Nay, we are but men. Rock!

Hello hello!

(cue music) Welcome to Epic Fail Friday!

I thought that I would introduce something not-so-random to our essentially stream-of-consciousness blog here.  Is there a better way to end the week?  I think not.

Epic Fail #1

Welcome to the official beginning of the US holiday season, the 2+ months from Halloween through New Year’s Day. This is, also, the first half of the Season of Sick.

So far in my family we’ve gone through a 3+ week battle with a cold, with overlap of those effected. Today happens to be the start (and hopefully the finish) of another bout with sickness.

My wife is off on a pre-school trip to the pumpkin patch this morning. The plan was that I’d take the youngest until a friend was available, and then I’d go into work a little late. When he woke up this morning he felt a bit warm, and was acting odd (lethargic). Whilst sitting on the couch with him, he proceeded to give me his opinion on my sweater by vomiting on me. He vomited at least one other time — this was before Aj left, so I was changing and don’t have an exact count of the times. He has since regained his normalcy; ate his breakfast, is wandering around playing with toys and reading to himself, etc.

Said friend is available now, but I’m not about to go dump off my kid who was puking 2 hours ago. So here I am, at home, half working and half making sure he’s ok. I just don’t want to have to change again.

I know that the title of this post makes some assumptions.  It assumes that I sometime do understand women, which may be a bit of a stretch.  I work with college students in leadership development.  I have a staff of 10, 3 men and 7 women, that I supervise.  My wife and I get to do some fun activities with the staff at different times of the year.  For instance last night my wife went out to Portland with the women from my staff on a girls’ night out.  They went to an Ethiopian restaurant for dinner and then went out for dessert.  Apparently at some point the conversation turned to the subject of skinny dipping.  I don’t know what the fascination is with skinny dipping and women.  According to my wife, as she recounted the conversation to me, most women at some point in time have gone skinny dipping and a good number of them make it a regular thing.  Not only that but the women from my staff are planning on going while we are all on a retreat at the coast this coming weekend.  

I am conflicted with this knowledge.  One one hand I can see the value of doing something like that in order to share common experiences and therefore strengthen their relationships.  On the other hand I think it is dumb and I know it’s illegal.  I can’t even set up some sort of prank like waiting until they are all in the water and stealing their clothes; talk about inappropriate.  What am I supposed to do?  I will probably put the kibosh on it just out of principle.  You can’t tell me that jumping into 50 degree water in the middle of the night with no clothes on, opening up the possibility for sand to find its way into the few places it can’t get into when you are wearing clothes, is a good idea. 

I would like to take a poll:  

Should I stop the exhibitionist water extravaganza or allow it? 

and

Is skinny dipping as prevalent amongst the fairer sex as I have been led to believe?

I gave the boys a bath tonight. Nothing unusual, really, just a normal bath experience. My bath time routine goes something like this:

1. Get the water running; usually the sound of the running water brings the boys with excitement.
2. Strip off their clothes, “toss” them into the tub.
3. Let the playing commence.
4. After a while wash them down.
5. Let the playing continue.
6. Oldest out first; dry him down, and send off for pjs
7. Youngest out; dry him down, and let him roam freely until the wife clothes him or I…
8. Clean-up the mess of toys in the tub; address naked boy situation if necessary.

Everything went as normal until #8. I was picking up the toys, and youngest was roaming freely. He happened to step right up next to me to watch what I was doing. I thought nothing of it, until I recognized something was happening to my foot. Yup, naked boy was peeing on my toes. Fortunately I was wearing shoes, but I think I need to wash them now.

I didn’t get to watch the first presidential debate, but I’m watching some of the PBS local time replay of the second debate. With the growing use of the interwebs as a news medium I have found myself reading the stories, and hearing the soundbites online, so this is the first time I’ve seen the candidates together. The following is a little bit of a running log of my thoughts during the debate.

Cronyism is just a grating word. It’s totally descriptive, but when it is used it makes me feel a little bit dirty. It just sounds like a four-letter word, especially when John McCain says it.

And speaking of John, I haven’t seen him on TV in a while (don’t watch the news much, remember the interwebs), but he’s not looking so good. He unfortunatly looks every bit of his 72 years of age.

I find it funny that “the campaigns” agreed to the rules of the debate, but it apparently wasn’t conveyed strongly enough to the candidates themselves. Gotta love Tom and his velvet gloved smack-downs.

I tire of the candidates (veeps included) talking not about themself, and what they would do, but what their opponent has or hasn’t done in their public service tenure, or their lack of public service. Obama correcting McCain on history, and McCain correcting Obama.

I tire of the offshore drilling argument. Pretty much everyone agrees that it won’t have any noticible impact on fuel supplies and prices for around 10 years. I’d rather see us with a lower demand for oil in 10 years, rather than holding out hope for that being our saving grace.

Obama talks long. Follow the rules please.

McCain is very thankful tonight. The first thing he does with every question is thanks the questioner. Every. Single. Question.

John’s not very good a self-deprecation, nor pointed humor. He also talks long, too.

I don’t think Tom’s idea of a “quick discussion” is on par with what Obama and McCain think a quick discussion is.

This debate has degraded to really bad cartoon where Obama is on one shoulder and McCain is on the other. No comment on who is the devil and who is the angel. Neither is presenting themself as angelic IMHO.

This past weekend four of us went backpacking in the Columbia River Gorge.  Since it is now Friday you may be asking yourself why it has taken me so long to post.  The answer is simple: I just now regained enough energy and got rid of enough soreness to type and formulate coherent thoughts.  

When it was decided that the guys from our small group should take a backpacking trip there was an initial flurry of conversation about where we should go.  One of our number had hiked the Eagle Creek trail in the Gorge l and said that it was beautiful, which proved to be true.  He said that the trail was a loop and that at the far end of the loop there was Wahtum Lake which suggested that it would be nice to camp there on the second night of the trip.  It sounded like a grand plan, and for the most part it was.

The trip has actually been a long time coming.  This past summer I helped one of the guys buy a handful of new gear through some connections I have.  Once the gear was bought it would be unfaithful not to use it, so we did.  On Friday we got to the trailhead at about 4:00pm.  Not a bad time.  We got our boots on, adjusted our packs, and headed out.  We got just under 4 miles behind us before we stopped to set up camp for the night.  All was well.  We experienced all of the things one would expect to experience in one of the most beautiful wilderness areas in Oregon.  We saw cascading waterfall that had cut through sheer rock faces, we saw lush forest still vibrantly green even after the long summer, we smelled hippie chicks who had apparently been on the trail for quite some time,…yeah we saw it all.  We set up camp and cooked dinner and sat around shooting the breeze until the Sandman’s gentle tuggings pulled us into our sleeping bags.

The next morning we awoke to some new elements to our environment.  There was a level of dew over everything as if the wilderness just needed a little spritz to wake herself fully.  The air was crisp, the day was new, and THERE WAS A HOLE IN ONE OF THE BACKPACKS FROM WHERE THE @$#%ING MICE HAD CHEWED THROUGH TO GET THE SNACKS!!!!!  I hate rodents I always have and I could have crawled through the underbrush, found every last one of the little furry turds, and broken their necks.  But what I did do was to say, “Man that sucks.  Sorry about the pack man.”  I thought it was a fair compromise.

We finally got on the trail about 10:00 and started the 10 mile, slightly uphill the entire day, trek to Wahtum Lake.  The evening of day 2 went much as the evening of day 1 went with dinner, a fire (that may or may not have been started with white fuel), conversation, and the like.  There was, however, one major and distinct difference WE FOUND A BEER IN THE LAKE!!!  Granted the ‘beer’ we found was a Bud Lite but it can loosely be considered beer category and was delicious.  

The next morning we broke camp a little sonner and were on the trail by 9:00am.  We ended up finding a shortcut to the PCT (Pacific Crest Trail).   One of the finer points of backpacking that I had not learned on any of my trips in the past is that “shortcut to the PCT” is apparently an old native american saying that when translated roughly means, “Trail that goes straight up the side of a mountain and is designed to make one rue the day that humans grew legs.”  And I mean straight up.  It was crazy.

The good news is that after starting the the day with such an intense assent the terrain entered into the down hill portion.  It started out gentle enough and then moved into something that resembled an olymic bobsledding course.  The steep decent lasted for about 6 miles and by the time we got back to the main trail my legs felt like someone had flayed open my quads and filled the cavity with over-cooked pasta.  We were all pretty well shot by the time we got to the main trail and we still had about 4 miles until the van.  By the time we got to the van we had gone about 25 miles over terrain that ranged from a gentle 3-4% incline to a not so gentle 9-12% incline/decent.

The final push to civilization felt like I was in Mordor trying to get to Mount Doom but without a stout hobbit companion to carry me when I could go no farther.  I wish I had a Samwise.  We finally made it to the parking lot where we pealled our sock off and donned our flip flops or shoes and began the almost week-long recovery process.  But we made it.  All in all it was a successful trip.  We had a good time and it is always nice to be in the woods.