Keith and Lacey

My decision to plant a garden went something like this…

“Hmm, there’s an established place in my backyard for a garden.”

That was pretty much it.  I didn’t really like my family’s garden as a kid and I don’t really like weeding, watering, or picking, so obviously it made sense to plant a garden.

In any case, I killed the overgrown weeds with Roundup, shoveled and hoed the dirt around and over itself, and then procrastinated.  Luckily, my awesome mom came to the rescue and planted a garden for me.  Carrots, lettuce, spinach, beets (for herself, beets are sick), bell pepper plants, and tomato plants.  The raspberry bush was already there.  Unfortunately, I didn’t pick the raspberries before they all shriveled up and died so the bush retaliated and stopped producing.  Reminds me, I need to call that girl back before too long.

Pearls of wisdom from Mom and I:

• My fresh cherry tomatos are the best ever.
• Don’t plant your tomato plants too close to each other, they grow.
• Don’t plant your bell pepper plants too close to the tomato plants, they’ll be covered.  One of mine died and we moved the other one to save the one pepper it grew.
• Tomato plants smell awesome.
• Thin your carrots like it says to on the seed packet so that they have room to grow.  I don’t know how many of mine will even be large enough to be called matter.
• I don’t know what happened to the spinach, it got tall and seedy and not leafy and then died.
• If you till your soil, plant a garden, water it, weed it, prune it, and pick it, you get to eat fresh organic food you raised yourself!  It’s really very cool and not too hard because you force your mom to do the work.

It annoys me that Derek and Sara always have their cute little suburban yard perfectly groomed so I spent 3 days completely weeding my overgrown garden for these final photos.  Take that!  Ninja style!  Hyaw!

As per Brian’s request, here’s proof that you can own a house without tearing up carpet, grouting tile, and spending all the equity you are supposed to be making.

I’m awesome at not finishing things.  I love it.  You know that feeling of unaccomplishment and things hanging over your head.  It’s great!  Like, it was a total bummer that we actually made it to Kent Lake.  If you recall, Shane and company spent several years not making it due to snow and cliffs and at least one near death, so when we got there it was a little too accomplishy for me.

By the way, I was originally going to talk about not finishing my Kent Lake story but I turned it into not making it to Kent Lake itself.  Twisty.

Following the “perfect day,” this cabin would be a great place to escape to.  It’s filled with enough food and supplies to survive at least a few months I’m sure.  You probably don’t know what the “perfect day” is so let’s just say it involves bombings, network failures, government collapses, riots, lots of destruction, and maybe a nuke here and there.

There’s a large flat rock at the edge of the lake with many uses: tanning, sleeping, diving off of, helicopter landing pad.  It’s sweet.  Helicopter landing pad I’m not kidding, there are heavy steel loops drilled and epoxied into the rock.  Instead of backpacking all the tools and supplies in to build the cabin and subsequently stock it, I guess they figured using a helicopter was easier.  “Twist it around your head like a helicopter.  North Carolina!”

I thought the water was going to be bitter cold (the glacier snow kinda gave me that impression for some reason).  But it wasn’t.  Counter intuitively, it was quite warm!  It’s shallow and I pee’d in it a lot so that may have something to do with it.  I had to go check out the glacier of course so Rusty, Emily, and I swam over.  Right where that little jetty sticks out, the water got weird.  You know how there are temperature layers in the water?  Here it was, top 4 feet of warm, and then bottom foot of ICE cold.  There was seriously a line between like 70 degrees and 40.  That’s probably too extreme but you get the point.  We stepped on the glacier and felt our feet burn from the cold and then decided we should test our fate and go up to the crack in the middle.  I have to say I was skeptical but Rusty took off up there so of course I had to.  I ran up and looked 12 or so feet down into the icy abyss and then found a little boulder to stand on until my feet recovered enough to run back down like a retarded quail.  After we swam back to the heli-rock, Ryan and Rich were like, “Dude, you’re a monster!”  I replied, “Huh?”  “Dude you stood on the snow forever!  You’re crazy!  Monster!”  Haha they couldn’t tell I was standing on a little boulder being a wuss!  Now if I can just figure out how to trick everyone else into thinking I’m not a wuss.

Loop hikes are generally better so you’re not just retracing your steps like a salmon in heat.  But it didn’t matter on this hike because even if you could find your steps to retrace, you’d be thankful because that might mean just one less branch to smash through.  Plus the views are totally worth seeing again.

My final campsite was pretty rad, a reflection of my overall radness for sure.  Remember my first night of mosquito love?  I was not looking forward to female mosquitos whispering in my ear and making out with me again so I got some tips from Mosmo (Mosquito Cosmopolitan Magazine) and wrapped my face with my American Bad Ass bandana.  They came around at first but quickly realized I was smarter than them and I had completely outmaneuvered them.  Take that bizquitos!  Bam!  I slept like a cadaver.

It’s hard (for me, I’m sure Derek could do it in his sleep with a pirate patch, two missing arms, and a peg leg) to take photos that show how high and close to the edge I am.  I was a few feet from the edge of at least a thousand foot cliff.  I climbed up and sat on the rock to the right to cook and eat my dinner.  Hardcore!  Well, not really.

I had a blast and I’m stoked I got in on a unique and epic adventure.  For me, it’s all about the epic, and this journey definitely added to my epic level.  What’s your epic level?

All the Kent Lake photos

Ye cain’t survive long in this ol’ world without bein’ a wee bit piratey these days.