Nay, we are but men. Rock!

Since moving from WV to OR there have been some pretty significant changes to my lifestyle.  The most significant change is probably with the friends I have here.  The friends we have here are much more natural than anyone else I have ever hung out with and they are claiming my wife.  Now in WV when someone was referred to as natural what it really translated into was stinky.  This is definitely not the case here.  Our friends are not stinky they merely have a commitment to living with green and sustainable practices.  This is great but it has an effect on my life that is getting to be a bit much.  We now make our own cream cheese, bread, and shampoo.  We are in a free range organic egg co-op.  My wife wants us to spend $9 on raw milk.  We recycle or compost everything.  We use cloth diapers which I have to carry dirty bath water from the bathtub to the washing machine in order to wash.  All of that to say I try and do my part. The problem comes when I find myself in a restaurant with our friends I never want to order first because I don’t want to order the wrong carbon footprint meal but I hate ordering last because then I feel like I need to follow suit and order the steamed salmon, water chestnut, and leek tartar.

Don’t get me wrong, I am truly committed to creational stewardship and all that jazz but too much of a good thing apparently leaves me hungry.  I want to be able to get a McRib, that’s right suckers I said McRib, and not have to eat it in my son’s closet in fear of being discovered.  I want to be able to walk down the street with my head held high while letting the grease from my Oregon Burrito lovingly caresses my chin.  I want to be able to eat a steak without someone who claims to be my friend asking me if I know how much methane a cow produces in its lifetime and why am I not eating tofu.

I say enough is enough.  It is football season and I refuse to mask my love of cheese product and sausage.  I am going to fly my greasy pizza flag high.  I don’t want to go back to my old ways but I do want the occasional guilt-free chili dog.  Who’s with me?

The Olympics are many things to many people; the hard work, the blood, sweat, and tears—all of that cliche stuff.

Also, this?

Looks like they wanted to keep lots of people from going home with more than a medal. If they didn’t, I imagine they would have to open up the ‘gold’ express lane at the clinic.

I guess the Olympics is all about love. Hah!

Here I am sitting in my house three days before I was scheduled to be home from my backpacking trip.  I checked the calendar before I left and sure enough it said August.  I checked the map and sure enough I was heading to central Oregon.  Then why in the name of everything that is holy did the weather act like something out of a Charlton Heston movie?  When we got to the trailhead it was sunny and about 104 degrees, typical for the geography and time of year.  That night the wind moved in, 30-35 mph gusts.  The next night the lightning moved in to go along with my friend Mr. Wind.  The night after that Rain Jr decided to show up to the party.  And last night Rain Jr’s father Papa Downpour decided to dance on the face of my shelter with his friend Cyclone Jim.  I mean there were torrential downpours and wind gusts upwards of 45 mph or more.  Last night was probably the most miserable night I have ever spent in the wilderness.  I was laying in my rain-soaked down sleeping bag looking up at the bottom of the tarp and just waiting for it to give way and fly off into the night leaving us even more unprotected.  Somehow our knots held and the shelter construction held pretty well through the night; I only had to get out and tie down the tarps two or three times throughout the night.  And did I forget to mention I FORGOT MY RAIN GEAR!!!!!!!!!  This was my fourth time taking college students into the wilderness for a week and never before had I ever encountered even a drop of rain.  Last night sucked.

Other than the weather that was more unpredictable than Cher on her wedding night the trip was pretty good.  The students I had were great and rose to almost any occasion  with high spirits.  They worked together and surpassed my expectations.  They were encouraging and supportive of one another.  They never questioned my decisions.  In short they were pretty awesome.  But the weather blew.  While on the trip I had to keep my tongue and watch what I said in order to set the right kind of example.  I needed to keep morale at a high level.  Now I could care less.  I want to vent.  I want to complain.  I think I am done.  Thank you for listening, or would it be reading?

So today is my wife’s birthday and two of her best friends came over to bring her ice cream and apparently talk all of the oxygen out of the earth.  It was good times for a while we were all joking around and I felt like I actually live here.  Then the subject changed to the diva cup.  It was this point in the conversation that I was banished from my own living room.  I’m not talking about a civil, “Hey Ben I know you live here and I respect that more than you will ever know.  Could you please leave so I could discuss something that could make you feel a little uncomfortable?  I know this is a little inconvenient so feel free to get a little more ice cream as payment.”  That is what I would expect, or at least that is how the conversation would go in my head.  What I got was, “Go check your email so that we can talk.”  

You need to understand the level of trepidation I am feeling right now.  Every time these women get together something bad happens to my life.  When they first became friends I had to start washing Ziplock baggies.  Later I had to leave the kids’ bath water in the tub so that I could use it in the washing machine or on the garden.  Then I started using a rock as deodorant.  Something bad always happens whenever I get kicked out of a room.  I’m afraid when I walk back in there they’re going to tell me that I can only brew and drink soy beer or something.  

The jokes on them though.  I’m not checking my email. I’m writing this post and I’m eating the rest of the ice cream anyway.  That’s right ladies you can’t control my life.  I’ll do what I want when I want to do it in my own house.

For the most part I am a pretty simple man.  I don’t like to buy a lot of stuff not because I am cheap but because I don’t like to put the energy into looking for things like clothes or TVs or household items.  I do like to hobby-shop.  This means I like to buys things that relate to my hobbies.  For example, I will never have too many fly rods, books, or guitars.  I will also never have too much backpacking gear. Recently I took a trip to the east coast to visit family.  When I got home and walked into my house I found a package containing my new tarp shelter and minimalist camp stove.  Now I already have a three season tent so why, would you ask, do I need a tarp shelter?  The reason is simple, weight.  My tent weighs roughly 7lbs with poles and stakes.  My new tarp shelter weighs 1.5.   This is amazing on so many different levels.  The first level is that it allows me to save space in my pack, the tarp shelter packs much smaller than my tent and because it is a tarp shelter it doesn’t have poles, as well as saving my back a little bit.  The second level is that it gives me versatility in the back-country.  More equipment equals more options to meet more needs on more trips.  The third level and the last I will go into is that it is cool and my wife said I could buy it.  Yes I love my ever-growing supply of gear.  If anyone needs me I will be in my back yard until morning.

I just got home from one of the most incredible sights of my life.  My wife just finished her first half-marathon and it was awesome.  First you have to take in the whole scene.  This race is called the Hippie Chick Half Marathon and encompasses women, and yes it is an all-female race, from every and I mean every walk of life.  There are you twenty-somethings that are obviously at the top of their game.  The winning time was something like 1:31.31, which is pretty impressive.  There is the sixty and over crowd, which is inspiring enough as it is.  There are the baby-boomers that run the whole race arm in arm. And there is everyone in between.  One of the most amazing aspects of this race is not necessarily that all of these women, totaling somewhere around 900, from all of these walk of life are here together but that they all want to see each other do well.  As they are passing each other those being passed are cheering.  I saw multiple women stop and get out of the way of other women in their sprint to the finish line.  It was a competitive atmosphere that I have never experienced before.

Then there is my wife.  She is the mother of my two children and probably the most amazing woman I have ever known, and I know so great ones.  She didn’t run the race fast but she finished.  She ran 13.1 miles and was able to smile at the end.  She uses the same tenacity in loving and raising our children and in being married to me, neither of which is easy.  She is the best woman I know and this race is merely the latest piece of evidence that proves what I have known all along.  She is awesome!!!

There is only one down side to today.  I have to run my half-marathon in July and I do not think I will beat her time.  Frankly put she is in better shape than me, which makes me love her more and go get on a treadmill.  Although 900 women can run a race and only wish the best for all of those involved I do not believe that is something men can do. We can cheer for people to do well as long as they finish behind us.

As I have mentioned in a previous response to one of my fellow bloggers I am a novice gardener.  This is the first year I have had a garden of my own for many reasons.  This is the first time I have had a yard big enough to have a garden and I have always been around someone who had a garden so I would just help with theirs.  I am growing, with good success so far, jalapeno and green peppers, roma and sweetie cherry tomatoes, sugar snap peas, red and yellow onions, cucumbers, lettuce, zucchini, carrots, raspberries, marionberries, blueberries, strawberries, basil, cilantro, mint, chives, and parsley.  I have been growing most of these plants in my house for some weeks now and have started moving them into the outside garden.  Up until this time all of my gardening has been pretty theoretical in nature.  Almost like I have been playing acting the farmer.  Now that I have put plants into soil I have broken myself makes everything a little more real somehow.  

However there is a little flaw to my plan.  I have found myself becoming more and more obsessed with gardening and gardening techniques.  I have added four or five different plants to my garden/herb/berry garden since the first till and this does nothing but divide my attentions more and more.  I feel kind of like I am playing a progressive game of Whack-a-Mole where the longer the game last the more moles are thrown into the mix.  On one hand you want more moles because they deserved to be whacked and who better to whack them but you but one the other hand the more moles that are added the more places you have to give your attention.  Right now I feel like I still have a handle on the number of moles that are in my game but if many more get thrown at me I may just keel over.

Anyway the reason I titled this post the way I did was because I made pizza tonight for my family’s pizza and a movie night, Lion King in case you were wondering, and I was able to harvest some fresh basil to put on one of the pies.  There is nothing like fresh basil, especially when all you have to do is to walk out your back door and yank some off a bush.   

The other day I was introduced to a world that I knew existed but had never explored.  It is a world full of unfathomable depths that can make the mind swirl and the mouth become numb with anticipation.  It is a world that I had never thought could hold so many possibilities for someone like me.  This is the world of home brewing.  Over the years I have drank my fair share of beer and have always had a decent palate that would require a decent quality.  Since moving to Oregon I have really been bordering on the edge of beer snobbery, which I am alright with because it means I don’t buy crap.  I also roast my own coffee which I find is a similar, yet less time consuming, endeavor and I am also a novice gardener.  There is something to be said about being able to consume something that has been forged by the sweat of one’s brow, or in the case of home brewing after hours of spending time with close friends and drinking.  Even if one was able to find a higher quality product than that which was brewed, roasted, or grown by oneself it still wouldn’t measure up because whenever you take part in producing something part of yourself goes with it.  Every morning when I wake up with my three-year-old and grind my coffee beans there is part of me that takes a little extra care to make the end product perfect.  I do this because I enjoy good coffee and I also want to preserve the part of me that is in the mug.  I have been hooked on home brewing.  I will never be able to go back.  Don’t get me wrong, I will drink other beer in the future, just as I will drink other coffee, but it won’t be the same.  I haven’t even tasted the beer that we started the other day but I can tell you that the first glass will be the best glass of beer I have ever tasted.