I last updated this blog on July 10th; it's been over a month since I posted anything. Therefore, today I play catch-up, starting with:
Where The Hell I've BeenIt was back in June, actually, that I traveled to Batesville, IN, for a hastily-planned, disastrously-executed vending install at a local prison. There were contractual obligations at play that resulted in my planning the trip one day and driving out the very next; you know as well as I do that details get missed, sometimes vital ones. I ended up staying there an extra day to try to get things sorted out. It was a mess by any standards, and it has only recently smoothed out.
On the plus side, I was near Cincinnati, and had a chance to practice at their excellent
aikido dojo. I also drove around in
Big Bone Lick State Park. I had remembered seeing the sign years ago, on a road trip with Ben, but I could not remember where it was until I saw the signs again. My pleasure in the name is entirely juvenile; this should not come as a surprise, given how long I laughed about a German town called Assmannshausen.
I did NOT, however, get a chance to visit the
Creation Museum, the brainchild of Ken Ham and the Answers in Genesis corporation. I feel torn about this, because on the one hand, I would be giving my money to people whose attitudes and views are, ironically, neanderthal; on the other hand, when else will I have the chance to take pictures of an animatronic T-Rex eating coconuts?
The museum, Ham, and AiG have been thoroughly eviscerated elsewhere, so I don't really need to go into details; a Google search will tell you all you need to know about this lot. The Museum itself is a shrine to dogma, intolerance, and willful ignorance about any kind of reason or science; really kind of a Retard Parthenon, if you will. The notion they put forth that they are performing any kind of scientific research makes my gorge rise. Adjusting the facts to fit the conclusions is a classic scientific blunder; to make that the centerpiece of your program seems to be a poor way to go about things (if you are actually interested in science, anyways). These people are cancerously stupid, and I think I lost IQ points just being near them.
Enough about them. Oh, and I got a speeding ticket in Kentucky. That sucked.

While on my way north, I saw signs for
Cumberland Falls; I had devoted the whole day just to making that seven-hour drive, so I decided to make a quick detour. It's a surprisingly large waterfall (even though we hadn't had much rain at the time) not too far north of the Tennessee border and about 20 miles off to the west of I-75. Given how popular a park it is, I'm surprised I'd never heard of it before.
A couple of weeks later, I got another stamp on my passport when I flew up to Toronto and drove north from there to Huntsville, Ontario to do an install at a laundromat there. It was my first real experience with installing individual readers in washers and dryers, and was actually rather interesting, if you don't worry about the oppressive heat, close quarters, and the ever-present risk of horrible electrocution. It turns out that some co-workers of mine are rather cavalier in their attitude toward electricity, and we had a couple of light shows and welded connectors before turning the breakers off became standard practice again.
Huntsville, ON, is a resort town near
Algonquin Provincial Park; in some respects it reminds me of the relationship between Gatlinburg and the Great Smokey Mountain National Park, though Huntsville isn't quite so commercialized. The first night we were there, a huge thunderstorm came through; the next day, the laundromat was filled to capacity with summer-campers coming in to dry their clothes. That same thunderstorm inspired me to convince the estimable
Spyro that we should take a quick detour up to the park to check out Ragged Falls.

Technically part of the Oxtongue River park, it might as well be part of Algonquin, being right at the southwestern edge. The storm that had come through the night before had everything roaring, and we hiked the short trail that led up to the top of the falls. The view was fantastic; it's the sort of park that I wouldn't mind visited for a week or so, paddling on the rivers and lakes and doing some hiking. I don't think I'll try it in winter, though.
Toward the end of July, I made two short day-trips up to Cookeville, TN, to install a couple of readers at a school there. The catch, in this case, was that the readers are brand-new units of a type I'd never installed before. I can only hope that things improve with experience, because even getting a handful of readers set up was an extended exercise in frustration. In all fairness, some delays were the natural result of so many different people being involved; that always slows things down. That whole saying about many hands making light work is only true if there's actual labor going on. In any sort of planning or organizational phase, more hands means more confusion and more delays.

But, for my third (and fourth and fifth, technically) waterfall of this post, I visited Burgess Falls, which is located between Cookeville and Sparta, TN. It was another spur of the moment trip; in this case, the huge thunderstorm was still going on when I left the interstate, and only let up to a drizzle when I arrived at the park.
Burgess Falls State Park actually consists of three waterfalls on the Falling Water River, of which Burgess Falls itself is the highest (the picture on the Wikipedia page can only have been taken some year in which we had a reasonable amount of rainfall). I got my hiking in that day, about a mile each way to and from the waterfall.
Enough for this evening. Time to get some rest before braving a new set of perils tomorrow. I'll be updating this all week.