An old highschool friend passed this along. I used to hang out with that kid. When I was in highschool, I was friends with his brother and the three of us would hang out at his house. What a doofus.

The car in front of me had a large sticker in the window that read

"Angels watch over me."

Immediately below the sticker was evidence that the car had recently suffered a serious impact. The body panels were bent out of shape, the taillights were broken and held together with red gaffer tape, and the bumper was caved in.

...and Gabriel spake, "Oh, shit. My bad."

Just an update on my trip from this past weekend. The associated photogallery is here and a trip report is here.

So remember the encoded messages on the Mars landers for Spirit and Opportunity? Well the contest for decoding the messages is now closed and apparently I was one of the first 10 people to solve one of them (not sure which, they didn't say). I just got an email from the Planetary Society indicating that I was one of the winners and that they will be sending me some Lego prizes and a free membership in the Planetary Society. How cool is that? I'll post more when I find out what my sweet Lego prize is.

No, it's not an obscenely high bowling score. It's the obscenely high elevation I hiked to this morning. I went on a solo backpacking trip for the last two days and this morning it culminated with my summiting Humboldt Peak. At 14,064', it is wholly 904' higher than the highest mountain I had hiked before today (Wheeler Peak, 13,161', the highest point in New Mexico).

This is the first "14er" I have climbed sucessfully. Robin and I tried to climb this same peak last year and the weather ate us alive. I have also tried to climb Blanca Peak (14,345') twice before but both attempts were unsucessful due to medical problems of one sort or another (hypothermia, hairline foot fracture).

As Colorado 14ers go, this one is about as easy and boring as you can get. It is the 37th highest out of 54, has no technical requirements, and has a very short hike (both horizontally and vertically) if you start from the South Colony Lakes. It does, however, offer tremendous views of Crestone Peak (14,294') and Crestone Needle (14,197') which are two of the best-looking 14ers, in my humble opinion. At any rate, it was a good peak to start with. I parked my truck along the South Colony Lakes access road at about 9850', leaving a total overall gain to the summit of 4200'. I split this gain in half by camping at the lakes. There was no one else in the area due to the still-present snow. I had the whole valley to myself. It was wonderful. Pictures coming soon.

Nina and I rolled a single game of bowling today, and she beat me! Her best game ever was enough to beat my mediocre game. I bet she thinks she's hot shit. But since I know she reads this, I'll just remind my gentle readership that I rule.

Ever since Brent told me the secret of the slow roll, I've gotten a lot more precise with my bowling. However, my strike percentage has basically gone to zero. I haven't had a strike in at least 4 games. Almost all of my balls go slightly off-center and I get tons and tons of 9's and spares. No strikes.

When I moved out to New Mexico in the summer of 2002, a friend from Boston who was originally from Albuquerque let me use the car that she kept in NM in return for paying her insurance. In February of 2003, I ended up buying it from her. It was a 1990 Subaru Legacy wagon, and it was the first car I ever owned.

Today, I sold the Subaru.

I put it in the Los Alamos Lemon Lot last week and I gotta tell ya, that thing really works. It's a parking lot owned by the county that you can get a permit (for free) to park your car in. Every car in the lot is for sale by owner and people go there to browze. I've been wanting to sell the Subaru for a long time because I never drive it anymore. I waited to put it in the lemon lot until May because that's when all the highschool kids are graduating and need beaters for college, plus all the Lab's summer students are showing up and some of them probably need cars too.

The first day I had it in the lot, I got six calls from interested parties. After two test drives and two offers for my asking price, I withdrew the car from the lot and stopped responding to inquiries. I ended up selling the car for $200 more than I bought it for in the first place - you don't see that too often!

I just know that, now that I am down to a single vehicle, my truck is going to break down and need some kind of repair that will take a week or something. It probably won't happen until Nina leaves for grad school, leaving me truly stranded. Mark my words. :)

I'm getting worse at bowling. My stats clearly indicate that I'm getting worse with each series I play. Although today I had the highest scoring game since I started keeping stats at 129 [my best before that was a 141], my other two games were both below 100 and I only had one strike during the entire series.

On the third game, Nina was ahead of me until the 8th frame. She's getting noticeably better each time we go out whereas I seem to be stalling.

So Nina and I went to see Troy last night. I really didn't care for the Iliad, though I liked it more than the Odyssey. I'm not much for epic poetry, and I have a hard time working through books where plot devices and solvency can be randomly conjured up by the gods. Though it is certainly one of the earliest works of its kind, viewed in modern day it seems overly dramatic and cheesy.

The movie was kind enough to do away with most of the intervention of the gods and cast it simply as the meddling by high priests in the affairs of their government. However, the cheesitude and melodrama was still present and the plot is left seeming wholly implausible.

I can live with that, as the Iliad (and Odyssey moreso) are wholly ridiculous, plot-wise anyway. However, the movie was plagued by bad technical elements of almost every kind. I found the direction to be largely non-existant, the editing to be sub-par, there were significant foley errors, prop errors (e.g. bending metal helmet), and assorted other errors (e.g. sunrise shown over the ocean - to the West). Some of the performances were distractingly bad (especially Patroclus). And the score... oh the score... it was... terrible. Maybe the idea with the score was to make it overly-dramatic and cheesy in the same vein as the book, but the result was that it was obnoxious and detracted from the movie instead of enhancing it.

I don't expect any movie to be perfect, but there were so many technical problems with this film that I found myself constantly reminded and unable to suspend my disbelief enough to get through the ham-handed plot.

Pager woke me up at 4:00am today for a search out in the Sangre de Christo mountains. Ended up being a collosal waste of time. Here's the writeup.

For the past two weeks I've been putting together an orienteering mee for the New Mexico Orienteers. The meet was today and it went great. Unfortunately I spent the whole day running registration and the finish line rather than running an orienteering course. We didn't have a huge turnout (probably because I neglected to put a notice in the newspaper like we usually do), but we did have a disproportionately large number of people running the Green (advanced) course. Usually I run the advanced course and it is just me and one or two other guys. This time five people ran it and I didn't get to compete. Oh well, it was still a good day and lots of people complimented me on the Green course, whcih I created.

I've been thinking a lot about goals recently and how I'm going to attain them. Some of the goals I have come up with are short term things and others are very long term. Most of my goals center around one of my hobbies.

After doing my first Nebraska county highpoint over the weekend (check out this exciting summit...), I got to thinking about this hobby and I decided to set a goal of completing one state highpoint for each year old I am, and maintaining this up through age 50.

I'm behind by five states! I'm currently 28 and I have completed 23 state highpoints. My shorter-term goal along these lines is to get caught up by age 30. So in the next 1.5 years I need to complete an additional seven states.

The two closest uncompleted state highpoints are Mt. Elbert in Colorado and Humphries Peak in Arizona. Both of these are straightforward dayhikes and could be done in a weekend from my home. I'm assuming I'll have both of them done in time. The other 5 states, however, are going to have to come during some trip to somewhere far away.

The trouble with western states highpoints is that they are almost all serious technical climbs (not to mention that the states out here are huge and it takes forever to drive from one state HP to another). In order to catch up 5 states, I'm going to have to draw from the reserves of easier midwestern and northeastern states.

Luckily, there are two well-placed travel destinations that I have a relatively high probability of visiting in the next 1.5 years. One is Cambridge, MA, where I will be returning for my thesis defense. From there, I could easily get to the highpoints of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and possibly New York without too much trouble. If I stoop to driving up Mt. Washington, I could probably knock off ME, NH, and VT in a single weekend.

The other travel destination is St. Paul, MN, where my parents live. From there I have relatively good access to the highpoints of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa. These are farther away but they're also not the real climbs presented by Maine, New York, or Vermont. A few days with long drives and I could grab all four.

Some combination of the two will get me to 30 by 30. And it will still leave me the Illinois/Indiana/Ohio/Kentucky block to do on some other trip (maybe if I visit my sister in Chicago) when I need to get ahead on states. With only the western states remaining (and the non-continentals), each highpoint will be a serious trip and getting one done every year might be a challenge.

But it's a challenge that will keep me travelling and doing some spectacular mountain climbs. Though the Denali expedition that I was a member of sort of evaporated, climbing the 20,320' top of North of America is still one of my big goals in life - and climbs like Granite Peak, MT, and Mt. Ranier, WA, will be awesome training for it. As much as I find peakbagging to be rather silly, it certainly does get me out there climbing the rocks.

It's been a long time since I've done any highpointing. Before my trip out to Lincoln this past weekend, I scoped out the nearby counties for any freebie county highpoints and found Seward County, whose highpoint is a drive-up. Sunday morning I drove up there and nabbed the 1,640'+ "summit" for my 68th county highpoint.

While adding this grand accomplishment to my highpointing statistics page, I also re-worked it such that non-county highpoints are included in the top-ten lists and the chronological table.

I sent away my NASA application to the astronaut corps back in June of 2003, and I got a post card indicating that they had received it, but never heard back regarding acceptance or rejection. I guess this clears that up...

Congrats to the new astronauts! I'll apply again in the next cycle. Looks like this time they were interested in an older age group anyway.

So I'm leaving tomorrow morning at about 5:00am to drive down to Albuquerque and catch a plane to Lincoln for Aaron's wedding. As I was packing this evening, I went to my computer to print out the instructions on how to get from the airport to the wedding... only to find that the email from Aaron no longer existed.

I swear I left it in my inbox, but it was not there to be found. Nor was it in the Aaron folder. I grepped every email folder I have for key phrases and came up empty. I checked my MIT account. I even drove in to work at 9:00pm on a Friday to see if for some reason it was in my LANL email. I was totally freaking out. The only email I have from Aaron that has a phone number in it is for his old place and the number was disconnected. I was envisioning flying into Lincoln with no idea of where to go and twiddling my thumbs for a weekend and cocking the whole thing up.

I sent out some frantic emails asking if anyone had the information or a current phone number [sorry Jason, Nichol]. Finally I called information and got his number and called the poor guy at 10:30pm his time on the night before his wedding. And I'm thinking... what an asshole I am.

Turns out that when I got him on the phone, he had just been looking for my phone number to call and make sure everything was set for the trip! He hadn't even seen my wanker email distress call yet, he was just being nice. What a guy.

So, in the end, if I had waited another hour or so I would have gotten a random call from him anyway and all would have been well.

I am really amazed at how calm and un-stressed Aaron is. He's getting married tomorrow afternoon and he's sitting around his house calling me. He was totally chill on the phone and didn't seem to have a worry in the world. He must have the good wedding fairy on his side.

Anyway, I have the information now and won't be flying into Lincoln blind. I'm off at the butt-crack of dawn to go hang out with Captain A-Ron and his lovely soon-to-be wife, Tina. Congratulations Aaron!

Spent the morning hiking out in Rendija Canyon setting the Green [advanced] course for May 15's orienteering meet held by the New Mexico Orienteers and run by yours truly. I made it a really long and strenuous course with one control mid-way through at the highest point on the whole map. I think the total distance hiked was something like eight or nine kilometers with several hundred meters of gross gain.

Other people will be setting the beginner and intermediate courses this weekend, but I'll be in Lincoln, Nebraska at Aaron's wedding!

So we had our first real dinner party thing at our apartment last night. The food was all Indian. Mark and Mikki came over and we all cooked and played videogames for awhile and then ate. We ate so much food that we all were about to explode. Yum. I made a chicken vindaloo and helped Mark with another batch of vegetable samosas. Nina made two yogurt salad dishes that I don't know how to spell the name of but it sounds like "rye-E-duh" and also gulab jamin. Mikki made mango lassis for everyone. It was excellent.

I think the theme for the next dinner party should be "frozen microwaveable white castle."

Note to self: don't have a dinner party on the same day as your root canal. While the dental procedure was basically painless, it does leave the jaw a little tender and eating huge quantities of chewy foods is not recommended.

Well I just got back from the root canal specialist... and I have to say that I don't know what all the fuss is about. At no point during any portion of the procedure was there any pain. The most uncomfortable part, aside from paying the bill, was that the headrest wasn't high enough for my head. It was no different in sensation from getting a cavity filling. It took longer, but that was mostly because I had four roots to clean. I was in there for 1.5 hours, and he said that if it had been a single-canal front tooth, it would have been 20 minutes.

I'm just amazed that it was as painless and easy as it was - and the doctor said that my tooth was more compicated than the garden-variety tooth in that location.

So right now I'm full of novacaine again and feeling rather drooly. We'll see if there is any pain when this wears off. But so far I give this root canal an A+.

Forgot some other updatey-type stuff. I went bowling with Nina on Saturday before the BBQ - rolled a 328 series, mostly due to an abysmal 88 first game (with the first two frames composed of 0-1 and 1-0). Something was not working right with my bowling. But I got the hang of it eventually. Nina almost beat me on the first game - she had a 70 going into the tenth frame and rolled a strike, but biffed the follow-up throws and guttered them both. Maybe next time. Oh, and Silva Lanes in Santa Fe is about 35% more expensive than Big Rock Casino in Espanola, and the shoes aren't as comfortable (and I score worse - so says the stats).

The finches have all left the nest! By Saturday they were all gone and haven't returned. The finch alarm sound that usually accompanied my walking outside is now replaced with lots of nice finch sing-songiness. I got the new camera from SuperCircuits that has the built-in nightvision IR LEDs and I ordered a USB video capture device, so next time we have a nest I'll be ready. Next job is to build a nest box - another reason to get that wacky miter saw.

I went to a BBQ at Robin's place and saw some of the picture frames and bookshelves he's built since he bought a 10" table saw. I was very impressed. Made me want to try my hand at building some stuff.

And then the discussion popped up that Robin is leaving for his post doc in California soon and probably won't have a place for his table saw there. So he said he might lend it to me, or sell it to me. Cool! Now Robin has been making some really impressive picture frames and jewlery boxes with his table saw, but he's been using it to do miter joints and stuff like that. It's really not the right tool for the job, but he's doing really well with it.

If he lends it to me, I'll be tempted to make picture frames with it as well and I'll fuck it up, because I don't have the anality or patience for that. Now if I had a miter saw.... then I'd whip out picture frames like nothing.

...Which got me to thinking... I could use a miter saw. Aside from picture frames, which I haven't really been itching to produce lately... a miter saw is a great way to precision cut small lumber. Recently I've been thinking about building a base and canopy for my future paludarium. I worked out a plan for a sturdy base that could hold a 100 gallon aquarium, but in order to be strong I'm going to need a lot of very evenly cut 2x4's and what-not. And some sort of radial arm saw would be perfect for that. Plus, I could make picture frames the right way.

I'll still need a table saw for doing dado cuts in the frames and the aquarium base, but with any luck I'll be the steward of Robin's tablesaw this fall.

I found myself pricing miter saws at Home Depot, but when I drove down there they had closed early and I couldn't give them my money. So I ate at India House and came home miter-sawless.