Falls of the Ohio

I finally had a weekend at home where I was all by myself. My wife works every third weekend, and she took off the last weekend that she was supposed to work. So it has been almost 2 months since I've had one of my precious weekends. Is it bad of me, that I look forward to these weekends? It's not that I don't want to spend time with her, I just enjoy the free time that I have. I always try to plan stuff that I normally wouldn't be able to do with the wife around. This weekend was no exception.

The main project was to reformat my computer. I knew this process would take several hours, and I'd never get away with doing this with her around. The reformat went pretty flawlessly. After several hours of reinstalling my programs, the computer is running as great as it ever has.

After fixing the computer, I cleaned my car, inside and out. It was quite dirty. I have spilled at least two drinks in there in the past few weeks, and I finally got that sticky mess cleaned up. I don't like clutter in my car, but I tend to slack on the dusting and vaccuum duties.

My last project involved picture taking. Lately I've been inspired by the guy that runs the Daily Dose of Imagery. If you've been there, you've seen some excellent photography. His photoblog has won many awards for being one of the best.

Sunday afternoon I headed towards downtown with my camera to attempt to copy his style. I got sidetracked though. I made an unplanned stop at the Falls of the Ohio. I've lived here for two years, and I've never been. To sum it up, Falls of the Ohio is a 220-acre area of exposed fossil beds. The beds are among the largest naturally exposed Devonian fossil beds in the world. They say that many many years ago, this area of Indiana was under an ocean, and the fossil beds were part of a coral reef. It was awesome.



I am standing on some elevated rocks at eye level with the river level. If you look in the distance, you can see the dam with water trickling through it. I walked around where you see other people walking. I snapped several pictures of stuff that had fossilized. Here's an example.



Several weeks ago, this whole area was flooded. I drove past it, and the water was so high you couldn't see the dam at all. It left logs and trash as the waters receded. It also left a rather large catfish. I saw what looked like a spine and rib section of a fish. I bent over to take a closeup picture of it, and almost fell over when I realized the fish carcus was right beside the bone. It looked like a plastic bag at first. But you can definitely see its head and tail.



I spent so much time walking around the fossil beds, that I didn't have time to go wander around downtown. I guess I'll have to save that until my next home alone weekend in three weeks.