Hiking

Yesterday, I went hiking with my dad, brother, sister and dog in Fayston, on Burnt Rock mountain. It was the first time in over a decade that we’ve hiked as a family – I have many fond memories of us hiking in New York during the summer. When I saw dad earlier this week and said that he and Dan were planning on hiking the mountain, I decided it would be a good time to go. Hiking is something that I’ve absolutely loved doing, and one of a couple things that I never seem to find the time to do (others being skiing and reading more).

I’ve hiked this peak before, as a scout over fifteen years ago now. Hiking it again brought back some memories, as I recognized some of the stops along the trail, and the top of the mountain. It was a relatively short hike – 4 miles all told, but it illustrated just how out of shape that I’ve become in the past year. When I was walking to school all the time (not to mention up and down the Norwich University campus, which is all hills), it kept me in fantastic shape. Since I’ve been driving to and from work and not really moving around as much as I usually do, I was out of breath a lot quicker than I should have been. Despite that, hiking again was fun, and getting to the top was breathtaking – it was pretty clear yesterday, and we had a fantastic view of the Mad River Valley.

It was the first time that I’ve gone hiking with Fionna – she really had fun, running ahead of us, taking in the new sights and smells. We only had to help her at two points, both rock ledges that she just couldn’t figure out a way around.

I need to get into better shape – I’m paying for the hike today, as my legs are really sore from the walk. I suspect that even walking around town every day would be helpful. I should do that…

A Quarter Century

Happy 25th Anniversary to my mom and dad (Yesterday). We had about 60 people over at our house for the afternoon, which was fun, because it was a lot of people that I hadn’t seen for a while. Of course, it meant that there was a lot of explaining about what I was up to, which was good and bad.
Mom and Dad were thrilled, because they didn’t plan it, and they’ve been very happy for the past 25 years. Here’s to another quarter century.

Obligatory Post-Christmas Post

So, christmas is over, the shoppers are returning things and everything is back to normal right? Wrong. The mall is still playing christmas music. Did I miss something and is christmas still a couple days away, or is our mall manager just extremely forgetful? Whatever it is, it’s irritating and annoying.

Christmas was fun – spent a couple days at home with the family, which was nice. We haven’t all been together for a while now, given that I’ve moved out and my brother is away at college. It was good to get together with people.

Things I aquired:

• A Crack in the Edge of the World, Simon Winchester. I was thrilled to get this – I loved Winchester’s Map that Changed the World, about the first geologic map, which was a fantastic read into the history of geology. This one looks to be just as good.
  
• Love, by the Beatles. This album is amazing. ‘nuf said.
• Very spiffy framed art piece with books and a cool quote. That went up on my wall the minute I got back.
  
• iPod Charger. Which is fantastic, because my other one was stolen walked off during the summer.
  
• Random articles of clothing, which were needed
  
• Money, a couple of gift cards – Have several plans to use those tomorrow. Planning on getting Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross and Broken Angels by Richard Morgan, and adding them to my reading list.
  
• Things for my car, which will be handy

All in all, it was a pretty lowkey day, which was nice. Got through to Altered Carbon, caught up on some sleep, all of which was nice. And now I’m working every day of the week through to next Thursday. Ugh.

Merry Christmas!

Hope that everyone’s having a good Christmas eve or any other holiday that you happen to celebrate at this time. I’m off for the next couple of days from work, which is nice, because I’m working straight through for the rest of the next week and a half. I’m off to my grandmother’s and parent’s house for the evening and next couple days, respectively.

Merry Christmas!

Liptak Christmas Trees

This morning, I got up early again and did my last English exam, which came out pretty well, and turned in on time. One more exam to go – Can’t wait for that to be completely over with. I’ve had enough Economics to last me a while.
After that, I went home, and arrived just in time to catch my dad and sister before they went out to select a Christmas tree for the holiday. We don’t buy our trees – we live on 27 acres of mostly forested land, so there’s a lot to choose from, and we usually get some good ones. The only problem – the good trees are usually around 40-50 feet tall. Too tall for our house, so we usually take the top six feet out of the whole tree. Sounds wasteful, but it opens the forest up a little, and there’s more trees that’ll fall down on their own anyway. So our usual tradition is going out to find a tree, cutting it down and dragging it out.
We had fun today – took us about half an hour of walking around in the woods before we found what looked like a good one, a 40 fir tree with a good top. We went back, got a chainsaw and cut it down, only to have it land in a second tree, in a fork, where it got stuck. We tried pulling it out from the base, after cutting some of it away, but trees are heavy. And this one was spectacularly stuck in a maple tree. So we cut the maple tree and managed to get it down without damaging the top. It’s a bit of a goofy looking christmas tree. It’s extremely tall and thin, but it’s pretty dense. For the first time in like ten years, we’ve stuck the tree in the main living room, with a very high ceiling, so the tree is about 14 feet tall, but it looks good with decorations on it.

In other news, ABC pulled their show Day Break from the schedule. I’ve been reporting on it in my TV Recaps, which I skipped last week because of time, and I’m incredibly annoyed by this. 1 – It was one of the best plotted and acted shows on TV, even though it didn’t get a whole lot of attention from the media. 2 – Black main character, which doesn’t happen too often. 3 -Serial storyline, tight plot, with only a 13 episode order. It was to be a closed off series with a possibility of a sequel, but the main story would be just that 13 episodes. That should be done more often. The good news is that is seems all the episodes have been filmed already, so they’ll be airing all of them on ABC.com. At least we get the complete run, unlike with Smith. Arg

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hope that everyone had a good thanksgiving (yesterday now). I had dinner with the family in the afternoon, where we were expecting to have something like 13 people, but that went down to 8, which meant that some of us weren’t banished to the garage. It was a good dinner. Me, my parents, brother and sister, Uncle and his girlfriend and my grandmother were all there. It was fun, and the food was fantastic, as my mother is a great cook. I contributed bread, which people seemed to like. Lots of talking and fun, which was good.
After that, me and my sister went to go visit my friend Sam and Miranda up in Burlington, which was fun, I haven’t seen them since this summer. Keelia and Miranda watched Veronica Mars while Sam and I visited my friend Blackwell in his new house. He was surprised to see us, and we hung out for a little while, played with the dog that they were dogsitting and generally caught up.
It was a good night.

Hope that everyone else had an equally as good Thanksgiving.

My Parents

My parents rock. I don’t think that I ever say that, or any form of a dignified thank you to them, but I need to more often. And because I know you read this:

Thank you.

Thank you for everything that you’ve done over the years, putting up with me, my moods, geekiness, problems, being annoying, and everything, and thank you for all those times that you’ve helped me, pushing me when I needed it, encouraging me to try new things and thank you for being simply wonderful. I should say it more often.

Life through a telescopic lense

I still have my cast on. No, it wasn’t taken off, like I’d hoped that it would be, but no, I have another week to go with it on. It’s infuriating and I’m about ready to take the damn thing off myself, if I hadn’t already been warned by someone that that’s probably a bad idea.

Arg.

On top of that, nobody showed up for my geology tutoring session. Now, this is somewhat usual, I sit in the Geology lab for two or so hours, waiting for someone to show up with a question. Hell, any question would do, but nope. Two hours of my time wasted, where I didn’t have to leave a meeting early or hell, even miss the latest episode of Heroes. At least I got a bit of my reading for English done, although I need to finish Dracula for Gothic Lit tomorrow. I also got another couple of chapters done in Matriarch (I’m going Sarah…). Brilliant book from Karen Traviss, the forth book after City of Pearl, Crossing the Line and The World Before.

I’ve been spending some down time working on the blog. New appearance, but Blogger also added a tagging option, so one can create a theme for each post, and if so inclined, someone could search for related entries. Great, but I have another 250 posts to go to finish up… some other time. Any thoughts on the new layout?

Studio 60 rocked. Go watch, if you haven’t yet.

There’s not a whole lot that I can talk about really. I took my sister out to dinner the other night. It was fun to hang out with her and catch up a little, because I don’t see my family members as often as I did. Freaked my mom out, as we got home to find 4-5 increasingly frantic messages from her. We had a good laugh about it later, along with talk of what my asperations are for the future, time management and other random school things.

Overall, aside from the cast still being on my arm, things are going well.

Merry Frelling Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone, or any other holiday that you happen to celebrate this time of year- hope that you had a good one. While I’m not religous, I’ve always enjoyed the giving and recieving of gifts, especially the escuse to do so. I got my family members things that they all liked – and it was really easy this year too.
Got some cool things – A suitcase for when I go overseas. I swear, you can fit a couple of lost civilizations in it. No way that I’m going to fill it. Got a book on London from my sister, a Borders card from my brother and a new jacket, among other things.
Spent most of yesterday with relatives. We traditionally meet with my grandmother on Christmas eve, sometimes at our house, sometimes at hers, this times at hers. We then visited my other grandmother aunt, uncle and little cousin (She’s getting huge- walking AND talking. It’s amazing). From there, we went and visited my maternal grandfather in the assisted living center where he’s currently staying, it was good to see him again. I think that he’s starting to get a little better from the problems that have been happening since this summer.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving everyone, hopefully everyone will have a relaxed day with some good food sometime. It’s interesting this year, because we’re not actually having our dinner until tomorrow – mainly because of the foot or so of snow that we’ve gotten over the past two days, which is delaying my grandmother’s trip from Burlington to come and eat with us, something that we do every year. It’s also interesting, because my entire family is here – my brother came up the other day from school, and I’ve seen him for the first time in a couple of months, which is odd again.
My friend Kyle is also spending the week with us, because he lives in Washington, which is a little too far to go for a week. We’ve been hanging out, watching South Park, Family Guy or Farscape, inbetween minor work projects that have been handed to us from the parents. Like the tree that we had to clean up. But it’s good to have everyone together. My grandmother is coming for dinner, and I think my brother’s girlfriend as well, so it’ll be crowded.
On Saturday, I’ve been ordered to go to one of my friend’s apartments, because the Abnaki staff is getting together while we’re all here for a celebration of our own. I imagine that it’ll be fun – and it’ll be good to see people again. I’ll probably visit Rachel while I’m up – she’s been having some random troubles, and I haven’t seen her in a while. Hopefully I’ll get to visit a couple more times before I go off to London.
My vacation thus far: fairly boring with lots of TV and headaches. On the plus side, my toes are no longer hurting and are healing, which is a huge plus. Now, if only I can get more Homework done.