The water’s up, the trails are slippery. Unless you’ve got a good reason to be outdoors, now’s a good time to catch up on your reading. Next up on my reading list is a book I picked up at a rummage sale: I Should Have Stayed Home: The Worst Trips of the Great Writers. For…
Let’s say that you want to become a Suburban Frontiersman…like Yours Truly. Where would you start? Perhaps you think you might need some gear, a pair of sturdy boots, a handy knife, a trustworthy haversack. But you’d be wrong. What you need is time. The Suburban Frontiersman’s life is chopped up until it’s a pizza…
This past year feels like it slipped away. I had big plans in mind, got off the track and then simply reacted to events for the next 11 months. Pages peeled off the calendar and drifted away, carried on the wind to the landfill of memory. *sigh* Looking back at 2010 I see that my…
Gestalt dreamwork presumes that dreams are a message from the subconscious and that every element in the dream is a projection is an aspect of the person’s self. The dreamwork involves identifying these various elements and opening channels of communication between them. The course of therapy simply involves the facilitation of the conversation. The conversation…
I’ve been running in Vibram Five Fingers off and on for three years now and they are not the miracle shoes that some would have you believe. For one thing, you won’t win any fashion awards. My college-age daughter won’t be seen with my in public when I’m wearing my Five Fingers. And for another…
Six months ago I signed up for the Agion “Stink at Nothing” challenge – getting a free t-shirt in the mail that I was supposed to put through a series of rigorous BO experiments. I’ve worn the shirt repeatedly during exercise and expeditions but I’ve failed to put it to anything I’d call a test…
TomTom has a new campaign featuring “celebrity” voices for their turn-by-turn GPS systems. Choose from a Yoda, Darth Vader, C3PO and coming soon…Han Solo. What? No Chewbacca?
Not for the ultralight crowd, though I once ran into some guys who hiked into Tassajara with heavy cast iron cookware, a dutch oven lets you prepare gourmet meals you wouldn’t think possible at the campsite. Casseroles, fresh baked bread — it’s all possible with with a humble cast iron pot and some red hot…
So yesterday I took Mr. Moose out for our weekly run in the lemon orchard. Typically we go about a mile and a half, I take the tennis ball launcher and Moose gets double or triple the mileage out of the deal. Very rarely we might see a runner or another dog walker on these…
This is just a quick update my regular readers know that I’ve started a new blog, specifically oriented to games, play, and fun in a youth ministry context. If you’re interested please feel free to hop over to Mud Pie Games and join the fun!
I used to go backpacking with a friend who was kind of a schlump in daily life but on the trail he was in prefect control. His backpack was amazingly organized – everything had its place. When he needed anything it was instantly at his fingertips. I made a vow, “someday, somehow, I’m going to…
I guess I didn’t think this through all the way. When a 75 lb. dog hits the end of a 50 foot yellow plastic rope at a full flat-out run, guess what happens? The force of the jerk knocks him off his feet and he tumbles in the grass. This isn’t as bad as it…
If you want to know more about where you live, and thereby know more about who your are, you can start with the birds. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has the most amazing site, All About Birds – and like some of the best things in life, it’s free! The site has everything from Birding…
In his book The Size of Thoughts, Nicholson Baker talks about some of the unexpected advantages of library card catalogs over databases: fingerprints for instance. Dark smudges of body oil can tell you at a glance which topics in the catalog are the most popular, something that would take a complex structured query to achieve…
Last week’s trip to Seattle and Portland was the most enjoyable time I’ve ever spent driving in two unfamiliar cities. Nevermind the list of crazy place names: Tukwila, Puyallup, Newaukum, Tigard, Tualatin to name just a few. I was at peace. I had achieved mind like water. Apparently I use a lot more brainpower than…
