Regular Life

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Note: This is the ongoing saga of our trip to Red River, New Mexico in early July. We’re almost finished now.
Since he had slept through several of our activities and was left out of our hike earlier in the week, we decided it was time to focus on Ben.
Each [...]

Cabresto Lake, above Red River, New Mexico
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On Friday (the 13th) we finally rented a Jeep, and Dad humbly displayed his offroading skills. We had the Jeep for four hours, which should have been plenty of time for us to make it to Greenie Peak, reportedly New Mexico’s highest [...]

More trip coming, but in the meantime, a few things:

Worked last day of job Friday, after a little more than two years at it.
New job starts when I fly out Sunday afternoon — same company.
Going to see the Oakland A’s play Monday night at their home stadium (second Major League Baseball game attended in my [...]

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“We’ll do whatever you want to do,” Dad said to Shannon and me.
It was Thursday, and we were to leave Saturday morning. There were a few things we still wanted to do on our trip, but we hadn’t assigned any times or days. All week Dad had been trying [...]

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Whereas Tuesday featured the longest, most grueling walk of the trip, the latter part of Wednesday brought the shortest and most harrowing. (I like posting trip journals after the fact instead of real-time because it allows opening sentences like that.) We also went to the place Julia Roberts hangs [...]

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You ever face your fears head-on because people are relying on you? You ever do this while on vacation?
Wednesday, Shannon gets up with Ben to let me sleep that extra hour between 6:30 and 7:30. She goes back to bed while he and I [...]

The city didn’t come out to our remote locale to retrieve our refuse, and Mom and Dad never signed us up with that lady and her husband (or son?) who collected rural trash in that rickety old pickup with plywood sides and then hauled it off to the dump. (Whew! Faulkner would be proud of [...]

(more vacation posts later, when I have time to prepare the pics)
This is a true story of laziness, karma, and just basic detective work, told in two parts. Similar in ways to Arlo Guthrie’s presumably fictional song, “Alice’s Restaurant,” (but not until the second part), this one’s all true. Even the part where people are [...]

Weekend break from vacation journaling. I don’t usually post someone else’s work, but I had to share this just for fun. In these three clips are “Peter and the Wolf,” “Inspector Gadget,” “Axel F,” Star Wars Imperial March, and the Muppets theme. Something for pretty much everyone.
This time, instead of Tim Barsky, it’s Greg Pattillo.
You’ve [...]

The difference between pea-size and dime-size shouldn’t be discounted.
To start our Tuesday, Dad drives us on a truck-only road to one open only for hikers and horsemen. I mean horsepeople. No, that makes this sound like Chronicles of Narnia. Horse riders?
Although Mom enjoys a good walk and natural scenery, rigorous hiking isn’t her bag. She [...]