This past couple of weeks have been stressful for both Ms. B. and me, sometimes in the extreme, with
daily salvos of sheer lunacy from that fucking orange shitgibbon in the oval
office. I've tried to find a good balance between staying informed and
retreating to recharge my mental health. I'm pretty much picking my battles
and avoiding the dreaded "doomscroll," as they say. But it's clear that we are
in for unprecedented hard times, and, quite frankly, I'm not sure the country
as a whole is capable of weathering it. Without question, many of us will suffer great (and such goddamn needless) hardship. On top of that, we've had a couple of expensive household breakdowns that
aren't improving my spirits.
I'm focusing as much as possible on my
fiction writing while also writing my senators and congressmen. We'll be
taking a Caribbean trip fairly soon, which we reserved about a year ago, so I
hope that will help with the recharging (though if we'd had any inkling at the
time our income would be less and our expenses more, I think we would have
changed our plans). Last night friend Scott (a.k.a. Diefenbaker)
came up from Asheboro, NC, and spent the night so we could make a geocaching
trip to Roanoke today. Scott hadn't found a couple of my nearby caches, so we
hoofed it out to them, and he made the finds without help from
me (meaning that, even though he's older than the hills, his geocaching eyes are still pretty good). Once back home, I made a killer batch of spicy Thai
beef. And while we sampled several bourbons from the bar downstairs, we
watched an eclectic assortment of music videos on YouTube, all of which
elevated our spirits.
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The No-Dead-Weight Irregulars at the famous
Mill Mountain Star
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This morning, we headed out fairly early, drove to Roanoke, and met friend
Natalie (a.k.a.
Fishdownthestairs), thus completing our
traditional trio, known to some as the
No-Dead-Weight Irregulars. We
spent most of the day at
Mill Mountain, navigating its numerous trails on the hunt for
geocaches of various types, including traditional, virtual, and Adventure
Lab. Mill Mountain is best known for the almost 90-foot
Roanoke Star at its summit, which is visible for many miles around, particularly when it
is illuminated at night.
We put in about five miles on the mountain, with terrain that ranged from
medium difficulty to downright rugged. Sadly, we bombed out on our very first
hunt, as the cache appeared to be missing; however, for the rest of the day,
we managed to claim all our targets. My favorite was a Bigfoot-themed
cache called
"Signs of the Sasquatch" (GC76KTA), although we never laid eyes on Bigfoot himself (even though, against the
sign's admonition, we oftentimes left the marked trails).
When I was a wee lad, my parents took me to the
Mill Mountain Zoo (although I have little memory of it), and when I was a student at
Ferrum College, not too far from Roanoke, some friends and I drove to the top of the
mountain and smoked pot in some secluded corner; but since then, I had never
gone back. I didn't even know the zoo still existed, and we saw nothing of it
today, not that zoos hold any particular allure for me.
After we had hiked ourselves out, we drove back down the mountain and found a
late lunch at a nice little tavern called
Fork in the Alley, where I went to town on their Inferno Burger and fries, accompanied by a
Devil's Backbone Vienna Lager, all of which hit the spot so hard it about
gave me bruises.
We snagged a couple of caches near the restaurant, and then set sail for
Martinsville (though I very kindly dropped Natalie off at her vehicle rather
than at some random spot a long way away, which Scott and I thought might be
entertaining, at least until she killed us dead). Brugger had spent a long
weekend in Hillsborough at one of her regular artsy-craftsy retreats, and she
arrived home not long before we did.
So, I reckon we're as recharged as we're gonna be for a while. And this week,
it's back into the trenches. Gird your loins.
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View of Roanoke from the observation deck at the Mill Mountain Star
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A massive rock formation high up on the mountain (yes, there is a cache
hidden in there, which we found)
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| Big honking bikes! |
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Inferno Burger at Fork in the Alley
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