blogging the sequel

the second half of the last few weeks of traveling happened, as most of you know, in ohio.

you brought a dog. . .to a bar

by far, the weirdest event happened almost right away. as i've learned typically occurs in athens, several young members of the psychology department headed to a local brewery on friday afternoon for dinner (pizza. . . yum!) and drinks on the outdoor patio. afterward, the same crowd found themselves next door to check out the live band lineup. what's weird about that? well, the fact that an extremely overzealous patron stole the show for almost the entire evening with his dog.

wait, a dog in a bar?

yep. and despite being willing to smile for a pic when our new little buddy made his way around the table to my lap, i was only slightly less amused than the band that was trying to perform for the handful of patrons that were present. or matt when the owner pulled a knife out of his bag and tried to show us how the dog hated weapons and would just swat it away (with a table full of potential petters, i have to say that the dog did not care at all about much else).

the bright side was that this changed a few of our attitudes about american pit bulls. despite the reputation, this might have been one of the sweetest dogs i've ever met.

snail friend

i know, i know. what can possibly follow that up? i can't say that i have a lot of good stories about our work days. and it turns out that it's really difficult to take photos of yourself (or even other things) when you're on a run. though i must give props to the hockhocking adena bikeway that runs right in front of matt's place and was perfect for keeping up with my running program while i was away. and, when i went to grab lunch one day (that path literally leads right to subway. . .), i did manage to snap a pic of this little guy. he's cute, right? he was just inching his way across the path. it was the translucence of the shell, i think, that caught my eye.

cool cave!

i did not get matt to run with me while i was in ohio, but he was an extremely good sport about doing the sunday walks with me. in fact, the first sunday hosted an all-afternoon hike, planned by matthew himself. we started at sells park, which many people (not me) had never heard of, and walked toward a rock house (which we never made it to, as a 10-mile round trip hike didn't sound that appealing to either one of us. it didn't really matter, though, as there were enough things to discover on the trails to hold our attention. aside from the *awesome* pseudo wind chime that i posted on dad's facebook, i think we totaled having seen a giant turtle, a crawfish, lots of birds, tadpoles, and frogs, several squirrels, some pretty awesome rock formations, and a few hippies out on their own afternoon hikes. quite a productive afternoon for a sunday.

the second sunday, of course, was Easter sunday. we had a small run in with a swallow in the morning (although i am still thankful it turned out not to be a mouse/rat/anything rodent-like) and then headed over to whipple. i can't really claim any credit for the cooking, so i'll say that matt and peggy put together a pretty wonderful meal. chicken, potatoes, noodles, beans, and then a piece of this adorable easter bunny cake. seriously, how cute is that? it had a little icing tail on the back and everything.

what you may not realize is that all of that purple is icing, so by the time we got in his car and followed peggy to the movie theater for an Easter matinee, both matt and i were either on a crazy sugar high or in the midst of a pretty horrendous crash in blood sugar. i don't know that my body has gone through that kind of spike-crash in quite a while. totally worth it, though. i'd eat my piece of Easter bunny cake again. . . any day of the week!

unnamed lagoon

that really just left us one more day. i flew out on tuesday rather than monday for this trip because (a) it was cheaper and i was buying my tickets later than usual and (b) chuck klosterman gave a free talk in athens on monday night. the venue asked that no photos be taken (and matt made be feel guilty when i got my phone out to sneak one), so i don't have a photo to post, but i can say that he did a very good job. as it turns out, just listening to him talk about his life in his overly-pensive and pretty humble way was pretty entertaining. and kind of similar to when i saw bob knight at penn state, the OU students asked a pretty impressive combination of insightful and semi-embarrassing (as in, "i'm embarrassed on their behalf") questions. otherwise, nothing else between hearing bob knight talk is similar to hearing chuck klosterman talk. i promise you that.