it's like unboxing, only there's no box.

this happened yesterday.

 

unprepared

whoa! i'm here at my desk with time to write and i am completely unprepared to tell you anything because my day lately has three components: time playing ingress, time talking to MB, and time sleeping. i talk to MB for two hours. i sleep eight. you do the math.

okok, so it's not a goal i GET anything for. there are no balloon drops and there are no parties nor admissions to secret societies, but i got it into my head that i would LIKE to do it.

when i decided that i wanted to hit level sixteen before i got my black sojourner badge (360 consecutive days of play), i thought if i worked hard i could do it, maybe. i had over a hundred days.
THEN it looked like if i worked hard, i could do it in two months. then the number dropped to twenty five days.

NOW the number stands at nine days, but i'm taking the weekend more or less off because i have a scout training, so let's say twelve days and i'm done. i'm looking forward to being done, so i keep charging ahead.

afterward i will be able to go camping or clean my house or do normal people things.

and i will have completed my shiny happy goal.

2017 venture vermont: Write a thank you note to a park ranger

funny, but i have done this since before it appeared on the venture challenge. and because i WOULD write a note to one, i sort of feel i should send more than the one i would have done already.

so this year i sent three.

really, once i get out my stationery and stuff it doesn't take that much more trouble.

and it never hurts to thank people for their work.

2017 venture vermont: Find and decorate your own hiking stick

for a couple of decades now, i have used poles. but "find and decorate your own hiking stick" was on the challenge, so i found a stick and started making it into a hiking stick for myself.

i cut it to the right height for me and went to work giving it some useful and decorative touches. i shaved down a lot of the mass of it for a comfortable swing weight, and i gave it several different grips for either had, plus i gave it two forks in case i wanted to use it as a tent pole and a hook for pulling things up.

and i did a little decorative scroll-type thingie on the top.

and because it's supposed to be a hiking stick, i took it on a short hike up stowe pinnacle, just to field test it.

and it turns out that a good stick is working for me a lot better than the poles.

so now i'm going low-tech and old-school.

where i've got myself off to

well. i was good about writing and then i dropped off the face of the eath because camping and then i was good for a few days and what's happening now is that i've gotten it into my head that i would like to hit level 16 (the level cap) in ingress (remember, boys and girls, join the RESISTANCE!) before i get my black sojourner badge.

a sojourner badge is for how many consecutive days you hack a portal, and you get your black at 360. my sojourner is a PURE sojourner, which is a term some people use to refer to a soujourner streak that started the first day you started playing and has continued uninterrupted.

that seems kinda cool to me, and getting level sixteen before that puts me in before my year anniversary, which i also think is cool. you only get one first year ever, so if you think it sounds cool, you'd better do it when you have the chance.

so i have just short of a hundred days to make seven million Action Points, and the sooner i get that done the better, so i'm pretty much just sleeping and playing ingress these days. my house is in a shameful state. i have given up wearing matching socks. dinner in my house the other night consisted of a packet of tun in a leftover half can of soup. occasionally i run the laundry machines or the dishwasher, but only because i need dishes and clean clothes.

really and truly i think i can cross the finish line in about thirty days, and the sooner the better.

it's still camping season.

2017 venture vermont: Build a sand sculpture at a state park beach

it's been a long time since i was at sandbar state park.

when i was young we went nearly every week.

here's my sand sculpture.

and here's the view.

2017 venture vermont: Attend a state park interpretive program

we intended to go to the program about dragonfiles at little river, partly because it's new this year and partly because bugs.

but the schedule i was looking at was the peak season schedule the day it got changed to the late season schedule, so we were an hour or so late to that but in a little while the mushroom thing was starting and we like mushrooms, so there it is.

i really need a copy of that book brian has.

fill in the blank

running makes me unsure of what i wish to communicate.

last of its kind

younger people may not recognize this thing.

it is a public telephone.

it has a current phone book on the shelf.

yep, you can use it to make phone calls. you pick up the receiver and you get a dial tone. you press buttons and voilà! you have a phone call.

local calls are free.

if you still remember how to charge a call or make a collect call, you can call anywhere.

this miracle thing is located in downtown waitsfield, vermont.

the dark corners of my soul

i think i have just realized why it is that i am enjoying the trump presidency so much.

when i was a small child, i learned that germany had been partitioned and i cried when grownups told me that it could never be reunited even though it was very sad because that's the way things were.

and then i learned that money corrupts politics and elected representatives can be bought and all the grownups told me that there is no other way to do it and it's very sad but it's the way things are.

i have been waking up every day in a world where i am overwhelmed with a sense of terror and outrage over injustices that nobody else seemed to care about very much.

and now it tickles me to turn to the news each day and find out what asinine thing the president has done or said and i have not been able to sort out why this delights me so.

until i realized that suddenly the level of terror and outrage in society as a whole has suddenly been raised equal to or above my own internal level of terror and outrage for the first time since the nixon administration and i think i find this odd equilibrium bracing.

because really? things are not so much worse than they were last year. the same people are making the same moves to deprive other people of a living or their rights or their lives. the same climate change that's been happening is still happening. the same institutional racism that's been going on for centuries is still going on.

what's different is that the ugly that's been hiding under rocks wants to come out into the light and decent people everywhere are forced to look at it up close.

it's not a good time to shrug and say that's the way things are.

all of a sudden it's stylish to fight back against the ugly.

late to the party, but hey. better now than not at all.

seriously you did NOT just.

i was in mac's market in stowe because i was in stowe and shaw's can be a pain to get to and it was day three of my never ending search for some nice fresh ravioli. not even FRESH ravioli but the kind they sell in your average grocery store.

only for some reason i have been to stores three days running and no fresh ravioli.

because i made tomato sauce, which i will tell you about later if i remember, and i thought it would be especially delicious on ravioli.

anyway, on day THREE i walked into mac's market in stowe and i asked the guy if he had any fresh ravioli and he said no, but then he said maybe and he managed to find one elderly container of buitoni cheese ravioli and that was totally not what i had in mind because in vermont there is no shortage of pasta companies selling precious little ravioli and i remarked that this should not be so hard to find and that's when the guy said the THING.

i did not even realize what he had done until i was in the parking lot and i wanted to go back in and give him whatfor, but ugh.

the guy looked at me and said "this isn't the big city, you know. here in vermont you can't always get everything you want."

seriously did he just city slicker me?

SERIOUSLY?

i live in bolton, a town that does not have a library or a pizza place or a stoplight.

stowe, for the record, has more than one art gallery. it has a sculpture garden, a bike path, a quiet path, land trust trails, tennis clubs, and polo fields.

and just for reference, they carry a half dozen varieties of fresh ravioli at the richmond market. i was going to tell you that richmond is a far smaller town than stowe, but really its year round population is about the same as stowe. i was going to tell you that richmond is not as wealthy as stowe, but it actually has a higher median income.

and this is where statistics are misleading.

most of the people who live in richmond actually live in richmond.

stowe is a town of high end resorts and ultra expensive vacation homes and there are a lot of service industry workers who don't make a living wage in a town where a plain cheeseburger costs $20.

post-traumatic

most of the things i meant to tell you about after tropical storm irene were things that in the end i did not tell you. i took pictures of some of the lighter parts of the work, but mostly i was too worn out and i had seen some things.

it was kind of a long time ago.

i get a shiver when i go by a building i helped put back together, or one i helped tear apart, but we all did what we could.

everybody who lived in the hills bought facemasks and crowbars and trashbags and we went down into the valleys and we just started helping.

sometimes the best help we could give was to stand there and listen to people cry.

watching the hurricane tracks has been hard for me, especially the one over florida.

because i know how thin work crews get stretched, how there's more work to go around than there are people to do the work, even if you can afford to pay workers.

my dad lives in florida.

and i'm the only child who would have been free to go help him if his house had been flattened. when i realized this, i started to remember the feeling of going through mounds of debris in someone else's house, looking for a few bits that can be saved before we put everything else in the dumpster.

people would rather you weren't there, but also they'd be lost without you. it's an odd unfamiliar etiquette. the smell is horrific. you have no idea what diseases you might get. the worst part is not the heat or the backbreaking work, but the waves of other people's pain.

so anyway, it's been some sleepless nights as i thought about the possibility of going to help pick up my father's house if he lost it in the storm.

it took some damage, but it's all right.

2017 venture vermont: Create a state park song or poem and send it to us

856 vermont route 12

i am standing on new ground
new to me at least
because here's this trail
and these steps carved in rock
and this stream of travelers-
college kids in sneakers, families with toddlers-
but i have climbed above the place
where more than once in winter
even with crampons
i could not safely pass
and turned back.
in summer it is a whole different trail.
every day it is a different trail.
today, above that place, i call myself queen of the world,
champion of everything.

2017 venture vermont: Take a picture with the biggest boulder you can find

this isn't the biggest boulder i know of, because off the top of my head i can think of two others, but not near here, but i have pretty big boulder out here, and this one is big.

it's hard to appreciate the scale of a really big boulder in a photograph, because to get up close enough to really see the rock, it's too big for the frame. and it can be hard to get a smaller thing, like you or your car, in the frame so it looks good.

so yeah.

in this picture there's nothing that smells bad. i'm just having trouble framing the shot.

i'm still not happy with it.

2017 venture vermont: Draw a detailed map of your neighborhood or yard

for about two and a half months a year, i live on various campsites, mostly on waterbury reservoir.

i often draw little maps of my site and my neighborhood to send in letters, mostly to mb. here is a map i drew of my home and neighborhood when i was on remote site #2.

2017 venture vermont: Get up at dawn and go on a bird walk. Attach a list of the birds you saw and heard.

i decided that for the purposes of this challenge it would be just as good to get up at dawn and go for a paddle. it's really the only practical way to leave my campsite, plus dawn birding is dawn birding, and you get a different set of birds on the water.

so here's my list:

kingfisher

3 double crested cormorant
1 american bittern
1 great blue heron
1 osprey
1 bald eagle
2 ring-billed gull
3 mourning dove
5 belted kingfisher
2 red-eyed vireo
2 blue jay
2 common raven
5 black capped chickadee
1 gray catbird
5 cedar waxwing
1 yellow warbler
1 song sparrow
1 american goldfinch

2017 venture vermont: Make your own musical instrument from natural materials and play it

2017 venture vermont: Skip stones and watch the ripples

because most of the time i am on the water i am on the res, i am not often in a place with good skipping stones.

if you're good at stone skipping you can do it with lesser stones, but i'm a wee bit out of practice.

i managed to find some reasonably flattish stones one morning, though, and even managed to take some video.

so here.

don't leave the door open.

there's a guy on the other ingress team who is kind of a dickhead.

by "kind of a dickhead" i mean he's the kind of guy who thinks "hey, faggot" is an appropriate way for a grownup to address another person and he will happily threaten to run you over in a parking lot because he likes to be intimidating.

over a game.

even most of his OWN teammates hate him.

and so, when he took it upon himself to message me with some little pleasantries intended to be intimidating, i chose to respond because i was feeling jaunty.

he opened with telling me to be sure to link everything up because he needs the AP (action points). this is a fairly common little bit of trashtalking, but it rings hollow coming from a guy who's already hit the level cap. i was two days from leveling up, so we made some empty little chitchat about helping each other level and then i said i had corn to roast and a hammock to put my feet up in, so i was done for the day.

and this is where it got interesting.

him: you'll learn to love me
me: nobody loves you
him: that's not what my mother tells me
me: i dunno. last time i was out with your mother...
him: do you have something to say about my loving mother?
me: she sure is loving.


so then he stopped talking and spent the next hour wiping out every portal he could find that i had made, which is really what gave me enough things to blow up and link to level up the next time i played.



fool can be played like a fiddle.

and i'm a brand new level 15.

down the video hole

i got home from the campings and all my internet friends were talking about this video, so you've probably seen it, but wow.

and then i just started watching videos.