12/7 Junk From the Abyss

I don’t know what to say. Every time I come up with something, I just get annoyed at myself.

I feel like I should have really spelled this JD out. Maybe brevity is for the best though…

was a 4-5 hour car ride on a paved road in the Sahara. No AC. Had the window down for air flow but when the air is over 100 degrees, that doesn’t help much. Then we tried to roll the window up and it was at that time the window slipped off of whatever was holding it up and fell into the door. And did I mention I was sitting with another guy in the cramped back seat? We dumped water in our hats before putting them on. We did this a lot.

a close second was a camel ride a few days later. that was pretty cool for the first hour. then it just starts to hurt.

Oden.

sort of funny dog, causing a scene

wiki’s dealing w/ the descent into the underworld

I was thinking of orpheus…

Last year, when radio head played in seattle, a friend and I drove up, right after work on a thursday. We got to our seats right before they went on stage. We stayed watched the whole show, and then jockeyed our way out of the parking lot. We got on I-5 probably around 1 am. We sucked down redbulls and drove back. I got home around 5am, kept up the caffeine and rolled into work super early. I was dead tired, but it was all worth it. I think that was my last adventure worth sharing around a camp fire.

Is what should have been a 5-hour trip from Topeka, KS (where I had led a Mock Trial team to our best finish ever) back to Grinnell, IA (where I went to college0 in the middle of a near whiteout. It took us 11 hours and half the time felt like we were in the middle of the arctic somewhere. Thankfully we did make it (thanks to the entire trip being on Interstates) and I must admit I was never so happy to get back to Grinnell and see about 3 feet of new snow on the ground.

yeah… I said it

I guess I kind of hope the answer is “yes”.

Woot has a TV today

Coming home from the airport at 8 AM (I came back from Asia on the nonstop Tokyo Flight) in the middle of that mega snow storm. Two days before Christmas and literally my cab was the only one of the road. It felt like I was in the middle of some disaster flick.

…so annoying

greg …

steve nash at it again…

Tough luck also for other players. Out another week or so after already missing 3 weeks with a twisted ankle. Maybe he wants to chat with Lou Williams about their experiences of getting your mouth shut. The worst I ever had to do was wearing a brace on my upper gums that made it hard to swallow, initially hard to speak, and gave me some nice scars inside.

I think we should trade all our injured players for non-injured ones.

I was on a plane

there were also snakes on the plane

I travelled across Bolivia in a bus where the driver had to hot-wire two cables to start it, and another two to sound the horn on narrow roads where you could drop to your death at a moments notice. When we were stuck on a muddy road, we had to push, and someone pushed so well that he pushed in the back window and cut his wrist. Now it was also cold. Amazing. Two days later we got into a rebel holdup, and I had to face a kid who was about 14 holding an AK47 in our faces. Good times were had by all.

I sailed across the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to Trinidad and almost collided with an angry whale (it was funny to see the skipper stand on deck with a signal pistol as a last defense and probably wouldn’t have helped anything), and a sea freight container where I couldn’t decide if I wanted to go starboard or port around it. A few years later I learned that my skipper had died on a trip in the Pacific after eating something bad and falling in a coma, and his guest couldn’t sail the ship on his own in a heavy storm. He got rescued in time with sharks already circling the capsized boat that was given up.

I travelled across much of Africa, especially East Africa and Namibia, and it’s amazing what kind of “roads” a simple Toyota “truck” can take. Once we were going about 40 mp/h on a road where you would better have used 20 for all the camel-back-sized bumps that made the car and the passengers jump around, and then a tire popped and we went into the ditch. Luckily it was a back tire so the car didn’t roll over. Also lucky that the super old rifle of our guard (it was in North-East Kenya close to Somalia) didn’t fire in that moment. Which it had done a few days earlier. When I watched a documentation on puff adders recently, I was amazed that I didn’t get bit by one since we marched through high grass and small rocky terrain that looked exactly like that for days, often with the hands down to collect samples or measure things. For some reason the thought of snakes never occurred to me when there, I was worried about ticks and predators covered in the grass.

Mountains: I got covered in an avalanche in the Alps but was up high enough to rescue myself. Don’t want to experience that when getting really buried for good. I got almost struck by lightning in the Alps, letting go of a fixed metal rope at the last moment when I felt the tiny hairs on my arm stand up and a fraction of a second later the lightning bolt struck into a metal rod that marked the top of the pass and then jumped over into the rope.

I never had a crash or emergency landing in a plane despite going quite often through bad weather, so in that regard I feel quite secure.

would anyone here trade Oden if you knew he would have success and become a all-star on another team but be cursed and stay injury-plagued if he stayed on the blazers?

Two days ago I did something stupid.

While climbing back up a canyon (La Barranca Huentitan) I thought I saw a shortcut. At this point we were at the bottom after a long hike down to the river, we were all very tired so a shortcut seemed like the best way up. No-one else was feeling adventurous enough to take it and opted for the safe path, I did take it.

It was an incredibly steep climb, between 45 and 60 percent gradient, littered with trees. cactuses and incredibly closed off from below by shrubs. Needless to say, within a minute my friends could no longer see me. They continued walking and I continued climbing, hoping to find the top of the path and save myself a two hour climb.

After an hour of climbing, hanging on to trees to steady myself and pulling myself up on vines to avoid the sudden drops, I realised there was no path. Instead, I was at the top of the canyon, with no feasible way to make the climb over the final 40 metre rock face, looking down 300 metres to the bottom. There was also no way down, due to the steepness and the propensity of the ground beneath my feet to shift suddenly causing land slides.

I had to shimmy 250 metres across, hanging on to rocks, vines and trees, before I could find a safe way of getting down by sliding from tree to tree. At one point, I had to hold on to a tree trunk, swing in front of it and therefore over a sheer drop of well over 100 metres to reach the other side. It was the most intense experience of my life, increased by the sight of tombstones earlier, belonging to those that had tripped on path down to the bottom. I managed, with a few cuts on my legs and arms, a few insect bites and a few cactus incidents, to reach the bottom after 2 hours.

I am a stupid, stupid man. Do not take shortcuts up the sides of canyons kids.

Excited.

I’m okay with this injury, I can cope. But if we try the same thing again, just having him work with our rehab staff… that is an awful decision. We need to send Greg to work with the best rehab guy in the industry, Tim Grover.

Greg’s body needs to move more efficiently and gain balance. Grover could help him immensely.