Graduated thoughts from the peanut gallery

Well, I guess I've finally done it. After 7 years, a little blood, some amount of sweat and excessive tears, not counting the grey hairs or the character flaws acquired, I'm finally getting out of Case and Cleveland. Graduation was on Sunday, nothing holding me back but the packing and the furniture. It's strange, I must have been here for so long, I feel like I've grown into the place. Don't get me wrong, I by no means want to stay here, but at the same time this is the familiar ground now; this is where I'd spent most of my 20s, met most of my friends and went through everything that had been important to me in the past 10 years. There's something like nostalgia already trying to bite me and I haven't even left yet! It's even more ironic now, since such a large number of my friends from here have moved on and moved out over the past few years, so it's not like I can say that I have so many friends out here anymore. Which only makes my friends here that much more precious. I know I am horrible at keeping in touch, and who knows if we'll even talk once I move, and I have no friends in the place to which I'm moving, so I'm scared. It becomes so much harder to meet people when you're not in school anymore: when you're not all the same age and in the same place and more or less same situation. At work it becomes more about the age difference, and the family or single, and whether you've had enough time to brush your teeth let alone hang out and whether you even want to see the people you work with outside of work. I know it all manages to work itself out in the end, somehow, but it doesn't really help knowing this right now.

And the Mammoth Cave pics

If you ever wondered whether to take 400 film or a digital camera into the cave.... take a look at this comparison, see if you can tell which pictures were taken with what camera! Just click here

Goin' down to Kentucky

I packed all my camping shit into the car Friday morning in the rain and headed down to Kentucky to check out Mammoth Cave. Along the way I realized that 1)i'd of course managed to forget a bunch of stuff at home (typical!) 2)if it kept raining like this much longer I'd need to start collecting pairs of animals into my car and 3)it's a hella religious bible belt out there. I seriously wished I'd had a camera phone to take pictures of some road signs. My favorites were: "HELL IS REAL" in the middle of a corn field along I-71 and one with 5 out of 10 commandments chosen apparently at random on a sign surrounded by others advertising "ADULT books and video", "Gentlemen's club" and "XXX Dance parlor". Gotta love bible belt.
But it's all fun and games until somebody's eye gets poked out, or until my right to drink gets taken away. Now I'm by no means a big drinker, but I like to be able to enjoy a nice beer after I've driven for 7+ hours straight and especially after I hung out in the parking lot of the Mammoth Cave park visitors' center waiting for my friend Ben to get his ass to the park from Chicago (there was no cell phone reception and apparently the boy got lost. Anyway, picture this, two tired and hungry kids make it to a Walmart/supermarket with full intention of buying some alcohol to soothe the aching butts and are told that "this is a dry county". ARRRRRGH. At this point it's a matter of principle and we drive down to the next county (about 30 miles away) just to load up on the alcohol for the next couple of days. We were so pissed and hungry we almost got a speeding ticket (but thankfully got off with a "courtesy warning"... this would normally be accompanied by a comment about how i feel about cops. but in view of this unexpected lucky occurrence this shall be skipped.
The country around the park is a trip in itself: there are more "rock shops" than one would ever think would be necessary on the planet (who buys ROCKS??). Fortunately there was other stuff we could play with: (I got a block to sharpen my machete--yeah! i'm dangerous now!!! and a little folding knife for all those occasions when i just really want to have a knife. Just in case i turn into Doug and want to go around "killing shit", or just for making holes). There were a couple of fainting goats I got to chase around and try to startle, but they were not impressed with how scary I was. Come to think of it, neither was I. As it was, I did not manage to make them faint. They just laughed at me in their goat-fashion. I also got to go horseback riding for the first time EVER in my life! Which was fun even though I could feel my sitting bones for the next couple of days. Unfortunately we only got to walk the horses, none of the trotting or galloping or any of that crazy wild stuff.
As it happens, we got through three bottles of wine the night before doing the wild cave tour at Mammoth cave, which basically comes down to waking up with a hangover and feeling like hell, taking down camp and praying we didnt forget anything (oh yeah, i couldnt find my keys so i got the honors of waking up the whole camp-site just because the siren went off for a while. This is then followed by much undercaffeinated spelunking (gotta love that word!!!!) for 6 hours and a drive back in the ridiculous rain for another 7 hours. In fact, I didnt make it. Around 50 miles from home i just had to stop and take a nap, because I was falling asleep on top of hydroplaning and that just seemed like badness waiting to happen. It was still raining when I got to Cleveland and apparently had been raining non-stop since Friday when I left. It's still raining as I'm writing this and the evil weathermen promise rain for the next several days. How can there be so much water up there??

Finally Belize pictures!

What I've been able to recover from my laundered camera (thankfully the memory card was still good!) is now up in the Belize folder on my yahoo picture dump