Adventures in Onionism

The last couple weekends have been fun. Last Friday afternoon I rode my motorcycle to Kweisos House outside Koru, Kenya, which is about an hour east of Kisumu. The ride was great, with views of the hills north of Kisumu, a giant wild sugar-cane fire, and a wrong turn that made me late and made the last half-hour be in the dark in the driving rain and lightning. Kweisos is a big farmhouse on 3,000 acres. There were about 10 of us, organized by a CDC friend in Kisumu. The house has a pool, gorgeous views, and kitchen staff to prepare whatever you bring for them to cook you. The owner's house is a mile away, and you have free access to their tennis courts, table tennis, croquet, darts, snooker, another swimming pool, and giant gang of friendly dogs. You can also pay for horseback riding, which I did for the first time in my life that I've been old enough to remember. (There's photo evidence that I sat on my aunt's horse Indian Summer when I was 4.) Basically, it was a week...

Also, jaguars, pirates, madness, and gambling. RIP John Fairfax , my new adventure hero.

Did I mention that I got into the Wasatch 100 ? This is the second year in a row I was picked in the lottery, but I didn't run last year because I would have to pay for a ticket home from Kenya in order to do so. This year, I'm luckily already planning to be in the US around that time. I may have to adjust my flight slightly, which, knowing Delta , will probably cost me $1,000, but oh well. So I started running. Two-a-days! Let's not get ahead of myself. I'm on day two. I'm in the market for a Garmin Forerunner, as I'd like to be able to know distances and my pace while running. I think that will help me be a little more serious about training. A couple people have suggested using cellphone apps like imapymyrun or cardiotrainer. I don't particularly like carrying my phone on runs, but if I were in an anti-new-gadget-for-environmental-reasons mood, that might be the best solution. I could map my 3-4 most common runs a couple times. Each of them is under a...

Buffett on gold , and sensible investing.

As we all know, I'm a bit of a cynical bastard. I mean, global warming is going to spiral out of control and end life on earth as we know it, but even if we manage to invent a carbon-eating bacteria that solves it all, the sun's going to blow up in 100 billion years, so really, what's the point? I'm kidding. Sort of. But occasionally I'm a (small) part of something cool .

For whatever reason I lucked myself into three bad customer service experiences in short order. One with Delta, one with Verizon, and one with the New York Times. NYT resolved it immediately to my complete satisfaction, Verizon met me halfway after a little back-and-forth, and Delta is the worst airline in the world. Maybe that's a tough crown to claim, as United is horrible too, but rest assured I'll be doing my best to give my business to someone other than Delta or their partners for the foreseeable future. Too bad, because KLM has always been pretty good for me.  The condensed version is as follows: 1 . The New York Times is cool. You should read it, and also pay for it. If they accidentally billed you too much, they're likely to fix it. 2. My experiences with suspending service and billing with US cell-phone companies has been horrible both times. Five years ago I suspended service with AT&T, but contrary to what I'd been told, they wouldn't suspend b...

I finished listening to Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons. The reading by Will Patton was quite good. I believe this was Frazier's second book, coming after Cold Mountain , which I also listened to and loved. (I can't remember what I later thought of the movie, but I vaguely recall thinking far more highly of Renée Zellweger than I usually do.) I think both were pretty amazing southern gothic. The sarcastic dialogue is brilliant at times, up there with "but I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." Only it's brutal and violent, so the sarcasm goes something like:  "I'm looking for my horse. He's a grey stallion." "There's no stallion in my stables that meets that description. There is a gelding, though." (Because the second dude castrated the first dude's horse because the first dude was sleeping with the second dude's wife.) It was sort of like Cormac McCarthy, only set in Appal...

Finally, a post about adventure and not just me being a bitter lefty atheist. I just finished a pretty awesome motorcycle trip around Mt. Elgon. I took the route I linked to in my last post. I left Kakamega around 10AM, and was on pavement until Endebess, Kenya. The pavement was only good to Webuye, however. From Endebess to the border the dirt was pretty flat and boring. I could still go in 4th gear (of 5) without much worry. I hit the border at the Suam River, and it probably took me about an hour to go through customs and immigration on both sides. I had no idea what to expect bring the motorcycle across, but all it required was filling out one extra form for each country. Apparently it's free as long you're bringing the bike back within two weeks. That was a pleasant surprise. The crossing isn't very busy, so I had to wait for the Ugandan immigration officer to show up. She'd gone home and the customs officers had to call her and tell her to come back. Aft...

Here's my motorcycle plan for the weekend. Remember this post about Rory Stewart's book on his walk across Afghanistan from 5 years ago when I was in Kenya the first time? I thought not. But I read a interesting New Yorker article about him today. Surprise, he's now a politician and likes to compare himself to Alexander the Great. Sorry it's gated.

" What the meaning of human life may be I don’t know: I incline to suspect that it has none. All I know about it is that, to me at least, it is very amusing while it lasts. " Read more on Letters of Note.