Fall Break

I went back into the woods again. This time we went to Nordhouse Dunes just outside of Ludington. That's Lake Michigan - the darker line of blue above the gorgeous trees.

This time, the trail was easy. Because it was easy, they didn't feel the need for accurate maps or markers of any kind. It was easy, but no one really knew where they were. This made me nervous, but the sound of the water calmed me down.

There are a lot of things to love about being on the water. One of them is the sunset. Have you ever seen the sun set over water? It literally sinks into the water right before your eyes. The sunset from the top of a dune? Pretty much perfect.

We walked on the squeaky sand.

And we dipped our toes in the water. It wasn't exactly warm, but it was also not terrible - nice enough for a barefoot stroll along the waterline.

In other news, I recently had a run-in with a professor. You know, the kind of person who expects you to rely on telepathy instead of assignment sheets and tells you that you simply aren’t trying hard enough all the while marking you down for not including requirements in your paper which you demonstrably did include. I find it incredibly hard to let go of these kinds of injustices, and they unfortunately effect my life for many days (and in this case weeks) afterwards. I find it depressing and yet oddly comforting that at every level of education I have received and in every school I have worked there are bad teachers and good teachers, no matter the level of funding or prestige. There are people who are good at their jobs and are always striving to be better, more effective, and more relevant, and there are people who are lost in their own world or, worse, don’t care at all. These people exist in every place and in every job on the planet.

And because I still have half a semester left with this professor (maybe more), I'm wondering how it is you deal with these kinds of people and these kinds of injustices. Any advice is appreciated.

Adirondacks

So I went on this backpacking trip. You might remember I mentioned I was going in October, but those plans fell through. We rescheduled for May, and one week ago I found myself in Lake Placid with my toilet paper wrapped in a baggie and all the essentials packed into a (relatively) small pack.

I've been struggling with what to say about this trip. It was awesome and intense. The hiking was much more technical that any of us had expected. There was some bouldering, lots of mud pits, places where we were essentially bushwhacking between trail markers, places where the trail itself was indistinguishable from the surrounding forest, very steep scrambles up and down very large rocks (Indian Pass, I'm looking at you), tons of stream crossings necessitating the use of fallen logs and well-placed rocks (24 on the last day alone), and very wet feet for certain of us.

People keep saying that it doesn't sound like much fun, but it was. I mean, the kind of fun the means carrying you toilet paper in a baggie and renting bear canisters. But the views were incredible. I think the best thing to do is let the pictures speak for themselves.

This is the trail. See it? Yeah, not so much.

This is also the trail. It looks like a semi-dried up stream bed because that is what it is.

I love trillium. They have a very delicate version in the Adirondacks.

The nature, it strives to make us feel insignificant.

Cooking dinner the first night. Thai Cashew Chicken. Yes, please.

1. Day 1 - Pristine New Boots, 2. Day 1 - First Sploodge, 3. Day 1 - Dampish, but not wet, 4. Day 2 - Very Wet and Squidgy, 5. Day 3 - Soggy and Sore, 6. Day 3 - Relief

An attempt to illustrate how to turn a pair of new boots into very wet, muddy boots. With the best part of any hike, getting the boots off and the feet in very cold water at the end of the day.

I am pretty much in love with all the moss. If I was a fairy, I would live among the many moss covered logs in the forest.

We found an Ent. They really do exist.

The water has this incredible dark stillness about it. I can't get enough. I'm a Michigan girl through and through. I miss the water when I can't have any.

Handknits in the wild. Shown are Owls and a hat I made before the blog from wool I brought back from Ireland. I think it was my first attempt at winging a pattern. And, yes, I am wearing a ridiculous number of layers here. It is cold! I've got on long underwear, a Smartwool pullover, and a chunky-knit sweater in addition to a hat, pants, and mittens. And I should point out that I'm not exactly warm here.

You want another lake and mountain picture. I know you do.

Oh, hey, that's not an outdoorsy picture! I decided I need to sewas pouch for my first-aid kit. I improvised this pattern to make a double pocketed zippered pouch that would fold up.

It turned out better that I expected. I didn't use any of the first aid except the ibuprofen.

Adirondack chairs at Heart Lake. I could sit here all day.

Epic Hike

The last Monday of the festival, Krista and I went on an epic hike. We’d been planning for it and working up to it all summer, gradually ramping up our hikes so we could be prepared to be at 12,500 feet, so we could handle and elevation gain of roughly 3000 ft. and a duration of 7 hours. We’d been planning for it for a few weeks, and by 5AM on the prescribed day, we’d nearly talked ourselves out of it. We knew it was going to be hard, sometimes painful, work. It was 5AM on our day off. Staying in bed sounded like a really good idea.

We got up anyway and headed to the Maroon Bells Wilderness Area to do the hike to Buckskin Pass. You’ve probably seen Maroon Bells, even if you’ve never been there. It is one of the most photographed scenic views in the US, and let me tell you, those photographers don’t even have to work for an amazing picture. It’s all right there. All you have to do is point and shoot. (Don’t ask me why they’re called “Bells.” I have no idea.)

We took a little break at Crater Lake for some water, snacks, and photos before heading off the beaten path towards the Pass. It’s quite cold in the mountains in the mornings and evenings. The sun in the source of most of the warmth, and without it, things cool off in a big hurry. It was in the upper 30s (farenheit) when we left, and at Crater Lake, most of the greenery was frosted over.

We passed Minnehaha Gulch, where we saw a mama and baby mule deer.

We stopped for a bit in the alpine meadow, where we dreamed of putting up a little cabin and never coming down.

We finally sighted the Pass (the snow covered bit on the left), and a marmot – a funny kind of cross between a woodchuck and a dog.

The thing about hiking so early is that your sense of time get so skewed. By the time we’d made it to the summit, it was only 10AM, and though we were sweaty and our legs were a little wobbly, it didn’t feel like we’d been hiking for 4 hours. One of the difficult things for us was hiking in the altitude. Though we were fully acclimated to 8000 ft, climbing steep switchbacks at 12,000 proved to be a bigger challenge on our lungs than our legs. We had to stop every couple hundred yards to catch our breath before continuing up. This was fine. We weren’t in a hurry. We just wanted to get there.

And, oh, there we were!

We were sitting down to some “lunch,” comfortably couched on some obliging rocks when Krista yelled, “Mountain goats! Mountain goats!” They were coming down the mountain right towards us. They got very close – Krista was actually quite scared at this point, and hunkered behind some rocks. I didn’t even have to zoom on this shot! I was a bit uncertain too. I had never encountered a mountain goat, and I had no idea what to expect from them – they really were very close! – and I didn’t know how to make them go away. Our talking didn’t seem to faze them, and neither did our singing. (To the tune of “A Spoon Full of Sugar:” A spoon full of mountain goat makes the hike a little scary, hike a little scary, hike a little scary….)

We did finally end up cutting the trail to avoid two goats who were getting a bit aggressive with each other right on the trail and we headed back down.

The thing about hiking in the mountains is that going up is hard work, but hiking downhill for hours is painful on the joints. The terrain is very rocky above the tree line and gravelly below it. Not such a problem going up, but on the way down makes for slippery and uncertain footing. Coming down got really old. It was hot and crowded by the time we made it back to Crater Lake, and we really wanted to no longer be vertical.

The other epic thing about our epic hike? An epic shower afterwards.

Summer

Colorado is an incredibly beautiful place, especially when you get into the moutains. I spent my summer at 8000 ft, and let me tell you, not only does it mess with your blood oxygen level, but it also messes with your sense normalcy. It's sunny every day. Every day. My first day back in Michigan, I woke up very confused because the sun was not spearing through the gap in my blinds directly into my corneas as is has nearly every morning all summer.

The view from Aspen Mountain

Not to mention, you kind of get used to the scenery, which is a shame since there is so much to see! Hunter Creek

I worked so hard this summer. I really can't explain to people the experience of Aspen. "I learned a ton." "It was very intense." "A great experience." These are my standard answers when people ask about it, but none of them is really at all adequate. It's like there's not enought to say and too much to say all at once. A big part of being a performer is being able to do it perfectly every time whenever someone asks and often to do it with every little lead time, and that's a skill that I have been honing all summer. I met lots of awesome people who I am going to miss, but I have to tell you. I'm almost looking forward to school starting up on Monday because I need a vacation. Local beer - Summer Wheat and Brown Bear Ale

It was a tough summer for a few reasons: the sheer amount of work I needed to do on a daily basis, having to do that work in a place where my usual methods of stress reduction were not available (TV, knitting, friends, cooking, cleaning), and lastly I lost someone very important to me this summer. Someone whose loss has left a huge empty spot in my heart and a perpetual tightness in my chest. I'm in desperate need of a vacation, but I almost don't want one. The more free time I have, the more I think about her, and the more I think about her the more depressed I get. I don't want to think about her, because if I don't think about her, maybe she's still here.

But now that I'm back in my little apartment, with my friends and my knitting and my kitchen, maybe I'll be able to handle it better than I have been.

Welcome home, self.

Rainy Day Ithaca

See, the thing about Ithaca is that there are many, many, many totally awesome things to do when it's sunny. You can hike in one of the numerous local state parks (always my first choice), you can go to the Farmer's Market and spend half a day wandering around, heck you can just walk around town and shop on the Commons or admire the beautiful houses and gardens. You can head up to Cornell and walk around the Plantations and the Arboretum and have some ice cream at the Cornell Dairy or Bubble Tea at The Old Teahouse in Collegetown. But if it's raining, things get a little bit more difficult. And since Sarah and I are both on budgets, it gets even harder to try and find entertainment on a rainy day, as most of my trip to Ithaca was. We, however, stumbled on a rather awesome solution to the rainy day blues. On your next rainy day, when you feel cooped up and in need of some inexpensive entertainment, may we suggest going to your local big box craft store and spending $10? There are so many entertaining things to be found there, but we settled on painting shoes.

Painting shoes, you might ask? Yes, painting shoes. We found acceptable slip-ons at the craft store and procured a number of puffy paints in colors appropriate for painting dragons.

Then, we took to the internet in search of dragon-y inspiration. I sketched out what I wanted on a scrap of paper.

Then, we sketched our ideas on the shoes. I used regular old pencil, but Sarah used a white colored pencil since she chose black shoes.


Then, simply paint away, giggling madly at your genius. Sarah did hers all in one go, but I let mine dry a bit and finished off the detail work. Oh, and my we also suggest letting them dry on the top of the fridge if there is a cat around? Cats and puffy paint do not mix.

And there you have two very different takes on dragon shoes. Sarah went for a more gothic, kind of Dungeons and Dragons, sort of motorcycle girl approach with all kinds of super cool flames and abstract dragons.

Her feet are on fire because she's so hot! I chose a more fairy tale, literal kind of dragon.

My absolute favorite part (besides the two of us wearing them out together and hoping that people notice) is the dragons I painted on the back. This isn't a completely finished shot - there's more to the flames now - but I love the gold sparkly belly and the little horns.

Oh, hey, and if you're thinking to yourself, "Well, now I've got all this puffy paint, what do I do next?" Well, you can puffy paint more shoes, or you can get yourself a piece of wax paper and make stickies for your windows. Paint right on the wax paper, let them dry, peel them off, give them a lick, and stick them anywhere! I now have a little sea forest on the bottom of my bathroom mirror!

It is clear that I am a bad blogger, because I have a bunch of backed up FOs to show off (not to mention a trip to the yarn store to admit to). One step at a time...

In which I divulge some great campfire recipes

I went camping this weekend with my family. There a few things I love more than being outside - hiking, camping, canoeing, swimming, whatever you've got as long as I'm out of doors. We went to Yankee Springs State Park, which was lovely. There were lots of hiking trails and a lake to go fishing. Also, there were lots of acorns.

I love acorns. I can't really tell you why. Maybe its their shiny roundness. Maybe it's their sweet little caps, or their thousands of variations, or all the different colors of rich brown. I found my pockets stuffed with them by the end of Sunday. I'm particularly enamoured of the stripy ones. I've never seen stripy acorns before.

I call this one "Acorns on White and Yellow Table Cloth."

One of the things we like to cook while we're camping is foil packs, also known as Hobo Stew. You need some kind of meat, onions, canned potatos, other vegetables as you like and then some kind of liquid. We were doing a tribute to Oktoberfest, so ours had sausage, potatos, onions, apples, sauerkraut, and for liquid potato juice from the can, sauerkraut juice, or beer. Other variations include hamburgers, potatos, onions, canned mushrooms, and canned gravy. It's important that the potatos be canned, because raw ones would take both too much time to cook and too much liquid.

Then you wrap the whole thing up in foil and toss it on the coals that you have carefully constructed in your fire pit. Half and hour, forty five minutes later, you've got some seriously good food.
We fished a bit off the fishing dock. I mostly just fed worms to the fishes, but my brother caught some itty bitty little fish after he figured out that the hooks were too big.

Even mom tossed a hook into the water.

The other thing we really like to cook outside is Doughboys. Doughboys are basically biscuit cooked on a stick. First you've got to find a stick in the woods that's long and straight and is about as big around as a broom handle. Then you mix up some Bisquick into a playdough like consistency with milk and form them into palm sized balls. You will, of course, have skinned a good six inches of the bark off of one end of your stick, and on this you will apply your biscuit dough, firmly impaling the ball of dough and squeezing it down the sides. Do not form a pancake and wrap the stick. This will cause the Doughboy to crack a lot while cooking and it may not stay on the stick. Cook over coals.

Cook until everything is golden brown. Your Doughboy will probably crack anyway, even if you have followed my directions. This is how you know the inside is cooking. When everything seems done (or the outside is charred to just this side of edible), pull off the stick with a paper towel and stuff with butter and jam. Or peanut butter and raisins. Or blueberries. Or bananas. Or, if you've got some lying around from last night's dinner, maybe some bratwurst or hot dogs. Enjoy.

Oh, and the name Doughboys? They're called that because if you're a less experienced campfire cook, you're likely to char the outside long before the inside is done, giving you a doughy, half-cooked biscuit which is still delightful, but which may sit like a hockey puck in your stomach.

I'm back!

Let's just get the important info out of the way. Yes, I did get Harry Potter in Amsterdam. It was awesome. I got off my plane, and at the first store I came to, there it was. I snatched it up with only a little bit of visible external dancing, paid, and was on my way in 10 minutes.

But, see, the universe felt I needed to pay for being so lucky as to get Harry Potter on the day it came out. KLM lost my luggage. Well, strictly speaking, they knew exactly where it was, it just wasn't in Italy. They sort of "forgot" to put it on my plane. Whoops. I fit into the Italians better than I anticipated, what with my stench an all. Four days later, they managed to get it to me, and let me tell you, I have never been happier to wear pjs in my life.

Italy was beautiful. Witness the disgustingly beautiful view of Todi, which is only on of the many disgustingly beautiful views I have in my picture cache.

And the Italian breakfast? Due cornetto nutella e un caffe da portar via. (Two croissants with nutella in the middle and an espresso to go.) All for less than 2 euro. And my non-existent Italian? Very much existent. Italian is actually quite easy, especially if you have been in a previous life pretty fluent in French.

And, oh, the wine. This is from a wine "tasting" which was actually 4 glasses of different wines with dinner, not tastes. My favorite was Orvieto Classico Superiore. I hope you can get it in the US, but I bet it's expenive. Wine it Italy? Not so expensive. Yes, they really do drink wine all the time, and yes they really do eat pizza and pasta every single day. Every. Single. Day.

This is the hill I had to walk up and down at least twice a day. There is no way for this picture to accurately illustrate how steep this hill really is (or how scary it is to walk up and down with buses screaming past.) Let's just say that I now have a fantastically perky rear end.

My Italian experience wasn't all wine and views and nutella (although, let's face it, there was a whole lot of that going on). Actually I was there to play music, and boy did I. I have never played 3 recitals in a row before, nor have I ever put music together that quickly, but the whole thing was remarkably successful.

I have finished my travels for the summer, so you can expect a much more predictable schedule of posting from now on. I've got a ton of stuff to do, like study for my theory placement exam, learn my audition excerpts, and move, but the knitting? It's coming with me.