These were great. unfortunately I took too long to write this to remember the recipe I used. BUT it was a pretty basic bread recipe with a bit extra oil.

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Obama, originally uploaded by treknpaddle.

So it’s been a long time since I consistently blogged well, much of anything. That should change.

I would love to claim that it had something to do with a lack of internet access, and there would be a glimmer of truth in that.

This is a shot from (obviously) inauguration. I was teaching in Amherst MA at the time. Given that that’s liberal central, this was a huge deal. We put it up on the big screen in the classroom. It was a pretty exciting day

So she’s been mentioned but not featured. And apparently, Patton was feeling left out. And I’m a pretty big fan and she has certainly been part of my life for about 6 months (holy crap!) now. She doesn;t particularly like getting her photo taken, so this photo pretty much gives you a good sense of the response I get when I bust out the camera…

This is Hannah. We’ve been trying to see more and more of each other since May. Which would normally not be too much of an issue unless we were to say, live in different states with busy schedules. Um…

I’ll see her again pretty regularly over the next few weeks, which is certainly a relief.

So I just got back home. I spent the last 2 weeks at 9,200′. I feel strangely energized, which is of course due to the fact that I am carrying around too much hemoglobin. My body will take care of this very soon.

I had a day off! That was very exciting. What was more exciting about that is that Hannah had the day off to and came up to hang out with me in Falmouth, which was pretty great, and a little surprising. I say that only because we have not seen each other since the middle of September. Phew! That was a relief, I mean I can handle the time apart, or this simply wouldn’t work, but we had no idea it would be this long.

My time in Colorado was a blast- the class was great, the weather was, well, New England-ish, packing snow and all. We had a warm morning that last morning of class, but then the clouds rolled in. Which would be fine, but… I decided that I should take that seriously and get out of the Vail area early. So I got on a 5:25 shuttle to Denver for a 10:53 flight. That meant I got to hang out in Denver for 3 hoursebefore my plane took out and the only alternative was too much of a crap shoot…

But it all worked out and I think I am well rested enough, and though I’m working today, I have most of the week off. Happily.

I made it! I really do love being out here, it is a pretty special place. The more I think about it, the more I realize that some of my time over the next few years is going to need to be dedicated to exploring this country I (sometimes proudly, sometimes reluctantly) call my home.

I flew in yesterday evening with little fanfare- my flight out of Dulles was cancelled, so I was re-routed through Chicago O’Hare, which cut my flight time down by 80 minutes and got me in 45 minutes early. And today I seem mostly acclimated. The course is being held in a fantastic lodge (above), in an even more idyllic location.

Scott (also above) is the man who set it all up, and who sponsored my

Okay, so I voted today.

This blog is not a pulpit from which I preach and seldom do I go out of my way to tout my politics. However, I’m a freakin’ vegan from New England. Vegans from New England don’t vote for reactionaries from Alaska, and I cannot envision a scenario in which I would willingly attempt to elect Sarah Palin to public office. All of that is, I’ve no doubt, pretty obvious given the fact that I’m a vegan from New England.

Of late, I’ve been fascinated with polling data. I think that anyone who would bet money on polling data is just as likely to win as someone betting money on weather forecasts 6 months out. Still it fascinates me. So does fake meat… I’ve always wondered what that’s about- real meat never interested me. I like logging on every morning to see where the electoral projections are. It’s all pretty exciting.

I know a lot of people who are feeling energized about this election and I have to say its too bad that the Democrats couldn’t come up with a worthy candidate 8 years ago- perhaps we wouldn’t be in a war that, stunningly, costs far more than this unprecedented banking scheme congress has concocted. I know they had no real choice, but still, it is pretty ridiculous.

So I got to town hall this morning and filled out a form for my absentee ballot. In NH it is a pain to vote early, you pretty much have to swear that you’ll be out of state, otherwise they expect you to show up on November 4th to vote. Well, it turns out that my registration had disappeared, and I was basically told I was not going to be able to vote absentee this year. And I’m headed for Colorado on Saturday, so no absentee ballot means no vote… So I pretty much freaked out. I don’t yell when I get upset, but I do get pretty intense, and the woman who was helping me does yell. Well, they told me I must have walked out of town hall this August with my voter registration form- a form I should never have had.

They were all too happy to blame me because on that day back in August I had been a bit of a nuisance. I changed residency, registered a car and (I thought) registered to vote. All of that required a great deal of paperwork and no small amount of money in two separate townships ~30 minutes apart. Well, in all of my flustered disinterest in filling out more forms, I distracted the woman there enough that she gave me $30 extra in change, something I discovered much later in the day… So they had me bring the money back (fair enough.) So they remembered me being a pain nearly 3 months out. Ouch.

Well, I walked out of the building thinking that I was not going to be voting in what is perhaps the most interesting and (in my opinion) exciting elections in my lifetime- AND in a swing state! I went to my car and opened the glove box and discovered, just as they had predicted, my voter registration form, clearly dated August 15th. I had filled it out along with other paperwork and I guess it just ended up in my pile not theirs. I ran back inside, handed it over, and they made it happen (after all, I was never supposed to have the form, it seems wrong to put the blame on me completely, even worse to deny me the vote) To their credit they were super nice about the whole thing in the end, and I think I was pretty friendly at that point too.

Okay, so now it’s your turn. I think that election day should be a national holiday and that the electoral college system should be trashed, that if I’m in the US I should not need to be in my state to vote on election day- the valid ID should do the trick. And I think everyone should stand up and vote, and if they don’t they should not have the right to criticize the government. Or something like that. Maybe we should just stop telling people we live in a free society- people as a group seem to have some pretty stupid ideas about the essence of freedom, thoughts like we need to bomb others to be free, we need to cut money from education to fight all of our social problems, we need to be able to carry assault weapons, we MUST be free to do nothing at all times and complain about how corrupt the government is… I believe that the best candidate for the most people can only be elected if people get off their butts and vote and I hoe they’ll vote blue as I did, but at least they’ll be a part of it- one way or the other…

This is where we headed during the WFAOTT. We found a boulder garden, set up, had lunch, and then practiced splinting up here.

I had the chance to run a WFA OTT last month. Basically, we had a cabin in which we ran some of the lessons, but so much of the time was spent hiking, setting up scenarios as we were moving along.

Being on the trail adds a sense of realism to the to the scenarios that can be hard to imitate when we stroll 30 seconds away from the building, and I liked the reminder that it can be worth it to walk away from the classroom and spend some time outside every class.

During the Fryeburg Fair each year, we run our instructor training and I took Jim and Jon from Gainesville out to check out the livestock. I got some good photos and had some tasty maple.

As I was running around New England this summer and planning to have some time off in July- I got a call from the office asking if I’d like to fly down to the University of Florida to teach a WFA. I can’t tell you how excited I am to have this connection, given the family place down in Gainesville. We taught it at Paynes Prarie State Preserve, and then we set up something for December. The plan is to come back down in the beginning of December to run a Wilderness First Responder course out of UF, but we’ll be camping out and spending 3 days at Paynes Prarie, giving the students the benefits of a classroom atmosphere, but also a chance to do some of our work out on the trail when we can focus on hands-on lessons and practice.

Hey, tell a friend, or let me know if you or someone you know wants to come to Florida and get their WFR while spending some time in the woods in January- good price, good folks and tons of resources available to us make it look to be a pretty exciting course!