Adventures in Onionism

A couple friends inquired recently. I believe you can't comment on blogger/blogspot blogs if you have third party cookies blocked. I believe Safari blocks these by default, and you can choose to have Firefox/Chrome do it if you wish. I do love getting comments, though.

I also stopped in NYC and spent a couple days with good friends from way back and the gf again. Everything was in bloom, the gods of the sea were jolly, and the street art was awesome.

I had meetings in Atlanta, so I took a long weekend in New Orleans beforehand and got quality time with the gf, grad school friends from Houston, and my high school friend who's finishing her PhD at Tulane. I pretty much loved the place. It's flat as a board and apparently crazy hot in the summer, but I would love to rent a double-shotgun there for a month and bike around listening to buskers. I saw David Simon's HBO series Treme filming on location in the Quarter, which made my day, but I failed to see Kermit Ruffins play, so I'll have to go back. Awesome. Wait a minute! He's only lunging out of the water because you were feeding him hot dogs!? So lame. Diabetes rates are high enough already. New Orleans wins for having a bondage-rabbit on a Mitt Romney firetruck I caught a cabbage. Also carrots, moonpies, crackers, a bubble wand, a spear, a frisbee, and a million beads. The cabbage I caught, in the air on its way to me. Seriously...

I forgot to post about the Hairy Lemon. The weekend before I went to the US, a few friends and I went to a little slice of heaven known as the Hairy Lemon. It's 40km outside Jinja on an island in the Nile River. I rode my motorcycle and my friend S took matatus and we stayed with friends in Busia Friday night. Saturday morning, after picking my bike up from the shop in Busia that I trust (I don't quite have the connections in Kakamega yet) we headed to Jinja separately, me on the bike and him in a matatu (I got there in basically half the time.) While waiting I met a German dude named Stephan who rode his bike all the way from (duh) Germany. To be exact he no longer had an unbroken trail because he'd tried taking a westerly route and had hoped to cross to East Africa through CAR and the Congo, but decided against it since he didn't want to die quite yet. He's headed to Capetown, of course. He was very cool. I'd link you to a website, but he doesn't have one...

I bought a Garmin ForeRunner. The 310 XT without the heart-rate monitor, to be exact. When I opened it up I saw the plug and thought "everything's going to be OK."

In shitty news, 2009 Health Care Reform is totally going to get overturned, Tim DeCristopher is in isolated confinement, and I won't get to see my girlfriend again until June. I'm trying to get all my negativity about before the 5-4 douchemajority announces their decision in June. On the positive side I guess I still have my dogs, my motorcycle, and the fact that PT Anderson is making a Johnny Greenwood-scored movie that is about a guy who comes home from war and decides to start a religion but is not about Scientology, and this movie is coming out October 12. (h/t my cuz )

Reno to the Bering Sea: another friend of mine of whom I am jealous. Best of luck to Krudmeister. And here's a random selection from his (trail) namesake:

I'm in the USA through Monday evening. I spent last weekend in New Orleans with my gf and friends from high school and grad school. St. Patty's day parade, swamp tour, live music, all pretty awesome. Except for the tour guide feeding the alligator hot dogs and marshmallows. That, I disapprove of. But this NYT Mag article about rampant plants and wildlife in the Lower Ninth is timely. At some point when the data fairy grants me my wish and I have my work-from-home-part-time-teaching-and-some-research-with-lots-of-time-for-hiking job I'd love to spend a (non-summer) month in NOLA, renting a double shotgun, riding my bike, working from coffee shops, and listening to buskers play on Frenchmen. Pictures soon. Now I'm in Atlanta for some meetings. I've been running in Piedmont Park: View Larger Map Saturday I'm headed to NYC. I've already seen The Book of Mormon , but this Olbermann/Savage discussion of it is great: h/t WF

Somebody's apparently trying to make a trail from end to end of the Himalayas. So of course my friend Trauma went and hiked it . Of course I'm jealous.

My hiker buddy Lint was on Oregon Public Television.

View Larger Map This weekend I went running and saw a dead (or at least unconscious) student at the high school near my house, milked a cow for the first time, had a giant drunk guy threaten to kill me for comparing Kenyans to dogs (my actual words: "I have to go home now because my dogs are in my house and I need to make sure they're not peeing or chewing on my computer,") then road my motorcycle to Kisumu, bought some tofu, and lost pretty badly at Trivia. Today I rode back a longer way, got rained on, drank tea at Rondo Resort to wait out the rain, and chatted with Kenya Wildlife Service guards at the northern entrance to Kakamega forest to try and set up volunteer trail maintenance next month. Moral of the story: (1)You can get tofu in Kenya if you're lucky. (2)Even though "waterproof/breathable" is a complete lie, you should still wear your waterproof/breathable motorcycle pants when riding in Kenya in monsoon season.