There's something I'd like to mull over outside my head, but I can't, so I won't. What spectacular logic on my part!

Today was St. Patrick's Day; Tory ended up with a green velvet scarf-cum-turban on her head to avoid being pinched. Funny, I don't remember that having been an issue at home—probably because so many people were Asian and Jewish that there was nobody left to be Irish. Sorry if that sounds like a blunt and slightly crass stereotyping to you; I honestly think that we funny bunnies of JPS grew up in such an odd environment that wry, self-deprecating comments on the strange ethnic situation simply became the norm.

Anyway, I've just two exams left after the veritable hell that was last week. This quarter was of the shoot-high-and-land-on-your-ass variety, as I termed it in an IM conversation a couple of days ago. I definitely embraced mediocrity for the quarter about a month into it, so I might as well take it all the way, right? Oh well. Can't wait for Wednesday afternoon to be over, and to have some down time to do whatever my silly self pleases...

Read a really engrossing book through a sunset and a sunrise. Take my brother backpacking for his first time. Work on some websites I'd promised to do. Draw things. Write things. Plant things. Bike places. And, best of all, go croc hunting! Yeah! And then a new quarter with new classes and new goals and new plans to actually reach those goals. Whee! Gonads and strife!

And we'll end with a rather pragmatic note: a month ago to the day, I was climbing in Joshua Tree with OEP at a face called the Atlantis Wall. When it was time to leave, I couldn't find my camera that I'd carefully placed in a secure hollow of a boulder about an hour before. The entire group searched around the base for at least 20 minutes before I resigned myself to the fact that some evil squirrels had made off with it, or some other equally likely explaination. I was fairly down, mostly because of sentimental reasons. First, I'd taken some promised photos of joshua trees against the desert dawn which I'd been excited to bring home. Second, the camera was a rather expensive one with a kick-ass zoom that I'd bought with the near entirety of my wages from my first job the summer after sophomore year of high school.

The night after I got back, though, I got the most serendipitous email from one of our instructors. Three other climbers had also been at the wall, though they'd left a good while before we did. At the time, everyone's gear was scattered around the boulders at the base of the face; this gear included my camera, which they accidentally took with them, assuming it belonged to another member of their group. They realized the fluke before they left the park, and left it with the West Entrance ranger station on their way out. Luckily, they were also Stanford students and emailed one of our instructors with that tidbit when they got back to campus. It was the most random and fortuitous occurance, and I excitedly looked up the park's phone numbers so that I could call them during business hours the next day. I've been calling the lost and found every few days since President's Weekend, though almost always getting automated answering services. A couple of weeks ago, I reached a live voice for the first time, who informed me that there was indeed a record of the camera at the West Entrance ranger station, though lost & found at the headquarters hadn't yet recieved it. No more human contact since then.

I suppose I can be miffed about the incredible—well, incredibly nonexistent—pace at which ranger operations move down there, but for some reason (SCA, perhaps?) I feel a bond with fellow national park workers; after all, it can't be more than a couple dozen rangers who staff that vast, brutal expanse of Mojave and Colorado deserts and they must be stretched fairly thin. I guess I've been letting the miffedness surface in the direction of the other climbers, who I think should have been a little more careful about gathering their stuff in the first place. That they actually have a record of the camera being turned in is really comforting, but it's been a long time. I really hope I get it back in my hands soon.

Whoops, this little postscript got uncontrollably long.