Babies Are the Root of All Evil

My friends Chris and Meaghan will find this out soon enough when their screaming bundle of sleepless nights arrives in a few months. They probably have the Bible and have seen the verse about babies being born evil (I'm paraphrasing, but it's pretty much what the good book says), but they haven't had to deal with one they couldn't just give back to the proper owner when they got tired of it. They'll understand the greed, wrath, and gluttony that is infancy soon enough, and sadly they won't even realize they're miserable. No parent seems to realize they should hate the life- and money-sucking parasite they created. I'm really just talking out of my ass when I point this out, but it's entirely true. I just don't quite believe it.

Anyway, here's the little ball of iniquity that I helped to make. Keep in mind before you view his terrifying visage that since he took up bipedal locomotion about three months ago that he has rightly earned the nickname Crackhead. It's not that he actually smokes crack, but that he kind of acts like a crackhead.

Sometimes I'm a little uncomfortable walking out in public with the kid because I'm afraid people may think I'm some sort of neo-Nazi. Even his looks are evil. I mean, despite coming from a line full of melanistic white people like Greeks, the little bugger could pass for a Swede. Who besides Hitler could love a face like that? And in demonstration of the little monster's greed, apparently one pacifier just isn't enough.

At his current rate, he's going to have the full list of deadly sins ticked off his to-do list by the time he's two, although lust may prove a bit difficult until his reproductive system starts working.

And if you're wondering why I chose to publish photos of my son today, it's for several reasons. First, I was really hurting for ideas today. I've been in one of my slumps with the blog the past couple of days. Coming up with ideas has been painful. Second, I know that some of you who don't know me personally may be interested in putting a face to the name of the kid who gets referenced in this space occassionally. Third, Justin talks about his little girl on his blog so I was feeling a little jealous. As for the language chosen to caption the photos, I really can't let the sappy daddy vibe from the baby blog leak over into my decidedly cynical and adult personal blog. Deal with it.

We're So Unloved

Technically, at least according to the veterinarian's records, K and I have two dogs, a mixed breed with a spotted tongue named Bubba and a Llewellyn setter named Bosco. I say technically because they don't love us enough to stick around. There was a time when they both had to stay close to us. We installed a fence in the back yard when we moved in a couple of years ago for the express purpose of keeping dogs close to home and safe. When they started digging and climbing out, we ran an electric fence around the bottom. I think Bubba touched it once and learned his lesson. The same went for Bosco. In fact, most of the time it was turned off and we only turned it on occassionally when we noticed them starting to get too close to the fence again.

Then the electric fence died. Bubba stayed around for a month or so after that before realizing there was no longer juice coursing through the wire and he made his escape. Bosco, who was still a younger puppy at the time, stuck around for a month or two longer before joining Bubba in their move. They didn't really move far; they just walked down the road to my parents' house to join their Great Pyrenees to assist her in dragging up dead deer and rabbit carcasses from the woods. They come to visit sometimes, but they always go back to my parents and their great white beast of a dog.

I blame this on K. She's the one who didn't think a 65-lb. dog belonged in the house so we had to keep Bubba outside. If he'd been allowed to cuddle with us on the couch and sleep on the floor next to our bed, he would have happily stayed with us instead of fleeing our boring backyard to be with his mistress in the shaggy white coat.

Actually, that's the odd thing. Cheyenne (my parents' dog) is spayed and Bubba is neutered, so there's no sexual attraction involved. Both are entirely lacking reproductive organs. They just share a passion for partially rotted bodies. I guess that's all any relationship really needs.

And the Photos Keep Coming

I feel like I've been posting an awful lot of slide shows lately, but they're easy and make telling the story of a trip much easier than just using words. That's an odd thing to come from a guy who likes to think of himself as a writer, I know, but I also think of myself as lazy, so deal with it.


This is the SAM Shortline train at the depot in Plains, GA. If you're curious what the big deal about Plains is, read the sign on the side of the depot. If you can't read it or are too lazy to click the image for the bigger image, the depot was Jimmy Carter's campaign depot. Otherwise, I doubt anyone would ever go to Plains on purpose, much less route a tourist train there. The town is minuscule and run down like every other small Southern rural town. Carter still lives here, although we didn't see his house. Looking at pictures and my dad's telling, it's a rather unassuming house, which really doesn't surprise me about the 39th president.


Billy Carter was Jimmy's black sheep brother who died of pancreatic cancer back in the 80s. Oddly, Billy died of the same condition that felled his father and siblings. The building has been restored on the outside and the inside has been turned from service station into one-room museum. The restrooms are clean though. The rumor of growling crotch crickets is entirely false.


This is the view when you hang out of the door between cars on the train heading back to Georgia Veteran's State Park. This is the section of the track that crosses Lake Blackshear. On the far bank is a very small section of the largest pecan grove in the United States. The grove stretched on both sides of the track for miles on that side of the lake. It totaled over 2,000 acres. That's a lot of drupes.

After the train ride, we drove over to Andersonville to sate my dorky side. This is a view of the gate in the reconstructed portion of the old stockade.

This is what the watchtowers looked like. There are actually some photos from when the prison was in use and this really is how it looked.

There are pairs of markers like this all around the site of the prison to show you where the stockade had stood and where the deadline (as in cross this line and they shoot you) was. Considering there were no actual structures inside the prison more permanent than tents, this was a huge prison.

This is the shrine that is set over Providence Spring, a spring that supposedly erupted from the ground after a lightning strike. The shrine was erected in the early 1900s.

This is a really cool installation behind the Prisoner of War Museum. The installation is intended to show the importance of water to the prisoners in Andersonville. There was only a single stream that ran through the prison and that was their only source of water. However, it came in already dirty from the Confederate soldiers camp upstream and the area basically just turned into a bog from the heavy traffic to and from the stream. It was raining when I took this picture and water streamed between the fingers of the cupped hands of the figure strengthening the image.

A different angle that shows the artificial stream that is part of the installation.

Gravestones so close together that you can tell the Union soldiers who died here were probably more or less just tossed into trenches side by side. Burials still take place here for more recent veterans. There was actually a burial earlier during the day we visited, although their headstones are spaced much farther apart.
Playing disk golf at Georgia Veteran's State Park. This is actually a really cool place as state parks go, but I suck at disk golf. Luckily no one was really that much better than me.

Well, the Internet Works Here

Actually, my phone works here, so I'm posting with it. We took the SAM Shortline train from Georgia Veterans State Park to Plains today. This wasn't my first time on a passenger train, but the cars were from the 1940s and the train is operated by the Georgia parks service. That makes it my first time in a moving state park.

After we disembarked back at GA Veterans, we drove over to Andersonville, where the notorious Confederate Civil War prison was and the National Prisoner of War Museum stands. I've wanted to go to this place since I was in high school but never have, so I was pretty excited about this. The museum is actually pretty well done, but the prison site itself is like every other Civil War military site. It's just monuments and markers saying where things used to be, although there were a couple of small sections of reconstructed stockade walls. I, being the dork that I am thoroughly enjoy things like this. My wife and father, on the other hand, don't, so I made my looking and reading as brief as I could bear. The actual space the prison occupied was larger than I imagined. For those interested in old cemeteries, this one is hard to beat. The oldest sections have remained the same since the 1870s and are so close together that they obviously weren't using coffins.

I have photos, some even on this phone, but I can't figure out how to upload photos on blogger with the mobile version of Internet Explorer. I'll put them up tomorrow.

I Hope You Don't Get Bored This Weekend...

Because you won't be able to depend on me to keep you entertained. K and I are off camping again, although this time we'll be in a popup camper that has it's own shower, air conditioner, and microwave, so it's really hardly camping. We're taking the kid to go with my parents to camp at some state park near where Jimmy Carter lives to ride the short line train on Friday. I'm actually writing this from that stupid work thing I had to go to the past couple of days just before cutting out a little early to meet the family at home and get on the road. I'll be back at home Saturday night so you can expect me to get caught up with the Blog 365 thing by Sunday. Next week is one of only two weekends I have left at home this summer before school starts back as I'll be in Asheville, NC, and Cleveland, OH for a week and a half starting on July 7, and I'll be doing my little internship thing at 5 Seasons North for five days starting on July 21. I'll be able to post every or almost every day during those trips, though.I'm hoping that at least the apprentice brewer type thing provides some good blog fodder. Most of our vacation is just going to be the same old, same old that we do at least once a year. I haven't been to Asheville in a few years, though, so I'm looking forward to that. You can't fault a town of that size and that rural of a location when it can support seven breweries.

I'll try to post photos from the train ride.

Anyone Want to Sponsor My Circumambulation of the World?

Today I had to go into work for the first time in a month to sit in the library and try to fill out excessively complicated unit plans for the upcoming year. If that didn't make any sense to you, don't worry about it. Explaining it would bore you to tears and just make me angry. You only need to know that it's a lot of work and it aggravates my adult onset ADD. I spent most of the day staring at the back of the shirt on the guy in front of me trying to get myself to concentrate on the task at hand. Instead I memorized the names of the kids on the recreation department swim team from 2004. Good times.

Towards the end of the day when everyone else (except for the weird lady who seems to consider her personal and work lives to be one and the same) was getting as loopy as I had been the entire day, a story came out from one of my younger colleagues about one of her friends going to a bluegrass festival in North Carolina then having friends drop him off 30 miles away on the Appalachian Trail so he could walk to somewhere in Virginia for another music festival a month away. From the telling of the story, the decision seemed rather unplanned and the guy wasn't known for his survival or camping skills. In fact, the storyteller mocked him for his lack of ability to pitch a tent.

Most of the other teachers were shocked by this man's impetuosity and lack of forethought. My only reaction was "Cool!"

I've now found my calling in life; I'm going to circumambulate the world. I know there have been circumnavigations by plane, boat, motorcycle, and human power, but I'm sure it's been rare for anyone to try to walk the distance. Of course I'd have to resort to boat or plane over certain sections, but I'm willing to make the sacrifice.

I'm sure I could even convince Mickey to tag along, keep me company and tie all of my knots. (I'm actually surprised Mickey hasn't mocked my complete ineptitude with knots. I am nearly useless in that category of survival skills, although I'm sure I could take out a black bear in hand-to-paw combat. The grizzlies would put up more of a fight, but if I were fighting a male, I could at least go for the nuts like any smart but outmatched fighter does.) I may lose Courtney as a friend for luring her beau away on a long-term venture that doesn't bring him any salary or job skills, really, but, again, I'm totally willing to make that sacrifice. Mickey just has to understand that I'm not going to take her place.

My only problem is finding the money. I seriously don't have the savings to spend several years travelling the world by foot. I'm not sure I could go more than a month or two on what I have saved, and I'd prefer not to fund this venture through credit cards. I may be American, but that doesn't sound too smart to me. Despite his frugality, I seriously doubt Mickey could make things any easier for me financially. If this was just hiking the American mainland from Murchison Promontory in Nunavut to Cape Froward, Chile (the northmost to southernmost mainland points on the two continents), we could do this on just the cost of the food we ate and some special survival gear up front, and replacements and repairs along the way, probably just a couple of thousand bucks apiece including bribes for the occasional official. The whole circumambulation thing would require money for jet or ship tickets and double the cost of the trip just with the leg over the Pacific Ocean. Plus, Mickey would probably tire of tying all of my knots somewhere around Oklahoma and my body would be found on the outskirts of Cherokee Nation lands with all of my fingers crushed with a broken carabiner and each twisted into a different type of knot.

I do at least have my own backpacking equipment this time around and I know where I can get some goats, so he may put up with me until at least Utah. He seemed to talk a lot about goats on our last hike.

To jump abruptly back to the point of the point, basically, I'm looking sponsors. If you'd like to sponsor an attempt to walk around the world by a young and ruggedly masculine man frustrated with his buzzkill of a career, please leave a comment to this post with how I can contact you. Serious patrons only need apply.

You Know That Whole Thing About the Cell Phone? Forget It.

I got a new cell phone yesterday. It may change my whole outlook on cell phones, actually.

Well, not really. I'll still hate the phone feature of the new gizmo, but this one may actually make me at least keep the thing around more often. Here's a picture of the new piece.

That's right, it's a Verizon SMT5800 smartphone with Windows Mobile and it really does glint jauntily when I slide it open to reveal the QWERTY keyboard. It should probably make a little bowler hat for it to wear cocked to the side. I still despise telephones and everything they stand for, but at least this one comes with an internet browser, e-mail, Microsoft Office (the mobile version at least) and pretty much all of the other features of a PDA. And it's the size of a slightly chunky phone. I think I may find the initiative to drag this along and turn it on a little more frequently from now on, so if you feel the need to call or text me at the old cell number, feel free to. I'll probably even get the message in a reasonable timeframe from now on, but only because I'll be dragging this baby along to surf the net or check my beer list when at a bar. Cool, huh?

I actually wanted one of these things the last time I bought a phone, but the PDA phones were running about $100 more back then. Now, instead of going for the Palm Treo at the same price, I decided to go for this much slimmer model. I'm so freaking cool that I can't seem to keep pants on today.

And That Was Stranger

I took K out on a date tonight. It was a good thing we did. The baby is teething and therefore a royal pain in the ass and our frustration with grumpy baby was to scream and throw things at each other. I've actually got a cut on my thigh where K went after me with the fork when she snapped while washing dishes. I left her with a black eye at least.*

So after we finished our own little private cage match (E seemed to enjoy it. He watched us go at it, giggled, and then went back to his books and gravity experiments.), we dropped the kid off at his grandparents and drove to a relatively nearby town for dinner and a movie. (And new cell phones since K lost hers and mine was old enough that the Verizon guys laughed when I pulled it out. That usually only happens when people see my penis.) Getting the phones took about an hour so we didn't get to the restaurant until 8 p.m., but the food was okay and K was smiling again, so I was happy and agreed to take her over to Bruster's for some ice cream before heading over to the movies. The odd thing is that all of this occurred within more or less the same parking lot. Seriously. The Verizon was next to the movie theater and I only had to drive around the corner in the parking lot to get to the restaurant and Bruster's was next door to that.

It was at Bruster's that we got the bad news. E was fine. We found out that he'd finally grasped waving goodbye while under the tutelage of my parents (he also mastered walking unaided while staying with them a few months ago). He was fine. We found out that the handyman that we'd depended on to get our house into working order at wages we could actually afford with our modest salaries had died earlier in the day of a heart attack. His girlfriend found him unconscious in their yard and by the time the paramedics arrived, he was already dead. I hate this. Stevie and I didn't have a lot in common, but he was a good man, and I liked him. K and I never could have afforded to move into the place without him, but I'd like to think my sadness at the news was for more than the knowledge that I lost this human resource. Thanks again for all the help, Stevie.

And maybe Julie's right. I probably should stop mentioning people in my blog. It's apparently not safe. Actually, apparently it only affects people for whom I've used blog space to express my gratitude. If you've been the recipient of a thank you or some sort of acknowledgement of your value to me on this blog, I'd probably be getting to the insurance guy as soon as possible to get the biggest life insurance policy possible. Actually, to keep my dark gift under wraps, I may just forgo expressing gratitude ever again, so if you ever do something nice for me and I don't say or do anything in return, know that it's not me being a prick, but me saving your life. The fact that I get to save money by not having to buy you dinner or a beer for helping me move is just a bonus.

*In case you don't have a sense of the absurd, that was a joke. K and I were grumpy at best, although the time alone hanging out was definitely needed.

That Was Strange

About a month ago I mentioned a guy who stopped and took me home after I accidentally parked my truck in a ditch on a dirt road back in high school. I found out today that he died about a week ago from a heart attack. It really seems a little strange that I would remember and write about the kindness of a man about a month before he died. It wasn't like the guy was elderly. He was my parents' age, and they're only in their early mid 50s. This would have been old a couple hundred years ago, but this is two decades shy of the life expectancy these days. It's probably close to a quarter-century short of life expectancy, to tell you the truth. It's not like I mentioned a guy who was 96 who died the next month. That's really not a surprise. A guy in his 50s makes it a coincidence.

On a more cheerful note, I found this really cool Simpsons game online through the forums at Ratebeer.com yesterday. The game gives you 63 Simpsons characters and the goal is to see how many you could identify in 10 minutes. I got 40/63. I should have gotten 48, but I was blanking on several.

Damn You Semicolon!

I never was a fan of the semicolon. Honestly, for most of my life I had no clear understanding of its usage. It wasn't until I graduated college, had switched careers a couple of times and ended up an English teacher that I finally really figured out the whole point of the semicolon*. I honestly don't even bother with the semicolon in my classroom. Personally, I'd rather read something without any semicolons at all instead of a paper that reads like the kid just randomly spliced sentences together with this accursed mark because they're trying to put what they learned to use, especially when there's no actual use for the mark. It's really the only punctuation mark where proper usage is entirely a matter of subtlety and perception, and as such isn't something the typical high school kid is going to grasp with their begrudging effort master the subject. Sure the comma, with many of its "either way is really correct" usages, can get a little confusing, but it's not the c of the punctuation set either, redundantly doing the work other punctuation marks do just as well.

For a more interesting on the history of the semicolon, try this surprisingly readable Slate.com piece.

* This is also how I fully grasped the correct usage of the word whom. This wasn't a point I made a ton of mistakes with before, but it wasn't something where I understood the usage either. I'm now able to explain its usage pretty clearly, although I'd much rather hear a person who's forgotten that the word whom exists than someone who uses whom in inappropriate places. There's nothing worse when it comes to language than hypercorrection in my opinion.

Mother 'Effin' Squirrel

This story is a week old, but for some reason it didn't really cross my mind as worth telling on the blog until today. Last week the family and I went camping at Mistletoe State Park and I took K and E for a little hike. The hike was fine. The baby backpack wasn't as well designed or fitting as the pack I took backpacking with Mickey, so it was more uncomfortable than my heavier hiking pack on a much shorter walk, but it wasn't that big of a deal. K started enjoying herself after catching her stride and despite almost quitting on me on the first and only stream crossing, she got excited about trying it again on the way back (so much that she was planning our return to make sure we crossed it again).

None of the actual hike was all that noteworthy, however. Instead, it's what happened behind the ranger station while I was waiting for K that makes for an interesting story. I already had little man strapped to my back and as usual he was silent. He loves going for walks outside. He's usually so amazed by what he sees that the usual running commentary of "dah" or "wuh dah" that accompanies his seemingly endlessly pointing left index finger is shushed to the point I can only hear his breathing as he strains around the side of my head to get a better view of what's coming ahead. I walked to the section of the trail that connected all of the park's trails behind the ranger station and stood looking around trying to decide in which direction we needed to go to get to the head of the Rock Dam Trail. Then something bumped me from behind. I turned to look and there was a gray squirrel sitting on his haunches looking at me. That was a little strange, I thought.

Then the little bastard charged me again, slamming into my ankle. I'm not used to being attacked by these dastardly little rodents. I'm more used to them running in terror from my 6'3", nearly 250 lb. frame. I think they can smell the meat of squirrels long passed that I killed and ate as a kid and know that I am their predator and not their friend.

This one apparently had a sinus infection. As I scurried away from my attacker, I noticed that he just scooted a few squirrel-strides away and returned to glaring at me. I started to back from my tiny nemesis and he charged again. This time I kicked the little jerk and he went skidding a few feet away. My mocking of Chris for beating up a mocking bird to save his dog crossed my mind as I realized I'd just gotten into a fight with a squirrel. Chris, please accept my apology at this point before you move on.

I thought this was the end of the skirmish. The squirrel had run away from me for the first time, so I just walked a couple of yards away from it down the path and resumed waiting for K to catch up.

Then the squirrel attacked me again. This was getting a little creepy. I have to admit I was getting a little freaked out. What if this thing was rabid? I've never heard of a rabid squirrel. Most rabid animals eat squirrels and would have killed the thing in the process of infecting it. Maybe it was just protecting a litter of its young in the tree near where it had first attacked me. Whatever it was, my amusement and irritation was starting to turn into the first intimations of fear. I was tired of being made a fool by an animal that possessed less mass than my foot, so I jumped a ditch and decided to wait across the gully from this mad mammal.

It didn't work, the squirrel leaped the ditch and was coming for me. I grew tired of putting up a fight and ran back up the hill, E strapped to my back. Luckily, K walked around the side of the building just in time to see the squirrel leaping the ravine and chasing me up the hill so that she actually saw enough to back me up on the fact that I indeed was being attacked and not just imagining things. The whole thing reminded me of a certain scene from a certain movie. Roll the clip!

Steam Is Fun

Today K got up early to go help my parents get the corn put up. My mom had been drafted into some remedial math thing at the middle school today and they didn't want the corn to go bad on the stalks before they got it put up. K went over to help pull corn from the garden before my parents went to work and the shucked and silked it before coming to get me and E. That fact that the corn ear worms didn't elicit a comment this time from K shows that she's becoming more of a country girl. The fact that she was freaked out by a cricket in the house says maybe not. Actually, she's starting to like it down here, while I merely put up with it because of practical reasons. Here's a photo of what the corn earworm (really a caterpillar) looks like. I didn't take the photo, but got it from another site.


We dropped E off at daycare and went over to the neighboring county to the canning plant to get the corn prepped for freezing. Canning plants may be a rural thing, so I'll diverge here to explain it. I'm not talking about something huge and commercial. The canning plants around here are kind of like a brew-your-own shop except they're for fruits and vegetables. They've got steam kettles, canning lines and giant pressure cookers set up on a personal scale. This is the gardener's canning plant, not the Jolly Green Giant's. They tend to be run by the local FFA Club and associated somehow with the county high school.

Getting back to the actual story, we went out to the canning plant with our laundry basket full of Silver Queen sweet corn. My parents' corn didn't turn out that productive this year for some reason. The stalks look healthy, but there just weren't that many ears and many of the ears weren't very full with many missing kernels. Usually from the amount they planted we would have gotten more than twice that many ears. At the canning plant, we dropped ears in the machine that sliced it off the cob to just nip the tops of the kernels off and then adjusted the machine and ran the cobs back through the machine to scrape the insides of the kernels out. This is the way we tend to make cream corn. We don't actually put any milk or dairy into the mix, it's just the way we take it off the cob. The starches in the internal components of sweet corn is enough to provide creaminess. All you add is salt and pepper when you cook it. My mom has these special slicing boards that do this job well, but let's just say the machine made it go much more quickly.

After that, we took the pot of corn to the steam kettles in the next room where one of the guys blanched it. Then we came back in to cool the kernels off before packing them up into freezer bags to stick in the freezer for future use. We ended up with about seven quart bags of corn.

One interesting thing is that one of the kids who helped us while we were at the canning plant was horribly burned. My first instinct was to wonder if he'd burned himself on the job. After all, the room with the steam kettles, canning line, and pressure cookers only had a dozen or so places in a 20'x20' room to be badly burned. Then I realized that despite the horrible burns (his fingers were twisted and his legs looked to be missing muscle mass) that these were old wounds. I've got to give the kid kudos for going around in shorts. I'm not even secure enough to take off my shirt and I'm just fat. I always feel uncomfortable about people with serious disfigurement, not because I fear it's catching or I'm disgusted, but because I spend too much time trying not to be a dick and look or sound like I'm disgusted, amused, or entertained by their appearances. It's kind of like being around a very attractive woman dressed in a certain manner. In both cases the person's variation from the norm draws your attention, but in both cases you don't want to be thought of as leering, especially when you aren't. The worst is when a woman wears a shirt with writing across the front. My eyes are drawn to words regardless of placement and I know that if I spend the time to read the woman's chest that she'll end up thinking I'm drooling over her boobs and think I'm a jerk. My curiosity usually turns this into a painful tug-of-war with my shyness. I know I can't even ask to read the shirt without risking the appearance of being a lecher, but I really want to know what those words say. I'm a curious person by natured. It's not the same with a guy. He's not going to question why you're reading his shirt. Only if a guy had a slogan on the fly of his pants would he wonder about why you were staring there. That's why it's nice being married. If K has a shirt that draws my attention I can read it without feeling uneasy. If she questions my reasons, I'm comfortable enough to tell her. If she assumes the wrong thing it's not like it's going to be an uncomfortable situation.

And that's correct, I equated beautiful women with burn victims. They're really just one and the same.

Jacob Angry! Jacob Smash!

I just saw another ad for The Incredible Hulk and every time I see one, it makes me angry. I mean, the last one was only released in 2003 and I don't really think that five years justifies a remake. Seriously, is Hollywood so hard up for scripts that they're having to remake movies that aren't even eligible for Kindergarten yet? Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of the remake thing to start with, with the exception of remaking foreign films given the fact that most people aren't going to get a chance to see the great films not made in English unless we rip them off.

I heard that this was perhaps Marvel's attempt to make a movie they felt was truer to the franchise, but screw that. Marvel got paid enough for the last one that they shouldn't care if it was bastardized. This is just a blatant money grab because Marvel and the producers know the silly fanboys would be psyched at the opportunity to see yet another Hollywood action flick about the big green bruiser.

But really, I think all of my ire comes from the simple fact that I would make a lousy superhero if I had been turned into the Hulk. After all, I'd get all worked up and wreak havoc in LA over some stupid unnecessary movie and then stand idly by while some dude blew up a bus. I'd feel a little fear from the violent act, but I wouldn't get all that angry about it. It takes a lot to get me angry unless it's insignificant.

A few other things that would trigger my inner Hulk, if I had one:

1. Anti-gay marriage protesters.
2. The stupid fucker who defaulted on a couple of credit cards, moved, changed his phone number and has a very similar name to mine.
3. Whoever the genius was who attached my phone number to this collections file.
4. Every last collections agency that ended up with the file after I proved to the previous agency that it wasn't me.
5. The dick who called from the newest agency today who just hung up on me mid-sentence when I tried to tell him I'd already verified to other companies that they had the wrong guy.

The only good side to the whole collections agency thing is that it's not attached to my social security number and only my phone number. The address and social security number attached to the file have nothing to do with me or anywhere I've ever lived. It's not a credit rating worry for me because of this, but it is a serious pain in the ass considering too many phone calls from people I know even get on my nerves. The best one was the pushy jerkoff who started yelling at me when I got tired of her badgering and told her that because I knew this account wasn't attached to my SS number that I didn't really care what she tried to do because it wouldn't affect me. I hung up on her mid-sentence and could hear her shrill threats until the handset hit the cradle.

This Is Me

Courtney over at Malfeasance stole an idea I liked, so I stole it as well. The project was to create a photo collage with Flikr that embodied what it was to be me. If you would like to do something as well, check out Courtney's post for the directions and links. Here's the questions and below is the collage and my answers and explanations.

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One word to describe you.
12. Your Flickr name.


1. Jacob, duh. If you're wondering what the photo is, Jacob sheep are the only sheep I know of to have four horns.
2. I'm a bit of a foodie, but I'll always go back to pizza.
3. I did get a lot of hits for a school in a county of the same name in Texas, but this was more like my friends and I were in high school.
4. Green is the color of God.
5. I had to change this choice. I'm not all that attracted to Janeane Garafolo anymore. I saw her standup act recently and it sucked. That's a bit of a turnoff for me. After losing her, I realized that I don't have any other crush obsessions in Hollywood. Sure, I love Jennifer Lopez's butt and Catherine Zeta Jones is the epitome of beauty even if she is married to a saggy old man, but I can't describe them as obsessions. While I have no interest in Alton Brown sexually, I am a little obsessed with the man as celebrities go. Where else on television can I go to watch someone who is basically a more telegenic version of me talk about things I'm interested in?
6. Everyone who knows me knows the answer is beer. Duh. Tea comes in a distant second.
7. I've been twice, but my dream vacation would still be wandering Alaska. There were plenty of usable photos for this, including some great glacier shots since anywhere with ice in the summer is somewhere I'd love to visit, but K suggested this one for the road and the wandering it symbolized.
8. Ice cream is one of my weaknesses.
9. I'd love to be a hermit, but I'd prefer to be a hermit with K. Plus, the photos for professor and brewer sucked.
10. I searched peace and quiet, but solitude would have been a good word too.
11. Quirky. That suits me pretty well.
12. Nothing came up for aracauna_man or aracauna man, probably because my username has been mispelled since I was in the ninth grade. Araucana man (with correct spelling) pulled up many photos.

Staying at Home for Once

I'm feeling lazy today, so I didn't want to think too hard to come up with a blog idea. Despite my lethargy, K drug me outside to pick blueberries in the boiling heat (we have boiling heat here in the swamps instead of the blistering heat elsewhere), so I decided to bring along the camera and take a few photos of my surroundings. After all, I think the only person who reads my blog and has seen my place is Hank. That basically means I'm wasting his time, but maybe the rest of you can find something of interest here.


As I set out on today's journey, I found this wasp digging in a dirt dauber's nest. This definitely wasn't a dirt dauber, so I'm guessing he was hunting for larvae to eat. I'm guessing this particular wasp would be all for stem cell research.

The sad thing is that I guess he didn't realize that I knocked this nest down last year and he's only going to find baby wasp mummies at best. Loser.

This is the view from my carport. If you could see to the right of the image, you'd see the paint-peeling visage of the trash truck. It's actually just my dad's old GMC full-size, but we keep it to take off the garbage. Trash pick-up service isn't an option this far out in the boonies so we have to haul off our own.


This is the view from the side of the house. That's the old horse and cattle barn my grandfather built. It's now mostly in ruins, but my dad stores his two tractors there. Only one of them works, but the one that doesn't work is an antique dealie that he refuses to get rid of. They're growing cotton in the fields that border our house on two sides, which sucks. They spray the crap out of cotton and I don't really like that fact. Plus, cotton leaves nothing behind for the wildlife. Peanuts and corn provide tons of food just from spillage at harvest and aren't sprayed with as many chemicals. Peanuts actually enrich the soil. Cotton sucks.

This is half of the back of the house. The pond starts there on the right and there's the chicken pens under that big flowering tree in the distance. The pens are actually empty right now.

This is the rest of the pond. You're not seeing the fenced-in portion of the yard to the right, but you're not really missing a lot.

This is the view from the other side of the house. It oddly has the best grass, although it spends parts of the year submerged by the pond when it occassionally overflows.

This is the key lime tree (left) and the blood orange tree. The lime tree is loaded with baby fruits right now, but the blood orange didn't make anything this year. I didn't get it transplanted last year like I did with the key lime and the extra time spent in the little plastic container it came in delayed it's growth a bit. It should make a few oranges for me next year.

These are my last two chickens. That's BACH (Bad Ass Chicken Hen, copyright Julie) on the left and the black araucana hen on the right. BACH is somehow still thriving after her partial neckendectomy.

Blueberries are coming into season. Anyone want to come down and visit for free blueberries? You'll have to pick them yourself, but they're tasty.

If I could include a sound file with this shot it would be the deafening drone of bees of several species. Those are the flowers of my date palms, although this bunch of flowers is a couple of weeks behind the other clusters that already look more or less like fruit.

Young dates. I'm actually going to try them fresh this year. I tasted dried ones in the past and they were too sweet for my tastes. I'm curious what they taste like before drying.

This is the beer fridge. I love my beer fridge.

Nothing but top shelf, yo. The little label on the front of the shelf says "Please pay when you take a drink out. Thanks!" It's because this fridge used to do its job in my aunt's store, but she traded it for one of my grandmother's refrigerators before I moved in. I find it funny now considering that I'm pretty much the only one taking drinks out of this fridge.

Kegs of homebrew and a liter bottle of Sweetwater Happy Ending Imperial Stout.

More beer in the door. I'm obviously a fan of Dales Pale Ale and Ten Fidy. Oskar Blues makes some of the best beer you'll ever taste in a can. I actually took photos of the freezer compartment in this fridge, but then I realized that it just looked like a freezer full of pot. There's no marijuana in the freezer, or anywhere else in the house, it's just that whole-leaf hops look a lot like the whacky tobacky and I've got a lot of hops in that freezer. I would say that I wish it was pot because I could make more money off of reselling it, but with the current hop shortage, hops may be hitting higher prices. I'll just make more beer with them.

Now For Those Pictures I Promised

I promised you photos on Saturday and when I promise, you receive, except when you don't. Here are a few photos from that restaurant we visited on Saturday.


There were all sort of wood carvings in this place. Some were in the style of the classic ventriloquist dummy except that they were almost life size. Actually they would have been life size for very short people, except that they weren't to scale exactly. This lady sat in the corner and watched us eat our meal.


The guy in the left is perhaps a little too minstrel show for my tastes, but he really does kind of fit the exaggerated features of his fellow card players, however. This was the first thing you saw when you walked in the door.

There's a lot of hand-carved detail in this bar. There was also a hand-carved cabinet for the wine selection (we picked out a Petite Syrah that was actually pretty damn tasty), but you don't get that picture. The boobs on the wine cabinet were more obvious than the boobs on the one post on the bar and this is a family blog.


Now that you've got a feel for the whimsy of this place, here's what keeps them coming back. If you look closely in the above shot, you'll catch sight of two thick New York strips in a sautee pan amidst the flames. Actually, all you'll see is part of the two steaks, but you can imagine the rest.

And now for the money shot. This is the actual oven. The guy cooking the steaks here actually built the oven by hand. He also renovated the formerly burned-out shell of a house and started the restaurant for $600. Here he's attaching the long metal pole to the handle of the steak pan to remove the cooked steaks from the oven.

After pulling the steaks from the fire, he deglazes the pan with wine and a little pico de gallo for the sauce. Actually, good steaks just need salt and pepper to be divinely tasty hunks o' fauna, but I'm not against tasty sauces. The only problem is that they don't season their steaks enough prior for cooking for my tastes. It was good meat, not overcooked, and tasty sauce, but the meat itself needed more salt for perfection. I still didn't reach for the A1 sauce if you get what I'm saying. Despite my very mild disappointment in the flavor of the steak, K's Calypso Chicken (stuffed with feta cheese, artichokes and more) was amazing, and my mom's shrimp dish and my sister's seafood, chicken and sausage dish were all more than tasty. I'd really wanted to taste their lamb dish, but the guy you saw cooking my steak wasn't happy with the looks of the lamb he saw when he went shopping earlier so they were out.

I'm sure that no one who reads this blog has a reason to be in Augusta, GA, unless they are an avid golf fan, but here's a link to the information about this place in case you're in Augusta and don't mind driving 30 minutes out of your way for dinner. It's an interesting experience.

Where Are All These Ants Coming From?

There are a lot of ants in Mistletoe State Park. Every slightly food like substance is soon swarmed by piss ants, these tiny little ants that don't seem to bite or sting. They were in the trash, in my parents' camper and in my car.

The little restaurant we went too was pretty cool. The owners are artists and turned a house out in the middle of nowhere into a restaurant. There are tons of interesting wood carvings, including the wine cabinet in one of the dining rooms that is a hand-carved piece. I've got a couple of photos that I'll upload into this space later. The food was pretty good, but the coolest part was how they cook their steaks. One of the owners built a clay horno oven outside and instead of cooking them on a grill or on the stove, he sticks them in a pan and slides the pan onto the fire in the clay oven, which supposedly reaches temperatures of 1800 degrees F. I'm not sure how accurate that was, but let's just say you could see the steaks changing from the extreme heat in the oven. Really cool.

That Didn't Take Long

Yesterday I posted about being home and already feeling antsy. Today we packed up the camping supplies and drove to Augusta to visit my sister. Her boyfriend is out of town and she's invited us to camp at a nearby state park and go to an interesting restaurant across the state line in South Carolina on Saturday.

Home Again and Feeling Antsy

Sorry to keep you hanging on Tuesday's post. I was having issues getting the videos to finish loading and ran out of alertness last night and time this morning and I just got it posted about 15 minutes ago. If you missed it, check it out. It's the post that vindicates Mickey, not that he needed vindicating. After all, those other posts didn't have the knowledge that I possess now so I resisted the urge to work in future knowledge when typing them up.

Today is my first day not either on the road or in the woods, and it feels strange. I've got this urge to keep moving after traveling more than 800 miles in the car and about 20 miles on foot during the past four days. I should probably spend more time hiking. After my soreness eased up yesterday I actually felt really good and energetic.

Today hasn't been all lazing around the house, though. The Bike Ride Across Georgia rolled into town today and my tennis team was doing a fund raiser, so I've been up there a couple of times today. Interesting stuff. It's an amateur race, although it really does cover some serious territory. It's basically the fun run version of the professional Tour de Georgia. I'm not sure this county has ever seen someone riding a bike around in a racing jersey, much less of hundreds of people, so it's a little surreal driving through town right now.

I'm actually heading back into town in just about 30 minutes. I just came home for dinner before heading back to show someone else how to run the projector and sound system in the auditorium to show the movie this evening. I was responsible for the first movie, but since I have a young child at home, I didn't even get asked to do the later movie. The fact that my young child and wife aren't even in town at the moment (they're at my grandfather's birthday party that I didn't get to go to because of this prior engagement) is irrelevant. It's a good thing that I didn't know they wouldn't be here earlier, because I hate lying.

One little quirk of the day: I'm having a beer with my pizza tonight and the one I grabbed out of the fridge is Highland Shining Rock Lager. That wouldn't normally qualify for the quirk except that it ties in nicely with my hiking excursion this week. After seeing a rather large quartz boulder sticking out of the side of the trail, Mickey mentioned the Shining Rock Mountain in North Carolina and how it's basically topped with quartz. I didn't make the connection at all when buying the six-pack this weekend or when I pulled it out of the beer fridge just minutes ago. In fact, I didn't make the connection until throwing away the bottle when I noticed the topographical map background of the label. I would say that it was the subliminal suggestion of Mickey's reference on the hike, but honestly, it was just a quirk of my beer-buying habits. Basically, if I haven't had it before and it's from a brewery I like, I'm going to buy it. Interesting, though. Fairly tasty beer, too.

If You're Reading This, You Probably Should Scroll Down

Before you read this, please scroll down to Sunday's post and read them in chronological order. It'll make a little more sense that way.

Today I just spent a lot of time on the road. I drove from Hank's house to the tire place to get my flat tire replaced and then after a lunch of Indian food and paying for those tires, I drove back to Hank's house to load up the car and head home. Then it was more driving to REI in Kennesaw to drop off the pack and unused tent and then driving through Atlanta traffic plus two and a half hours more to get home. By the time I got home it was after ten. E was asleep and K was only awake to greet me. Not long after I dumped all of my still-wet clothes into the dryer, she was asleep and I set to work getting the blog updated.

It's Morning. I'm a Dumbass.

If you look carefully, you'll see the trail on the other side of the stream from where I shot this from our campsite. After a quick meal of oatmeal in the pouch and packing up camp we threw on our packs and... mine broke. It wasn't a major problem. It was just the adjustable strap that cinched the pack tight against my right shoulder. We were able to tie it off to where the pack was still comfortable and even if we hadn't, it would have been more than serviceable. It was just a bit annoying because the pack I rented was unused before I strapped it on for the first time. I was the first user and I managed to break it by just wearing it. Nice.

You'll also notice that I'm alive and apparently in a good mood. Mickey's tarp idea worked. I figured it would, given his experience in the activity in which we were partaking, but I am a little surprised that I woke up dry after two thunderstorms passed through during the night. If we'd been in a more exposed location where the wind could have gotten to us it may not have been so effective, but as it was we never even felt a breeze. It didn't help my clothes dry out much, but then neither would a tent given the humidity. I had to give Mickey credit on the tarp thing.

Oh, and from the angle of the above photo, you can't tell it, but my glasses are now crooked. "Why?" you ask? Because I lost them in four feet of cold water, stepped on them, knocked out a lens and made Mickey find them for me. True story. We stopped for a swim break yesterday afternoon and I was good to check my pockets for things that shouldn't be wet and take off my watch before jumping in, but somehow I forgot to take off my glasses. I popped up gasping from the coldness of the water and took a few steps before realizing that I hadn't taken off my glasses but I couldn't see the tree leaves any more. Shit. Mickey quickly found the frame with the one lens still attached, but when he found the other lens and tried to grab it, he missed and the clear lens under four feet of clear water disappeared. Mickey searched until he was shivering too much to keep the surface of the water still enough to see and I kept searching for a while longer because I'm fatter and better suited to retaining body heat. I realized that maybe if I took a stick and moved it around the bottom that I might notice the lens moving. It didn't work. Part of it was because I didn't have my glasses on. Part of it is that I didn't look in the right place. After Mickey warmed up and I was ready to quit and just walk hazily through the rest of the hike, he went back in and with my stick found my lens. While I held the stick next to the lens, he dove down, grabbed the lens and handed it over. I could have kissed him, but that would have been a little weird and we still had 24 hours to spend in each other's exclusive company. Awkwardness needed to be avoided at all costs. Instead I went back to shore and popped the lens back into the slightly warped frame. Then, while he was filtering water for our bottles, I tried to bend the frame back into shape and popped the lens back into the water. Luckily, this time it was just an inch of water and I was able to find it before Mickey even finished filtering water, but I felt like an idiot.

If it's starting to sound like Mickey was doing all of the work, well, he kind of was. He cooked dinner. He filtered water. He found the idiot's broken glasses and the missing lens. When it turned out that I was a little useless tying knots, he even did most of the work setting up our minimalist camp. I really hope my ineptitude was tolerated, because I loved every minute of the trip (except the glasses ordeal, but you've got to admit it makes a great story) and would love to do it again.

You may also notice that there aren't a lot of photos this time around. There's a reason for that. Remember how I said that we basically started at the head of the river and worked our way downstream? Well, we never got deeper than mid-shin in our crossings on Monday and we kept our cameras in easy reach and took plenty of photos. By the second day the stream had become a much bigger thing and we were more likely to be crossing knee-deep or even nearly waist-deep water and often across erosion-slicked slabs of bedrock instead of the traction-friendly gravel and small cobbles upstream. The cameras went into waterproof bags pretty early in the day and only came out for special occasions. I did get a video of Mickey crossing one of the fords, although it was far from the deepest of the trip, and a video of the rapids at the same crossing.

After that, the main photos are just of us being finished. We piled our gear into Mickey's truck, I sorted out his gear and gave it back to him and we worked our way back to my car at the other end of the trail so we could go home...


Where we discovered that my car had a flat tire. Great. After putting on the spare, I finally rolled out of the WMA and got to Athens to visit Hank around 8 p.m. I think we exited the trail somewhere around 3 p.m. That kind of sucked. Luckily, Hank was telecommuting the next day so it wasn't like I showed up to watch him get ready to go to bed to prepare for his pre-dawn commute. Instead, we went out to My Pie, an interesting pizza place near his house, and down to the square to have a couple of beers at Trappeze, a really cool beer geek bar. I even got to play Guitar Hero for the first time. Hank has Guitar Hero III for the Wii. I even managed to work up to being good enough to be able to finish a couple of the easier songs. I rock so hard it makes my head hurt.

Actually, the only bad part about the day (because the glasses part was yesterday), was the fact that every time I sat or stood still for more than a couple of minutes, my legs stove up so badly that I could barely walk. I did a lot of stiff-legged waddling as I worked my legs loose every time after I sat down. Still, between the backpacking and visiting Hank, this was one of the best trips I've had in a long time. I am looking forward to getting home to seeing K and the kid, though.

P.S. If I made it sound like Mickey was condescending or the like, it was purely just for the sake of the story. The truth is, he was really cool during the entire trip. I'd been a little self-conscious at the beginning because I knew I wasn't experienced with serious hiking like he was. I don't think I did too poorly, though. Turns out that I only embarrassed myself on the really steep climbs. I kept up without trouble the rest of the time.

Walking Up Hills Sure Is Hard

Mickey and I didn't really leave his parents' house much later than we had planned. We were on the road somewhere around 8:30 a.m. and we'd planned on leaving at 8. No big deal. The only problem is that we didn't really plan on the time we'd spend driving on narrow gravel service roads inside the wildlife management area. Actually, I should say that I didn't plan on it. Maybe Mickey had an idea how long it would take us. Part of it is the fact of just how remote the trail heads were. Another part is that you really can't drive that fast on those roads unless you want to fall off the side of a mountain. Another part is that Mickey got us lost.

Mickey navigated us to the bottom of the trail where we left his truck quickly and easily. It wasn't until he climbed into my Prius and we started up the mountain to the end of the trail where we planned on beginning that things started going not so perfectly. Maybe when we saw the happy family of four playing with a giant snapping turtle in the middle of the road, we should have taken it as a sign. Instead, we got farther down the road than Mickey thought and we turned right when we should have turned left. Another turn later and the Prius is driving down a path intended only for ATVs. It was narrower than the others, not covered in gravel and rutted out and full of very large stones. I managed this trail in forward reverse, however. As I'm backing out of the trail after we decided it was't the road to the trail head, two rednecks on four-wheelers drove onto the trail giving me dirty looks. I think they just had their feelings hurt that my fuel efficient hybrid car could manage trails they thought required four-wheel drive. I wish I had a photo of that trail, but I don't. It was pretty rough. But that's right, the Prius is a capable off-road vehicle. Just don't tell Toyota. They might void my warranty if they knew.

We finally got on the trail just before lunch. This was my view for most of the next 24 hours, or at least the parts spent awake.


Actually, Mickey gave up on the hat about five minutes after this when he realized that most of the hike would take place under heavy cover, but he did lead the way more often than not. I took the lead ocassionally and when the trail widened out, we walked more or less side by side, but I had a great chance to memorize the back of Mickey's shoes. I couldn't check out his ass because that would have led to me tripping over the roots and rocks I had to watch out for. Plus, it was covered by his sleeping pad.

Lunch! Mickey had a bagel with peanut butter (which his parents had about three gallons of for some reason) and I munched on a Clif Bar and some trail mix. Right across from us was a tree that Mickey thinks was a Mountain Laurel. I'll take his word for it. I have no clue. Botany isn't one of my specialties.


It had really cool flowers. I had another picture from farther downstream where blossoms had fallen from a tree and collected like little white boats against a partially submerged root, but it didn't turn out. It just looks like round lights in the water.

Speaking of water, there was a lot of it. We started near the head of the Conasauga River and during our first few crossings, it was little more than a shallow stream. Our first crossing was actually where one of the river's tributaries bubbled up out of the ground. It didn't take long before enough separate streams had joined forces to create a flow that was deeper than my waterproof boots were tall. Off went the boots and on went the sandals.


After another mile or two, I started worrying about rubbing a blister into my right pinkie toe, so as a preventative method, I put my socks back on. Sure, this is a fashion faux pas, but this is backpacking, not Paris. Deal with my pragmatism.


We also saw bear sign. The next two pictures are of bear poop. Notice that they're full of berry seeds. That's what made me think it wasn't dog poop. The second pile was also too large for humans (and most people would have gone farther away from the trail than dropping their trousers in the middle of the path). The first photo is the baby bear and the second photo is the mama bear. Daddy bear was shot during hunting season last winter or is a deadbeat dad. He could just be constipated I guess.



The next section of the trail had other signs that hairier travelers had passed that way not too long ago. Several rotten logs looked to have been ripped open, possibly by those same bears looking for grubs.

There was a lot of great scenery, but I'm not going to post all of the pictures. For one, it just doesn't look as good in a photo as it did in real life. There were also a lot of photos and I don't want to spend all the time uploading them. Here's just one shot to sate your need for natural beauty.


Finally, between 6 and 7 p.m. we set up camp, cooked supper (Knorr broccoli and rice with pre-cooked chicken in a foil packet). Here's a shot of camp. Notice that I didn't bother bringing the tent and let Mickey go with his hair-brained idea about the tarp.


Most of the trail was actually pretty easy. The entrance was a little steep, but it was downhill. It worked those muscles in the front of your thighs that you only really use going downhill, but it wasn't something that was going to make you lose your breath. I was starting to think I was in pretty good shape and wouldn't embarrass myself against Mickey's fitness until we decided to make the three-mile roundtrip detour to see Panther Creek Falls. The hike up the steep boulder field wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't been carrying a big pack on my back, but as it was I felt like I was going to pass out before I could even see the face of the falls. Mickey went on ahead to scout it out while I sat down on a boulder to rest. When I got my heartbeat down to a healthy rate, I decided to carry on without the damn burden. It was still tough going, but at least I didn't die. Plus the falls were worth the pain and exhaustion. I just didn't have my camera because it was in the pack 200 yards downhill.

The Journey Begins

Today was rather uneventful. I got a later start than I had anticipated (something that turned into a running theme of the trip.) K and E stayed behind when I rolled out around 1:30 p.m. and made my way to Atlanta to pick up my pack and tent from REI. I got there in plenty of time (they closed at 6 p.m. and I got there not long after 5), and I picked up the pack and tent from the rentals department and then picked up a few supplies for the trip. I got this cool green shirt and really lightweight pair of hiking pants. Both were synthetic, quick-drying fabrics. This is a good idea since we're taking a river trail that seems to have more time spent in water than on land from Mickey's description. I also picked up a couple of extra pairs of hiking socks, snacks and a couple of other things I thought might be useful on the trip.

Things started going horribly wrong when I finally made it to Mickey's parents' house. I mentioned to him that I picked up a tent along with my pack and he looked at me like I was an idiot. It's true that I am an idiot, but I didn't realize that I didn't need to get the tent. Mickey had said that he had anything that we would share along with a sleeping bag and pad. I've seen Mickey's backpacking tent and I know that I'm not his romantic partner. Not only did I have no interest in sleeping on top of or spooning with Mickey in the tight confines of his ultra-portable tent, I'm not sure both of us would have fit safely. I'm more than double the mass of his real girlfriend (his imaginary one is freaking huge, though) so it'd really be squeezing three people in a two-person tent, and those two-person tents aren't really intended for two American people.

Turns out that Mickey had intended on just hanging a tarp from two trees and calling it shelter. That thought hadn't even crossed my mind. Now that it has, I'm not so sure that I like it so much. The idea of camping in the middle of the largest roadless wilderness area in the state in a place where black bears live didn't sound wise. Sure the flimsy walls of a tent wouldn't stop the strong limbs and sharp claws of a bear from ripping into my flesh into shreds, but at least I couldn't see him coming.

After dinner and organizing my pack under the watchful gaze of Mickey, I lay awake in my unfamiliar guest bed, wrote this post and trembled in fear at the thought of the coming night in the wild.