Random Shit Tuesday

Hey, a new shtick: Random Shit Tuesday! It's a blatant ripoff of HRG's Triple Tangent Tuesday, with an obscenity thrown in for good measure. It will likely never be half as interesting as hers, but meh. Here comes mediocrity!

• I need to stop looking at my blog. I think I've inflated my page view numbers by like 100. It's like, I look at my numbers, look at the blog (I dunno why, I'm an idiot, give me a break), look back at my numbers, see that it's omg gone up by one!!!!!!!!, and throw myself a party. Totally rational. Either it's all me, or (gulp), my friends have found it. I think that's highly unlikely but if that is the case, then I'm extremely embarrassed. My friends are not blog-friendly people, for the most part.

• I can't stop listening to this song. I like Mumford & Sons well enough (a lot well enough, actually), but I think it stuck with me because I saw this video by a badass ultrarunner. I guess that, given that "wandering" and "running" are sort of the same thing, and that I'm a hopeless athlete, my equating it with running isn't deep in the slightest. AT LEAST I TRIED. That's as deep as things get around here, folks. Get used to it. I also really like this song. Yes, Mumford & Sons again and yes, I realize Paul Simon did it first, but Jerry Douglas is awesome! I feel like in another life I would be a great dobro player (this is based on the fact that I know what a dobro is). And I think everything mishmashes well in this song. How's that for analysis?

• I got one of those "here's your training plan you didn't ask for!" emails from Runners World (is there no apostrophe in that name? Proper grammar what?), which reminded me: I need a training plan. Soon. It doesn't help that I'm not actually training for anything, and that I'm pretty sure the last real race of the season happened this past weekend.

• I signed up for a group run on Meetup. Everyone familiar with Meetup? The creepy internet dating site masquerading as a totally legit way to meet people with similar interests? Okay, scratch that creepy bit-it's actually pretty cool. I've done a few hikes with a local group via Meetup and all have been smashing successes (even that one time I ended up hiking alone with an older man who wasn't actually a "hiker" so much as a landscape photographer who moved occasionally), so hopefully this will have a similar vibe. I'm a much more confident hiker than runner, however, so I'm a bit nervous. I'm a solo runner out of necessity, but I like running with people. People I know, that is. Otherwise I'm worrying about farting or running too fast or breaking my leg mid-run but continuing to run on it because I'm too embarrassed to admit something's wrong. But hey, we'll see how it goes! Jebus knows I could use some more social interaction.

Shit, mustn't lose audience, need pretty Alaska photos!. Here are some from a hike I did a month ago. We camped in the rain and I was deathly ill for a week. Apart from that, though, it was sick. I get the feeling that photos don't count in the blog world if they aren't taken the day they're posted. Whatever. It was this or nothing.

The most miserable river crossing anyone has experienced EVER, and that's putting it lightly.

Updated to add: So, Meetup meetup didn't happen. Too much shit to do! Soon though.

I thought it was funny that we were entering a forest.

Another rainy day. I'll take it over New York hell/heat/humidity any day.