Great thoughts of Fleeting substance

Good Grief! I am a seriously busy man!

Briefly after writing last week, I got sick. An unfortunate fever and the associated body aches, but nothing dangerous or notable. No strange fever-dreams either, which is only slightly unfortunate. While entertaining in retrospect, they can make sleeping an exhausting process. And, once again, J(5) has managed to escape my sickness uninfected. Will wonders never cease?

This last weekend, a bunch of us went hiking. The *plan* was to attempt a hike called ‘the bridge to nowhere’. It had its ups and downs. For ups, it was an incedibly pretty hike, going along a lovely river, and giving plenty of opportunities for scrambling along river-rocks. J(5) and I spent most of our time in sandles, which allowed for ease of river-crossing. Overall, it was a quite nice place to walk.

The downside was that, for a hike, it was fantastically hard to navigate. I’m not sure what kind of shoes they expect you to wear, but you are quite often forced to ford the river by foot, and so you wouldn’t want to encase your feet in hiking boots, necessarily, but afterwards you end up scrambling across these strange riverbeds with big, clunky rocks, so sandles are pretty rough going too. Luckily, J(5) and I had some pretty hearty-bottomed sandles, so that was okay with us, and two other hikers, the Chef and…um…’Android’…(a newcomer, he left raytheon for a while and is now back, until he decies he would rather be somehwere else) had nifty shoes they’d picked up at REI that had mesh sides but solid bottoms. Those worked okay, but the Chef kept having to dry her feet off, lest she risk foot-based aggrivation. And the Chef’s boyfriend, also along on the trip, brought river-walkers, which had soles too flimsy to navigate rocky paths, so every time we had to cross a river, we had to pause and let feet dry and shoes be exchanged. It made for very slow going.

Worse still, the path was extremely tricky to navigate, simply because it was extremely tricky to find. More than once we found ourselves having to cross the river back and forth only to discover that there was an alternate path on higher ground that would have taken us past the river. Not to mention that the place was ruddy with these aweful bush-plants with leaves that sharpen to a, literally, needle-sharp point. I lost a little body fluid over those buggers. Overall, quite nice, but a very, *very* tricky hike.

We ended up running into issues of water and time around the same point. The hike itself was only supposed to be 4.5 miles, which doesn’t sound like much, but, going was incredibly slow. We started around 9:45 or so (it was a bit of a drive from where we live) and at around 1:00 we realized we were still pretty far from the bride. (Besides, J(5)’s favorite part was the river-rock scrambling, she wasn’t there for the bridge). So we decided to break for lunch and turn around. We made it to the car just as we ran out of water, and we were all very, very thirsty. It had been a blazingly hot day (no sunburn, thanks sunscreen!) and dispite everyone having brought at least 2 liters of water along, we all went through all of it, and we even stopped at a drug store on the way back to buy water. J(5) and I demolished a 1.5 liter bottle between the two of us on the drive home. Tricky hike, but I think we did it just right.

Then, a couple of days after that, my birthday! Happy birthday to me! I’m officially 26 now, though I have to keep calculating my age in my head, just to be sure. J(5) got me some Alton Brown DVDs, which are awseome. I did, however, fail to send birthday lists to the rest of my family, thus proving that I am not only bad at remembering other birthdays, I’m also bad at remembering my own.

Tool concert tomorrow! So excited!

Next week, I’m flying 4 times! Crikey!

That’s it! Time to rest!

-N