mmrobins.com

• Got a flat tire biking to work today. Forgot to repack my patch kit after using my bike bag for luggage this weekend. #
• Going to see Public Enemies tonight. Got free tickets from work. #
• Reunion pics from this weekend are available as a zip http://bit.ly/11ARdR #
• High school reunion pics on flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/mmrobins/sets/72157621358895081/ #

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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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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.

Class V without the raft

This was my first time being a best man, and I think I might have gone a little overboard on the bachelor party – I almost lost the groom. I’m reminded of camping trips we used to take in college with Thien-An where he would always say that he only had to bring 80% of the participants back. In this case it was a rafting trip, and I managed to bring everyone back, but there were a few moments where I think that was in doubt in a lot of the participants minds, myself included. Rather than the usual bachelor party shenanigans, I thought I’d treat Jacob to some rafting and a class V rapid. I didn’t expect that we’d do the class V rapid outside of the raft.

The trip started out as usual, with Jacob showing up late, yes, even for his own bachelor party. Once we rounded Jacob up we headed out for the rafting trip. We first found a pretty sweet, isolated campsite next to the river a couple miles from the Skykomish ranger station. Once camp was setup we went back to Gold Bar to Alpine Adventures to begin the rafting trip. After suiting up in wetsuits (the water was around 42 degrees), jackets, helmets, etc we all got on a bus to go to the rafts. We ended up with a guide named Rena who hadn’t had a lot of experience guiding rafts on the Skykomish. This proved to make the rest of the trip fairly interesting, as we’d go through the rapids in what seemed a most unconventional manner compared to the rest of the rafts.

Helmet popped off… That’s not good

This became a really big deal once we got to the most interesting part of the trip: the class V, boulder drop rapid. They had everyone get out, walk down the river, and look at the rapid to make sure they were willing to give it a try. The guides gave a talk and pointed out lots of really big rocks that they had funny names for and said where the rafts would go while we nodded like we had a clue what they talked about. Since our guide hadn’t had a lot of experience we stayed at the observation point to watch most of the other groups go through. It definitely looked exciting, but nobody made it look terribly difficult. One group even bounced off the gigantic rock with the raft, and kept going like it was all part of the plan. Things didn’t go according to plan once we tried to take the rapid.

Immediately, without even any excitement to preceed, the raft flipped in the very first drop of the rapid. I was on the left front corner of the raft, which was what went under first. Somehow our guide was flung out of the raft ahead of everyone else. Once I came up for air I saw her fairly easily since she was wearing yellow, and tried to follow her through the rest of the rapid.

The raft is there, it’s just in a big hole

Adrenaline and tunnel vision definitely took over, and it was hours of time spent corroborating stories with everyone before we really had any kind of picture of what had happened, even to ourselves. One especially strong memory for me was going over a large drop and realizing that my helmet had popped off. Turned out the buckle was defective. Other memories include finding out the wrong way when you’re supposed to breath (at the troughs of the waves, not the crest as would seem intuitive), realizing that I might as well just hold my breath for a while because the current had decided that I wasn’t coming to the surface for a bit, turning around to see a raft falling on top of me and pushing me under water (I thought it was someone else’s raft at the time and just thought they were assholes for not waiting until we were through), and FINALLY seeing other rafts with people who would get us out of the water.

Oh sweet, sweet air

I’m sure everyone involved has some pretty strong memories. Fortunately there were a lot of photos for us to view once we got back. Some of us spent more time in or near the raft than others, some more time under water. Jacob and his cousin Steve suffered exhaustion and minor shock after the event, and it was decided by anyone with any medical knowledge that they were done for the day. So they went back to headquarters and sat in the hot tub while the rest of us finished up in the rafts. The adrenaline wore off and we all realized that we were a tad hungry and that the water was cold.

Thankfully, Steve and Jacob were much better off when we met them back at headquarters. We looked at the photos, which they gave us for free in light of all the trouble we went through, ate dinner and swapped stories. Luckily Steve and Jacob were recovered enough that we decided no hospital visit was in order, and we all even felt good enough to go back to the campsite and spend the night outside. We built a fire and spent most of the rest of the night swapping stories about the rapid. I think in hindsight we’re all pretty psyched having done the rapid, but I don’t think anyone has any desire to repeat the experience.

We’ve been kept busy the last week by visiting family – Kim’s parents. It’s been a fairly mellow visit. For the most part we haven’t changed our schedules too much. Kim is working her normal schedule and I took one day off so that we could go to visit the coast. We’ve done a few of the touristy things such as the Saturday market and visiting Multnomah Falls, but generally we’ve made dinners at home or gone out to eat at some of our favorite places like Hopworks and Nicolas. Kim and I have really enjoyed showing off our new city of Portland this past year while getting to know it ourselves. That’s right, it’s been a year that we’ve been here now. I feel like it must be time to start planning the next trip somewhere…

The last 3 weekends have been jam packed with activity. This has mostly been to do with Travis and Lucy’s wedding. Two weeks ago Jacob and Jesse came down from Seattle for Travis’ bachelor party. We took some guns and went out to the woods to shoot at toys we bought at the dollar store. The weekend of the wedding Jacob and Jesse were back with their better halves, and Jake even flew in from Italy and stayed with us for the weekend. We all helped setup for the wedding the night before, which was a good thing for Travis and Lucy cause there was a LOT to do.

The wedding was a blast. It was one of the most unique weddings I’ve seen too, with a bit of comedy built into the ceremony, donuts instead of cake and trivia in a basement. The other guests weren’t much for dancing or drinking, so we tried our darndest to make up for both. Alas, at the end of the night the keg was barely half empty, so we had to take it home and spend the next few days trying to kill it. Thankfully, Laura moved into our house that weekend, so she and her boyfriend Eric were able to help with that task. On top of all these happenings, it was Kim’s birthday, and I made her a special present this year involving memories. If you contributed you know what I mean. If not, ask me because I may have forgotten to include you in the gift and that was totally unintentional…

This last weekend Brendan come up from Sacramento for a visit. Unfortunately, Kim’s grandma passed away in the middle of the week and she flew back east, so wasn’t able to hang out. Fortunately, we had fun seeing the sites of Portland anyway. We spent quite a bit of time talking and I learned about some cool new stuff like ted.com where they give fascinating talks on a variety of subjects. We tried to see the free Battlestar Galactica showing at the Bagdad theater, but there was a line around the block over an hour before the show, so we didn’t get in. The next day we tried to go to the OMSI (science museum), but the parking lot was full and everything was ridiculously crowded. I guess we just kept picking overly popular activities. We did end up going to the Saturday market, watching the Urban Iditarod’s crazy costumed participants run around, touring the Portland Art Musem, taking Ubuntu to the dog park, visiting some other friend of Brendan’s, and eating a lot of good food.

Phew. Thank goodness it’s the work week and I can slow down again :-)

Big group. Don’t lose your exit buddy. Whoever that is…

I went with Danny and a dozen or so of his friends to hike through Ape Caves near Mount St Helens. This was the second time I had been, although this time there was practically nobody else there besides our group since there was so much snow on the ground. The signs on the way up to the caves all say that they’re closed, but that just seems to mean there’s no tours. We had to walk a little farther than normal to the entrance since they don’t plow the roads as far, but once you’re in the caves snow isn’t really a concern since they’re a constant temperature. I think that’s the largest group I’ve ever been hiking with and was somewhat impressed that we didn’t simply lose someone. We did both the lower and upper parts of the cave fairly quickly. Most of the group headed back to Seattle after we all had Thai food together. I woke up the next day feeling incredibly sore, but it appears that’s due to a nasty cold Kim has managed to give me, and not the 3-4 miles of hiking.

Styling

We’ve now had Ubuntu for close to a month and we’re loving her. I’ve learned a lot about having a house dog too, as I’ve had dogs before at my parents, but never inside dogs. At my parents our dogs only came in for a little while when it was cold out. Ubuntu has access to our yard through a doggy door, but she doesn’t spend most of her time outside.

The first new thing that I found really weird at first was this concept of having a crate. My initial reaction was that crating a dog just seems cruel as they have to spend so much time cooped up. However, she loves her crate. She feels safe in there and goes in there to gnaw on bones. When she’s ready for bed she just goes in. However, recently she’s figured out how to open the crate door by shaking it until the slide locker comes loose. Lately when I come home from work she’s at the door to greet me since she’s escaped her crate.

Another thing I never subscribed to before was the notion of using treats for training. That always seemed like the easy way out. Well, it is. It’s so much easier. Ubuntu has learned so many tricks so much faster than I’ve been able to teach my dogs in the past. We’re currently teaching her to bring us her leash before we go on a walk, and for that one treats aren’t necessary since the walk is it’s own reward.

Ready for dinner

Having to walk a dog twice a day is something fairly different too. At times it seems like an inconvenience, but a half hour after work walking seems to do me good as well as the dog. When we got her she pulled like crazy on her leash, but then we got a halti head collar and it was magical. We spent a bit of time doing research on the halti vs the gentle leader, but in the end they both seemed like great options as long as you could find the right size in either. We got the halti because it was $2 cheaper and has a backup latch that attaches to the collar. Basically it’s like a harness for the dog’s head, so that if they pull, it turns them around with their own force. Ubuntu was so confused initially as to why when she pulled forward, she ended up looking sideways. She’s still not the most well behaved dog on a leash, but she’s getting better and the halti saves the walks from being a constant struggle.

Another area I never really worried about with outside dogs was their nails. Inside we actually need to worry about her scratching up the floors and since she interacts more with people we don’t want her having claws either. We bought some nail clippers, but Ubuntu’s nails hadn’t been trimmed in quite some time and they’re black so we immediately cut the quick and she bled. I’ve since switched to using a dremmel to slowly get her nails back to a decent length. It’s taken some time to get her to be okay with the dremmel process, but it’s a lot less error prone than clipping.

Finally, I’ve found I love watching the Dog Whisperer. I would watch it without owning a dog if I had known how interesting it was. I thought it would bore me to death to watch a dog trainer, but it turns out to be more about training people than dogs and the psychological aspects of that. It’s fascinating.

Time to go feed the dog breakfast.

Ubuntu the Dog

Kim and I were so busy this fall with house hunting that we didn’t make time for our semi-annual fast, so we decided to do one this weekend. However, we didn’t last very long. Not because of will power mind you. No, it was because we got a dog! That’s just too much excitement to try to not eat for 2-3 days.

We had already juiced two of our “meals” for the day and decided to try to take a bike ride on the Springwater Corridor trail, but we only went about a mile because the wind was ferocious! I don’t think the wind we’re having now is normal for Portland. I can’t imagine being in a hurricane. Anyway, it took about 15 minutes to go a mile pedaling into the wind and about 2 seconds to pedal back. On the way back we saw a dog shelter and stopped in. They had a 1.5 year old ridgeback mix named Sally. At least we think it’s a ridgeback mix. There’s no ridge, but she has most of the other characteristics. We almost decided to take her immediately since everyone who came in the doors also wanted to see her. I think she was shown to 6 other people that day. We decided to go back home and warm up and rest a little since being cold, tired and hungry make it really hard to make a decision. Once we had a chance to think it over though we knew we wanted her. Fortunately nobody else took her while we were making our decision.

It took about 20 minutes to sign all the paperwork and ask all the questions we needed. The adoption fee was $200 at Family Dogs New Life, but it included getting her spayed, shots, a leash and collar, some dog food, toys, a month of pet insurance, one free vet visit, a six week training class and a ton of great information in both printouts and a DVD. I was really impressed with all the things they included to make getting a dog easier, and the shelter is a no kill shelter. Seems like a great organization.

Not much was known about our new dog since she came from a shelter in Yakima and was only at Family Dogs for a couple days before we took her home. She had been called Sally and Skinny Minnie since you can see her ribs so well. She didn’t really seem to be attached to the name Sally, so we decided to call her Ubuntu since it’s a Zulu word (Rhodesian Ridgebacks were bred to be hunting dogs in Africa) that describes a nice concept which is loosely means “humanity to others”. It’s also a Linux distribution that I use both at home and at work instead of Windows. Ubuntu (we also like to shorten it to just two sillables “oo-boo”) has been at home for one day now and is doing really well. She’s extremely eager to please and already seems to have learned the sit command pretty well. She weighs 42 pounds, but is a tad underweight right now, and we’re not sure if she’ll keep growing since we don’t know her exact age. We got her a crate which is something pretty weird to me as I’ve never done that, but everyone recommends it, and it does make sure that she doesn’t get into any trouble while we’re asleep. She follows us everywhere in the house, but isn’t needy since if we stop moving, she just lays down and chills out nearby. She was just spayed a couple days ago, so we’ll have to remove the stitches in a week or so. We didn’t know if she was housebroken, and she had one accident in the living room right after she got home, but since has been very good about going outside. She seems to make a weird bark/cough sound to let us know she needs to go out, so we weren’t sure if she could bark, but we heard her bark once today at something out the window.

I’m sure that’s plenty of info about our awesome new dog. I hope you all get a chance to meet her soon.