What Have You Been Up To?

"So, what have you been up to lately?"

I've been asked that question a lot lately, and usually I answer something along the lines of, "working and sleeping. That's about it," which typically gets me a response along the lines of "welcome to life, kid". However, if I really thought about it, I still get to do a lot of cool stuff.

Do I have as much free time as I did in high school or college? No way. 10 hour shifts take a good part of your day, and on the days that I do have a little bit more time I come home from work absolutely exhausted.

Yet, the ability to rest often comes through occupation. People do things to unwind. It's strange how after a 70 hour work week a doctor will choose to spend his weekend cycling 50 miles. That sounds like work. But, that's what we do.

As for myself, I am no exception to the rule. I spend all day on my feet training clients, demonstrating exercises, and occasionally picking somebody off of the floor (moving treadmills don't stop when you like sometimes), yet I still find time to get out there and do things.

To start with, I've still been doing a great deal of hiking, leading me to some pretty cool, little-known vantage points of my city.

 I found this cool goat and his little buddy while meandering about an absolutely stunning cemetery during one of my recent lunch breaks. He's there to clear out the brush.

A buddy went hunting for quail, and brought me a few to try. 

Tastes like chicken. Looks like frog. 

We recently got a double hammock, which I have thoroughly enjoyed. Retreat from society, find awesome spot, sleep in a tree. It's hard to find a better spot to take a nap. 

 I've been hiding some of my own geocaches lately. I'm pretty proud of this one. That's a camouflaged PVC pipe zip tied to a tree. You fill it up with a gallon of water, cover the hole at the bottom, and the cache floats to the top!

The floating cache!

This one just required solving a pretty tricky puzzle. A little plastic ammo case I got for $3 at Rural King, one of the greatest stores on the planet.

And, I've been working on my knife making skills. I cut the rough outline of the knife out of a piece of steel I got from Lowe's using an angle grinder. A bench grinder has allowed me to smooth down some of the edges, but it still needs a lot of work. Hopefully, it will look like the plastic version at the right when it's all said and done.  

I Thought That Was the Way to a Man's Heart?

One of the things that I really appreciate about where I work is how awesome my patients are. To prove just how awesome they are, every Christmas I get buried under a plethora of incredibly thoughtful and creative gifts.

Let's just say that my wife is fond of some gifts more than others.


Me: "Today was a good day for Christmas presents. I got all sorts of stuff!"

Yellowhed: "What'd you get?"

Me: "Well, here's a rum cake."

Yellowhed: "Cool."

Me: "Here's an orange with those smell-goody things stuck all in it."

Yellowhed: "Cool."

Me: "Here's a book on blacksmithing someone gave me. I'm pretty excited about it."

Yellowhed: "Cool."

Me: "And here's a giftcard to Olive Garden."

Yellowhed: [while fist pumping] "SUHHWEEET!"

On the Tip of My Tongue

80 something year old woman: "And that's why I left Chicago."

Me: "Why did...crud, I just forgot what I was gonna say."

80 something year old woman: "Welcome to the club, kid."

Geocaching Adventures

As I mentioned earlier, now that the underbrush and ticks have died off, I've been able to do a heinie-load of geocaching lately. 

Here's a few of the places it's taken me the past few weeks.

I found this little orange bat stuck to a tree in broad daylight. Initially, I thought he was the cache because he was right at ground zero, and I couldn't see his head. So, I poked him with a stick just to make sure. He didn't appreciate it very much. He flew a few feet away and chirped at me for the next 20 minutes. 

I'm not a huge fan of tupperware caches, as they tend to be trashed. 

This one more than made up for it though. It was hidden in the local library, and you could only find it by finding a tiny little magnetic pill container that told you the call number of the book that you were looking for. 

Fake rocks are always cool. 

I ended up pretty deep into bear country attempting to find this one, and didn't come to that realization until I was already deep into the woods. "Hey. This is a bad idea!" Next time I'm making sure that I have more than just a little pocket knife and a dead stick to defend myself. 

This one was absolutely fantastic. It took me to a magnificent view of a field on top of a mountain on a trail I didn't even know existed.

The girls really enjoyed finding this one hidden behind a reflector. They had to use a pair of pliers to get it out, it was so deep into the post. 

The girls really enjoyed having the local donkey follow them around the cemetery as we searched for clues as well. He was separated by a fence, but he followed them everywhere. 

"Feed me."

Winter Hiking

Writing is a funny thing.

It's something that I absolutely love, something that I find cathartic, yet it's hard to sit down and write what you WANT after you've been drained throughout the day. You can't just sit down and let the pen flow after you've been dealing with emails and presentations all day - at least I can't.

As a result, I've not been able to muster the energy to add an extra blog post for every exciting thing that's happened recently. I get to it when I do.

What I DID do lately though is go camping. And considering the fact that it's winter time here, I think that's a pretty big accomplishment.

I was feeling stressed out from work after a rough week, and asked Yellowhed if we could take a mini weekend vacation somewhere. I was thinking something like spending a few nights in one of her favorite cities, watching some movies, and eating at some nice restaurants.

She recommended camping.

I was stunned.

Of course I wanted to go camping. I always do. But to here those words come out of City Girl's mouth - the girl who once attempted to chase a baby bear through the woods because she wanted to hold it - blew me away. And so, we went.

*PLOP* Our little tent!

It's been a while since I've spent the night outside, and so I guess I'm a little rusty. I completely forgot that there's a difference between winter and summer tents. A summer tent tends to have mosquito netting in the top so it doesn't get so stuffy during the mid-July heat. However, it also allows wind to rip through your little lean-to like a Taco Bell fart through swimming trunks. 

Guess which one we had. 

It was absolutely frigid. 

I knew that it was going to be cold on top of the mountain. It always is there for some reason. Even in the middle of summer, you can get hypothermia up there. Back in high school a friend and I went up there and he decided to bring nothing but a sheet to sleep in at night. A sheet. He no longer does that. 

As a result, I brought every blanket with us that we had in the house (literally), as well as every packet of HotHands that I'd been hoarding over the years. As soon as I got out of the car to register I knew it was going to be a loooong night. It was easily 20 degrees below the already low temperature back at home. We ended up going to bed at around 6pm simply because it was too cold to not be inside of a sleeping bag anymore. 

I spent most of the night curled into a little ball in the bottom of my sleeping bag wondering how I could be so cold with so many blankets. Eventually, I gained the courage to peep my head out to see how Yellowhed was doing. 

There she was, sound asleep, with every blanket on her wrapped up like a little cocoon. I further mustered the courage to wake her up, and when she saw how cold I was she offered to share.

She's so nice. 

It was at this point that I decided to break out the HotHands packets. I'd been awake for well over 3 hours in the middle of the night trying to stay warm, and by golly I was gonna fall asleep. 

I ripped open a couple of the packets, lining the inside of my sleeping bag with them, and finally got some rest. 

We woke up with the mutual understanding that we were going to be much better prepared next time.