March Mustache Madness

I’m joining in the time honored tradition of Competitive Facial Hair Growing.
At Alex’s dinner party last night Dan invited me to join his buddies in March Mustache Madness. I’m not sure what all the rules are, but the basics are familiar to me. For the month of March I am to grow a mustache, and there will probably be some kind of judging going on at the end. I have no idea if this is at all related to March Madness, the basketball thingy, but I really don’t care. I’ve long held the opinion that I don’t like having facial hair, but hate shaving, so this is a really great opportunity to annoy the fuck out of Shawn experiment with styles of facial hair and not be self-conscious about its outrageous appearance.
Even though the ‘contest’ started yesterday, I’d shaved the day before and wasn’t interested in losing a full day’s growth just to have a ‘fresh start’. With as infrequently as I need to shave I don’t think a day’s extra growth is going to give me any kind of an advantage, so this morning I trimmed down my stubble to a generous mustache. I thought it better to have extra hair that I can pare down if need be, than be stuck with a stunted ’stache.

Here’s me, today:

(did I mention the drinking last night)

Heath Ledger

I was only kidding when I said the makeup looked like the Crow.
He didn’t have to take me seriously!

Filling in the gaps

Life being what it is, and me being who I am, I haven’t posted 1/1000 of what I’ve been up to out here.  So in light of the holidays (like that’s any kind of excuse) here’s some of what I’ve failed to mention previously.

-I, am from Michigan.
My bosses and supervisors are from Southern Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia. My coworkers are all fresh of the truck Mexians. (They’re all Legal too… no, really officer.) I continually dress about one layer of clothing less than my supervisors, to their amusement. I dress about two layers less than my coworkers, much to their horror. I think that 50 degrees is t-shirt weather, and you don’t need a jacket ’till the mid 30s. When it got down to 20 the other day I thought I’d have to spend the morning thawing the Mexicans out in front of the gas heaters!

-My workday starts at 7, and by 9 my last reservation about loving Virginia was falling to pieces in around me in great luscious flakes. It was real, honest-to-god, snow! Two inches of it! Schools closed early! Cars piled up! Cats and dogs living together! It was pandelirium! And while I was  happy as a pig in shit, the subcontracted labor (all fresh off the truck from Mexico) got so freaked out by the stuff that they quit work for the day by10. The just yelled “La Cassa!” packed their tools and headed for the highway.

-Shwankie and I have really scaled back our hiking trips because of the shorter days of winter, and because the mountains are to the west of us so things are dim that much sooner. We did go out yesterday and hike Old Rag, a very popular mountain in these parts. We took the saddle trail from the back which is much shorter and easer than the ridge trail. Although the hike was easy, the payoff (view) wasn’t as great as we’d expected by its popularity. We figured that the draw is the hike up the ridge which supposedly includes a rather intense “rock scramble”. That’s now on the hit list for when it warms up. There was enough ice on the trail (which Shwankie licked!!!) to make us want to wait ’till it thaws out up there.

-Shwankie and I are frequents at The Frenchman’s Corner, a gourmet shop down the street. The cast of characters are: Marc, the deaf Jew of a Frenchman is the proprietor. His 17yr old adopted son ,Tallia, with four first names and deeply metrosexual tastes. Katelynn, Tallia’s friend and part-time shop girl and professional crack.. uh, I mean chocolate dealer. And Jeff, our personal sommelier, cheese monger, and all-around bon vivante. He eagerly pairs wines with Shwankie’s meal ideas, which we promptly go home and change. Such faux pas as having a Pino Noir with hand-tossed pizza instead of apple-stuffed pork chops, and having a Cabernet meant for dark chocolate with vegetable stew instead.

-We also made a Gingerbread house this year. Our first ever. There will be pictures posted when I get the camera working again. There are also plans of making a Gingerbread Zombie invasion in the near future. :)

Happy Holidays from Old Rag

How to kill the mood 101

S: You know what’s interesting?

UC: <quizzical look>

S: There’s no balls there!

We haz a trail!

Been busy out here.
Shwankie’s well under the weather, and I’m only a foot and a half above her in that regard. It seem that this is the usual “Welcome to a new state, have a virus!” you can expect when you shift latitudes. She’s on uber cough syrup, steroids, and an iron lung. I have a cough and a runny nose. We’ll both probably be perfectly healthy by monday with a little bed rest and some chicken soup. Unfortunatly neither of us are good at bed rest.

Tonight we had CookerHiker, and Lee&Leslie over for dinner. We’d been planning this for a couple weeks and weren’t going to let a little bubonic plague get in the way of our plans. I made some lovely snacks and Shwankie made a two and a half course feast of pork and roasted root vegetables. CookerHiker is a new friend we met while doing trail maintenance at GWNF with Lee&Leslie, he brought his fantastic apple cranberry pie for dessert while L&L provided two bottles of terrific red wine (Three Blind Moose Sirrah). There was much eating and talking. The highpoint was Lee, who is the PATC district manager and head of the Stonewall Brigade, officially appointing Shwankie and I our very own trail. We are now the proud managers of 2.2 miles of the Great North Mountain Trail on the Virginia/West Virginia boarder!
What does this all mean? As we’ve made great efforts to start a social life out here that doesn’t involve the SCA (harder than you’d think) we’ve spent way more time hiking. By chance we found out about PATC (Potomac Appalachian Trail Club) who are the folks that keep the AT clear and maintain other trails connected or near by the AT. Many smaller clubs, such as the Stonewall Brigade pick up the slack and maintain trails in other areas, but are umbrellaed by PATC. We’ve been hiking with and helping Lee and his crew clear trails in the George Washington National Forest for a couple months now and one of the overseers had to move out of the state. We were asked if we’d like to take over her trail and we jumped at the chance.
It’s a gorgeous 4.4 mile out and back (so 2.2 miles of trial) with rocks and hills and trees and springs and cliffs and mountains and views and grasses and animals and mosses.. and, um.. dead falls … yeah. So about 4 times a year we need to walk the trail and see if any thing’s obstructing it or if it needs to be re-marked or “blazed”, if so we either take care of it or call in a work trip to get some reinforcements. Other than that we’re going to keep helping others maintain their trails and possibly pick up a couple more trails to oversee that are closer to home.

In the baking front, apparently I just SUCK at bread. A lot.
Cookies I got in the bag.
Cinnamon rolls are a piece of cake.
Muffins I can do in my sleep.
Ciabatta is just fun.
Pumpkin pie is easy.
But good old slicing bread totally alludes me. I don’t get it. I have plenty of healthy starter, but I just can’t get it to rise a decent loaf. I’m going to spend some time in The Fresh Loaf (thefreshloaf.net) forums and see what I can find out. Maybe sourdough just isn’t for me.

Today, rather than staying home and drinking tea Shwankie and I took off to the mountains to see some of the snow CookerHiker claims was there. He said there had been two inches on the ground when he had been there earlier in the day, but I dubious. After breakfast we went speeding our way to the mountains, astounded at the colors still in the trees, only to be blown away by the swaths of snow surrounded by brilliant autumn leaves.

The finale were the signs we passed on the way home.

Waking from a flat line

Ok, ok. So doing a joint post was a cop out, and not a good way to prove that we were both alive.
In reality, believe it or not, I’ve been pretty busy of late.
After the move Shwankie and I spent a couple weeks just getting unpacked and adjusting to our surroundings. We went camping, and decorated the house, and even had house guests. Then the job hunt. Shwankie landed a dream job an hour from here, which is pretty typical for this part of the country (or so I hear). Mine was more… interesting. I got ‘hired’ at a very, VERY high-end horse farm as night watch. I was the perfect applicant: able-bodied, local, security experience, horse experience, doesn’t drool on self. Unfortunately the whole place is owned and micro-managed by a psychonaut.
I lasted one night, my “trial run.” Not by any failing on my part (even Shwankie was surprised), but because of overwhelming incompetence on their part, crowned by the owner calling me the day I ‘resigned’ to demand “;WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?;
It only took me another week to get a real job. I’m working construction, four 9’s and a 4, good pay, benefits, and all the immersion Spanish Language sessions I can stand. I’m learning a trade, and working outside all day, so I’m pretty happy.

Not that we’re afraid of down time or anything, but we’ve joined a gym recently, go hiking every weekend, hit the farmer’s market on Saturday, and this week we’re helping with PATC maintenance in George Washington National Forest. I’m making tomato sauce from scratch tomorrow, as well as organizing the “project room”. Things have gotten so hectic that we’ve actually planned days off. This week, our “Free Night” is Thursday. Tonight the project was emptying the “project room” so we could re-organize it and maybe even do projects there.

My latest and greatest experiment in growth and education is Guitar Lessons.
I suck, horribly. Like really, really, really bad. I can’t manage to strum just two strings. I can do one, I can do 3, I can do 6, but two? That’s just inhuman! With that, I can’t seem to mange to move both hands at the same time. I can strum 1-6 strings OR press 1-4 frets (mute 1-6 strings). But that’s the point, ain’t it?
I did a recording of my chromatic scale yesterday, and some day WAY in the future I will have improved enough to make another recording of my chromatic scale, and then I’ll post them both for everyone’s amusement.

From the Land of Milk and Honey

Yes, we are both still alive.

Sorry for the lack of updates, but things keep piling up, and the thought of updating has gotten a bit daunting to us. So, we decided to take a minute and update you all at the same time. This is a joint post, by which we mean that Shawn is typing and Thadd is talking (which should tell you all that things are pretty much status quo here). The post will appear on both our websites, and pictures should follow sometime tomorrow on our flickr accounts.

Where to begin? Every day could be a new post, a huge post filled with gooey, runny goodness. This is going to get long…

How not to get laid 101

Good Idea: Comparing your woman to a fine wine by saying she’s aging beautifully, just reaching her prime, and has fine legs.

Thadd Idea: Comparing your woman to a fine wine by saying you want to pop her bung and cork her.

3rdFloor

Sounded like a good idea at the time.

I arrived Friday, a day late thanks to Budget Truck rental.
We’ve spent the last two days hauling things up to our 3rd floor apartment (WTF did I bring a chest freezer??).
Today, tomorrow, and the rest of the week we’ll be unpacking, organizing, and hosting out first houseguest.
Shortly after that my legs are going to fall off.

The weather here is amazing, Shwankie found us an incredible apartment, and the local coffee shop is an amazing disappointment ($16 for two cups of coffee, a day-old turnover, and a sheet cake “scone”). 

Current Heroes of the Move are Badgermonkey, to whom I owe many, many thanks, and Dave & Marie, our awesome former neighbors and two of the coolest people we’ve ever met.

More will follow, if I survive.