November 22, 2009
I’ve been helping with a couple non-profit websites for more than a few years now, and I’ve been bad in that I haven’t mentioned them or even linked to them. Oops. Perhaps part of why I haven’t done much with these sites is that I rarely have to do anything to them. That was my original goal in setting them up so that the people running the organization could modify the information on the sites however they wanted without having to wait for me. To do this I set the sites up running Drupal and WordPress, two great site management technologies both written in PHP.
The first is Espaanglisch, which is a great English teaching volunteer program near Trujillo, Peru for lower income students of all ages. I taught there for a month in 2007 when Kim and I lived in Huanchaco, and I helped the guy running the program, David, build a website so that he could attract more volunteers. Learning English really is a great way to open up a ton of employment opportunities for these children. I recently found out how important the website has been to helping David attract volunteers when it stopped functioning for a few weeks because of DNS issues. Fortunately the DNS issues resolved themselves. If you want to travel and volunteer in South America, this is a great place as you’ll feel immediately appreciated and you can even learn to surf in your off hours.
Some other friends of ours name Becka and Michael have been doing a lot of work in Uganda, Africa for years helping to protect the Kibale National Forest. Their most recent project, the New Nature Foundation, aims to help protect the forest by improving the lives of and educating the people who live around it. They’ve made great strides, as can be seen in their latest reports showing they’ve reduced the number of people gathering wood inside the national park from over 30% to around 10%. They done this in a number of interesting and innovative ways including teaching the locals to build more efficient stoves, and growing their own wood from fast growing trees that they plant themselves. The project is ongoing and always accepting donations.
I’m grateful to be able to help these dedicated people in some small way with what expertise I have, and I hope they continue to thrive.
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November 21, 2009
This was my third dodgeball season, and I’ve definitely gotten better. Before starting I wouldn’t have thought there was much to the sport, but there are some serious dodgeballers out there – including some who seem to take it more serious than they should. I just go to have fun, and this season was that.
I played on a team named Wii Not Fit for the second time with Lucy, and we had a decent season. We won most of our games, but I don’t think we played some of the harder teams. Fine with me. We lost our first game in the tournament today. Actually our first game was against a team that forfeited so we didn’t get to play them.
Now that my marathon training is over, this is my main physical activity every week, and since I’ve started to fall out of marathon shape I’ve noticed that it’s more physical than I had thought since I’m actually sore after some recent games!
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October 18, 2009
Kim really went all out for planning birthday this year, so it was a really good one. Last week she planned a little surprise party, and yes, I was surprised. I thought we were just going to Hopworks for happy hour, but when I got there I kept seeing people I knew and at first I just thought it was a coincidence. Then I realized there too many people to be a coincidence and that Kim had organized a gathering. After happy hour we all came back to our house to sit around our fire pit, play Rock Band and board games.
This weekend Kim planned a trip to Breitenbush Hot Springs. We did a native american sweat lodge on Thursday. That was an intense experience. I thought it would be more like a sauna, but I didn’t expect it to be so physically uncomfortable. I was uncomfortable because there were so many people crammed into such a small, dark, hot place for around 3 hours. The physical discomfort wasn’t all bad. In fact, I think that’s a large part of the experience since being uncomfortable forces you to be very present and in the moment.
We camped a few miles from the hot springs in the national forest since that was free, then returned Friday for a day of soaking in the hot waters. We soaked all morning, and then went for a hike to look for mushrooms in the afternoon. We had dinner at the lodge both nights, and the food is very good. It’s buffet style, so we ate a very light lunch so that we could eat more at dinner and because being stuffed while you’re in the hot pools wouldn’t be very goo.
All in all it was a very relaxing couple of days and a great birthday week. We should celebrate birthdays for a week more often :-)
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October 11, 2009
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October 5, 2009
Feeling good around mile 20
Where did August and September go? I know where a lot of it went – marathon training. And now I’m done with that for a while and will get a big chunk of time in my life back. As of yesterday I’ve run a marathon. And boy do I hurt today. In training the farthest I ran was 20 miles. Turns out the last few miles of a marathon are the hardest. Who’d have thought? Seriously, after mile 23 I had to really focus just to keep my legs moving. I did it though, and it feels pretty good to have done it.
My parents and my brother came to Portland for the weekend, Kim took the day off work, and I saw them cheering me on a few times while I was running. Fortunately they only saw me when I was doing pretty well, which was around mile 20 and at the very end when only the adrenaline from the crowd and knowing I’d soon be done kept me going. I started out strong, got a little worried when I had to stop and tape some blisters around mile 6, picked up the pace from there all the way through mile 20 or so, and then started to hurt around mile 22.
The white stuff on my face is salt from sweat
I really don’t think I’ve felt quite like I felt past mile 23 before. Fortunately I had learned from my training runs how not to get too dehydrated or starving, but my muscles just wanted to shut down after a while despite being hydrated and eating enough liquid gold (honey and molasses). Every mile felt much longer than the one before, and I did in fact slow down quite a bit, but I persevered and crossed the finish line running. Once there I ate everything in site. Oh yeah, my time was 4 hours and 31 minutes. That’s about 15 minutes faster than I though I was going to do it, so I’m pretty pleased.
Everyone asks if I’ll do it again, and I’m definitely holding off on answering that for now. Certainly not anytime in the next few months. I’ll be glad to have such large chunks of time back for other stuff for a while.
July 29, 2009
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July 17, 2009
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July 15, 2009
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July 14, 2009
Class of 1999 at the Mudhole
Time to ask the obligatory question: has it been 10 years already? Fortunately for our class, our senior class president Carey Sauer was totally on top of the organization, so we had an awesome time and a great turnout. We even had some people who weren’t there to graduate with us, but were in our grade for so long I couldn’t believe they weren’t technically part of our class. The best part about the whole weekend was how welcoming and accepting everyone was. Everyone I talked to was genuinely interested in how their classmates were doing, and nobody had a bad attitude. Even the kids at the picnic behaved great.
Friday night was an informal gathering at Kelly’s. Way more people showed up for this than I expected, including the class of 1989, who we didn’t socialize with, but it was interesting they were there just the same. It took me at least a couple hours to get across the bar and even say hi to most people. By the end of the night I didn’t even have time to catch up with everyone who was there. Fortunately, there was time at the picnic at the mudhole (yes it’s actually called that) near Priest River the next day. Carey even enlisted her
Outside the bowling alley at closing time
family to help with all the preparations, which was awesome. Kim and I spent a bit of time trying to teach Ubuntu to swim in the river. That went okay… It was fun to see everybody’s kids.
Dinner was at the Riverbank, and we even got vegetarian dishes which were, of course, big plates of pasta. After dinner everybody went next door to the bar for more drinking and the slideshow that I put together. I was surprised that when I put it on everybody mostly stopped talking and just watched. I kinda messed up and started the slideshow half way through and didn’t put it on repeat, so a bunch of people didn’t see the whole thing since they thought it was over and didn’t pay attention while it looped through later. Everyone seemed to have a lot of fun, and ended the night at the bowling alley bar, with a pretty large group hanging on until closing time.
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July 6, 2009
Matt ferries people across streams
Rather than the usual 4th of July with fireworks and crowds of people, we got away from it all this weekend on a camping trip to Pamelia Lake in the Mt Jefferson Wilderness. We went with our friends Travis and Lucy, and it was Lucy’s 30th birthday on the 4th. This was her first ever backpacking trip, and the longest hike she’s done too, so pretty badass stuff for a divisible by 10 birth year if you ask me…
From the trailhead to the lake is a little over two miles. This was a good distance to go with a pack for people who haven’t backpacked much, and I made it harder than it had to be by carrying in a pack weighing over 40 pounds with all sorts of luxury items like camp chairs and alcohol that I
would not normally carry backpacking. One of the nicest things about this wilderness area is that there’s a limited number of people allowed. You have to get a free permit, and they only give out so many. Of course, this doesn’t stop everyone from entering without a permit, but in general you’ll have fewer neighbors and trail traffic than you would otherwise. We got into the lake camping area late afternoon on Friday, so most of dozen or so sites were taken, but we still got a really nice one right near the water.
We spent the evenings eating and drinking a lot while playing cards and hanging out. We taught Lucy to play Euchre, a game which Travis had just learned the week before at Jacob’s bachelor party camping trip. We mixed 99 Bananas and Peppermint Schnapps with hot chocolate for our desert :-)
Waterfall on the way up to the lakes
Saturday we did a day hike to Hanks and Hunts Lake. This was probably about 8 miles of roundtrip hiking. The hardest part was that we couldn’t find the trail after doing a stream crossing. It looks like the water changes which stream bed it flows down fairly frequently, sometimes choosing the ‘trail’ as it’s path. Kim and I hiked in our sandals, so we would ferry Travis and Lucy across stream crossings so as not to get their feet wet. The hike had lots of views of waterfalls and snow-capped Mt. Jefferson. We got to the first lake and we ate lunch. Ubuntu went exploring the icy lake and fell through the ice into shallow water. Boy was she surprised. After lunch Travis and Lucy relaxed in the hammock we carried up, while Kim and I hiked a bit farther to the next lake for a cold swim.
We were all pretty tired after a hike back, especially after a big dinner and some more hot chocolate and mixers. Lucy brought some sparklers, so we lit those off on the lake shore. The next day we hiked out, had lunch at a Mexican restaurant and drove home to shower and enjoy our comfortable beds again.
