Monday, October 22, 2007

Shootin' The Breeze

Laura and I made it out for some duck hunting yesterday morning. What a great time that was! We saw quite a few ducks and even some geese - in fact, we had three geese decoy into our spread, but spotted Laura, who was caught off guard and in aww as the giant birds quietly soared towards us! Once they spotted Laura they were on the move though, and we was still a little in shock from how much larger the geese were compared to the ducks we had been seeing most of the morning! Laura took the first shot of the morning and got herself two Ruddy Ducks, I got myself one leaving from the same group. The rest of the morning we were seeing a lot of activity and ducks were giving us good looks, but our gun barrels must be bent because we missed EVERY shot we took. Oh! The shame... We still had a great time though. We were just happy to see good numbers of ducks in the area - a lot more than we saw last week when we went on our evening hunt. Laura was having a good time, as you can see in the photo. It wasn't long after she dozed off and took a short nap. I laid back for a nap but about one minute later I was awaken but the distinct sound of ducks dropping into the pond from WAY up high! If you don't know what I am talking about, imagine a little fighter get buzzing past you! The wind on the wings of the ducks makes them sound like miniature jets, and they will get your blood pumping to see them wizz past you - in some cases reaching well over 50 mph! ZOOM!

I told Laura she could try to shoot the duck, she just looked at me with that "you're crazy" look. I don't blame her, that guy was on the move!

We packed up the gear a little before noon and made our way to some geocaches. We had a few caches in the foothills of the mountains that we wanted to get before the snow was too deep so we made our way to those. It was a great little hike too, we had the trail mostly to ourselves and when we arrived at the end we had the great waterfall all to ourselves too. This is Morrell Falls it is just a few few miles outside of Seeley Lake.


One last thing that I know Laura and I were dumbfounded by was the number of idiots who come out of the woods, or maybe go into the woods, on opening day of big game season. Yesterday was opening day of elk season and the number of hunters is staggering. Ok. let me rephrase that. The number of hunters is few, and the number of idiots out driving around with rifles is staggering. There, that's more accurate.

What am I talking about? Well, we encountered a lot of road hunters. Road hunters are what I call lazy and stupid. They are the people who give hunters like Laura and I a bad reputation. Some of the examples from yesterday would be the guys sitting in the back of a pickup truck in lawn chairs, wearing their blaze orange with rifles in hand - going down the highway. Another came when we were driving to the trail head of the falls - a guy standing up in the back of a pickup, wearing the blaze orange, leaning against the cab of the truck looking for game - oh, did I mention he had his rifle in hand as well? This is NOT hunting. For people who do not hunt, and see this kind of behavior, I can understand why they see hunters as a bunch of beer drinking idiots with guns!

Believe me when I say, real hunters don't comply with this subterranean behavior. We work hard for our rewards, and we don't intentionally break laws. It's disgusting to see this type of behavior being paraded around, and it's these people who make us look bad. It's too bad this is the type of behavior that many non-hunting folks see.

Until again

-=Nolan=-

Friday, October 19, 2007

Stained Glass

We've made it to Friday once again - and we are ready for the weekend. As usual on Friday evenings we will be going dancing.

I've got the day off from work after putting in a solid 10 hour day yesterday. It was time to blow out sprinkler systems around town, so the boss and I started at 8:00 and finished a little before 6:00. It wouldn't have been so bad if the wind and rain wouldn't have picked up in the afternoon, add to that the temperature overing around 45 for the high and it just became a less than enjoyable day.

Enough about that though, I wanna share my progress with the stained glass window I am making. Laura informed me that I should be sharing that, so here goes.

Here's a picture of some of the work - it's actually what I did on Wednesday evening. What you are looking at is what will eventually be two swans. Something to note though, this is actually the back of the window - in the design they are swimming the other way. You're seeing the back because there is a template pattern stuck to the other side of the glass. Also, the glass looks much darker than it truely is because of the templates and because it is laying on the floor. Actually, here's the picture of the finished window from the book I am using. I actually redesigned the pattern to look 'better' in my eyes. I changed a few colors to keep the cost down as well. I also did some redesigning to make it a little easier to cut the glass out. The large piece of blue glass on the top runs about $12 a shot - so messing up is a costly mistake! I've completed most of the other parts of the water as well, but they don't really fit into place yet so I left them out of my photo. This afternoon I am headed to the glass shop to get some white glass for the swans!

Here's a random photo for the day - it's me and R2-D2 hanging out in front of Macy's in downtown Missoula a few weeks ago. In this case, R2 is actually a mailbox that has stickers on it to look like the Star Wars robot. The USPS released a bunch of these designs for the summer to promote the Star Wars anniversary.

Here's one more random picture for everyone. Occasionally I mention how strange things are around Missoula, particularly some of the amazingly strange people we see all over town. Well, when you have a bumper sticker that proclaims the town to be weird then evidently I am not alone. I spotted this on a light pole I usually park next to when I go play ultimate frisbee. It reads "Keep Missoula Weird - Do Your Part!" Well, I think it's safe to say that some people are overdoing it.






Finally, I had to show off some of our work from last week. We installed a patio at a house - there was already a concrete slab poured, but they wanted to extend the patio with paver stones.You can see the boarder around the pavers, I thought that was a nice touch. The trick was getting the stones cut to fit into those shapes. This is where I really have to show off some skills - particularly mine. You can see some of my handy work in the bottom of the first photo where the boarder comes together to meet. This was some crafty work to get this just right. See how tiny those pavers are? Not to mention the stager that continues throughout the narrowing... Here's a better angle. Check out how small that last sliver of stone is before the boarders meet! That was some fine tuning with the wet saw to get that to come out how I wanted it, but I got it on the first attempt, so that's how it was.

The next area I'm going to show off isn't all that impressive, but I still like how it looks. For the most part the patio didn't have much in the form of a straight section of boarder - that is, there were no straight edges on the exterior boarder. Except one spot that is a high profile are of the patio, and quite noticeable. The real challenge was getting the curve to come out nicely and transition into the straight section before curving the opposite way. I actually did this section before the skinny area, but I thought it was a lot easier - basically because the cuts were rather simple once I got started. The pavers were basically being cut in half and that makes everything much easier! Overall it wasn't a particularly difficult patio, but it was a good challenge. We are hoping to get started on a patio early next week before the snows start flying for the winter. That all depends on if the owners get things aligned and make a final decision though.

Otherwise, the weekend looks to be cold and rainy. Likely I will find myself hunting at least one day, if not two and before I know it, Monday will be here. So, on that note, have a good weekend! Until again

-=Nolan=-

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Bonk!

Another two weeks have passed and I have once again failed to get my act together and blog. With the day off, I have a long list of things to do, but blogging about our weekend trip to Spokane is numero uno on my list right now.

The half marathon (13.1 miles or 21.1 kilometers) was Sunday in Spokane, Washington and we were there to partake in the fun. For some, like myself, it was less fun than desired!

Saturday, Laura and I left Missoula a few minutes before 8:00 a.m. and made our way to Spokane - no doubt geocaching along the way. We picked up our numbers that afternoon and went out to check out the route we would be running on Sunday morning. We had been in the area before when we were geocaching last year so we had a good idea what we were in for, but wanted another good look at it before Sunday. We looked over everything and looked forward to running the next day. Here's the map if you know the area:Sunday we went through the usual pre-race warm up that we always did in college - stretching, jogging, relaxing. I had been looking to run the race at 7:30/mile pace, which would be 1 hour 37 minutes (give or take) and Laura wanted to keep her time better than 8:00/mile - or about 1 hour 45 minutes.

The weather was as close to perfect as could be. When the race started for us at 8:45 the temp was around 45. Laura and I rolled along the first mile and with the group of close to 450 folks it felt like a pedestrian pace! Taking up close to three lanes of traffic, we had trouble working our way up in the pack, but soon found our way up where we felt comfortable. The first mile seemed to take awhile to arrive, but once I hit the 'lap' button on my watch I saw 7:28 and I turned to Laura and mentioned we were both going along at a good clip.

I knew at some point in the run I would get away from Laura, I just didn't know exactly when that would be. I thought I would be nice and run the first 6-7 miles with her and then let her finish the last half of the race on her own, so the first few miles we went along together - talking and enjoying the morning. The second mile was a 7:55, the third a 7:20, and from there we were right around 7:30 for the next five miles. In fact, we came through our five mile somewhere in the 37-38 minute range which isn't a bad five mile run for us these days. The next time we checked our overall time was at the 8 mile mark - 1:00.13 - about as close to 7:30 pace as can be! We had been picking people off for the last six miles and slowly working our way into the top 50! We were really feeling good and mentioning how easy the race was going considering the amount of hills and lack of running we had been doing in the past month. In other words, we were getting there and it was like a 'jog in the park' - literally!

About this time I was thinking I should probably consider doing some racing with a few of the folks who were in front of us. Mile 7 and 8 are basically all downhill, and lots of people pick up the pace through here, that's not my running style so we had lost some ground and it was time to gain a little back. Laura and I did a short surge - a 10 second increase in our pace - useful in breaking up running form and getting things shaken out. You'd think after 8 miles we would have things shaken out, but it's actually the other way around - you tend to get into a habit of going a certain pace and that can be a problem.

So we surged along for 10 seconds and it was then I realized I was working far too hard to go the pace we had increased to - it couldn't have been any faster that 6:45/mile pace (AND ONLY FOR 10 SECONDS TO BOOT!)

As we approached mile 9, I could feel things were starting to shut down and I was going to be in trouble soon - how soon I didn't know, but it was coming like a freight train in the dark! I told Laura to go ahead and keep the pace she wanted because I was going to have to slow down to finish the race, but I would likely catch her shortly. This all happened right before a nasty nasty hill that is rightly known as DOOMSDAY HILL! I didn't get a picture of the hill, but here is the elevation chart of the race - you can see it after mile 8 - it's a steep climb, and it's a long climb!

Usually I am a person who attacks a hill and runs the hill to pass people, I like passing people on hills and I like working hard to get over the hill and put some distance on the competition...but not Doomsday Hill, and not at mile 9 of the half marathon. I tried to attack the hill for a short time, I even caught up with Laura for a short while, but then T.B.S. set in. T.B.S. is a term we used in college known as Total Body Shutdown. In the athletic word it's known simply as BONK.

From Wikipedia:
bonk [or bonking] describes a condition when the athlete suddenly loses energy and fatigue sets in, usually caused when glycogen stores in the liver and muscles are depleted, resulting in a major performance drop.
Things went from bad to worse. I managed to run the entire hill - if you can call my jog a run - and I continued on to almost mile 10 before things got real real bad. I desperately did not, I repeat, DID NOT want to stop or walk, but once I realized I could walk faster than I was trying to jog, well, I knew my number had been called and I was spent.

I started walking and tried to regain some energy to get a jog started again, in hopes of getting back to a run and just finishing the race off. Every attempt I made resulted in less than 100 meters of running before my legs shut down and I was back to my crippled walking pace! After I passed mile 11 I began getting dizzy (always a sure sign when you are running that you are dehydrated) and had trouble walking straight down the road. If you've ever been to a cross country race or perhaps at a track meet when a distance runner begins walking but doesn't really seem to know what's going on - that's where I was going... However, I knew what was happening and that I needed to keep my breathing steady and focused. A few moments later I was at the aid station getting a small amount of Gatorade and I was on my way again - chugging along at 14:00 minute pace...

I had some encouraging comments from folks pacing me though - most of whom Laura and I had passed between mile 2 & 8.

"Come on, you didn't run that well the past 10 miles to walk the last three!"

"You've got it, give a little jog going and get on your way"

...

and then the comment that blew me out of the water.

"Come on buddy, you are still on pace to finish under two hours!"

TWO HOURS! I was now struggling to get my self across the finish line in two hours! What was a pedestrian pace of 7:30 and the first 8 miles in an hours time, was now becoming a 14:00 minute pace and the last five miles were going to take me an hour... I managed to get myself together and took the last 1.1 miles in 13:03 to finish at 2:01.30 - the results show 2:01.36 but I figure the six seconds it took for us to get to the starting line after the race started shouldn't count against us, and I obviously need all the help I can get!

I finished 226 overall. Not bad really, but disappointing to myself none-the-less.

Laura on the other hand did really well. She had some troubles too, around mile 11 she stared feeling the gas tank going empty and had to walk for a short minute as well. She lost several spots and her pace slowed, but she still finished with a 1:40.53 - good enough for 54th place and 2nd in her age group. Oh, by the way, the girl that beat her in her age group passed her only a few hundred meters from the finish line and beat her by 8 seconds! DARN! Regardless, still an excellent first showing for Laura and I have a lot of room to improve!

We have already started talking about running the half marathon in May in Lincoln, Nebraska - but who knows. All I know right now is that I am still tired, sore, and should have done a little more training for that race. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twi - you can't get fooled again!"

Until again

-=Nolan=-


**Bonus picture**
This is really how we felt after we were done!

Monday, October 01, 2007

Post #250

Can it be? I've rambled on for 250 entries? I find that hard to believe. Then again, it's been nearly two years since the start of my blog!

Fall is in full affect in Western Montana, the leaves have gone from green to orange and red in a matter of days! Not only are the leaves changing, but so it the weather - Laura and I experienced it first hand this weekend.

But wait, before I start in on our weekend of geocaching (yes, that's basically all we did - AGAIN) I should start out with our Friday evening. Our dance class started on Friday and Laura and I spent an hour, escaping the rain, dancing with a wide range of folks learning to 'Cha Cha.' Now before you start laughing, or perhaps when you finish laughing at that statement, I have to make a confession. It was actually a lot of fun. There, I said it! I can hear my brother laughing at me already. All I can say is Laura and I can really shake a leg now, and we are just getting started! We actually picked things up pretty quickly on Friday night and we will be ready for an advanced step by this Friday - a few folks were still having trouble by the end of the first class, but I think they will pick it up pretty quickly this week - after a week of practice.

Now onto our geocaching weekend...

We slept in on Saturday morning - 8:00 is sleeping in for us these days - before getting ready for our day at "The Grubstake" restaurant in Hamilton, MT. The local geocachers have an occasional 'party' and they are always a grand time, so we make our best efforts to attend. The event on Saturday started in the afternoon, so wouldn't you know it, we had plenty of time to geocache before getting there! It's true, we really can't make a trip over 25 miles without incorporating a geocache or ten into the mix...

So after our morning of geocaching we found ourselves at 5,500 feet of elevation enjoying the view from the side of a mountain overlooking the Bitterroot Valley. The forecast called for rain most of the day, but nothing of the like arrived. We experienced a few occasional snowflakes, but that's it. In fact, after I took the pictures the clouds actually broke up and cleared out of the valley, leaving us with a blue sky! Here's the majority of the crew from the party. Laura and I especially enjoy the fall party at The Grubstake because the food is excellent! This year we were treated with huckleberry ice cream to go with homemade buttermilk pie and to wash it down there was homemade root beer!


After the party we had just enough daylight left in the sky to do a quick 3 mile hike to a geocache we attempted to get in the spring but got the canoubaru stuck. I blogged that story. This time we didn't have any trouble and we enjoyed the view from the overlook at Blodgett Canyon.

Sunday morning we thought about going duck hunting and then thought about doing some geocaching. In the end, we decided to take our shotguns geocaching! We compromise quite well. Although we didn't find any ducks, we did find four geocaches - bringing us up to 13 caches for the weekend and 1,455 total. Our goal has been to hit 1,500 before December 4, 2007 - our 3 year geocaching anniversary. By the looks of it we are going to make it and then some.

We aren't really ready for the coats to come out with the hats and gloves, but it looks like winter is going to be here a little early this year. We have already had a frost and lost our pumpkins the other night. We still had a few geocaches in the mountains we wanted to get to before the snow buried them, but it appears we are too late now. Oh well, that's the beauty of weather, you never really know what's going to happen.

As far as work goes, we will be starting on a patio tomorrow. That is, as long the weather cooperates and we don't receive the half inch of rain we are forecasted to have. Tonight I am thinking of making an appearance at ultimate frisbee or at least getting out for a walk to take in some fresh air. Until again

-=Nolan=-