Nature Deficit Disorder

First of all, I would like to say that the California Zephyr might really be North America's Most Beautiful Train Trip. Especially if you leave out the hilarious part where seven teenage boys wait on the bank of the CO River for the train to pass so that they can drop their pants and moon its passengers. I'm suspicious, though. Other train routes might be just as beautiful. I enjoyed traveling on the Amtrak so much that I have also booked my ticket home that way, this time on the Southwest Chief on August 3rd. I will post a verdict before the school year starts.

Nature Deficit Disorder is a phenomenon that actually exists. Caryn told me about it during our innovative campout in her parents' backyard in Hammond on June 28th. You can read about it here, and you can find out more about the backyard campout movement here. While you're busy doing all that heavy reading, I will post a photo of our awesome retro tent.

My campaign to manage my own case of NDD included a series of geocaches in a place near Griffith, IN called Oak Ridge Prairie, where I was swarmed by what seemed like hundreds of mosquitos at once on the way to a geocache entitled Oak Ridge Bottle Depository.

Next, five days at the Millers' cabin on the Titabawassee River. Grandma Miller passed away at the end of June this year, so the trip was at once our normal annual getaway and also a memorial to a complicated yet fabulous woman who called Gladwin her actual home. I will post my version of the cabin photos on my Facebook page, but include one here, of us geocaching.

As usual, my typical cabin activities included sleeping in, a leisurely breakfast, reading followed by a brief swim or pontoon ride, card playing, participating either in cooking dinner or cleaning up afterward, then relaxing by the camp fire and making sure I'm one of the last people awake as it burns down to ember-level.

The cabin is always a learning experience. This year, I learned that it is possible to stay there for five days without EVER going into town (of course others went into town on my behalf), and I was reminded again that you do not have to see a person every day, or even every week or month, to love and cherish them.

I didn't know whether to update my blog tonight, as I would like my posts to be all thought-provoking, which they rarely are, and I knew this one would not be. I would elaborate, but must get to bed as tomorrow is a big day of packing up for this weekend's drive to Wappapello, MO for the Payton family reunion. That's right: I said Wappapello. I have not attended the reunion since around about my 11th or 12th year of life, so I'll be sure to post something about it, and about all the treasures I anticipate finding in Wappapello.

layover

Well, here I sit in a hotel in Salt Lake (the "Crystal Inn Downtown") with t-minus 8 hours until I board the Chicago-bound California Zephyr train, which according to Amtrak's website (see "Wahhhhhoooooooo" entry) is reported to be the most beautiful train ride in North America.

That's good. I hope that it is beautiful.
The Greyhound dropped me off safely here in Salt Lake under a dome of dark, menacing rain clouds and a torrential downpour. While both Las Vegas and Salt Lake City share membership in the desert biome club, LV is part of the Mojave Desert, whereas SLC is part of the Great Basin desert. The Great Basin is a "cold desert," and...ahem...it rains more. Since I spent half an hour of the 8-hour bus trip punching in geocaching coordinates, and since I left my poncho in the Subaru after wearing it at Super Summer Theater, and since I went out in the rain to look for two geocaches and didn't find them...suffice it to say that the fun evening I had planned for myself in Utah has not turned out to be much fun at all.

Adding insult to injury, my camera seems to be broken. McDonald's is right next door to this hotel, so that's where I had dinner. I was excited to eat my two meatless cheeseburgers, which they call "cheese grills." I got back to my room, opened up the wrapper, and discovered that my cheeseburgers didn't have any cheese on them either. While eating my ketchup-onions-and-pickles sandwiches, I attempted to transfer today's awesome photos to the camera's memory card, which the camera told me did not exist. After fiddling with the camera and reformatting the card and messing with it for about half an hour, I went to Walgreens in a taxi and bought a new memory card, which the camera assures me also does not exist. Luckily, I had the imagination and foresight to purchase a quasi-disposable camera, but on the way out of the store, I was so distracted asking for directions to the third attempted geocache that I left without getting the cash back that I requested on my debit card. I had the cabbie drive me to the third geocache, which confused him terribly. The hint on the cache page tells EXACTLY where the cache is, and still I could not find it. So I came back here to the Crystal Inn and have been playing on Facebook ever since.

I likely should have stayed in my hotel room in the first place, since it is surprisingly luxurious. It has a king bed with five fluffy pillows, a seperated kitchen area with a microwave and fridge, a desk with two cushioned chairs, an armchair, a couch, and a coffee table. If I can find this hotel chain again for the same price I paid for it this time, I'm totally staying here again. The nice hot shower with the nice big towels also helped raise my spirits, as did the meditative act of ironing some clothes. Now I'll watch about another five minutes of Grease on ABC Family and hit the hay.

I tried to write a post last night, and the night before, but it seems that I am suffering from a case of blogger's block. Perhaps North America's Most Beautiful Train Trip will cure that. Here's hoping.

And off they go...

Officer Friendly directed me to my parking spot yesterday, as I was sporting my boob-showcasing dress (oops) and silver shoes for the 2009 graduation ceremony, during which nobody tripped.

We arrived around 11 and milled around greeting the students. After the last of the girls filed in, we followed and traipsed across the floor of the Orleans Arena even though someone was already talking, to find our seats since no one had bothered to tell us exactly where we needed to go.

The class motto was a quote from Malcolm X, the class song was "Graduation" by Vitamin C, the class poem was excerpted from Dr. Seuss's "Oh, the Places You'll Go." The speaker made the students stand and do the Stanky Leg, but then his speech was fantastic until the part when he said, "If you're going to college...blah blah blah something, something; if you're going into the armed forces, God bless you, and if you're going into the work force, GOOD LUCK!" The valedictorian's speech was the best one I've heard since my own performance in the 8th grade, and the choir sang "For Good" from the musical Wicked.

After all this, I was off to my assigned task for the day: handing out diplomas to the REZ-SAP section of the alphabet. This was the best assigned task ever, because the diploma is the actual whole point of their lives up to that moment. It makes me feel important that I was the one who placed that piece of paper in their hands.

All in all, we sent these young ones out into the "real world (finally! none of them realizing that my classroom IS the real world)," in grand fashion. They will have the rest of their lives to separate the poignant from the cliche, which is something I now realize that I am making you do, too, what with my laundry list of titles and quotations from the two-hour ceremony.

I will miss some of them, I will most emphatically not miss others of them, but their high school careers are over and they are now officially not mine to worry about. On that bittersweet note, I turn my thoughts (naturally) to 2009-10.

Onward, and upward.

Wahooooooo!

Just booked my one-way fare from Las Vegas to Chicago for summer break.

Check out my environmental friendliness based on the chart from Amtrak.com.
(Is that like saying "check out how effective this medicine is based on a report from Eli Lilly"?)