Major kudos to Brandon Sanderson – he pulled it off beautifully.

In other news, I tried to electrocute myself last Wednesday. Took out half a wall and 3 computers in the lab at school – talk about embarrassing.

So, I was going to work on my project write up, using Pages, which means using my powerbook. The battery on the aging laptop doesn’t seem to hold a charge for more than an hour and a half, if that long, which means I needed to plug it in. There was an empty outlet, no problem. However, the desks and computers were wired such that the locking cable (twisted metal) to one of the computers was lying across the outlet. I pushed it aside, definitely out of the way, but there must have been more pressure on it than I figured and it popped back in the way as I was about to plug the cable in.

Pow.

Holeeecrap but that was some spark! There were a couple sparks that I just watched fall all the way to the floor before they went out.

Embarrassing.

Luckily, once the campus electrician dude found and threw the breaker, all was well. Outlet still worked, as did the computers. My power supply, however, is probably toast. I’m sure the cable is, at least, I’m not going to try it, but I’m not sure about the actual power supply. Maybe the Apple store has a way to test them, I don’t know. Still, at least my powerbook wasn’t plugged in yet, and, thankfully, neither was I. Eeesh.

Electricity is not necessarily your friend. :D

Next time, I’m just gonna suck it up and use notepad.

(click through for a more impressive size)

What have I gotten myself into?!?

(any comments here please)

Last Thursday, Rob and I had the fantastic opportunity to go to Bracken Bat Cave and watch around 20 million bats emerge from their cave to go hunting. Of course, we didn’t see that many bats – we were told it takes almost all night for the entire colony to emerge.

It was incredible. As we walked up to the area above the cave, we first noticed the stench of bat (and, apparently, beetle) guano. It wasn’t too bad, but fairly powerful. After the initial blast it wasn’t very noticeable.

The cave (picture below, also more pictures on my flickr photoset) was really just this huge hole in the ground. Once things started hopping with the bats you could see thousands of them circling the cave mouth in some instinctive holding pattern.

Then they just came spiraling out of the cave, thousands and thousands of them. The vortex of bats created a breeze as it rose from the cave – they were so close you could hear their wings whirring. As more and more of them came out, they began to stream south in this endless river in the sky.

It was absolutely an amazing sight.

Swirling in the mouth of the cave:

Those smudges? Bats.

Swooping around and around until they streamed off south:

More pictures are here!