Time away

Christmas break has finally arrived! I finished my last final on Tuesday, so now I have – quite literally – nothing to do for three and a half weeks. Doubtless I'll fill most of my days with reading, episodes of LOST, Age of Empires III and random acts of tomfoolery. I'll be heading home to Cincinnati for a few days on either side of Christmas. Over the New Year's holiday, Sarah and I are heading to New England to visit Lake Champion, Sarah's brother's family in New York City and my sister's family in Portland, Maine, where we'll hopefully go skiing (Sunday River) and hit up the L.L. Bean Outlet in Freeport.
I'm also going to make a point to photoblog during break – especially during the New England trip. Without schoolwork to do, I'll need something to focus on!

Anyway, as I mentioned before, I decided to start off my Christmas break by taking a personal retreat. After spending some time looking for a location, I settled on St. Meinrad, a Benedictine Monastery and seminary in southern Indiana. The seminary had some interesting history – it was founded in 1852 by Swiss monks who were looking to expand their abbey to the United States as an insurance policy against the anti-Catholic Swiss government of the time. If the Swiss government became too oppressive, the monks planned to pack up and move to America. However, that never happened, and by the 1870s St. Meinrad had become an independent monastery.

I arrived Wednesday afternoon and pretty much spent all of my time in reading and prayer. I took an hour in the afternoon to walk around the grounds and take photos, and also attended the evening Vespers service in the monastery. The most interesting reading I was doing was from Tim Keller's "Counterfeit Gods," an excellent book about modern idolatry. When I'm finished with it I may have to devote a post to it.

Anyway, here's a few pictures. These were all taken with my Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8. I'm digging the superwide.

Vacation, briefly

I don't have much time to compose a post this morning, but I thought I'd post a couple pictures from the vacation so far. It's amazingly beautiful here. The weather has been great, the travel easy, and we've seen an incredible amount of things in just a few days. We were in Yosemite National Park the last couple days and today are back in San Francisco. We're going to do some things here today (Golden Gate Bridge, etc.). Should be a fun day!

The Mariposa Grove in Yosemite National Forest:


The view from our backcountry campsite in Yosemite:


On a random dome in northern Yosemite:

A bit more spring break stuff....

I'm on a real blogging kick here this past week... anyway, just wanted to post a couple more of my favorite photos from Florida:
This is the sandbar off of an island we stopped at for lunch one day. It was totally bird-infested. Or at least it was until we went running into their midst.


More of the birds.


There were a ton of Osprey. I thought this one was going to attack me for getting too close to its nest (the sign says "Manatee Zone, No Wake").


Plenty of sting rays, too. This was the biggest one I saw:


And lastly, might as well put one in of us actually kayaking, huh?

THA NK YOU FOR ISITIN GTHE GV SSOM AEROPLE X

I'm currently up near Kokomo, Indiana at a training session put on by the Indiana Department of Homeland Security. The session is "Introduction to Emergency Management," and covers a lot of the basics of emergency management, including the various functions and phases. I don't know how I fit in to all of this exactly (career-wise), but I know it's good to be here learning and making these connections. Most of the people here are much older than I am – of the 40 people here, 33 are probably white men in their 50 – and all of them have more things on their belt and flashing lights on their SUVs and trucks than me.

The class is at the dilapidated, somewhat-melancholy Grissom Joint Air Reserve Base (named for Gus Grissom). A few decades ago, the base must have had a thriving little community. It was originally a training and testing base, and has been greatly downsized in the last decade. One of the guys at the training is a local – "grew up just on the other side of that fence there," as he says – and talks about how he used to come onto the base to play with the military kids. It feels a lot more like a ghost town. Really, this picture says it all.

The base isn't entirely inoperative – there's still a squadron of KC-135 refueling planes that operates out of the base, and it's also been opened to civic use. The base might have been closed were it not for an accident that occured in 1964, when a B-58 (a supersonic bomber) skidded off the runway with five nuclear devices.

"On December 8, 1964, during a routine Operational Readiness Inspection, a B-58 strategic bomber skidded off the runway) at Bunker Hill AFB, IN (later named Grissom Air Force Base). The consequence of the accident was a fire and destruction of five nuclear weapons on the aircraft. The high explosives in the weapons did not detonate, but melted and burned, leaving some residual radioactive contamination in soils adjacent to the runway. The contaminated area was excavated and buried along with the aircraft wreckage at a different location on base. In June 1996, the Air Force Safety Center conducted a review of both classified and unclassified documents in its possession and concluded that sufficient data did not exist to support closure of the site. Since that time, the State of Indiana and this organization performed small- scale scoping surveys that identified a small area with elevated gamma radiation exposure levels. Soil samples collected from the area indicated the presence of depleted uranium."

Oops. Anyway, I guess that's a good reason to not close the base. Back in Bloomington tomorrow!

More pictures... from France!

Another little update since it's been a couple of days.

Tuesday we traveled from London to Caen in an exhausting all-day excursion. It was bus to Dover, then ferry to Calais, then bus to Caen. It took us about 12 hours total to get to our destination – partially because of problems with the ferry (bad weather combined with a strike of French ferry workers). Anyway, we arrived in Caen last night.

These pictures are mostly from today, apart from the first one from the back of the ferry (the coast of France is just visible on the left).

1. On the ferry.
2. Omaha Beach.
3. The American Cemetery near Omaha Beach.
4. German gun emplacements near Longues Sur Mer.
5. The town of Aromanches, where the allies built their artificial harbor on D-Day +2. An engineering marvel of the time, most of the parts of the artificial harbor can still be seen just 2km off the coast.
6. In Bayeux, in front of the Bayeux Cathedral with several of the students on the trip. We ducked inside (it was beautiful) and then went to see the Bayeux Tapestry, a famous 11th-century depiction of the battle between the Normans and Saxons (involving "William the Bastard," later known as "William the Conquerer."

All in all, very cool stuff. I'm exhausted and hoping to catch up on some sleep tonight. I'll certainly post full sets of photos later on Flickr or something... so far I think I've taken 487 photos on the days we've been here. Yipes.

I love London.

A few images from my day in London today. The internet isn't so good, so I'll have to post my full set later. In order:

1. At the new home of football. I watched an Arsenal game at the "Gunners Pub" in Islington then went and saw Highbury and Emirates. Happy day.
2. Phone booths on Fleet Street.
3. Platform 9 3/4 at King's Cross!
4. Random bikes.
5. At the Arsenal tube stop.
6. At the newly-remodeled and refurbished St. Pancras train station.
7. There are flowers here. It's green. It's (sort of) warm.

In short, I LOVE it here. I could live here.

Happiness is...

Happiness is a warm nap in the sun.

Another fantastic day yesterday. More work - I ended up taking a lot of photos of people golfing – but then more play, too. We went down to the beach near San Diego and had a great time. We saw a bunch of seals up on one of the beaches, too, which was cool.

All the photos here.

Joshua Tree

Well, if you didn't know, I'm in San Diego on business. My friend Mark got a gig covering a biotech company's annual sales conference and needed a hand, so he and I are out here doing audio/video coverage of the conference. It's not a terrible amount of work – in fact we have quite a good amount of free time.

Today we had the most amount of free time we'll have all week, so we rented a car from the hotel and drove to Joshua Tree National Park – a place I've wanted to visit for a long time. Mark and I had a U2 moment in front of one of the Joshua Trees (also, the middle picture is Mark's, you can find more of his here) and really enjoyed the awesome views. The weather was great, too – not too hot or cold.

The only downer today was finding out Arsenal lost to Manchester United 4-0. Blech. That's okay, though... we'll beat 'em in the league!

My full set of pictures can be found on Flickr here.

'San Diego'

The view from my hotel room in San Diego as of 5 minutes ago. :) I'll have to write more about what's going on a bit later... off to dinner right now.

More Philly...

We got the tour of Independence Hall today! It was really cool to be in the room where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were debated and voted on. I didn't find any clues to a giant masonic treasure, but I'll keep looking.


Also, as we were talking to the historic district of Philadelphia, we passed a McDonald's with this trash can out front – and for some reason the clever graffiti made me laugh out loud. So apparently one graffiti artist thinks McDonald's is murder – but another says, "Hey, who cares? It's delicious!" Maybe this is only funny to me ...

The House of Pass and Stow

I'm on a business trip in Philadelphia right now, but while I'm relaxing in my hotel room this evening I thought I'd put the free Internet access to use and post a couple pictures.

Though I've been to Philadelphia before, I've never seen the historic part of town, including the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. I am a bit of a history nut, so I was pretty excited today when Jessica and I had a couple free hours and were able to walk over to Philly's historic district.

After all, Philadelphia full of interesting American history. It's one of the U.S.'s oldest metropolises, established in 1682 by William Penn. It was the home of the first government of the united colonies, home to the first Supreme Court, home to the first and second banks of the United States and is still home to a federal mint.

We ran out of time today to get the tour of Independence Hall, but we're planning on taking our lunch break tomorrow to go back. I'll try to sneak off to discover mystery like Benjamin Gates does in "National Treasure..."

Vacation... Part II

Just a few more pictures to share.

The road through the Smokies:

The inspiring view from atop Clingman's Dome, the highest point in Tennessee:


And camp:

Vacation ... Part I

Here I am at the top of Rainbow Falls on the Horse Pasture River ... the falls were a 25-minute hike from the car, and we arrived an hour before the park closed. The locals assured us that the park service would actually lock the gate and lock the car inside the park at 6 p.m., so we really had to run through the woods to get a view of the river and the falls.

It was a real Last of the Mohicans moment, running through the woods and running along the river. Incidentally, lots of the movie was filmed right in this area, possibly even some on this river. I felt like I was in the movie. Except I didn't jump off the waterfall.


Here's a view from Newfound Gap in the Smokey Mountains National Park. The fall color was really coming out at higher elevation.


We spent one night in the Chataloochee Valley on the eastern side of the park, in an area where they had repopulated elk back in the 1990s. We got there kind of late, just as the sun was going down, so I wasn't able to get very many great pictures... but I do like this one.


Now you may be asking yourself, "Why didn't Tim approach the wildlife?" Well, here's your answer.


More to come, later...