Not Quite Dead...

...it's just that this past week, I've been either busy, exhausted, starving, or some combination of the three. On the busy front:

- Got the desk from my mom's office out of the pickup (with some help from Fibonacci) and got it into my office. Then I discovered a rather nasty, musty smell emanating from it and have spent much effort attempting to remove said odor. It's a metal desk, so at least I don't have to worry about rotten wood, but there are inner surfaces that I can't get to to clean. Oh, and between the mustiness and the bleach, I've come down with a sore throat and a few other symptoms, which seem to be going away now that I have a decent air purifier in with the thing.

- Moved a rather large roll of carpet into my mom's office, with help from Fibonacci and everyone at the office. That was interesting. My dad thought the thing might have weighed 500 pounds or more. It was 10 or 12 feet long and probably 3 feet thick. Lifting it was out of the question. Mostly it was a shoving match.

- Tea with Matt, when I should have been cleaning to make room for the musty desk. Incidentally, this post came out of a bit of our discussion. Good illustration of how massively fast exponential growth really is.

- Philosophy club. I started on a post about Aristotle based on last week's meeting, and gave up due to need for food and sleep. Not sure I'll get back to it at this point, but next week we're on stoicism and Epictetus. Anyone in the Pocatello area is welcome to join us Wednesdays at 5:30 pm at Mocha Madness (Corner of 5th and Halliday, though the map makes it look like it's in the middle of the block).

- Putting up a fence/gate. I'll probably post pictures at some point. Last spring, I put up a temporary chicken wire fence between my driveway and the back yard. It was intended to be temporary, so it's not a huge surprise that it was a bit, er, the worse for wear. I replaced it with some metal fence sections from Lowe's. I couldn't afford to do a very large fence with them, but for that section they worked nicely, and they look much better than the chickenwire did.

- Tiny bit of hiking/exploring yesterday. I was hoping to find Crystal Summit Road. I think I did, but it was closed (and labeled 006). So I wandered further south along Bannock County Highway. Once it goes out of Caribou National Forest, it seems to be farms as far as the eye can see. I turned around at Wright Lane (yes, that was really the name) and headed back and stopped at Beaver-something-trailhead. It doesn't seem to get much use by humans. There was no clear trail from the parking lot. I wandered up a semi-clear patch and eventually found an obvious trail. I suspect that it's primarily used by cattle, though. The only places with clear trails were in among the trees. In clearings, the trail tended to die off. Also, there were quite a lot of cattle up there grazing. Incidentally, one of the signs of overgrazing is hillsides covered in mule's ears (a kind of sunflower with leaves that look vaguely like donkey ears), as the cattle don't care for them. One of the signs of mismanaged land is cattle still grazing on such hillsides. I did find something that might have been an old beaver dam along the little creek, which probably explains the name of the place.

- Then I headed back down and explored a dirt road off of the highway that I'd never gone down before. It seems to follow Mink Creek. There were a few potential places to hike as well as some nice vista spots to get a good view of the creek. It was also bloody narrow, the kind of road where when two cars meet, one pretty much has to pull off the road. But still an enjoyable (and pretty) drive for all that.

- Okay, exhausted and starved again. So I'm done writing for the moment.