Updates from the Office of the Mountain Man

Well, just a slathering of little updates for y'all today. 

I got my motorcycle license two weeks ago.  What a blast!  No cycle yet, I just have to make it official and go write the drivers test to get my license changed to Nevada, then start shopping.  Our two final days on course were very hot on small 250cc machines.  The afternoon we did our testing the temperature hit 118F (48C), while sitting atop of a motorcycle pumping out its own heat, in jeans and winter boots and a longsleeve shirt.  Wow.  That's a record heat for me so far.  That takes a lot out of ya.

I was up to my biking playground in MacDonald Ranch this morning.  The temperature was at 91F (33C) by 10am but the big difference is the humidity at 25%.  That's alot for here, and the air is like molasses, HOT molasses that you have to chew first.  It was probably too warm for me to be out biking in the desert, but I had a trail I wanted to try and... well, on a side note, I noticed my weight has been increasing slightly since I got here.  My body has pretty much stayed in the 152-158 zone my whole life, but I think all those cheep beers are beginning to tip the balance because now I've jumped to 169.  I see it, and I feel it, and I dont' like it.  So I'm in training as of now.

I played 2 games of ultimate frisbee last night which is another story I'll get into when the season is over.  So today, my legs were a little rubbery but I went on my biking adventure anyway.  5mins from home I was climbing the mountain into MacDonald Ranch, and 15mins in I was absolutely done.  But I never turned back, I never do.  Somewhere early in those hills my body just completely ran out of fuel and it became a very exhausting, long trek back home.  I had to walk my bike out of the valley, up a craggy knoll to get up on top of another hill.  It took me another 45minutes work to get home.  So I'll have to give the mountain this one:  Jones-3, MacDonald Ranch-1.

An old haunt revisited me last friday as I was trying to back up all our photos onto DVDs.  My machine has been getting a little twitchy so I decided to clean up some space.  I once had this nasty little habit my buddy Boris used to call 'The Delete Monkey'.  Y'see, computers have never been my strong suit, and sometimes bad things happen because I'm a little trigger happy.  And the Delete Monkey reared its ugly head once again.  I backed up all my photos up to 2012, but was going to wait til the 2012 folder was a little fatter before backing those ones up.  But then, in trying to remove all the backed up photos from the Mac, I deleted EVERYTHING!!  All our christmas pics from last year, the move, and all our Vegas pics to date, maybe 2000 photos in all, gone.  Tanya was supremely not impressed, and I was pretty hard on myself for being so stupid.

However, I found a program online, the 'Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery' program, and launched the scan of my hard drive.  It scanned for 32hrs and retrieved 195,000 jpgs and video!!!  So my weekend and monday were spent sifting through a ton of crap to recover those missing photos.  All of the video files were wrecked.  I had no idea that my computer got imprinted with all those little internet jpgs, facebook photos, internet sites, kijiji and craigslist pics, and every freakin' googlemap search we've done... it was all there.  And in an almost random, sectional order, not linear at all.  It took a really long time to sift through all that mess, at least 10hrs of work, but I got all of my missing photos back.

It was quite a trip back through all those pics, it made me a little homesick.  Our little green house in Riverview and its lush green backyard, our since-passed dog Cozmo, our families, the music guys and the times we had, the Mannstock parties on the Restigouche and all that beautiful water, all our vacation trips.  We had a great life back there in NB, and I wish it could have worked out a little differently to allow us the opportunity to stay and grow as individuals, but it wasn't in the cards.  We hit the end of the road and it was time to go.  We are looking forward to getting home for 2weeks in august and seeing everyone again. 

Thanks for reading.

TRJ