All the world looks up to a skydiver.

'Excuse me while kiss the sky.'

It had been about three years since I last did a real honest to goodness skydive. I had a wonderfully gifted high wire bungee/bungy jump experience when in New Zealand last year that was pretty cool, but I still missed the feeling of a longer freefall even if it didn't have quite the ground rush. So this week I decided to just pull my rig from the closet shelf, check for spiders, moths, and small families of rodents or marsupials, and head to the drop zone. Since it had been so long since the last jump I had to go through a quick recertification class, but some things in life you just don't tend to forget, especially stuff that's suppose to help save your life. The weather sucked most of the day so I sat around talking to my buddy Jason waiting for it to clear up. The jump was normal, and it felt great. Even after a good bit of an absence it felt like I hadn't left. I burned through the testing skills, opened up, and enjoyed a decent canopy ride, even though I did land slightly off the DZ due to high winds.

After packing the parachute, which will be the real test of my memory on the next jump, I headed over the the hash event. I've been out of the activity for a few months while I reevaluated a lot of stuff, but this was supposed to be a pretty big event with some out-of-towners coming in, so I decided to make it out. Tattoo is infamous for his last trail that was a shot trail that saw the pack barely making it to the end due to the numerous shots provided on trail. We met in the Westchase area and boarded the rented bus that took us to the various colorful and cultured sites in Tampa for the pub crawl. It was nice to see some old friends and I actually started to enjoy myself again, which I actually didn't expect. I got to see Mams and Shop Teacher and hear all about their three week honeymoon to Turkey, Jordan, Israel, and Egypt. The after party was at Tattoo's place and was complete with jello wrestling food, lots of great food, and plenty of remaining kegs. I ended up staying the evening since I wasn't about to drive 40 minutes so late at night after such a party evening. I'm actually thinking of getting back out to some more events sometime if time allows.