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Heron Lake Discoveries
We’ve looked down from the main dam at Heron Lake before, but the fresh perspective from the Rio Chama trailhead brings us face to face with our erroneous mental map of this place. We had pictured Heron Lake and the nearby El Vado (The Ford) Lake as two back-to-back reservoirs on the Chama River. But…
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Global Washington Geo Directory
This site houses a database of academic centers, businesses, foundations and non-profit organizations engaged in global development. Each member can list all the countries they are active in around the world. The former site had no map interface to this extensive data. The focus on country data lead me to choose the Google Visualization API…
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Movie: Coraline (2008)
I’m usually disappointed in child fantasy movies as an adult because at some point they stop observing the reasons for child fantasies and just churn through a simple plot with lots of pretty colors (the stop-motion animation in this film is really cool). This movie got our hopes up in the first half, but fell…
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Heron Lake
Ann has been wanting to go to Heron Lake forever, but I always drag my feet because I’m uncomfortable with water-oriented activities. I wish I knew what my problem is – I can swim and usually have fun once I get started, and water activities are usually in great outdoor places, just like climbing! Heron…
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Movie: Me and You and Everyone We Know
At some point we watched this, and I guess I didn’t review it, so we got it again. We start watching it, immediately recognize it, and can’t stop. It’s ingenious in such a wierd way that you can’t help but look. And keep looking. Back and forth. And now I’m cracking up.
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East Pecos Baldy Loop
It’s time for some more leisurely backpacking! We hit the Jack’s Creek trailhead around 10:30am, and it’s busy. We’re the first to have to park in the weeds. On the trail, we meet hikers and equestrians enjoying the nice weather. It looks like it could storm, but after just a few drops it clears up…
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Book: The Housekeeper and the Professor / Yoko Ogawa
An aging professor of mathematics has suffered an accident that left him with only 80 minutes of short-term memory, and most housekeepers are not up to the challenge of caring for him. It’s a good setup that uses the professor’s memory limitation to explore the importance of history in relationships. It also gently plies the…
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Wyoming CDT GPS Track
I failed in my goal of making map posts from the trail, but I still managed to collect a high-resolution GPS track of almost the entire hike. That in itself was challenging enough to be a proud accomplishment for me. I’ll write a little about how I did it, but let’s start with a map…
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Raven’s Ridge Repeat
We return to the site of our snowbound May hike to see how it feels now. No postholing this time! The Santa Fe Ski Basin parking is now packed, however, and the trail is accordingly much busier. It takes ten minutes of climbing before my body starts to come out of its murky funk, and…
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Book: Deep Survival / Laurence Gonzales
This book has some weaknesses. It’s a little overblown at regular intervals, a bit repetitive, and has a dash more macho than I usually like. These are small complaints about a close examination how humans behave under the supreme stress of survival situations, and why they behave that way, that is ultimately thoughtful and broad.…