I’m in accounting class right now, but even when I don’t pay attention, I normally get great grades anyhow.

The big story so far today (it’s only 0842) is that it was perhaps three degrees outside today, and I, as I do, insisted on biking to school. I’d lost my gloves recently, but luckily my dad had some soon after I lost them. If I hadn’t worn gloves, I would not have hands with which to type this. Even through the gloves, it seemed like someone was spraying a steady stream of liquid nitrogen at me. I noticed a prnguin on the sidewalk across the street. And he looked cold, too.

That’s why this may have been the first time ever I was glad to be in band.

I had a heck of a creekwalk last Saturday. Here’s how it went:

Micah and I and (cringe) his friend Brian walked off down our street at about 1330. We were wearing backpacks and thick coats and we were in the spirit for adventure. At the end of North Hill Lane, we strode off a large hill into Congress Run, which was only the conduit to what we were going to do today. Slogging through plenty wet mud, we came to a pipe out of which the creek flows and climbed up a pile of rocks and stuff nearby. We came out behind a roofing company. Then we crossed over North Bend Road and found the beginning of our second creek. It was about eight inches wide. That would change.

After a dog briefly chased Micah, we were on our way. The creek ran unassumingly to the right of Stephanie Hummer Memorial Park, which we could see vaguely through some trees. Then we were plunged into a huge forest, fairly abruptly. The creek ran a little faster, and Brian noticed a deer on the other side of it. I took ap icture. THis was the best creekwalk I’d been on so far. It was so peaceful and it was so awesome. The forest was one of the better ones I’ve been in. But the going wasn’t simple.

Creekwalking isn’t a sport for the meek. It involves climbing over logs, scrambling up steep inclines, and not losing your footing in thick mud. We had plenty of thick mud, because of the recent rains. We trudged through it to all kinds of places we hadn’t seen yet. There was a dam. There was also a big ruined bridge. And finally, after such a long trek, we came to Waterfall Canyon: a huge gorge that rises about thirty feet above your head and has rapid waterfalls running all through it. After a minute we realized we wouldn’t be able to walk inside the canyon and we had to climb up its walls to walk on the bank. I had to do something like in one of those cheesy movie scenes and tell Micah and Brian, “Take my hand!” to pull them up.

We walked along the top of Waterfall Canyon a little ways and came to where the creek triples: The Confluence. Here our creek and two other creeks join up down a steep hill coated with two feet of mud and form an enormous swell that’s probably twenty feet deep. It looked like something at the bottom of Niagara Falls, but without the falls. I would not want to fall in there. With some difficulty, we crossed all three smaller creeks (to avoid having to cross the big one) and climbed up the steep hill (it was two steps forward, one step back in that mud, let me tell you). We found ourselves across a fence from a horse stable. Wll, we came out the stabulary’s driveway and were near an auto parts store of some sort, and also a place called “Seymour Preserve (Cincinnati Park Board)”. The dominating feature of this preserve was a towering power pylon, shooting several hundred feet above us. I discovered then that the path marked on my map that I couldn’t figure out what it was, was a power line. But Micah and brian wanted to go home, so we did.

By now, the bell has rung out and I’ve gone home once and it’s the next day–I did this in two days. I think this is plenty of update for this week.