Adventure

I've got to admit, taking time off to do an adventure vacation... my usual thing... not only brings my adrenaline way up but it gives me a goal to live for and train to.

I'm far too hyperactive to do a passive vacation where you stay home and rest, or drive to a touristy city and take a bus tour. I want to die spent.

Adventure vacations are just larger and grander versions of my usual weekend, where I'm glad it's Monday and back to work so I can rest. Thus my vacations are long strenuous mountain hikes or extra long bicycle rides which include overnights with wide variation... from the tent carried on my back to a hotel. In a long wilderness hike or bike, I usually lose a dozen pounds simply because I can't carry that much food. Road biking is not too bad, since along the road there is fast food and motels, and thus credit card camping is the norm.

Even day hikes or mountain biking can turn out to be strenuous. The temps were way above 100 degrees when hiking 15 miles from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon to Phantom Ranch in the gorge last summer and I chugged 3 beer before the rest of the group showed up. I rode a gorgeous canyon pass in Jackson Hole one hot summer a few years ago that took all day... when I finally got out and to a convenience store, I gulped a half-gallon of Gatorade. A 100 oz bladder only goes so far.

The allure is the challenge, and the opportunity to prove my fitness... in spite of injuries and accidents.


-© 2009 by Willy

P.S., and off to New Hampshire I go, hiking the White Mountains.

Don't Look Back

Lot's wife looked back and turned into a pillar of salt.

After a while we only seem to remember the good times and forget bad ones. This is mentally healthy in one sense, but on another sense, we have to be careful that our feelings of love, loneliness or jealousy don't ever take us back to a proven horrible person. If our previous relationships or friends were abusive, remember that they will do the same to a new significant other... or to us... again and again. There's a reason why we have our current friends and don't associate with some of our old ones. There is no hope... people don't really change... they are what they are, just like us. We may mourn the end of our fantasy, but should recognize it as a happy ending necessary for a bright healthy future.

“Remember Lot's wife.” - Jesus in Luke 17:32


-© 2009 by Willy

Too Tactical To Worry About

Around here we have alarm horns at all the schools, the TV gets interrupted by The Emergency Channel System, and my secretary's weather radio alarm makes me jump off my chair much too often.

Then when I get home late after gym or cardio the Tivo-ed news is just the local weather jocks rambling on and on and on.

Rant 1: It's the old overused wolf call story... when the real wolf comes we'll be desensitized to it and won't respond.

Rant 2: What in the world are they doing, when a tornado and a thunderstorm are so surgical and tactical? I figure that when it's my time to go, it's my time to go... in the meantime I have way too much to do to worry about something else. I'm not cowering from fear. That is, I'm picking priorities and weather is not it.

Related Rant 3: Neither is a priority yet another relationship. What's the point of stressing to death?

Call me only if you see a nuke detonating.

- text © 2009 by Willy

Proposal

"Want to get married?" said Jan yesterday.

Friend Jan had earlier told me The Rest Of The Story. She could not get a disability check due to her heart problems, even after getting a pacemaker-defibrillator put in due to her heart attack, because she was able to work too much, but her doctor told her not to work so much. Definitely a chicken and egg situation. She's in a bad spot, and does need somebody to help her, but it should be the social security administration cooperating with her doctor. She also needs to get her stressors off her.

If it wasn't such a bad situation, Jan's proposal would have been quite a hoot.

That was the first time a gal has outright proposed to me. Previous times have been manipulations, like the redhead from hell telling me she wasn't looking for a husband but then telling everybody else that I was her fiance.


- © 2009 by Willy