But if I don't do it then I'll never fail spectacularly

I am aggravated with myself.  I reread my old journals and I crack myself up.  I read actual published books, and I think "I could write a better book than that."  But do I get off my lazy butt and write said book?  No I do not.  I'm not so good at writing unless I have a long stretch of time in front of me.  Or it's due tomorrow.

Also, part of me thinks I should actually hike the entire trail before writing a book about it.  I mean, Bill Bryson didn't, but he was already a famous author.  I'm just somebody who amuses my own self.

I'm probably going to have to do something adult and mature like make a commitment.  Like, I made a commitment to go to the gym twice a week to do the back exercises the physical therapist taught me.  It's important, it's for my own good, and I actually do it.  Of course, that's only 45 minutes twice a week, which isn't a huge commitment.  But I think it counts.

Gah.  Hate being adult and mature.  Is much more fun to watch tv and eat Twinkies.

Come to think of it, I'm not sure that I've ever watched tv and eaten Twinkies simultaneously.  Also not sure how many years it has been since I ate a Twinkie.  I am definitely sure that I loved Twinkies when I was nine.  Also I loved that tomato soup with the alphabet in it.  What was that called?  I can't remember.  But I tried it again when I grew up (technically I'm an adult now) and it tasted sweet and gross.  Sad.

Also, we haven't really watched "tv" since those jerks changed everything to digital and turned my tv into a useless hunk of metal and glass.  I watch Netflix.  Sporadically.

INTERLUDE

I just went into the kitchen because I heard the dryer buzz (the dryer is only accessible through the kitchen) and as I walked through I saw a camel cricket.  ON THE CUTTING BOARD.  Camel crickets have invaded our kitchen!  I screamed like a little girl, and then I tried to kill it with a knife but it jumped, like those little effers like to do.  So instead I dropped the cutting board on it from several feet up, and miraculously I hit the critter.  And then I bravely killed it by stepping on the cutting board.  Not one of my finer moments.  I'll sleep in the woods for months on end, but do NOT let one of those godawful too-many-leg prehistoric-looking things in my house.  Eesh.

END INTERLUDE

ACTUALLY, MORE INTERLUDE

We are having a domestic situation here at the house.  I can't really give you any details because my husband might divorce me, but the gist is that we have a LOT of ants in here right now.  All over the place.  I am having hysterical itching.

OKAY REALLY DONE WITH INTERLUDE

What's a good way to do something that you do want to do but it involves being grown up and mature?  Do you think 45 minutes twice a week is reasonable?  That's, like, 8 words in Words with Friends, which is mostly Words with my Husband, except not in the "we're having words" way.  It's amicable.  Except when I get all vowels.

The really galling thing is that it's mostly written already.  I'm planning to take journal entries, spell check them, buff them a little, and intersperse them with commentary as I feel moved to do so.  And it's not like I need to do a lot of fact checking.  (I might need to change some names to protect the innocent.)

So annoyed with myself.  Might put self on restriction.  No tv for one week.  Or Twinkies.

On the whole I have few regrets

I came across one of those "things people regret on their deathbed" sorts of things today.  I took the moment to pause and think about my life.  What have I done that I'm happy about?  What would I regret having not done, if I were at the end of my life?

Things I'm happy about:

I got a degree in physics.  In one sense I never use it (my job is not physics related), but in another I use it every day of my life.  I always wanted to know how things worked.  And to a large extent, I do thanks to that degree.

I had a really great dog.  Everybody should have at least one really great dog.

All the time I got to spend wandering around in the woods as a kid.  I made up a thousand stories, and ate as many wild berries.

I've experienced enough pain and suffering to enhance my empathy for others.  You really have to walk a mile in those shoes to know what it's like.

I had a really great horse.  Far fewer people experience this than a really great dog, but it is, if anything, more fulfilling.  Dogs are bred to want to be around humans, and their pack structure makes them nicely obedient if you're the alpha.  So they're kind of easy. Horses, on the other hand, usually don't care about people except as it relates to their dinner.  If you have a really great relationship with a horse, it means a special horse and probably a whole lot of time spent together.

I own my very own Lipizzan cross, as close as I could afford to get to nature's own dressage machine.  And I did in fact ride dressage on him for several years.  More importantly, that nutty horse and I have learned each other.  I have not yet met another horse who will play Red Light Green Light with me.

I finally told the man I loved how I felt about him, and we are now married.  

If things go as planned, we'll own our own house together before either of us is 50.  We are pretty much financially stable.  This makes me happy.  I have never been comfortable with debt.

I have some really great friends.  And they are not the ones who I expected to end up with, which makes it more special.

I have spent a LOT of time alone in nature.  I've sat on the tops of mountains - under a clear sky, in the middle of a cloud, watching a storm come in, plundering a blueberry patch, listening to absolute silence.  I've felt nature's fury against my bare skin.  I've laid out at night, far from a city, and seen too many stars to count.  I've felt the thrill of sharing a place with a wild thing.  Teaching myself the skills to be comfortable alone in the wilderness has been a wonderful experience.  Sometimes scary, but wonderful.

I've met hundreds of people hiking, and they have almost all been the sort of people you would really want to meet.

I've made some people happy and I've made some people laugh.

Things I regret:

Sometimes I was lonely when I didn't have to be.

Sometimes I've been unfair to others.  And to me.

All those times I got Lyme disease.  What a waste.

Oddly enough, I regret not meeting some people who died before I was born, or before I could meet them.  Two grandparents, and JD's dad.


********

On the whole, the likes far outweigh the regrets.  I think I'll keep going the way I'm going.

Is there anything I still want to do?  Of course!  I want to keep enjoying my life, and that means more hiking, travel, trying my best at my job, many years of laughter with JD, probably more dogs and cats, and loving my friends and family to the best of my ability.  But as far as anything that I've never done that I really wish I had?  Something I would regret missing? Nope.  Can't think of one thing.

Today's revelation

I went out to the farm this morning, as one does, to see my horse.  He was being a sweety.  First I drove to the south end of his field to check out his hay bale (so freshly installed that it's still perfectly cylindrical) and then I turned to drive up to the barn where his gear is.  In the meantime he had started walking toward my car, so he had to reverse and walk the other way with me.

I love having a horse who recognizes my car, and likes me enough to follow my car around.

Of course, despite that he didn't want to be caught, so instead Mystery got a handful of cookies and some attention.  And then Pluto was ready to be caught.  I imagine that if anybody else ever ends up with this horse, they'll be cussing me for his quirks.  But I swear I didn't install those quirks.  He came this way.

He was oddly good on the lead - no lunging for the grass, just sort of calmly walking along at the end of a loopy rope, as if he were well trained.  What's up with that?

I brushed a few loose hairs off him and neatened up his mane a little bit, but he was already looking pretty shiny.  Pluto pretended to be scared of the fly spray when I fwooshed it at him, but he didn't pretend very hard.  Not much is worth the energy to really act out on a summer day.  I said "stand still" and then he did.  A really scared horse would have jigged in place, or maybe just stood and shook.  Whereas Pluto just stood.

I intended to stay with Pluto and let him graze today like Bonnie does with Mystery, but instead Pluto wanted to stand with his head three inches from my face.  We did that for a few minutes while I blew zerberts against his nose, but eventually I decided to put him back out with Mystery and mosey on home.  Between the new grass the rain brought and the fresh round bale, I think he has plenty to eat without grazing outside the field anyway.

After grooming and spraying and making much of him, I suddenly realized that my middle didn't hurt.  I stopped to think about it.  I guess it did still kinda hurt.  I just hadn't noticed.  And that's when I had a revelation.

My brain has been trying to come up with a reason why I should keep a horse when I mostly don't ride anymore.  My heart says "I love him" should be enough, but my brain keeps looking at my wallet.  But today, my brain finally figured out that when I'm with my horse, I forget about everything else.  And I don't have to be riding him for this to happen.  This is valuable.  This is a good enough reason to have a horse that I don't ride.


PS My middle really doesn't hurt as much today as yesterday.  I'm not as swollen up, either.  Yesterday was a very bad day.  Today is making up for it.

An encyclopedia covering the last three weeks, with an emphasis on grossness

Special note:  if you don't want to read about bodily functions, you are totally at the wrong blog.  You've been warned.

I'm back!  Actually I've been back since Thursday night, which is almost a week, but I've been pretty busy being bulbous.  The last week of my hike, my stomach or related items in my abdomen started getting kind of cranky.  And so I stopped eating as much, so I got really tired.  Because when you're hiking up and down big effing mountains with a backpack is not a good time to cut calories.  Food = fuel, people!  No food = not going up mountains very fast.

That said, I had a really good time.  If my tummy had behaved it would have been pretty much perfect.  But then again, when has my tummy really behaved on a long trip?  Eh?  EH?  I think the answer I hear echoing around the room is "never".  So I'm kind of used to it.  The terrain was gorgeous, the people were fun, and the hiking was not as hard as I expected.  It was a good vacation.

So I'm back at work.  I'm sort of easing in.  My boss has also been out, which helps with the easing.  My coworkers very seldom pressure me to do more work.

Weeks ago, before I went on my hiking trip through the Whites, my doctor gave me an order for a CT scan.  I had only casually mentioned the astonishing but short lived abdominal pain that had been happening in my middle periodically, because I was in the office already getting my arm (and apparently arthritic neck) checked out.  As I told her, I only brought it up because I knew if I ended up in the ER with something abdominal and I *hadn't* mentioned it when I was right there in the office that she would be really mad.  My doctor is tiny but she has very intimidating frowny expressions that she gets when people do things like that.  So I "oh by the way" mentioned it, and in addition to the MRI orders she wrote out the CT order.  But she said it could wait until I got back, since I wasn't having immediate problems.

Well, she was *almost* right.

I'm pretty lucky things happened the way they did.  I mean, A) I didn't have to go to the hospital, although I was starting to wonder, and B) when my intestines did what intestines do when they're really pissed off, I was in a motel room.  With a flush toilet (and a shower, which became important).  Not on top of a mountain in a tent with no more facilities than whatever sort of hole I could scratch out of the bare rock with my plastic trowel.  Had I ended up in that situation, I think I'd have just laid sideways on the stone, shat my brains out, and hoped for a rainstorm.

Did you know that if enough pressure builds up in your intestines (due to, let's say just theoretically, an intestinal blockage) that poop can undergo a phase change?  Not solid, not liquid, but more of a foam?  Kind of like happens with geysers.  Except in this case nothing started miles underground, and also nothing was heated to  hundreds of degrees.  Although it kind of felt like it from my perspective.

I listened to a fascinating podcast about geysers the following morning, as my poor abused innards and I were jostled and jolted the many miles from North Conway, NH to home in MD via the bus and the train.  It really struck a chord.

Anyway so I got off the trail a few days early because I was tired and I needed a day off, and I didn't have time to get over Mt Washington and then find a way home if I took that day off.  I mean, it took me two whole days to get home starting from Crawford Notch.  Several more days travel would have only made it worse.

Day one only got me as far as North Conway, where I could get a bus to Boston... the next morning.  There is not a lot of public transportation happening in the smaller parts of New England.  If you miss the 8:30 AM bus, you're stuck there until the morrow. I started wandering around North Conway, hoping to find the movie theater.  I never did, but I did have iced coffee in a delightful coffee shop / art gallery.  After I gave up on finding the theater (it was five hundred and three degrees out, and it just wasn't worth it) I stopped in at the information office for town and the lady there directed me to the town library.  I just wanted some place air conditioned to sit quietly.  Reading free magazines was just my speed.  Also, the lady told me to come back and talk to her if I got bored.

Also, EVERYBODY told me I had to get ice cream while in town. Apparently it's a thing.  So, library and a milkshake.  And I visited the Mt Washington museum, which was right across from my motel, and also free.

After sufficient time had passed to allow me to checkin (around four pm) I went and checked in at an exorbitant rate to a room so small that it had a Murphy bed.  But it had air conditioning, and a shower, and a toilet, so I was happy.  I immediately folded down the bed and lay directly in the breeze of the air conditioner and was happy.

At dinner time I wasn't really hungry, but I've been fooled before.  I hate it when I'm not hungry and I don't eat, and then it's too late and my stomach is a giant pit of churning acid.  It remonstrates.

I went across the street to the Thai place for basil rolls (which are kind of like spring rolls except it's all incredibly fresh crunchy veggies inside, and the outside is a not-fried rice paper wrap) and some Pad Thai.  Which was starting to gross me out by the time I got it.  I ate a few bites of noodles but couldn't finish.  The restaurant owner convinced me to take it with me in case I got hungry later.  I think he couldn't stand the thought of wasted food.  Which is too bad, because I left the whole thing in the fridge of the motel room.

I stopped for a Slushee, which I had never actually gotten before.  At home we have Slurpees.  Slushees are different.  Instead of several varieties of flavored slush, there are several varieties of syrup, to which you add plain slush.  Both ways work fine.  I got blue flavor syrup.

Blue slush was tasting pretty good.  Sugar + ice + water is excellent when it's twelve hundred and nine degrees out.

So I toddled back to my motel with the intention of watching bad tv, drinking a quart of sugar ice water, and falling asleep early.  Instead, as soon as I got there I noticed that a basketball had apparently inflated itself just under my breastbone.  I don't know how I didn't notice this procedure, but once I did notice I can assure you that it was painful.  I lay back and tried to focus on the tv, but dang!  It was really uncomfortable.  And I couldn't, you know.. go.  Actually I hadn't been able to for several days.  And suddenly the whole "you might have adhesions because of prior abdominal surgeries" portion of the casual chat I had had with the doctor several weeks earlier became very clear in my brain.  Adhesions = things connecting where they shouldn't = possibly my intestines are not a through street anymore.

I thought pretty hard about calling 911.  Or the front desk.  Wouldn't it be good to alert the front desk before I exploded all over their room?  They might want to get a mop.  Or a tarp.

Then, I remembered "wind breaking poses" from yoga.  I was in far too much pain to do a real down dog, but I attempted a facsimile thereof.  Oh my lord.  That hurt.  BUT!  I felt things moving.  Like in one of those Indiana Jones movies, where a giant boulder is rolling down a carefully hidden track, and it wants to crush Indy?  Like that, but with poop.  And then I was ever so grateful that the room was tiny, because I was only four feet from the toilet.

And then there was the business with the foam, and something about projectile, and I had to take a shower.  And basically that's how my evening went until quite late at night.  It was quite early the next morning before I could fart with impunity.  Which I did a lot of, because apparently I had packed a *lot* of gas into the basketball.

Oddly?  Those farts, and all the farts of the next two days, smelled like nothing.  I was sad when my farts started stinking again.  But in the meantime it was very handy because I farted about every 30 seconds on the train, for hundreds of miles.  And nobody complained.

In the morning I realized that if I didn't do something about the geyser I wasn't going to be able to travel, so I purchased a large quantity of Imodium, some ginger ale, some Gatorade (blech) and some graham crackers, which I figured would keep me from passing out due to low blood sugar.

It was a long day, my friends.  But I stoppered the geyser, I manfully maintained my stiff upper lip while farting copiously, and I painfully made my way home.

Which brings us to today, when I finally was able to get that CT scan.  I couldn't get a followup appointment with my doctor until next Monday, and of course the technician isn't legally allowed to tell you anything because that's the radiologist's job.  But she did point to the exact spot where my belly hurts to ask if that were where my trouble was located.  So I'm guessing she saw something.  Which I'll find out about on Monday..

In the meantime, I'm dealing with the after effects of the "oral contrast" they make you drink so they can actually see your intestines in the xrays.  Just like last time, in 2009, my body has been trying vigorously to eject the stuff since I started drinking it.  I was able to clamp down on the gag reflex, but I can't do anything about the other end.  I went to work after the scan in the vain hope that THIS TIME I would be fine, but no.  After four hours of hurried trips halfway across the building to the ladies room, I gave up.  I tried to time it so that I would have enough time to drive home before the next visit, but I didn't count on road construction. I almost didn't make it.  But I did!  It was like I had an umpire yelling SAFE as I slid through the door!  Whew.

I'm pretty much clean as a whistle now.

Oh, and the bulbous thing?  Has been pretty much happening every day, so I feel like things are kind of drawing to a head.  I get up, I'm normal shape, and by mid morning my middle is distended.  Getting horizontal helps.  I'm fairly certain I have some kind of partial obstruction.  And I'm pretty sure the only way this is resolving is with the help of a scalpel.

Good times, good times.  How was your vacation?

I'm leaving on a train tomorrow

You know what is no fun?  Is living in the mid-Atlantic in summer with no air conditioning.  That derecho knocked out our power and I got to spend several unpleasant days with the two dogs and four cats, and all of us suffered.  Just sitting still, I had sweat rolling off of me.

The power went out at 11:30 or so on Friday night, and came back on at 3:30 Monday morning.  That doesn't sound like very long in retrospect, but it felt like forever right then.  And I couldn't open the fridge or freezer, where all the yummy stuff is.  I pretty much ate granola bars.  I didn't even want the granola bars.  It was too hot to be hungry.  What I wanted was a huge cold drink with a lot of ice.  Instead I drank 90 degree 0 calorie PowerAde because we had some in the sunroom.

Man.

Anyway, that's over.  Now it's time to go hiking.  I decided to go ahead and do a trail journal again.  It's kind of a last minute decision.  I am not promising journalistic excellence.

This link probably works.

I've spent much of the last two weeks clutching my right arm which hurt a lot for something that didn't even get scraped.  I finally got an MRI on Friday, and got the results today.  I have arthritis.  The arthritis got irritated and pinched a nerve.  This is an improvement over the two previously proposed options, which were a herniation of a previously bulging disk, or a brain tumor (because I also have increased migraines and dizziness).  So arthritis is looking pretty good at the moment.  Although, last year's MRI of my neck only showed one bulging disk, and this one shows four.  I am self destructing quickly.  I'm now up to eight bulging disks.

I might get all wacky and try acupuncture.  Or something.  But first I'm going hiking.

2003 AT trip report Day 2

Monday, May 5
Brown Gap

I wake up to the pitter patter of rain on the hammock.  Dang.
I get up and start packing.  No movement comes from the
two tents.

I voice my opinion that it's not going to stop raining, and the
other two start packing up.

It rains.  Rain, rain, rain.  I arrive at the gap where the
shelter is supposed to be.  There's a path.  I follow
it.  There are footprints on it.. there must be a shelter,
right?

Eventually the footsteps peter out and I'm in the middle
of some very nice evergreens.  No shelter.  I go back
to the trail and notice the real path to the shelter, 20
yards down the trail.  Oops.  Once at the real shelter,
I strip and put on warm clothes for the lunch break.

After lunch we put our cold wet clothes back on and
keep walking.   We considered staying at the shelter
but it was early and we wanted to go a bit further.
The campsite we aimed at turned out to be notso hotso,
but we set up anyway.  Nothing else in the vicinity
seemed better.

Getting down to the campsite involves a steep slope
no matter how you do it.  We wipe out.  I do some damage
to the seat of my Provent pants, sliding butt first.

I set up my hammock on a slope, leaving the tiny valley
floor to Leapfrog and 10-kid (Nancy's new trailname.)
It's been raining quite a while and it's still dry, so it might
be okay.

During the night they find that it's not okay.  The waters
begin to rise.  The Nomads turn into small waterbeds.

Leapfrog feels unwell during the night.  I don't feel
so hot myself.  But at least I'm pretty dry.

10-kid shouts over the rain that if a car comes, she's
getting a ride.  Sometime during the night, a car does
come.  She shouts over the rain.  I can barely hear her.
Not wanting to get out of my hammock, I say "Do you
really want to leave that badly?"  Silence.  "If you
feel the same way in the morning, we'll find a way out"
I tell her.  The car has moved on anyway.

Lightning crashes.  It rains really really hard.  I
put in my earplugs to sleep.

2003 AT trip report Day 1

Sunday, May 4
North of Davenport Gap

With Miss Janet away for the overnight party, a hiker staying at the house takes over breakfast preparations.  I have a yummy biscuits and eggs.  We all hang out in the back yard in the sunshine.  I notice a lot of things hanging out to dry. Hmmm.

Miss Janet brings the first load of hikers back.  She is going to be very busy today.  A bored zeroing hiker offers to shuttle us to our starting point.  It will save us a lot of time.  Yay!  We drive and drive and drive and see a little bit of Asheville and finally get to the AT at I-40 near Davenport Gap.  We've weighed our packs while loading up - 31, 31, and 34 pounds. Not too bad, for five days food.  The others take tons of "getting ready to go" pictures, and we're off.

It's really pretty out.  The sky is hot and blue.  You can smell the pine trees.  I love that.

Soon we have a stream to cross.  In our first injury of the trip, Nancy falls in and skins her knee.  No lasting harm done, we doctor her a little and continue walking.  I notice signs for Standing Bear Farm.

In the late afternoon we arrive at our planned stopping point, a little spit of land between two streams.  The bugs are ferocious.  We quickly set up and get in our shelters. My hammock fly ends up staked in the middle of the stream, as there isn't enough land to go around.