lumensoutdoors.org - Page 15

• I am an awesome bike mechanic - April 29, 2007

  Back in college, biking was a big part of my everyday activities. I rode to and from class several times a day, went for night and weekend rides with Ted and Ian, and in general just used it for transportation. For a while, our saying was “if it’s not thirty miles, it’s not worth it”. After college, I got lazy and stopped biking. It didn’t help that I was living on the worst road in Atlanta and would have died every single day I got out on the road. Things didn’t improve once I moved to Nashua because I was able to buy a car and didn’t need to bike everywhere anymore.

• Gravity's Rainbow Death Pact - April 27, 2007

  It’s a widely believed fact that Gravity’s Rainbow is impossible to read. No humans are known to have ever finished this book due to its huge number of characters, pages upon pages of tangential subplots, obscure cultural references, and maze of randomly assembled paragraphs. I myself have attempted to read this book several times, but have never managed to get past the first 60 pages. I’m not sure what the plot really is, or even if there are main characters at all.

• Finally, a storm - February 13, 2007

  We haven’t had a single strong snowfall this entire winter. Sure, there have been a couple light ones from time to time but it’s nothing like the first year I lived here. There are plenty of places where there isn’t even any snow on the ground. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I was woken up at 4am by the lights and sirens of plows going by my window. It certainly hasn’t been any time in the last twelve months. David and I had this big New Year’s party this year and were hoping for a really serious snowstorm to scare our friends from the south. That almost worked with a good storm the day people arrived but it quickly disappeared. I don’t think anyone was too impressed.

  Well it looks like all of that is about to change. The weather forecasts are all conflicting but right now the totals through Thursday look to be somewhere around a foot of snow, some ice and sleet, and winds gusting up to 50 mph. This may not sound like much fun to other people but I am really excited about that. If we do actually see winds around 50 and big huge snow drifts, I will have to go outside and run around in it. Let’s just hope that this doesn’t end up like all the other forecasts this winter and fizzle out at the last minute. That’d be disappointing.

• Rocking out - February 5, 2007

  I spent all Friday at FUDCon and then all Saturday and Sunday working on repoman. I figured I owed myself a break. So I took today off from work to sit around the house and not get anything important done. The one thing I did do was pick up Guitar Hero again and make another effort at beating hard.

• It's almost like making beer - January 31, 2007

  I’ve been going pretty crazy on cooking this past month. For Christmas I got a couple cookbooks and I have been picking things out at random to make. In addition to dinners and sides, I have been trying to get into some baking as well. It’s seemed like this mysterious other half of cooking knowledge, completely different from the typical things I do like making a roast or sauteeing something in garlic. The first thing I baked was banana bread. It was so simple and so good that I felt like an idiot for throwing away perfectly black bananas for all those years. I’ve resolved to never do that again. I also made some chocolate oat bars that would have been almost perfect if I’d had the right dish.

• Winter hiking - January 30, 2007

  Well, look who forgot to update the blog for a whole month? Yes that’s right, it’s me. Since it’s been so long, I don’t think I am going to try to cover all the Christmas and New Year’s activities. Maybe I will do a quick review of those later in the week if I keep up the writing again. Since this is the first entry in a long while, I will just cover the latest big thing I did. I’ll cover the smaller events tomorrow I think.

• The year in hiking - December 22, 2006

  Hm, I sure have been silent for a while. I don’t know why that is except for the generic being busy answer. Anyway since it is just about the end of the year and I’m not going to get another hike in, I’ve decided to present this quick retrospective on my hiking this year. It was quite a season for me. We started hiking in March on Monadnock, and finished up just last weekend on the same mountain. I still managed to take two whole months off. I also had some forced time off due to a knee injury. This is way more hiking than I’ve done in many many years, and is even more than I did when I was in scouts and did this sort of thing regularly.

• Stupid fingers - December 12, 2006

  After many, many hours spent in front of the TV playing Guitar Hero 2, I can state with some authority that I believe pull offs are impossible to do. This may just be because I have stupid fingers, but I believe it being impossible for anyone is more likely. I can do the hammer ons with pretty good precision at this point, but I just can’t convince my fingers to do the opposite motion. I don’t suppose anyone has any suggestions for mastering this.

  If I could figure this out, I’d be a whole lot better at the game. I can strum pretty quickly, though not quite fast enough yet to play through Misrilou on expert. That’s going to take a lot of work, but it’s doable. And I can get through songs like YYZ on hard with some competency as well as do a lot of the chord stuff. It’s just that moving back and forth on the fret buttons that I can’t figure out yet. But once I do, I figure I will be unstoppable.

• Things I like about the new place - December 9, 2006

  In no particular order:

• Speedy delivery - December 7, 2006

  Today, we received a package from UPS containing twenty shower heads.