Today at work I fell back into a depressed unproductive stupor. Which isn't to say that I didn't get some things done. Just not as much as I really could have. I did manage to get my hopes up about taking a little time off to go travel in September. But, of course, I just found out from Dad that my uncles and aunts are coming in from all over the country the exact weekend I was planning on being out of town. So, so much for those plans. :: IthicaFilter When I first got into Ithica, because I knew nobody there, and the only people I did know (Bride, Maid of Honor, and other Bridsemaid) were busy doing wedding stuff, I had a lot of time to kill. A LOT of time. So, I just stomped around Ithica some. Ithica is your typical small college town, only a little more compact. The downtown area was laid out in a nearly nice grid, and there were a suprising number of young people I saw who seemed to live in the town itself. Downtown was a contrived outdoor mall, that sort of worked, and sort of didn't. Too many places for punks to hang out and cause trouble, not enough nightspots for people to have fun at. And it seemed that the town shut down after 10pm, which is a litle early for a Friday night. Collegetown was nice, in that it was the typical strips of commecial/cafe/nightlife you would expect to see in any town, only it was confined to one area. So it was like a little piece of the Lower East Side dropped down into the small town. Parking was impossible to find. Cornell was suprisingly large in its layout. You can tell the football program is not too big, for it was actually on campus, as opposed to far away from campus to ease the auto traffic on game day. The campus was very pretty, or at least the parts I got to see in the pitch black of night. I got lost pretty badly there a few times. And after seeing the place, I have to say that I am a bit remiss that I didn't more seriously consider Stuy North, as what we used to call it. The waterfalls of Ithica are not the impressive falls that you imagine. No water pouring over dramatic cliffs, with spraying mist to boot. More like running sloping affairs of a thousand tiny 1 inch tall dropoffs combined in sets of falls. This makes perfect sense when you see that most of the rock that surrounds the area is that of thousands of layers of sedimentary rock. Especially in the deep ravines that the rivers carve out, the rock simply flakes off in tiny brittle sheets half an inch thick. This also means that the riverbeds are often wonderful sheets of gently inclined steps, much like how every interior waterfall in a building tries to look like. I would recommend another trip up there for those of you who haven't been.