On December 8th, I ordered a couple of t-shirts from a Michigan-based clothing company I’ve ordered from a few times before. I like their tees, as well as the idea of supporting a Michigan company and keeping my carbon footprint smaller. The US Postal Service had other ideas.
Since I’m at the age where I see enough balls dropping just by looking in the mirror, I continued my custom of being in bed several hours before midnight on New Year’s Eve.
I took the weekend off from lumbering just ’cause I wanted to, but I wish I hadn’t.
The weather was dark, glum, and morose all weekend, the football sucked, and unsurprisingly Spurs blew another lead to draw 2-2 with Wolves. I hate them. My time would have been much better spent walking in the woods with my camera, but the ache of “new muscles” used whilst hiking three days on mushy snow and a tired mind from a week of grief, travel, and holiday “merriment” had me thinking differently.
The good part of the weekend was that 50˚ and an all-day rain melted any shred of snow, and the trails were completely bare come Monday morning.
With warmer temps, conditions in the woods have been getting progressively worse, so on Friday, I needed to adjust expectations of what I was going to get out of my morning lumber. I also needed to make further adjustments to my kit.
While we were away in Pennsylvania, the central Michigan area picked up another few inches of wet snow on top of what we already had on the ground, and that made for some tricky hiking conditions on Christmas morning.
Wifey would be joining me for the early morning lumber, and we debated whether to take the snowshoes with us or not. We settled on sharing my trekking poles and using hikers, and that proved to be just fine, with only minor slipping here and there.
My much-anticipated weekend of slack turned out great, and I enjoyed all the hits: good beer, good food cookin’, a commanding Spurs victory, sexy time, and other indoor goofball slacker activities due to freezing rain. As Ren Höek would say, “This is the life.” Well, at least until Monday.
On a recent wintry lumber, I created a new course in my head that I was sure would easily get me over 5 miles and provide some new stimulation for my eyes. I was half right.
The new course just barely got me to my 5-mile goal, so that was a bit disappointing; however, it did provide the appropriate amount of visual stimulation for picture takin’, so I’ll take it.
I’ve been thinking more about the trails I lumber on lately, and it brought back some memories. I’ll explain.
Thursday’s 5-mile lumber in 10˚ temps had me feeling pretty logy last night, but I was up and ready for another 5 miles today and the chance to hit my 25-mile weekly lumbering goal.
Thank goodness it was going to be warmer today. Well, by 4˚.
With about a mile left in my lumber on Wednesday, I passed Mary(?) and Jim(?) coming in the opposite direction. Mary is usually the more talkative of the two when we pass, but this time, Jim said, “It’s going to be something else tomorrow!”
I was confused for a second, but then I remembered the weather forecast: a high of 16˚, windy conditions, and light snow. “Oh, yeah, I saw that! Gonna have to bundle up!”
And the weather people were not wrong.
The week of lumbering is flying by, and I’m currently sitting at a nugget’s hair over 15 miles, with my 25-mile weekly goal on track to finish by the weekend.
What’s not on track is my time spent getting real-life, Cul-De-Sac-ian type crap done, so this post is super short (another gift to you) and heavy on photos from the past two days.