Mt. Rainier National Park After a very nice break in Seattle visiting family, I got back on the road and started hitting up the trails again. After a short(ish) morning drive away from the SeaTac traffic nightmare, I made my way to Mt. Rainier National Park. Since I still had plans to do some driving later in the afternoon, I chose the Ranger Falls trail. The hike up past Ranger Falls up to Green Lake is a beautiful and quiet…
I couldn’t think of a better title so I used another of my favorite lines from The Hobbit. Since my last post I’ve made my way through Canada and back into the US while simultaneously making my way into The Lord of the Rings audiobooks as well, so it will most likely be several months before I’m able to retrain my brain so that not everything is a Middle Earth reference. Title ideas (or a lack thereof) aside, here are…
I finished the audiobook of “The Hobbit” recently and I can confidently reassert that it is easily one of my favorite books ever. No allegory, no topicality, none of the incredibly long deliberative sessions or historical digressions that flood the Lord of the Rings trilogy… Just a wonderfully creative story made for the sole intent of entertaining. I love this book so much that I would even go as so far as to say that it is the most influential…
I recently came to know a beautiful young woman. With a smile cold and blue as an iceberg. In its infancy, I had hoped our encounter to be born under the auspices of great Romance. Much to my dismay, I soon found myself mistaken. Her interest, though perhaps as physical as mine, was business-like. A professional it would seem, though not quite of the consummate variety. And as the weight of her shrewd bargaining fell to me with all the…
During a recent trip/fall down one of YouTube’s innumerable rabbit holes, I bumped into a video which I actually found somewhat alarming. The premise of the video itself is fairly innocuous in that it is just a man conducting an interview with an AI language model. At face value this scenario sounds a bit quaint, perhaps even approaching the silliness of “choose your own adventure” text-based games from decades ago, but while I watched this video I found myself genuinely…
Took a quick trip over to Honolulu… Figured I’d share a few photos 🙂
Broke in a new pair of boots and started hiking season off with a run up Skyline the other day. I ended up post-holing through knee deep snow about a third of the way and another third was a muddy slip-and-slide, so the already “arduous” trail rating definitely let me know where I stood in terms of cardio and constitution. Still, it’s a beautiful hike and I was glad to get out. After the typical Alaskan winter my body is…
Ghelat knew everything about this mountain. Everything about this moment. Ten thousand times, he had seen the same afternoon sun bleed slowly into its resting place on the western horizon. He knew the shape of the cold whisper of wind that flew up through the rigid valley below, the feel of how it whipped and danced softly in celebration of its freedom from the dense foliage beneath it. He recognized each individual among the small, jagged rocks he stood upon….
2020 Vision is a collection of sci-fi short stories written roughly during the mid-70’s which were then compiled together in 1980. When I bought the book, I had thought it would be fun to close out the year with a light-hearted review of the whole collection or possibly just one of its better pieces. I had hoped to make note of particularly poignant or striking predictions that had been posited about our potential future, and to possibly compare and contrast…
I’ve decided to share a bit of a detective story from my larger project for the holiday. I don’t think there’s too much that needs to be laid out before reading, although there is a fair amount of “in-universe” vernacular for periods of time that pass and some basic fantasy-ish backstory… I hope these terms are not distracting, but I think the reader should be able to guesstimate more or less what the words represent. If something is odd or…