Pasta and History, they go together like intestines and manuals.

So this morning as I was working on school work, Larry sends me a skype message (yes, when we are both in the house, we use skype to communicate) asking if I wanted to go see this. Down on the south side, right next to Heinz field, they docked the LST-325. It was a tank landing ship used during WWII and more specifically the battle of Normandy and after shuttling supplies and men across the English channel. This ship in particular was given to Greece, and then reclaimed by some old guys (really, it was crewed by a group with an average age of 71.5!) and bough back to the US and preserved as a museum. You can read more about it here as well.

It was all a very impressive event. We, Larry, His mother, and myself, got to stand in line for about an hour with a ton of people to get on. The ship could carry 30 Sherman tanks, or a bunch of troops, and it could float in 3.5 feet of water. It was the type of boat that would point towards the shore, drop anchor, and go full speed ahead to get up as far as it could up the beach. Then use the anchor (and the lightened load) to get back out to open waters. In side that had some decent displays and a bunch of cool photos, most of winch were taken on or of the ship. You could walk all around on the main storage deck, and up on to the main deck. They had some vehicles, some 'verteran' and some replicas that were stationed throughout the ship. All very interesting and enjoyable. If you want to see more pictures, you can go here. Gramps, I was thinking of you, we were right next to the confluence!

 So when I got back, I very quickly headed out to school. It is this time of the year. It is Never Ending Pasta Bowl at Olive Garden. I really enjoy this event, and seeing as I had no one to go with, I sent out an e-mail to all of the grad students (yeah for spamming mailing lists!) setting up an event. I told everyone to meet in front of Hamerschlag Hall at 5. We ended up having 9 people. It was awesome. Funny enough there was only one non-American, and she was a trooper. She spoke almost no English, but tried really hard to learn and figure out what was going on. It was good food and great company. They were a good group of people. All but one were Engineers, so the topics of discussion were rather uncommon, and odd, but it was a lot of fun. Don't worry, not nearly as cool as my Gonzaga friends, but still a good evening.

We all wanted to just lie down on the grass... we were so full.