Vernons Away!

 haha, this is kinda fun...thanks skippy!

So, the premise is simple: put your name + “needs” into The Google (as I like to call it) and see what comes up! Here’s what happened:

Katie needs...HULA LESSONS! i love that this is first! maybe i DO need hula lessons...

Katie needs...your help! hmmm...help is good. anyone looking to hire a katie vernon?

Katie needs...to work on her posture! Uhg! this is so true, i sit on a yoga ball when i work on the computer, but i still hunch..maybe hula would help with this. 

Katie needs...to be on her own. interesting. there is talk of me going to btown this summer. 

Katie needs...a rest. not having a job is actually very stressful...i could use a rest, preferably somewhere warm, where i could work on my hula skills. 

______________________________________________________

Frank needs...a woman. good thing i got one!

Frank needs...sensitivity training. seriously, it said that.  what a load of crap.  i'm happy as a bag of wigs.

Frank needs...wheels. now this would be awesome.  besides me being scared of skateboarding and those shoes with the wheels in them, i'm sure if i had some i'd figure it out.  wheels on the balls of my feet that i can push along with my big toes.

Frank needs...nets to improve intensity on defense. with nets i could ensnare my opponent, thus rendering helpless while i move to offense.  brilliant!

Frank needs...shelter. shelter from Nootka, who currently has the most consistently awful gas she has ever had.  thank you, katie for giving her cheese at lunch.  fresh mozzarella, no less!

Frank needs...to put the reins on Vince. friggin' Vince.  if he shows his lousy face around here again, i'll show'em a world of hurt.  no disrespect.

it's been a busy start to the semester.  lots of reading, lots of writing, lots of trying to figure out the meaning of life.  and i'm tired.  katie's tired, too- sick with a nasty cold, she's up in bed getting a much-needed nap in.  i've been looking up research in the educational and business fields on team leadership or co-leadership... there is surprising little in business literature.  maybe it's too commie-red for that field of study still.  the educational field has quite a bit, but it's inter-disciplinary pairings between special and general education teachers- still a little outside of my intra-disciplinary world of outdoor education team teaching pairings.

oh well.

yeah, kinda nerdy.  i know.  but then again, i've always been kinda nerdy.

so, what's new here?  not much, really- we're trying to figure out what to do with the place in bloomington (we're going to keep it for now, since who knows whether or not we'll need it again)... try and get it up for rent, i think.  at least through next year.  as for here, katie's looking for work and i'm looking for ways out of work.  well, not really looking for ways out of work- just trying to get my workload under control for the semester.  it's all still a little overwhelming and i fear that i'll be 1/2 way through the semester before i know it, and feeling rather behind schedule.  i've taken to setting up my work station on campus in front of the climbing wall: read a little, do a route, write a little, do a route- the activity keeps me off steep and cheap, which i think ends up being a time-saver in the long run.  and it keeps me from having a total mental collapse. 

strangely, i only have 2 classes next year- one each semester- so i figure i should just power through this semester knowing that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, but then again, i have no idea how i'll fill up my time next year.  i just sent plymouth state university's professor an email to see if they expect any teaching opportunities to be open next year, so we'll see how that goes. 

anyways, i really need to get back to reading.  lots of articles to read, and i still have to tackle dewey's experience and education- i think i'm supposed to read it 3 times by tuesday.  i hear that's how many times it takes before one has enough of a grasp to actually discuss it. 

you've been waiting a while, i know.  wondering what the deal is.

actually, at this point you are probably already aware of katie and my tribulations over winter break... but if for some reason you aren't, here goes:

katie and i have a place in bloomington indiana that we were trying to sell upon moving to new hampshire.  but then the housing market collapsed.  so, just as we were switching to rental-mode (and just as a family was writing an offer on our house from seattle), we got a call from our friend Jill that something had gone wrong with the place.  as near as our calculations can be (a likewise pretty accurate depiction can be found with more brevity here), here's what happened:

1. sometime between nov 20 and dec 10 our house was being shown and the realtor or client messed with our thermostat, switching it from heat/auto to a/c.

2. on roughly december 10th about 6 pipes in our house, from the garage to the north wall, burst

3. on december 18th the utility company was checking meters, saw that ours was spinning at 10 gal/min, and shut off the water

4. the meter reader left a note on the door and drove away

5. on december 28th (10 days later!) one of our smoke detectors' batteries went dead, causing an incessant every-one-minute beeping; which prompted a neighbor to call our real estate agent (who was on vacation)

6. one of her other agents goes to our house, sees the damage, and calls her up

7. she isn't sure if she has our phone number- but has one of our friends, so calls her

8. jill calls us, we drive back to bloomington thinking that a bit of carhartt, drywall, and friends can fix the problem we'll encounter

9. we see the damage



that's really just the start of it all.  over the course of about 8.25 days roughly 120,000 gallons of water flowed into our house, with at least 2 of the burst pipes being in the wall between the upstairs and downstairs sinks- collapsing this section of ceiling in the downstairs apartment.  all of the walls, the ceilings, and the floor needed to be ripped out.  the carpet when we walked in (despite being water-free for 10 days) was absolutely soaked and practically still underwater.  everything was taken out.  even the floor to the upstairs kitchen had to be taken out:



who knew we had such ugly tiling underneath the faux-wood!  it looks like katie's backsplash that she made will make it through renovations, but some new cabinetry is going in as well.  lots of cleaning, painting, re-drywalling, etc.

insurance is covering the cost of repairs, but we're certainly at a crossroads of what to do with the place now... it's basically being remodeled, with a whole new apartment downstairs and partially redone upstairs... so to try and sell again, or hang on to and rent out?  we also aren't quite sure if we'll end up back in indiana within a year or two (need to see how different universities offer ph.d funding), so we might hang on to the place for now as a rental.  at least until we know what our 5-year looks like.

we did have some positives come out of it all, though:
1. we got to hang out with some of our favorite people, even if in odd circumstances
2. we found a secret storage closet downstairs!  no way!  we had NO idea that there was a closet downstairs in the apartment hidden behind the entertainment center.  no idea.  it was stocked to the gills with boxes (man, i really hoped for boxes of money.  really.) of books- books on germany, the pacific islands, the navy, and sci-fi.  i think someone that lived there in the early 90's (there were also a couple of early 90's textbooks) had a relative in the navy during WWII or specialized in it as a professor at the university.  besides the boxes of books, though; we found a couple of real treasures: 2 HUGE white fake-fur rugs, and we're talking like 4-inch long fur here, as well as 3... ummmm... "paintings".

how best to describe these works of... ummmm... art?  they're certainly unique. 

these two are totally black velvet:



and this one.  well, i don't quite know how best to describe this... it's not a painting, first off.  it's definitely furry, with beady eyes... sort of like someone did a dog-hair loop-stitch or something.  we love it.



enhance!



we're putting them all up in our place here in new hampshire.  we have the perfect place for them, in our exotic-honey orange stairwell going from the kitchen up to our bedroom with the strange un-usable nook in the back.  it can be our terribly-bad art nook.

all in all, the whole experience feels a little bit like a song by Battles.  try this one on for size:

i drove back into new hampshire last night after a week back in bloomington- katie's still there and should be joining me at home hopefully next week- and as i promised before, the full story of why we ended up back in bloomington will be posted soon.

but i need pictures first, and the camera's still back in bloomington.


SO, i'm sitting here in dover rather bored and without my sweetie; and that can only mean one of two things: i'm eating junk and i'm immersed in music.  hopefully ice climbing friday with some friends.  probably on campus working tomorrow.  maybe tele skiing sometime in the next few days.

but until then, i felt like sharing some music with you that holds a special place in my heart.  as you may (or may not) know, i've been kind of a music snob ever since i found metallica and joe satriani in gradeschool while everyone else was listening to vanilla ice and wierd al.  over time there have been a couple of bands that have risen to the top of my list and garnered my respect as being above-and-beyond talented, despite the fact that none of them ever "made it" as big-name tickets.  i'm just perusing youtube and i'll post a vid if it remotely works.

first up: The Appleseed Cast.  i truly believe they might be the most underrated band of late 90's and 00's.  unfortunate.  their 2-disc set  (Low Level Owl Vols I & II) pretty much got me through college.



second on the list: Sunny Day Real Estate.  you know.  best thing to come out of seattle in the 90's.  yes, better than pearl jam.  better than nirvana.  deal with it.  in the same way that we look back on the influence of the velvet underground, so it shall be with sdre.  and yes, that is them on a very young jon stewart show!  let's put it this way: when dave grohl wanted to start the foo fighters, he immediately asked the bassist and drummer from sdre to be his band.



third on my list tonight: damien jurado.  i couldn't find a good live version of this song, so you get to deal with an odd pic of damien staring at you through the whole song.  it's worth turning on in the background.  damien jurado has been doing the singer/songwriter thing since the early 90's in seattle, found when called in to open a show for jeremy enigk (of sunny day real estate) after a last-minute cancellation.  unfortunately last time katie and i saw him live he had just come down with a nasty cold so it wasn't the best show.  he really is one of my favorite songwriters.



finally, Over the Rhine.  they've just been getting better with age, turning more and more to their own flavor of folk/indie/jazz.  hard to mess with.  when i was a little punk kid in high school this band was my hidden joy.  ashamed, i was!



yes, it's one of those nights.  but time for bed.  in my most humble of opinions; though, i have left you with some of the most important below-the-radar musicians of the last 20 years.

good night!

my oh my... where to begin?  2008 went out with the most fantastic bang i've ever seen, and 2009 is going to start with an amazing story.

it's about 1am on Jan 1, 2009; and Katie and I are at our friends' place (Kim Collins and Mary Williams) back in Bloomington.  we just got home from a semi-formal new year's eve party at our other friends' place (Jada and Bethany)- I would have planned accordingly had I known we were going to a semi-formal, but as it was that we came to bloomington in a rush, i ended up borrowing a skull-and-crossbones tie from Kim and wore a red button-down shirt from goodwill with my grey patagonia double-knee pants.  i also found a synthetic mountain hardwear jacket at said goodwill, but i digress.

none of the above has anything to do with the story that needs to be told, but it does serve as an excuse for saying that i'm a bit too tired to write it all down at the moment.  let's just say that pictures have been (and are continuing to be) taken, and you should prepare yourselves for a multi-part story that will unfold on this site over the coming days and weeks.  possibly months.  if i get some time at a coffeeshop tomorrow or sometime in the next couple of days i'll get started, so just stay tuned and check in now and again.


talk to you all soon!

well, christmastime has come and gone with snow between the ground and our skis; family is slowly drifting back home between today and tomorrow; a warm front is melting away our once-impressive white expanse before it gets cold again by tuesday; and katie and i are finding out if we'll be spending the start of the new year here in new hampshire exploring snowy trails and wine bars with good friends- or back in bloomington, shampooing a carpet and putting up new drywall with good friends.  or; if we can move quickly, both.

there has been some sort of confirmation that there was a pipe leak or burst in our home in bloomington (the one we've been trying to sell for who-knows-how-long and that we're going to have to start renting), but no word yet on the damage; and if it's merely the sort of thing where we can pay a friend to go over with a carpet shampooer and some anti-mold paint or if it's bad enough that we'll have to drive back to bloomington and re-drywall/mud/paint a room.  hopefully we'll know by the end of today- tomorrow mid-day at the latest.

personally, i'd much rather be able to stay here and have friends come out to visit us because our place really just needs a plumber to fix a small leak so that the water can be turned back on- but we'll see.  it's an unknown, so there's no use fretting at the moment.  we'll plan accordingly when we have the details.


in other news, we had family in for christmas- katie's sister sherin and her husband jp, katie's mom and jack.  bbq ribs for christmas dinner, a trip up to a closed-down portland (everyone gone from maine for the holidays), a bit of time in portsmouth, some candle-pin bowling.  candle-pin bowling is an interesting one: the pins are symetrical- narrow on the bottom and top with the roundest part in the middle, while being quite a bit smaller than normal pins and more widely spaced apart.  the ball is much smaller also, about the size of a bocce ball (although a bit heavier) with no holes for your fingers.  all-in-all, it is much more difficult to knock the pins down and the technique is much different than typical bowling.  as such, you get three rolls per frame and the downed pins aren't cleaned up after each roll- they can be necessary to help get the rest of the pins down.  we had a few spares over our two games we played, but apparently a good game of candlepin bowling- the best players- only bowl about a 130 or so per game.  i guess it's huge in northern new england (mass, nh, maine).



today we're having some sort of major heat wave- it's around 56 and i'm in flip flops walking through the slushy snowmelt- it's sad to see the snow going so quickly, but if this doesn't totally take down our ice up in the mountains it could mean some very fat conditions when it all refreezes in a day or so.  i've got my fingers crossed its enough to help but not really hurt.  i haven't gotten out ice climbing yet this winter (our first trip out was called on account of a pretty swollen creek not being frozen over yet, and then it was family in for christmas) and the month of january is really when i'm hoping to be outside enjoying that infamous new england ice- although i don't really think i have to worry about it disappearing when this is where we get to go now:



check out those ice routes in the backcountry at the end of the vid!  some are well into the 1,000's of feet worth of rock and ice.  awesome.

SNOW!

we've been shoveling for a couple of days now.  the clouds decided to dump buckets between thursday and last night:


On saturday my friend Ben (here's his wife's blog) and I braved the roads and drove up to Waterville Valley on a two-fold mission: to pick up his season pass (i'm still deciding if i should get one, more on that later), and to get in some tele-skiing.  If you're not sure what tele-skiing is per se, here's a basic breakdown: it's sort of like alpine skiing on x-country skis, but you have beefier boots, bindings, and skis than normal x-country skis.  To turn, you need to do a lunge onto your outside ski like this:

All-in-all, a very different sort of skiing.  I'm used to alpine skiing, where it is something of a mindless exercise in speed control- but going out saturday, I must say I got my little butt handed to me on the slopes- it was my first time tele-skiing, a skill that i have long wanted to learn but haven't had the time or location to work out.  i knew it would be a thigh-burner, but i wasn't quite prepared for how tired it got me.  by the end of the day, my legs just didn't want to hold me up any more and i ended up finding myself just toppling over when lunging into a turn by the last run.  good thing the mountain was closing by that point.

but it was gobs of fun- a very focused, intent sort of exercise that i could see getting into.  luckily, we have a couple of places here in new hampshire where one can ski without paying- either backcountry locations, or ski resorts that have for one reason or another closed- but where a loyal few still keep the trails down clear enough to ski on, so that those who really want to exercise can hike up and ski down, or ski across a ridge from a nearby resort with a lift.  here's one of those locations.  hopefully i can get out a few more times this winter and start to nail it down.  i was just getting the hang of it yesterday, but unfortunately it coincided with my legs deciding that they'd had enough.

katie and i also love us some x-country skiing.  we have a great place just 5 minutes away from our house that offers some 5-6 mile trails through woods and fields.  we went out there yesterday with nootka (she, by the way, LOVES romping around in the snow), and we'll head back out there again after it warms up just a bit today.  i promise to take a couple of pics to post up here.

we're SORE, but happy.  snow is good.  hopefully it'll stick around long enough for us to get some enjoyable days out on it.  i'm sure it will- after all, we're in new hampshire, right?

so apparently the northeast was hit by an ice storm.  really, it was about 3-4 days of straight-up rain that slowly became ice thursday afternoon when the temperature dropped to 31 degrees.  rumor has it the mountains got about 15 inches of powder, but i've forced myself away from the outdoors until i've finished my projects due monday: a 20-page research report, a communications log for a program, and mailings for a job fair.  i think they're all done.  snow and/or ice this coming week.


but the storm:
it didn't feel like that much of a storm, really.  sometime thursday night our power went out, then came back on again.  then, an hour later, it went out again.  an hour after that, it came back on.  at 530am, it went off again.  we woke up around 745 to no power, and; not sure what it would entail, we headed out- hoping to find breakfast and coffee somewhere in town.  what we ended up finding was a town completely dark- roughly 1/3-1/2 inch of ice brought down trees, tree branches, and subsequently powerlines all over the place.  unsure but hopeful due to our family in new york's experience in a blackout being next to a fire department, we headed to Adelle's- a fantastic coffee shop in town that is across the street from town hall and the police station.  the hunch paid off- they were on the same power grid, a power grid that was immediately restored so that emergency operations could be run from a command center.  we checked out our situation online (adelle's has free wireless internet, not to mention free refills on excellent coffee), which was saying something to the effect of this ice storm being worse than the infamous ice storm of 1998 that left people without power for a week.  

i texted out a message to our friends in the area (who also desparately needed internet and electricity for their projects) and soon had adelle's front room taken over with outdoorsy-looking ruffians.  beards and carhartts, that sort of thing.  friday was spent sitting at the coffee shop as the stress began to build in me: pipes bursting, papers going unwritten, months of cold and darkness, spoiled bison meat in the freezer.  i left everyone (including katie) at adelle's and drove from hardware store to hardware store, looking for a kerosene or propane heater.  of course, everything was sold out- until i got to home depot.  although they had told me on the phone that they were out of heaters, i stopped by anyways.  there was a wall full of them.  i picked up a propane heater (keep a window open because of the carbon monoxide poisoning, they told me), and on the 4th try found a full propane tank outside- an infinitely more confusing ordeal than i expected- and drove back to adelle's feeling much relieved.

we took nootka out to kingsman farm- a university-owned chunk of woods and fields that the mountain biking team maintains and a favorite trail running and hiking destination for us.  the sun had come out and ice was falling off trees and power lines (sometimes 20-foot segments falling onto the road, even better if onto the car in front of you)- the sun was warmer than the house- so we hit the field.  nootka had been holed up away from the rain for a few days, and the chance to run/sniff/get dirty was a huge hit with her.  here's a pic:






Saturday was spent sitting in front of the climbing wall on campus, doing a mix of exercise and writing while katie watched a matinee of Australia at the mall (she says the dog looks just like nootka, but that's not a good enough reason to see it).  I had stressed out enough friday night that we shut off the water supply so no pipes would burst, and i took our freezer contents out to the garage.  having me out of the house was probably a good thing.  

sometime saturday afternoon the electricity was restored at our house, and we moved back in without major incident.  a number of our friends, though, are still without.  we had one friend come by last night with her little shit-poo dog (shitzu/poodle mix), but ended up staying elsewhere.  another is on his way over with pizza in exchange for warmth and wireless internet while he gets work done. 

myself?  i'm feeling pretty relaxed, what with the balmy 59-degree house (the warmest it's been for a long time, we're only using a little space heater!)... so relaxed i think a little damien jurado is in order.

i promise you that this totally made our night.

it's somewhere around 9 degrees here, but supposed to warm up wednesday to like 55, then turn back into snow.  just be winter already!


but anyhoodles, without further ado:

sickness.  it's not fun.  i've come down with a nasty little head cold, right during the last week of the semester when i need to writing 2 final papers- one for statistics and one for research methodology.

although it could be worse, i could be sick right AFTER the semester ends when i should be ice climbing and skiing.  and writing research methodology stuff.


anyways, katie and i are in the doldrums so i've been tracking down stuff that brings the funny... sometime last night i decided that, although i know i should probably find it somewhat offensive, engrish funny was one of the best things i had seen lately.  i laughed hard, despite myself.


especially upon finding this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVDtzBeap7I

i would have embedded the video, but it seems like it could be just on edge of not deserving a spot on our blog.  so instead i'll just say that you shouldn't click on it unless you understand that we're actually quite cultured and inclusive people, and only frank in his lameness finds it amusing.  if you feel sensitive in an internationally-cultural p.c. sort of way, you may not want to check out either of the sites mentioned in this blog.



anyways, that's about where i'm at so far this morning.  time to get back to my statistics!

we got back from new york on one piece!  (maybe even a bit more than we left with, considering all of the amazing food)


nootka had a crazy time and, i must say, was spoiled rotten.  turkey dinner on thursday, multiple invitations up onto the sofa sleeper, 4+ walks a day to keep her tired out... i don't know how she's adjusting to life back up in new hampshire, especially with katie and i having schedules again.

really, i'm on crazy-schedule for the next 2 weeks.  2 final projects to do, both of which are basically writing journal articles (the sort of thing some people take years to complete).  so i'll be disappearing for about 14 days, doing statistical analyses and whatnot.  i put together some 14 data graphs this afternoon in the computer lab for one of my finals... it should take up about 3-4 of the 15-20 pages, so i'm feeling pretty good about that.  my other data is still being collected, thanks to surveymonkey, so i won't worry about that one for a few more days.


while we were in new york katie, sherin, and i went downtown to see Pape Mbaye- he's a senagalese performer who had to leave his country and seek asylum here in the states due to his sexual orientation.  i guess he's big stuff in africa, having played parties for the senegalese president and whatnot, but over the last couple of years there has been a huge anti-gay movement there.  he'd always wanted to travel to new york, and came here to escape the persecution. 

well, he was doing an interview/performance at a club in downtown new york on friday night that was advertised as a mix of african drumming, singing, and translated interview.  it sounded super-interesting, so we forked over the $4 tickets (sherin and jp are part of a super-secret discount club) and hit the subway.
we met up with jp downtown, but he was totally thrashed from thanksgiving prep followed by a day of work, so he drifted home and went to sleep... actually, later that night when we got home, he quite literally fell asleep on the floor.  snoring and everything.  sad panda.


the rest of us 3 hauled over to the venue, where we were ushered into a room that was something like a bursleque hall- some round tables, but lots of long tables where people just lined up while waitresses came around for drink orders.  i'm not sure what i was expecting, but maybe something more reminiscant of a concert venue was in my head.  the emcee came up and gave his back-slapping schpeel on pape being his new best friend (and soon to be yours!) and invited him up for an interview with a translater (from the audience, i think).

anways, pape was about what i was expecting to see: a mid-20's way-gay guy in hot pants and a black bra over his tight white t-shirt, lots and lots of jewelry.  it seemed like he was LOVING his newfound freedom to wear whatever the heck he wanted to in the states after years of persecution in senegal.  good for him.  the translater turned out to be something of a high school french teacher- as sherin pointed out, there's a difference between speaking french and translating french.  i felt pretty bad for her, considering there were quite a few people in the audience who could speak french- people were asking questions in french, and there were also a few senegalese that had been in the states for a while and had a great grasp of both the regional language of senegal and how it would best translate over into english.

so basically the interview was pretty bad.  the emcee was pretty ad-hoc, and the translater wasn't sure what to do.  people in the audience were correcting her mistakes and omissions.  eventually one of pape's (pronounced "pop") friends that had been in new york for about 10 years came up on stage and just took over for her.  she gladly ran off stage (and even leaved the show early). 

after the interview, pape's lawyer that helped him with his asylum request hopped on stage, giving a 15-minute tirade that basically went, "There aren't any NGO's that are out there helping GLBT's leave their country and seek refuge here in the US!" over and over again.  he must have said that like 25 times.  thing is, he wasn't even that impressive of a guy- it kind of came across as a star trek nerd debating the virtues of kirk over pickard (is that how you spell it?).  not to say that i don't see his point or agree with him, just to say that i wasn't very impressed.  none of us were.

pape eventually took the stage.  again, i wasn't sure what to expect.  we were sold on a mixture of performance from a guy known for african drumming, singing, and burlesque shows- so just about anything was possible.  what we got was an audience sitting at tables and a guy up on stage, by himself, singing along to his songs on a 7-song cd playing over the speakers.

karaoke!  it was like bad karaoke.  apparently he did a show the night before and was tired, and so we sat there as he told the guy in the back which track to play off his cd while he sang over the top of it.  actually, i'm not sure if he was lip-synching or not. 




in the end, it was pretty funny.  i was hoping for something a bit more exciting- perhaps a bit more professional musically- but all in all, it ended up being one of those things where "you really had to have been there" is the only way to describe it. 

this sunday night jeremy enigk is playing down in the city... dang, that sounds pretty sweet after this.

actually, he's playing up here in north hampton on the 10th (that's what, wednesday?), so we're going to try to go to that instead.

here's a clip to wash the stink out of our ears:

katie and i are sitting on the couch, waiting.

for snow
for thanksgiving
for nootka to be done at her salon visit so we can drive to new york
for my arm to heal.

well, i'm waiting for my arm to heal.  i seem to have strained a tendon in my right forearm... bummer, since the only way to fix it up is to rest it.  maybe for a couple of weeks... which is really making me feel a little stir-crazy, since it means no climbing. 

there's this nice little swell on the back of my arm just behind my wrist, and if you put a finger behind it while i bend my hand at the wrist, you can feel a tendon dragging back and forth like an old, brittle rubber band.  or a rusty hinge.  the athletic trainer at the campus rec center says it looks like tendonitis, but i'm thinking it's a fancy way of saying that the poor thing was strained and just needs rest.  so i got my hands on a wrist brace and i'm icing 2x a day, 20min-on, 20-off, 20-on again cycles.  plus getting a solid dose of arnica gel and vitiman I.  i got it while we were painting our bedroom, too much gripping a roller while working the ceiling- not something that my wrist was used to.


anyhoo, so hopefully after a couple weeks of rest it'll be back up and i can be back to climbing things.  actually, i've been thinking that my fingers don't seem to be seriously involved in the injury, so i've been wondering what climbing would look like while using the wrist brace... maybe next monday i'll test it out on the campus bouldering wall.


as for nootka, snow, and whatnot: well, we're heading down to NYC to hang with sherin and jp for a few days and partake in thanksgiving dinner (yay!); so nootka's getting cleaned up.  she needs it.  we tried to wear her out the last few days with long woodsy walks and a run yesterday in the misty wind, and as soon as she gets out from her bath/nail clipping/gland expressing we'll be on the road.  snow?  looks like it may be enough to ski up in the mountains, but we'll probably have to wait until the semester ends for that... it's been cold enough here when it is clear, but still just a couple of degrees too warm when storms roll in for solid snow.  fingers are crossed that over the next couple weeks that will change and we'll get even colder. 

we're bringing gluten-free bread, stuffing bread cubes, and chocolate cupcakes with raspberry and dark chocolate ganache down with us...mmmm... can't wait!  we also just scored some gluten-free oats, so katie can do oatmeal again- absolutely necessary now that it's getting to be winter.  i hear there's 2 feet of snow up in the mountains right now, and the ice climbing season was officially open for business the last couple of days... can't wait!  picks of our ice are constantly updated on neice and neclimbs...

i must share this.  it's too funny not to.




i know, i know... it's sick and messed up... but katie and i seriously can't stop laughing.  it's made our day.

i stole this from skippeh, and since i'm sitting in our most favoritist of coffee shops in dover right now, braindead from finishing up an annotated bibliography of outdoor leadership research and emailing some 80 new england outdoor programs to invite them to a job fair this february, it seemed like a good idea.


so here it goes:

it's one-word descriptions of my life.  feel free to steal it if you'd like.  no bigs.

What wakes you: sunlight
Your initial look in the mirror reveals: stubble
You usually first put on: hoodie
Your closet: metallic
Your mood before 11am: caffeinated
The first thing you look at online after email: TDS
Something you tend to snack on: tortillas
What you see out your front door: porch
Your takeout menus: pizza
Number of boxes of tissue out in your home right now: two
The way you sneeze would read: "wwwwwwhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaa...blazpt!"
Number of times a day you probably brush your hair: HA!
The most predominant thing in your pantry: rice
A smell commonly coming from your kitchen: PB
How you sort your books: topic
The way you keep your place in a book: dog-ear
Something you hide when people come over: b.o.
Number of people normally at your table during dinner: two
Something you put on your nightstand before bed: nightstand?
How high you pull the covers when you go to sleep: necky

do you live in seattle?  because if you do, then you know all about The Stranger.  and if you know all about the stranger, then you know that this week one of Katie's illustrations is the front cover art!

so swing on by your local stand and pick up a copy, frame it, and stand back and enjoy all of it's glory!


that's about it for today... it's in the low 20's out but we haven't gotten a good snow yet... there's ice and snow up in the mountains but i'm stuck with final projects leading up to early december- as soon as the semester's over, it's time to get outside and play.  although nootka and i did go for a trail run this morning- 830, in the woods, upper 'teens out... it was beautiful, not another soul in sight.  can't wait to be able to take the x-country skis out there!


and it's thursday night dinner at the vernons tonight- a bring-your-own super-secret mac and cheese recipe potluck... can't wait to see what we get!

Well folks, here it is, i think we are especially proud of this one, since frank tore down the wall, re-drywalled, and trimmed a ton, and i caulked, did the floor and some painting, and together we primed and installed the closets, and with our friends painted the whole room in just a few hours. It was really a big team effort to get us moved into our bedroom....and we love it! So, without further ado, here is a little before-during-after of the bedroom and also a look at the stairway/nook that i repainted at the end. enjoy!

ta da!

yesterday i facilitated a group of at-risk high school students from across the border in maine.  but seriously, if i went to this high school, i'd be at-risk as well.

first off, let's look at some numbers:

30% of all students actually excel in the current US school system;
30% just drift through but don't learn nearly as much as they could;
and 30% end up rebelling against the school system.


why is that, you may ask?

well, it's because the US school system doesn't work.  it never has.  there is no evidence that "traditional" school is appropriate- but that's the problem.  it isn't designed the way it currently is because it works.  it's set up the way it is because it is the cheapest way to shuttle a mass number of children through the ranks.

unfortunately, it only actually works for 1/3 of our kids. 

what the shit is that all about?
we obviously don't care about children's education as much as we care about our taxes, or we'd do something about that.



anyways, back to this school in maine: we had 9 kids yesterday.  we would have had 25, but about 1/2 of them were suspended the day before, and the rest got caught skipping and were suspended for that (what an amazing consequence: ditch school and we'll make you miss more of it!  oh no!).  suspended for what, you may ask? 

it turns out that in this school you get suspended for just about anything.  if you're in a fight (not even a physical fight, but an argument) with someone and a teacher hears you talking to A DIFFERENT STUDENT about that argument, that's a 3-day suspension.  so if you are one of the roughly everyone out there that benefits from talking through problems, you'll get suspended for it at this school.

i just don't get it.  are we really THAT stupid?




in other news, a bunch of friends came over last night and painted our bedroom under katie's direction (she had a couple requests to become people's graduate advisors for them because she was clear and told them exactly what to do) in exchange for pizza and beer.  it was a wonderful exchange, as we got our bedroom painted in record time and it's currently getting the floors finished up so that we can start thinking about moving in this weekend.  the end is in sight!  woohoo!

also, the weather is just nasty here right now.  wet, wet, wet.  and a nice cold front coming in right after all this rain, so we should be looking at ice early this next week.  hopefully some snow. 

finally, i think i strained a tendon or muscle in my arm painting/priming this past week.  i've got this point-specific and movement-specific shooting pain in my right forearm where i've got a noticeable swelling going on.  hopefully it's just a strained muscle and not any torn tissue, but time will tell.  i'm borrowing katie's wrist guard from when she hurt her forearm working at oliver winery and using some arnica gel... i really should be icing it, but i've been lazy.

and doing statistics.  and gearing up to write a paper on my definition of how people learn.  and fixing up a survey from a pilot testing to get it ready to have it re-done by a different group of people for a project and also as a pilot run of my master's thesis.  probably all this weekend.  while we move into our bedroom.


good times!

it's 4:30 and the sun has set.  explain THAT with your modern science.


that's what we get for living on the far reaches of the eastern time zone and practically in the arctic circle. 

katie just sold a print on etsy!  hooray! to someone in hawaii- rad, it's not even someone we know and it's her first sale!

hey, so where are you at, people we know?


in other news, i've been banging my head against the keyboard for the last 4 days trying to develop an annotated bibliography on outdoor leadership.  starting with around 90 studies, i've narrowed it down to a list of 80- all appropriately cited, with abstracts and annotations (basically my opinion).  it's 47 pages long.  at around 75% done i stopped to develop a presentation on the bibliography that i'm giving monday. 

ah, the exciting life of the grad student.

but why do all this?, you may ask.  here's the deal:

the outdoor leadership field has been hard at work since the 40's, starting with the 10th mountain division training for WWII.  research started coming in the 1970's, with the hayday of outdoor leadership research being the 80's.  not a lot has been done since then- not at all because we answered all of the questions, but because very few people have really been devoted to studying it. 

now here's the major problem:
all current outdoor leadership theory and practice teaches 3 basic skill sets: that of a) leader-to-task or environment, b) leader-to-group, and c) leader-to-self.  in that sense, leaders are all taught to be solo-leaders.

unfortunately, the field does not actually work that way.  all leaders are paired in co-leadership teams, resulting in a whole new dynamic.  it's as if every tennis team practiced singles-tennis but played doubles in matches- some skills would be transferrable, but there are some fundamental differences that one needs to understand to be successful at doubles tennis.

and here we are, expecting everyone to play doubles-tennis when we've never taught them how.  we don't have any research on skills involving leader-to-leader, or coleaders-to-group, etc.  that's where i'm trying to come in.  desparately.  and somewhat sloppily. 

lucky for me, the therapy and social work fields have a deal of co-leadership theory  (also ALL from the 80's.  what was up with leadership fever in the 80's?), so i'm drawing a lot from there... some of it transferrable, but in many ways we need to invent the wheel for the outdoor education field. 

which means i need to do some major research study trying to define what an effective co-leader relationship looks like, to pick apart what skills exist within that we can start frontloading and training our leaders to develop, as well as using to evaluate how are leaders are doing at forming co-leadership teams for their programs.



ok, thanks for that.  i needed to get that off my chest.  it's the stupidest thing in the world- apparently NO ONE, including the social/therapy field judging from my reading, has thought about how to define co-leadership in a manner that it can be TAUGHT and included in leadership trainings.  it's slapped me in the face earlier this semester as i was reading a very poorly done study relating to co-leadership that basically said that leaders believe that others should have the same leadership priorities that they have, and so we should make co-leadership teams based on pairing up leaders with the same skill sets.  the problem with that is, chiefly, that it's improbable.  then i realized: i read a lot about how "finding a good co-leadership team is incredibly difficult" in MANY, many studies... and not one of them had postulated that it's not because good co-leaders don't exist, it's because we don't TEACH PEOPLE HOW TO BE GOOD CO-LEADERS.

it's cleary been a long few days.  staring at studies that are dancing around the subject and not coming to grips with the obvious.  so frustrating.  must... do... own... study!  i'm putting together a few co-leadership studies from other fields right now to come up with a list of possible co-leadership traits deemed important to have, to develop a ratings scale that i can have professional outdoor leaders fill out, ranking their perceived importance of those items on a "not at all important......very important" sort of spectrum.  then pull it all together and see what consistantly gets ranked highest on importance and go from there... in a nutshell i think i've just summed up my master's thesis, so PROMISE YOU WON'T STEAL IT.  since clearly from the current literature no one else has come up with this, if i see it and i know you, i'm coming after you.  this is my ticket to a degree, so no taking it.

wow, i needed to vent all that out.  thanks.  even if you skipped past most of it.


in other news, katie and i are heading up to the mountains tomorrow, check out north conway.  the weather's supposed to be better tomorrow than it has been for the last 3 days, so we're going to see if we can't get a good view of mount chocura, mount washington, and the rest of the whites that we can see from a cute little mountain town about an hour north of us.  i'm sure the view won't be quite as good as ryan and skippy's, but it's still pretty good.  plus, there are 2 used gear shops, the wild things store, and a few cute little places to eat.  not to mention cathedral and whitehorse ledge are basically walking distance from downtown.  if the weather holds, we'll take a couple pics and post them for all to see later.

and then i saw this. 



and it made it all better.

 it's late for me, so i'll make this short and sweet. I was up in my studio and hear a little scratching in the walls, then a little squeaking. yep...we have another bat issue. seems as though a little guy got into the walls. anyhoo, i am in the process of painting our stairway walls and every time i brush in a certain spot the bat goes nuts and starts squeaking. Nootka hears this with her massive ears and comes upstairs to check it out. For about a half hour she intently looks at the wall and tries to figure out what was going on. needless to say she is clearly distraught and slightly nervous about the whole ordeal, and this gives her gas. (at least i think so, frank said it was probably excited gas or just plain nootka gas).

but here are some pics (some very blurry or shall i say "artsy" pics) of the Noot looking quite upset at the top of the stairs (and of the almost finished "exotic honey" (aka orange) walls).

pics!