The King of all Comfest giveth you an encore.

Friday I called off, very sick all that rain and my not giving a FUCK about work. Turned out it was a good day to take off work as some client called in wanting to do the impossible.... use our product. Then once they started the whole process they realized that they really didn't want to do it anymore and they stopped. All that staying late for nothing, Huzah. Clients suck.

Friday morning I woke up bright and early at 11am went over and did some cardio, because, well I workout only because I'm not creative to think of anything else to do. Today was the start of Comfest and so a good friend of mine and I went and caught Giganta on the Bozo stage. The show itself was pretty good though I think it might have been more because it was entertaining to watch a seven month pregnant woman bounce across the stage like a giant mega super bouncy ball. There was also this guy wearing jeans and a cammo jacket and I'm not sure if he was mentally disabled or just really high as he would break into little bits of Napoleon Dynamite-esque dancing. Which is strange in a ha ha look at that guy dance all freaky I just hope he isn't retarded because then I might feel bad sort of way. I will say the guy could dance a mean jig to the jagged Joan Jett like sounds coming from Giganta.

Comfest is a lot of local music which can be a problem because I'm not a big local music sort of guy, it's not that I dislike music it's just that I find most amateur musicians resemble drunken cats at a late night karaoke session. They don't lack the energy and passion to get their music across but it's the talent that is wanting and I have a hard time throwing up cash and time for someone that sounds more like an 8th grader at a junior high talent show. Not knocking you starving musicians you do what drives you and that is admirable, it's not you it's me, I suck and I apologize but I'm trying to get better. We left at about 4:30pm and then came back about 8pm and saw bits and pieces of a few more shows and eventually found ourselves back at the main stage to hear the closing act "The Suns" (Sound files off of Woxy) which reminded me vaguely of an edgier "Death Cab for Cutie". I have nothing else to back this up on, I haven't heard any of their music other than what I heard that night though I will say that I am intrigued. The highlight of the night other than "The Suns" was the announcer for the night who was this guy with long flowing grey locks who got gradually more intoxicated as the night went on. When "Autumn Under Echoes" finished the crowd started chanting that they wanted an encore. The King of all Comfest looked down upon his subjects and said:

"Yea but you have already had one encore and I cannot giveth you another, it would not be wise in my wisdom to give you my subjects more than thy shouldeth."

The crowd continued their chants and after a minute or two while leaning on the microphone and letting the volunteers clear off most of "Autumn Under Echoes" gear The King of all Comfest looked back down hearing the cries of his people and said:

"I now realizith that you do indeed want an encore and I shall give it to you. But realize with one hand I can giveth you an encore and with the other hand I can rend you asunder and eat your little babies with my tiny sharpened teeth."

Seriously he totally did that.

So Comfest right you may think that it's this music festival full of hippies and their dogs.. well there are hippies and their dogs but there are other people too. It really is a community music festival where anyone that likes music or just wants to get drunk and watch music makes it out. You could read the about Comfest section of the site though I will admit that I did not bother doing that, I hates the reading unless it's about people stuck in a perpetual dark ages fighting dragons, and casting spells and never EVER discovering gun powder. That's my one rub with fantasy books, how in the hell can someone write books that have this history of hundreds even thousands of years where society never evolves or discovers anything. Seems silly, but I'm always in for a good dragon slaying. Where was I? Oh yes Comfest among all he music stages there are also booths upon booths with anything from art, to informational/organizational stands to most importantly the food booths which I am most interested in. My tally for the day was one salted pecan ice cream from Jenny's, a Gyro that as Olaf said we should have gone and gotten a better Gyro from somewhere else just to wash the taste out, a bratwurst from Schmidt's and last of all a homemade German style soft pretzel. I tried to get beer but the lines were too long and the beer way to expensive ($12 for 32oz of beer). I didn't make it out Saturday due to doing some work on the house and Sunday I was putting together a 1964 Corvette's engine with much supervision of others who don't have spatial issues.

I don't take good pictures cuz i have the kind of beauty that moves

And no I'm not talking about myself I already know that I'm not a pretty man. That's ok, I've come to grips with that... no long flowing locks of hair blowing perfectly in the wind, no chisled ab's, and no 6' height. Of all things not being >6' tall is something that SG brings up on a semi regular basis. It's not like we are walking around and she will point out someone that is 6' tall and say:

"Gee if you were that tall you would look hot"

She does think I am midget, Ewoke if you will, Yub nub pitcha yuuuuuuuub nub. I'm none of these things I'm just sadly four inches short of being 6' and I've noticed that if you are under 6' it's hard to intimidate someone. That's why I like knives (Guns for show, knives for a pro) and while I have never actually pulled one on a stranger because I'm just not a big person and the chance that I might just end up cutting myself seems that much more likely. There was this one time when I was unemployed and I was attempting to cut some chicken with a not so sharp knife. Well one thing led to another and I just happened to have my finger in the way when the knife slide off of the chicken and onto my finger. All I could do at that point was wash my finger under cold water, then wrap it in a band aid, some gauz, tissues and a paper towel and get back to cooking, cause dinner don't make itself and SG is a mighty terrible freightening force when she gets hungry. I have no idea where I was going with that, though I will mention that even to this day the cut will sometimes ache when it gets damp out.

The subject of the post is not even remotely of my own choosing it's a lyric of an Ani Difranco song that I heard on Thursday night that was burned into the retina of my whiskey soaked brain. Thursday SG and I had the chance to see Ani Difranco at the LC downtown and the show was fantastic. Ani Difranco has the sort of stage pressence that can only come from one who is a born entertainer. When she is up on stage you get the idea that performing in front of all these people is nothing different than sitting on her back porch sipping a beer, and the way that she interacts with the crowd feels as normal as if she was having a conversation with you at a coffee shop. It's personal, it's a real feeling and above all the music is excellent.

Her opening act was a energetic 40 something bald guy named Hamel who spun us stories ficitious and potentially real many times with a political point but other times just to tell a story. The whole thing was done with just him up on a stage standing there with nothing else to buffer him from a waking crowd but a well loved guitar. Of the set he played there was one song called "Inquiring Minds" told from I think the perspective of a grown son asking his father if he had done certain things throughout his life. Actually after listening to it off of his site it was actually much much better live as recorded he seems way to calm. Live Hamell had this raw energetic style that made his songs feel less practiced and more impromptive. The other song that I remember was one called "Values" which was done from the perspective of a young son asking a father questions on why he has to do certain things like picking up his toys when the President of the United States can do whatever he wants. Very very good song.

After Hamell finished his set Ani Difranco came on and played till about 10:30pm. Though it sounds like it was a short show you have to realize that she had no background singers, no lead guitarist, no drummer and no keyboardist. If there was singing to be done it had to come from her voice and if there was music to be played it had to come from her guitar and her only other accompiament Todd the bassist. I can't point out any one song that I thought was better than another last night. It may in part be due to the fact that I just don't pay attention to song titles anymore and so am incapable of even remembering titles of songs that I like. The other part is that I don't actually own that many Ani Difranco CD's and of the ones I have neither one was the latest. It really wasn't about that though, I just wanted to see and hear her as from I had heard and now have seen her shows are excellent. Sure she played "Little Plastic Castles" as an encore song but I actually liked some of the other songs she did that I hadn't ever heard.

The evening all and all turned out to be a really nice evening even with all the thunderstorm warnings, pouring rain at the beginning and me being all grumpy with my grumpy turd face on and my I hate work aura exuding. The rain stopped as soon as Hamell started and didn't start again, the LC has a White Castle stand which I gladly got a mini crave sack (as a large one would make me feel like I was compensating for my lack of stature), 32oz of some watery refreshing bud light and once the show started I was no longer grumpy. BEHOLD the power of music ..... and white castles and booze. The LC itself has both an outdoor and and indoor venue and while I've not been to the indoor one I will have to say that the outdoor venue is really pretty nice. It's kind of like the mini me of a gigantic outdoor concert venue. It has an area where people can stand and get up close to the stage, a "box area" which is nothing more than plastic tables and chairs followed by a grassy area where you can bring blankets and sit down. They have outdoor drink stands a White Castle food stand and bathrooms that are not porta johns. I highly recommend it, it's just the right size and would be a really really great place to enjoy a concert outside if the weather permitted, be warned though LC is a rain or shine place so if it rains you'd best go or be willing to lose the hard earned cash on the tickets as there will be no refunds.

Nutmeg natures little nut of hallucinogenic fun, dry mouthed hallucinating fun.

I'm having trouble forming thoughts today, or making my vision focus. When I look directly at things my eyes keep wanting to go out of focus and my peripheral vision makes me feel like I'm swaying, it's very disorienting. I blame ALL OF THIS on the Nutmeg (From here forth called the "Spice", for He who controls the Spice controls the universe.) in the "Painkiller" drinks we were making last night because well the Spice has narcotic "properties" that could make me feel this way along with turning my eyes blue (HA HAAAAAAA they already are blue) and making me able to kill with a word, travel across time and space and eventually turn me into a giant navigating slug thing. Just in case you don't know that the Spice (nutmeg) has hallucinogenic effects much like cannabis let me drop this little bit into the post:

Even in smaller doses, Nutmeg can still be toxic. Ingestion of as little as 5 g may cause dry mouth, fast pulse, fever and flushing. It has amphetamine-like effects and may lead to the ingestion of large volumes of water. There is no specific antidote; the adverse effects wear off after 24 hours (or more) of rest.

-- Wiki

Six glasses, Spice in each glass, a few times where I added more and last night I could have easily had a teaspoon of nutmeg and according to a very reliable source a teaspoon is 7.1 grams. If Wiki can be believed, if indeed, I'd say I was and am still totally bombed on the Spice. The internet doesn't lie and besides if I feel better by 8pm tonight we will know that the Internet doesn't lie. Like that logic.

For more proof that I might have had a teensy bit more "Spice" than I should have I feel really really groggy today. I shouldn't be groggy as I went to bed at 12:30 and slept nearly nine hours more than enough to make me feel rested. On top of that I think I was experiencing dry mouth as I got up at one point and drank nearly a liter of water. Then upon coming back to bed I found that I was unable to fall back to sleep due to feelings of feverishness. Count em' up, Grogginess, fever, dry mouth, intoxication, blue rabbits doing the polka, all signs point to the SPICE.

SCIENTIFIC WIFE's PERSPECTIVE - WARNING!
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SG always wanting to debunk my fun is convinced that I was hot because the AC didn't cycle on as the outside temperature dropped and we didn't open our windows. She thinks I was dehydrated because I drank too much, and was intoxicated because I'm a lush, and I'm groggy because I'm spacey in general.
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I however think that's all bunk, though I will admit I might have had "one two many" I was more than sober by the time we left. Some people may find that a small glass is a good idea when having a mixed drink as you get smaller amounts of whatever it is your drinking and are less likely to drink as much. I have found that the smaller the drink the faster I tend to finish it treating it more as a shot than a drink. Maybe all goes back to the fact that I am a goal oriented person and finishing things is something that makes me feel like I am accomplishing something. With a smaller glass one is able to see the glass go down faster thereby giving one a sense of greater accomplishment. I could leave it a single glass but then there's the larger goal (the pitcher) which one has to keep one's eye on and that pitcher has this tendency to refill itself.

The Painkiller is a drink indigenous to the Virgin Islands made from the roots of the painius killerarius drinkius fruit (alkhoalicaea family). The plant attracts giant wholly ant eaters who are drawn to the spice and make the harvesting of it a very dangerous endeavor. The drink itself was first made at the "Soggy Dollar" bar on the British Virgin Island Jost Van Dyke. The bar got it's name because there was(is) no dock for you to pull your boat up to so you have to anchor off the beach then swim to the shore thereby getting your money wet. Apparently people who own boats don't believe in things called dry bags. By the time you get to the bar and order your drink your money is soggy which brings us back to why the bar is called the Soggy Dollar bar. Why not pounds? Well see because even in the British Virgin Islands the dollar is King. Can you imagine how irritated you would be if you were a citizen of Britain visiting a British Virgin Island only to find that your own money can't be used.

Must fight the spice... I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when my fear is gone I will turn and face fears path, and only I will remain, Must fight the spice. If anyone needed anymore proof that indeed I am experiencing a Spice induced haze here's another link that SG has provided me which I am convinced is a complete and total tongue in cheek type thing but at this point what does it matter. THE SPICE!!!!!!!!!!! Thankfully there were no hallucinations of serial killer clowns holding bloody knives at the bottom of my stairs otherwise I'd have to swear off Painkillers and Eggnog and THE SPICE. I need more coffee.

BTW here is the recipe for the Painkillers we made.

4 parts pineapple juice.
1 part Cocoa Lopez (coconut mixer).
1 part orange juice.
1-2 parts Dark Rum.

Note
You can find Cocoa Lopez in the area of your grocery store that has the mixers for Margharitas and Pina Coladas. It comes in 12

Directions
1.) Get out your trusty blender and add 8oz. of pinapple juice, 4oz. Cocoa Lopez, 4oz. Orange juice and 4-8oz Rum.
2.) Blend briefly and pour over glasses filled with ice and garnish the drink with a few taps of Nutmeg.

Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of Rowenta's.

It's my gift in a way, I break computers by touching them, watches and clocks run slower/faster from my mere pressence, I broke my digital camera on vacation (story forth coming), and now I have broken our Rowenta iron. I have broken a German engineered finely tuned zero to pressed clothes in 3 seconds super iron. It's really sad because I was finally coming to terms with ironing, I had a system and it was wonderful and yeah the people said my clothes were not wrinkled. SG thought the iron was broken a few weeks ago when she was making her apron however at the time the emotional scar that was the loss of my digital camera made me blind to this possibility. All I could think about was the loss of my beloved picture device. This morning the reality of it's broken state finally dawned on me when I tried to iron a pair of pants before going to work. I'm not sure what it was that made me realize it was broken, maybe it was the fact that it was dumping water all over the ironing board however that's not an uncommon state with irons. No I think it was when it started leaking a brownish colored fluid that I realized strange things were amiss in the iron Rowenta. SG always willing to provide me with timeless information looked up at me and said:

SG: "Oh.. you know I had read that you were supposed to turn the temperature control and the steam control all the way off before filling it."

SFB: "Really when were you going to tell me that? Even so it's not like it would ruin it, would it?"

SG: "Actually it said that it would eventually ruin the iron if you did that."

SFB: "Thanks."

See what I mean information right when you need it and not a moment before. I'm starting to suspect the SG might actually be a CIA spy the way she delivers her timely advice and information right after I need it. 0I could have read the instructions but then again reading is something that gets in the way of me breaking things and let me provide you with an example.

Lets take my weed whacker, me and it have had a long standing feud where it refused to work and I refused to let it not work (I refused to let it not work, double negative equal a positive, right I think that made sense). For the last couple of years I would pull it's cord hoping that all things were aligned, Houston had cleared me for launch and that no clouds would obstruct my ignition. Sometimes the weed whacker would start annnnnnnnd sometimes it wouldn't start at all. This then would lead me to swearing, blisters (yes blisters while trying to start a weed whacker), and eventually the always trusty but rarely effective drop kick. No joke, I actually dropped kicked this thing like an NFL punter on game day trying to get the winning field goal with 2 seconds left in the fourth quarter. The weed whacker would go into a tight spiral fly four feet and land in the grass in front of me. Feeling much better knowing that I had once again shown it who was the master and who was the tool I bent down and started it. And yes it did start, it starts or else it gets the foot again. Two months ago with another grass mowing season fast approaching I decided to have it overhauled in the vain hope that by doing this it might actually work this year otherwise shallow grave along some unknown country road. I called my local mower place I found out that they don't service it but someone across town might. At this point things are looking less convenient, it's one thing to go a half a mile away and have them look at it, it's entirely another if I have to actually make a conscious effort to do this. I called my eternal crutch, my little grey man, my Asgard ally (Stargate, why most you infect me so) the father-in-law to get his spin on this whole weed whacker feud. His advice was to prime it, put it on choke, pull the cord and repeat until starting. It was only after getting off the phone and trying to start it again that it dawned on me that on the handle right in front of my hand was very simple and very well written instructions on how to start it.

• Step 1: Prime weed whacker 10 times or until there is fuel in the bulb.
  
• Step 2: Set the weed whacker to choke (position A) and (here's the key part that I was never doing) hold the trigger down while pulling the starter cord. Do this five a maximum of times.
  
• Step 3: If the whacker does not start switch whacker to semi choke position and
  again hold the trigger down while pulling the starter cord a maximum of three times.
  
• Step 4: Repeat steps 2 and 3 until whacker starts.
  

The short short version of this story is that there were instructions on how to start it right in fron of my face for two years and I never read them. So for two years I was bruising my toes kicking this poor weed whacker around the yard in the hopes that a swift kick in it's wacker's ass would make it start. I have nothing to say for myself, logic wasn't in this, I made it personal and when I make things personal all bets are off, the brain shuts down and all I can do is say "Hulk smash, Hulk kill!". So the fact that I destroyed an iron and the fact that SG didn't tell me didn't really matter I would have most likely destroyed it anyway before learning this lesson because that's the only way I seem to learn things. Painfully one bloody step at a time as I attempt to pull my bruised and battered body across a sea of broken glass using nothing but my thumbs. Huzzah.

I'm Daniel Boon and you are Sheela Queen of the Sods.

I know I was going to talk about vacation, and I am still planning on it, really, truly, promise, cross my heart and hope to die. Since vacation I've had just a single weekend to stop, hold my breath, count 3 Mississippi before I found myself bouncing off to somewhere else. Last weekend found SG, myself and friends doing yet again another test of wills as we attempted to finish yet another Nazi death march into and back out of mother nature. Truthfully there weren't any Nazi's, we weren't actually marching anywhere, no one died and there was no frost bite. There was however rain, hours upon hours of hiking over uneven rocky and bog like terrain followed by tantrums, tears and curses.

I'm not a terrible backpacker, I'm just not the best backpacker either. I chalk it up to the fact that when you only do it two to three times a year you get a little rusty and don't ever really come up with a very good system or checklist. Sure I could do a checklist and I actually think I have one, it's just not a very good one. Because of this the week leading up to every backpacking trip I find myself scrambling around buying food, rebuying food that I forgot to buy, buying gear that I knew I needed because of some lesson learned on the previous trip but was too cheap and/or lazy to buy it ahead of time. By the end of the week I find myself sitting amongst a pile of gear in the basement cursing backpacking and myself for ever agreeing to take time off from work to punish myself. Here's a little not so well known fact about outdoor hobbies, it is all about buying/owning the right gear and gear is all about the maintenance and maintenance is all about maintaining or paying someone else to maintain it. So when you backpack you spend a week prepping for it and once you are done you spend a week cleaning and maintaining your gear for the next trip. It was much better when I used my friend S's gear, he'd clean it, he'd hang the tent up to air out and he'd make sure everything was working. Going backpacking with S was kind of like the equivalent of taking a vacation with a tour group, no stress no work no pain.

This trip we found ourselves going to a nature/wildlife preserve in West Virginia called Dolly Sods. Dolly Sods has a strange sort of status as it isn't a state or federal park and it isn't private land. There are no rangers, no trails marked with blazes (think giant drippy paint mark placed on the trunk's of trees), no trash cans, no defined camp sites, no trucked in water and no latrines. If you have to crap, God help you, grab your handy trowel go 100 feet away from the campsite (or until your fellow campers can't see your big white butt) and any water source dig a hole six inches deep squat, poop and cover. In theory if you follow the "leave no trace" credo then you are supposed to then take your *used* toilet paper and hike this stuff out with you. By the end of your time communing with Mother Nature you will have a nice stinky trash bag filled full of aromatic shit paper strapped down to your pack not twelve inches from your body. Sounds like fun doesn't it? If that wasn't great enough due to the rockiness of the area digging a whole any deeper than 2" with a plastic trowel is synonymous to trying to dig under the great wall of china with a plastic spork. Alright back to this whole abridged Dolly Sods thing, the "Sods" as it is called is an area of land that was owned by a family named "Dolly" who cleared a bunch of land for their cattle which apparently they called a "Sod". I'm not sure what happened to the family but eventually it became a preserve after the army got tired of lobbing artillery shells during WWII.

Backpackers love it because it's climate and terrain is such that it is more like hiking in the woods of Canada than it is like hiking in the Appalachian mountains. Think alpine meadows. As it has no one to manage the area it's a bit rougher than most state and federal parks are which is a double bladed sword, the wild wild west of the backpacking world. As already mentioned there are no latrines, bathrooms, chamber pots or trash cans all water must be filtered from wherever you can find it and fires are prohibited however everyone lights them because there's no one to stop them but their conscience and those aren't all that loud. A trail is marked in the Sods by the use of a quaint and finicky thing called a "cairn". Rock cairns while blending very nicely with it's surroundings can sometimes blend TOO well into the surrounding rocks. Then there's the problem that rock cairns aren't exactly the works of architectural feats once performed by ancient Romans, nooooooo these are more of the rickety nature where one good fart and the whole thing comes a tumbling down humpty dumpty and all. I'm really making this sound much worse than it is as in the last few years nice legible signs have been added to all trail junctions to help tell you where you are. This doesn't stop you from getting lost in between the junctions however it is a great leap forward in the navigation of Dolly Sods.

As far as maps go here's another kicker, up until about a month ago and keep in mind people have been backpacking the Sods for decades now there wasn't an official map. There are hand drawn maps which I have seen and printed that I thought were a joke until I was talking to some guys at a trail junction and the told me that it's actually pretty accurate and has most of the campsites listed on it. Who would have known. The other map source that is decent is the map created by the Army Corp of Engineers when they were doing their whole "let's clean up all these old unstable artillery shells laying in wait for some poor backpacker to kick by accident and blow themselves up" initiative. Remember how I said that the Army used to play pass the artillery shell in the Sods in the 40's well apparently some didn't explode and some they just sort of lost. So for awhile now they have been sweeping so many feet on either side of the known trails and campsites clearing and detonating these old artillery shells. In doing this they were able to come up with a pretty accurate topographic map, but the only problem with it is that it lacks the important things like where campsites are which tends to be important when you are trying to determine where to sleep for the night. So to navigate in the Sods you have in one hand the hand drawn map to show you campsites and landmarks and in the other hand you have the Army Corp of Engineers map as the reliable topographic map. Apparently you can buy really nice maps of Dolly sods that may actually be a combination of the the Army Corp of Engineers map, hand drawn maps and older park maps but you have to go pick one up at one of the two visitor centers which just so happen to be 30 miles or more from the actual Dolly Sods area in directions opposite from which we came. In a world that made sense you'd think that they would have come up with these maps years ago and made them available for purchase to the public instead of waiting till now. I can completely understand why they wouldn't want to make high quality maps on water proof paper that people could buy and help whoever it is finance the maintenance of Dolly Sods because that would make sense and making sense could be a sign of the end of the world, rapture, the anti-christ, Christians getting sucked up to heaven naked, the sign of the beast, and the movie Poseidon being a blockbuster hit.

The trip itself was good, we took Friday off and drove to Dolly Sods getting there at about 3:45pm. We were on the trail and hiking by 4:30pm under overcast grey skies with rain clouds spitting on us like a wheezing old impudent cobra. Our plan was to was to cross Red River creek on the Little Stonecoal Trail (552) and continue to Dunkenbarger trail (558) taking Dunkenbarger to Big Stonecoal trail and once we passed that junction to camp somewhere around there. The reality was that we passed the trail junction for Little Stonecoal trail thinking that we had come to it too fast and that the split in the trail that we saw was most likely a trail to a campsite. So instead we went up the Red Creek trail to the Big Stonecoal junction. There we crossed Red Creek and started a semi gruelling uphill hike that continued until we hit the trail junction for the Rocky Point trail (Which if you are curious will take you to Lions head). By the time we hit the trail junction for the Rocky Point trail it was nearing 7:15pm and we only had about twenty minutes left of daylight. This doesn't sound that bad when you talk about it however when you've been hiking for a few hours and it starts getting dark and you don't really know how much further you are going to have to go the fact that you could be stumbling around in the dark becomes a much bigger motivator. This wasn't that big of a deal this time as I had hiked this part of the trail twice before and knew that we were close to a camp site. By 7:30 or so we got to the campsite setup and started cooking as the light dwindled to the darkness that can only occur when there are no lights for miles around. Think inky black darkness, darkness so dark it's something beyond black, something where you look out and all you can see is more darkness to the point where you feel that this nothingness goes on forever and you get the idea. You really do tend to forget how dark things can get when you live in a city. In Dolly Sods that night if you turned your headlamp off you would be unable to see anything more than a foot or two in front of you. It really brings home the idea of how someone could get hurt or potentially die if they aren't careful and if nothing else being stuck in the middle of nowhere without a flashlight would be a long cold terrifying night.

Saturday the weather cleared up and we got a good 7-8 miles in hiking up the rest of Big Stonecoal (513) trail stopping to each lunch at the trail junction of Breathed Mountain trail (553), Black Bird Knob (511) and Big Stonecoal Trail (513). After lunch we hiked all of the Breathed Mountain trail segment which turned out to be a nice easy rolling trail with the usual rock pastures and slightly boggy areas. Right at the end of Breathed Mountain trail it slopes steeply down to meet back up with the Red Creek Trail. Something to note here is that if you choose to instead go North (Or left for those like me who are cardinally point challenged.) on the Red Creek trail you will find campsites not much further up. We didn't know that until later in the day so instead we choose to hike south (right) on the Red Creek trail seeing a steady stream of backpackers hiking the opposite direction that we were going. The Red Creek Trail by the time we hit it at the Breathed Mountain trail junction is a continuously downhill trail with stretches of flat terrain so the rest of the day flew by and we found ourselves camped right along the Red Creek creek not 40 yards from the creek crossing on the Red Creek trail. For a change we had plenty of time to setup camp, cool off with a nice freezing dip in the creek make dinner, clean up and relax.

Sunday found us with only about 3-4 miles to hike out to the cars which we were able to do with only one momentary loss of direction where the Red Creek trail zig zagged up a hillside looking more like a stream run off than a trail. The trail on the last day had a few ups but it was mostly a gradual downhill as we hiked towards the Laneville trailhead. There are two very nice little waterfalls which can be seen on the topo map as little areas where the trail creates a nipple of sorts which was where the trail would briefly parallel the ravine created by the stream until you could get to a point where you could cross the the stream. Once you hit the trail junction for Big Stonecoal the trail stays level and tends to be wide enough in parts to make you realize that it was probably an access road at one point in time.

My only recommendations on this trip is that if you are considering hiking all the way up the Red Creek trail from the Laneville trailhead I would try to discourage you as all you are going to be doing is going up hill. If you like to go uphill for 6 miles with very few breaks then all the more power to you however I like to manage the miserableness in my backpacking as much as possible. Also the part of the Big Stonecoal trail that went from the creek up to the trail junction with Rocky Point wasn't all that enjoyable due to it's constant uphill and semi poorly marked trail though truthfully I'm not sure if my feelings on this are slightly influenced because we were hiking in continuously overcast spitting weather with time constraints to get to a campsite before dark. Once you hit the trail junction with Dunkerbarger trail on the Big Stonecoal trail it's a nice and level trail with beautiful meadows, serene pine forests and stream crossings of scenic bubbly streams.

The ride home was uneventful except for the fact that S's brother in law who happens to ship things for his families company was able to navigate us a much better route back. For those wanting to take a note or two and for me who can't remember his own parents birthdays unless they are written down I will document the route we took. From Columbus take 70-E to Cambridge and then take 77-S heading towards Marietta. Pass Marietta and head into West Virginia on 77-S until you get to Parkersburg. At Parkersburg take 50-E towards Clarksburg/Bridgeport and when you get to route 79 go south on 79 towards Charleston. When you get to a junction for 119/33 go east on it and stay on 119/33 until you get to Elkins. Follow 33-E out of Elkins and when you see a sign for 32 go east on it for about 9.5 miles. At some point while on 32-E you will see a little sign that says 'Dolly Sods next right' ignore this sign as the next right isn't the road you want and is still ~3 miles further up. East Laneville road will be on your right and once on it will take you ~20 minutes or so to get to the Laneville trailhead which in true Sods like fashion is not marked. The Laneville trailhead can be found right after you cross a one lane bridge and will be on the left as the gravel road curves right and goes up. Turn into this area and you will see old cabin like structures on your left and a large map welcoming you to Dolly Sods, explaining the do's and don'ts along with a book to sign in on. The other trailhead is the Red Creek Campground which can be reached if you continue further up the road and is something like another 15-30 minutes, I really don't know as the last time I went up that road it was 1:30am I was exhausted.

While the cat's away the mice will play, very slowly.

My work computer is a giant piece of monkey poo, if I thought that I could get away with picking it up and throwing it at someone all the while making angry piercing monkey shrieks I would but alas things called common courtesy exist still. I call it a piece of poo and threaten to feed it three week old bologna sandwichs with expired mayonaise to keep it from grinding to a halt resembling any time on I-95. How bad is it? Well have I to close my web browser every single day or risk not being able to avoid work and waste time on the internet. Why a web browser slowly sucks up all memory like Mega Maid did in Spaceballs is beyond me, but then again 99.99999999999999% of the myspace websites are also beyond me. What is it about a myspace website that turns all that goes on it into a collage of mental explosive diarehea. If someone were to stick a dozen M-80's in their mouth go into a small perfectly white room lite the fuses and let em' blow I'm sure you'd find that a myspace website would look very similar.

Why is it that these sites have to have an impossible number of pictures all placed at impossible angles? People, people didn't your mother ever teach you how to line things up, what is so hard about the concept of right angles? For Christ sakes how will you ever be able to shoot your way through the first zombie apocalypse if you are unable to even line up silly little bytes of visual goodness little less aim a gun. Maybe we would all be better off without you, let the zombies munch you see if I care. If it were just a site having as many images as there are stars in the sky that would be ok,however there's the sound bytes, flashing text, games, movies, boobies, animated cursor, middle fingers, clashing colors, AIEEEEEEEEEEE. It's enough to turn an ADD child into a normal one. Yesterday while avoiding work for the Nth time I decided to look up some information about this breakdancing group that was breakin' at the intermission for Sunday nights roller derby event. Before anyone from the group finds out who I am then comes to my house to do multiple jackhammers and windmill kicks all overy my painfully white face realize that I respect what you do and I think it's pretty amazing. Your websites however suck. Just tone them back a little bit remove 90% of the images, get rid of the banner adds, stick to three colors and don't use an image as a background unless of course it is a background image meant to be used in a repeating environment. This page is amazing for many reasons but mainly because I wholly believe that the entire interenet suddenly gets slower as you try to download all the content associated with it. I think I just got an email email from the network administrator asking if I am running some sort of file sharing network in my office due to the high traffic he is seeing coming into my office. Even with the whole internet trying to give birth to this thing it's still dialup slow. Maybe sucky sites are all part of the breakdancing scene to make your site look as ghetto as possible, maybe it's retro, then again maybe it just sucks. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder but sadly most myspace sites are some of the few things that trully cross economic, cultural, and language borders and can be universally accepted as sucking mas fine.

Last night was my first intermediate dark room class which I have to say differed not at all from the beginner class except there were twice the number of people in the dark room. Those that have never set foot into a dark room let me explain how things work. Your tools of the trade are an enlarger (thing you stick your negative into, thrust back and forth and finally shoot white light through onto some paper), an easel, photo paper and if you are feeling particularly anal a little focus do hickey. You first select a negative that you want to make a picture of, put it into the negative holder, slide it gently into the enlarger careful not to rub anything the wrong way. Am I tired of this sexual innuendo, hardly... actually I am. You then bring your picture into focus, make a test print to determine the most appropriate amount of time to expose the light on your paper. Finally when you have determined the duration, focused and re-focused the enlarger you are ready to expose your paper. After exposing the paper you must put it in developer for 2 minutes. Once the two minutes are up you then drop the photograph into the stop bath which stops the development process. After 30 seconds you then take your photo and put it in the fix bath for 4 minutes to permanently fix the picture onto the paper. When there was just four people there were no issues as far as being able to get to the chemicals or finding your photographs when there are eight people things become a little more crowded. There was this primary offender last night who would just forget that he had his pictures in the fix which doesn't affect the pictures it's just kind of rude. You know like TAKE YOUR SHIT OUT OF THE FIX SO THAT THE REST OF US CAN SEE IF OUR PICTURES ARE IN THERE. Stop Watch, as we will call this person due to his analogue gym teacher like stop watch, would stand in front of the developer timing his development time exactly. However when it came to taking his shit out of the fix or out of the wash he was not nearly so particular. Filthy fuck. The instructor of the class as I have mentioned before is a really nice guy it's just that at any moment I nearly expect him to start talking like that crazy Irishman in Braveheart. Where Braveheart Stephen (the crazy Irishman in Braveheart) would talk to God as in "For an Irishman to speak to his equal he most often talk with God" I expect Photo Stephen (Not his real name) to start talking to Photos, the Greek God of photography.

Photo Stephen: Yes Photos I'll ask him, Photos wants to know why your picture looks like shit, I told Photo's that your picture has a soft artistic feel but he disagrees. What Photos? Photos wants to know if it's your
camera that sucks or if you are blind?

So after class finished OSU was able to provide me with a double round house kick to the crotch when upon paying to get out of the garage I got back three Sacagawea coins, one Susan B. Anthony coin and two quarters. One, Two, Three kick away OSU
because you just beat the Post Office hands down in currency abusal.

In other music listening news I've been listening to an album which was brought to my hears by Keith, friend and music aficionado who has also introduced me to amongst other tasty tidbits "Dangermouse & Jemini - Ghetto Pop Life", "Dangermouse - Grey Album", "Gnarles Barkley - St. Elsewhere", and "Non-Prophets - Hope". The album is called "For Those About To Rock" which is a hip hop album mixed over classic rock songs, I don't like it as much as Dangermouse's Grey album but it's still pretty good and worth checking out.

Shiny grumpy people holding hands.

Post Post Post the egg into the bowl, so today I found a bug in Evolution. And before anyone gets their soggy wet panties in a bunge I'm talking about a mail client for Linux that looks like, smells like and feels like Microsoft's Outlook, you know the thing that you check your mail with. Le's continue, at work we switched over to use a different mail server a few weeks ago so that now all your mail resides in some centralized and hopefully backed up place. The old system was that you downloaded all your mail directly onto your machine and if your machine went down God and Linux Torvalds help you if you ever wanted to read any of that email. That or you could try to become fluent in 1's and 0's something only a looney would want to do, LOOOONEY. I finally got fed up with the fact that my e-mail signature wasn't appearing on my emails anymore and thought that maybe because of the new new mail service that I added that I'd have to create a new signature associated with this mail service. I went to the preferences screen created a new signature using the same name as an existing signature and 10 seconds later Evolution starts crashing over and over again. HEAR that Evolution development group I've got a BUG for you and I didn't create it. MWA HA HA HA HAAAAA! Oh the power, I'm drunk on the power of finding a bug, this is what it must be like for the people that "test" the crap we write at work. Servants fetch me a Jack and Coke and make it light on the Coke or heads will roll.

Last night was 'D-Day' at Battelle Hall for another Ohio Roller Girl bout. This one was even more lightly attended than the last one which while making me disgusted with the lack of love that my fellow Moo-Towners must feel for their Roller Derby I was cheered up by the fact that no one left until the end so it was just the hardcore fans. The matches themselves are getting better and better as I think the girls are becoming much more competent skaters, they are also getting a lot more physical and nasty. At one point in the second match between the "Band of Brawlers" and the "Take Outs" one of the "Take Outs" blockers nudged/body checked the "Band of Brawlers" Jammer right out of the ring. The Jammer then had to skate around the announcer booth and back through the opposing teams area before entering the track again. Excellent. There were a lot more cross track body checks, Jammers getting sandwiched by blockers, fantastic Jams by the Jammers and fantastic blocking ... well by the blockers. My favorite team right now has got to be the the "Take Outs" due to it's players "Pippi RipYourStockings", "Ruby Doom" and "Hellion BOI". Pippi tears through the opposing teams blockers sometimes effortlessly and other times like a fricking linebacker taking hit after hit and never going down. Ruby Doom is a blocker that knocks people over just by looking at them and Hellion BOI attacks people with the fervor of a crazed rabid mongoose. She's got to be all of 100 lbs. and that 100 lbs. is hell bent on hitting whoever gets in her way. I also really dig the "Blackeyed Bullies" though most of what I remember of their match with the "Sprockettes" seems to have been driven out of my head by what I saw in the second match. Next time I'll pay better attention as I'm sure if I don't their mascot will come to my house and bust my knee caps. All and all excellent time and I'm really looking forward to the next bout in July.