foraker

Taken by the housefrau on her return from Europe.

I wonder what the kid is like in a class room

I'll add to John's by adding one for my father. On his return to Anchorage from SoCal via Seattle he was experiencing one of the 9 pits of TSA hell (though he does tend to bring it on himself a fair bit) when one of the Alaska Air reps asked him if the barrel of his rifle should be sticking 4 inches out of the hard plastic case that it was in. What kind of drug crazed gorillas do they have working baggage-handling anyway? I did a bit of that at Prudhoe and never flung people's shite from the truck to the plane....

Hey, she said she was 18. She said she was on the pill.

Well, what do I know? I'm neither a hunter nor a lawyer. Haven't tried lawyer hunting yet though.

After this week, I can say another rule is 'Never fly Lufthansa'. They cancelled my wife's flight out of Ukraine to Frankfurt and never said a word. The only way I found out was I happened to go online to check her times and flight numbers and found something odd and called my agent about it. They (Lufthansa) also rebooked her on another flight (again without telling anyone) out of Kiev, over 400 km away. I find this out about 10pm her time and she was supposed to be on a 6am flight. Since they have no more flights that week, they shove her on a shuttle in the middle of the night to get her to Kiev for her flight out. This being Ukraine, her mom's worried sick that she just let her daughter go off with some white slavers. They are an hour late leaving Kiev meaning my wife misses her flight out of Frankfurt. Did I mention the two aborted landings, within a few meters of touching down, without any explanation? I will go out of my way never to fly them again. I love talking to customer service people here about dealing with their offices overseas. They just don't seem to understand the phrase 'This is Ukraine/Russia/Azerbaijan/.... don't you?' They seem to think the entire world has reliable cell phone coverage, home computers, and responsive customer service. And they wonder why we get massively pissy with them on the phone.

I'm not sure the hunting license comparison is all that bad. Hunting licenses are usually for precise periods of time. Maybe not here, I don't know, but usually your license to hunt or fish something is spelled out from day X of Y month until day W of Z month. Anything that requires a permit typically spells out the time limits of that permit. Thus if the rule was always in force, you would expect wording such as 'permits are always required to park in winter recreation areas'. If not, you would expect 'permits required from September until March'. I think anyone exercising common sense (and supposing they read all the fine print on all the signage available) could argue that one would not expect to have a permit when it was not technically winter. A judge would not have to rule the law unconstitutional in order for you to catch a break.

if you can have more than one headphone plugged in, why can't you have nmore than one 3rd party accessory and have yourselves a party with tunes? the only thing it doesn't do is make some snacks.

That's to protect themselves from the poorly aimed shots from the Homeland Security fukwits when they start a blazing gun battle with some petty criminal trying to escape to Canada. The criminals are shooting south, it's Larry the Tool that's shooting north.

I can see it's been a loooooong dark wet winter for some people......

closing my eyes now because i just know that Dru is going to post a pic real soon....

if it worked like that, women would buy their men the underwear that gives them six-pack abs.

Exxon hasn't paid out it's billions to Alaska yet either. Been fighting it for 20 years. I was surprised to see Reichert weigh in on it. WHo do you think will pay out first? (um, neither?)

That's a sweet climb, eh? Boy, that brings back memories. What's with the ropes on the last bit? I guess the ice was so piss poor when I did it that we just didn't bother. Pretty interesting climbing looking between your legs and saying 'Don't come off...Don't come off....Don't come off....' Are you going to be in NZ long?

worked at Prudhoe Bay oil field before and during college grad school (i was getting paid for work so technically a job) post doc in Sweden and in Australia government lab (ack!) private remote sensing company supercomputer company

That's the thing about firing people: nobody wants to be the bad guy. I got canned from a job once. Can't say I blame him.

You want to save weight, try losing 5 pounds instead of worrying about 100g.

= no submissions allowed When did anyone ever have a bouldering 'epic'? What would that be? Running out of chalk and Mountain Dew and having your iPod batteries die all at the same time while being more than a 100 feet from the road?

How many times do you have to wrap it around your ankle/hip before it's equalized?

ex-bike-hero or car-driving-ecosaint.

If this is the guy there everyone complains about, he sells this stuff on eBay and someone mentioned he spends his time bidding $0.01 to frak with the 'buy it now' option. kind o' petty but if you want to irritate the dude, that's one way to do it. i think the problem is when it comes to gear we all think we should 'share the goodness'. unfortunately, this isn't the way our society or economy or culture is structured. when NF had their big gear giveaway, I didn't see anyone 'sharing the goodness' there either.

I need to stop coming here.

What's not to like about a guy who can scythe through the evil dead AND cut his own birthday cake?