My nephew Caleb

My brother Andrew and his wife Bethel were over on Sunday afternoon/evening for some food and company. Naturally, of course, they brought their new son Caleb with them. He's a little over 7 months old, and is getting awful big. He burbles a lot when I see him and he's very good at recognizing people.

It's possible that I am almost as excited to be an uncle as my Mom is to be a grandma (no way, nobody's that bad). Anyways, maybe that's where I get it from. Whatever. But he's a very cute baby, and is starting to get to be lots of fun. He can sort of crawl, although not very well. Caleb gets up on his hands and knees, but his motor control isn't precise enough ... he scoots *backwards* instead of forwards. It's pretty funny.

Interestingly enough, Caleb's actually a lot better at walking than he is crawling. If you hold his hands to help him steady his balance, he will literally walk across the room, and you can totally just let him hang onto the side of the table and he'll stand there. Problem is, he loves to bang on tables & the floor with his hands ... he hasn't figured why that if he lets go of the table to bang on it, he loses his balance and falls to the floor abruptly.

Logging

My brother Andrew has a wood-burning stove in his house. Although he has a heat pump and central heating, he tries to burn as much wood as possible over a given winter to save on his electric bill costs. His neighbors own a bunch of land right across the street from Andrew ... a whole wooded hill that doesn't have anything built on it. Anyways, they sold a bunch of trees to a logger, so the loggers went in, chopped down a bunch of trees, and took out the good straight thick parts of the trunks that they wanted. They left behind the treetops ... when they log, it's often too much work to get the last 20 feet of the tree ... that part may be too knotty or too small to be worth anything to sell to a lumber mill.


To make a long story short, Andrew, Dan, Metnick, Kendall, (even JD a little bit) and I went in, trimmed off the branches, chopped up the treetop trunks in 18" pieces, and moved it all down the hill and stacked it across the road from Andrew's house. It was a lot of work ... took pretty much two days worth of work to get it all done. Dan and Andrew ran the chainsaws Saturday morning, and stacked the first several piles. Then when JD and I showed up in the afternoon, we helped Andrew load the truck and make the runs down to his house and stack them across the road.


We spent pretty much all Monday evening until dark chopping wood and moving it. Pretty much everybody ran the chainsaw for awhile ... it's a lot of fun but it does start to feel pretty heavy in your hands after you've cut a few trees worth of wood. Even Andrew's dog Cocoa got in on the action (read: pretty much getting in our way and trying to hang out *in* the truck while we were throwing logs into it).


I estimate that we made well over 16 trips with my truck about full up to the bed rail top. Andrew figures that he got about two years worth of wood, which should save him several hundred dollars a year in wood costs. Next step is he's going to rent a power splitter and then we'll split it all in one go, instead of doing it all by hand as needed.


Kendall had fun playing around in the creek with his Land Rover Discovery. This thing is sweet. He's got the lift, and nice mudder tires, and a big old safari rack. He was able to make up the really steep part that my truck couldn't get up, but he needed to get a good healthy running start because it was *very* slick.

A day in Detroit

Kate and I spent the day in Detroit on Friday. Among other places, we went to Belle Isle, which is a pretty sweet island just north of downtown Detroit. Nearly 1000 acres, it's kinda like Detroit's version of Central Park. I'm actually pretty impressed by Belle island ... it's a lot of fun and it seems like the cops do a pretty good job of keeping sketchy homeless guys and the like out of it. The park is definitely a little too dirty, but there was a big sign on the way out about how Detroit is working to renovate and clean the place up.



The southern point of the park has a heap of concrete boulders right at the waterline; it offers a spectacular view of Windsor, Ontario to the southeast, and downtown Detroit to the southwest. I've been here at night before, and it's really quite pretty. Kate was pretty amused at how excited I got when two large ore carriers passed each other on the river. I've seen plenty of big ships before, but it's still quite a thrill when a 700 foot long cargo ship passes just 200 yards away, sounding its horn with a deafening blast. It's so cool!



Certainly the highlight of the island is the Conservatory; its grounds are kept in fairly good shape. The whole thing is not quite as nice nor nearly as well kept or maintained (or as extensive) as the Franklin Conservatory and grounds in Columbus, Ohio, but it was enjoyable nonetheless. This reminds me that I really need to get myself some books on North American flora and fauna because I'm tired of going places and not knowing how to name the trees and flowers and birds and stuff. It's funny ... I think I'm becoming more and more like my father every day ... now I find myself almost constantly interested in trees and nature and odd stuff on the side of the road. It wasn't very many years ago that I was rolling my eyes every time Dad noticed something interesting and would point it out and muse and ask questions about "why does it look like that?' and "what makes it grow there?".



They have a nice collection of cactus (cacti??), a pretty good tropical collection, and the center room has 4 or 5 really large date palms, as much as 5 feet in diameter and a good 40+ feet tall; these are *inside* the center dome. I was duly impressed.

After the fun afternoon at Belle island and cruising around Detroit, we went out to dinner at Sindbad's, a nice seafood restaurant on the water across the river from Belle Island. We got there early, about 5:30, so it wasn't too crowded. I was a little worried, because the neighborhood that the restaurant is in is a bit sketchy, but the place was nice and the food was good. I was definitely digging the marina/dock attached to the restaurant; someday I want to have a boat set up where I can drive the boat up the river and eat at some sweet place... yeah, that'd be hot. As a result of the dining experience, I have absolutely none of the money that I got back from selling my textbooks back to the bookstore. Yay!

The Snack Bar

I've been living in the Snack Bar lately. Well, not living like my friends have been living here, but still spending a lot of time here nonetheless. It's Finals Week, and everybody is doing MASSIVE amounts of studying and cramming and freaking out and making late-night McDonalds runs and the like.

For those of you who are not familiar with Hillsdale College culture, the Snack Bar is this dingy eating area in the Student Center. You're allowed to smoke inside, so the tables are all sticky and there's ash all over them and they're all dirty because I swear they never actually wipe them off. The snack bar is shut down at 2:00am all semester, but finals weekend they keep it open 24-7. It's usually populated by the campus smokers: the libertarians, the reprobates, the diletantes, and the revolutionaries. My roommate Ed is definitely beginning to fall into this category these days.

Stephen, my roommate Ed, Joy, Lydia, Krudy ... and many others from the Polis and our friends; we all just kind of congregate in the back corner and assimilate 2-3 tables as our "home". Most everybody leaves a bunch of their crap here all day, just claiming these tables as "ours", and people leave our stuff alone. I'm convinced there's at least 3-4 of the guys that actually live here, including Ethan Lewis who has so many books and so much crap in one booth that people have started to refer to it as his "home".

I'm looking over the table that Stephen and Javonne and various other people have been studying at; there's a laptop, a bunch of pipes, notes, empty bottles, pipe tobacco, tea, tea bags, trash, sunglasses, and textbooks. It's awesome. Mmmm..... I think I've finally found the 'college experience' or whatever passes for it.

I am not actually doing much right now... I already took my Chem final, and my Poli Sci final was canceled. So, English and History are next week, then back home on Wed night after I drop Kate off at the airport.

The Perfect Martini

Coudal Partners has a great article about the craft of the perfect martini. I truly appreciate this obsessive approach to the crafting of a choice cocktail, because I myself share the obsession. While I truly admire his rhetoric and the lengths he goes to pursuing his craft (and I thought I was picky about my martinis!), I must, as a purist, protest that a Vodka Martini is no true martini at all.

You will need the following:
1 bottle of Bombay Sapphire
1 bottle of Martini & Rossi Dry Vermouth
Santa Barbara Olive Co. Olives Sundried tomato-stuffed
1 martini shaker
1 jigger or graduated cylinder
2 clear glass or crystal long-stemmed martini glasses
1 dinner spoon (the sort you use to eat with)
1 box of toothpicks

At least a half hour before, place your martini glasses & the bottle of Sapphire in the freezer to chill. Ensure that your shaker is cool and dry, clean and clear of any other previous alcohols.

After things are chilled, take your graduated cylinder and measure out 2.5 oz (75 ml) Bombay Sapphire and 0.5 oz (10 ml) Martini and Rossi. Add these to the shaker. Next, take your dinner spoon, and fill it 1/3 to 1/2 full of the olive juice, and add to the shaker. Be careful not to add too much, as it will make the martini too briny and unpleasant.

Before you go farther and begin to add ice, prepare your olive garnish. After first querying your guest as to their preference (“one olive or two, sir?”), take the desired number of olives and carefully blot them with a dry napkin to remove excess olive juice. This is essential; you already have all of the olive juice that you want in the martini mix. Insert the toothpick into the olive’s long side (not the pitted end) at a 30 degree angle and set aside.

Now, once you have the mix and the garnish prepared, fill the shaker with crushed ice to the brim. Stir (do NOT shake!) vigorously. Then, and only then, remove the martini glass from the freezer. Add the olive to the empty glass. Quickly strain the martini into the glass and promptly serve.

As an alternate gin, Tanqueray will also work quite nicely. The botanical mix in the Sapphire is more subtle and complex than the Tanqueray, but I sometimes find that Tanqueray’s stronger juniper flavor is just what I’m craving.

Occasionally, if the mood strikes me, I will substitute the olive for a cocktail onion, shifting this from a Martini to a Gibson. Always remember to blot the onion before adding as a garnish. If blue cheese stuffed olives are desired, blot carefully and do not add any olive juice.

Sushi

Friday night I had the opportunity to go out for some nice Sushi with Kate for my 23rd birthday. Mom and Dad had sent me some money to go out for dinner (thanks guys!), and I made sure it was well spent. We went to Godaiko, really quite an excellent Japanese Restaurant and Sushi Bar in Ann Arbor. Mmmm... Hamachi.

Katie had never had "real" sushi before (a few homemade pieces at somebody's house before, I think). Anyways, it was fun explaining to her the etiquette (as best as I understand, anyway -- Wiki was helping brushing up on my etiquette) and ordering different stuff. We shared some Edamame, and some Shrimp Tempura and Seaweed salad as appetizers, and then had some Nigiri – Tuna, Yellowtail, some Unagi, some Fatty Tuna, some King Crab, and some shrimp I think. Anyways, it was all very good ... I've become a big fan of the hamachi (Yellowtail), although this wasn't *quite* as fantastic Hamachi as I had with Joshua in Cleveland over New Years.

After dinner, we went to the campus district in Ann Arbor, and browsed a few book stores. I found a very nice old hardcover copy of Dana's "2 years before the Mast" at a used book store, and then got lost in the travel section at Border's looking at books on New Zealand ... I need to remember to ask Joshua if I can borrow some of his books on New Zealand ... I really want to go....

Spring Break!!!

It's been over two weeks since Spring Break, so this is a bit of a delayed posting, AND I pretty much haven't posted anything on my blog in 4-5 months or so, but whatever. I've been busy and distracted with school. Problem with school is, especially because I'm doing all of my freshman core requirements, it sucks all of the energy that you have for writing right out of you. Something about all of the English, History, and Political Science papers that kinda eat into your time. :-)

Myself, my cousin James, my girlfriend Katie, and 3 other of my friends (Stephen, Lydia, and Tiara) went to the South Core Island, part of the Cape Lookout National Seashore. The island is part of North Carolina's Outer Banks barrier island chain; the South Core Island is 24 miles long with no fresh water, no campsites, and (this time of year) basically no people.

We took both my truck and James' 4Runner on the ferry over to island loaded down with fishing gear, a canoe, firewood, 20 gallons of freshwater, emergency gas, some beer, 5L of wine, 3 tents, a 19ft canoe, a bunch of duffel and gear, and enough food to last 6 people 5 days.

The weather was brisk, often downright cold. The week before we left, temperatures were highs of 75/ lows 50. The week we were there, the temperature was highs in the high 50s/low 60s, and lows in the high 30s/low 40s. And the water was a pretty consistent 45+ degrees. So pretty dang chilly. Oh, and it was very, very windy; usually winds 20-30 mph often with gusts to 35-40 mph. We were there from a Sunday Afternoon to a Friday morning, and it definitely rained all day Tuesday, which was pretty miserable. Here's our campsite for Thursday night.

Still, everybody had tons of fun, despite being cold, getting soaked, not taking a shower for a week, and generally stinking to high heaven. Most of the time that we were there it was sunny and generally pretty pleasant, if maybe a bit too chilly and windy. Still, taking our trucks over onto the island to off-road and play was a lot of fun; Kate said that pretty much the whole trip was a Toyota add:

The Outer Banks is know as the "Graveyard of the Atlantic"–– they still have major shipwrecks off of both Cape Lookout and Cape Hatteras every so often. So on Monday, we were driving down the beach towards the Cape & Lighthouse at low tide, and spotted about half of the side of an old wooden shipwreck. I don't know how old it was for sure, and we weren't able to find out more information about it, but from what I know about ships and ship construction, I would guess at least 100-120 years old. Pretty cool - Here's Katie sitting on top of my shoulders so we can take a better picture of the whole wreck:

We built huge campfires (almost bonfires, really) every night. We brought over enough wood to have maybe two decent-sized fires, because the Park Service warned us that there would not be firewood available on the island and that. I brought my copy of The Hobbit and Winnie-the-Pooh, and had a good time reading to everybody each night in front of the fire. Here's Katie asleep on my shoulder ... I promise I'm not that boring of a reader!

We brought my parents 19ft canoe; funniest moment of the trip was when Stephen capsized the canoe IN THE OCEAN! Okay, so the island is, on average, several hundred-one thousand yards wide. I thought it intuitively obvious that we had brought the canoe to paddle around in the calm waters of the Pamlico Sound. But first day we were there, all of us but Petrie went and jumped in the 45 degree ocean. We were sitting around trying to warm up from freezing our butts off, when Petrie comes up and asks if we can help him drag the canoe out of the surf because it was full of water and he couldn't tip it over himself. THE SURF? Apparently, he had this bright idea to take the open-top 19ft canoe BY HIMSELF and try and get out past the breakers. After the first two waves completely swamped the canoe, he started having second thoughts, but by then it was too late. I was so incredulous that he had even attempted it -- WHAT were you THINKING??? Anyways, pretty funny stuff

We had a blast the whole time we were there, including the last night where I broke out the gasoline. After I filled up my truck, I started messing around with the half gallon or so of gas that I couldn't' quite pour into the gas tank because of the shape of the can. So, here's me, having poured a ring of gas around myself and torched it off. Ah.... the things you can't even THINK about doing while living in Colorado. :-)

And the best part is ... it only cost $150 / person for the entire trip.

Musings

I'm pretty sure that Homestar Runner has become my favorite tv show. And that's funny, because it's not on tv and it's not a show. Strong Mad, "This is my funny voice. This is my Funny Voice!!" . Yup. It's just such weird, dry humor with all of these obscure references that if you haven't seen all of the previous episodes, some episodes just don't make any sense.

It's late-ish. I just finished having this super-geek conversation with two friends about science and chemistry. As all of this unfolds, I realize that I truly enjoy people, I enjoy science, I enjoy history ... but not languages. All of this may be brought upon by my not-so-hot grades in French, but I think that as I get closer to the end of my 1st semester of college, I am more and more impatient to study the things I went to college for (Economics, Business, Chemistry) and less and less interested in studying vague core requirement Humanties that (quite frankly) bore me to tears. It's funny. I love literature. You would think I love English. But I don't, and most of it is due to the fact that the MLA rules and the guidlines on writing papers and suchnot seem more of an end to themselves than a means to an end, at least where the English department is concerned. Also, I feel so rushed ... we barely have time to read one book before we run helter-skelter off to another.

I register for classes for next semester in another few days. Looks like I am going to take another of Dr. Moye's History class. Golly, I like History ... especially Dr. Moye's classes. There is something about the intense interest in the subject matter itself and less of the interest in the over-academicized "write papers because the point of learning is to write good papers!" that makes the study of History, at least with her, much more interesting than my other classes.

Well, I should prolly go to bed. I have *both* a Chemistry and a French exam tomorrow.