| moving! |
[Nov. 18th, 2004|09:35 pm] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Iron Maiden - Fear of the Dark | ] |
Not that I update this puppy much anyway, but I'm moving to the blog I have set up on my home page:
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jpr
see y'all there |
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| qualifying exams! |
[Aug. 19th, 2004|02:14 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  drained | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Smashing Pumpkins - Thirty-Three | ] |
gah, I'm ready to take these qualifying exams and be done with them. Forget about being "prepared," I just want to be able to stop studying most of the day every day. They can't possibly be as bad as they were last year... right?
In other news, tomorrow I'm sitting on the panel of graduate students that get asked questions by the newcomers. At least that will get me here in time for the free pizza.. orientation week rules. |
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| Mammoth Caves! |
[Aug. 4th, 2004|12:37 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  satisfied | ] |
So on the weekend of the 24th, Todd, Mira and I embarked on a historic trip to Mammoth Caves in Kentucky. Our trip went something like this.
Saturday morning, 10:00 AM - Todd and Mira arrive at the hip bachelor pad (i.e. my place) and I make blueberry pancakes.
Note: You can click each of the following pictures to see a high-resolution version open in a new window
Sometime later we hit the road. At some point we stop at a gas station in Kentucky. I took three pictures of some random car thinking I was just advancing film, then took this picture of Mira who was standing nearby. I cleverly focused the camera on the gas pump behind Mira. That camera is junk I tellya...
We drove a little ways away to sit in a parking lot while Mira smoked a cigarette. I think we parked in a restaurant parking lot.. maybe we wanted to eat, I forget. Anyway, while we were waiting, I snapped this shot of a classic Kentucky car. You can't tell from this shot, but the rear tires are humongous and the interior is basically gutted. The car is also painted matte primer gray. Awesome.
After that, we actually got to the caves and I don't really remember the chronological order. Here are the pictures in some kind of rough order.
This is Todd standing in the forest. We had to go off the trail a couple of times.. sometimes to avoid trees that had fallen on the path (which was technically closed....) and other times just to check stuff out.
And here's Todd and Mira both in the forest, probably a little later.
Some time later we got to a "scenic outlook" on the trail. Here's what the scene was. This is a river - I forget the name. There was a pretty steep cliff down from where we were standing, but down in the river there was an island. We ended up hiking down to it later, and balancing on logs to get out to it. It was covered with underbrush and stuff which we rooted around in for a while.
We also hiked to the point where the River Styx springs up from under the limestone. It does so at the base of a limestone face about 60 or so feet high. Around halfway up this face there is another, smaller spring coming from a hole in the rock wall. Todd and I climbed out to this hole to see if it was big enough to climb in. We couldn't see in (and hadn't brought flashlights) so I took a picture hoping it would show me later how far back the hole went.. and this is how far.
For reference it's about 4 feet high at the beginning. I should have had somebody sit inside for scale..
Later Todd and Mira were standing around and I took a picture for some reason.
Sometime during the night, somebody crashed their car into one of the power transformers along the road leading to the campground, putting everything out of power. We all woke up at 8, ready to go to our 9:30 tour, but found it cancelled.
Later we got tickets for another tour, but that eventually got cancelled too. Here's Todd and Mira waiting for the bus that was going to take us to our second cancelled tour. This was before we found out it was cancelled.
We goofed off for a while, but finally ended up going on a $4 torchlight tour of one of the most tourist-y areas of the cave. It had a cool entrance though... massive. Would have been awesome to get to it before they paved everything and put the concrete steps and lights in there.
This is how it looked from outside.
This is how the entrance looked from the inside. I left all the black on the edges of the picture to try to give an impression of the scale.. dunno if it worked. You also can't tell from the picture, but the cave ceiling got really high later on.. I'd guess 40 feet or so.. and it was 250 feet underground, under the camp offices and hotel.
This is me rocking out inside the caves.
I took some more pictures inside the caves but they didn't come out. Later when I get the pictures that Todd and Mira took, I can give you, the viewing public, what you want... more pictures of yours truly. |
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| donuts |
[Jul. 28th, 2004|01:31 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | content | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Nancy Sinatra - Bang Bang | ] |
Wow, those white Krispy Creme powdered snack donuts are like crack. A few of those and a golden delicious apple + water makes a delicious snack.
Just in case you wondered. |
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| Cataract Falls! |
[Jul. 15th, 2004|01:59 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | content | ] |
So last weekend a bunch of us grad students went to Cataract Falls (near Terre Haute) and picnic'd it up. Much fun was had by all despite the humidity and the fact that it rained a little. Many pictures were taken but here are the ones with me in them.
Crawling down on a rock ledge near the lower of the two waterfalls...
Standing on a rock in front of the higher waterfall...
Standing on a rock above the waterfall..
Everyone but Todd and Mira (Todd took this picture)
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