Thor's Hammer Is Finally Done. It Weighs A Considerable Amount, But Couldn't Be Happier With It!

Every time I feel like my apartment is cluttered and over stuffed with possessions I just want to fit as much as I can, of what I want to keep, into a suitcase.

Sell the rest.

Hike into the wilderness.

Build a house (a treehouse would be cool).

And live there, away from it all, until I die.

Gotta love fall camping

If only I had the money to keep it

For us here in Chicago spring has finally arrived. I know it's almost May but here it seems like we have been cut back to only two seasons, winter and summer with maybe two weeks of fall and spring (if we're lucky). So with hopefully just three or four more days of 30 degree weather left, it's time to break out the camping gear!

Me (Jake) and my girlfriend Allison live in a one bedroom apartment in the city with our cat Turd Ferguson (Turdie for short). Even though there's a park across the street it doesn't fulfill the desire we get to be outside. This is a blog for us to share our outdoor experiences and love of nature. Enjoy! 

I have a working interview tomorrow for a job that I think is a perfect stepping stone towards the kind of life I want.

I am scared to death.

Watching your world slowly collapse around you is painful. Having no one to be there with you is unbearable.

Dreaming of Parks and Rec

It’s Anne Perkins wedding and we’re at a grocery store to pick out something for her fiancés bachelor party when we find out that he cheated on her. This is the same moment when I realize that I’m still in love with her. Leslie is super excited for the wedding because she doesn’t know anything and starts dragging me towards the bathroom but I tell her she has to let me go since I can’t go in the girls bathroom. I go over and all the guys are showing Anne that we picked out fish for the party and I’m super depressed so it just comes out as “yeah, fish”. I leave them and go to the men’s room where every stall is taken by guys standing up on the top of the walls and peeing down into the toilet. Ron gets down from doing that and I start to take his stall but he tells me he has to poop too. I start to pee at a urinal and a guy on top on a stall says “geez can’t anyone stand anymore?” And I reply with “geez can’t anyone sit anymore?”. So I’m having trouble peeing and then all of the sudden several of the guys at the urinals and I get peed on. We all start freaking out and I go over to the sink and start splashing myself with water and saying fuck as I try to dry off with a towel. Then all the emotions start coming out and I shout fuck and throw the towel right as this dad and baby walk past. The dad gives me a dirty look and I start apologizing. I pick up the towel and lean against the hand dryers. Just then Mark Brandanawitz steps out from behind a ring of sinks with Anne. She’s also soaked and holding back tears. I know she knows about her fiancé and I start to have trouble holding back the tears because I love her so much but she thinks it’s because I feel bad about her fiancé. Then she walks forward and we hug really tightly and both burst out crying.

That was a dream I had few months ago that was so vivid and emotional I woke up just short of being in tears. I wrote down everything I could remember and even now I can remember just how I felt waking up that night.

One year down, a lifetime to go.

Beorn the skin changer

I have long been a fan of the LOTR books with the Hobbit being my favorite. I think it's because I read it at a young age and t was able to make a nice impact on my imagination. Anyways I was excited when I heard about the Hobbit movies and couldn't wait to see one of my favorite minor characters, Beorn, on the big screen.

Needless to say I was disappointed.

Not only did they skip over the chance to lead nicely into the film with some down time at Beorn's house which would have allowed them to reestablish the plot prepare everyone for the events that would later happen in the movie, but they also cut down the content from the book drastically. Why go into the appendices and pull out extra information to help extend film time and then cut short scenes that are actually in the book  itself.

I don't want to be totally negative about the movie, it did have some great parts and as always the people at Weta did a fantastic job with the set, props and design work. However, I recently got a chance to look through the "Desolation of Smaug" design book that is out on the market (available on amazon below).

http://amzn.com/0062265695

All I can say after looking at all the designs made for the Beorn character is that they picked the wrong one. There were some truely fantastic concept ideas that were much more closely related to the book's description. Understandably you want the dwarves to look distinctly different so that you can tell the 13 of them apart, but there is no way anyone could mistake the giant Beorn for a tiny dwarf, so why try to make him look like one? Luckily the got all 30 seconds of screen time for his bear form right at least.

Every day there are several things that happen which moves me that much closer to selling all my things for a hill somewhere I can into a hobbit hole to spend my days reading, ignoring people and the government. Yeah, that'd be nice.