When the Smoke Clears

Think about it…
if you had a great deal of money and you were single, wouldn’t you want to have a big house that had areas you could use to creep people out?
Friends come over with their kids. Friends tell the kids they are finally in the country, they need to spend some [...]

Friend: I love the fall. One of the best things is getting to relax with a really warm meal. I even had a can of alphabet soup for dinner. It was good.
Me: I know what you mean. I made a hearty tuscan tomato soup from organic tomatoes a friend gave me, with some fresh [...]

Back from the weekend with the mountaineering unit (again.)
The Rock-face: slippery. Rains over the last week have left bubbling flows at the top of the mountain, meaning lots of little sometimes waterfalls coming down the side.
The View: beautiful with the changing of the leaves. It’s one thing to drive through it. Quite another to [...]

I’m headed off again for the weekend with the young ones. I think it will be pretty cold up in the mountains with these men and women training to defend our freedoms.
It’s the freedom to choose who we are and what we do. Within reason. And when there are others who have been freed, [...]

Badgered, battered and blue. That’s the latest feeling about the workplace. It will pass, but today I needed to get some work done. More budget hearings come tomorrow and I was requested to help spec out details for others, which meant a good bit of work from my office.
But my office was in a [...]

The Blog-friend/adopted brother was talking about contortionists. I’ve had the same thoughts rattling around in my mind a bit lately myself. Why?
Well, a good friend sent me a Cirque du Soleil DVD for my birthday and I’ve watched it a number of times, sometimes keeping it playing in the background while I went about [...]

The settlement of certain pains in the body can be a sign of aging or pure defiance of that same process. My wrists and forearms still hurt. After three days, there is an aching deep within the tissues.
Last Sunday was a climb day, one I desperately needed. The Wildebeest and I had intended to [...]

When you have to be made conscious of your breathing, your day has probably extended well past where it should.
The last few days have been a bit blurry, some of it good, some of it challenging. I like to use this space often as the way of putting together my last thoughts for the [...]

I remember from times when I was a kid that warm days meant slightly less warm nights. It was only when visiting my great-grandmother in the mountains of Virginia that I would encounter a chill night air, moist and ripe after a hot day.
Now I have been living in the cabin for three years. [...]

Waterdrops are striking the roof of the cabin randomly tonight, with the occasional violent acorn landing and rolling down the steel surface. The last several days have been blankets of rain. I’ve not been here enough recently. I’ve been chasing social butterflies elsewhere when the real color of the days can be found in my [...]

FADE IN:
INT. JEEP — NIGHT
Driving home from a celebratory dinner with friends, RSM looks down at his gas gauge. Nearly empty. He glances at his heads-up display, pushes a few buttons. It reads: “12 MILES TO EMPTY.” He passes a sign that says it’s another 35 miles to his town.
RSM
Damn.
INT. CABIN — EARLIER
RSM gathers [...]

Wanna bet the Canadians aren’t going to have much trouble recruiting for the military this year, especially with the Vancouver crowd?:
Hiller said some troops were using the Taliban’s own jungle tactics of using the plants as cover by draping their personnel carriers with cannabis branches and leaves…
Tip to the commander: that’s not [...]

So time for a blogmeet recap:
We gathered, we imbibed, we solved nothing but enjoyed everything.
Typical of me, I pulled off yet another brief appearance at a blogmeet. Foolishly I had not made hotel reservations but I also knew I would not be one of the ones to join the squatter’s village in the [...]

Saturday afternoon, atop a hill under an old oak tree as the sun was setting casting a glow across their faces, two good friends of mine were married. The top of the tree yellow and orange, green farther down as if the altitude was great enough to only create the autumn effect on the upper [...]

Grasshopper 1: Dude. If one hasn’t shown up by now, she ain’t coming.
Grasshopper 2: We’ve only got a few days left. Have you noticed the weather? It’s getting cold. I don’t want to die a virgin.
Grasshopper 1: Nothing wrong with it. Besides, the whole doing it thing, it’s not all it’s cracked up [...]