Lost another one

Another funeral. Soft spoken man I knew from church my entire life. He was always doing for others, didn't even want a funeral. 

Honestly, the people that don't want anyone making a fuss over them when they go are going to be the ones with disappointed friends and family if there isn't even a little fuss. Come on man, it's not for you.

What struck me was the dichotomy in what was said about him. People in the church spoke highly of his constant and continuous work with the missionaries in the area, helping them however they needed. His family spoke more generically (none of them, except his widow, are involved in the church at all), but his granddaughter said everything without saying much. 

She always wanted her grandfather, but he was always giving all of this time to... *this church*. It was brief, but it was the way she said it. In that moment I saw a little girl that just wanted her grandfather, and she grew to resent it. That was the moment that I realized that endless selfless service can lack balance and cost you just as much.

The Windaween haul

My kids braved the icy rain and blustery winds. The winds themselves died down a good bit before it got dark, but it was still rainy and the rain was still icy. Still they ventured out. Decked out and wrapped up they decided to brave the elements to beg candy from strangers.

It really is a weird event.

Our road is the entrance to the neighborhood. If we head south, it's a smaller subset of roads that can easily be covered in an hour. If you go north, you can stay out until the lights start to go off. Typically, we've led them south, because if anyone tuckers out they can go home when we pass by. It happened when they were younger than one or two of them would tap out and the others would continue onward. 

The entire time we were out, we saw four other groups of kids. That was it. After half an hour, we found that houses were absolutely dumping candy into our kids bags. At the hour mark, we had finished the southern section and they were done. They could carry no more. I was alright with that, because I wanted to get out of the rain anyway.

Windaween

Ah yes, Windaween. Similar to Rainaween, but instead of rain the predicted weather is 36mph winds. First of all, nobody is sick this time, so that's a bonus. I'm grateful that none of the costumes double as wind sails (inflatable dinosaurs, boxy robots, etc). I'm also glad that it's on a Friday this year. They can get all the stranger supplied junk they want, then I don't care if they stay up half the night watching Halloween movies and eating junk food. In fact, I expect them to.

Everyone bailed again

So, the two friends that I helped with their paperwork? One of them had a shotgun and no idea how to use it. For a while she didn't know where it was, either. She liberated it from the house when took her kids and escaped her abusive ex.

Wisdom

She found it, and we all saw it as a great excuse to go shooting again (part of my helping with paperwork also included taking them out shooting so they could get a good idea of what they liked). Once again, everyone bailed on me. Once again all valid reasons (new job - yes go do the thing. Migraine? Yes, this will make it worse and if you're not having fun then why are you here) So as I was ready to call it, another friend was apparently sent to fill in.

Didn't see that coming. Whatever, he's cool and we don't get to hang out much so off we went. Bro is a crack shot and fun fact: we have the same first name (spelled the same, too)

Literally nothing went the way I expected it to but everything was fun anyway.

Everybody bailed

Two of my friends wanted to get a NYS pistol license, and slicing through the bureaucratic nonsense to help them overcome this direct infringement on their constutionally protected rights is something I'm good at.

(The more the clown show in Albany tries to make it harder, the more motivated I am to help people overcome it)

So the gun show was today, and they were going to go with me. Both of them, separately, cancelled on me. Their reasons were valid, but it still left me flying solo. My brother was also going to go, but he kept texting me all morning about one delay after another - right up until he, too, cancelled.

I am an extrovert, I do things with people. I do not count as people.

I still ran into four people I knew, so that counts.

Mass-aaaaahhhhhge

So I had, previous to even planning my hike this past weekend, booked a massage for this afternoon. I couldn't have timed it better, but this gal flat out asked me wtf I did to my calves. (I book her almost monthly, so she definitely has a frame of reference)

I didn't even realize they were that bad until she got to them.

The kneedful

I did another couple of Adirondak high peaks this weekend. Giant Mountain and Rocky Peak Ridge. It's just up. Up up up up up. That's to be expected, but honestly it felt more like spending five hours on a stair climber than hiking.

That's ok, it's actually why I use the stair climber. Torture myself at the gym so my outdoor escapades are fun. So that wasn't really the problem. No, the problem was going down.

When I first moved out to Buffalo to attend UB, I was the type to skip the elevator and just use the stairs. I still do, but back then I did it a lot, and I discovered an odd problem after a while. My knees hurt when going down the stairs. Conventional wisdom suggests that going up would be the difficult part, but this was not the case. The direction, force, etc, were all conspiring against me for a while. I used the elevator when going down even a single flight of stairs, and after the first semester the problem abated. Never came back, and I continued to use the stairs every time (up and down) until I graduated.

Back in June when I hiked Whiteface, we did it backwards. We drove to the peak, then hiked down, then up to Esther, then back up to Whiteface. From the peak, there's a part where you can either take an elevator back down to the parking area (booo) or take the very rough trail down, which is basically bouldering. It was tiring getting back to the peak, but those rocks going down... they hurt. Wow did my knees hurt. I took it nice and slow, carrying myself on the guardrail until I could walk like a normal person again.

By contrast, when I did Cascade and Porter, my knees ached a little during the last hour. Very different strain.

This past trip, it was a mixture of stair climber and bouldering to get to the peaks. It was beautiful, but going down wasn't a challenge - it was a problem. It was a longer hike, but our plans had us getting back to the car three hours before sunset - so nobody had a flashlight. As soon as the decent started, my knees started. The sharp grade combined with the bouldering parts made it almost excruciating. Our speed was cut to less than a half. We timed ourselves and realized that at that pace we were going to make it back to the car well over an hour after sunset. When bouldering with no lights, that's dangerous. I had exactly one dose of Tylenol which took the edge off, and we managed to get down past the boulders and onto just steep trail before we had to pull out our phones to use as flashlights just to make sure we stayed on the trail. I almost used the trekking poles as crutches, but taking the pressure off helped a lot.

My entire body was overdoing it to keep the pressure off my legs, and I ache all over because of it. Good thing I can sit down at work.