This past Sunday was an unusually humid and rainy day for a Seattle Summer. It was reminiscent of springs during my childhood, and I was reminded why I was much lazier when I was younger. Luckily, due to the recent release of Harry Potter, I wasn’t the only one who was lazy…
I used the time to take some pics which are now up on my brand new Flickr profile. I’m hoping that not having to manage the pages will help me stay more prolific with the photos.
I went on a hike up to the Mount St. Helen’s summit yesterday. Though we were cursed with extremely poor conditions, the hike was extremely enjoyable. Most of the ascent and descent involves navigating volcanic boulders and rocks, and the fog, in fact, added to the spookiness of the terrain. Unfortunately, the low visibility downgraded actually the exercise of reaching the summit to almost pointless. Despite that, the interesting nature of the hike made it well worth it.
Though the climb was challenging to say the least, I had overestimated the difficulty of the climb. I was over-prepared in the way of food, water, and gear, but I was under-prepared for the changes in temperature as we ascended. From the presence of sleet and freezing rain, I believe it was below freezing at the summit. If you are interested in getting the details of the climb and my recommendations for what to pack, please comment, and I’ll add an additional post.
At one point halfway down the mountain, the sky opened up just a little bit, and we finally got an idea of the immense beauty of the place. Needless to say, I would like to return on a more cheerful day and do it again.
Here are a selection of the pictures which do not capture the eerie beauty of the place.
I cleaned up the first set of photos from Europe and posted them here. I apologize for the lack of integration. This will change in the near future.
I’ve finally decided to quit waffling about setting up a website and actually set it into motion. My reasons for finally doing so are myriad, but a recent trip abroad gave me the final impetus to get off my tail and make it a reality.
The inner struggle I’ve had stems from two facts:
- I dislike blogs by people with nothing interesting to say
- I have nothing interesting to say
Needless to say, I am terrified about becoming exactly what I rage against. It is my hope that the typical self-important, boring, and pretentious writings will be missing from my website or at least short lived. As a general disclaimer though, it has been many years since I’ve written anything but detailed technical information for an audience, so please forgive me if my rhetoric is awkward, my prose is pretentious, and my grammar is painfully incorrect. I believe that a natural tendency of most bloggers is to use their blog as an outlet to satisfy their desire to write a novel or memoir without actually having to do it. This is most certainly the case with me, and I will be trying to fight it. My plan is to actually write everything that comes to mind, but only publish the most insightful or informative pieces. I completely recognize that the Catch-22 to this approach is that as I author and start creating the content, initially every post will be the most insightful and informative pieces.
So why risk it now? Simple. I feel that my recent approach to living a fulfilling life has both given me some interesting things to talk about and given me enough surreal experiences to comment on. Also, as a side-effect, I hope that requiring myself to publish something interesting on a regular basis will force me into actually becoming interesting. At the very least, having a chronicle of my thoughts will upon review prove that I am NOT in fact a unique snowflake, and that I don’t have anything interesting to bring to this world. That particular insight seems like an important one to have.
Anyway, welcome and thanks for reading.