Let’s say “thanks” to all the worriers of the world. They’re the reason we have helmets, inspections, accountants, public address systems, insurance, and people minding the store. And ulcers. They also gave us all ulcers. They had them first, of course, and wanted to make sure the rest of us had them, too.
Also, Thanks to you guys for the birthday wishes, and thanks, Bic, for resubmitting your application!
Mondays are tough… but Tuesdays don’t answer any of the big questions either.
So, I’ve got this doctor thing tomorrow. And I can’t have caffeine all day today, right? So, I haven’t.
There’s probably a conclusion to that idea, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out what the hell it is.
Time is all weird, and I can feel the great grandmother of all headaches coming, I feel like I need a nap, and by tomorrow morning, when I haven’t had enough caffeine to make a neuron jiggle, I’m supposed to do some kind of stress test and run on a treadmill.
And I bet I know what the result of the test will be. That I can never have sweet, sweet caffeine again.
Goodbye, thoughts. It’s been nice having you.
So, changing the story arcs. Gotta swing the increasingly bulky craft around, aim it in a new direction, and get under way. Hard to do without getting a little maudlin. Hopefully, today’s cartoon is a quick enough turnaround, as we sail into the next chapter.
Anybody want to make a request? Now would be the time. I’ve got a framework to hang things on, and as soon as I start filling in details, you psychics will start figuring out where I’m going. You might as well start telling me what I’m going to write and save me a lot of extra work.
I’ll give you a clue- I’m finally getting around to a previous request for a particular kind of bike race. Fire up the crystal balls.
Poor Lowell. But OutdoorFest-By-Committee just isn’t going to come out the way it went in.
Everything you get in an outdoor store these days comes in a stuff sack, doesn’t it?
I mean, I got used to buying sleeping bags that came in their own nylon drawstring bags. You ram the sleeping bag down inside them randomly, so the stuffing in the bag doesn’t eventually line up and separate in weird stripes from repeated, organized, anal-retentive folding and rolling of the bag.
Disorganized, chaotic people like me LOVE those kinds of instructions.
Which is why I’m not as keen on my tent’s stuff sack. Only by carefully laying out, folding up, and properly rolling do you have any hope whatsoever of returning the tent to the bag it came in.
Back to the point- I’ve bought camp towels that came in stuff sacks, I’ve bought campstove gear which by it’s very nature cannot be stuffed down any smaller than it is, in a stuff sack- or at least in a nylon bag with a drawstring closure. Which counts as, I believe, a stuff sack. What else comes in stuff sacks? Sleeping pads, camp chairs, jackets, shirts, climbing harness, hats, throw rope, first aid kit, Christmas gifts from my brother, and… well, you’ll see, if you haven’t bought one lately yourself and have figured out what we’re talking about.
My oldest son needed to upgrade his sleeping bag. He had a sort of kids bag that wasn’t going to work well on Boy Scout trips. You could tell it was substandard because it didn’t come in a stuff sack. It came in some nylon clippy strappy thing with his name embroidered on it. Cool, but it’s not a stuff sack. So we got him a new one. It came with it’s own stuff sack, of course, but it was newer and better than the ones that came with my old Kelty bags- bought nearly twenty years ago now. It came with a compression sack. That, and the fact that it’s made out of some nano-age fabric that’s apparently spun from something so high-tech it’s almost air, means that it packs down to a size you can overlook in the big duffel bags I usually pack our gear into.
Impressed, I vow to buy compression sacks for our older sleeping bags and pack ’em down modern-style. So I went to get new stuff sacks. I got some high-tech looking things that my brother wouldn’t look silly owning, so I figured I was in the gold, here. Not so much. My bulky old sleeping bags strain at the tiny little cords that serve to compress the bags, so you’d pull on one side only to feel the other side go ‘Vvvip!’ and give way. Damn.
So when I saw a slightly lower-tech model at the Scout Shop, that was 2/3s the price and had big honkin’ nylon straps instead of fine little filament sized cord, I got that. Better. Much better.
Of course, by now, you’ve guessed what the stuff sacks were packaged in.
Yep. Their own stuff sacks. I have no idea what to do with them. Maybe I need to give tiny little Christmas gifts this year, wrapped in these little stuff sacks.
When there’s a modern disagreement, it’s only natural to both find a way to call the other person a communist, or was it socialist? No, HITLER. Yeah, that’s it. Anyone you disagree with? Hitler. There you go.
I imagine a lot of skaters are somehow part of ‘the Shadow Economy’- and it probably makes accounting for a skate/bike/kayak type store an unenviable task all over the country.
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