We’re going to Burning Man

We hemmed and hawed, changing our minds several times over the last few weeks. But now, we're committed. We spent the money, bought the tickets, and we're going.

For those of you who don't know, Burning Man is an annual event held out in the Black Rock desert some 129 miles north of Reno, NV. The idea is a week long experiment in temporary community – with people coming from all over the country and even across the world to participate. You can find out more about it here . There are lots of crazy “theme camps” and huge pieces of artwork, including a giant “man” that gets burnt at the end of the week.

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Bear Update – a rant

The picture of the bear in the blog is probably the most commented-on entry. We hadn’t seen the bear for a while during the summer, and thought that perhaps it had moved to higher country to beat the recent heat. But it was back on Friday. We could tell by the crowd of people sneaking through our backyard with their cameras out.

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Mom’s tough break

I always feel out of touch when something happens in the family. My mom broke her hip about two weeks ago and is still in rehab. She is hopefully coming home soon, but it always feels weird to have such big things happen in the family and not be able to be there. I'm crossing … Read more

Whitney postponed or canceled

We are still here. In the final hour, at some point after we had laid out our various meals, pulled the sleeping bags and tent out of storage, but before actually getting out of the house, we decided not to go.

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Where did July go?

Cats and dogs, nothing. It must be raining lions and bears this afternoon. The thundershower that moved in brings to mind animals of much greater size than the average cat or dog. Small animals don't boom like that. The forecast is for more of the same for the next few days. It doesn't exactly bode well for our plans to drive over to the east side of the Sierra's for some mountaineering.

A woman that we know had wilderness permits for the Mt. Whitney region for this weekend. Unfortunately for her, she sprained her ankle and had to get rid of them. So Tom and I have vague plans to drive to Lone Pine, meet the other two people who are splitting the permit with us, and do some climbing. I'd like to tag the summit of Mt. Whitney, and we've been making plans to do a superb-looking route on near-by Mt. Russell called the Mithral Dihedral. Our permit is for Sat-Mon nights (8/2-8/4) so that should give us time to hike in (Sat), do some climbing and hike out Tuesday. That's all if the weather holds. It sounds like we may get disturbingly wet.

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Another new page: art stuff

I put up another new page today – with a couple of pictures that I drew. You can get to it by clicking here, or you can sort of navigate there by going to the 'Leaning Tower' page on the navigation bar on the left to access the rest of my pages, and then click … Read more

Trip to MN and the Bay Area

The birthday boy (38KB Tom and I have returned home safely from our trip to MN and the Bay Area. We spent my dad's 70th birthday celebration at Lake Mille Lacs (pronounced me-lak, don't be confused by the apparent resemblance to French, we're talkin' Minnesotan here). No one in our group managed to catch any … Read more

New Web Pages

Hey, I finally got some other pages up to go along with this nucleus blog software. Unfortunately, the next big step is to hack into the navigation links on this page, so that you can actually get there from here. That may take a some extended effort and learning on my part. Meanwhile, you can … Read more

My Birthday

I can't believe how fast the month of June seems to have flown by. Except for the calls and e-cards that I received, I probably would have forgotten all about it. So, there weren't any big parties or anything like that, but I get up every day and basically get to do exactly what I … Read more