gwax's rumblings

Today was Valentine’s day (still is, but that’s not impor­tant to the story). Today started with me wak­ing up at 6:00a from a really lucid dream. It was an odd expe­ri­ence; I woke up and was all like, wait, when did I go to sleep, wasn’t I just awake. It was all early like because today was a day of plans.

Then I drove into Cambridge for a cou­ple of rea­sons. Firstly, I needed my Nalgene bot­tles (the rea­son will likely be appar­ent in the next para­graph). And sec­ondly, I had a cin­der block to deliver. Many months ago (some time last sum­mer) I resolved to give a girl a cin­der block every Valentine’s Day hence­forth. Today was the first giv­ing of a cin­der block, but, trust me, I’m going to keep it up until I actu­ally real­ize how stu­pid it is (not very likely).

Anyway, then I set out for Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire to do some hik­ing (me likey hikey). Oh, and this is why I needed them Nalgene things and the water. So, I’m nearly to Mount Monadnock and then the car gets a flat tire. No biggee, I know how to deal with a flat tire, but some­times, the wheel gets stuck and you kick it and three dif­fer­ent peo­ple stop and offer help but fail. Eventually, you call AA, wait no, that’s for drunks; you call AAA and some guy shows up and helps you get the flat off and the spare on.

So I got to the moun­tain thing, climbed it and had a gen­er­ally great time. At the top I sat around for a while and hung out. I had a beer and a nice con­ver­sa­tion about win­ter hik­ing and camp­ing and the like with a cou­ple of guys that came up a dif­fer­ent trail. They sug­gested some shel­ters in Pinkham Notch; I sus­pect that they mean the Hermit Lake Shelters, which match their descrip­tion from what I find on Google and in my AMC book. I think that the Hermit Lake Shelters would prob­a­bly do quite well for the camp­ing trip that we’re plan­ning for March.

It was ~1:30 up Monadnock and ~1:00 down, very windy at the top, really nice vis­i­bil­ity. So after the moun­tain thing I came back, got the flat replaced and then did the whole sit around thing and have been yam­mer­ing stu­pid ban­ter back and forth with Will.

That’s my Valentine’s day in sum­mary; not very roman­tic, but pretty amusing.

Hippo, Max, Riad and I went sled­ding this evening and it was totally awe­some. Yesterday, it snowed a bunch and then it rained a bit but then it got colder again today. The final result of all of these weather shenani­gans was a thin layer of snow that was coated by a thicker layer of ice-like crust and then there were many areas con­sist­ing entirely of ice. Suffice it to say that there was quite a lot of fast sled­ding and a lot of bumps that will likely be bruises tomor­row, but hey, it builds char­ac­ter and it was totally worth it.