Reading (For Dummies)

Down and out in Flu-Land

I get seriously sick once every ~2 years by my calculations. The last time it happened, I was in a strange land and it was much worse. This hasn't been pleasant, though...hacking up my lungs every few minutes, even with the help of Robutussin. No head cold like usual, just chilling out in my lungs. I started feeling it Friday before leaving for our backpacking trip, but shrugged it off as something that would disappear. When I got back Sunday night, it was on.

So I've missed a lot of class, slept a ton, and gotten helpful folk remedies from David and Jithka (the Czech couple). She went out into the woods and picked some herbs for cold relief a few weeks ago, and gave me a generous helping, as well as some Bercherovka (traditional czech liquor, which I've never had before). It's like Jagermeister, only much spicier, tastes good for clearing out the lung and sinuses. And so I go to sleep again. I only hope this clears up before our scheduled kayaking trips this weekend...

Bushwhacked

Against my better judgement (I've had a chest cold since Thursday), I went backpacking in the Macintyre range over the weekend. We came into to the Lake Colden lean-to at about midnight or 1am Saturday morning after hiking and wheezing down the trail. When we started our 10pm death march, it was 13 degrees fahrenheit (-11 celsius), and dropped a bit as we hiked -- no cloud cover meant lots of surface heat bleeding off into the oblivion of space.

I awoke Saturday morning at around 7:30, shivering. My bag is rated to 0F. Most of me was warm, my feet felt like blocks of ice. I rolled over to get my glasses, which I left on the floor of our lean-to. I hit them a little bit hard. Not too hard, just kind of a rough pick-up. The frame cracked around the lens, brittle from the cold (and a few years of UV radiation, no doubt). Duct tape to the rescue.

We got a late start, hitting the trail at about 10am. I had all the right gear, I just wasn't ready psychologically for such a cold start. At about 3pm, we summited Algonquin. Above the treeline was frigid, and windy as hell. It was a bit hard to take photos up there...my gloves were stiff from the cold, and it wasn't very comfortable to hold my hand out and take photos.

We opted to not summit the adjacent peak, as the sun would be setting fairly early. Heading down, Bull (our "ghost leader") and Amalia decided to split our group up. David (one of our Czech Republic members), Amalia, and myself were all hiking a bit more slowly. Lack of sleep, my chest cold, and the cold in general were making me feel sluggish. Plus I could feel myself low on electrolytes -- a feeling not unlike I experienced on my Lake Placid ride.

The stories about the trail distances on the signs being totally out-of-whack in the Adirondacks is quite true. After hiking down past Avalance Lake, we found a trail sign indicating that our lean-to was only 1.1 miles away. Another hour of expeditious hiking and we weren't there yet. After trying to convince poor Amalia that maybe we had taken a wrong turn, Jithka (David's wife) could be heard calling for us. They had moved the campsite anyway, so much embarassment had been saved (as the story went, "yes, we knew where we were but our equipment was missing!"). Still, freezing to death in the Adirondacks wouldn't have been a bad way to go.

Another frigid night, this time in tents, gave way to a morning barely below freezing on Sunday. We couldn't believe it, we danced about the campsite in polypropylene undergarments. And that was that. I am certainly looking forward to more winter hiking this season, hopefully with Bert (who has conveyed some interest in preparing for a run on Rainier in the not-so-distant future...).

A road to Nowhere

Guess what I did over the weekend? You're right, SUOC!

While some of us consider running away from our new overlord, the rest of us are happy to cool out and see things through. Myself, I'm learning to kayak the right way (rolls first) at a SUOC rolling session in the gym swimming pool. Lots of good instructors make sure that I can flip myself over when the inevitable happens. I managed to get a somewhat shaky roll down, and with practice I started screwing it up big-time. So I'll be back this coming weekend to make things perfect.

We went deep into Onesquethaw cave on Sunday, me with an aching shoulder. It is a gorgeous one, with an beautifully carved opening (much easier to crawl into than Clarksville, too). We tramped into it for hours, admiring the neat-o rock formations and fun barnyard smells before getting too cold and tired and calling it quits. Then we got somewhat lost trying to find out way out, making for a total trip time of about 5 hours. Thank goodness for Burgelene underwear, which kept me warm the whole time. I even lead a blind exit, where we turned off our headlamps for the last stretch of cave and I felt around trying to tell the group how to navigate over what I found. It was pretty dicey -- there were some climbs to go up -- but the reward of coming out into sinking sun twilight on fully-opened pupils was just amazing

The way home from the cave was equally fun, as my car hit 200,000 miles. That's quite a ways, and it will definitely hit many more miles as the winter wears on.

Asylum from Bush

My buddy Stephen has started a website seeking political asylum in Germany. I still have friends there; maybe I'll join him and move into Ferri's basement in Austria or some such.

End of (another) Era

Early this morning, Lindsay Jean, my friend Pete's girlfriend, moved out from her upstairs domicile. She carries with her "our" couch (the best durned living room couch I've ever had), and a car and uhaul trailer-load of stuff to move in with aforementioned Pete in their new home in Westchester, NY. She will be missed for baking delicious treats, taking shit, teaching me how to dress, and being irreverently funny moody while PMS'ing. She is survived by one Gregory P. Ferguson and Gregory M. Dorchak.

Long live Lindsay Jean.