I went caving yesterday, again down in southern Indiana, with the SJVG. By far it was the most extensive and challenging cave I've ever done. Originally we were going to do some surveying (in two groups of two) but first myself and another caver were going to look around for some missing surveying equipment that was lost in the cave last week. Anyway, it takes over two hours to get to the unsurveyed parts of the cave, and by late in the day I was literally worn out to the point of barely being able to push my pack along as I crawled on my belly through a foot of cold water with two feet of head space. (I've come up with a long list of equipment I'm going to need to go caving as extensively as I want: better knee pads, a smaller pack, neoprene socks, polypropylene coveralls, and a wetsuit. The latter two I borrowed yesterday.) But our search for the missing instruments took long enough that there wasn't time to survey. We entered the cave at about 10:45 am and exited at 6:15 pm. By coincidence the other team exited within 5 minutes; they got a few hundred feet surveyed. Today I am sore all over. I did promise to come back when we can get some more surveying done. The others are a lot faster at moving around in a cave than I am; several times I had to call ahead "are you still up there?" to make sure I wasn't lost and going the wrong way.

I just got back last night from three days in Detroit at a training class for robot programming. I'm the engineer for a department that owns a robot...and now, the only one in that department who knows how to program it. Seems that everyone who did know gradually trickled out of the department until there were none, and the programs needed adjustment, and nobody knew how. While in Detroit, I also hung out with old friend Mikey, went to see a Tigers game at the newish ballpark, ate at Hockeytown Cafe, etc. Comerica Park is nice enough. I hate to admit it but it's a lot more attractive and the seats are much better than old Tiger Stadium. The Tigers, however, suck. They got their collective butt kicked last Wednesday and looked like a bunch of amateurs. Anyway, some weirdo in the parking lot tried to sell us $35 tickets for $10 (scalping is hard when there are 50,000 empty seats) but we turned him down, opting instead for the $8 bleacher seats and moving into empty $35 seats after a couple innings. There were 5 others in the robot class with me, from a food plant in Tennessee, who all went to the Tuesday game and had better luck than Mikey and me. Someone GAVE them 5 $35 tickets free, they stumbled into getting invited into the Tiger Club (invitation only-type dining, for sportswriters, politicians, etc, with an amazing buffet from what I hear), one of them caught a foul ball, and the Tigers won. Go figure.