Firstly I want to apologize for this being extremely late in terms of my normal updates. Vacation, illness and the events in CT have held this up. So this was going to be a blog about my wife and I adventuring in Vermont, but then shithead when and shot up a elementary school, so I need to touch on it.
It's amazing that people keep getting shooting places up all over the us, it just really surprises me that there are that many fucked up people. My heart goes out to the families that have lost loved ones in this tragedy.
Now on to a fun topic, a weeks vacation.
My wife and I ended up on a bit of an unexpected to trip to Vermont this past week. We left on Saturday and 6 hours later we were in the green mountain state. We ended up on vacation because of a timeshare that my parents gifted to my sister and I that we now share, and my week happened to be this week. Now I have not been up to the resort (Smuggler's Notch) in close to 7 years, but I use to go there regularly when I was younger, pretty much every winter in February, so as one would expect, a lot of things have changed, to the point where knew nothing of the area. This was OK because the wife and I were just there to relax, since she needs to take it easy until we find out if there are babies in her belly.
When you ask me what my definition of relaxing is, I'll tell you that it involves beer, music, and maybe a book depending. Typically my wife would agree, however with it being so close to Christ's birthday, she opted for, peppermint tea, and holiday traditions on XM and Christmas movies all week.
Well, being the good husband I am, I thought why not make a fire for her in the fire place...which ended up setting off the smoke alarm when the condo filled with smoke. After this I decided to hit up YouTube to see what I was doing wrong, the only suggestion YouTube had (that I wasn't already doing) was to trim some of wetter bits on the log off. If you look for this "Starting a fire with wet wood" on the YouTube, you'll notice that the men in the video are using either large knives, or a hatchet. I did not have either of these items and instead was relegated to using my folding knife to trim down logs in the same fashion they were in the video. I'm not sure if I need to say it, but a folding knife is not the ideal tool for this type of operation and after about an hour of "trimming" I was holding a dull knife.
My wife being the wonderful woman she is suggested that I get a stone to sharpen my knife, which we did the next day. After getting home I realized I have absolutely no idea how to sharpen a knife, since I haven't done it since Boy Scouts since years ago. However after another quick trip to the internet I had a general idea, that there is no "correct" way to sharpen a knife, which I felt was wrong. So I tried to apply various bits of information that I had gathered from the web. I'm not sure if I was successful, or I had just dulled it enough for it to work as a wedge but I was able to continue with my attempt to build a fire.
About 30mins later a knock come on our condo door. Its the upstairs neighbor, he asks if we're OK cause his smelled a lot more smoke then usual and was worried something might have happened.
After this I bought a Duraflame log that I used to beat mother nature.
The rest of the week we spent looking for moose while we antiqued, since there was no snow for me to ski on. Now as I said this was my first time back in 7years but I did spend ever 2nd week of February of my youth in this resort, in that time I have only ever seen one moose. My wife has never seen a moose, and desperately wanted to see one since there are moose crossing signs all over the place. After not seeing any for the whole week, my wife now believes that wild moose are like Sasquatch. I hope to prove her wrong some day.
There are some other stories here and there but I'll but those in Friday's post.
N
