Tomorrow I travel south to Bend, Oregon to see what I’ll be doing this winter.

I’ll write more when it doesn’t feel like someone snuck needles into my arms.

The guy trying to sell acid in the parking lot of my local grocer was an excitable fellow, and thus he became the personification of my evening. It is a cold, spitting rain outside that whistles through the windows and rattles the garage door. The Tri-Force of my universe is moving, working and summitting. My brain and bedroom are a complete mess as we all try to bolt off in different directions at the same time.

I swung by the grocery store to pick up produce boxes so I can start packing up all my stuff, with the intent of a) mailing some of it back to Minnesota and/or b) finding someone in Hood River with a huge freakin’ basement where it can hibernate for four months. It’s weird to think that I need to start taking this room apart, without any clear knowledge of where I’m going from here. The path is still dark and choked with brambles, but I anticipate that it will lead out of Hood River within the next month.

With rumors of my departure floating around the shop, work has since gotten a lot more interesting (repeated Internet and power outages have made work more interesting, but have also made work less work, and now that the Internet is up and the generators are off there is more work again). Before I leave I must tie up many loose ends with our website and our relationship with a leading online retailer, train someone to be just like me in my absence, and temporarily run shipping upon H20 Joe’s return to Utah. Add to this the moonlighting I’m doing for an important local client, the moonlighting I’m sadly neglecting for another client, and recent flare-ups of RSS in my poor paws, and I’ve got myself a full plate.

Blessed with a beautiful weather forecast for this weekend, we are going to attempt the summit of Mount Adams. Thus, it now behooves me to modify my boots so they won’t gnaw my feet to pieces, epoxy my pack’s cracked waist buckle, re-waterproof my rain jacket (which hasn’t repelled water since Ihduhapi last summer, where a kid puked on it and it rained for a month straight), refill my fuel bottles, find my snowboarding goggles (as if wind and snow starts flying upon our descent, sunglasses will be useless), borrow an ice axe, and drive to The Dalles to rent a pair of crampons. The current plan is to spend Friday night at Cold Creek, Saturday night on the mountain at Lunch Counter, and start out for the summit at 2:00 am on Sunday.

And we’re just gettin’ started, we is, we is.