I give Joe the finger

My friend Joe "Brassy" Josephson was driving to the outdoor retail show the night I had surgery, but he wanted to know how I was. I sent him this picture giving him the finger (hee). For the record, because I've had frostbite in a lot of fingers, my middle finger was the only one they could get a reading from.

Check out all those jacked up IVs they put in my arm. I was like you dudes are doing that because I have good veins, not because I need them. Which made the nurses laugh because I do have great veins and it gave the interns a chance to practice. Interesting fact - new needles for the IVs are plastic, not metal. But still, I don't like having that shit in my arm. See that blue thing? That's to monitor my oxygen. I unplugged it and forgot to plug it back in...oops...I got yelled at for that.

 Joe had recently burned his fingers, so he sent me this pic of his finger in response to my middle finger picture. Of course, he's not really giving me the middle finger.

And now, I have to go lay back down on the sofa and watch a movie or something. Still feeling tired and it's uncomfortable to sit up for long periods of time. And somehow my eyes are messed up, they've been blurry since the surgery...

surgery

 The surgery was a huge success. It's amazing that, even though my innards were chopped up I have less pain now than before surgery. My doctor said that the tumors were sitting like a bowling ball on top of all my other organs and that's why I was in so much pain. And all along I thought I just had an ulcer.

My anesthesiologist did a great job (and was a smoker, and told me that he would have snuck me out for a smoke break if the doctor hadn't shown up). He gave me something he called "medicinal bourbon" to relax me. I don't know what the fuck it was, but I literally felt it hit my vein. He said it normally takes a few minutes to kick in, but right as it went into my arm everything in the room got crazy. I vaguely remember saying "Did anyone else notice that everything in the room just turned purple?" Then I don't remember anything. My mom said that I was carrying on as if I had been on a drinking bender for hours. I'm glad I don't remember what I said.

When I came to in the recovery room, I was still pretty jacked up. The nurses said I kept laughing uncontrollably. Surprisingly I didn't vomit once. The key is to take Dramamine before surgery if you are allergic to anesthetic. Wish someone had told me that 10 years ago. I'm normally vomiting my brains out in recovery. This very sweet orderly took me to my room. I remember telling him "look, you've had a lot to drink, maybe you should let me drive". He told my mom that I was the first patient he's ever wheeled up to a room that was like a happy drunk.

I stayed at Rose Medical Center. Say what you will about the annoyances of HIPAA, one good thing is hospitals can no longer crowd patients into a room. I had my own room, a huge contrast from my last hospital stay when they packed 3 other patients in a room the same size as the one I stayed in at Rose.

,

The nurses were bored because there weren't many patients on the floor. They kept bringing me stuff to eat, even though I wasn't hungry. They would show up with ice cream and then say "oh, you can't eat this can you" and then they would eat the ice cream while sitting on the edge of my bed. After re hydrating I started feeling more human and was able to show the nurses how to do a little hack on their computer system to make it easier to enter patient information. I learned how to use all the computers in my room so I could get out of bed to pee or wander the halls without setting off any alarms.

After getting knocked out for surgery your lungs get lazy. One thing I had to do was breathe into this machine to register how strong my lungs were working. My lungs were kind of shit (this is also supposed to keep you from getting bronchitis, but I got sick anyway because my mom got it, supposedly because she was with me in the hospital).

I had asked the nurses what I had to do to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible. I met all of the tasks they gave me by Thursday night, but they wanted me to stay so I did. At 3 in the morning me, two nurses, and a nurse intern had a contest with the breathing machine. I won for the strongest lungs, which surprised them because I smoke(d). Then they said I kind of cheated because I didn't tell them that I also run.

One of the nurses, Kathy, came in to see me every hour. I always woke up when she came into my room and she would tell me stories about her family. She also would bring me popsicles and as much coke as I could drink even though I was supposed to be drinking water. She kept telling me to order a sandwich from room service (yeah, hospital with room service) but I really couldn't eat anything. And she took me off the "standard diet" delivery so I could order what ever I wanted for breakfast and dinner.

When I left the hospital they didn't even make me ride down to the car in a wheel chair.

If you're ever in Denver and need surgery, I highly recommend Rose Medical Center. It was seriously the BEST hospital I have ever been in.

five points batmobile

While doing laps around my neighborhood (you have to walk a lot after having abdominal surgery) my mom and I came across this.

Weird. What the fuck is this thing? The batmobile with empty gun turrets? Oddly, on the same corner some guys were selling drugs. Maybe it's their car.

Very subtle. Not.

weird things the French eat

Yesterday I was way swamped with work tying up loose ends before my surgery. It didn't help that I had a conference call from 754 to 1030 last night...

FRG offered to make me dinner since I didn't even have time to go pick something up. Dinner consisted of potatoes broiled in spices that are from FRG's "prah vansss" and salad. If you can roll the S sound out really long when saying provence you get extra points from the French.

He also brought two kinds of cheese. One was Roquefort cheese, which I've had, and the other was Morbier, which FRG used to make when he lived in France. For the record, we americans do cheese wrong. It was in the wrong kind of plastic packaging and the sticker on the cheese, according to FRG, "is stupid and sucks". I guess in France the cheese is served in leather jackets with matching pants.

There was a very long explanation about the temperature at which you serve cheese, as well as how it's made. Morbier has this green stripe in it because back in the day farmers didn't have a big enough pot, or what ever you make cheese in, to make the whole cheese (I didn't know cheese had to be a certain size) so they would put some stuff (I didn't really understand the word) in to mark where the cheese was stopped so the next day they could make more. Making cheese is totally stressful. You have to press it, get the whey out, make some bacteria grow in it, and beat it to pieces with some metal blender thing, but if you beat it too much all the cheese goes down some drain thing. But it you beat it into too big of pieces it's "totally fucked up" as the FRG helpfully put it.

I disgraced myself by sticking a knife into the middle of the cheese and pulling a blob of it out to put on my baguette. FRG looked at me as if I had picked the cheese up with my toes and said I must never do that again, specific guidance being "You cut a whole slice, put it on your plate, and then you can spread it on your bread". Who knew... He also cautioned me not to eat the rind of the cheese. As if.

I was a little worried about the cheese because it smelled sort of like feet, and things that go into your body come out smelling at least 4 times as bad. I figured if the Morbier cheese made me fart they would have to block off my house as a toxic waste site.

He also brought prosciutto to go with the potatoes. I never had it before, and was not pleased to see that it looked like the skin that's peeled off of an infected blister. Gross. Also, the label on the package said "Boar's Head". It took about 5 minutes for FRG to convince me that was the brand name of the meat place and not where the meat came from (I have reasons to be suspicious - he told me about how in his village people drink blood from a pig right after it's been killed - "with spices" he said as if that makes drinking blood alright - you apparently have to share your blood with your neighbors and they share their blood with you when they kill a pig - I'm glad you can't raise pigs where I live).

After smelling the prosciutto and attempting numerous times to put it in my mouth, I finally ate a piece. It was like pig sushi. So gross. I told FRG "this tastes like raw bacon" and he said "that's essentially what it is". I almost puked.

He said I have to be more adventurous in eating if I expect him to continue cooking for me. So I plan to take him for sushi after I've recovered from my surgery. We'll see how he does with raw quail eggs.

Fair is fair, even when it comes to the french.

French translation

While hanging out with my French rope gun (who would have imagined I would become friends with someone who is French, real French, not Canadian French, and worse, from southern France) I've had a few moments of confusion over his English. I've provided some translations of French English in case you decide to become friends with someone French who "speaks english".

While we were driving in the worst traffic ever on Saturday to go skiing, FRG was (oh wait, I just noticed, the abbreviation of french rope gun almost spells frog - I did NOT do that on purpose) telling me a story about getting in trouble in high school while taking some test they have to take to graduate. He didn't study for the exam, but he and his friend devised a little plan to pass the test. But, what I heard when he was telling the story, was "I was accused by my teacher of being a shit" (I can see that, he's french) and "she accused me of shitting with my friend" (okay, that sounded weird, even for french boys in boarding school). I finally figured out shitting was cheating. I have not corrected him on that word, and have encouraged him to tell that story to more people because it was so funny.

He was also telling me, after skiing that he was worried about his harm. He then went on for a few more minutes about his harm. I thought at first he might have been talking about how dangerous ski conditions were on Saturday (half the runs on the mountain were closed because of high winds, and I literally could not see more than 2 feet in front of me due to blowing snow while I was skiing). I finally realized he was talking about his arm. Which is interesting BECAUSE...

A few days previous he was showing me pictures of climbing areas in France and Washington State. In one of the pictures he said "Look, that is art lake". I thought that was a kind of stupid name for a lake, though it was very picturesque and had a nice reflection of flowers in it. So I said "Yes, I can see why someone would want to paint that, which is why it has that name I guess." He looked at me as though I was a moron (that happens a lot, especially in the gym when I am trying to learn proper footwork or how to use a gri-gri). Later, in another picture, I noticed that the lake was in the shape of a heart, and realized he had been saying "heart lake".

So I accused him of randomly leaving out or adding an H to words. He said that he doesn't like to say "arm" because "it sounds stupid, and is a stupid word". So he will add an H or extra vowels to words he doesn't like to make them "sound better". He also leaves off consonants on words. He refuses to say "th" and replaces it with either an F or an S sound. If I make fun of his pronunciation he asks me to say phrases in French. He especially likes my pronunciation of my cook ware, Le Crueset. When he says it it doesn't even sound like a word you could spell.

I guess I'm going to have to learn some French so FRG can write a blog making fun of me...

my quit smoking program

So I will hopefully quit smoking starting this thursday, when I show up at the hospital at 530 am to get my uterus cut out. Fun.

Don't recommend that as a quit smoking program for everyone, but getting rid of the curse and a nasty nicotine habit all on the same day seemed like a good idea to me.

my bread! like jesus, it finally rose!

my bread! it's really flat but tasted good...

Mickey Mouse uterus - a gross blog you might not want to read

On Wednesday I went to the doc's for a check up. I have to do that every year since I had problems back in 2004 requiring surgery. I almost skipped the appointment because I just had one in April of last year, and had a pap smear (if that mention bothers you, don't read the rest of this) in December that was normal.

Well wouldn't you fucking know it...during the ultrasound my doctor started freaking out and taking lots of pictures. That's never a good thing. I could see the screen and could see the dark spots that are tumors (know how to spot them after my last surgery). There were 5 big enough for her to take pics of, and smaller ones. Plus, I have some tumors growing on the outside of my uterus. My doctor, who is very cool, said my uterus looks like Mickey Mouse. Which would be funny if it didn't also suck.

So now I have to get a hysterectomy. My doctor wants me to do it as soon as possible because the tumors grew so fast (8 months), they're big enough for her to feel by just poking my abdomen (not that I have a lot of fat on my abdomen, but still, that's gross). I go see a specialist tomorrow to figure out what the fuck I'm going to do.

Positive thing: no more monthly curse. Negative thing: a lot of blogs I've read doing research say that constipation is a problem, along with gas, and potential weight gain. And some other crap stuff.

The cool thing is I met with my veteran yesterday and she had the same surgery. My vet was a combat medic and I'm her mentor to help her transition into a commercial job (I'm volunteering through an organization called ACP). She's great and really tall. She said she'll be my surgery mentor since I'm helping her with the job stuff. I like that we are helping each other.

More to follow after my appointment tomorrow...

quiet please, my dough is resting

So last night, after 2 glasses of wine, and while switching to the second DVD for Godfather II, I decided to make some bread. I had been given an "easy" recipe from the ladies at La Crueset when I bought my pots. It's a bread I can make in my dutch oven. In theory.

I thought last night went pretty good. I put my flour through the flour shifter (shocked I own one, aren't you). Then I didn't exactly measure the amount of yeast I put in, but more should be better, right? I had to do some mathematical calculations on the water (perhaps that's where things went wrong).

This morning when I checked my dough it looked exactly like the directions said it should. Bubbly on top. I luckily checked the directions around 2 (I'm making the bread for dinner tonight at 630 - my rope gun is coming over and is making me chicken picata) and found out the dough had to be taken out of the bowl, rolled in some flour, laid on a towel with more towel on top, and that it still needed another two hours to "rest" before being ready to cook (for an hour and a half - that seems excessive).

I rolled it out and did just what the directions said, except that it said to form the dough into a ball, which was kind of impossible because it's like a total blob. Then it said to rest the dough on its seam. Seam? What the fuck is that? I just put it on the towel and it sort of oozed into a flat kind of thing. I tried putting more flour in but the recipe said you can only do that if you do it quickly and not to man handle the dough too much. It was supposed to rise to twice it's normal size.

Anyway, after an hour it's still the same old blob as before. I even turned on the oven to give the dough more heat and that's not helping (it's sitting on top of the oven).

Damn. Fucking bread. How about this dough blob? Less resting, more rising.

I will post a picture of it after it's cooked. Should be good for a few laughs.

OR victory from the jaws of defeat!!!!!!!!!!!

I was kind of bummed last night that I lost pitchapalooza. But, when I was walking home, in a way, I felt like something good was going to happen. I talked to Brassy last night and he cheered me up, but still I felt like there was something unfinished, or that something was going to happen.

This morning I checked my email, and had one from someone in my writer's group that I haven't really met. He was at the pitch last night, he's a published author, and an award winning screen writer splitting his time between here and NYC (which is why I haven't met him). The email said:

Hi, Franki,
After the event, I bought a book and got it signed.  I put in a
nice word for you with David (the pitchapalooza panel guy).  He wants to follow up
with you and was really impressed with your pitch, Franki.  He
wanted me to make sure you contact him.  His email is [deleted].

Good luck!  Awesome job tonight.

I was shocked, surprised, excited, and stunned that this person who's never met me, or read anything I've written, would go out of his way to help me. I sent a profusely thankful email back to him, offered to buy him a drink, and then got on the stick and sent an email, which was probably crappy, to David. Now I guess I'll wait and see what happens.

In the mean time, I got a response back to my thankful email:

Your story is CAPTIVATING!  I have not seen your writing, but if it is anything like the way you tell it verbally, I believe you will inspire many people.  Plus, you're a really nice person and I want you to succeed.

See you soon.

 

Stay tuned...

I lost

Well, tonight was a weird experience...

When I got to the pitchapalooza 64 people had shown up to pitch. I was like uh oh. They had us put our names in a basket to be randomly selected to pitch. They said they would take 30 people. I didn't get called. Then they said they only had time for one more pitch (19 had been done) because Tattered Cover was closing early. I thought as hard as I could for them to pull my name as the last pitch.

Amazingly, they did.

From the first 5 seconds of my pitch there was an audible gasp from the panel. Then they laughed at the cadaver knee part. When I finished they even applauded me (they didn't applaud anyone else). The main guy said my pitch was perfect and that he loved it. A guy who is a book rep said he thought my book would sell really well and that if the media got their hands on me they would eat me up (his exact words). They all said there wasn't a single thing about my pitch that they would change (unlike every one else that had pitched). I told them I had gotten some rejections on my book and the book seller said "that's because they aren't reading your pitch, but that's going to change - don't see those as rejections at all".

The one woman on the panel asked if my stories were true. I said I had the pictures and witnesses to prove it which made everyone in the audience laugh (maybe because of the way I said it, I don't know).

Then the woman and the book seller went out of the room to pick the winner. I put my hat on and got my jacket ready. Everyone was like "what are you doing? you had to have won!" When the woman and book seller walked back in the room a bunch of people from the writer's group started saying "You know you won".

Which was embarrassing because I didn't win. The woman who won wrote a memoir about making a major change in her life from being a house wife to a feminist. Her pitch was so boring compared to some of the others that I didn't even remember what it was about (someone pitched a kid's book about the Cat Intelligence Agency, where cats solve crimes by manipulating humans - thought that was a great pitch).

Afterward a bunch of people came up to me, that I didn't know, and told me that they really liked my book idea. It was weird.

So, I'm going to change my cover letter to my one minute pitch. Find some agents. Send them a paper copy of my letter, chapter summaries, and the first five pages of my book. And keep going. I have to be close at this point for something to happen.

pitchapalooza

Tonight I'm attending an event with my writer's group. It has the dumb name "pitchapalooza". Everyone gets one minute to give a verbal pitch to a panel of experts (what ever that means and how ever they qualify as an expert). The winner gets a 15 minute consultation that may or may not lead to book publication.

I spent Saturday and Sunday trying to come up with my pitch. I can't decide today whether I'm nervous or not. I wish I knew more about what the format for the event was going to be, and how many people are going to be there. I'm wondering if less people will come because of the snow we got yesterday.

Here's the final version of my pitch:

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have your head almost bitten off by a great white shark? Or to take a 70 foot fall in front of eight tourists while rock climbing in the gunks? Or to complete the Alcatraz to San Francisco swim after learning to swim on the internet?

Me too! That’s why I did those things and then wrote a book about them. My Other Nine Lives is a completed collection of 9 humorous non-fiction essays about my experiences in learning extreme sports, despite having little athletic talent and a knee built out of cadaver parts as a result of an accident that doctors thought would leave me crippled for the rest of my life.

The stories are woven together by a biographical thread that provides insight into managing extreme pain through extreme sports, as well as detailing my romances and mis-adventures with professional extreme athletes. It’s the usual travel adventure book, but with homicidal sled dogs, falling ice, and screaming barfies.

american express - I should have left home without it

My fucking head is going to explode. Seriously.

I spent 5 hours today (luckily had a lot of conf calls - multi-tasking!) going through every corporate am ex statement since March of 2007 along side the scanned in copies of all of my expense reports trying to find out why I have a $1,400 balance on my card.

If that sounds like not such a hard task, let me clarify by saying I have at least 2 expense reports every month, and for the past two years have had one submitted a week. Last year I charged about $200,000 worth of stuff to my am ex.

"Well," you're probably thinking "can't your company just run a report to see what expenses on your card haven't been assigned to an expense report?"

Yeah buster, I'm one step ahead of you on that one. I tried that. We use a system, the same one I've used at every company I've worked at since 1995, that uploads your charges and then you assign them to an expense report and the bills get paid. But, what has happened is somehow charges that I didn't make got assigned to my account in the system. Charges I did make probably ended up on someone else's account (for example, I had an airfare that never showed up in my card data). That has never happened to me before in the 12 years of using the system other places - only at this company.

When that started happening last year I called the morons who handle this shit in my company. They said "oh, just delete those expenses if you didn't make them." Regarding my missing charges, they said "you can't put them on a report manually, they will be rejected. We'll try to figure out what's going on."

What, me worry?

Anyway, since November of 2009 I have been trying to get this issue resolved. Even though Am Ex and I can both prove that expenses being applied to my account were never made by me, my company can't figure out how to take them off my account (e.g. $900 of stuff charged in New Jersey - car rental and hotel - when I can prove I was in the UAE when the charges were incurred). Am Ex tells me they can see the name on the receipts and it isn't my name - they know whose account the charges should go on but my company can't figure out, in their system, how to move the charges.

My company suggested I pay the $1400 until things get sorted out because my credit card is about to be turned off. Fat fucking chance. After almost a year and a half this problem is not any closer to being resolved. I can probably sweet talk am ex into cutting me a break, again, but I'm racking up late fees to the tune of $45 - $80 a month. But I'm afraid if I pay the charges my company will never give my money back.

They did give me a form to fill out for expenses over 1 year old. Unfortunately, after I filled it out and sent it in, I found out it was the wrong form. I filled out the new form a week later, and was told the process of who I have to submit the form to was also changed, so the person I sent it to just ignored it, and my subsequent emails, and it wasn't until I went to her boss that I found out I wasn't supposed to send the form to her anymore. No one can tell me who to send the form to, but they're going to email me real soon.

I would ask my manager, but he's not really my manager because he's working a different job now and they haven't replaced him with someone else. I inquired who my manager was and the response was a copy of the job description for my manager with the suggestion I apply for the position.

Fucking fuck I am annoyed!

I'll drink to that!

I saw this sign when I was on a walk today. In case you can't read it, it says "Fuck it I need a drink Please help".

Had the person who made the sign still been around I would have ponied up some cash for a few rounds.

bacon bird

My friend Cam sent me this picture last night. Her son James shot a pheasant, then her ex cut it's head off, and then she covered it with bacon. They ate it for dinner last night. I am glad I wasn't invited.

GROSS!!!!!!!!

I ate mac and cheese for dinner last night.

the wrong Ben

I am such a fucking moron.

When I was talking to Shim at the Bozeman Icefest he was telling me about a climber dude I should meet named Ben. I thought I knew Ben, and decided to email him about possibly building a bouldering cave in my garage.

So I send Ben, a guy I knew from the east coast, an email saying I had talked to Shim, that Shim said hi, and could he give me some info about building a climbing wall. Then I put a bunch of chatty shit in the email figuring Shim must have emailed him that I would be emailing him. Blah blah blah I went on about a bunch of stupid shit. Ben responded back to my first email right away so I emailed him back, inviting him to Denver as per Shim's suggestion. Ben never responded back to that email.

Then on Thursday night Shim called to wish me a happy new year. I mentioned to him that I had contacted Ben, but used his first and last name. Shim paused for a moment and said "I don't know that guy." I was like but you said I should email Ben. Shim was like "Well, that's the wrong Ben".

SO embarrassed. Ben probably thinks I'm some kind of idiot, and I wonder why he didn't ask me why Shim was saying hi when he doesn't know Shim. Worse, he's friends with a bunch of people I knew at this gym where I have a high profile ex. And all the people at that gym gossip like they're still in high school. I'm going to send Ben (the wrong ben) an email trying to explain myself so he doesn't think I'm a total twit. Though Shim and Cat both said I shouldn't email explaining.

I always have to do things people tell me not to :D

new year's eve

 My sister Cat came to visit me for new year's. Kind of an epic visit because she was supposed to arrive at 10 am on Thursday morning, but she missed her flight so didn't get in until 11:30 pm Thursday night (her flight was delayed 1 1/2 hours).

The weather had been perfect here, but of course the day she flew in we had a snow storm and then the temps dropped to single digits. Friday morning we had decided to do a hike at Matt Winters, and I lent my sister a bunch of clothes because it was only 3 degrees F outside and she didn't have anything warm enough to hike in.

The hike was fun, then we went to Wahoo's and had fish tacos. Cat took a nap while I worked on the photos we took at Matt Winters. We saw a huge buck and a family of 8 deer while hiking. I took a movie of them for my sister's kids.

I woke Cat up around 630 and we started getting ready to go out. Above is a pic of me with my hair kind of fixed (well, I dried it with a hair dryer, and I consider that "fixing" my hair) and make up on. This pic is of me and Cat sitting on my bed with a portrait of us when we were 4 and 3 that my mom painted (I'm the one on the right in the painting). I took about 10 shots to get this one. Guess we should have thought about taking the pic BEFORE drinking some wine. Cat was upset at the way her hair turned out because I don't really have any hair products and her hair is a lot thicker and is straight so she always puts hair spray in.

Hair spray is one of those things, like deodorant, that I don't understand and will never own. Oh well. She survived.

We were planning to go to 16th Street mall but it was way too cold to walk down there. Also, Cat was wearing boots with heels and I was worried about ice on the sidewalk. We went to Larimer Lounge instead, which was tres boring. We got there around 830 and it was dead. We had to pay a $15 cover to see a band that started playing a few minutes before we left (I think we heard one song).

We were standing against a table set up by the band, talking and having a beer (no wine - sucked!!!!!). People started showing up. Soon there was a group of 3 geeky guys. They kept walking by us and giving us meaningful glances. I was like I am NOT going to talk to a guy who doesn't have the balls to talk to me first. Then two other guys showed up and were standing behind us and the table talking loudly about climbing. I had to laugh. Yeah, I'm SO impressed you climbed at the Monastery. Then a guy came in with his girlfriend and did a double take when he saw Cat. He almost fell over. His girlfriend grabbed him by the arm and dragged him into the room where the band was playing.

No hot guys, so after 2 beers we left and got home right at 10. Then we ordered a pizza and watched some Ab Fab. I had to get up at 330 this morning to take Cat to the airport. Luckily both her flights were on time. She's supposed to come out to go skiing in March. Psyched! Also, we decided next new year's we are going somewhere warm.

versa climber!!!!!

I just ordered my very own versa climber!!!!! I've been saving up for it for the past two years!!!! Psyched!!!! They start building it today and I should have it mid-January. I even got the sales guy to make the shipping free.

I think I'm going to put it in my kitchen next to my cacti so they can watch me work out. And I've downloaded a bunch of workouts from the web site.

The versa climber has always been my favorite cardio machine in the gym (though I usually end up using the dreadmill because most gyms, for some stupid reason, don't have versa climbers). I am hating on push ups and pull ups so this will give me a nice exercise to keep my arms in shape. And it's a nice thing to do with running to keep my knee from blowing up (in theory anyway).

Because, this is the year for big trips. I'm going to do the grand with Joe in the summer, Little Bear (also maybe with Joe unless he hates me after the grand), and I plan on doing the rim-rim-rim in the grand canyon (likely that will be a solo endeavor as no one I've talked to seems interested in doing it with me). I'm going to train for a 5k, and then a 10k, and see how my knee does. I might try an easy marathon if the stupid thing holds up this year.

After wasting a year of my life with those fucks in the ME I am ready to have some serious fun this year.

red river gorge

Me at the base of the indian staircase

 Last weekend my dad and I met up with my Uncle Denny to hike in the RRG in Kentucky. We rented a cabin because it was way too cold to sleep out (temps were 30 degrees colder than normal). It was a lot of fun hanging out with my Uncle Denny because I haven't seen him since he came to visit me in 2008.

We were going to do a hike called the indian staircase. But first we had to find it. My dad had a map that was 10 years old that didn't even have the approach trail on it. We walked along for about 3 miles and he decided we should start bushwhacking up towards a cliff where he thought the staircase was. There was lots of snow and ice all over everything since they had just had a huge ice storm. After I tripped over four downed trees I was like "dude, I don't think this is the right way". So we retreated to the trail and kept walking. My dad spotted finally a staircase carved into the bark of a tree, and that's how we found the trail.

The trail was really, really steep and covered in ice and downed trees. All of us were just wearing yak traks so it made walking interesting. I kept telling the guys to kick in their steps but they weren't so I took the front and kicked in steps for them. The trail gets narrow and there's a big cliff you can potentially fall off, especially when the trail is ice, so we started slowing down. Then, we got to the actual staircase, and it looked like a fucking ice climb. You walk up on this 10 foot ledge and start up the stair case, and even just walking around the ledge made me nervous because I couldn't kick steps into the ice and if one of us had fallen it would have been a long, long way down.

"This is way to dangerous" I tried to tell my dad, but he wanted to see if he could get up the staircase. I pointed out to him that if he slipped he would not be able to stop himself on the ledge before he went over the cliff. My uncle was getting pretty nervous too. And it was fucking cold and getting colder while we stood around trying to see if there was a way up. Finally we retreated. Just coming back down the trail was hard - I don't think we would have survived coming down the ice covered rocks.

We did 3 more hikes and headed into town because my uncle had told us about this pizza place that had great pizza, and then you can sit out back by a bonfire and drink beer. The whole day we were talking about what kind of pizza we were going to get and how many pieces we were going to eat and then how we were first going to have a beer. And how we would have more beer while sitting by the bonfire.

But the fucking place was closed.

We went back to the lodge, which was the only restaurant opened. "Do you have pizza?" I asked the waitress as we were being shown to a table. "No, we only have the buffet". Crap. Then my dad asked if they had beer. "This is a dry county" she said. I could have wept.

But, the food wasn't bad (though it wasn't pizza). And we had beer in the cabin. Actually, I drank some Jim Beam with my uncle and woke up with a bad headache the next morning.

We did a short hike up to the natural bridge, which was really cool but covered in ice. I couldn't believe some guy was taking his kids up the trail and they only had on tennis shoes. I don't know how he got them down.

Anyway, we've decided to make a trip to the RRG for hiking right before Christmas a new tradition. Though, after walking around in my hiking shoes (I couldn't fit my boots in my luggage) and freezing my feet off I decided that my dad needed to buy me electric feet warmers (he did, they came today, and I have already put them together!).

My dad and I at the base of the natural arch

The indian staircase

a blond and an engineer discuss a fruit bowl

Last weekend I helped my dad move from a 3 bedroom house to a one bedroom condo. Well, I showed up for the unpacking part. My dad had been left to his own devices to put his stuff in boxes.

My dad has never had to pack or unpack a house even though we used to move a lot. My mom always did it. But since she broke her arm she stayed in Williamsburg and I went to Cincy to help my dad.

I almost had heart failure when I walked into his place and saw wall to wall boxes. There's no way all this shit is going to fit in here I thought to myself. Also, I only had 24 hours to get everything unpacked, and had to unpack enough stuff to make a place to sleep for myself.

I managed to get a shit ton of stuff unpacked, despite my dad's packing. He, for example, packed canned goods and socks all in one box. Then, I came across a big wad of packing paper with a bunch of tape around it in a box that contained tools like wrenches and screw drivers. What the fuck is this going to be I wondered. The last wad of packing paper I had found contained all my dad's silverware (which I dumped all over the floor cutting it open).

I carefully cut into the wad and found a fruit bowl with the fruit still in it. I couldn't believe my dad would pack fruit in a cardboard box. Oh wait, I did believe it.

I went into his bedroom where he was trying to find sheets for the bed. I was like "dad, what the fuck is this?" and he said "it's a fruit bowl". I was like "I know it's a fruit bowl, but what the fuck were you thinking packing the fruit like this?" He looked puzzled and said "well, I thought it was a good way to pack it".  I ripped open the paper some more and said "next time, don't put fruit in a box!"

I went back out into the living room and took the rest of the paper off. Hm, I thought, maybe my dad was right. The fruit was in good shape, with no bruises. So I yelled back to my dad "Hey, I guess I was wrong! This fruit didn't even get bruised!" I started thinking I would use that trick next time I have to move. My dad stuck his head out of his bedroom. "Um, you realize that is not real fruit, don't you?" he asked.

It was indeed plastic fruit. How embarrassing. "You really are a blond" my dad said before retreating back into the bedroom.