Sunday, September 28, 2014

Random Blogamathing Post

Wandered out on a camping trip this weekend with Shyam.  It's the first we've taken just the two of us.  It's been a busy couple of months (couple = 19, I think).  We wandered up to the mountains and just enjoyed each other's company.  We also wanted a day or two away from the crush of humanity.

2014 has been kinda hard for me.  I've tried not to let myself get too down, because it's all seemed like those things that have to happen in life.  And they are.  But they've been weighing on me a bit.  I've really felt it the past couple of months.  Stolen truck.  Dad's getting downsized.  One of my (by way of my folks) dogs dying.  Work keeping me from doing a couple of things I'd looked forward to.  And one of my best friends moving away.

That last one feels weird to say, especially at age 37.  But it is what it is.

Whatever it is, right or wrong, it's been weighing on me.

So.  Went out into the woods for a couple nights.  Get away.  Hit the reset button.  See if I can cut that moping shit out a bit.

A good trip.  Near perfect weather all weekend.  Very few neighbors.  Able to sit down, read a book and enjoy a campfire.

The book was Cherie Priest's Maplecroft.  A Lovecraftian take on Lizzy Borden.  A well-done epistolary work that manages to maintain a good energy the whole way through.  Multiple first-person narratives are tough to pull off (i.e. keep interesting, keep moving all while maintaining unique voices).  I dug the aspect of it that left you questioning some characters, and whether they were falling down the monstrous rabbit hole.

It's Priest's best since Boneshaker, which was her best, for my money.  I'll take a little while to digest, but it may end up surpassing Boneshaker as my favorite.

But I digress.

We camped.  We stayed away from people.  One set of neighbors within eyeshot our first night.  The second night featured an RV pulling into the site across the street.  The RV's bug me.  Not that tailgate camping makes me any kind of man's man, but if you need a TV and air conditioning while travelling?  Why not just stay at a hotel, instead of dragging a 7 mile per gallon behemoth up to Chilhowee?

Anyway.  The campsites share community water spigots.  I couldn't guess how many are around, but I figure for the 25 or 30 sites, there's probably one spigot for every four to six sites.  The spigot across the street from our site we shared with three or four sites.  The RV folks, with tags right from God's Waiting Room, hooked the RV's water hose up to the spigot.

Multiple times, we and the other campers near us had to ask to unhook the water.  This morning?  We just unhooked ourselves.  I have a funny feeling we did it right in the middle of somebody's shower....

Gonna be an interesting couple of weeks at work.  I've been having a difficult time with the job.  The aforementioned problems getting to me, on top of a work schedule that makes me want to go back to 2007 and explain just what "working like a botard" means.  Currently scheduled 11 out of the next 12 day, but there's a light called vacation at the end of this particular tunnel.

Anyway.  It was a good weekend.  I'm gonna make a conscious effort to stop moping about the little shit.  A good weekend like this one made me realize just how lucky a fellow I am.

1 Comments:

Blogger Gladorn said...

Hmm... I may have to put Maplecroft on my reading list. The last really "interesting" book I read was Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. (Loved the book, but felt that the ending was lacking.)

10:56 AM  

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