I received a stay of execution and my contract may now end in March instead of December.  To celebrate, I brought “The Codebreakers” into work as my new bathroom reading and things haven’t quite worked out.  I simply can take a book that big into the work bathroom.  I stand up, grab it and immediately am mocked by my own brain.   As I walk towards the door with five pounds of book I start losing strength in my legs and my hand shakes as it goes for the knob.  I simply can’t into the work bathroom with that much… book.  Frailty, thy name is textbooks-on-cryptology.

I woke up at the crack of 11:30 AM after the forceful deflation of my air mattress and after a sequence of shit-we-forgot’s and two pizzas which were eaten across from surly old people we made out way Northward.

I got to drive Pat’s Rav4 and being in another person’s car the most dangerous thing I did was drink and drive.

September 19, 2009-112-Acadia

At a previous point I’d taken a picture while driving and holding my iPod, so this is a cakewalk.  Pat and Joe were also strongly opposed to a practice I call “slap steering” which terrifies both of them.

Around 10 PM we stopped at a Target in Augusta to get a 1/8″ patch cable so I could bore everyone with The Economist audio edition.  The hand dryer was quite potent and my hands came away red with windshear.  On our way out, we hit a T-intersection with no obvious path back to the highway so I picked left at random.  This small change resulted in us taking a sequence of country roads, byways, and semi-paved paths to Acadia through the “drive faster, I hear banjos” portion of Maine.  I got bored and started taking long exposures of lights while driving of which some came out well.

September 19, 2009-116-Acadia

We arrived at Acadia at about 11:30 PM, several hours after the proper closing of the park.  My concern for lateness dropped when I learned there after-hours check in process was “go to a campsite, and tell us sometime the next day that you’re here”.  We entered our gravel-covered campsite and discovered that one was supposed to sleep on the gravel.  Gravel ranks as slightly below a battery of dull steak knives for uncomfortable sleeping surfaces and the hours taken to actually sleep proved this.

Luckily, the rest rooms were exceptional and even included two-ply toilet paper.  The walls also held some of the most erudite graffiti I’ve ever seen including:

  • A spot-on picture of Master Shake
  • A Sierpinski triangle after three iterations
  • I LOVE HUNGARY
  • Eulers Identity

    Euler's Identity

  • “Go Organic” with an arrow pointing to that phrase with the caption “wow, you convinced me”.

I was impressed.