This week has been a blur of final fall leaf cleanups, getting the septic tank its quinquennial suck-out, dealing with an unrelated plumbing issue in the basement shitter, and dealing with Lola (the dog), who, after four years, has decided that shitting on the floor of my office is easier than going outside.
This week has been a weather rollercoaster of light snow, rain, and sun with freezing temps one day, spring-like temps the next, and snow amounts varying between our home near town and the trails out in the country before finally melting.
Sometimes, the numbers don’t add up.
After hitting my weekly 30-mile goal last Friday, I held true to my promise to “not do a damn thing” over the weekend. And by not do a damn thing, I mean no hiking, for there are always more leaves to bag, foods to cook, groceries to get, poop to scoop, dogs to tend to, beers to drink, music to listen to, sexy time to have, and absolute shit International football to watch (Gahdamn, I hate International Breaks!).
I got out on Monday for a 6.75+ lumber, half of which was done in a thunderstorm, and I have to say it was pretty magnificent. Plodding along through the dark woods with rumbling thunder and lightning overhead and rain pissing down shouldn’t be as fun as it is, but it is. And I only almost pissed myself once with fear.
For whatever reason, and for possibly the first time since 2005, I have found myself uninterested in writing anything about my long-running, mundane, pedestrian, unproductive life. But in the interest of knowing I paid my hosting bill upfront, I am here. So, I got some photos and some October stats—that’s it.
As I type, I am in the middle of enjoying (?) an “off day” from hiking so I could get some lab work done at the hospital. I am also in the middle of Week 4 of increasing my lumber mileage to 30 miles. Because if I can’t go faster (and I can’t, not yet), I must go further. Know what I mean?
The past two, now three, weeks have been busy as I’ve upped my weekly lumbering goal to a minimum of 30 miles [I have 23.49 in my feetz as of Thursday A.M.] until the snow starts flying. Of course, with the combination of the world burning itself down, climate change, and El Niño ’23/’24 in effect, who knows, I might be hiking 30 miles a week in February… in a Post World War III nuclear wasteland littered with ashen, lifeless bodies. NOTE: I am not sure how I survived; I credit beer pickling.
I had a good week of lumbering and took the time to tweak some standard loops with different trails to keep things fresh as we get further into the stank scrum of autumn.
Throughout most of the week’s hikes, I had next week’s appointment with Doctor Bob in my head, as well as the blood tests I needed to have done beforehand to check my cholesterol numbers.
After last week’s one-year anniversary of the ’22 Comeback Special/’23 Soil The Woods Tour, I continued on as normal, lumbering through the increasingly fall-like woods of central Michigan.
