i miss the mountains. st. louis has a lot of really great points, and i like discovering new things about it, but i'm starting to miss the elevation of home again. it's so flat here (not like oklahoma flat, but pretty fucking flat) compared to my home. i miss the horizon being well above eye level in all directions.

on our home trip, siouxs! and i went swimming at the townsend "wye." *i can't footnote, but at least i can asterix* this is effectively "the ol' swimmin' hole" up in the mountains. at a place where the main road splits, leading to cades cove on the right and gatlinburg on the left, the creek finds a deeper place to flow for a few minutes, and hill people come out to play. there were perhaps 150 people there, but i still preferred it to a public pool. there were kids cliff jumping and flirting, little ones splashing about, and their parents sitting around getting sandy. i loved it. i hope that siouxs! understands just how much fun that has been over my childhood years, and i hope she had a good time. if you're ever in townsend tennessee, just ask about the wye at any gas station, and go have some hootin' and hollerin' fun. warning: the water is moving, and it comes out of the mountains. this means it is freaking cold. goosebumps and nipples go up, male genitalia goes down. that said, have fun.

*(they call it the wye instead of the y so as to not make people think one is talking about the ymca, i suppose. the only ymca i know of in east tennessee is in knoxville just south of downtown proper, and is a truly scary place. my daycare center used to take us to the pool there once a week. after a few years, the slightly churchy daycare people decided they'd had enough of knoxville's handful of homeless people ogling the freshmeat elementary schoolers, so we started going to another pool, much further away, where the creepiest people were the pimply concession stand teenagers, all of whom had verifiable addresses.)

and no, i didn't forget. fuck bush.