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In a final flurry of 2569 lines of code in five days, punctuated by an afternoon of listening to the world's worst on-hold music, my winter break is over. Tomorrow I'll be driving myself through temperatures in the teens and twenties back to St. Louis. My final semester at WashU. I have a whole list of things to do when I get back tomorrow. Get my schedule straightened out, pay my tuition, find a job. The first two seem easier than the third.

I've spent the past week writing another web app for whirlpool. It's a system for submitting buildup requests to the techs. If it weren't so late I'd explain what that means, but I think that'll have to wait until later.

Anyway, being back at whirlpool was a bit surreal. I was sitting at the same desk I'd used all summer, and it felt like nothing had changed. All my programs were still installed, my bookmarks were still in place, nothing seemed to have changed. I found a file on the desktop called post1.txt. It was a post I had started writing last summer for this site, but never gotten around to finishing. I think I'll include it here, unrevised and unfinished.

Early on Saturday evening I was sitting in my room flipping through the New York Times Book Review when I heard some strange noises coming from the front yard. As it turned out, the noises came from Jared, using his newly purchases megaphone to try to get me to go outside without him having to get out of his car. When the megaphone ploy failed to work, he moved on to plan b. He borrowed Luke's cell phone and called me. All this to save himself a trip of about 10 feet from his car to my front door.

Eventually, I went out and joined Jared, Luke, John, and Kate in Jared's car. We were planning on going to Breaker's to play some pool. But for reasons known only to Jared, we were instead driven out into the reclaimed mine area. (The mine area is only a couple miles from my house. It's an area where coal companies had done strip mining, and the old strip mines have filled up with water, creating a lot of lakes.) Jared started our mine adventures off by driving in excess of 60 mph on a gravel road, creating a huge cloud of dust that hovered just above the road going back about a mile behind us. Jared followed this up by driving even faster on a paved, although riddled with potholes, road. Even on the pavement he managed to create a huge cloud of dust, probably from all the dust that had coated his car.

Our next destination was an abandoned cemetery in the Peabody mine area. The Peabody mine has yet to be reclaimed, so its road are supposed to be private, but Jared claims that they are open to anyone visiting one of the old cemeteries in the mine areas. These old cemeteries are a site to be seen. The whole area around them has been strip mined, so they sit up on these artificially created hills topped by the only trees in the area. They're easy enough to find if you know what you're looking for. I know of five or six in and around the mines near my house. Anyway, to get to the cemetery you drive up a narrow gravel road, and at the top you'll find maybe twenty graves, all dating from the early to mid-1800s. Depending on the cemetery you're visiting (we visited two on Saturday night), there may or may not be a large number of shotgun shells scattered about and various items, including a computer, with shotgun blasts in them. They really are very neat. I'm hoping to get out there again with my camera and snap a few photos of them sometime this week.

Anyway, the whole point of the cemetery visits was for Jared to scope them out for a little practical joke he's planning. I have little faith that the joke will ever be executed, but if it is, it'll be very, very good.

Following the cemetery exploration it was time for mine exploration. We set off at random down a road that lead out of the Peabody mine to see where it would take us. As we were driving down this road in the middle of nowhere we see two cars going in the opposite direction from us stop side-by-side and start flashing their headlights at us. Assuming that they were on a security patrol we rolled to a stop as well. They turned out not to be security guards, but were part of a wedding party trying to find a wedding reception. They thought it was at a place called "Thresherman's Park." Why they thought this park would be about 10 miles down a gravel road in the middle of a mine went unexplained. I'm not sure if the wedding go-ers ever found Thresherman's Park, but we came across it about 20 minutes later. It was about on the road we were on, about 10 miles from where we met the wedding people, just off the highway outside Boonville. It had a big sign and was rather hard to miss. We were tempted to stop in on the wedding, but better judgment prevailed and we kept on driving.

As night approached we were exploring a road that we thought would take us in the direction of I-64 and Lynville. Jared was looking for another to stop in and was stopping the car and peering down every intersection. As luck would have it, at one intersection there was a Warrick county sheriff parked right around the corner. So the rather suspicious sequence of events was: blue Taurus covered in dust rolls slowly into the intersection, stops, passengers see the deputy, blue Taurus rolls away. After we'd gone about 100 yards down the road, John saw the sheriff's car roll out on to our road with its headlights off. It stayed back there for a while, and then disappeared. We thought he'd turned off somewhere, and stopped paying attention to him. (The whole time he'd been following us, John and Kate had been staring back at him through the back window.) But he hadn't turned off, and as soon as we reached a slightly more inhabited stretch of road, he flipped on his lights and pulled us over.

Posted by on 12 January 2003 at 1:53 AM

dave! finish the story, man!

Posted by ben on 14 January 2003 - 12:22 PM

Well, no time to entirely finish the story, but I will mention that the first thing the cop said to us when we walked up to the car was "You don't have any bodies in the trunk, do you?"

Posted by david on 15 January 2003 - 10:43 PM

i guess there was no real trouble for dgw and co, then, eh?

Posted by ben on 16 January 2003 - 9:56 AM