Mmph. Damn allergies. I can't stay awake, even without the drugs, and that's a problem now that Spyridis has cranked up the speed in his lectures. While I'm sniffling and silently yearning for a tissue, he's trying to demonstrate how an SN2 reaction will proceed with "backside attack" and that if the substrate (read: sitting duck inviting the nucleophile to attack its backside) is too bulky in back, the nucleophile just can't fit in there, and will be turned off...i mean, deterred...it was a tie between cracking up and sneezing my head off. Never mind that I've already heard this lecture with this exact description nine months ago.

Lindsey, Dano, Martin, and I got back from our Cuatro de Julio adventure to find Rachel asleep in my room! She's leaving today, but was back to decompress from a week of hiking switchbacks and digging latrines, and to stock up on hugs and Family Guy, of course. So...our adventure to Wynoochee Falls went trippingly well. It was beautiful over the weekend and we found the falls while it was still light on Saturday, so we climbed up to them and I found a way down to this flat rock right next to the falls where I could sit and catch the spray.

We made camp on a bed of grass upriver a bit with a rocky bar across a little stream where the guys built a fire ring. This led to problems when Lindsey wanted to cross the stream from the tent to the fire (and food) and opted to jump rather than walk across the logs 15 feet away. She can jump about as well as I can sing. She has forward momentum, but no lift, which explained why she was drying her shoes by the fire that night. Wait, no it doesn't. She dunked her shoes when she tried to go back over the stream to the tent, and put all her weight on a piece of wood no one had tested. We heard an odd sound and then a sploosh as her entire right side went underwater.

This is hilarious because only a few hours earlier Lindsey and I were up at the tent after dinner while the guys when to find more firewood/explore. Only a few minutes after they headed out, we looked up to see Martin standing in front of us, dripping. He was soaked from his feet to his chest. Apparently the piece of wood he put all his weight on wasn't sturdy either. His cell phone has great spiderweb cracks now, though.

We ate hot dogs and roasted corn on the cob to the sound of exploding M-80s and sparklers from the campers across the way, so our Cuatro de Julio was pretty much perfect. We talked around the campfire until it was so dark we couldn't see each other's faces any more and then continued the debauchery in Lindsey's huge tent. Yay for car camping, because I wouldn't want to pack that beast in unless I were weight training for Mt. Ranier. I returned with mosquito bites, scratches all up and down my shins, and a lingering eau de campfire that won't wash away, no matter how hard I scrub. Must...erase...evidence...