I saw a bear today. Not really. But I saw it's tracks. They were left frozen in the slush from when it was slushy a few days back. Now, it's been snowy here for a while – several weeks at least – and I have been laboring under the idea that bears were hibernating and were not to be worried with. Now I am living in fear again...mainly of scritching fabric.
The bear tracks I saw today
Today I rode right by the scene of my shit eating (this blog entry still has more pageviews than any other single one. This leaves me wondering if my audience is really just a middle school class assigned to read this blog?) and I wanted to stop and take a picture of me eating something edible thinking that this would be ironic. But things look different now that there is snow on the ground and I rode right by. So in honor of the memory of my past scat-sampling:
and this:
some leftover turkey from Thanksgiving that I took out with me today thinking that I could just eat the meat and then throw the bone in the trees when I was done eating it. This didn't come to pass as I put it back and carried it with me so that if I bonked I could crack the bone and suck out the marrow.
Today I was thinking about what kind of food I should take on Arrowhead. Last time I did it I took a bunch of things to eat but the majority of it was summer sausage – which I heartily recommend: it has lots of calories, salt, protein, and nitrates; it also won't freeze up on you. And I think it tastes good....within reason. The “within reason” part ran out well before I was done and so at hour 40 suffice it to say that I was truly sick of summer sausage. You know how some people say, “I love pizza. I could eat it for every meal!” I doubt many have done extensive, below zero, field testing of this theory. So this year I've been thinking I'll just take a bunch of jerky cut into cute shapes. Kinda like this:
After all – one never gets sick of eating seahorses
So this talk of food and not exactly chomping at the bit to down yet another slice of -10 degree summer sausage reminds me of a camping trip I took. On said trip we had remembered food and cookware and would have been set if we had remembered to bring any utensils at all. Eating food scraped into your mouth with a stick does not do wonders for increasing the appetite. Jenny made chopsticks out of tent stakes. She's smarter than I...but then again what do you expect?
We had had spiral pasta and some of it got eaten with tweezers as well as the chopsticks. We had also forgotten a potholder but inexplicably had a Vise-Grips along.
Anyway, back to biking. I took this self portrait of myself out on the ride today (by the way I know that's redundant but it's the first thing that came into my head so I typed it and I thought it was cute in a way that only an author could love, so I kept it. Now it's clever and ironic...right? Almost makes up for my failure to be clever when we were camping and forgot silverware...right?). Red face caused by wind and also by me upping the color saturation of the picture digitally. You see, I am desperate to include as many clever and ironic things as I can and if I didn't alter this one, the other one would in no way relate to it and I couldn't put it in at all without looking like I was desperate for approval...which, obviously, I'm not...right?
And here's my scalp with sunburn in the shape of the pattern of the vents in my helmet.
If this doesn't make me look clever I don't know what will.
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