Just Thinking

Sorry for slacking on the updates again. I supposed this whole novelty of blogging thing is wearing off on me, and it’s now the old cool toy that lost its appeal. I’ve been in a bit of a reflecting mood lately and less writing.

I think I’m hitting another of life’s milestone…if there is such a thing. Like I always think that people hit a milestone around age 25 of their life where they suddenly decide everything that they think is right suddenly is wrong…I warn buddies looking for serious relationships against dating girls 24-26. Now that I’m 30, I’m suddenly looking at my career path and questioning the hell out of it. I still love making games, it makes the geeky kid in me giggle – yet it’s not fulfilling my dreams as an adult to make some kind of difference in the world. I’m supposed to start looking for a place for my restaurant, but I’m wondering how that fits in my wishes to contribute to the well-being of the world. So I’m thinking.

Gear Whoring

I finally got off my ass over the weekend and picked up a full set of climbing gear because you know…it’s practically winter and all here so maybe I can hug gear for warmth since it’s pretty much worthless in this weather. In another month or so I should think about shopping for some bikini. I’ve been a bit of a gear mooch when it comes to climbing and with my favorite climbing buddy waaaay the fuck in California and my other sometimes climbing buddy just married, I realize I need to pick up my own gear. I’ve been having some crappy luck finding a new climbing buddy so I figured if I got my own gear, I can train one of my current outdoorsy buddy to climb with me. That or I’ll beg my Cali buddy to marry me and move back here to climb with me. I hope he’s not married or something because I’ll have to run some poor gal over. How many years of vegetarianism does it take to erase that kind of bad karma? Yeah, so back to finding a new belay buddy and buying climbing gear.

First thing first, must buy rope! Rope is a good thing, the way I see it, if I fall under hard times, I can always use some rope to bind some kidnapped victim to be held for ransom. Yeah! What I didn’t expect is that climbing ropes are the bling blingiest rope amongst ropes and the price reflected it. If I do go broke, I’ll just bring the damned rope back to REI, demand a full refund and live in style for a while…screw this hostage business. So what fancy rope did I pick up? Well…it’s this dual-weave thingie meaning it has a different design on each half of the rope so climbers know where the midpoint is. The rope costs 230 bucks, I had no idea they cost that much. Then again, that is the ONE thing keeping you from plummeting to your death…so let’s not be stingy there.

Another important thing? Quickdraws. A single quickdraw isn’t all that expensive, say 25 bucks, but when you think about needing a dozen…ouch. Still that’s the doohickey holding your rope to the rock, so skimping here might not be so smart either.

So now that I’ve got gear that I can’t use, I need to shop for a belay buddy, I wonder if REI carries one of those.

Swerve

I’m going vegetarian for a week. Being as huge of a carnivore as I was, one would think it would be hard. In actuality, it hasn’t been tough at all…the key thing I’ve noticed in pushing for vegetarian eating is to not eat out so much. For lunch I usually make my own sandwich, and I make extremely elaborate sammiches with fresh cucumber, red bell peppers, sprouts and pesto, it’s just damned good.

Why the sudden jump? Well…as I’ve mentioned in some past blog posting, I’ve been trying to add some veggie in my diet here and there and enjoying it. Most of that came from my realizing that if I take care of myself now, I could enjoy better health when I’m old instead of wishing I did that. Then over the weekend, I accidentally ran over a squirrel/chipmunk cute little furry creature while driving out to my hike. He kinda ran out from nowhere then paused in the middle of the road. We were going downhill on a one lane gravel road, I couldn’t swerve and the gravel didn’t help with sudden braking, I was fishtailing all over the place even at 10mph. So in the end, I ran over the poor thing. I screamed and hit the brake and screamed some more. Charlie went out to check on it, I followed behind crying. He got to it first and told me I didn’t want to see it. I went back to the car while Charlie moved the poor body off the side of the road. Needless to say I feel bad. How does a person make up for driving off to the forest and killing its creature? I honestly don’t know, but I figured not eating meat to honor the life of the little guy helps. It’s a small bandaid for my soul so I can sleep a little better at night.

I grew up in a traditional Chinese household where we raised random small farm animals (mostly chicken and rabbits) in our yard and killed them for food, so I’m not squeamish about whacking an animal here and there. I have deep respect for the animal that gave life for my food, I don’t pretend my food comes in faceless packages from the grocery store. My guilt comes not so much that I killed one of the forest creatures, it’s more that I killed it by accident for nothing. I told Charlie that had we been able to turn the creature to food, I would probably felt better. He said I could go back and cook it, but there’s not much meat in the thing. So a week’s worth of my sparing some other creatures life for one poor innocent life…if nothing else, the dead creature gained some good karma for his afterlife.

So far, I think the hardest thing about jumping to vegetarianism is the people around me. My meat-eating coworkers are constantly giving me grief that I’m causing a major cosmic imbalance by not eating meat. As one coworker puts it, “You were our spokesperson. Our star quarterback! We need you back on our team!” My sister is by far the worst. While I’m eating a veggie roll at her sushi bar, she’ll bring out dishes of sashimi, eat it slowly, and tell me about how amazingly fresh the wild sock-eye salmon are. Still, I have gone out to nice restaurants and I am pleasantly surprised with how many good vegetarian dishes there are out there when one cares to look.

In response to the hockeyman’s comment one of my previous post…I’d like to take credit for being a marketing genius…but before I even composed that post, the views on that one picture had been higher than ANY other picture in my collection. Yeah, I’ve got over 600 pictures from glorious hikes, rain, snow, fog, nature’s bounty, with many links to all the pictures from my blog. Nothing compares to a picture of two girls in very short skirts.

Hmmm, now that I think about these people taunting me about my new eating habits, I should warn them that I could run them over.

Edit: Random side note, I almost titled this post "TofuGirl" as a SteakGirl contrast...but then I remembered that's an extremely derogatory slang for lesbian in Chinese, so I figured I'll forgo the smart-ass naming.

Rachel Lake and Rampart Ridge

This hike is stupid easy, it was very pretty, but because it was so damned easy, I don’t really recommend it. The original intention of the hike was to find Hibox Peak, which we didn’t see any hint of a trail for. Then we thought maybe Mount Alta, but we couldn’t find that either. Being that I have THREE books on this hike and didn’t bring any of them nor did I bring my GPS to find that route, I really have no excuses other than the fact that I suck. So we had a nice stroll in the park. Round trip to Rampart Lakes was 11 miles, so I guess the distance made up for the sad elevation gain. The day was still gorgeous and being outside is always good.

Short slide of hike here.

With Love

Forgive my unusual lack of update…I’ve been busy with nothing. You know the kind of busy, where you feel like you have a ton of crap to do, but you get not a god damned thing done. That’s me. In the mean time, because I feel like I’m “busy” I can’t take a moment out to compose a nice little blog. So until I get my bearings back, have a good day, and my…you seem to have lost some weight. Looking good!
Oh, and those of you checking out my Flickr account, seriously, stop trying to peek at my underwear. Shame on you.

Vesper Peak

As I had mentioned in some Headlee Pass post, I wanted to hike up to Vesper Peak, but had to stop at the pass because I started extremely late and had flat out ran out of time. Well, I also forgot to mention that when I hiked my sorry as up 2.5 miles to the pass and finally got a view of the peak off in the distance with a traverse across loose rock field…my mind went, “Oh hell no!” Loose rock field is creepy especially with a deep mountain valley to catch your sad tumbling body. Then looking at the mountain it seems a bit insane to just walk up the face of that thing. I was scared. So of course I had to go back ASAP!

Saturday was foggy and hazy everywhere, I think it’s the first less than awesomely sunny day since my sad backpacking trip. I think I’ve got some kind of weird cool hike curse where the fogs roll in and follow me. Some people have storm clouds following them. I get the fog of war…it’s like playing StarCraft, except wherever the mouse goes, you stop seeing stuff.

If you don’t care for the view so much, hiking in the fog is actually nice, it made the hike back up to Headlee Pass super easy with the nice cool air. The best part of it all was it made the rock traverse easy because my problem with that area is looking at the depth and getting freaked out by my stupid fear of height. You can’t be afraid of height when you can’t see how high up you are. At some point in the middle of the traverse I laughed at myself for being afraid in the first place. The fog stayed pretty thick from the pass to the peak, so I couldn’t see too far out in every direction…just kept hiking upwards. Overall, I thought some of the reviews of this hike made it sound a lot harder than it is. It’s an awesome hike, and I’ll definitely do it again maybe next year on a clear day.

Hidden somewhere in this hike is some good old fashion mountain philosophy for life...sometimes when you look too far ahead, things can scare you into not moving, if you just look at the next few steps and keep moving, you'll find that things are neither scary nor hard.

Slide of hike here.