You would think I didn't like winter, if you read this

It is hard to believe that we evolved to live in a climate with multiple seasons.  It is such an adjustment to get used to big changes in the weather.  Every year, the cold comes on like a revelation.  A revelation that I will not be comfortable again for six months.

In the beginning it's kind of nice.  A little nip in the air.  A nice change from sweating to death.  No more chafing from heat.  No more mosquitoes!  (Lack of mosquitoes may be the one truly good thing about winter.)  The days grow shorter, and the leaves change.  Autumnal color changes are one of the most beautiful things on the planet.  It's free!  And it's going on all around you.  You don't even have to go out of your way to be struck by massive, sweet, visual glory.  It's a feast for the eyes.

At first, it's enjoyable to dig out the sweaters and turtlenecks, the long pants and the wool socks.  It feels like dress-up.  "Oh, there's that hat I love!"  Plus you can change your look with colored scarves, different styles of jackets, maybe some snazzy boots.  But it gets to be a little bit of a hassle, because when you go back indoors you have to take all the extra layers off and then what do you do with them?  Do you put them over the back of your chair?  Do you carry your coat over your arm?  Do you find a hook or an out of the way table and hope that no miscreant steals your warm layers?

Still, it's not so bad.  You get used to it.  There are coats piled and hung everywhere, and you have to remember where you left your warm boots, and why are there six left gloves but only four righties?  There's also the anticipation of the holidays.  Halloween!  Especially if you're immature like me.  Not just the costumes, either.  There's chocolate!  And after that there's Veteran's Day, which isn't exactly a jolly holiday but in between thanking service members we're allowed to take time off and do other things we want to do, like (oh, say) go backpacking.  Just when you've recovered from that, we get to have Thanksgiving with friends and neighbors and loved ones and some poor sad animal which got slaughtered so we could sit around and become more obese.  (... might have gotten off on a tangent there.)

There's even more of a nip in the air, and now it's more of a bite.  Less love nibble, more bitch slap.  But wait!  Christmas is coming!  Buying presents is so fun, and the cold weather reminds me that it's time to think of buying presents.  And lights!  And trees, and holiday music, and the smell of cut pine trees which got slaughtered so we could sit around and become more.. never mind.

Even though it's not Thanksgiving yet, I still kept an eye out for Christmas lights on my drive home tonight.  I *LOVE* Christmas lights.  Love 'em.

There weren't any, though.

Okay, so we've gotten through most of the holidays.  Oh, New Year's!  That one's good too.  Staying up late and drinking.  So basically reliving college?  Whatever, it's good fun.  But the day after that.. that's it.  You're done.  All the fun is over, but winter is still here.  Still stealing your lunch money and shoving you in a locker.  Winter is running your life for the foreseeable future.  Dealing with all the extra warm layers is a literal burden.  And those warm layers are getting wet and cold sometimes, and that is sheer misery.  Your feet get damp (because all your sweat glands migrated there after Halloween) and then your feet are cold the whole rest of the day.  Or you carry a spare pair of socks everywhere with you, and you look like a hobo with socks sticking out of your pockets.  But at least your feet are warm when you change your socks after lunch.  I bet your coworkers appreciate the view of your feet while you're swapping the woolies.

The first snow is cool.  Everything is white and pretty and new!  Even the first shoveling is a little fun.  It's like making sculpture on a grand scale.  It's not even hard!  Until you've been doing it for about an hour, and then you remember that you're old now, and your back kind of.. hates you, and wants you to die.  You retreat into the house to get warm, but bow to necessity and stick a freaking icepack on your lower back while simultaneously trying to warm the rest of yourself back up with a blanket or a warm sweater.

It goes on and on like that.  With every snowfall you get a little more bitter.  Will it never end, you think?  Is this the longest winter that has ever been?  (No.  Man up, wuss.)  You can't remember the last time you walked outside without your shoulders tightening involuntarily against the cold.  You can't remember stepping out of the shower and not getting goosebumps.  You stop being so careful coming into the house - snow is going to get everywhere anyway.  Maybe you just give the hell up on trying to exercise, and you settle in on the sofa with a beer.  (This sounds good, doesn't it?)  And then your lovehandles breathe a happy sigh and settle a little too, anticipating imminent company.

I tell you what, though.  If it weren't for the winter, spring would not make me nearly so happy.  Sometimes you have to suffer to really enjoy a reward.  The first day of the new year in which you can walk outside in your shirtsleeves?  That is a glorious day.

Why I was hanging around HUD at 6 pm yesterday

Last night JD and I got seriously misplaced in DC.  WHY IS IT A GOOD IDEA TO HAVE FOUR SIXTH AND E INTERSECTIONS IN A CITY?  WHY?

Before we left I googled and mapped and generally oriented myself.  Then, as we were driving away from the house, JD decided he wanted to go to a different metro station.  Yay.  When we have 30 seconds to decide before making the turn.  So, I went to his preferred metro station.

Unfortunately, on the train I was looking at the map, and I said "Hey, why don't we get off at this other metro station?  The walk looks okay and we wouldn't have to trek east as far."  And JD looked it up on google maps and it was near Sixth and E SW, which was where we were going.  I checked my calendar entry to be sure.  We'd just approach from the south, not the north.

But when we got there, we couldn't find the building entrance.  Weird.. also, we couldn't find the restaurants we expected.  We settled for McDonald's and then went back to tackle the building entrance issue again.  And that's when JD discovered that we really wanted to be at Sixth and E *NW*.  I had written it down wrong.  Had we gone to the originally planned metro station it wouldn't have mattered, as that WAS the right place.

So, we got back on the metro and road it a few stops and made it to the meeting late.  But before we got there, a train arrived as we were still walking up to it, and we ran to get onto it.  You remember that I don't run anymore?  Because I'm not supposed to? Because my spine sucks?  Yeah.  I wasn't thinking about that.  In the back of my head, I could still run in an emergency.  In my head, it would take more than a few seconds of running to hurt myself.

Not so much, as it turns out.

When I got on the train I realized that I had totally effed myself.  And I remembered the last time I had felt this particular pain, and how long it took to feel better afterward.  It is not a fast healing process.  Oh, I was steamed.  Two minutes!  Another train would have been along in two minutes!  For two minutes I bought myself weeks of pain.

We went to the meeting and I paid attention as best I could, and then they declared that they were adjourning around the corner to the local beer and steak place.  Not me.  I was done.  Toast.  Stick a fork in me.  I snappishly announced that I was not following them, and I headed for the Metro.  Given that we hadn't had a chance to speak, JD had no idea what was going on in my head until I started bawling while we waited underground for the train.  The prospect of weeks of pain plus no horseback riding hit me like a ton of bricks.  Or like my spine bouncing while I ran.  One of those.

Also, I perhaps neglected to mention that I fell headfirst, downhill on Saturday.  I landed on my head and my shoulder.  I wasn't going fast (I was trying to step over a log and the maneuver went drastically wrong) but I ended up in a position which neither my head nor my shoulder are really trained for.  The lump on my head is nearly gone, but my neck is kind of pissed off about the whole thing.

So, yeah.  Just waiting for an arrow in the back to irritate my other ungood spinal area, and then the set of irritated spinal bits will be complete.

I didn't feel good but I straightened the house anyway. You may bow before me now.

My body tried really, really hard to get sick today.  I don't think it fully succeeded.  But it gave it the old college try.  Finally it stuck me with a migraine.

I think today was officially, in every way, a Monday.

I went to our weekly sysadmin meeting wherein they informed us that they wanted us to do a new inventory.  And they wanted to know which machines were servers, and which were REALLY servers, because apparently there is some distinction.  Am having much hate of this kind of inventory.

One of our machines has been having odd problems, so we made the decision to replace its memory today.  I trundled up the stairs, kind of hating life (because I was achy, and dumb) and found that this was one of the last of the old model of machines.  Which meant I couldn't just slide it part way out of the rack to work on it.  I had to pull it all the way out.  Over my head.  And they're heavy.  I managed to maneuver the server to somewhere flat, and I replaced all the memory, and then I called a coworker to help me get it back into the rack.  And it booted with an error.  One whole bank of memory claimed to be operated at 261 fahrenheit.  That's pretty suspicious to me, because it's 127 celsius.  127 is the highest signed eight bit integer.  It's kind of a special computer number, and likely the highest number the sensor registers.  If the temperature sensor were going to fail, it would likely fail to 0 or 127.

To test this, we took the server back out of the rack and scanned the memory with an infrared thermometer.  (These are the coolest things ever, btw.  Everybody needs one.)  The memory all tested to within a few degrees of the same number.  Definitely NOT 130 degrees higher for one bank.  So I reassured the boss that it would not die of heat, but that it was time to retire that machine.  (Also, its video card is totally dead.  Not a huge problem for a server, but annoying.)

At some point I looked up and realized that the day had passed by without my permission, and I left the office.  And came home to start straightening the house.  Today is the day when we do that.  House-straightening day does not always combine with physical ickiness and work problems, but today it sure did.  I attempted to soldier manfully on (if manfully soldiering involves taking ones temperature and needing extra hugs, which it might for all I know.)

Assuming that my puny immune system won today and I am not showing the classic symptoms of the Black Death (or any other Death) tomorrow, JD and I are going to go downtown after work.  I know!  On a Tuesday!  DC-SAGE is finally having a meeting.  It's been years.  And one of my favorite people is presenting.  I'd like to attend to be supportive.  Plus, you know, learn stuff.

New Gear Reviews

As it happens, on this trip I tried out several new (ish) items.  I hadn't thought about just how much of it was new until one of my fellow hikers brought it to my attention at the shelter.  I said "I hope this sleeping bag keeps me warm.  I haven't used it before."  And he said "That's new TOO?"  (His wife won't let him buy any new gear before he gets rid of some of what he has.  I advised he try out Ebay.)


New or previously unused on this trip:


Montbell Super Spiral U.L. Down Hugger sleeping bag #1
Z-packs Exo external frame backpack
a somewhat modified Platypus GravityWorks gravity filter
Evernew .75L Ti Pasta Pot
Enertia Trail Foods Three Cheese Mac
AntiGravityGear Katahdin Stove
Enertia Trail Foods Snack This Chocolate Love
Elemental Horizons Radiator Fleece Hat


That's quite a list, isn't it?


The sleeping bag was awesome.  Amazing.  Happy-making.  It isn't quite as stretchy as my previous Montbell Super Stretch U.L. Down Hugger #3.  They stopped making that model a while back, I hypothesize because it isn't warm once stretched.  The Super Spiral gets the job done.  It was stretchy enough to keep me happy and not let me wake up stiff in the morning.  My feet were still a little chilly, but that's the nature of the beast I suspect.  (The guy next to me put his shoes back on during the middle of the night, and put a handwarmer in each shoe.  It gave me food for thought.)  The neck-collar thingie worked really well.  I wore more clothes to bed than I really needed.  A couple of hours in I took off my down jacket and wrapped it around my feet, which helped a bit.  My torso didn't feel any cooler with the jacket off.  The sleeping bag is rated for fifteen degrees and in theory it got down to twenty nine, so it's no surprise that I was still quite warm and comfy.  Fifteen degrees is just about how much warmer I want to experience with bag compared to what it is supposedly rated for.


The backpack was almost right.  The load lifter straps don't appear to do anything.  If I had my pad in the holsters just right, the external frame didn't poke me in the butt - however, it wasn't just right all the time.  (I suspect that the person designing and testing the frame is guilty of not having a butt.)  I was using an eight section piece of Z-rest.  I don't know how it would work with a smaller pad, or an inflatable pad.  And I think the pack body itself could stand to be a wee bit larger.  With everything in it, (including two liters of water and two days of food) the whole pack weighed 23.8 lb.  I could not have fit in another day's food or any other gear.  It was maxed out.  Of course, that was with my huge fluffy warm bag.  I think it will be good for warmer weather hiking, but maybe not long distance hiking due to the space limitation.  Oh, and I thought the adjustable straps for the shoulder straps needed to be longer.  The shoulder straps themselves were just right.  I loved all the loops on the backpack.  The belt pouches I ordered with it were a great size, and firmly attached.  Despite the occasional butt-poking issue (resolved by fiddling with the sleeping pad) the pack carried quite well.  I expect to keep using it.


I've never carried the filter, but DeLee has carried one much like it on our joint trips.  It weighs a smidge more than my Steripen, hence I normally use the Steripen.  However, the Steripen sucks in cold weather.  The filter is fine as long as you don't let it freeze. (I stuck it in the bottom of my sleeping bag in a ziplock over night.)  Instead of carrying the "dirty" and "clean" bags, I used an old 2 liter Big Zip Platypus for the dirty bag, and an old 2 liter Platypus bag for my clean drinking water.  The standard kit comes with 4 liter bags, which is overkill for me.  I may switch to using a zipless bag for dirty water.  I think I can get away with using my cup to pour water into one, and it would save me a little weight over the zipper bag, which has a 2 oz handle.  However even with the zipper bag, the whole system is lightweight.  And it's faster and easier than using the Steripen (mostly because for the Steripen I need to strain the water for particulates prior to treating it with UV light.)  Definitely a win, even for solo hiking.


I *loved* the pasta pot.  It's just the right size for me.  I can heat enough water to make dinner (in dinner's ziplock bag) then use the rest for a hot drink for me. The pot is large mug sized so I can drink right out of it.  In theory I could also make pasta.


I ordered the Enertia Trail Foods stuff because it claimed to come in single servings.  And, in fact, it was a single serving.  Weird.  That's a first.  The mac and cheese was very good.  The Ham TVP was good.  I was less of a fan of the little onion bits or whatever that were packed in with the pasta, but they weren't dealbreakers.  I'm likely to order this again.  (FYI, I put it in my pasta pot's cozy to keep warm while it rehydrated.  I made mint tea with the extra water in the pasta pot while I waited.  Delightful.)  Given how good it was, I'm looking forward to trying some of their other meals.  I especially liked that it was cook-in-bag.  The bag wasn't so tall that I needed my long handled spoon (as one does for almost all the other manufacturers of cook-in-bag meals) and there were markings on the interior so I could tell when I had put in enough water.  Somebody with camping experience definitely had input.  Or they're just super considerate, yo.  I think it's worth putting up a direct link to their site:  http://trailfoods.com/  Thanks for making great stuff, guys!


The stove, like all alcohol stoves, was cranky about the cold weather.  For dinner I ended up adding alcohol to the starter ring after the stove went out.  After a restart it did its thing and boiled the water.  At breakfast time, I couldn't light the alcohol with a lighter - I had to use a match, and let the match heat the alcohol near it for a little while until it finally caught on fire.  I definitely need a winter alternative.  However, that is not the stove's fault.  It otherwise performed as expected.  And it was a pretty stable surface for the pot.  But at twice the weight of the Tin Man stove I can't think of a reason to use it regularly.  I might keep it on the shelf as a backup stove in case the flimsy Tin Man stove gets crushed.  (Flimsy sounds a little insulting but it's not meant to be.  It's made out of aluminum cans.  It will crush if stomped on.  However, it's a great stove.) 


The Chocolate Love was an "Enh" for me.  I'm not a huge dark chocolate person, but that wasn't the problem.  The various bits of fruit and nuts were just kind of tasteless.  I'd rather have Planter's Trail Mix.


And finally, the fleece hat.  I already had a fleece hat I love (my Rockdancer hat.)  But I wanted one in blaze orange for hunting season.  I actually have other blaze orange warm hats but they're not comfortable.  They're scratchy, or a little too tight so I get a headache.  This one was just right.  It's not *quite* as warm as the Rockdancer hat, which is double layered around the forehead.  But it's pretty nice, and I was fine with it.  I'll definitely be wearing it on future hunting season expeditions.


Sadly, I didn't take pictures of gear on this trip, so if you want to know what things look like you'll have to go to the commercial links.  What was I thinking?!

Things I saw this weekend

Horns!  I didn't know we had horned cows around here.

This little guy was so cute and skittish, and I think he has Italy on his butt.

A deer stand in a tree right next to the trail.  Hmph.  Is illegal to hunt there.

Merry Mary took a picture of me at High Rock before I got started.  It was too cold to stand around so I didn't actually go to the top for a view.

The moon as seen through the shelter's peak window

Mark and.. I forgot his trail name.  It was odd.  Bloisius?

The fire that I Tom Sawyered everybody into building.

So many leaves down.  Mid-sized rock wall ahead.

SO MANY branches down.  They were falling around me as I walked.  Winds were over 30 mph.

The only color left in the woods is yellow.  Pretty, though..

I forgot Maryland has these old stone walls.

The trail fell over!

The oddly Panera-like McDonald's I stopped at on the way home for fries and a mediocre sandwich.  

Most of Maryland is an easy ridge walk

Boyscouts.  I lost track of how many boy scouts I saw.  Sixty?  It was crazy.  Also, there was a view.

Looking east toward Myersville

.. And more easy ridge walking

Blaze orange and proud of it

I don't know what hill this is (Buzzard Knob?) but it was a nice climb and very pretty.  Met several hunters coming down it.

Do-not-eat berries

The new shelters are extremely swanky.

I could pretty much live here

Where "supplies necessary for survival" means "marshmallows"

Hello there

It's that blog writing time of evening, but I'm tired.  I've been busy.  Got my backpack all stuffed (to the gills) with food and water and various supplies necessary to survival, and I just kind of want to go to bed now.  So that's what I'm going to do.  

I hope to have some pretty pictures to put up when I get done hiking.  Maybe some happy ones too.  (See above.)

Night all.

Oh dear god stop looking at me

So, you may not know this but I am not super outgoing.  Online, yes.  I will tell total strangers about every incident in my day.  I will do so at length, and occasionally with good spelling.  I organize my thoughts .(... ish)  I start somewhere and end somewhere.  No problemo.

I have no problem with small groups, either.  Small groups of friends, small groups of strangers, whatever.  I can talk to you.  I can smile and laugh and make conversation and track what is being said.  I can make a funny.  Perhaps I occasionally lose my train of thought, but who doesn't?  Plus I've had many head injuries so some occasional loss of trains is to be expected.

However, if we increase that small group to small crowd level?  Everything quits working.  As soon as my hindbrain processes that all attention is on me, my autonomic nervous system goes to hell.  My ears buzz, my face flushes, my heartbeat races, and very shortly after that my mind goes blank.  I lose my command of English.  I actually have a somewhat easier time speaking to groups in Spanish because all of my being is concentrating on vocabulary and conjugations.  But in English, my first language, the language of my heart?  I am an idiot.  Shortly, a silent idiot, as my mouth runs out of pre-planned words and my brain gives me that hands-upraised, "I got nothin' " look.  I am lucky if my brain retains the ability to guide me back to my seat.

And it's not that I'm scared of public speaking. The idea does not give me the heeby jeebies.  I found out the hard way that my brain had seceded, one day, when I went up to the conference room as the Nerd in Residence to explain to all the scientists how to use the X-Terms for their meeting.  No big, right?  I had given the same talk forty or fifty times to individual users.  And, I knew most of the people in the conference room.  So no one was more surprised than I when my brain went blank.  Luckily, people never follow directions anyway so it didn't really matter what I said.

Hand in hand with my brain problem, I have become less comfortable with crowds on every level.  Crowded restaurants, movie theaters, conventions, shopping malls.. hate 'em.  I couldn't swear to you that there is a link, but it sort of walks like a duck doesn't it?

All of that was a really long introduction.  Which I could not have said out loud to you if we were sitting in a room together.

This year, during my annual review, my manager asked me about professional goals.  I told him that I was long past the time when I should have been writing and presenting papers in my field (i.e. nerdism.)  I don't think he had realized the extent of my disability before.  I filled him in on the heart, ears, face, brain thing.  And it turns out that he had a solution.  Toastmasters.  (He didn't mention the whole "I was president of Toastmasters" thing.)  He (being really good, by now, at persuasive speaking) persuaded me to join Toastmasters to overcome my issues with public speaking.  Much as I wanted to, I couldn't disagree with it being a good idea.  It is completely obvious that I need to solve my problem.  So, I agreed.  I said that I wanted to wait until after my hike this year, and then also after some huge changes that had to happen at work.  But I set a definite starting date - the first meeting in November.

Today, I went to my first Toastmasters meeting.  It was awful.  For one thing, I *hate* anything resembling parliamentary procedure thanks to my early introduction to it through youth groups.  (I am aware that the early introduction was supposed to prepare me for competent use of the parliamentary procedure in adulthood rather than imbue me with a lifelong distaste for the stuff.  It didn't work.)  Also, thanks to Three's Company I have an instinctive cringe-and-avoid response to other incompetent public speakers.  And nobody is at Toastmasters because they lo-o-ove the public speaking.  Just sitting there while nervous people gave presentations made me want to run away.  But I didn't.  I clapped on cue, mostly, and when they pushed me to join the group in giving a one minute speech on a topic which they handed to me, I did it.  Because that's why I went.  You have to suffer to achieve some goals.  And I suffered.  I did okay for thirty seconds, and then my brain seized up, and then I had to just stand there and say (out loud) "I guess I'm done."  My manager, who was judging grammar and vocal pauses, if I recall the phrase correctly, said that at least I didn't use any "um er ah" type words.  So that was good.

At the end of the meeting I had to introduce myself.  Which I did willingly.  I have no problem with standing up and getting started. But again, thirty seconds in, I had no idea what I was talking about and I just trailed to a stop.  Oh god.  I have got to get better at this stat because I can't stand the torture.

Afterward, I walked back to my office.  My heartrate was still increased.  My chest was tight.  I felt jittery.  And it all STAYED THAT WAY FOR HOURS.  I could seriously have used some xanax.

I'll be going back to the next meeting in two weeks.  And I will keep doing this, hammering my brain on its thumb, until it gives up and lets me talk in public.