadena, including a couple new bars with the gang, and finally dinner with my team in Huntington Beach.

Warming up fast, not much of a winter, Nick shoveled the one snowfall we experienced.  
The general teenage mysteries continue.  Why does he require a half-dozen alarms and clocks and still sleep through them all? And when we're having a casual conversation, why does he think to ask me about extradition laws, for what purpose?  He did cook a little more this month, I had him working on a roast and gravy, gotta start honing the cooking skills before college.