Saturday is the worst day to go to Vertical Heaven, the local climbing gym. Saturday is Birthday Party Day, and the gym is likely to be filled with grade school grommets, running, jumping off stuff, throwing chalk bags at each other. The kids aren’t the problem. They zip about like supercharged neutrinos, never colliding with…

People who know the outdoors will say that you’re better off with a good liquid-filled compass, a map, and a little know-how than with any whiz-bang GPS unit. After a year or so of scrambling around in the sticks I’m here to say that they are right. If your goal is to orient your self…

Near the end of his book Waking the Dead, John Eldredge invites his readers to ask God what they should do to care for their hearts. Eldredge believes that God speaks to people today through Scripture, through mythology, and through others. For instance, over the course of a few days Eldredge had a number of…

It’s been a rugged month, pouring on the overtime at the Evil Day Job from Hell. Server installation gone bad. Migration to a new content management system that gobbles up man hours the way the Devil snacks on the souls of young teens. The only thing that comes to mind when I get home from…

Something that a reasonably smart person could overlook when buying a refrigerator online is to compare the measurements of the fridge to the measurements of the space in the kitchen where the fridge will go. If you are placing the refrigerator in a space between a wall and a cabinet, don’t forget to account for…

It’s day 30 and I’ve lost 2 lbs. faithfully following Timothy Ferriss’ Lose 20 Pounds of Fat in 30 Days Without Doing Any Exercise diet. I figure Mr. Ferriss owes me 18 lbs. right about now, payable in chocolate. Fact is that I had to cheat and start pumping a daily 20 minutes on the…

Sure, trees look oh-so-huggable from a distance. But get too close and a tree might try stab you through the floorboards of your Jeep. I know from experience, the trees are pissed off and they’re not going to take it lying down. [Via JeepNewsNow]

I think I’ll make snowshoes…

I’m being stalked by a word. First it pops up in a Rick Mckinley sermon I heard on my iPhone. This same word practically beats me to death when we watched Night of the Hunter before Christmas. Over New Year’s the word snuck up on me in a game of Wii bowling (with Mii characters…

Take 84 hotel maids and tell half of them that their job consists of exercise, lots of it, and what happens? The half that learns about the burn factor of their job loses weight and sees an improvement in blood pressure. The other half doesn’t. Maybe obesity is psychosomatic? Via NPR.

At the edge of Coyoteville we’re too cheap to subscribe to Consumer Reports. This makes it a little tough to get the straight dope on big ticket durable goods. But with our beer getting warm and Home Depot’s 10% discount set to expire at midnight, we decided to do the best with what we have.…

Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. To-day, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our…

I know, here it comes: the retrospective cliche. But what are you going to do? Highlights for 2007 included a DEAD WHALE!!!!, my first backpacking trip in 20 years, nearly losing my wife, getting lost in Ballinger canyon after dark, learning to identify birds, joining a climbing gym, and of course, my daughter’s wedding.

Tim Ferriss promises that you can lose 20 lbs. of fat in 30 days without exercise. Let’s just ignore the fact that Tim’s diet spanned six weeks (not 30 days) during which time he lost 15 lbs. (not 20), and forget the fact that Tim’s diet role model cheats by exercising a little (50 marathons…