The morning started out cold but colorful with fiery red skies before the clouds pushed in. That said, it was a pretty cold and gray November morning but many are like that this morning.
Yesterday was a quiet day of reading, then in the afternoon visiting the Boy Scouts Sportsmart, not buying anything like cross-country skies but then riding out to Five Rivers 🐸 then coming home and reading for a few more hours before lights out by I don’t know, maybe 8 PM or earlier. It was so crazy 🤪 with tons of people 👪 at Five Rivers yesterday until dusk 🌆 but it was a nice ride home. Today is also busier then I expected, indeed I was shocked 🚽 when somebody was in the outhouse, and I tried to pry open the door thinking it was vacant until somebody shouted out, occupied! I ended up pooping 💩 in a little hand-dug cathole in the woods. I really try to avoid flush toilets when I can, as I rather the poop rot naturally in the ground. I just hate how everything is a celebration of landfilling and fossil fuels. 🌎 I’m not political even if I make my money from moving data for Democratic Party, I don’t go pushing for new laws, but I don’t also want to participate as much as I can from the shit one-way system we live in. Maybe that’s why I’m so fascinated by the off-gridders and homesteaders. 🐐
Pancakes 🥞 with cranberries, shredded carrots and apples 🍏 and lots of coffee at 5 AM this morning. Finished off the last of the one container of Greek yogurt I got last week at Walmart, rinsed it out before putting it in the trash so it doesn’t stink 👃 before I get up to woods and turn it into carbon dioxide. 🔥 I could pretend recycle it but I know there is no real market for No 5 plastic, and truth is I make a lot less trash then most and I need stuff to get fires started. ♻️ Maybe it’s all that reading I”ve been doing about the off-gridders this weekend that has my mind so focused on the wilderness and having fires. 🌲And thinking about those days riding through the wilderness on my bike after enjoying cannabis. I don’t do that shit at home nor do I ever touch beer at home. 🍻
Started out my day riding out to the Bender Mellon Farms Trails 🚲 and taking my bike around some of those trails, riding easy, hoping not to break and spokes or get a flat tire. So far so good. 🤞True of the wheels are decent, maybe I’m getting used to it and don’t want to mess with the spoke key, but whatever. It was skipping into low last night when I down shifted but didn’t have that issue today. ⚙️ Then I headed over to Five Rivers for a second time this weekend and walked around there before heading back home to make some cornmeal pancakes with onions and spinach for lunch. Also put carrots in them for extra softness and fiber. 🥕 Any chance to replace calories with fiber, I figure is a good thing.
Been doing a lot of reading on this cold weekend. 📚 I don’t normally bring my computer home, so I figure learning is a good thing by reading and it’s beats the endless ads and crap of social media. People say being well read is part of the healthy human life. Started out a book reading about the the History of the Rensselaer Train Station and railroads in the Albany area, Ernie Mann’s Railroads of Rensslear. Then I started reading Mark Sundeen’s The Unsettlers about modern day rural and urban homesteaders and off-gridders. For listening while riding, Cheap Land Colorado by Ted Conover. That book discusses the mostly rural poor, the outcasts, the crazies and others who have bought 5-acres of very cheap land on the Colorado plains.
I am endlessly fascinated by the rural poor, the homesteaders, the off-gridders. 🐐 Maybe I make too much of the nobel savage of the rural poor, and I confuse voluntary poverty with real poverty, but I deeply unsettled about the modern consumeristic suburbanite life. And it’s not just because I like all things dirty, the pungent smell of manure, wood smoke and silage. Some people make so much out of so little, while others drown themselves in big color televisions, plastics, and motoring everywhere as they eat organic twinkies and say their green because they recycle some of their plastic with their weekly 96-gallon garbage service, put solar panels on the grid-tied-house, and have their $100,000 Tesla parked out front. 📚 Got to take advantage of Libby now, though come Thanksgiving I should plan out my 10-Hoopla Borrows and get them out before I head up to camp. Libby is not reliable in places without phone service, like out in the wilderness.
Mom is sick this weekend with a cold, 🤒 so no visiting this weekend, though it’s probably what has been going around the office so everyone is hopeful including my sister and neice and nephew that we can all get together for Thanksgiving. 🦃 It’s all good, it’s expected to turn to a mixed-bag later on today, and while it might be too warm to stick, it’s going at least be pretty wet come the evening.💦 I want to read more this evening, prepare beans and acorn squash along with knead bread dough and prepare that for cooking at 5 AM tomorrow morning. I think I have enough clothes to avoid going to laundromat this week, though my 5-gallon compost bucket is overflowing but I’ll stick that outside in the morning and it will be fine with cold. 🪣 Going to rot at any rate either here or out in my parents pile. 🍏
It looks like it will be a good weekend to get out of town next weekend, ☀️ though rain or maybe ice and snow up north come Monday. I’ll probably take that following Monday off so I can get three nights camping 🏕️ starting Black Friday. I am leaning towards heading farther north for this trip, but no so remote that I’m far from plowed road should things turn to ice and snow by a week from Monday. Leaning towards camping along the Boreas River – Moose Club Way – NY 28N but I’ve also considered Old Lake Durant Road campsites or maybe just old East Branch Sacandaga. I’d just love a few days hanging out at camp, 🔥 have some nice fires, cook some delicious meals, 😋 smoke some weed and ride all day. 🚲 Kind of like those memories of Horseshoe Lake, or even the Adirondack Rail Trail. I like the idea of riding Moose Club Way but also the Roosevelt Truck Trail ain’t far from thee, and while gated and rough in places, might be quite nice on the mountain bike.
My blog is making money thanks to advertising but at the same time, I’m increasingly bored with my blog. More than a quarter century into telling my story and sharing my experiences and interesting things I’ve found on the web and elsewhere I’m running out of things to talk about.
One of the things outside of work I’ve been spending much of my time doing is studying the C/C++ programming environment, especially more advanced topics like library and system development and ranges. Of course, I should really be writing more code if I want to get good at it, and one useful thing to would be to write code to develop content for the blog.
Work consumes more and more of my time, and riding my bike to work takes time that I could be writing. But also I need investigate other concepts to keep the blog going after all these years.
You have money, why don’t you go out and buy shit. It’s good to support the local Boy Scouts. You are buying used, it’s keeping crap out of the landfill temporarily. All reasons I told myself to go to the Sportsmart.
Still I didn’t want another thing in my life to break and get used up. It snows so rarely in the city and the snow rarely sticks around. Trails in the mountains are steep and dangerous and I’m not a great skier. Gas is expensive and the roads are usually icy especially in the back country. Honestly, I’m not a fan of the day trip unless it can involve an overnight in the wilderness. I ride my mountain bike to work all year round and that’s exercise. It’s cold in the winter and the days are short. Might as well stay home and read and be warm under the heated blanket. I should buy a snowmobile.
Some day! Never comes. (Goes the song.)
Maybe I’m the ultimate procrastinator. A dreamer not a doer. I turn down many an opportunity by refusing to gas up my truck and buy shit. I could die tomorrowin a freak accident and never get a chance. But money not spent today compounds and offers greater future leverage. Why buy skis today when someday I can own a snow machine and live somewhere in retirement where I can ride every day?
It’s pretty easy to look the other way, when others are engaging in bad or even really bad behavior, if you benefit from other parts of the relationship. Epstein had a lot of money to hand out and he provided a lot of benefits to others that were in his inner circle, and when you are benefiting – it’s hard to ask difficult questions.
We want to all believe we have the moral fortitude to stand up to evil and not be involved in supporting problematic individuals and institutions, but truth is we often focus on the benefits of be associated with such individuals and institutions and are more then willing to gloss over their problematic nature.
