Who Does That?

Apparently North Face.

I got a hat for the hike to sleep in and for cold weather, so as with all my equipment, I figure I'll give it a little test. I went skiing at Camelback last weekend, so that's as good of a place to go.

The hat was actually a little too good, which is an anomaly for me because I freeze swimming in 70 degree ocean water in the middle of July. I get out and shiver on the towel like an infant.

So I sweated in that thing for about seven or eight hours, and as I don't like to be considered a dirtbag, I decided to wash it when I got home. A regular old hat I think.

"Think again," says North Face.


And if you're having trouble reading that, here you go:


So now I need a new one.

Sons of bitches. Who makes a dry clean only hat?

Anyway, let's do some action shots in the tiny hat:

The Witch All Up in This

The roads this blog will take me down. Check it out. I'm sitting on my porch the other day. I see little old Mrs. Richmond walking up the street. She's on her way to buy cans of tuna for her cats as usual. I wave, she waves, but then she makes a turn up the front walkway.

"How are you today, Bradley?"

She has one of those creaky old lady voices that takes a while to get to the end of a sentence.

"It's a little cold today, but the kitties are hungry so I need to get them some tuna. They love their tuna."

I figure she might need a ride being that it's a bit of a walk to the Mine Hill Market for an old lady, but she says she doesn't need one.

"When a woman turns 39 she needs to start thinking about keeping in better shape. So I'll walk."

I can tell she wants something, and all it takes to get her to tell her a story is to ask her what's new. She always has a story.

"Well, like I told you before, my granddaughter's not happy."

Like she told me before, her granddaughter is a teacher who isn't too happy with her job. She kind of hates it. So much so that she wants to write a book about it. But she figures she'll start small with a blog and go from there.

So until her blog is up and running, The Witch is going to spit some fire on that education game. But enough out of me. I'll let her tell her story:

I Have So Much to Say and Don't Know Where to Start
by The Witch…Brad’s favorite cousin (ok, so she's my cousin - I don't know any Mrs. Richmond)

Unlike my favorite cousin Brad….I HATE MY JOB! I sit here on my couch, my Bischonpoo acting as a heating pad up against my leg, shaking my head and laughing to myself because I, The Witch, can totally relate to Brad’s feeling of discomfort of being stuck in the same job position for the next 10, 20, or even 30 years down the road.

As a matter of fact, I just recently got a pension statement that showed I needed to work another 42 years before I could retire!!! I almost pooped my pants! How am I even going to make it until June? YUP! I am a teacher…an elementary school teacher.

Let me just get this off of my chest…IT IS TERRIBLE and that is putting it nicely! Unlike most holiday-sweater-wearing teachers that brag about how they taught a nose-picking child how to tie their shoelaces, I have found NOTHING rewarding about this profession. It has been nothing but a nightmare! I really do try and be positive about my job, but I seem to like my job for all the wrong reasons.

Here are some of the reasons I do like my job:

1. My 1/2 mile commute to work.
2. I can dress down whenever I want.
3. Being able to come home and share ridiculous stories from my school day with my family and laughing about it.
4. Today was “Inside Out Day” at my school. Of course, being the fun teacher that I am…I wore my track suit inside out. We were counting how many students in our class did. One girl, so innocently, told me she didn’t wear her clothes inside out because she didn’t have any inside out clothes….ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Yeah, it’s cute and funny, but COME ON! Even after an explanation to her about how you just have to turn the clothes that you already own inside out she responded by saying that she didn’t think her mom bought her any of those clothes. And yes, English is spoken at home.
5. We get unexpected days off (snow days, watermain breaks).
6. My favorite coffee joint is right on the way to work.
7. School lunches (yes….I admit….I love cafeteria food on pale yellow and green plastic trays….chicken nuggets are my fave!).
8. Free local newspaper near the sign-in book every morning.
9. Great stories from my students about “what really goes on at home."
10. And my grade level team members (without them, I probably would have quit last month).
    

I don’t believe that any of these reasons relate to educating children.

Now, don’t think I am this big slacker. I am a VERY hard worker. Since I began teaching over 4 years ago I have put 150% into the job everyday and probably have spent between $3,000-$4,000 on my classroom and supplies for extra fun crafts and activities.

I spend most nights and weekends planning interesting and engaging lessons that I know my students will enjoy…such as using real eggshells, vinegar, soda, and water (all items were purchased at my expense) to show how teeth rot if you don’t brush them. (It is AMAZING how many children admit to not brushing their teeth at least once a day).

And what have I gotten in return for all of my hard work, dedication, and money I have spent? NOTHING BUT GRIEF!!!!

Once I get my blogspot up and running (hopefully we have a snow day tomorrow…I will be wearing my pj’s inside out) I will let Brad know so he can put a link up. You can read all of my teaching HORROR stories, why the teaching profession is NOT WORTH joining, and my first blog will be sure to explain my blogging name The Witch.

Good Night J
--the witch

I'm In An Embarrassing Mood

There was something wrong with the muffler strap on my dad's truck so he took it in to the dealership to get fixed. He wouldn't be able to make it over during the day to pay for it so he asked me to do it for him so he could pick it up later tonight. I figure later tonight means five or six, during normal business hours, so I leave the keys there figuring that he'd be dropped off and would just grab them then. Wrong on both accounts.

I get home and as it turns out, my dad was going to pick the truck up way late, like around midnight and would indeed need his keys. But like the loving, doting wife that she is, my mom decided that she would go pick it up so he wouldn't have to. After I got home from work she asked me if I would go with her ("After you eat we're going to pick up daddy's truck") and drive the truck home. After informing her that I did not have the keys because of a father-son miscommunication, she told me that she completely understood ("You're an idiot") and called my dad so that he too could join in on the understanding.

I really didn't feel like going out, especially not after having the molehill of an issue turn into a mountain of manure which was then dumped on me, but I am a loyal son (no rent payments) and agreed to help out anyway. I go outside, walk across the deck to the driveway, take a step to turn the corner right on top of a patch of ice. My right leg goes straight up into the air, my left arm drives into the ground and I perform a pathetic roll.

Motherly instinct: On
"Are you alright?"
"Yes."

Motherly instinct: Off
Cackles loudly.

Embarrassed, I get up and start running to my car.

Motherly instinct: On
"You didn't hurt yourself did you?"
"No, just my pride."

As I was driving home, keys in hand thanks to the showroom manager, I thought, "I'm in an embarrassing mood." Whenever this happens, I feel the need to tell the entire world whatever cringe-inducing event has just occurred in my life. I guess it's my way of getting over it. This makes two embarrassing falls in three days.

I went skiing at Camelback on Saturday and I'm standing in line at the lift, one of the next ones to go and wouldn't you know, I lose my balance, fall over backwards and almost poke my friend Kile's eye out with my ski. The entire line laughed at me, even more so as I tried to stand up and almost couldn't.

But I'm over those (well, almost - I'm still shaking my head over the Camelback fall), so in the true spirit of embarrassing mood story telling, I present to you a never-before-printed tale crafted in the early days after deciding I wanted to become a writer.

There is no title, or real distinction between characters, so without further ado, I present it here with disparaging comments:

"Gay."
"What's up, beach?" (Awful)
"Nothing. What's going on?"
"Nothing. So what do you want to do?"
"I don't know...I thought we were going to the park, douche."
"Alright, fine. I just wasn't sure if that's what you wanted to do. Do you really want to go?" (The conflict here is intense)
"Yeah. I got no problem with that."
"Alright, so where do you want to meet?"
"Ummm...I'll just come to your house, ok?"
"Yeah, fine. See you in a few."
"Peace, yo."

(Instead of describing the scene change, I wrote a squiggly line)

"Yo."
"Yo." (Hemingway-esque)
"So what's going on?"
"What are we gonna do?"
"I don't know. Let's explore."
"Sounds like a plan, dawg." (Cringing)
"I love coming to the park. It's so nice, well, as long as its not shitty weather." (How insightful)
"Yeah. I want to find something cool. Treasure chest...million bucks...one of the two."
"And what are you going to do with the money? Treasure's gay." (Head shaking)
"What!? You're telling me you wouldn't take some diamonds or a crown?"
"Alright, I would, but a million bucks is better." (A philosophical debate for the ages)
"You know what I think is gay as shit? Those people who say money has no real value. Like, that 'means of exchange' bullshit." (As you can tell, I was taking an intro poly sci class at the time)
"Yeah seriously. Would you take a million bottles of coke, or a million dollars?"
"But then they'd say, 'Oh, a million bottles of coke' just to spite me, or because a million bottles of soda is worth more." (Huh?)
"Well, technically a million bottles of soda is worth more."
"Depends on the brand."
"True."
"Say a million bottles of Coke. That's like $3.5 million dollars or some crap, depending on where you buy it. So we'll set the price at $1.50. So $1.5 million. And then those people will still insist, out of spite or stupidity that they'd take the Coke. So where would they use the Coke? Are they going to spend it at Wal-Mart? Shit no."
"And then Coke would be like, 'Where did you get a million Cokes?' You're under arrest."
"Exactly. Dumb f---s." (When trying to make a point, the f-bomb always works best)
"I hate stupid people." (Self-incrimination)
"Me too. But they make for good conversation."
"True."

I can't continue. It's too horrible. The rest is filled with curses and late 90's-early 00's pop culture references (India Arie as a sexual icon? What was I thinking?). I thought enough time had passed, but now I think that will only happen if I'm dead and I leave it in my will to one of my great grandkids to read on their 18th birthday with the requirement that they burn it immediately afterwards. Even then I'll probably look down from heaven to see myself being laughed at generations later and the embarrassment will have stretched into eternity.

They say sometimes its best to let sleeping dogs lie. This one should have been clubbed and thrown into the woods.

The First (Real) Post

The hike is two and a half months away, but I've realized that sometimes I'm just not going to have much that's interesting to say about it.

Take today for instance...actually I did do one thing worthwhile regarding the hike, so my intro is useless. I set up a donations page through COSAC so you can make credit and debit donations online (http://njcosac.kintera.org/aamonth2008/hike4autism). I'm quite tech savvy.

So today was not one of the days that I described initially. Anyway, that intro was just a ploy to make a smooth transition into talking about something non-hike related, and as evidenced by that segue, there's more than one way to skin a cat.

I figure if you're going to be nice enough to spend the next seven or so months following along, we should get to know each other. And at the very least I should try to be somewhat entertaining, otherwise this would just become an embarrassment to be paraded around at family dinners and by my friends at the bar.

The keyboard to this computer is annoyingly loud for some reason. Normally I wouldn't think anything of it, but my brother is home from school tonight. He's going for his physical fitness test for the police academy tomorrow morning and he went to sleep since he's got to wake up early for it.

He left the door to his room open and I could hear him snoring, but these firecracker keys must have woken him up because he got up a while ago to close it. I kept insisting earlier today that he was going to fail, but after that the thought of it drifted out of my head and only came back when I heard him shut the door.

I felt bad and have sort of been trying to keep quiet, but I can't help Gateway's crap-ass keyboard construction methods. Anyway, the point is I wouldn't normally think of the loudness of the keyboard because no one's usually here to wake up with it. So now that he's here, there's just no more walking around naked.

The beauty of living close to work is that I'm the last one to leave the house in the morning. I wake up to an empty house, exercise, eat breakfast and get ready for work in an unfettered environment, and for me the term unfettered almost invariably means no clothing.

When nobody's home, there's no carrying a wet towel around and forgetting it on your bed leaving a big wet spot. If I want to watch highlights on ESPN, but don't feel like going upstairs to get changed first, I'm free to do that too. YAHTZEE!! All your clean underwear down in the basement? No need to throw on a pair of shorts just to walk through the dining room and kitchen without offending someone.

Now my routine has been messed with. If my brother's home possibly lurking around a corner trying to scare me, then I'm not so keen on it. Plus being naked is more of a solitary thing for me anyway.

Luckily, it's not a winter or summer break situation. Then all bets are off. I could go weeks at a time without having an opportunity. Not to mention he eats all the damn Chips Ahoy in about two days. So few cookies, no nakedness. It's not a fun situation.

I've read that you can go entire days at a stretch without seeing anyone on the PCT, so it got me thinking...But then I realized the sun's a factor and I wouldn't want any issues there. You've got spiders and scorpions too (don't want to think about that). But the one thing I'd be afraid of is tripping and falling. Doing it in clothes is one thing, but it can't feel good when you're au naturale. Then if you hurt yourself, you're going to be sprawled out waiting (could be a while) for someone to come around the bend... and then what do you say when they find you?

I don't know, but it would certainly make for a good entry.

How to Donate

Option 1 - Click here to donate by credit or debit card.

Option 2 - Download a printable donation form and send to:

COSAC
Attn: HIKE
1450 Parkside Avenue, Suite 22
Ewing, NJ 08638

COSAC requests that you write "HIKE" in the memo line of your check so they know to attribute it to Hike4Autism.

Donate any amount you'd like. I'm happy to have you participate at any level. But if you're still wondering what a good suggested donation is, how about going by mile or state? Here's an easy list to work with:

1/2 cent per mile - $13.25	Oregon - $450.00
1 cent per mile - $26.50	Washington - $500.00
2 cents per mile - $53.00	California - $1700.00
5 cents per mile - $132.50	Pacific Crest Trail - $2650.00

10 cents per mile - $265.00

25 cents per mile - $662.50

50 cents per mile - $1325.00

All donations are tax deductible. For more information on tax deductions and COSAC, visit their Make a Donation page.

You're a Damn Liar!

There might be a few of you out there that read my first post and were like, "Whoa whoa whoa. This guy's talking about changing his life and wanting to do something big before he chains himself to a desk forever but his blog is named Hike4Autism. He's messing with my head and I don't like it!"

Actually, nobody has said that because at this point, nobody knows that the site is here. I figure I'll make a few posts before I tell anyone about it, that way when people do start coming (knock on wood) they have a few things to get them hooked (knock on wood) instead of seeing one post and thinking, "Only one? That's bush league." And then leaving never to return.

So, if you did have some form of conflict resembling the one described above, then let me do a little clarification. I am hiking to go away and have some adventure and get some clarity. But, in the course of planning it out and thinking it over, I figured that just going was a little selfish. Maybe selfish is the wrong word. I felt that if I was going to go and keep a blog so people could read about my trip and follow me as I go, why wouldn't I use that to do something for people in need? Hence the title - Hike4Autism.

Why autism, you ask? The simple answer is that I kind of just picked it. The longer answer...well it's just a little longer. Sometimes it seems like everyone either knows someone with autism, or knows of someone with autism. It seems to affect so many individuals in so many ways, and yet nobody can say with any type of certainty why it afflicts people in the first place. So I think that deserves some attention and I hope that this blog can bring a bit to it.

My goal is to raise $5,000 by the time I return home in October, so let's see if we can make it happen. Don't make me look bad!

Time to Get Started

Last March I was sitting at work doing exactly what I'm doing right now at home, only it was a lot more depressing. It was a March day, which I'm sure was overcast and horrible, but I wouldn't have known because I was sitting in a windowless cubicle in a windowless office. As I stare into Outlook, a small blue box in the lower right corner of my screen informs me that another press release has found its way into my inbox. This one, like all the others, touts the industry's leading product from the industry's leading company. My eyes glaze over and a thought crosses my mind.

"This is the rest of your life."

Sure, it's not the major leagues like I had once hoped, but I'm doing what I've wanted to do for a long time. I'm making my living from writing and enjoying it. But still, I figured there had to be something more to it than that. But then again, maybe there wasn't. I'm sure nobody grows up wanting to sit at a desk for the rest of their lives or working out in the cold, but the world has jobs and they need to be filled. It wasn't even the job. I love writing. It was more the lack of glamor to it.

It's probably just my tendency to romanticize everything, but I guess I always expected more excitement from a job. Every job I thought could be exciting. You're a cop, you bust drug dealers. You're a writer, you're investigating. You're a repairman and house wives greet you at the door in bath robes and little else. You own a convenience store, you get robbed a few times and make it onto Cops, America's Stupidest Criminals or at the very least break.com. Whatever a job was, I could always picture myself doing it because I injected far more excitement into it than most likely would ever be found in the real world. I guess you could say that after 9 months on the job, I had officially realized that work is a boring thing and that my mom's "Work sucked" responses to my adolescent queries about her day were not simply the result of a bad day at the office.

But it was more than that. Thinking of myself in the same position 10, 20, 30 years down the road was not exactly comforting. What will I have done by then? What will I have seen? What will I look back on? I felt a general dissatisfaction about not having done anything worthwhile, about not having done that one big thing that defines a part of your life. And it's not like I don't have ideas. I daydream all the time about the green grass on the other side and it might be while I'm talking to you. You never know what's going on in my head. This week alone I've thought out what my life would be like as a ski instructor, a band manager, living on a deserted island, what I would do if I won the lottery, living alone in a cabin in the woods somewhere, being a landlord, being an actor, being a screenwriter, being a teacher, being a brewmaster. The list goes on.

That week I'm sure I thought about those very same things, probably right up to the moment when I received an email from my friend Joe asking me if I could take a year off from everything for a trip that would put life in perspective. And that is how I have arrived at this point, writing in a blog getting ready to hike 2600 miles from Mexico to Canada. I didn't make the decision right then and there of course, but the email planted the seed. And it really wasn't just the idea of a hike, but knowing that wherever we went, when we came back, life would be in perspective.

I'm restless and have been so for quite a bit of time. I've felt like there's something out there for me that I need to do before I can settle down and be happy with the direction in which my life is headed. So something like a big trip where I'd see things that I never have before, where I'd test myself physically and mentally sounded like just the thing. Originally the plan was to put our lives on hold for a year and hike from Alaska to San Diego. Now, if you're thinking that that doesn't sound practical at all, you're right. We have few if any survival skills and quickly realized that the Alaskan wilderness would laugh at us and kill us immediately for trying to travel through without experience. So that idea fell through and changed to a hike across the middle of Canada to backpacking through Europe to a long road trip before finally being relegated to the extremely large pile of failed ideas that has built up over the course of my life.

A few months passed and after going back and forth about whether or not it was a good thing that the idea had died, I started searching around the Internet for long trails in the United States and I came across the Pacific Crest Trail. But I'll spare you the flowery descriptions of deserts, mountains and flesh eating bears. You start in Campo, Calif., walk for five months through California, Oregon and Washington and end up in Manning Park in British Columbia. So it's not Alaska to San Diego, but it was close enough for me.

And that was pretty much it. Once I did a little research and found out that there were people who've hiked it numerous times, that a few dozen hike the entire thing every year and that there were more than enough how-to guides to help me get out onto the trail, I decided to go for it.

I say it was that simply, but who am I kidding? I needed words of encouragement on multiple occasions to get myself to commit to the decision and had more than a few sleepless nights agonizing over whether the trip could really happen, whether it really even should happen in the first place.

After a while, though, that feeling just passed, probably because I did something I don't do as often as I should. I always get caught up in things, some idea that sounds like the best thing in the world, something shiny sitting on a pedestal that I have to have now now now and before I know it I own an orange 1981 Toyota Celica and can't stop wondering what it was I was so excited about.

But this one I thought over...and over and over and over. I went back and forth, double and triple checked the list, took a couple deep breaths and eventually I decided that things were going to be alright. Still, I have absolutely zero idea whether anything is going to work out, but I'm content with the decision at least. Then again, I've had this feeling before, but let's just hope all my planning makes the ending a bit different.

So that's why I'm hiking. It's not because I hate work, my cubicle or the idea of being at a desk writing in 30 years (my cubicle actually is gray, but it's really not that bad and it's surrounded by nice people), just that before I get there I want to have done something worthwhile along the way, and the hike is it.

Mile one begins in two and a half months.