bucket list

How do you tell people "I'm just not making new friends right now" without sounding like an antisocial weirdo? I've been feeling really pressured to hang out with people at work, but really really don't want to, even though everyone is really nice and everything. I feel like some kind of weird hermit-in-training, but I really am at a place in life where I am feeling 0 percent social--I could literally wander around by myself every single day for the foreseeable future and be really happy about it.

So I'm working on crossing off a major item from my bucket list. When I was a lot younger, I think probably 5th or 6th grade, we learned about Crater Lake in Science or Social Studies or one those classes--it's a lake formed from the collapsed caldera of an extinct volcano and is supposed to be one of the most pure water sources on earth (not to mention the most beautiful). It was one of those things that sort of stuck with me as the years passed, but strangely I never remembered where it was or bothered to look it up.

When I was in late middle school my family went on a vacation and my Dad informed me that we would be camping at Crater Lake, which I was so psyched about. Unfortunately it turned out that I had mis-heard him, and we actually were bound to Claytor Lake, which is actually a reservoir in Virginia and not the same thing at all. This did turn out to be a very cool trip though. My dad had remembered that some of our relatives used to own and live in the house on the lake that now serves as the visitor center (aka the historic Howe House, see left). He visited pretty frequently as a kid, and when we got to that house he took all of the tour guides and rangers out back and showed them a spot near the back of the house where his cousin (one of the original owners) had carved his name in the bricks. None of them had seen the carving before that moment, so from a small historical standpoint it was an exciting moment, and I felt very weirdly proud right then.

But I digress. When I arrived in Oregon my sister and I were camping in the Columbia River Gorge, and in the site next to us was a car with a license plate that read "Oregon, home of the famous Crater Lake."

HOLY SHIT.

So I'm planning a camping trip to Crater Lake State Park, either solo or with a friend, if I meet someone that I want to spend that much time with between now and whenever I go. So yeah, probably solo. I am so jazzed.

Editor's Note: I just read on Wikipedia that Crater Lake is on the Oregon quarter. It also has this, which is the kind of dorky shit that I absolutely live for.