I was born in Murray, Ky. but I grew up in Paris, Tenn., pop. 10000, located about 85 miles west of Nashville, in the Kentucky Lake area. Life in Paris is particularly uneventful: going to Wal-Mart is often a form of entertainment. I have relatives in Knoxville, and whenever they come to visit they ask us, "How do you keep from being bored to death?" Weeellll quite frankly, I have no idea. The most common outdoor activity is going to Kentucky Lake, or crossing over to Land Between The Lakes. Shopping/tourism destinations from Paris: across the state line to Murray, 22 miles; Jackson, Clarksville, or Paducah, each about 60 miles. Nashville is about two hours, Memphis about three, St. Louis about four, and for the more adventurous, Atlanta is something like six. The chamber of commerce is always pushing the fact that Paris is within a day's drive of 70% of the U.S. population. The problem is, that 70% of the U.S. population could care less about a rednecky town smack dab in the middle of nowhere. I suppose I'm painting Paris in a pretty dim light. It's actually a great place to live. For a small town it does have quite a bit of history and culture and it's not too far removed from the offerings of larger cities. I'd rather live there than a lot of other small cities I've spent time in. What I meant earlier was that I know many people from the East and West Coasts would write it off immediately as "passé" just because it doesn't have much nightlife. If you want excitement, maybe Paris isn't for you.
Anyway, the city's claim to fame is the annual World's Biggest Fish Fry, held each April. I suppose if our town had a local delicacy, it would be Kentucky Lake catfish, and apparently that was a reason to celebrate for past generations, so a festival was devised. I don't make a big deal about it because I don't like fish. But it brings a huge amount of money into the Paris area and the town's population rises to as much as 90,000 for one day. The TV stations from Nashville usually come and report live from Paris on the day of the Fish Fry parade. The only thing that will bring them to Paris is a tornado (proven in 2001) or a parade.
We also boast having a 70-foot scale model of the Eiffel Tower (touted as the world's largest, but I doubt that is true). In the early 1990s, Christian Brothers University in Memphis donated to the city a wooden replica that stood at about 60 feet. That was a nice gesture, but after several years the paint peeled and the wood rotted. Plans were made to build a new tower from steel. Paris, Texas had a larger model, standing some 65 feet tall, although it was not a replica--it seems to be an artist's own rendition of the real Tower. Apparently whoever designed the new model for our town wanted an edge on that one, as our new steel tower is slightly larger. Not to mention ours is apparently an exact replica, which should give us a few bonus points. So not everything is bigger in Texas. However, those Texans later saw fit to cap theirs with a red steel cowboy hat in an attempt to outdo us. It's no more silly than a short man buying elevator shoes, I guess.
Other interesting tidbits relating to Paris abound. For example, before reaching fame, Elvis Presley performed at the City Auditorium at the corner of Market and Rison Streets. Tony Award-winning actress Cherry Jones was born and raised in Paris. One of the first factories producing cat litter was located in Paris due to the abundance of clay in the area's soil. And perhaps the most interesting weird fact about Paris is that the name of the city's newspaper, the Post-Intelligencer, is almost entirely unique. Only one other newspaper in the country uses that name--and that's in the wee borough of Seattle, Washington.
I graduated from Henry County High School in Paris, which has about 1100 students. Our high school had/has a lot of problems, but maybe when they renovated it after I graduated, it improved. My favorite High School Memory is when we put a moistened Life Saver in this dude's chair and he sat on it, then walked around with a green life saver stuck to his ass until someone pointed it out. That was pretty stupid but we laughed anyway. There were a lot of crappy teachers at the high school, mixed with a few really good ones. Some of them seemed good until I moved away from Paris and I learned others' approaches to the same subjects. The school also had an overly high percentage of jocks and/or drug addicts. Oh, wait, I forgot, it was high school. Never mind.
After high school I left for Mississippi State University. Early on they were the college which showed the most interest in me, much more so than the institution I originally expected to attend, UT-Knoxville. Based on my ACT scores, MSU awarded me an out-of-state tuition waiver and a moderately sized scholarship to come and join their flock. I had a good experience there, starting out in electrical engineering. After two and a half semesters, though, I began to hate that program. I am a tinkerer at heart; I have been playing with electronic parts and computers since I was a small child, and I already knew a lot about electricity when I started in EE. The MSU program, which is very highly regarded in engineering circles, didn't want me to learn by tinkering, as I do naturally with anything technical. They wanted me to learn Thévenin's theorem and build circuits that didn't do anything and be treated like chopped liver by complete assholes. I guess those things build a good engineer, but I did not want to be a part of that system.
Another great interest of mine going back into childhood is the weather. MSU also has a good program in meteorology, which I knew prior to starting my first semester. I always did want to be a meteorologist, too, and I knew from the start that I would use meteorology as a backup plan in case engineering sucked. I took that option and was welcomed into the meteorology family. I was treated with dignity and learned things I actually was eager to know, as I had not been exposed to them before. I was excited about the prospect of becoming a meteorologist. It worked out well, as the math and physics classes that were the majority of my engineering credits were prerequisites for upper-level classes in meteorology. I was all set to become an employee of the National Weather Service. In May 2005 I completed my degree (B.S., Geosciences, Operational Meteorology concentration).
At the start of my senior year, I discovered how competitive the job market was in meteorology, and for the first time ever, I considered graduate school. It had always seemed like something only a crazy person would want to do--completion of a thesis seemed impossible. But it was starting to look like my only viable option. I discovered Saint Louis University and its meteorology program totally by accident. I visited the school over Fall Break that year and it made a huge impression on me. I applied there soon afterward, and before I could apply to other schools I was accepted to SLU and informed that I was being awarded an appointment as a graduate assistant. I was floored. My life was planned out, it seemed.
After graduating from Mississippi State I spent the summer working and enjoying myself in Starkville, without a care in the world, in anticipation of a long and storied career beginning in St Louis. Unfortunately, when I began to approach my last trip out of Starkville I got closer to my friends there than I've gotten to any friends I've ever had. I'd always valued having good friends but I guess I never realized how important friendships are until right before I moved to St Louis. I think I became a lot more mature that summer, at least on that level. I moved to the city about a month before classes began, to get settled in, but I took well to my new environment. I became a city dweller. I'd always been fascinated by urban areas and I finally got one to explore. Even now, after getting used to the ups and downs of city life, I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to go back to life in a small town.
Graduate school was tough, but a good experience overall. During my first semester I had a particularly hard time adjusting to meet the higher expectations of a graduate student. I was frustrated with life in general. The reason? It became evident to me that to excel in advanced meteorology I needed to be, as we would put it, a "weather weenie." And I just was not one. I didn't have the drive to remember all the things I was supposed to remember. I honestly tried to learn a lot of the material, but it didn't stick. Out of my frustration grew a need to tinker, to build, to create, and unlike my undergraduate years, I didn't have the free time to do these things. So I admit I slacked off. I did what I could and my grades were less than spectacular. The following semester I knew I couldn't get away with that any longer, but I still had trouble to a certain extent--particularly in preparation for my qualifying exams. With some persistence, some help from my friends, and some luck, I passed the exams. I got back in the academic groove partly because I found a niche for myself--I became skilled in applying my knowledge of computing topics to meteorology. It gave me a thesis topic and it made me somewhat unique among the student body. The second year was considerably easier even though I was working on a thesis. I graduated in August 2007 (M.S., Meteorology).
While attending high school I worked at a restaurant in Paris called Fresh Market. I really liked it a lot while I was there. I had a bunch of great friends there; we all knew what we were doing, and the pay was decent. I was a charbroil cook...cooking ribeyes, ribs, burgers, chicken breasts, pork tenderloins, pork chops, salmon, halibut, you name it. I also knew my way around a grease pit: chicken tenders, catfish, fried mushrooms, potato skins, fries. In a misunderstanding about which I will defend myself even today, I was fired from Fresh Market one week shy of my last day, which I had already announced. I had told the boss early in the last month that I would be going on a week-long mission trip two weeks later with my church. He acknowledged this and allowed me to go, or at least I thought he did. After the trip, I came into work on a Saturday evening to pick up the paycheck I'd missed, and he fired me. I think he was just in a bad mood that evening, from what the others later told me. I was only a week away from quitting, anyway, so I just let it go. I haven't been back to the restaurant since.
When I went to college I took advantage of my previous experience and got a job at Chick-Fil-A, where I remained for most of my freshman year. When I went in for work I usually ended up making the waffle fries. I wasn't treated with a lot of respect, and the pay was actually slightly below minimum wage (they got away with it I think because we were students and we didn't pay taxes). I managed to work an easy schedule of Tuesday afternoon, Friday evening, and Saturday morning. The latter two periods were always dead because everyone on campus was either out partying or recovering from partying.
After finishing my first year of school I was employed for the summer by Hendrix Electric, in Paris. I enjoyed it much better than the other jobs I'd held at that point. I'm not qualified enough to call myself an electrician. Really, I did everything nobody else wanted to do. I suppose my job title was "Ditch-Digging, Wire-Pulling, Outlet-Wiring Biatch." It was a good experience, though; it was my first real full-time job, and I learned quite a bit of practical knowledge. We had a lot of fun at work, too. Construction sites are more raunchy than a teen sex comedy. Van Wilder would have been cryin' for his momma.
I didn't have a job during sophomore year, but after I got out for the summer I went to work at Snow's Paris Plumbing & Electric. It was a great job. I worked mainly in the eBay division. People brought stuff in and we'd sell it on eBay at a commission. But I also learned a good bit about plumbing and electrical parts, expanding what I learned with Hendrix.
During my junior and senior years at MSU, I was employed by MFJ Enterprises performing ironic duties as an engineering assistant. FYI, MFJ makes products for the amateur radio market, and I was a shoe-in for employment since I am a licensed "ham." In short, my job was to build whatever the real engineers designed or visualized and determine where the problems were. Much of my time I spent running power tests on antenna tuners to determine how much power individual parts could handle. I saw RF do a lot of strange things: illuminate burned-out fluorescent tubes, ring telephones, blow fuses in devices that weren't even turned on. Just think what it was doing to my reproductive organs! I also learned the joys of RF burns. Aside from that nonsense, I prepared prototypes for manufacturing runs and even sold MFJ products at hamfests. I suppose my favorite task at MFJ was drawing parts in AutoCAD and translating the drawings into programs for the CNC machines. Neat stuff. I gave up a good offer at MFJ to attend grad school, and during my tough first semester at SLU I considered going back, actually.
At SLU, my work as a graduate assistant dealt mainly with two projects. Firstly, I worked on a project optimizing an atmospheric model for particulate dispersion forecasting applications. Namely, the MM5 model, and soybean rust fungal spores. It was this project from which I took my thesis topic. Secondly, I worked on a separate project using a biogeochemical model to study carbon sequestration by Iowa crops under different farming practices. I was unemployed for two months after graduation, while holding out for a job at the university. As with many university jobs, I kept being told I'd be employed "next week." Finally, I was hired, and I worked on a new operational project between SLU and Ameren, the electric utility company in eastern Missouri. Ameren had a really bad year in 2006, on account of two severe wind events and an ice storm, each of which put several hundred thousand St Louisans in the dark. During 2007 they approached SLU about doing custom observing and forecasting, and I was immediately brought into the project to write routines to process the data. Employment was, at best, temporary.
Strangely, just days after starting work on the Ameren project in November 2007, I learned of a job opening at Baron Services in Huntsville, Alabama. The job description was virtually identical to that of the job I'd just started at SLU, but the pay was better and it was a permanent job instead of grant-based. I interviewed immediately after Thanksgiving and was hired a week later. Immediately after the new year, I moved to Huntsville, and am now a Data Services Meteorologist for Baron. There are a lot of things I miss about St Louis, but I'm in a much more comfortable position in Huntsville, in terms of my quality of life.
I have a wide range of hobbies and interests, some of which are documented elsewhere on this site.
Specific items that also may be of interest:
If you've been acquainted with this site for a long time you may remember the extended opinions, beliefs, and descriptions of my personal life that once occupied space here. I decided that these were too self-centered: nothing to offer to the public. Just me yammerin' on and on about myself. I am going to try to refrain from that, except for on this page, where I will be as narcissistic as I want.
I have an e-mail address if you want to chat:
wimberjc#$*at(%!eas.slu.edu
Of course, paste that into your e-mail client and take out the junk before
sending.
I can be reached on AIM, too: longview999