the past few days

[chhotii]

Friday: Got restless at work, unmotivated, and concerned about packing for the camping trip, and went home early. Concern was well-placed; it turns out, Sweetie had a conference call at 4:15 (on a Friday??? What kind of sadist schedules a conference call for then?) and it fell to me to pack for him and do the grocery shopping if we were not going to be late. Grocery shopping: it was the day for families with hoards of bratty kids to shop... grr. When buying food for others, I get overly obsessed about meeting every person's every possible whim, and tend to buy too much. That took a long time. Since we were not taking Jill, I started thinking about taking my car, even though it's smaller. I measured the dimensions of the cargo areas in both our cars, did the math; his is about 20% bigger, which is significant, but I said, what the hell. The car filled up really fast, but by the time I started to see what a bad idea this was, it was too late to unpack one car and re-pack into the other, so instead I got on-line to send marmota the message "pack light!" Finally Sweetie was out of work, we picked up marmota and only as much of his stuff as would fit, and headed north. It's a good thing I packed and shopped instead of staying at work, because by the time we got to the campsite, it was already kind of dark. First we set up the tent, and then, before cooking, we had to suspend a tarp over the table, in case it started raining. For want of more and better rope, this took really a long time. When I went to buy firewood at the ranger station, I found Dave, who had driven up with some random person named Sharon who was going on the same hike of Mt. Adams the next day. Dragged Dave, Sharon, and firewood back to camp. I prepared stuff for soft tacos, which went really well, other than some rather terrifying moments with the Coleman stove. The cooking could have been done on the fire, except that Sharon, who was put on the task of setting the fire, couldn't get it going. Afterwards, hanging out until quite late, very pleasant. Sharon slept in Dave's Jeep just because she didn't have a sleeping bag, and the rest of us piled into drbitch's magnificent four-person tent and slept soundly. No-one even snored.

Saturday: I got up early, wanting coffee, not wanting to deal with the Coleman stove, so had no choice but to make a fire. I was apprehensive about the process after seeing what a rough time Sharon had with the fire the night before, and I put all the used paper plates in to get it going, but of course the fire started right up. Sharon evidently didn't know what she was doing. Sweetie later proved that you can start a fire with just two paper plates and one match. Sweetie got up, and was displeased to find that I had not bought bacon. Apparently a large chunk of the appeal of camping to Sweetie is the opportunity to cook bacon on a campfire. So he roared off in the car to fetch bacon, and came back with bacon, lots of thick rope, and more firewood. After breakfast (adventures in bacon grease), I proposed going up to that trail I had chosen, the Welch-Dikey Loop. Neither Sweetie nor marmota seemed enthused about this idea, and Sweetie didn't see the point of leaving the state park when there are plenty of trails to hike at the park itself, so I said fine, let's see what the trails here are all about. We set off wandering; marmota grumbled because we were wandering around without a map, because we weren't headed for any exciting destination such as a scenic overlook, and because he's marmota, I guess. After perhaps 3 miles, my toes felt like they were burning up, and I just wanted to get back to the campsite. Sure enough, when I got back, I discovered large spectacular blisters between my toes on both feet. Strange, I've never had any trouble with these boots at all. The trails in the park did not satisfy the urge to accomplish something on an outing, but the foot situation ruled out any further adventures. Disappointing. We lazed around and read and napped for a bit, and had lunch. I got worried about the amount of food we had, our unsatisfactory progress in consuming it all, and whether a bunch of it was going to go bad, so I bought some ice. Not able to hike any more, and tired of reading, I suggested to Sweetie that we play catch (of course we brought baseball gloves and a ball!) Marmota wound up being bored, I guess. He couldn't join in baseball practice without a lefty's glove; he didn't want to go check out the archery range by himself; and the wind didn't seem promising for flying the kite. Later on, I showered at the coin-operated shower, which Sweetie thought was a waste of money given the general grubbiness of the camping experience in general; but marmota's concern for getting a shower had made me self-conscious. For dinner, Sweetie made camp stew-- stew beef and veggies wrapped into foil and slow-cooked over the fire. Soon after he started cooking, it started to seriously rain, and we were worried that the rain would put the fire out; but the fire pulled through sufficiently to cook everything just fine. I think the foil packets perhaps sheltered the fire a bit from the water. We were comfortable enough sitting under the tarp and didn't get too wet. The other worry that I had was that I realized I had bought way, way too much beef, and surely we wouldn't be able to eat it all, especially if David didn't come back to the camp. David's expected arrival time came and went, and I started to really fret about this. Sweetie tried to reassure me that he could eat any quantity of stew beef, which didn't make me feel much better; while I don't like wasting food and money, I don't like him treating his body as the human garbage disposal, either. Although, hmm, I guess his food consumption does even out over the long run, rather than just gaining and gaining; so the great stew beef fiasco would explain why Sweetie hasn't been really interested in food for the past couple of days. OK. Finally, after we had done our best to consume, and we were down to half a stew packet, David showed up. He really appreciated being greeted with my cries of "Dave! You're here in time to eat! Look, food! Stew! Eat!!!" After food, much sitting around the campfire, talking, late into the night.

Sunday: Got up to find that Sweetie was already up and had the fire going. Long lazy breakfast featuring yet more bacon fat. Considered going for a hike, but blisters on feet were really scary. Considered going canoing, but it's a pond, not a river, at the park, so there's no paddling upstream or downstream and feeling like there's progress towards a destination, so it seemed kind of circular and boring. Considered playing more catch, but Sweetie voted for frisbee instead so that marmota could join in. Some frisbee, not much exercise for the day. Lazed around the campsite, read more, then we packed up and left before even having lunch, even though we could have left later. I drove from the park to Medford. When Sweetie and I got back to JP, Sweetie wanted pizza, but I persuaded him to finish the lunchmeat instead. Some unpacking the car, then I crashed on the sofa and fell asleep for a while. We managed to drag ourselves up, shower, and get together with drbitch, her sweetie, and Zed, who's visiting from Berkley. Zed is vegan, and was feeling tired of Asian food, leaving Country Life buffet as the only restaurant in the state we could eat at. I was very dubious of the idea of driving into downtown Boston, but it worked out much better than I expected. Sunday evening is the time to take a car downtown, if ever. Traffic was crazy, but a bit lighter than usual. Navigating the twisty maze of one-way streets, ugh. But we found parking right next to the restaurant, and thanks to it being Sunday, it was free. And the food was really quite good. After all that meat consumed on the camping trip, my body really profoundly appreciated the all-vegan fare. Win, win, win. Discussion of Mason's "jersey barrier bicycle" idea, and ranting about banks. Sweetie proposed that we all go back to Pondscumme to watch some movie. It turns out that he had taped over the movie he was looking for, so we put Pi on instead. Fortunately, I've seen Pi before, so it didn't matter that I fell asleep, hard, during the movie.

Monday: Cooked oatmeal for breakfast, packed a cheese sandwich and a banana that really, really needed to be used for lunch. Sweetie was stressing out that he couldn't find his Palm Pilot, worried that he might have dropped it at the campsite; I wasn't too worried, given that there were lots of places it might lurk in the jumbled piles of disorganized stuff. At the lab, found a solution for reducing the size of all the JPEGs without Melinda having to spend hours going through each one; what would they do without me? Worked on getting her experiment working on the computer just about the whole day. Went to yoga at the gym, and it went well this week; was able to do upward dog, with my knees up off the ground. This led to contemplation of whether taking some days off from exercise now and then might have merit. Tummy looking rather flabby, blame the bacon fat. Considered going to REI to look for that book on knots. Considering learning knots as a short-term fidgety hobby; I want to be able to tie up the hammock myself; but decided to just go straight home. Left the gym to find Sweetie waiting for me in the parking lot on the way to the bus, with his car-- he had gone to Home Depot for drain cleaner. Ride home, yay! At home, feeling inspired to cook, made a fruit shake with all the remaining fruit that really really needed to be used up, pan-fried zucchini with dried tomatoes and rosemary, and spaghetti. But Sweetie was not inspired to eat. Early to bed with my sweet cuddly loving Sweetie.

Comments

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

incidentally, forget REI for a knot book. yeah, really.

borders is selling a lovely color 256 page/1200-photograph book, by geoffrey budworth, for all of $6. definitely worth it for for knot pleasures. if you're at OPN sometime soon, i can easily secure one if you can reimburse me the costly $6 :>

[chhotii.livejournal.com]

Don't know when I'll be going to OPN next, but sure, I'll buy the book off of you for $6. Might make a good little fidgity hobby to learn knots.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

got book, will keep in car, good cheap fun, and useful to boot.

learn 4-5 good knots, and you can tie stuff down like a pro, at the very least :)

lots of ornamental stuff too. nice keychains/etc.

[chhotii.livejournal.com]

OK.