en in Colorado?
(Also note the noticeable frown of my rear suspension. As though all of my crap was not heavy enough, I just had to keep adding weight further and further back...)
And speaking of my car, Gwen is doing fine these days. She got her first oil change under my care the other day, only a measely 3000 miles late. I also have begun making some serious mods. For instance, because I didn't feel she was assertive enough, I drove her over some huge rocks on a crappy dirt road up a mountain. Now the resulting dings (and holes?) in her muffler let her roar through the countryside. (Some might argue that Colin, Jonathan and I were just lazy and didn't want to hike the extra 2 miles at the beginning of our trek - and they would have good reason, as we started our backpacking adventure at about 9 pm, eventually finding a reasonably good campsite at around 11 (no thanks to our 15' visibility range do to the limitations of our headlamps) - but no, car-related coolness was all that I had on my mind at the time.) Future mods will hopefully include installing the air filter I ordered online. For the last 6000 miles I had been wondering to myself, this big empty hole over the air intake looks like you could screw something over it... I wonder what that might be... Well, all my stupidity aside, Gwen is still getting 40 mpg, so with her I am well pleased.
What have I been up to?
- pruning. always pruning.
- putting 2 X 6 sled runners on a mobile sheep shelter
- eating ludicrusly lavish lunches (at the bosses' house)
- driving to Paonia with the boys (and doggie) to play pickup ultimate and soccer
- learning to weedbadge (=trying to keep the vine death:weed death ratio at a minimum while atop a tractor equiped with a ginormous weed whacker on a hydraulic arm)
- making tasty food
- learning to fly fish - so far only befriending the local fly shop guy. I have yet to actually cast into water
- most recently: attending a wedding in Cairo, NE.
Oh yeah, one more bullet point:
- entering an outhouse race in a local community festival, constructing a racing outhouse, dressing in drag, and thoroughly shocking and entertaining the conservative community of Crawford, CO.
We noticed the ad in the High Country Shopper, the local free magazine that has all the community news and advertisements. Outhouse race? Sounds dumb. Let's enter. We checked it out on the internets, and it seemed within our grasp: outhouses would be raced for 200 ft. on a grass surface. Certain dimensions must be met (thou shalt make thine outhouse 3 cubits by 6 cubits, not exceeding 7 cubits in width... [that reminds me, if you have heard of lolcats, check out www.lolcatbible.com. If you haven't, visit www.icanhascheezburger.com first... Exaggerations aside, this has provided at least 2-3 hours of entertainment for us thus far, and it's still not getting old...]), and there must be a jockey inside, sitting on a seat - with a hole - while the race is in progress. Colin had the brilliant (no sarcasm) idea of making our outhouse a litter of sorts, rather than utilizing wheels, as we guessed other teams would do. Since the race was only 200' we figured a lightweight design with no rolling friction would give us superior acceleration. Awesome. We're in. We sent in the $5 for registration, and decided on the name "the Queen's Latrine" because it sounded clever. We later decided it would only be appropriate to dress in drag for the race. We began to hype ourselves up during the preceding weeks, but we didn't actually do anything but talk. At 7pm the night before the race we built the Latrine. It's makeup: two 1 X 6's, some 1" dowel rods, and a ton of cardboard. We actually spent more time painting it than we did building i
t.And the painting was quite the process. Before I arrived, Colin and later Jonathan had begun developing a style of collaborative art-creation. Colin's rules for this process: anyone can paint anywhere at any time they choose. The numerous paintings that adorn our walls are a testimony to the efficacy (or maybe "grooviness" is the word I'm looking for) of this style. Anyway, the three of us, Evan (the bosses' son) and Nicole (the bosses' son's girlfriend - also our jockey) had a great time painting into the night. On the big day the five of us were up at the crack of dawn to eat a huge pancake and sausage breakfast. And then as quickly as the last manager's special sausage slipped down someone's gullet the sun dresses went on and we piled into a huge diesel truck - kind of a driving oxymoron...
There was a parade before the races. We were somewhere after the fire trucks and somewhere before the people in pioneer getup and blanks in their guns. Fun times. Crowd reactions ranged from cheers to cat calls (from women, from jesting men and from men too uncomfortable to know how else to respond) to questions such as, "isn't wearing a dress kind of gay?" (Colin's response: [innocently:] "Isn't that okay?" - silence -) The parade over, we chugged some overly sweeted iced tea, and loaded up on power food - i.e. corndogs and funnel cakes.The actual race was somewhat of a disaster. We hadn't actually practiced synchronizing our running while carrying a jockey-laden outhouse. To make matters worse, we learned about 3 minutes before the race that due to the small racing area (only about 75-100'... great planning, guys...), each outhouse would race against the clock, going down the field, rounding a pole and returning to cross the finish line. Unfortunately, even with two physics majors on the design team, lack of information ultimately left us hosed. We accelerated very well, yet upon trying to round the corner with our superior speed Evan (the outside-back runner) simultaneously felt all the weight of the Queen and her Latrine shift into his hands and was accelerated (think crack the whip) and flung outward toward the crowd. He dove into the ground - out of respect for the crowd's probable wish to not make physical contact with a running transvestite - and the rear of the outhouse crashed down.
Jonathan and I looked back, saw why our progress had been so suddenly arrested, looked at each other and drug the Queen the remaining 40' over the finish line. We finished last, yet were only 2 seconds behind the winner, despite our humiliating wreck. We recieved the "flimsiest outhouse" award - a mini plywood outhouse, housing a roll of toilet paper.- Outhouse race entry fee: $5
- Acrylic paint: $10 (sorry, art people, that this estimate is probably so wrong...)
- Utility costs to launder sweaty sun dresses: $0.40
- Providing comic relief for the entirety of a rural mountain community: priceless
This is hilarious...I miss you guys.
ReplyDeleteI second the above comment...
ReplyDeletehah... no words... XD