A Day Outdoors Leads to Misadventures With Cargo Shorts

This is a post about how cargo shorts can ruin your day. – A personal experience.

Recently, I had a horrible experience with cargo shorts. It wasn’t like a “shoot, I outgrew my shorts” issue, and it certainly was not a deep, serious life or death situation (too much of a lead for a post about shorts? Apologies).

It’s funny, because last Sunday evening some friends and I were sitting outside enjoying some frozen yogurt downtown. Somehow we started talking about how ugly and unstylish cargo shorts are and why one should not wear them. We may have even touched on the conveniences of wearing them. Anyway...

Let’s start from the beginning.

It’s 11:30 a.m., July 16. I was wearing a Mizzou t-shirt and a pair of cargo shorts. I planned to use the Saturday to go walking around the trails the city of Columbia has in the nature areas. The heat and humidity was beginning to set in, but I thought ‘pfft, I walked 17.6 miles on the Katy Trail last week in that heat, I can certainly do it again today.’

I arrive at the Hinkson Creek trail at 11:52 a.m. I have my phone in my right pocket, my wallet in my rear right pocket, my car keys in my left pocket, and my digital camera and a piece of gum in the lower left pocket. As I started walking, I thought to myself, ‘I probably should not have put the gum in that pocket. I’ll forget about it and have a little bit of a mess when I wash my clothes.’

A Google Map of my hike down the Hinkson Creek and MKT trails.

As I walk, I see a bee on a flower alongside the trail. Later, I see a squirrel eating a nut in a tree. I seize both opportunities for a photograph. It was two of the three occasions I used my camera through the whole afternoon.

Needing water just over halfway through my trip, I stop at a building off of Forum Boulevard to see if there was a restaurant or vending machine. There was no water. I remove the gum from that lower left pocket and the thought crossed my mind that I would not need to worry about a mess.

The bee on the flower.

A little more than four hours and 13.6 long, hot miles after beginning the walk, I was tired, slightly dazed and parched. I drive back to my apartment. I remove my cell phone from my upper right pocket and my wallet from the rear right. I cool off and throw my sweat-drenched clothes in the washing machine with the rest of the laundry. I jump in the shower for relief.

Note: Public water fountains are disgusting, especially the ones in a park. Who knows what kind of germs and disease lurk on those things?  ...back to the story...

I make some EasyMac for dinner and change the clothes from the washer and put them in the dryer. It instantly begins to make a strange noise. I had no idea what it could have been and didn’t mind it, so I continued to devour my EasyMac while watching the news. – Macaroni and cheese and the news: they make the world go ‘round.

Squirrel in the tree. It had a nut before I took it's picture.

Later, I sit down to edit an assignment for my news writing class with the clanking noise of the dryer still going in the next room. Then it hit me: I forgot to remove MY CAMERA from the lower left pocket of my shorts.

I freaked.

My camera drowned. It’s dead. The pictures you see posted here are the final pictures taken by that camera. By the way, if you ever lose your camera in a water incident, you will be happy to know the SD card is salvageable.

It had such a sad ending to an extraordinary life. It’s captured images around Italy and France, good times with friends during my senior trip to Daytona Beach and Orlando, graduations, family events, Mizzou sporting events, many beautiful outdoor sceneries and so much more. All to end in the depths of a washing machine.

So, let’s blame the heat for my lapse in responsibility, shall we? Haha. This will be one of those things that I’ll look back on life and laugh at. I already have, actually.

Just remember this story the next time you go walking though the mall and you see a nice pair of cargo shorts and think they will be a good buy. Don’t do it. It’s a trap. Besides, I think my friend was right... they are rather ugly. Don’t you think? Haha.  

So Long, Space Shuttle Program!

Tomorrow (Friday, July 8, 2011) will mark the ending of an era in American history. Space Shuttle Atlantis is on it's pad ready for lunch at the Kennedy Space Center, weather permitting. As it rockets off into space, so will the program itself.

Personally, I have grown up very interested in the space program. I remember watching my first space shuttle launch in 1998 in the library of Donnelly Elementary School in Lebanon, Mo. I was only in first grade.

It's sad to see it go. And it's even worse that the future is uncertain. Little in the way of funding is bringing bad news to the iconic NASA space program. It's just an opinion, but the U.S. government, more notably the Obama Administration, kind of failed the program.

President Bush announced the ending of the fleet in 2004. However, he said that there would be a replacement, and a more advanced way to rocket Americans into space. This project was called the Constellation Program. The program would have built a new space vehicle and made it possible for humans to make it to the moon and Mars sometime in the future. Nonetheless, development from NASA will manage to continue on - just not quite the same way.

In 2008, Americans elected President Obama to lead the country. He elected to lead Americans out of the space race, or at least slow us way down, by cutting NASA's budget and ultimately bringing a negative change to the famed American space program, and prematurely ending the Constellation Program.

I guess pushing for a social take over of health care was way more important, right? Oh, hey, how about saving all the jobs and keeping Americans employed?

Looks like to shoot for the stars, the U.S. will now have look to Russia to make it happen. Apparently, according to a report from a Houston ABC affiliate, the Russians are even a little surprised by our move.

However, there is an upside. Even though NASA has to end manned space flight for some time into the future, there are future plans for unmanned space flights to study the heavens. So we aren't out of it yet. Just a set back.

What I'm getting at here, is that we cannot let this program die. Sure, we can look to the future. Manned space flights from the United Sates will return someday ... at least we can hope, right? That is as optimistic as this pessimist is going to be.

After all, it is in times of hardships and turmoil when Americans look to little pick-me-ups like seeing a shuttle blast off into the sky. It is what truly gives people the hope for the future. Margaret Mead put it well when she said: "

We are at a point in history where a proper attention to space, and especially near space, maybe absolutely crucial to bringing the world together."

So tomorrow morning, at 10:26 a.m. central time, grab a bowl of Cheerios, sit down, and watch an important moment in American history, when we will place the period at the end of the sentence.