Taking It Too Far

If you're wont to getting sucked into Internet fads, then you've seen this:



Well... you know how these memes evolve:

 

And yes, somebody went there:

Reevaluation

I was thinking today about what it means to live an authentic life. By that I mean: to be living as an aware being, choosing a path, and not just blindly repeating the same motions day after day. Because that's what I've been doing the last few months: get up, eat breakfast, work at the computer for four hours, go work out, work four more hours, tend the garden, eat dinner, watch a film, read a book, sleep.

Repeat x120 days, modulo random variations.

This is not what I want my life to be. What I want more of:

• Real interaction with people in my life, instead of screen time (computers and television)
• To stop doing leisure time activities that I really don't like
• More stop & quiet

For the first one, I want to push the keyboard away, and figure out how to fill the spare time with my people.  Play backgammon with Laura, hike an evening trail, help mom haul some compost.  This sitting in front of screens thing has got to stop.  Really, it just has to.  Facebook is stupid, and a $5 comcast movie is a waste of both money as well as time.  I used to read a book a day, and I remember thinking and being challenged.  Now, I feel like a lemming, waiting for the next round of entertainment.

For the second, this is harder.  It means some real introspection.  You know what?  I really don't like the mountain rescue stuff.  They consume my weekends and my weekdays, and honestly, there were only four callouts last year and I was unavailable for all of them.  The guys in that group do it mostly to get away from their families for a night or a day.  That's not the kind of dynamic I want to be a part of.  I appreciate their efforts, but really, it's not fulfulling, and it's wasting my time.  If I'm going to volunteer my time for a cause, I want it to feel right.  I don't want to be a person who does things to get away from his life -- I want to do things to be a part of them.

For the last, it's the hardest of all.  I'm so sick of supermarkets playing pop songs in the background, and radios in the car.  Why must we always have noise?  And why must we always be moving or doing?  The best times of the last month that I can remember involve.. nothing that would make any headline.  I remember Finn sitting beside me as I crouched by a garden bed, shivering as he does when the ground is cold and his foot pads get wet.  I remember the warmth of Laura's skin as we stood together, watching the sun set in the forest.  I remember waking up and then lying still, listening to the frogs croaking in the stream bed outside.

Well, tomorrow is the start of a new day.  Let's see how it goes.

Beer Review

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

Okay, here's the spring beer review, also known as "what I do after ten hours of work, not including time spent wandering around the garden to see what has sprouted or furminating Finn."

Seriously, before I moved to the pacific northwest, I thought that I understood beer.  I am now properly chastened.  Here are three (relatively) local ales that pretty much rock, limited to that number because after three bombers I am unable to know or care what I'm drinking:

Tricerahops, by Ninkasi.  I am a mad fanatic for the IPA, and this is far and away the most consistent and hoppy IPA around -- and FSM knows, I've tried A LOT.  Freshly tapped it's even better, but even in a bottle from the grocery store, it kicks ever-lovin' butt.  This is some good stuff, folks.  Oh sorry, if you're from a Blue Law state, there is no Ninkasi in the grocery store.  Time to move, I guess.

 Boundary Bay Brewing's Imperial IPA.  This is even better than Tricerahops, but unfortunately it doesn't age well at all.  As in, it loses a lot just a few days after they tap it.  So you pretty much have to know when it's being brewed, when the tap is going in, and get yer butt up there to drink it.  But trust me, it is so worth it if you make that window!  Even after the window, it's still really good... I mean, I'm not going to stop drinking it just because it's not absolutely perfect anymore!  I even have the Imperial IPA hoody from Boundary, even.  Jealous?  This beer just won an award at the beer festival, too -- and I bet that that was tapped, older stuff!

 Chuckanut Strong Ale.   On any given wednesday, you'll find me wandering down to the Boundary Bay Brewery with an empty growler to be filled with Imperial IPA, but you'll never see me doing that at the Chuckanut, because the bastards don't sell their Strong Ale in growlers, only in pints.  Probably because the Strong keeps even worse than the Imperial, I'm guessing.  But OMG is the Strong so good out of the tap!  Besides, one pint is enough to make me need to spend some time down on the waterfront, chilling out.


A brewery that I haven't mentioned that is also (relatively) local is the Standing Stone Brewery in Ashland, Oregon.  I stopped off there for dinner over New Year's and was out-and-out stunned by how good their beer was, so much so that I bought a growler for the trip home.  Even makes me want to go back south again.

All this being said, I will still always love New Belgium for their marvelous philosophy (no other company looks after their employees as well!), their fantastic beer, and the fact that they're a Colorado home-grown native.  But alas, I am no longer a Coloradan.

What a day in the garden does to my thoughts

I spent this saturday helping to man a first aid tent for the local MS Walk.  I am a certified wilderness first responder, so the theory is that since I (theoretically) know how to deal with an open femur fracture more than an hour away from definitive medical care, that I should be able to put a band-aid on a knee.

Both of the above assumptions are wrong.  On the one hand, although I was taught in a twelve-day course how to apply traction and a splint to a femur fracture, I'm not at all certain how I would handle it for real.  And it was a year and a half ago that I took the course, so things are a bit fuzzy now.

On the other hand, it's really wrong to assume that just simple scrapes will happen with a community benefit walk.  The people who are doing this stuff are not in good shape, almost by definition.  And some of their relatives are REALLY not in good shape.  The whole day I had visions of needing to do CPR, and I hoarded free oranges and water bottles for possible diabetics since our supplied med kit had no glucose.  One old dude sat down in our patient chair and said "whew!  I made it a mile this year.  Double what I did last year, when I lost my sight since I'd forgotten my insulin!"

Whew, that was saturday.  And then sunday: all day in the garden.  I put up a third raised garden bed, and cleaned a bunch of rocks out of the yard.  Interspersed with a lot of just sitting and listening to the creek, the wind in the trees, and birds calling back and forth.  Finn was out with me most of the day, Zooey occasionally.  Finn caught a mole and a mouse.  Zooey sniffed them, but mostly she stayed close to me, wary of the wider world.  Sometimes I just had to stop, and sit, and be.  Occasionally Laura would open the door, come out, and come stand next to me.  She has her own battles, but the garden is good for both of us.  We stand, she listens, I listen.  After ten minutes, she nuzzles me and goes back inside to finish what she was doing.

It's weird.  Where I am now, I would not have thought I would ever be, just 3-ish years ago.  Which is an example of hope, I guess.  Plenty of things go wrong, but time passes, and we go on. 

A new page is just a day away.  Well, if we let it be, it seems.

What's Not Up (or what is)

Spring is here, finally and certainly.  We awake to songbirds through open windows and fall asleep to frogs chorusing in the creek bed of the forest just behind the back yard; the radishes are bulbing out and will be ready for salad in just a few days, the spinach and arugula throw out more leaves every day, and the afternoon sun beams lean long and warm.

Finn has taken to catching moles, about one a day.  He doesn't really know what to do with them: they're obviously not food, to his mind, since they look and taste nothing like kibble, but in his attempts to figure them out he inevitably kills them.  I feel a bit sorry for them, but then it's his nature to hunt.  Death is a part of the rebirth of spring, after all.

Tomorrow I plant my red cabbage starts (fish tacos!), and prepare for my saturday of administering band-aids, moleskin, and aspirin to the participants of the MS Walk here in town as one of the medical volunteers.

Overall, a boring update.  Because life is good for me right now, and boring -- such as it is -- after years of strife and uncertainty -- is just fine.

MINE

So, I'm a member of a mountain rescue group, yada yada yada.  It's a interesting way to maintain mountaineering skills and to learn rescue techniques, which are pretty far and away different from standard mountaineering geekery.  Also, there are helicopter rides, sometimes.  And free bratwurst at the summer picnic!

Anyway, there are a number of women in the group, which is not unusual.  It doesn't stop all manner of sexist joking, like the lead rigger screaming that the mainline raise team is "HAULING LIKE A BUNCH OF GIRLS!" or another rigger delicately quoting lines from "Forty Year Old Virgin" as he helped haul a 3:1 leverage system on a belay line, and I quote him, "SUCKER MOTHERFUCKER! IN THE ASSHOLE! COCKSUCKER MOTHERFUCKER!"

(Yarding on haul lines is hard work.)

They're a pretty tight group, these guys.  And morbidly funny.  We'll have a membership meeting and be going over points: recent donations, upcoming trainings, blah blah blah.  Then the president will close the meeting with an offhand remark like, "and oh yeah, don't forget that spring is here now and we've still got a couple up in the freezer who are going to thaw out soon, so stay ready."  As in, two corpses somewhere up on the glaciers that are going to surprise some tourist hikers soon and necessitate a quick body recovery.  (Or two.)

So last week, Laura asked me if it would be okay by me*, if she joined the group.  She said that one of her previous SO's used to rigidly partition "his activities" and "their activities."  As in, he didn't want her doing "his stuff."  So he refused to take her camping, for example**.

I can sympathize with that attitude to a very small degree, because I know I like to carve out my own bit of the world that I can call my own.  But seriously?  It's really pretty childish to declare that someone can't do something because you need your space.  You gotta make your space, not deny space to other people, I think.

Plus, I really can't wait to see what happens when a bunch of good-natured he-men are exposed to a feminist who won't back down, and who can probably out-perform (athletically) most of them.  She'll swear up a blue streak right next to them, and turn those "bunch of girls" remarks right back on their heads.

Yeah, this is going to be pretty amusing.  Hell YEAH she should join!

*Obviously, we still are getting to know each other.  I can't imagine Laura asking the same question of anyone that she knew well.  She'd just say "fuck it, I'm joining this thing!"

**Which is just patently stupid because skinny dipping with a hot girl in a mountain lake is the best thing ever.  Just saying.

HA!

"I just think that it's funny that you fart in your sleep and then blame it on Finn*, aloud, also while you're still asleep."

*Finn is our kitten