Bon Voyage, Tooley!

On June 1st, Jason Tooley left to begin his journey with the Peace Corps. He will be spending the next two and a half years in Kenya, Africa teaching HIV/AIDS education. It should be quite the experience. To make sure he documents his time there, and hopefully shares with us, I gave him my "old" Canon S2 IS digital camera, 1 GB card, and card reader. It's a good camera, and one of that few that takes AA batteries, which would be the only thing that would work for him. One of the things on his list of items to buy was a solar battery charger, because most likely the village he lands in will not have power. Hopefully he'll be able to hit an internet café, or something of the sort, and update us soon.

The Thursday before he left we went out to have some fun and play some pool. Apparently they do play pool in Africa, but the rules are a little different, and I don't know how likely it is that he'll get to play while he's there. So we had a good time.


By pure happenstance, Jason and Tooley ended up wearing the same shirt.

Then on Saturday, Tooley's family threw him a going away party and invited all the family and his friends.





This cake was fantastic. They ordered it from Salty's and it had this thin raspberry layer and some cream stuff. Yum.




In between times of hanging out on the patio and chowing on the awesome spread, there were Touchdowns. I guess a Touchdown is mandarin vodka and Rockstar energy drink. Lots of the first and some of the second in a cup, and then you chug it. It actually wasn't that bad. The mandarin flavor of the vodka helps take away some of that alcohal flavor and helps the "citrus" flavor of the Rockstar not taste so bad.





At one point they ran out of Rockstar, so Jason and Tooley's sister, Lindsey, ran out to get some more. Jason came back with this monkey for Tooley. Maybe to help familiarize him with some of the wildlife he would soon be seeing.






When the sun started to go down, we got the patio heater going to help keep the heat around, and continued hanging out. We weren't out of there until 2 AM.



Then it was time to go, and we said our temporary good byes.




This has been pretty hard on Jason, since Tooley is his best friend. Doubly hard because while Jason and Tooley have been together since high school, for the last few years it's been Jason, Tooley, and Patrick hanging out all the time. Now Patrick is in the Navy and Tooley is in the Peace Corps, and Jason is feeling a little lonely. But he's doing better. We hang out with our friends Kevin and Angelica pretty frequently, we've got a roadtrip to Chicago for their wedding this summer to look forward to, and he still goes up to Chloe and Walter's house every week to play D&D with Walter, Catharine, and friends.

And, Tooley's planning on coming home for Christmas, so it won't be too long before we see him again. What an adventure he's having!