| The Chronicles | Nighttime Nature Walk | ||||||
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 Really hard to know where to start. It's been quite a while since I updated, so I apologize. It's been eating at me for months that I haven't checked in. Easing I returned from Vegas without incident. My dad picked me up from the airport, as my car was still in the shop, and brought me back to Auburn. I prepared to go back to school for the first time since last fall by lazing about for a while. Because I only had six relatively heavy classes left, I decided to split my schedule up with "light" loads. This semester, I've been taking a French class and two engineering classes. The French class is basically a study of "ghost stories", but more seriously it's a study of the French works that are equivalent to Edgar Allen Poe's. For the final project, I have to write a research paper and give a ten minute presentation (en francais) on French science fiction. I'm not particularly looking forward to that. The two engineering classes that I'm taking (Power and Communications) are going relatively well. I'd tried to take each on earlier occasions, but due to a combination of overload and lack of discipline, I'd had to drop them part of the way through. Fortunately, I've applied myself pretty well this time, so I think that accounts for my better showings. It's amazing how much going to class every day can improve your understanding of the material. Letdown As the academic season began, baseball season began to close and football season began to arrive. Unfortunately, the Braves did a piss-poor job this year and missed the postseason for the first time since I became a fan. I'm grateful for all the years that they did great, but the playoffs this year were quite underwhelming without them and my next two favorite teams. In the end, I will say that I was impressed by Detroit and somewhat saddened that they lost to St. Louis. As for football, it's hard to know what to say at this point. Auburn's season looked so promising before flushing the game versus Arkansas and then royally botching this past weekend versus Georgia. I'd defended them all season, but I can't really defend the play recently. I suppose the one salvage from the season was the overwhelming joy/pandemonium that accompanied the win over Florida. I'd entered that game with a great deal of doubt. In fact, I wasn't even going to attend. At the last second, Kev & D convinced me to go after finding a ticket. Probably one of the more fun games I've ever gone to. Anyway, I don't anticipate talking sports again until spring. Cotillion In August before school started, my sister attended the Cotton Ball in Chattanooga. If you're familiar with debutante balls, it's one of those. My mom really wanted her to go, and I think Sarah enjoyed it. I rode up the night before and attended the "pre-party" at the Creative Discovery Museum with my brother and parents. We got to meet Sarah's boyfriend from Savannah, Ryan. Seems like a cool guy. Then again, I've always been pretty easy-going/accepting about the guys she's dated. We roamed around the museum for a while acting like little kids as opposed to dancing with the heavily chaperone crowd. The next night, I sported a tux and sat at a table with my dad, my grandmother, and number of other old people. Old people generally like me - particularly when I engage them with talk about the Glenn Miller Band. We watched the semi-ridiculous ceremony of the event, and I found the fact that the "queen" was ~19 and the "king" was ~50 to be kind of creepy. I also learned that you must have Confederate ancestry to be a debutante in the Cotton Ball...which made me further dislike the event. For growing up in the South and really liking it, I'm surprisingly anti-Confederate. It's not that I don't admire the "courage" of the people that fought in the CSA or anything. I just think they believed in a stupidly faulty system and were guilty of treason - and I find it strange that one would celebrate that. Being a Lincoln fan probably also plays into this. Rapidity As the semester kicked in, I started hanging out with the Navigators again and found opportunity to go on a rafting trip with them one weekend. I rode up to the Ocoee with Robert and some other guys. The Auburn chapter ended up meeting up with the Georgia Tech and Alabama Navigators. I didn't really mingle with them too much, but I did get to know a good number of new Auburn folks. Before school returned, I was somewhat lamenting the fact that I didn't have good chances to meet new people. As I built the bonfire, I had occasion to get reacquainted with a girl I'd had a crush on quite a while ago. I pretty much stopped talking to girls there for a while, so that was a change. The rafting was pretty fun. I'd been down the river before, but it'd been years. Ever since college started, I've started to feel like I need to do something outdoorsy at least once every six months. I'd really like to go skydiving or hangliding next.  The Ham It took a few months, but I finally got my car back from being repaired. It's still not completely fixed, but cosmetically, it looks pretty good. Finally got rid of the persistent dents and paint peels. On my way back from picking up my car in Chattanooga, I dropped through Birmingham to visit the crew. I started out by meeting Leigh (in town from Memphis) and Natalie over at the Summit. I picked up and read some books while they browsed at Gap. Afterwards, we met Cat, D, Amber, Paul, Clark, and Katherine over at the bowling alley. The first game, I was a little above my average, and the second, I got one of my better games ever - 158. We bowled a third game (I don't want to talk about it) before filtering out. D, Leigh, Cat, and I drove over to a coffee shop, talked of Cat's beard and my chin scruff, and then had dinner at a small Mexicanish restaurant. That night, we met back up with everyone over at Cat's place and played a rousing game of Balderdash - the game where you make up meanings for obscure words. It's much less intensely competitive (i.e. heated) than a lot of other games, and it can be really really funny. Our particularly fun words of the evening were 'boontling', 'alipile', 'fleus', and 'laminack'. I wanted to get back for tournaments the next day, so I drove home after the game. Nighttime Nature Walk I went back to nature again a couple weeks ago. Kevin had invited me to go camping/hiking with him and Nathan over the weekend. I'm not the kind of person that plans these trips, but I'm usually decently happy to go along. My one hesitation was that it'd be as late in the year as I'd ever been camping. I'm not a fan of the cold, so my trips are usually during the spring/summer. He'd decided that we'd try to do an 18 mile loop in the Smokies near Gatlinburg. As the three of us were coming from different directions, we decided to meet up at the trailhead. Unfortunately, the driving route that Kevin had suggested to me wasn't quite the "short-cut" that Mapquest denoted. It took me an hour just to drive across the park, and then I got dumped into the middle of the Gatlinburg strip on a Friday night. Think Vegas without the skyscrapers/resorts. By the time I arrived at 10pm, it was totally dark. We were expected to hike 5 miles to our first campsite, so we set off with our headlamps. Unfortunately, a storm with 100mph winds had come through the area earlier that week. Thus, there were downed trees across the path every half of a mile or so. So imagine wearing giant packs, the weather being chilly, being unfamiliar with a trail, and having to go over/through/under trees. Needless to say, our progress was not speedy. After wrongly taking a detour to a waterfall, we finally reached the campsite around 2am, set up, and crashed. At some point during the night, I'd curled up in my sleeping bag and became aware of what sounded like animal noises just outside the tent... like two feet from where I was laying. There was heavy breathing and an occasional snort. The animal sounded large. I stayed perfectly still for around half an hour until my position became unbearably uncomfortable. Finally, I realized that I'd misperceived the direction of the noise... that it was just Kevin. Yes, I can be dumb. The next day we made our way through the woodland debris. With the light it was easier, but the path was certainly still harder than any other I've encountered. We came across some hikers and talked with them over lunch. They informed us that our campsite for the second night normally required a permit... and that it had actually been closed for about a month due to bear activity. Seeing as we didn't want to go back through the wreckage and hearing that the path ahead was clearer, we decided to press on anyway. Along the way, we ran into a ranger who questioned us suspiciously about our plans and informed us of the same thing the other hikers had said. We really didn't have any other choice though. There weren't any other nearby campsites, and there was certainly no way we could do the rest of the trail that evening. We took our chances. We arrived at the campsite as it was becoming blisteringly cold. I tried to start a fire, but everything was too damp. As miserable as I've been in recent memory, I choked down a bit of food and passed out. I actually slept much better than I did the first night. We passed the hike the next day with word games, observed some pretty balds, and got out of the woods early that afternoon. When we got to town, we stopped at Cracker Barrel to eat, and I discovered that I had some urgent messages on my phone. Apparently, my mom had been taken to the hospital after a fall. Fortunately, everything was okay... she just sprained her back badly. It would've been nice if some people had left messages telling me that so that I didn't have to frantically worry. *ahem* I dropped by the Indian resort in Cherokee briefly on the trip back. I was curious to see if it had any p-game, and barring that, despite my dislike of the game, I figured I'd play a little BJ. Apparently the p-game is still illegal there, and the smallest limits on BJ were $15, so I left somewhat disappointed. And that's about all I've got to say about that. I've still got a ridiculous amount of movies/tv/books that I've seen/read over the past 9 months that I'd like to talk about, but I'm going to forego that again for the time being. Hopefully I'll get to it soon. | |||||||
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