This Makes No Sense At All

From Wikipedia: Mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near-homophony . As a child, my hearing was good, but sometimes the cognitive processes couldn't quite make sense of what I heard. Around Christmas time, as Silent Night was sung, I visualized "sleep in heavenly peace" as "sleep in heavenly peas." Life goes on, I eventually learned the less interesting truth and put such things behind me. Now, some 70+ years later, I  am kidding Susan. She has a princess quality, and is truly sensitive to slight imperfections, particularly those that affect her comfort. Remember the pea under the mattress story? Anyhow, I try to accommodate her when I can, as she is genuinely distressed and can easily be made happy. I do, however, tease her a little about this princess quality. This morning as I proceeded to satisfy some request, I responded "yes, your highless". Susan says "what did you say?" Me "your h...

April 2021. This product is still supported but no longer in production. ----------------------------- I have frequently wished that I had a sat phone, but weight and cost considerations have held me back. findmespot.com 's new phone at $499 with monthly and annual service plans caught my attention, and when they offered me a loaner for review purposes, I jumped at the chance. When the phone arrived, the first thing I did was weigh the components. The phone itself was just under 7 oz, and the charger and cord were 5 oz. A spare battery would be another 2 oz. It feels comparable to a home mobile phone. I started charging the battery that evening. After two hours it was still charging, fully charged by the next morning. The phone has a lot of features. A quickstart manual comes with it, but the full manual needs to be downloaded. To get the user manual go to https://www.findmespot.com/downloads/SpotGlobalPhone_Usermanual.pdf and download. 118 pages. Manual is half page size so c...

For an overview of the Bulb, see Wikipedia . This rubble and rubbish filled landfill, projecting into San Francisco Bay, has benefited from benign neglect, it has a world class view and is now slated to become parkland. However, there are some complicating factors, the folk art, the resident homeless, and the risk factor perceived by city and park authorities. I’ve been walking here intermittently for twenty some years. This blob of land maybe 200 meters by 400 meters is strewn with massive chunks of concrete; rebar sticking out of much of it. This is just the visible part. More is beneath the surface, and some partially exposed. You need to pay attention when walking. A stumble could lead to being impaled. Of course when this landfill is excavated further, all sorts of other more noxious things are encountered. For the usual urban park, the park district would bring in bulldozers and landscapers to make it all safe for visitors. Complication 1 - the folk art, ranging fr...

heading towards Donahue Pass approaching Glen Pass  Every once in a while we meet some young men on the trail - 30ish, and they go on and on about how great it is that we are out on the trail. We have figured out that they think we are old and thus a novelty. We thought we were just other hikers, participating in what we sometimes look at as an extreme sport. Hiking and backpacking are one of the few areas where I can talk the usual trail topics, gear, food, weather, and feel like any other hiker. I guess we will have to live with being categorized by a few. At 72 and 77, we may be getting past middle age. viewing Rae Lakes We see our older friends beginning to be impacted by aging, so that threat is always out there. As a consequence, each of our trips over the last few years is an intentional pushing of our personal envelope. How else do we find our limits? This does lead to making mid trip changes to adapt to the circumstances. For the most part, age seems to be a ...

We've just been doing training hikes lately, primarily on city streets. Our goal is two  or three long hikes a week. (at least 10 miles). We discovered that Semifreddi's bakery is 5 plus miles from our house, depending on route, so we make the journey there, carrying our packs, have a pastry, buy a sandwich for the trip back, and return home. Voila! 10 miles. They give out these little cards, to be stamped once for each visit. Twelve spots on the card. When it is full, we get a free coffee. At this point we are about half way through our 3rd card, representing about 300 miles walking to Semifreddi's. To get to the blog topic, we've also been giving some video presentations around the area, some on Patagonia, and some on the Camino. During setup, for my own entertainment, and to test the laptop and digital projector setup, I run some short videos that I've put out to Youtube. After the presentation I always get a couple of questions about the projection software an...

You may have wondered about my blog name "This Makes No Sense At All". It came about because one of the things we have always loved about hiking is the consistently wonderful community of hikers, when we meet them on the trail. No matter what their circumstances in the real world, on the trail they are without exception, friendly and go out of their way to be helpful. When we got more interested in long distance hiking, and I started following the related hiking online forums, I discovered that this spirit prevailed, but that there was also more than expected angry divisive commentary. It was this that made no sense at all. I could not match it with the people I met on the trail. Last fall when we noticed that our sales of Camino Chronicle abruptly dropped by two thirds, we did some checking and saw that a couple had bought a copy from Amazon, and then posted two very negative one star reviews. Since we didn't have a lot of reviews to begin with, that had a drastic...