Bite the Bullets

So much stuff, like a teenager's messy room. Aw, who'm i kiddin'? Like my messy room. i got stuff to write about laying all over. Whelp, only one way to handle this one...


Bullet Points!

• Kapwing! First point is bullet points should have sound effects.
• Pow! Sound effects are even better if you have an eight year old reading them out loud over your shouder. Go get one.
• Bam! Also coincidentally the sound that two cars make when slamming together. My least favorite sound in the world and one i had not heard in a blessedly loooong time, until this weekend.
• Bang! i've heard the complaint made about churches, usually by people who won't step foot into one, that they are full of shiny, happy people faking that everything is wonderful. Now, as a regular church goer i happen to have experienced this phenomenon once or two hundred times and i've come to the following two conclusions: a) when worshipping the God of the Universe, one occasionally experiences a time when God allows one to feel his presence and love. God being all powerful and the King of the Universe and our Creator and such, His love and presence have profound effects, just one being a sense of shiny, happy well-being. " 14Then John's disciples came and asked him, "How is it that we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?"
  15Jesus answered, "How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast. " Matthew 9 So forgive us if we seem to be riding a high sometimes, trust me, the rest of our weeks usually make up for it. Conclusion number b) some folks are faking it. Can you blame them? i wouldn't, they are usually doing it for your benefit, you wouldn't really want to know what's bothering them.
• Peeyow! Time is a liquid. Sometimes it just flows along at the pace your used to and at others it dams up a little, like when a little red Neon is coming at you and you can see its nose dipping and the smoke coming off its tires and you have enough time to crunch the numbers on the distance between it and you and the distance between you and the turn you haven't finished and know that there isn't time to get your foot from the brake to the gas or turn the wheel back into your own lane but for some reason you could have very easily typed this entire bullet point in that same little dribble.
• Pop! Sometimes, like oh, say, when your hiking, or driving or living your life, you wake up, look to one side or the other and even though it could be a path you've already walked, or a road you drive everyday or the person you've lived with for thirteen years but in that moment you see the sun hit the water on the stream girded with pines or a really cool house that you just never noticed before or the person your spouse, best friend, relative or co-worker is becoming and you realize that you've been so intent on the mode of transportation and the ground you ate up that you forgot why you were traveling in the first place.
• Zango! Putting one's emotional well-being, even if only one day's emotional well-being in a basket held by pro-football team is a poor investment.
• Thud! Particularly if that team is from Phailadelphia.
• Crack! Listening to you children's laughter as they roughhouse inside the tent is one of life's little joys not to be missed. Even if they might be putting a hole in the tent.
• Thump! This is starting to read like an episode of BATMAN.
• Chachink! Bird watchers, i mean real hike-up-to-hawk-mountain-three-or-four-times-a-week-just-to-see-and-identify-a-tiny-tee-shape-in-the-sky-in-library-voices bird watchers, while really nice people, don't make a lot of sense to me. But then they looked at me kind of odd when we scrabbled over the cliff face they were perched on and we had just scaled in our full packs and explained that we had just hiked three miles across the stony dragonbacked ridgeline after spending the night outside in below freezing temperatures. Go fig.
• Rat-! Camp stoves, while eminently convenient and efficient, do not have the same ambiance of a camp fire.
• -atat! Camping without a camp fire is kind of like an imitation Oreo cookie. Good, but just not quite the same as the real thing.
• Boom! If they put any more restrictions and rules and regulations and trail fees on campers and camping soon only tax lawyers will be able to camp legally.
• Crump! i find it difficult to be a scofflaw in front of the rather wide, naive eyes of my children.
• Badadoom! My vacations are often more work than my work, which is very odd considering that my work is slowly breaking me.
• Vadom! The last time i went backpacking was the first time i had gone backpacking and i had to carry everything for my two boys and my pack weighed fifty-five pounds. This time i was packing with that experience under my packstraps and two boys who could help carry more of their own weight. Happ carried a thirty pound pack and Rascal's was fifteen. How much was the wiser, more streamlined scruffy dogg's?
• Dud. Fifty pounds.
• Ack-Ack! Sometimes on top of the mountain, with the trees all slimmed down to their winter weight you can hear the wind coming from a long way off.
• Zapp! A quote from the Rascal while coming near the end of our long day of very grueling hiking, "I wish we had UPS here, they cover more ground faster."
• Brrrrap! My body chemistry is such that while hiking i would have been perfectly comfortable in shorts and a longsleeve tee shirt and as soon as we stopped moving for the day i needed the full Eskimo.
• Eeenyow! My Grandmother spent some time in the hospital recently, my uncle has just died, my family is scattered across the country and i have completely disconnected from all of them. My phone works but my mouth and brain when i'm on the phone does not. Is a letter that really says what i want to say impersonal? The easy way out? Or better than nothing?
• Frap! yeah, i think i know the answer to that one too.
• FFT! (silenced bullet point)
• Buppuppup! Maybe it was the pack weight difference, maybe it was a tired old bones thing or maybe my rather beat up knees but i could not keep up with Happ on the trail. But go Happ go! i have a feeling i'll be looking at his heels a lot in the coming years. Hope i've trained his sense of direction well enough.
• Whoosh! (Technically a rocket point.) To the coyotes that started yelping like the hounds of hell right after i told Rascal not to worry about his dreams of being devoured in the darkness while we slept out under the stars the other night. Not Funny! If i ever see you i will put a .30/.30 bullet point in each of your wee little skulls!

Well, there you go. Think that about covers what's going on in the oblong pumpkin for a while. Or at least until my "Wot i'm tankfoo fer:" post. Till our trails cross...