Thursday I went to Louisville to hang out with friends for my unbirthday. (I can drive and take pictures at the same time. tada!)

But to their surprise, I brought a present for them!

After that we drank a lot and there was much tounge sticker outing to be had by all.

Here is a pic of Joe looking very smert … amazing!

Then it was a hop, skip, and a jump over to Bardstown …

For skydiving!

Here we have Ben looking very incredulous in front of a small airplane.

And of course we practiced our arc stances.

And I’m pretty sure this look sums up our competency level for the afternoon.

Also, this is a 10 year old packing parachutes!

The 10x optical zoom on my camera finally came in very handy!

This guy looks like he was flying into a tree but he really wasn’t.

Then they make us sign some documents that pretty much assure our deaths.

We get into our jumpsuits and become very scared.

We load up in the plane, and all of a sudden we are at 3000 ft …

And then a guy jumps! Ahhhh!

But we don’t get off that easy. While 3000ft seemed plenty high, we were doing the 10,000ft jump, so we went up a bit higher. And at this point I quit taking pictures because most of my thoughts were occupied by various obscinities and general terror (actually, I was much calmer than I would have imagined).

So we jumped and I screamed a lot, although about halfway through the 5000 feet of freefall, I realized that screaming wasn’t really doing much so I all of a sudden stopped. The freefall was by far the most amazing part of the jump. It really is pretty indescribable. You’re hurling down at 120 miles per hour, and like most truly blissful experiences, I can’t really remember what was going through my mind at the time. Pure extacy? Pure terror? I guess I’ll have to do it again to find out :)

So we landed and I didn’t die. And finally, if you decide to jump out of an airplane, watch out for deadly, loose flying propellers.

More pictures here.