Been an action packed fun filled 9 months so full of chaos, time to ruminate and babble was not available. More to the truth, I have been busy, but lazy and have ignored this avenue of expression and horseshit flinging.

Going to stick with the facts here and get into the deep bla bla bla in subsequent posts.

In the last 9 months I’ve had both my right shoulder

          and knee      

rebuilt (along with a sweet plantar wart dug out of my left foot while down with the shoulder, suicidally fun let me tell ya), finished my degree in GIS, got me an actual awesome girlfriend who seems to like me

and will soon be wrapping up my very final, honest to goodness, yes I’ve said it before but I mean it this time LAST season fighting fire. Fuck this gig with a spiny steel dildo covered in chocolate sprinkles.

In the mean time there have been a great deal of mods, and a few adventures, on Big Pig the Might KLR. My shoulder was done in early February necessitating a 2.5 month layoff from riding, so I went balls deep into tinkering with it to keep the sanity as walking was a no go due to the evil plantar wart. Not a good combo. Got the bike out to Ideeho and had some good deep desert adventures before getting my knee done last Wednesday. Going to be a few weeks down, but not as long as the shoulder. Rebuilt is an exaggeration knee-wise, I got a meniscus tear while working and had that tidied up.

Knee follow up is Wednesday the 6th of October from which I shall enter loaded car and head to Bend for a weekish before returning to land, once again, in PDX. While in Bend a cousin I’ve not seen in 30 years and his wife will be in town and I’m quite jazzed to see him. Being raised by parents who fled their Midwest homes early on for the West Coast and chose not to maintain much in the way of ties, it was easy to forget there are actually family members out there. I’m looking forward to catching up.

PDX has the promise of a gig in my new field that pays more entry level than what my very shortly ex-career pays with 20 years experience. A real job, as it were. With less lying, deception, manipulation and downright bullshit I imagine. Yes, every gig has BS and assholes, but I’m looking forward to a new flavor. Nothing is 100% as of yet, but why not go all in on a decent gamble? Life is for living, not staring at.

Amanda, the new GF, will be living in Seattle. Seeing as we are both of the cat variety of human that should work OK for a bit plus give me a reason to check out Seattle more. How did I meet her you ask? Well, seems my boss thought is was time to put females out at the guard stations to mix things up a bit. On this, we agree fully. The BLM may have tried to crush my soul, but they provided the opportunity for a GF, so we’re even in my book.

After almost a year of physical pain and debilitation it has been a long road out of the pit of not giving a fuck back to, well, giving a fuck. A long list of new adventures is in the process of being drafted and now that I won’t hurt every time I push things it’s time to get off my expanding ass and back to the life of constant boundary pushing and adventure. Would be a fundamental betrayal of my inner most being to stop this path now. Trail runs, ice walls, summits, canyons and long shitty dirt paths are calling to be explored and I’m finally back to a place where that can happen.