Turn Right at the Light, Go Past the Trailerparks

As I go into the last 8 hours of my life of being a pre-old fart, I'm going to celebrate what little rebelliousness remains with me. Let's take a trip to Mojo World. Turn it up.

The Boy Gets Sewn Up

We had our first trip to the Emergency Room with Jackson late yesterday afternoon. He was playing down in his sister's room when he sat down on a glass vase and cut his legs up. He had two small cuts on his left thigh, and two cuts on his right calf muscle. Three of the cuts were pretty minor, but one on the calf had carved up a small chunk of muscle, and kept oozing blood even after we put pressure on it for a while.

I wasn't sure if a clinic would do stitches, so we went ahead and took him to the ER at Summit. Fortunately, they weren't very busy and took him back pretty quickly and the doctor looked at it about 10 minutes after we got there. He decided that the cut would need some stitches plus they wanted to take a X-ray to make sure there was no glass in it.

The X-ray was not fun, since we had a hard time making him hold his leg still enough to take three shots. Then the nurse came in and put something on a cotton ball and taped it over the wound to deaden the area. After about 15 minutes, the doctor came in with an EMT that was helping out that day to do the stitches.

It turns out the cotton ball was just to lightly deaden the area so the doctor could inject more stuff to really deaden it up. Marissa was holding Jack's chest, I was holding his thighs, and the EMT was holding his feet. This part was just terrible. When the doctor stuck the needle in Jack started screaming at the top of his lungs and bucking all over the place. His face turned beet red and he kept saying "Daddy are! Daddy are! Daddy are!" Jack was crying, Marissa was crying, I was crying, and the EMT didn't look very happy either. The doctor, who looked to be in his late 50's, was completely unconcerned and put the three stitches in very quickly.

On the way home, we got Jack ice cream and potato chips, so he cheered up pretty quickly. We also got him some band-aids with the characters from Cars on it, so he was pretty happy about that and made Marissa put a few extra ones on him. Marissa and I were nervous wrecks the rest of the evening, and I don't think either of us slept very well.

Guessing Game Update

Ok, no one had a clue what the image was from last week, so here's the original picture in all it's glory. Maybe you can tell where I cropped the image from now. Are those skid marks?

Happy Saint Patrick's Day

I forgot to wear green today, but to make up for it, here's a classic to help celebrate.

Hardins Cave

We went to Hardins Cave last night. This was my seventh trip to this cave, but it was still a lot of fun. We had a good group, including several new grotto members. I would try to name all of them but with my poor ability to remember names I'm sure I'd mess things up horribly. Joe Stewart was there with his seven year old grandson, along with Kylie. Jody Bailey actually showed up, which was great since he knows the cave so much better than I do and was able to point out things that I never noticed or had forgotten about.

We went back to the rope climb-up and then turned around since it was getting late and we had gotten a late start. I kept up pretty well on the way into the cave, but I started slowing down a good bit on the way out since my total lack of staying active over the winter started catching up to me and my quad muscles were just about shot from climbing over the piles of breakdown.

We found some really nice crinoid stem fossils in the ceiling in a few places. The biggest difference between this trip and most of my previous trips was the amount of water in the cave. This was the first time I've actually seen the stream in the cave with running water, and there was a small waterfall very close to the entrance that had never been flowing on any of my previous trips. The waterfall in the big room was flowing as well, whereas in the last few years it's only been dripping.

Photo Guessing Game

So let's have a guessing game. Anyone care to ponder what the above image is? I cropped it out of a larger image and enlarged it a bit, but otherwise it has not been enhanced in any way. Actually, it represents a "de-hancement" of sorts. If I stare at it long enough, it starts looking like the face of a demonic bunny.

The winner of the contest gets a virtual overnight stay at the Motel of Love in Chicago.

Back to Cedar Ridge

So several people in the grotto have been asking me to arrange a trip to Cedar Ridge, which I first visited several years ago. I finally relented and planned for a trip this past Saturday. One by one, everyone dropped out, so only John "I am the" Law showed up at Shoney's on Saturday morning. This cave is really awesome though, so we loaded up in the Honda and headed for Monteagle.

There were snow flurries that morning in Nashville, so I was expecting some possible bad weather going over the plateau, but the only thing bad up there was the fog. You could only see about 30 or 40 feet ahead on top of the mountain, but of course people were still blazing past me at about 80 mph or so. By the way, if you're going down I-24 past Murfreesboro, the local cops there apparently need to make up a budget shortfall, since they had about 6 brand new SUV vehicles planted in the median waiting to write tickets.

We got to the cave about 10:30 and headed in. It was pretty chilly outside, but the cave was much warmer. The first time I was in this cave, we didn't have any really bright lights, but John brought a 50 watt track light hooked up to a big battery that we used to help light it up for pictures. This is definitely the way to see this cave. This light made my 3 watt Apex look pitiful by comparison and showed off a lot more detail when it was turned on.

As I've said before, this cave is simply amazing. I've never seen one this beautiful anywhere else, and I've been told by long time cavers in the area that it's one of the best for the sheer number of decorations in a small space. We spent about 3.5 hours in the cave, mostly letting John get his camera set-up.

Afterwards, we did the obligatory tacos and cold beer at the Mexican place in Kimball, TN and then headed back to Nashville. I could tell it had been a while since I'd been caving since my shoulder and upper back muscles were pretty torn up, and are still sore today.

Here's a picture of me that John took in the cave. You can also see more of his pictures by clicking here.