Good Morning!

This was one of the forms of entertainment of choice at field camp - the dreaded Flash Bang. During periods of downtime and carbo-loading, it was discovered fairly early on that the sighting mirrors of our compasses, particularly those of the Brunton brand, reflected sunlight REALLY well across large distances. (This is also very handy to know for potential field emergencies in which signaling across large distances would be required. Let's hope my buddies and I never have this problem in future excursions.)

This turned into a game and it ultimately became hard for large groups to eat lunch together as we'd all end up flashbanging each other. My favorites were when we could get someone when they were about 1000 ft. away, usually on the other side of a basin or canyon that we were mapping.

The other dominant form of entertainment was the fabled "Suck Bomb," in which someone called out the target victim's name to grab his or her attention. The victim's typical answer is, "What?" The reply would then be, "SUCKS!"

Not really sure which is the more mature of the two, but both are funny. With the latter, people figured out pretty quickly when they were about to receive a suck bomb. If they heard their name called, some would figure it out and instead of "What?" we'd get a "F**k you!" with a giant grin on their face.

A short-lived practice was something some of the boys invented, called "Pass the Rock." Pretty self-explanatory. The trick was that the rock generally had absolutely nothing to do with the lecture going on at the time, but they wanted to see how long it'd get passed around and inspected. People figured that one out within a couple of weeks, I think, after it became frequent and rather obvious.

Back into the present and we find no soy milk in my fridge, so no pancakes this morning. Bummer. I'll probably do eggs again today. Thunderstorms are expected, my running buddy's bike is in need of maintenance (tire blew, so my inefficiently-running arse can't join her today on her 7-miler), and I have grading to blast through. Should be a quiet day, which I'm totally in favor of, and anything could be more productive than yesterday. About the only things I managed to do yesterday were to make/eat breakfast while it was still early, get out for an hourlong walk in the residental section of Urbana (GORGEOUS - saw some crocuses!), wash the pile of dishes I've let build up for a while after 11 pm, then attempted to stay up to watch a movie and fell asleep less than halfway through.

And I'm off to be along with it. Peace out.