Known Associates

Circulus Maximus

Lisa Anne Auerbach Photo
An offer has been made...now the waiting game begins...

Nights Like These

We don't have them as often as we'd like.

Rely On Your Training

As you can probably imagine, this was a terrible pot of coffee...

Hatfield Wilderness

I snapped this picture on the Indian Point hike Jen and I took a couple of weekends ago. The hike was a loop, and this was what you saw on the way down...those distant folds are pretty amazing. I probably could have just sat here for an hour.

Hell Yes!

This is going to be awesome.

Newness

Brenton Salo snapped this shot of me last night. It is pretty awesome, don't you think? He does excellent work.

Best $9 I've Spent In A Long Time

The Tour

I'm certain you've been following the Tour this year? I hear it has been pretty good, but honestly I've not been paying too much attention. Not owning a television means I have to watch the stage somewhere else, or follow along online. I've tried, really I have. But after hearing riders complain that Stage 3 was too hard I kind of lost interest. Couple that with the ongoing Lance Armstrong doping investigation, and yesterday's "Shiftgate", I cannot wait for this years race to end. I'm totally burned out on it.

I think it was my friend Chris Potter that put the Tour in perspective in about 2000. We were gathered at Ft. Panic for our daily stage watching/beer drinking/meeting of the minds, and Potter remarked how much cooler it would be if the riders didn't have extra bikes, team cars, radios, etc. "Like it was in the old days." I can kind of remember laughing him off at the time. But now, I think he is right. I was researching some tour history, looking specifically for the story below:

In the 1913 Tour Eugene Christophe crashed on the Tourmalet. He had just taken the lead when he laid it down on the mountain. "He was unhurt, but his front fork had been snapped in two. As Christophe stood over his ruined machine, Thys (his main rival) sped away alone towards the stage win and overall victory.

Another man would have given up there and then. Not Christophe. He wept, but as he did so he picked up the pieces and set off on foot. Eight-and-a-half miles away, at Sainte-Marie-de-Campan, he found a forge. The race rules forbade outside assistance, but Christophe was a skilled mechanic and forged a new fork from 22mm steel. As Christophe gripped the frame in one hand and a hammer in the other, he allowed a seven-year-old boy to work the bellows that supplied air to the fire. For this assistance, the race marshal who policed the operation imposed a 10-minute time penalty. Then Christophe filled his pockets with bread and set off over two more mountains for the stage finish. He arrived three hours and 50 minutes after Thys. Remarkably little, all things considered, but the Tour had gone."

That is the stuff of legends. You tell that story to people and they don't believe it. In this day and age where a guys mis-shift can cost him the race, and people call his rival un-chivalrous for racing onward, I feel like I just don't care anymore. They don't wait for the leader in F1 racing if he blows and engine do they? If you see Usain Bolt lose a cleat from his track spikes, are you gonna jog in place till you see him get it fixed? Hell no, this is racing.

Restoration

Jen bought two of these chairs last summer and we've been waiting until the evenings were cool and dry to start restoring them. It is pretty fun to sit in the late afternoon/evening sun, sip a beer and scrape the old varnish off of these chairs. The smell of the dusty, stripped varnish is nostalgic for me, smells like Bob Klein's barn near Ionia, MI. We used to go there with my parents as kids. Bob has just piles and piles of old furniture stuffed into a couple of barns on his property, you just need to dig through for the good stuff.
Anyways, the chairs have quite a bit of detail, and they need quite a bit of work. I'll periodically post some pics so you can see how the work is going.

Practice Of The Simple

I got it in my head last night that I was going to get up, hand grind some coffee beans and percolate them on my Snowpeak stove. Hadn't used the stove in years, but I had just purchased a can of gas about 2 weeks ago.
Need to practice to get the perk just right, but I gotta say it was pretty tasty, and that little pot was fun to use. I'm not sure exactly when/where I picked it up, but I'm glad I did!
It makes just enough for a couple of wayward souls who need to get a move on...

Otherworldly

Indian Point

This weekend Jen, Elsa and I went back out to the Gorge to do a couple of different hikes. Saturday we hiked the south side of Mt. Defiance, then did some dirt road exploration around Odell. We ended up at Double Mountain which is one of my favorite places to end any Gorge excursion.
Yesterday, we hiked Herman Creek up to Indian Point. The view above is the view from Indian Point. Really, really awesome. Highly recommended.

Mjöllnir

The Hammer Of Thor. Bitchin, huh?