Sometimes you just have to put a roadtrip on pause.
We had an *amazing* overnight in Buffalo and I’ll have a tale to spin after I resume this nap now that we’re home safe.
October 2007
Buffalo, New York.
Earl and I are stationed in Buffalo tonight for their annual bear run. The festivities started up yesterday and continue through late tomorow. We just got in and will do some exploring and catching up with old friends. It should be fun.
Climb Ev’ry Mountain.
Earl and I went for a ride today. That in itself is not unusual. He took the afternoon off from work and I had no scholarly obligations, so we went for a ride into the beautiful Adirondacks.
What makes this ride into the Adirondacks special is that it is relatively close to 11 years since we made a similar journey. On October 13, 1996, Earl and I climbed what we thought was Bald Mountain (turns out it’s Rocky Mountain) near Inlet. At the top of the that mountain, overlooking the Fulton Chain of Lakes and in front of 30 or so other mountain climbing enthusiasts, I got down on my knee and proposed to Earl.
We haven’t been to the top of that mountain since. Today we climbed it again. At nearly 2300 feet above sea level (impressive for this part of the country) and near the peak of leaf peeping season, the scenery was impressive. The trail is around a 1/2 mile long and fairly steep. It was a pretty good workout getting to where we had stood over a decade ago. The scenery along the trail was beautiful.
Once at Rocky Point, we sat down on a rock together, reminisced about our life together, cried a bit, laughed a lot, made a little video and took lots of pictures. Previous visitors had left a discarded Triscuit, so a chipmunk joined us and ate the one hor d’oeurve we had to celebrate the occasion. The sky was a brilliant blue, the lakes were beautiful and the leaves are turning all sorts of autumn colors in magnificent brilliance.
[MEDIA=35]Just for the heck of it, I put photos from our two climbs side by side. I think we’re holding up pretty well.
Rejuvenation.
I know that springtime is all about rebirth and new life and all that, but as usual I don’t conform to popular belief. For me, the best season of the year is occurring right now in the Northern Hemisphere and that is autumn. Today is the perfect autumn day: clear skies, bright sunshine, 70 degrees or so and just a hint of that crispness in the air that I’m fond of. It seems the trend will continue through the weekend.
Being a night owl I feel like I live my life in perpetual jet lag. Many don’t get this, but though I’m up at 6:30, I’m not awake until 10:30 or so. I stumble through the first four hours, feeling like I just stepped off a plane in from someplace far, far away. When I worked full time, I would come in after lunch, and having completed half of my workday, and I would say “Good morning! So nice to see you!” My co-workers would understand that I have no comprehension of what occurred prior to lunchtime.
I think being out in the sunlight helps. I know it chases my blues away. When I wake up and it’s still dark outside, I feel all depressed. This new version of Daylight Saving Time has me cranky beyond belief, but we’ll save that for another blog entry.
Just know that today I’m out enjoying the sunshine and letting the wind whip through my hair (?!?) as I shuttle between classes, home and work.
Here’s a few photos I snapped in the back lawn just moments ago. Descriptions are on my flickr page.
Expectations.
I’m wondering if I’m expecting too much from this college experience. Today I had one class, Surveying I. I don’t plan on becoming a surveyor, however it’s a required course for all of us that wish to work in the civil engineering field. I might have to survey someday, and though we are being trained on equipment that became obsolete during Donna Summer’s “Last Dance”, by god we must take this course.
My Surveying class is compromised of 29 men and one woman. I’ve bonded with Jennifer to an extent, she’s very attractive, a little rough and what you might expect of a female civil engineer, not that I like stereotyping people, but she fits the image. Of my classmates, I’d say that I’m tied with another guy for being the oldest and many are in their mid or late 20s. There are a couple of freshmen as well. Some are stoned.
Today the professor handed out a 35 page packet on Trigonometry with the following instructions: read it, do the problems and turn in the homework next week. Now, I don’t expect him to teach us the fundamentals of trigonometry in 50 minutes, but for many of us in the class we haven’t had trig since high school. Heck, I was in the first round of students when New York State changed the traditional “Trigonometry” class to “Course III”, which was an advanced, unique blend of algebra, geometry, calculus and trigonometry that focused on the latter. I don’t know why the class of 1986 was selected to be the guinea pigs for the “mix it all together” approach but I think it kind of puts me at a disadvantage. I’m already suffering from the elementary school math experiment with the class of 1986: “let’s teach them only metric!” That went over so well when the U.S. converted to the metric system and all.
But I digress.
Now, I know that for every hour of class I should spend two hours studying and I try to adhere to that guideline to the best of my ability. But I think perhaps we should have spent some time in class talking about the contents of the packet. Instead he popped a quiz and told us we could leave when we finished that. I’m not a fan of the disinterest.
Boo.
Maybe I’m expecting too much. Perhaps I was spoiled when Miss Chontosh (high school math teacher) took time to walk us through problems and had after school tutoring sessions to coach us on the regents exams. It could be that I’m just putting too much pressure on myself and setting my personal expectations too high.
Sometimes I wonder if I should just bag it all and get a job that pays the bills and spend my free time in community theatre or something.
Crow.
Imagine my surprise when Time Warner sent a full cable crew, complete with bucket truck and hard hats, to our home only 45 minutes after the cross-eyed, twangy sounding tech and the four kids in the back of his truck left the premises.
Wow! Color me impressed.
The cable crew replaced everything aside from the cable that runs under the driveway (which is completely intact and passes all tests with flying colors), ripped out the booster that the tech installed three weeks ago, explained everything they did and gave me an internet experience that’s faster than passing gas after Burger King.
I am once again a happy geek and surfing at high speed, baby.
Bring on the porn news and family friendly entertainment.
Connect This.
I’m pretty dependent on the internet, especially when I’m in bachelor mode with Earl being away for work. The internet is my main source of entertainment. I chat with friends over iChat, I watch videos, I make videos, I read up on all things geekly and I get good sized dollops of news via the tubes we call the ‘net.
It’s not nice to fool with my internet connection.
A couple of weeks ago our high speed internet connection over cable (RoadRunner) died. The Fine Folks At Time Warner promptly sent a tech out to our home 72 hours later. Said tech had no testing equipment that worked with him, so he put a signal booster on our cable, said a prayer to the cable gods and viola, instant mediocrity which he said was the fastest experience they could provide. He was cute, but he was a liar.
Don’t mess with the geek.
On Sunday the internet started crapping out again (surprise!) so I made a call into Time Warner once again and made them adhere to my schedule; send someone out after my work hours. They promised a tech after 5 p.m. today. He called at 2:45 and wanted to know where I was.
It’s not nice to fool with my internet connection.
Slightly irritated but pleasant nonetheless, I coaxed him into coming after 5 p.m. He said he’d be here at 5. He arrived at 6:30.
“There’s nothing I can do”, said the cross-eyed, twangy sounding tech. He then ran out the front door to calm the four kids that were bouncing in the back of the service van. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.
“Your tap runs under the driveway and you have your own private tap and we are not allowed past the tap.”
“There have been many techs here over the years and they’ve all climbed the poles. They used their ladders and everything.”, I retorted.
He threw a bit of a hissy fit, as only a cross-eyed twangy sounding tech can do. That’s when our sometimes working connection died completely.
He then packed up to leave.
“Uh, it’s not working at all, you need to undo what you just did.”
A few more hisses and fits and it was once again cooking with blazing mediocrity.
“I just called in to the dispatch center and they’re going to send a line crew. They’ll probably have to tear up your driveway but we’ll get your internet going right fast.”, he said.
Earl is simply going to kill me if there’s a ditch across the driveway when he gets home tomorrow night.
