Viewless Hikes

Today I went on a hike to Stahlman Point, near Detroit Lake.

In the hour leading up to my departure, I kept refreshing the weather page on my computer. One minute it was predicting a 30% chance of precipitation. Ten minutes later, it was up to an 80% chance of precipitation. Back and forth, back and forth. I gave it up and looked outside. It was overcast with mild showers ("mizzle" in Oregonian terminology), so not bad. The weather stayed pretty consistent all morning and didn't disturb the hike at all.

When I say "didn't disturb", I mean that the hike to the summit and back was uneventful. Unfortunately, the view from the summit was equally uneventful. It was almost as though we were sitting inside a cloud--though, at 3500 feet, that wasn't terribly surprising. On the bright side, I've never seen such great light diffusion for picture-taking purposes. You couldn't have asked for better lighting conditions. Pity there wasn't anything to take a picture of...

By 1:00 PM, the sun was breaking through and things were warming up considerably. In my book, that's a definite fail for weather prediction algorithms.

After returning from the hike, I went grocery shopping. I wouldn't say that I'm quite up to Olympic standards yet, but it's getting much faster. Today's excursion took 30 minutes; I bet I can get it down to twenty. While shopping, I picked up a brick of Colby-Jack cheese and a brick of Colby cheese. To my chagrin, "Jack" cheese doesn't seem to exist. It's probably a conspiracy. If consumers could buy it separately, they'd probably just combine the two and forgo the combo cheese.

Those evil corporations, always gouging us poor citizens to our detriment and their gain. Maybe we should get government to fix the cheese industry.

Monsters Lurking in the Living Room

Every time I get home from work, there's a three-legged monster standing in my living room, waiting for me. Its large eye is usually gleaming in my direction, looking like some grotesque prehistoric thing brought back from the annuals of time. Each leg has two segments, allowing for great flexibility and stealth when stalking prey.

Then I flick the light switch, and it turns into my tripod-mounted camera. (hey, who says you can't take artistic liberties when blogging?)

"So there's a tripod sitting in your living room", you're thinking. "Big deal."

Now, if it were there merely for decoration, I'd agree with you. However, it's much more than that. It symbolizes the need for me to start working on something productive; it gets my creative juices flowing.

The first thing it reminds me to do is blog. I walk in that door, start thinking about pictures, and then try to find something that catches the eye. Even if the picture doesn't relate to my post, it still serves the purpose of getting me out of my box and thinking about a unique topic to write about. Usually an idea will pop up while I'm doing a random activity, like dinner prep, speech writing, chess, or math homework.

For example, tonight I spent some time studying Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs). While studying, I realized that differential equations would make a terrible blog entry, so I moved on to dinner prep. Still nothing. I sliced up an avocado and a grapefruit, but the knife didn't slip or anything, so there wasn't anything to write home about. As time kept creeping closer and closer to blogging time, with zero noteworthy happenings, I began to realize the desperation of the situation...

...which is why I ended up writing about writing. It's an old standby when no better topic presents itself. The tripod monster was the last gasp of my imagination, and, as you saw, things went downhill from there. I close this post wishing you a very good night and--I hope--no ill effects from the extreme excitement displayed here.

Until next time.

Where the Nerds go

Today I attended the OSU chess club for the first time. It was such a thrill playing real opponents with the breath of life in them. Such ecstasy. Such joy. I can't even begin to describe the feeling as I began that first game.

I was annihilated.

Chalk it up to nervousness or that prior feeling of bliss; one or the other rendered my mental processes useless. Whatever the case, I quickly realized that this club wasn't going to give the new guy off the street an easy time. I rebounded in games two and three, drew the fourth, and lost the fifth (the euphoria was starting to creep back in).

But oh, the pain was worth the cost. There's nothing like touching physical chess pieces, nothing like seeing (or feeling) the agony of defeat or thrill of victory first-hand. It's a chess thing. All I can say is that I left that place happy.

And it wasn't just the chess. The people there were weird, but weird in a strangely familiar way. The social ineptness, the sarcastic remarks, the "nerdness" in the air, it just felt right.

Of course, this is probably because I'm just a weird guy myself. Maybe some soul searching is in order.

Online Gaming

I'm an online gamer, though probably not in the way you'd expect.

My game is the game of persuasion. My arena is YouTube. It's not a game of skill as much as it's a game of luck. In order to win, you have to convince people that your view on a particular subject is the right view. Obviously, it's an easier game to play if you're a talented speaker and your videos go viral, but that's where the luck comes in.

Once you've got a large number of people watching your persuasive speeches, you get all kinds of interesting feedback:

• "You're a ****ing idiot."
  
  
• "Dude, you've got a nice voice. If you got a real haircut you could sing in the London underground."
  
  
• "Get out of school and read a ****ing book."

As constructive as these comments are, I've realized that most viewers are rather entrenched in their ways and reluctant to change. Still, it's a pleasant way to spend the evening, and probably more productive than playing tic-tac-toe or chess with myself.

Simplicity as seen by a bachelor

Living alone as a bachelor, one learns to appreciate simple things. Take an apple for instance. It's nutritious. It's cheap. It comes with an eatable external wrapper and requires zero preparation time. Granted, you'll have to eat the stem and seeds if you want zero clean-up afterwards, but hey, it's a small sacrifice for simplicity's sake. Thoreau would agree.

Granted, man cannot live upon raw fruits and vegetables alone. Protein is another necessary component of a bachelor's diet. That said, is there a need to sacrifice simplicity in the pursuit of this dietary component? Absolutely not! There are many simple ways to obtain protein. Protein mix, lunch meat, canned tuna, and fried eggs, are all excellent sources of protein with a minimum of effort required (notice that I've ordered the list from easiest to prepare to hardest to prepare, fried eggs are definitely pushing the envelope).

Yes, going it solo is definitely a trial in patience, as it takes time to achieve nirvana in food preparation. However, once reached, all the pain of hitting your goal will be instantly forgotten, and you will live forever in a state of eternal bliss and pleasant satiation. 

DISCLAIMER: The above rhetoric is meant as a sarcastic critique of complex food preparation. The author does not actually view a violation of simplicity as a sin, nor is he advocating the concept of nirvana. Rather, he finds a good dose of humor to be helpful in digestion, and it serves as an important ingredient in his patented Spice of Life™.