Frakkin' Gentoo, Again!

I am so flamin' mad right now. I tried to install a new power-saving feature on my desktop machine, the same one I've been using on my laptop for the past few months. It required an upgrade of some core utilities, but I figured, okay, go ahead.

Everything broke. And I mean everything. I have to re-install the entire OS from scratch.

Now, normally, that wouldn't annoy me too much. No, what makes me stone cold furious is that the current edition of Gentoo (Gentoo 2008) does not provide a backward-compatible cryptoloop. Until I find out what the hell it does with the cryptoloop, I can't access my archive drive, which I'd crypto'd on a whim just to see if I could do it. It was by bittorrent drive; all my anime is on there! Grrr.....

I'm pretty damn sure I can build old-mount and old-loop by hand and recover, but dammit, I shouldn't have to. Anyway, there's still a working kernel on there. Just nothing else. And, oh the irony, the Gentoo 2008 "install disk"-- is an image on the desktop machine. And the motherboard is too old to boot from USB.

This really is my fault for letting the machine go too long between system updates.

Camping without the children

Omaha and I have been blessed this week to be childless. They're both packed off to summer camp for the week, and for the first time in eight years Omaha and I have found an entire six-day stretch to ourselves.

Unfortunately, that didn't turn out completely as well as we'd planned. The state-wide primaries were Tuesday, so Omaha was booked Monday and Tuesday night doing political stuff. It wasn't until Wednesday that we were free to ourselves. We went out to eat at a lovely restaurant called Bennett's, up on Mercer Island, which was pricey but delicious, and went to bed early in the hopes of getting out and onto the road the next day.

Thursday morning, we quickly threw everything we needed for a camping trip into the car, secured the bikes to the back, and rode out for Tahuya State Forest, a "working forest" popular with mountain bikers and off-road vehicle enthusiasts.

The Magnificent Omaha

We first tried a short run called the Overland, off of a place called The Sandpit. The Sandpit was exactly that: a huge field of gravel. Gravel is the enemy of the bicycle, because it disperses all of your energy, robbing you of any momentum and making it hard to get any traction to build more. Eventually, we crossed the Sandpit and made our way onto the trail. The ride was brutal, with lots of gravel in the trail, and the trail had recently been ground up by dirt bikes. Tires slipped and slid. It was nasty. We did about two miles of that before heading back to the car, taking a shortcut on a forest road. We drove down to Belair State Park for a campsite, then left the campsite to try Mission Creek.

That was a much better ride. Jarring in places, lots of roots, lots of standing water in trail ruts and pots, lots of mud, but at least it was a trail and not a gravel pit with trees. We dumped our bikes quite a lot and our shoes got very wet. We rode for about an hour, then realized we'd left the map we had and turned back.

One thing about these "working" forests; they don't feel right. They have a "used" feel to them, which I suppose is only normal as that's what they are: used. We're not in a forest in the same sense as, say, some of the ancient woods around Mt. Rainier. This place has been chewed through once or twice is the past century by loggers as a way of providing cash for our school system. That's the excuse that the state uses.

It's been a long time since I've ridden on anything other than city streets (and I don't even do that often enough!). My thighs and buttocks were brutalized by the constant pounding of the bicycle seat. I could barely walk.

We returned to the campsite with just enough light left to make Omaha's famous campside meal, foil chicken. I took a quick three-minute shower (50 cents for three minutes) and used as much hot water as I could buy with 50 cents.

Drying shoes by the campfile

I will say that the kilt is pretty much the perfect dress accessory for this kind of outing. I could change into my riding pants without needing privacy, and going regimental in the evening was a damned relief after wearing those things all that time. Also, since we'd forgotten many things in our haste to get out of there (like towels), the kilt was great in allowing me to shower, squeegee myself as well as possible, toss a t-shirt over my damp body, and go. Not too bad.

It felt so weird to be camping without the kids, though. It was the first day I'd really missed them in more than an intellectual fashion. Where are my giggly kids?

I must have slept like a stone that night. I don't remember any of it.

Mountain Biking, Medical Crises, More Self-Abuse

Elf, The Full Package.

Omaha made a fire while I scrambled the eggs, and soon we were toasting English muffins and having breakfast sandwiches (ugh, did you know those things were invented by McDonalds? At least the ones you make yourself are tastier and better).

Don't believe the photograph. Those pants make everything look bigger.

We forgot so many things. We forgot bicycle pumps! The camera tripod, spare shoes, towels, the toasting grill. Contraceptives, not that we could have used them with our bruised and battered adult bits. We remembered food, shelter, bedding, medicines.

The campsite is full of RVs sporting satellite antennaes and other wealthy people pretending to commune with nature. Scattered among them, though, are some ordinary families, with tents and sleeping bags and campfires required for heat and cooking. Lots of kids on bicycles out here, too. I saw one group go by and wondered what kind of example Dad was setting because he made the kids wear helmets but he didn't have one on himself. The creek that runs through the campsite looks groomed, too tame to be natural, with little step-down dams of larger rocks at regular intervals as it makes its way down to the Hood Canal. There are way too many crows in the campsite, and the trash bins aren't animal safe so I guess they're not worried about predators here.

Omaha and I packed up and drove out to Spillman Camp (actually, the Oak Patch intersection, as Spillman Camp proper requires a reservation), which is a popular ORV (Off Road Vehicle) attraction. While we were unpacking, we saw a lot of 4-wheel ATV's (All Terrain Vehicls) puttering about, including one brood with three children-- everyone had their own ATV, and "Mama" was just about the white trashiest thing I've seen or heard in a long time. Her little boy, about ten or so, had his own gas-powered ATV and was cruising through the woods, and she was telling him that she'd ride with him later but right now "Mama's just smoking a cigarette." I mean, she had the trailer-park accent down. Straight out of central casting, that one.

We rode down Howell Lake Trail for a while until we reached the fork with something called "Randy's Water Spot Trail," which we took for a short distance, then turned off onto a trail with only an identifier: UB14. There's a trail on the map called UB Lost; this wasn't that trail, but we surely felt like it. This trail was technical, with lots of crap, lots of falls, and that momentum-robbing gravel. Parts of it were fun; I like mud, and roots (Omaha hates roots; I think she'd rather do gravel), and vicious downhill bombs. We were getting worried that we'd have to walk this trail back when, finally, it met back up with Howell Lake Trail. We decided to ride back to the intersection where we'd first seen Randy's Water Spot Trail.

Having done this half-mile of trail before, I bombed it and reached the trail marker with, I had thought, Omaha right behind me. It was a pretty easy chunk of trail-- lots of mud, but mostly downhill and no gravel or roots to speak of.

I waited for Omaha to show up. And waited. And started to get worried. I was just about to head back up the trail when I heard her coming through the trees. She stopped right next to me. "What took you so long? That was a pretty easy stretch back there."

She looked at me blankly and said, "I, that is, what I said, I mean, uh, it was..."

Oh, shit. "Did you have a seziure?"

"Little one," she said.

"Come sit down."

Omaha, recovering.

We sat about half an hour, sharing a Clif bar and waiting for her to recover. I know she'd taken her meds that morning, although she'd taken her afternoon dose the day before very late. We shared our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and she announced she was good to ride. So, we tried Randy's Water Spot. No go; the trail was brutal, with too much gravel and too sharp an uphill to get anywhere without porting the bikes.

We turned back, headed over to a road, and found another trail called "Paul's Grade." That was better, although about halfway in we found "CAUTION: DO NOT ENTER" yellow barrier tape had once been across the trail, but had also been cut recently. Omaha said the tape was down, we should go on, so we did.

This ride was fun. Not so much gravel, lots of bumps. Quite a few places to dump the bicycle, but we made it okay into the high "meadow" (actually, a clear-cut that had just started to grow back) and around the ridge, meeting up with the Randy's Water Spot Trail three-quarters down. After briefly getting lost and hitting a dead-ended trail (oh, did I mention that the batteries on my GPS had died? Yeah. Lost, we were) we finally dropped down onto the Tahuya River Trail, which took us back to the Twin Lakes sandpit, and it was a mile's ride on forest service roads back to Oak Patch. By then, I was in pain. My right shoulder had taken a hit from a fall, my calves were scratched to hell and back, and my ass was numb from all the brutality. My knee had been complaining about some vector and I was afraid I would have trouble walking, but actually no... it was better walking than riding by that point. We made it back to the car just in time for our water to run out. It was nice to sit down on a soft cushiony surface.

We refilled from the five gallon jug we'd brought, did ibuprofen and trail mix, and headed out for the ferry. The ride was fine; Omaha slept in the car most of the way. We got home and had dinner; wisely, Omaha had pre-cooked some brisket in the slow cooker two nights before and put it in the 'fridge, so we had dinner ready when we got there. A shower made me feel almost human. We went to bed at 8:45, how grown-up is that?