The whole wide world is at it again, showing me how it feels good to bleed

You know how sometimes life is really shitty, and you keep trying to do things to make it less shitty, but none of those things seem to work, and things just get shittier and shittier? That.

I won't go into all the reasons why, but I had planned on moving last week, to a much nicer place, albeit with a longer commute, but the whole thing fell through on moving day. So, as I finished loading the U-Haul, I found out I had no place to go, but still had to be out of the old apartment by the next day as they had new tenants moving in the following week. The solution? All my shit is now piled up in my brother's garage, and I'm living out of boxes in his basement until I figure something else out.

Good times.

I am still alive though. Thought some of you might be happy to at least hear that part.

Don't go 'round when the Devil's loose

A few weeks ago I went to my brother's house for a Sunday dinner. While there, he and I started talking about how we should go try to fish.

Brother: Is it okay if I go fishing with [Minnow] tonight?

Sister-in-Law: You can do whatever you want. I don't care.

Me: Alright!!! Let's go expose ourselves to female joggers along the river trail!

I need some air that no-one's been breathing

I seriously don't know where the time goes anymore. I went on a hike last weekend, and meant to post about it before now, but better late than never I guess.

It all started when I posted one of the pictures from the drive I went with on my brother on Facebook. One of my old high school friends commented on how gorgeous it was, and then said that the next thing I needed to do was meet her and her husband for a hike the next morning. I haven't seen either of them since high school, but it was a hike I'd been wanting to do all summer long, but thought there would still be too much snow to make it up that high. There was still snow, but she said they'd heard it was passable, so I joined them. It wasn't a hard decision to make. I'm really glad I went. It was nice catching up with the two of them, and the scenery was simply phenomenal. Here are some of the pics I took.

It's been a relatively cool summer, so there were still plenty of wildflowers:



As expected, we did have to cross a few snow fields:



The view from the other side of the first snow field wasn't too shabby:



And it just kept on getting better. This is my favorite picture from the hike:



Here are some hikers and their dog that were crossing another snow field in front of us:



The scariest part for me was that I'd lost my sunglasses, and was worried about getting snow blindness. I had to squint my eyes as much as possible while walking across the snow so as not to burn my retinas. I think I did sunburn my eyelids, even though I'd applied sunblock, but better the outside of those than the eyes themselves. Luckily, everything turned out fine.

We eventually came up along a ridge just before making our final ascent to the summit. The view was pretty good on both sides of the trail:





The summit was pretty cool too:





But perhaps the funnest part of the entire hike was when we were crossing one of the steep snow fields, and decided to follow someone else's slide rather than walk back down. Here's a picture that shows you how steep the slope was:



And here's one of the slide itself:



We also saw a commode that has a view that rivals any:



No, I didn't use it.

At some point during our ascent, my friend told me that I hadn't changed a bit since high school. She added that she was glad that it wasn't weird hanging out again after all this time.

"Really? I think I've changed a lot since high school."

"Yeah?" she asked, "How so?"

I answered, "I'm way more cool now than I ever was back then."

All in all, it was a good day!

The way the scattered ever-busy bright lights of a city might look off to a distant mountain range

You know, some days you just have to get up into the mountains. Here are a few pictures I took when I went for a rather long drive with my brother and his two youngest girls. Of course we had to get out and play around in the water a little bit here and there.

Here are some of the pictures I took along the way. They're not very good because I forgot my regular camera, so had to take these with my phone, but hey, it's better than nothing.

















I would've taken more, but the last half of the drive was in Wyoming, and we all know how ugly Wyoming is.

I posted the second to the last picture on Facebook, which immediately prompted an invitation to go hiking with an old high school friend the next morning. I'll post those pictures later. Wouldn't want to overrun your senses with too much rugged beauty.

So please, let me be lonely tonight

Yesterday I had lunch at a Mexican restaurant we frequent, and had the following conversation with the owner when I went to place my order.

Him: Where's that girl that came in with you last time?

Me: I don't know. I'm sure she's around somewhere.

Him: Why don't you two date? She's single. You're divorced.

Me: She's too good for me.

Him: That's what you want.

Me: Nah. I want a bad girl.

Him: So take her and wreck her.


Maybe the man has some sound advice after all.