Two Gems From the Inauguration

Alice Walker, speaking of Michelle Obama:
I like how she is so naturally elegant. I like how she dresses, also.


Alice Walker:
Is that Ethyl Kennedy behind Michelle? Look at the nose...
Amy Goodman:
Actually......I think......That's Joe Biden.

The Nietzsche Family Circus

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

Thoughts are the shadows of our sensations -
always darker, emptier, simpler than these.

Blast From the Past

Well we are back from Costa Rica and totally married. Pictures of our luna de miel to follow this coming week. In the meantime, check this out. It's the long-awaited, finally-created official page for Expedition, the backpacking and rock climbing branch of Kanakuk where Amy and I met. We got to work on this site, write a lot of the content, and contribute photos so it's pretty rad to see it up and running on the Interweb.

New Hotness

Soooo, Amy got me a Nikon D40 for which to play with. Perfect timing on her part, as I was lamenting my lack of a decent digital camera for our trip to Costa Rica following the wedding. This here's a little shot I took with it yesterday before the blizzard hit.

I've had similar thoughts as Davis on my lack of thought and writing as of late, but I feel that things have been building in my mind for a bit and that I'll be back in the swing of things soon. Most of my free time during the past few months has been devoted to fixing up the house that Amy and I will be living in, and learning the hard way (read as: REAL way) a lot about building and home repair. I've had tools and materials on the mind, to the point of getting trapped in Moscow Building Supply just wandering around and ogling the many manly contraptions and gizmos, as well as getting excited about brackets and handsaws.

All this to say, I'm looking forward to getting back into something of a rhythm of writing and posting. So hold on dear reader, and your wildest blog fantasies will be realized in a wizardly cloud of 1's and 0's. Whillikers.

Can You Put a Price on Security?

This is amazing.

C&L

I'm usually a big fan of the C & L Meat Locker, and man, that smoked salmon we had last night was the best ham I've had in a while.

"But There's More. There's MUCH More!"

So the lovely Amy K. Ballard and I have been engaged for about two months now, and for those of you who haven't heard the story and would like to, here goes:

We'd been looking around at road bikes for Amy ever since she moved up to Idaho in January, usually by stopping by bike shops and taking different styles out for a test ride. Bike shop owners are surprisingly cool with letting you ride out of their store on $5000 worth of equipment with nothing but your driver's license as collateral/evidence.

I'd had the idea of proposing on a bike ride for a while, and had even thought about the one-two punch of surprising her with a bike, going for a ride, and asking the Big One midway through. Not finding any good deals and wanting to have done the deed before we both went to Wisconsin, I opted for the test-ride freebie deal. I suited Amy up in one of my racing kits from UI, she hopped on a Giant OCR-3 from Paradise Creek Bikes, and we took off down the Latah Trail towards Troy.

The ring was tucked into my jersey pocket and I'd hoped to find a nice spot in the wheat fields to stop. We turned off of the trail and headed into farm country 7-8 miles from town. Amy was doing so well, and really enjoying the views along with the challenge. We started climbing a good sized hill that I was a little worried about, but she powered up like it was nothing. A bit longer found us on another hill and Amy mentioned it starting to get pretty hard. I suggested turning around after we got to the top. to which she agreed with a laugh.

At the top, we got off our bikes stretched a bit, and I started getting the Nervous. I repeatedly told her how glad I was that she liked biking, and scratched/rubbed my head. I then told her that I wanted to buy her a bike, which she thought was great. This not being the climax of the afternoon, I threw my hands in the air and said,

"But there's more. There's MUCH more!"

Boom.

Mawage

Idaho

A Change of Seasons

After 5 merry years at the Malebox/Wisconsin House pt. 2, I'm moving on to a little house down the hill. Triple the billz is worth a home that can be clean, quiet, and free of television.

Sooooo, Chris Aberle, Drew Nicholas, and Jordan Smith are looking to fill my spot ASAP here on Polk St. Four bedrooms, wood stove, two living rooms, huge kitchen, and bidet make it a castle among shacks in a college town. Asher is staying in NY through January, and would also appreciate roommates to ease the rent burden on his end. If you or anyone you know of is looking for a place, there are two openings.

New Pictures

Hola, just posted some new shots on flickr from my time in Colorado with AJ. I had the great opportunity to take a group of guys out from Wisconsin on a three day trip in the Indian Peaks Wilderness, just south of Rocky Mountain National Park. It's, you know, scenic...

The Palouse Cup rages on, we're currently 1-1 with two games to go tomorrow.

Vocab

The Book Club, consisting of Nate Wolff, David Hoos, and myself had its first meeting last night. We discussed Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables a bit, and made plans for our next reads, which will probably include some Tobias Wolff short stories, Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. Yes, we set out to read some Catholic writers.

Besides the learned words listed below, we talked about the sometimes insultingly obvious tools many classic authors employ in relating themes. For example, much of THOT7G is about generational sin and curses. In order to make sure we hadn't missed it before, Hawthorne goes to great lengths to tell us how a descendent of the cursed ancestor bears an uncanny resemblence to the orginal Pyncheon. This led me to revisit one of my old gripes about middle/high school literature programs that tell kids that the classics are simply too dense and difficult to understand. Oh, and they also were written too long ago to have any bearing on a 17-year-old who drives a Mazda and has an iPod. The fact is, many of the classics function as textbooks on Themes in Writing. Dickens, much to Nate's frustration, will carry you along a nice little theme in his novels, show you bits and peices here and there until you are comfortable and fairly pleased with having gleaned something from the text, then say something like 'And the wooden table was a metaphor for the Clark family.' To which the appropriate, Wolffian response is to bring an open hand to the forhead, hold it briefly, extend the hand and cry "Dude."

Words I've learned:

lugubrious - ridiculously, excessively mournful.

Daguerreotype - an obsolete photographic process, invented in 1839, in which a picture made on a silver surface sensitized with iodine was developed by exposure to mercury vapor.

matutinal - pertaining to or occurring in the morning; early in the day.

escritoire - a writing desk.

obstreperous - noisy and stubbornly defiant, aggressively boisterous.

piquant - agreeably pungent or sharp in taste or flavor; pleasantly biting or tart.

dromedaries - the single-humped camel, Camelus dromedarius, of Arabia and northern Africa.

approbation - official approval or sanction.

effulgence - shining forth brilliantly; radiant.

physiognomy - the outward appearance of anything, taken as offering some insight into its character.

alacrity - cheerful readiness, promptness, or willingness.

testator - a person who has died leaving a valid will.

propinquity -

1.	nearness in place; proximity.

2.	nearness of relation; kinship.

3.	affinity of nature; similarity.

4.	nearness in time.

augury - an omen, token, or indication.


And I'm only halfway through...

Lewis on the Lazy

Teachers will tell you that the laziest boy in the class is the one who works hardest in the end. They mean this. If you give two boys, say, a proposition in geometry to do, the one who is prepared to take trouble will try to understand it. The lazy boy will try to learn it by heart because, for the moment, that needs less effort. But six months later, when they are preparing for an exam, that lazy boy is doing hours and hours of miserable drudgery over things the other boy understands, and positively enjoys, in a few minutes. Laziness means more work in the long run. Or look at it this way. In a battle, or in mountain climbing, there is often one thing which it takes a lot of pluck to do; but it is also, in the long run, the safest thing to do. If you funk it, you will find yourself, hours later, in far worse danger. The cowardly thing is also the most dangerous thing.
It is like that here. The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self - all your wishes and precautions - to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call 'ourselves', to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be 'good'. We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way - centred on money ore pleasure or ambition - and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs. If I am a field that contains nothing by grass-seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and re-sown

From Mere Christianity

Return

Back from Estes with pictures to come soon. I ended up not only taking out a backpacking group, but helping the rock climbing guides on their two trips as well. Moody Bible Institute did a little write-up on First Adventure that you can read here.

Check It

I have a lot of foam-core and mat board left over from the Spring Gala. If you have photos or art that you would like matted or mounted onto foam-core (or both), let me know and I'm sure we could arrange something. I haven't had a chance to do much in the way of photo-ing or writing since starting at the TerrorMark, but in exchange I'm now relatively wealthy. So I'd love a few projects to work on.

In other news, I'll be down in Colorado this next week helping my good friend AJ Dudek start his guiding company, First Adventure. A group of guys from a church back in Wisconsin are coming out for a week of climbing, backpacking, and fly-fishing and AJ has asked me to guide the backpacking trip. We'll be tramping about just south of Rocky Mountain National Park in the Indian Peaks Wilderness and Roosevelt National Forest. Hopefully some good pictures to follow.

Hancock: Probably my least favorite Will Smith movie , but hey, that's like describing the least delicious ice cream. It's all tasty.

Familiarity Breeds Contempt

When first the Fox saw the Lion he was terribly frightened, and ran away and hid himself in the wood. Next time however he came near the King of Beasts he stopped at a safe distance and watched him pass by. The third time they came near one another the Fox went straight up to the Lion and passed the time of day with him, asking him how his family were, and when he should have the pleasure of seeing him again; then turning his tail, he parted from the Lion without much ceremony.