In this Fozzolog, I got in touch with some old friends with the help of high-tech Internet technological technology. We're a little closer to moving into a new house, I think. And I went caving... kind of.

Wow! It's Edgar!

A couple days ago, I got some e-mail from an old friend of mine — Edgar!

Edgar was my boss when I worked for Continuing Education at Utah State University while I was a student. Edgar hired me to be the system administrator of a UnixWare-based system that supplied e-mail accounts for students attending U.S.U. through extension centers around the state of Utah.

It wasn't long before I had replaced UnixWare with Linux and it wasn't long after that until a couple more Linux systems sprung up on the network.

Edgar left U.S.U. around 1998, if I remember correctly. I knew he went to work somewhere in Utah County, but I couldn't remember exactly where. Since accepting the position at About.com, I've tried to find Edgar. I looked in my e-mail archive and I tried to find some trace of him via Google. Nothing.

So, I was very surprised when I found his message in my e-mailbox.

Hey Doran, I stumbled on to your web site and started reading your journal. Congratulations on the new job...

Edgar included his AOL Instant Messenger screen name in his e-mail, so within a day or so, we were catching up in between tasks during work hours.

I always wonder if and when I'm going to hear from people I've lost touch with. I think it's great when things like this happen.

Incidentally, Heather — another old friend — sent me e-mail a week or so ago. I also haven't heard from her since she left to work as a web designer for a Salt Lake City company (which later went belly-up) a couple years ago.

I replied to Heather's e-mail and asked her what was up in her life. She never responded. *sighs*

So... Heather, if you ever read this... WRITE BACK!

Just find me a hole in the ground

Dave — my cube-mate at work — has told me a few times about his experience going spelunking, or “caving”. I expressed an interest in joining him sometime and last Thursday, we went.

We were joined by Thomas — another About.com geek — and Dave's brother. We went to the Nutty Putty cave which is southwest of Utah Lake.

It took us about an hour to get there from our meeting spot near Saratoga Springs. The roads were still muddy from some recent rainfall, so we consolidated everyone into Dave's brother's pickup truck on our way up. Thomas and I rode in the back of the truck covered with blankets.

The ride in the back of the truck was really fun! Dave's brother couldn't avoid going through dozens of puddles in the road on the way up and Thomas and I were worried about getting wet. We never got wet, but it was fun sitting in the back of the truck bed while water sprayed up around the truck... in the dark... in the middle of nowhere.

At one point, I held my hands up in the air and screamed. That solidified the sensation I had that I was on some kind of amusement park ride.

We had to hike up a good-sized hill on the last leg of our ascent to Nutty Putty. It was already plenty dark and we had to be careful with our feet because the hill was mostly rock. When we finally made it to the cave entrance, we were all pretty winded. Then we made the decent into the first chamber which is about 30 feet below ground.

From that chamber, you have to squeeze through a small opening, which looks barely large enough for a person to fit through, to get to the next chamber. That kind of freaked me out. To make matters more interesting, the channel you had to squeeze through had about four to five inches of muddy water at the bottom of it.

Going through that opening required that you got very, very wet. I didn't bring anything to put my hearing aids in to keep them dry and I wasn't too excited about squeezing through that opening anyway, so I held back. The other three proceeded to whoop and holler and they submerged themselves in the cold water and belly crawled to the other side.

The others asked me if I was okay, if I wanted to go back to the truck, etc. etc. I said I'd wait for them there. They proceeded down into the rest of the cave. I sat there in the small chamber for about twenty minutes, turning my headlamp on and off. It was really quite a serene experience simply because it was so dark.

The longer I sat there, the more things I noticed in the chamber. I was joined by a small white and brown field mouse who came very near to me before realizing I was not part of the surrounding geology and scurrying away.

I saw a couple weird looking insects attached to the rock wall around me. As I looked closer, I saw more details and saw they had maggot-like bodies that were a very light, almost translucent, color. They had long back legs that came to a sharp angle in the middle, much like a grasshopper's back legs. They also had long wispy antenna on their heads and beady black eyes which seemed a bit too big for their heads. Cave bugs, I presumed.

As I shone my headlamp around on the other walls around me, I began to see more and more of these bugs. Some were large, some were small. They seemed to gravitate to pockets in the rock face where they would be shielded from the elements such as the wind or rain coming in from the opening above. Many of these bugs were upside down on the rock face. I was impressed.

I decided to eat a granola bar I'd brought along and picked off a small piece of it and left it on the ground for the mouse I'd seen. I waited for a few minutes to see if it would come back for the snack but never saw it.

After sitting in there for about 35 minutes, I got bored and little chilly and decided to “go topside” and walk around to get my blood moving. I did a few laps around the cave entrance for a few minutes and gazed at the stars and lights from communities I could see from the hilltop. After a while, I went back down into the entrance chamber.

The piece of granola bar was gone and no thank-you note was left. Ungrateful rodent!

It wasn't long before I heard the voices of the other three as they approached me. Nutty Putty is a thermal cave and, apparently, it gets pretty warm further down in. Because of this, the other three guys were not very excited about belly-crawling through the cold water to get out of the cave. Each of them screamed as they slithered through the water and came out into the open air.

Everyone (except me, of course) shivered as we walked back down to the truck and cranked the heater.

We got back to the truck around 10:45 p.m. As soon as we got back to Dave's car, I borrowed his cell phone and called my parents to tell them I wasn't dead. My dad told me I had my mom really worried. I found out later she'd called the Utah County Sheriff and Christine (who told her not to worry).

Later, she just told me not to let her know I was going caving if I ever did it again. Heh.

Sick in the head

I've come down with a bit of a head-cold the last couple of days. It started with a sore throat and tonight I'm a little congested in my ears. I've been taking some Sudafed for that.

House stuff

I think we may have found a house to buy. I'd love to say a ton of stuff about that, but I'm tired. I'll have to write some more about it later.