Brocktastic

I've been trying to think of a way to thank Brock for the continued generosity and camaraderie he's provided me this past month. So I came up with this shitty solution: a tribute in blog form!


Here he is in all his splendor, preparing to ski I guess. I got this picture from Katy's camera. Sometimes he calls me bennifer and it makes my day. Sometimes in the morning, as he prepares for work by stomping clumsily around his apartment, he wakes me up and says "aww, did I wake you up big guy?" I just cover my head with a pillow and silently curse him before falling back to sleep. Then when I awake again 2 or 3 hours later, I stretch my legs and begin another lonesome day in a Brockless apartment. Oh, I'll go climbing or biking, or do any number of things that are tons better than whatever mind-numbing crap Brock does all day, but it all still pales in comparison to spending time with Mr. Bafford.


See? It's nonstop laughs with good ol' Brocker. Today he told me he wishes he could just exercise all day. When I said that's basically what I did, he directed some delightful profanity at me. But I learned long ago that with Brock, the amount of swearing he does is inversely proportional to how upset he is. When we lived together in college, on returning from class he would often curse up a storm. "What's wrong?" I'd say. "What a clusterfuck this is! I can't find my fucking goddamn cellphone!" Then he'd find it immediately.


I should mention "clusterfuck" again. This is Brock's favorite word. Anything that is slightly askew is deemed a clusterfuck. Shorthand for clusterfuck is CF. Remember this if you find yourself conversing with Brock.


This is Brock Sampson. He is Brock's favorite fictional character. He is the reason our Brock enjoys the Venture Brothers. Now, to his credit, he does seem to genuinely enjoy the non-Brock aspects of the show, but Sampson is without a doubt the reason for his original interest.

If these Brocks were to fight, I fear that Brock Bafford would be killed before even inflicting a bite wound. He is a biter.

He is also a thinker, a drinker, a biker, a climber, and recently, a food dehydrator. He's a regular renaissance man. Also he's a rester, a complainer, and above all, a dead-hooker-joke maker. I won't repeat any of them here, not because of my readers' sensitivity, but because each individual joke isn't very special. It's the sheer number and constancy of dead hooker jokes that makes them special.


It's just a coincidence that I chose this picture to follow the word "special." Really. I just like this picture. It exemplifies Brock's commitment to bike safety. Guess what he does every time he sees a biking hippie without a helmet? Did you guess curse loudly? No? Then you haven't been paying attention.

We always see a number of these hippies on our way to one of the many local dive bars here in Olympia. Since Brock moved here for work, he has been deeply conflicted about the place - on one side is his love for dive bars, and on the other, his extreme hatred of hippies. Happily, his proximity to Katy and his internet friends have tipped the balance in Olympia's favor, and I do believe he likes it here.


Look there. He's as happy as a helpless turtle. I'm pretty sure he's thinking about Olympia there.

Alas, he'll be leaving soon, and I'll be leaving even sooner - I'll be leaving Brock. Today I've come to grips with this, and it's going to be hard to do, but the time has come. By Monday I'll be out of Olympia and heading down the west coast - so Brock, I say so long to you. But perhaps I'll be back after a month or so, for as you know, and envy, and hate, I can do whatever I want.


Thanks for the memories, big guy. I hope this article has left you feeling appreciated, complimented, and not too much insulted. Don't ever change.

Nerds, Tourism, and Random Objects

I'm finally catching up to myself... this entry is about events that happened only a few days past.

Today I continued my Monday tradition of going to the climbing gym, finding it closed, and returning home. Why Monday, climbing gym? Why close at all? Why can't I remember you're closed? No one will ever know.
So, instead of climbing, I'm here at Brock's house writing. Strengthening my mind instead of my body I suppose.

Onto the meat of this article.
1) Nerds. I think I mentioned Brock's internet friends already. We've all been having dinner on Mondays at one of their houses, and usually after dinner we play a board game -- either Settlers of Catan, or RoboRally. Both awesome games, both too complicated to explain here. Brock seems to hate playing these games, but I enjoy them very much. Two of his internet friends, Scott and Tim, sometimes play these games and more with a group of nerds that gathers every Saturday. I joined them this past weekend and we played games for 12 damned hours! It was awesome.
Probably most of the people reading this have had me strong arm them into playing games that they didn't really want to play, and I'll bet you've all gotten sick of my competitive nature, right? Well I played games for 12 hours, and neither of those things happened! Dave, the host of this marathon, owns probably 150 board games, maybe 3 of which I'd seen or heard of. When we walked in, we were greeted by 3 game tables, 6 or 7 waist-high stacks of games, and a few games already in progress.
Have you ever heard of Settlers of Catan? I hadn't, but it originated in Germany and it's apparently the 2nd most popular game in the world. We played a game of that. We also played Arkham Horror. It's based on H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulu Mythos, and it's sort of a mix between an RPG and a board game (as were many of the games there). It's horribly complicated, but once I learned the rules, it was pretty fun. I think it might be boring to go into the games day much more, so I won't.


2) Tourism. Sunday, Brock and Katy and I again hung out in Seattle, this time as typical tourists. We went to Pike Place Market, which is apparently famous so you've probably heard of it. We watched fish throwers and bought Russian pastries that were filled with mushrooms and fish and other things that you wouldn't expect to find inside pastries. From there we walked to the old section of Seattle, which is called [something], and which is literally built on top of an even older section of Seattle. You can go on underground tours and see the ruined old buildings. Despite the idea of the day being tourism, none of us are really that interested in touristy stuff, so we skipped the underground.

Ok so while writing that paragraph I noticed a blue reflection in a glass that is sitting here next to me. Unable to immediately identify the source of the reflection, I stopped writing for a fully minute until I could find it. Why? Was I expecting to learn something important? I don't know, but I had to find it. Do any of you know any attractive girls who do things like that? Please tell them good things about me and then refer them here.

Tourism. Next we drove to Gas Works park, which we TOTALLY should have been allowed to climb all over. Granted, everything was brown with rust and probably structurally unsound, but come on - you can't just leave two story pipe jungles around and expect people not to demand climbing rights. Imagine the coolest playground ever, then double it, then triple that, and then put a big stupid fence around it. Luckily Gas Works park also had nice fields and trees and a hill and a cool sundial. We sat on the hill awhile and looked at the city center from across the water. Seattle is a beautiful city.


3) Random Objects. I don't have any pictures for Nerds or for Tourism, so I took these pictures of things around Brock's apartment.

Dehydrated cinnamon apples.
Brock got this food dehydrator from his parents and finally used it last night to make his apartment smell like cinnamon.

Beer a-brewing, and fruit. Lots of fruit. Those black ones are called Marion Berries, like the former mayor of D.C. The fruit is arranged for dramatic effect, NOT in order of tastiness, which is as follows: cherries (least), strawberries, rasberries, marion berries.

As per Kevin's request, here are the items I bought in Chicago. Also this pinecone that I acquired elsewhere (not to scale).

Three-Wheeling in Seattle

Okay I'm skipping from North Dakota to Olympia, WA. I've been staying here with Brock for just about 3 weeks now, sleeping on his floor and eating his food and drinking his liquor. And sometimes, I mooch off his girlfriend too. As some of you know, and others of you deny, Brock has a lovely lady named Katy, who works as a TA at UW up in Seattle.
So, on a few occasions Brock and I have traveled up there to visit, and I play third wheel and we do fun stuff. First, a few days after I arrived in Washington, we went up for the 4th of July.


That's me and Brock. If you look real close at the water, you can see a reflection of Katy taking the picture. Behind us is Jerry's boat, where we hung out with some bus drivers Brock works with, and watched the fireworks. One of the bus drivers, Roy, and his wife Sue, raise livestock somewhere around here. Brock and I each ate a burger shaped piece of George the cow.
Then, after a 6 mile, hour long bus ride, we got a good night's sleep at Katy's in preparation for a bikeride around Seattle the next day. Katy planned out the trip, which consisted of ~45 miles of biking, and 3 ferry rides.

Here we are on the other side of that water from the other picture. If you look closely at the water, you're wasting your time. This is only about 10 miles into the ride, and before the first ferry.

This is us on the way to the second ferry. That orange mess on Brock's bike are his walking shoes tied to his handlebars. We pissed him off pretty good when he was rigging it up, giving advice and insulting his methods, but it worked out in the end. He got pretty pissed later too, when we learned the second ferry doesn't run on weekends.
When we found that out, we were about 30 miles into our loop. I suggested we turn back, Katy suggested hitchhiking, and Brock suggested we use a lot of swear words. But - just after we enacted Brock's plan, and before we tried mine or Katy's, we found out from some locals that this was the commuter ferry, and there is another ferry just down the road that runs for free 7 days a week. Whew.

There's Katy on the final ferry back into Seattle. When we reached those buildings, we got back on our bikes and rode the final 6 miles back to Katy's place. It went a lot faster than the bus ride the previous night.


Our second trip to Seattle (1 week ago) was brief - we picked up Katy, and headed northeast our of the city, to Mount Pilchuck. We drove seven miles up the mountain, then began a 3 mile hike to the summit. Brock and Katy had hiked it before, so we expected a steep, but fairly easy trip up to the top. However, when we found large amounts of snow covering the trail half a mile in, Katy got more demerits for bad planning. Brock was displeased again, but I was psyched about this development. We carried on, following others' footsteps where there was snow, and following the dirt or rocky trail otherwise.

On your right is the first scenic overlook, about a mile into the hike. This also marks about where the hike became ALL snow-covered. We started to see a lot of people with ski poles and protect-your-ankles-from-snow thingies. We asked some of these people if they thought we would make it to the top without such gear. They said "Yea, there's a steep part coming up around the bend, but after that it's not so bad. You'll be fine." Steep was an understatement. When I got around the bend, I looked up at a white, 45 degree slope, and if I hadn't known that other people were hiking this "trail," I'd have never thought it possible. Seriously, I would have said no way, and turned around. Thankfully, other people had been hiking it, and their boots had made some steps for us. We still slipped a lot, but we made it up eventually.
Here's Brock, trudging up one of the big hills. He was kind of sick, and was kind of hating this hike. Poor guy.
But I was invigorated. This was the most amazing, beautiful, tiring, and satisfying hike I've ever done.

After 2 1/2 hours, we summited -- well, I did -- Brock was a little freaked out by the sheer drops all around, and opted not to come up to the old fire lookout station atop the mountain. He stayed about 50 meters below, where Katy sat with him awhile before joining me at the top.

She snapped this sweet picture of me breakdancing on a precipice:

We spent some more time up here, just taking it in. It was too much for me to really appreciate-- it was 360 degrees of views like the one above, with a totally unobstructed view of mountains and lakes and rivers and barely visible towns in the distance.

The descent was fun. Even Brock and his headcold enjoyed it. We walked, hopped, slid, fell, and luged our way down.

Yea, it was real fun. Best hike ever.

We've got plans to go back to Seattle once more maybe, and do touristy stuff in the city. I'll keep you posted.

Trailblazing, Part II

Here's the link and map again:


I got my pictures developed, but they kind of suck and just don't do their subjects justice. And my fingers were in like 10 of them...

But, continuing with

I) Teddy Roosevelt National Park (TRNP, pronounced "turnip"), ND. Here's my campsite:


Not very wooded but neither is any of North Dakota, and there is a river running right by it. I wish I could have captured the windiness of this place. When I arrived, my bikes were slanted at 45 degree angles on top of my car. And it was a bitch to set up the tent. An Iowan man and his two teenage daughters helped me fight the wind and get it staked down. He commented that it seemed like a very good tent, and his daughters agreed. For some reason I felt self-conscious about using a three-person tent for one person, so I said, "yea, but it's a bit big for one person." Later, I realized that could have been taken as an invitation to the daughters. I should have done a little wink wink nudge nudge.

The wind also made cooking nearly impossible, but after a half hour running between the grill and the camp stove, I ended up with some fantastic soot-covered hot dogs and cold beans. Then, while I slept, the wind covered the inside of my tent and lungs with a thin patina of dirt. Those may sound like complaints, but I actually enjoyed the wind. It got me thinking about how pioneers must have dealt with it, and the satisfaction they must have felt when they figured out how to conquer it and heat their beans to a reasonable temperature.

I spent the next morning in Medora, the little tourist town just outside of the park. I managed to lose a postcard between the car and the Cowboy Cafe where I planned to write it. Sorry mom. Then I got some info about biking, and biked around the ~30 mile scenic loop with my new panniers, which is fricking hard, especially with the hills and the wind.

Here's the beginning of the ride:

And here's the first third, with the second third off in the distance.


And here's a buffalo:

That disposable camera is really lame. I know it doesn't look like it, but I was actually about 12 feet from this bison, who was named Theodore Roosevelt (as are all the bison at TRNP). Theo wandered slowly into the road and stopped there, thwarting me. All the park literature tells you to be afraid of these creatures, so I was, but I followed him a while anyway, until I snapped this picture and ran away.

J) Circle, MT. All I did was get gas here, but this place totally creeped me out. It reminded me of that episode of the X-Files where those deformed hill people do a lot of ax-murdering. Not that I saw any deformed hill people, but still. The gas station was super old-timey, they had to charge two times what the pump read, because the pumps won't let you set the gas price above $3.99. I was going to take a picture, but, you know, I didn't want to offend any hill people.

K) Shelby, MT. After Circle, I thought I was just going to be uncomfortable the whole way through Montana, because I was off the main highway, and I thought it would be a bunch more Circles. But when I got to Wolf Point, in the Flathead Indian Reservation to stop again for gas, there were tons of friendly and obese Native Americans, so I started to warm up to the state. After Wolf Point, I passed 10-15 small 'towns' which ALL consisted of 1 bar and 1 silo/processing plant thing. Then I got to Shelby, where I slept at a motel.

Brock just got home, so we have to go biking now. Next post will be Glacier NP and beyond.

Trailblazing Across the Country

Once, when asked what my dream job would be, I replied "trailblazer." You know, one of the people who actually carries logs into the mountains to build those erosion-resistant trails that you might hike in a national park.
My friend Anuj from work likes to remind me of this, and call me a hippie, so the title of this post is a tip of the hat to him, and to real trailblazers. I myself have never really blazed any trails (yet), but I did forge this route across the country. My thanks to google maps for this beauty:


(click on the picture to enlarge. or check out this more interactive version of the map.)

Here's what's what:

A) my starting location. Baltimore, MD.

B) Mike and Alison's house in Belmar, NJ. I spent 2 nights here to kick off my trip. Steve and Jana also came up and we took in one day of an AVP (pro volleyball) tournament, played plenty of v-ball ourselves, and enjoyed and/or mocked the local beach culture. Mike and Alison were fantastic hosts and showed us all a good time.

C) My Aunt/Uncle/Cousins' house in Horsham, PA. I called Greg Sunday at about 4 p.m. and asked to "stop by." When I arrived 2 hours later I was warmly greeted by everyone but Chris, who was working (yes, that includes Oggie). We talked for a while and then I imposed myself on them and ended up staying 2 nights, leaving on Tuesday morning. Everyone worked Monday except Alex, so he and I talked philosophy and went climbing. Then we ate at Chris's restaurant for Greg's birthday. I can't thank you Pennsylvanias enough for the great time I had.

D) The Brighton Recreation Area in Brighton, MI. Here I learned what a mountain bike is really for. And let me say, mountain biking is HARD. After the first 2 winding, hilly, rocky, rooty miles, I considered turning back, but plodded on, and I was so glad I did. I ended up riding 15 miles that day, and it was the most fun and satisfying bike ride I've ever done. I fell once, because I took my eyes off the trail for 1 second to read the mile marker. And I smashed my knuckles on a tree. Totally worth it.

E) Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. As you can see, my route took me through very little of Indiana. But I did stop and camp there. And it's a good thing too, because I got a some free ice cream. The short story is, the lady in line behind me was being a bitch, and the clerk and I exchanged a knowing look about this, and I walked away with free ice cream.
Also, if you want to visit Chicago, and you like camping, go here. There is a train stop across the road and it takes you right into the city.

F) Chicago is awesome. I wasn't able to take advantage of the abovementioned train, because I couldn't take my bike with me. Instead, I parked in chi-town, and biked around, through Millenium Park, and then to a bakery that Rosemary told me to go to. I forgot the address in the car, and then it turned out the bakery had changed locations. This meant I had to bike all over the city asking people where to go, and wound up in a latino neighborhood, where I got great food, great thrift store t-shirts, and finally found a cassette tape player at Jalisco Discoteca Electronica. If I do become a bike courier, Chicago is now high on my list of places to do it.

G) Alexandria, MN. I slept here. Nothing more. But I should mention that Wisconsin (one of the few states in which I did not stop) is beautiful, and I'd like to do a very long bike trip there sometime.

H) I stopped for the day in Fargo, ND, mostly because of the Coen brothers' movie. It turned out to have a sweet downtown area where I ate and bought some panniers at a bikeshop employing all young hipster-ish females. James, it seemed just right for you.

That's enough for now. Look for (I) thru (O) tomorrow, hopefully accompanied by some pictures, which I started to take at (I) with my disposable camera.

Good night

I fixed my camera

Let me preface this entry with this statement: I am an idiot.

My mom gave me a digital camera a few years ago for xmas. The first time I used it was the following July when Eric and Mesan were visiting me in my former Virginia home. I took 3 pictures before the camera died. I was annoyed, but I remembered reading something in the manual about charging, and I figured it was one of those deals where you have to charge it for a few hours before the first use. I put the camera back in its original packaging, with an intent to do the thing right next time.
Years pass. I am not much of a picture taker. Now it's June '08. I've decided to take 4 1/2 months off, so I've tied up loose ends at work, and I'm moving out of my apartment. In an effort to simplify the process, I have decided to give away or trash everything I possibly can. So, the camera packaging and manual go into the trash, and the camera and any cords and accessories go into my laptop bag. I finish moving, and begin bumming around at Zach's and Mom's and James's. A month or so passes, and I want to take a picture. I open the laptop bag, but I can't find the charger! I must have thrown it out with the packaging! Crap. I'll deal with this later.

Now, it's later. I search again in vain for the charger, and resign myself to buying a new one. Sony's website is totally worthless - they don't seem to make this camera anymore, and I can't find any info about chargers for similar cameras or anything. So I call up the local radio shack and ask them if they have a charger that will work for my camera. They say no. But while describing the camera to them, I notice that there doesn't seem to be any place on it to plug in a charger. But whats this arrow on it? I push, and clunk clunk, some batteries fall out. Aha! I have to charge the batteries, not the camera. So what kind of batteries are these? Sony brand AA/LR6/AM3, and they also have a lot of Japanese writing on them.
I do some research, and the internet yields surprisingly little information about them. Again I call radio shack, and this time they assure me they will have a charger for whatever kind of battery I throw at them. I put the batteries in my pocket and jump on my bike.

45 minutes of biking pass, and I can't find the god damn radio shack. I even ask people on the street, and their directions are worthless. Eventually I stumble into a best buy, haggard and sweaty, and present the batteries to the door greeter. "Where do I go to charge these?" I am directed to a fat man in the electronics section who inspects the batteries, half smiles, and says, "these are just regular AA batteries. You can't charge these." See? I am an idiot.
So I drove across the country, through incredible natural beauty (and was in other photo-worthy situations), and didn't take any pictures because Sony sold my mom some dead batteries, and I didn't try putting in some new ones (I even had extras in my car!).

Anyway, I fixed my camera today, and I took this picture of my invasion of Brock's living room:

It's actually not too bad now -- I organized it yesterday.

Also, I actually did manage to take some pictures along the way, 27 to be exact, with a disposable camera I bought in Medora, ND. Hopefully I will be able to digitize those photos and post them here later.


Okay, I hope you're reading this sentence because that means that my blog isn't horribly boring. Leave me comments, questions, and insults please!