So, I won’t bury the lede here. The big news is this: On Friday July 1st 2011, I will be leaving Bellingham. I’ll be leaving with a backpack, a change of clothes, 30-odd pounds of carefully selected and tested gear, and some boots. Good, well broken-in boots, because my car will be staying here. I’ll be leaving on foot.

I’m planning to take a shakedown hike through the San Juan Islands, then later in July I’ll be meeting up with my dad and sister at Sea-Tac and I’ll spend a week touring around NW Washington with them. After that I intend to hike the PCT from Mt Rainier to Cascade Locks, and west up the Gorge to Portland. From there, I’d like to hike farther south on the PCT from Mt Hood to Crater Lake. From there, who knows. I see trails, trains, and many long-missed friends and family members in my future.

I’d like to end up Back East eventually– I’ve never seen many of the east coast states, and most of my family lives in Florida now. I have old friends in the Carolinas and in Maryland who I haven’t seen in half-a-forever. Of course I’d love to get back to Michigan for an extended visit too. I likely won’t be able to fit all or most of that into this year, but starting this summer I aim to have lots of time on my hands and few obligations, and thus fewer excuses not to keep right on travelling. With luck, that’ll carry over well into next year and beyond. Remember: it’s always summer somewhere.

I plan to get back to Bellingham eventually– I love it here, after all– but it won’t be for quite some time, and it probably won’t be to stay.

I informed Kevin (the miller / my boss) on the first of the year; I’ve told my sister, mom & dad, a bunch of my local friends. They’ve all taken the news quite well. That’s been incredibly encouraging, thanks you all. (I’d been wanting to tell the rest of you all weeks ago, but haven’t had the time or energy to write this properly until now.)

I’ll try and explain my motivations more in later posts, but it all comes back to old ideas of living simply combined with post-industrial ideas about making a living through ingenuity. To quote [an influential document]: “Appropriate technology, green thinking, machines doing what machines do best, people doing what people do best.”

Those of you who know me know that I’ve been harboring such notions for quite some time. The big news isn’t that I’m leaving town on an extended backpacking trip to tromp around the States on foot. The big news is that I’ve picked a date.

July 1st 2011! Fourth of July weekend, baby. My phone has a little home-screen display that I’ve programmed to countdown the days. Today is D-165. Only twenty-three and a half weeks until July. In the meantime, I have a lot of preparing to do.

As I cryptically alluded last time, I have a New Year’s Resolution going to sleep outside one day out of every 7. Every Saturday, to be precise. It’s been coooold the past two weekends and I’ve chickened out, but this weekend I’m hoping to drive up to Lynden with some gear and camp out in a friend’s backyard at least.

This week I’ve also started switching my everyday diet over to trail foods– natural dry milk, good ol’ granola, organic dehydrated potato flakes, trail mix. Not a huge stretch away from my usual diet really, but I may as well start now.

I’m also leaving my car parked at home again this week and getting back to my daily routine of taking the commuter bus to Burlington then walking from Cook Road Park-N-Ride to the flour mill each morning. That’s about a 1.5 mile hike along the railroad grade– or 3 miles round-trip every day, with a light pack that I’ll gradually be filling to full travel weight. I put up some photos of my daily commute on Flickr yesterday; it’s actually quite a lovely walk most days (and of course I’ll be saving hundreds of dollars in gas money in the process). [Have a looksy].

In five and a half months, I aim to be ready to leave my cozy home here in the top-left corner of the map and get back out into the wider world again.

I’m really excited about 2011. I have some incredible plans for this year that I want to share here, soon.

But right now the writing part of my brain just does not work mid-week. Honestly, it barely functions even in the best of times. After a day of pouring my energy into making flour, keeping current with my hobbies, and trying not to screw up any of the hundreds of other complex procedural and social interactions of my day, writing a blog post becomes a much more exhausting prospect.

Maybe I’ve said all this before, probably multiple times, but I just want to make it continually clear. Most weekday nights I am riding the yellow line between tired-and-happy or tired-and-grouchy. At that point, I hit a fork in the decision tree: I can either (A) start writing a blog post, run out of energy, become grouchy, and end up writing a grouchy blog post about how grouchy I am… or (B) snap closed the laptop, stay happy, and go do something else.

Most weekday nights I decide to stay happy and write nothing. Most weekend nights I’m doing something more interesting than plunking words into a text box and hitting “Publish”. But yet, I like having this website. I like having a platform for posting updates on my thoughts and whereabouts for other people to come to and read– or not– at their leisure.

How do I jive those two competing desires (to both have a blog and avoid the stress of blogging)? By continuing to refine how I manage my time and energy, probably. This year one of my three^* Resolutions is to update each of my web projects (this site, [HUD], and [Nodeslam]) on a weekly schedule. In order to make that happen, I’ve started to make some dear and drastic cuts to some of my other much-loved hobbies. “Reading sci-fi novels” is right out, cut from my agenda altogether (and I was just getting into [Perdido Street Station], too). “Reading webcomix and MtG news” has been relegated to Friday nights only (and there’s Mirrodin Besieged previews going on at [DailyMTG] right now, grawh, so hard to not click that link). Similarly, “Flickr” is now Sundays only, “play MtG w/ my nerd crew” is now Tuesdays, “prep/play an RPG” is Thursdays, and so on.

Once that new routine starts clicking in and kicking back dividends of unlocked time, I’m aiming to add “update ByM” to my Monday night agenda, “update Nodeslam” to Wednesdays, and “update HUD” on Mon-Fri.

Um…. so, I guess, see you next Monday? Or not. Changing one’s life momentum is a tricky business. I’ll keep working on it. Until then, no news is good news.

^* footnote: I like to make three (and only three) New Year’s Resolutions each year. My other two for 2011 are “Sleep outside one day out of seven” and “Pay off 50% of my remaining debt”. You can follow these and other boring goals– if you really want to– on [Heads-Up Display]. Yes, I’ll explain the sleep-outside thing next time.

“Be your own fiction. After that, the story almost writes itself.”

I usually avoid these but I have time to burn tonight, and I enjoyed this challenge much more than that nonsensical “BBC” list of 100 books that’s floating around. Thanks, Justin D.

The Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Name fifteen fictional characters (television, films, plays, books, etc.) who’ve influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Then, if you’d like, tag fifteen friends on [Fb] (including me, please. I’m interested in seeing what characters you choose.)

Mine:
1. Arthur Dent (The Hitchhiker’s Guide)
2. Jack Duluoz [Kerouac's literary alter-ego] (Desolation Angels, etc)
3. Luke Skywalker (Star Wars)
4. Legolas (LotR)
5. Yakko Warner (Animaniacs)
6. Encyclopedia Brown
7. Pippi Longstocking
8. Usagi Yojimbo
9. Ed Bloom (Big Fish)
10. Kaylee Frye (Firefly)
11. Kurt Wagner [Nightcrawler] (X-Men)
12. Randy Waterhouse (Cryptonomicon)
13. John Locke (Lost)
14. Radical Edward (Cowboy Bebop)
15. Shelley Winters ([Scary Go Round])

honorable mention:
Bugs Bunny, The Doctor, Arkady from [FreakAngels] [also: KK, Karl], Rob Gordon (High Fidelity), Cool Hand Luke, Guy Noir

commentary: #1-3 should be obvious. Small-town dreamers turned hapless, seat-of-pants adventurers after falling in with marvelous friends? Yeah. (4) Legolas was a tough choice; Aragorn is my hero in the novels, but in the films there are subtle– and a few not so subtle– moments where Legolas really shines. (5) I realized again just a couple weeks ago (while talking with Monica T) that Animaniacs likely had a bigger influence on my sense of humor than any other single source.

(6,7) Encyclopedia Brown and Pippi Longstocking were my grade-school literary heroes. (8,9) Usagi Yojimbo & Ed Bloom are the guys I want to be when I grown up. (10) Kaylee was another toughie. All nine of those characters are so fun and relatable. But Kaylee is the person on that crew whom I would most like to be. (11) Kurt’s my favorite X-Man– for many of the same reasons as Kaylee, oddly. (12) I’ve said it before: Randall Waterhouse is the finest nerd in fiction. (The rest) You figure it out.

Shelly and Ed were late-adds when I was nearing the end and realized I hadn’t named very many women. Looking back over the list though, the biggest bias that jumps out is that these characters are 100% white people. Well, okay, I guess Usagi is Japanese and technically a rabbit, and Radical Ed is fairly post-racial, but the rest of these dudes– much like the rest of my Facebook friends list– are very, very white. Not saying that’s particularly strange or unexpected. Just interesting. I guess one take-away is that it’d be healthy for me to read about and emulate a more diverse array of people.

Also, no Star Trek characters on there? Or video games characters? Huh.

I’m getting a root canal tomorrow. Not even an easy, standard root canal. A complicated root canal that requires a specialist– an endodontist, a profession I did not even know existed on Monday.

Short version: I needed & got a root canal in one of my front teeth when I was a little kid. There is a gap at the top of that filling now, 15 years later, way up on the inside of the tooth. (Maybe it got worn away from the inside somehow, maybe it was just a bad filling and the gap was there at day 1). There is a colony of bacteria up there and it’s eating away at the bone. If I don’t– well, if a dentist doesn’t– drill out the old filling and put in a new one, the tooth is going to continue to hurt like a mofo and eventually fall out. I like to keep my teeth in my head thank you, so: root canal.

I’m not worried at all about the procedure. Heck, if the doc says I’m okay to drive, I’m planning to go straight on to the mill afterward & work the rest of the day. I guess it must mean you’re an adult when dentists stop being “pain scary” and start being “pocketbook scary”. What bums me out is the $900 blow to my savings account. That expense is going to implode my travel budget for the next few months, crumpling up whatever plans I may have had for getting away for the holidays. Buh-bye Thanksgiving in Oregon, see ya Christmas in Fort Myers.

Does that mean I’ll be moping around at home every weekend playing video games? Ha, nope. It just means I’ll be snowshoeing closer to home, suckas. And fortunately, “closer to home” just so happens to include Mt. Baker/Snoqualmie National Forest. And it just started snowing up on Kulshan on Monday. Check it out: [http://www.mtbaker.us/snow-report/conditions-photos]

As typical, I seem only to have time to write about the one lousy thing happening to me at any given time, and not the ten marvelous things that are happening all around it. Next entry will be all snowshoeing all the time, promise.

(And yes, I realize I never [finished my thought] vis-a-vis HUD and plans for next year. I’ve been talking informally to some of my more-local friends about next year’s plans, so bits of that info are now circulating out there. As for HUD, I’ve been so slampacked with work the last two months that my organizing-system has failed around the edges– I’m flying without instruments until I can get a bit of breathing space.)

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