I did have a weigh in.

I was up a pound. I paid a dollar. I fell from 2nd place to 6th place.

I’m not thrilled.

I’m going backpacking with the Boy Scouts this weekend. They calling for rain and snow this weekend. I don’t know how well that’s gonna work. I didn’t have many kids signed to go. I’m guessing I’ll have a few bail out on me.

It’s late… so that all you get.

One of the sites that I support at work is have a Biggest Loser competition. As in the person who loses the greatest percentage of their body wieght wins.

They invited to play along, mostly cause they wanted my ten dollars. I’m not grossly over-weight or anything, but I do want to drop my weight by 15-20 percent. So I said sure. We have had two weigh-ins so far, and I am solidly in second place with 3.26% lost. Good for me.

Thursday and Friday night we had Pizza for dinner, big greasy pepperoni pizzas to be precise. Saturday we had a birthday party complete with cake and ice cream. Last night we had a family movie night that included popcorn and ice cream. And tonight we went out for a big Steak Dinner. Bad for me.

I would have this contest so won, if I had the even the slightest bit of self control. Weigh-in is Wednesday morning. I may have to consider fasting tomorrow. Or maybe I should adopt the classic Roman diet plan of Binge and Purge. That would probably suit me the best.

Not losing the weight, I could probably handle. Not winning. That’s not cool at all. Besides, If I make my goal, I’ll be a lean, mean, Kung Fu machine. Well… lean and mean anyhow.

I will, at some point, finish writing about my last backpacking trip. And post it with pictures.

In the meantime, I guess I should put something up in this space.

This week has been a bitch. Work hasn’t been very inspiring.

You don’t care about the details, but the gist of it is that I’ve been doing some pretty dull shit. Mostly I don’t care. I’m not defined by my job or career. If they want me to earn my pay this way or that way. Whatever. I’ve got be there forty hours each week either way. But it takes something out of me. I guess I’d rather be challenged. The upside I guess is that this is temporary. I should be flooded with challenge when my project takes off in May. But in the meantime, this is just adding to growing cloud of apathy that has been following me around.

I really need to shake this funk.

I’m a dork.

I admit this freely. My hobby is the Internet (and backpacking.) I read blogs. I play on stupid forums. I listen to podcasts and Internet radio. I even do a stupid radio show myself.

It’s a stupid hobby. I know this. But I figure that it is no worse than getting all wrapped up in Lost or Desperate Housewives or, kill-me-first, American Idol. I could be writing the great American novel… but then again, maybe I have nothing to write anyway.

None of that matters. Hell none of this matters either.

The point.

There is no point, there never is.

The Internet should be better than the real world. People of like thoughts should be able to find each other and communicate. People should be able to express themselves freely. Information should be exchanged… freely.

But that’s not how it works a lot of the time.

It becomes just like the real world. Full of petty bickering. And stupid politics. Not like Red State/Blue State politics, but like office politics… only as it relates to … blogs, forums, chatrooms, whatever.

Fuck That.

Says a lot about human nature… doesn’t it? And I don’t like what I’m hearing.

Read Part Two.

I had thought that my feet would warm up once I started walking. But as I made my way up the first climb, my feet showed no sign of regaining any sensitivity. It was very hard to walk with my feet completely numb. I kept going, figuring that was the only way I was going to regain any heat. After a mile or two I was hot but my feet were still mostly numb.

I began to picture, taking off my boots and finding black, frostbitten toes. The longer I walked the more my mind wandered in that direction. I pictured myself show my foot minus a few toes to some young backpackers and telling them that’s what happens if you don’t keep your feet warm. I tried to think about other things, but my mind kept coming back to my frozen feet. I decided that having a little frostbite wouldn’t be so bad. It would be a like a badge of honor. Look at me. I’m a goddamned mountain man. It was so cold that my toes froze right off and I still walked 10 fucking miles!

Luckily, I caught up with Shutter before my thoughts could get any more bizarre. The temperature rose to about freezing by mid-morning. And that combined with a little sunlight really helped. I began to feel my toes again, and it wasn’t a pleasant process. It was the most painful case of pins and needles I ever experienced. But by the time we caught up with my dad, I had regained most of the feeling in my foot.

We trudged on. The temperature was dropping again and a breeze was blowing. We reached another shelter and stopped to rest and have a snack. We didn’t stop long. We began to get cold almost as soon as we stopped moving. We hit the trail again. My pack was bugging the hell out of me. My Zero Degree sleeping bag is pretty good but it is heavy and big. Because of it’s size, I had my tent lashed to the back of my backpack. This really screwed up the way the pack was supposed to distribute the weight because the tent was basically pulling straight back on my pack. To make things worse, the tent had shifted slightly to the right and was pulling the pack to the right. Every few steps I had to kind of throw the pack to the left with shoulders to give my back and shoulders some relief. I tried a few times to adjust my pack better, but my fingers would begin to go numb pretty quick and wouldn’t be able to really fix anything due to the numbness. After a while I gave up and decided to tough it out.

As we got to the end I walked double time just to hurry up and get my pack off. We got to the car and dad drove us back to my car and he headed on his way. Shutter and I cranked up the heat and the radio and began our drive back to the real world. Since we hadn’t really eaten a meal, although we had snacked plenty, we stopped at a Pizza Hut and pigged out. The staff looked at us funny, and I’m sure we deserved it. Dressed in fleece jackets, with layers and layers of clothes underneath. The unmistakable smell of campfire smoke that was all over us probably didn’t help either, but we didn’t care. Hot Pizza was making everything better.