The Dark Side

Dexter's Laboratory is one of my favorite cartoons on TV. We don't have cable so I turned to the internet to download a couple episodes to watch in my free time. Little did I know that there are two shows with the name Dexter. Of course I downloaded the non-cartoon show by accident. Out of curiosity I watched it. It was kind've freaky and weird but intriguing.

The second Dexter is a show that aired on Showtime last year about a forensic blood specialist at a Miami police department. Sounds like another CSI copy or something like that, right??? It has a little twist Dexter happens to be a serial killer. In many ways, the classic anti-hero. He is a nice guy and He only kills the bad guys... Guys who are murdering innocent people.

All the previous things made the show interesting, but that is not what really drew me. Dexter hides the inner killer inside him from everyone around him. He lets no one see who he really is. He puts on a facade to hide the darkness in his soul. He is afraid the world will reject him if they know who he really is.

I think that most people in the world want to be loved by someone. I also think that most people in the world hide a darkness in their soul from everyone around them. I know I do. I put such extreme boundaries around certain areas of my life that it has effected the way I relate to people.

When I look back at the past 6-7 years I can see the wall around the darkness in my soul building higher and higher. I even remeber the first day the wall started going up between God, me and other people around me. I was so ashamed of what was in my heart that I did not want anyone to see it. (Regardless of the fact that I knew God would see it) I dissauded myself to the point where I built a wall so high that I figured it was easier to just drop any desire i had for God then to tear down the wall.

Last night it clicked that one of the reasons I harbored no desire to get close to God was because I did not want to let him see behind the wall. Actually, I should rephrase the previous statement. I desired God, but I would no let him inside the wall. I acknowledged parts of the wall to some of my friends. I asked God to help me stop the actions that resulted from the darkness in my heart without inviting him to see behind the wall and to help me beat down the darkness in my soul and turn it into light.

I wrote about simplifying my life in the past couple posts. I think that more then anything else I could do to simplify me life; tearing down the wall around the darkness in my heart and letting God see it and help me with it would simplify my life more then anything else.

No Car, No Loft but a simpler life

Last month I was looking at buying a loft up in Victor, Colorado...
The lofts were beautiful, well designed and the views were awe inspiring, but I went up to aunt and uncles house after I looked at the lofts. As i was sitting around watching TV that night i realized that the lofts went against a couple of the goals i have for my life.

The first goal was to simplify my life. Not to take away any of the fun I have or cool experiences , but to take things out of my life that I have just because I am supposed to have them... For instance a car to get to work in the winter or a yard that has actual grass in it.

The second goal was to get rid of my car and all the extra bikes I had. I drove my car a total of about 20 miles in August. I am still working on the bikes. I gave my bike rack away to clint, a friend who just moved to New Mexico. I am going to sell a couple frames and parts of bike racks on craig's list also.

I realized that 95% of the time, The Traveler and single speed mountain bike are all I need.

I really need a car about 3 days a month at the most and I can rent a car for those days.

The third goal was to use my bikes for everything except for a couple trips to work and when I travel out of town. I think that that goal is also totally possible.

To bring all this to a point... Buying the loft in victor, no matter how cool, goes against all that.

It is not that I am some crazy environmentalist or anything, but if I do not need to drive a car 60 miles each way and I can help out little by riding my bike to work why not. I guess now that I am selling my car I will see how the experiment works.

A loft, a post, a thought about life in general...

In Victor, Colorado an architect built some lofts. They are 50 miles away from my job, but the first time I saw a picture of one I knew that it would be worth the drive. Tomorrow, I am meeting the realtor to actually go inside the lofts and take a look. Jev and I road up to Cripple Creek and victor last week and glanced in them to see if they exuded the same cool design in person that was shown on the web. Loft pictures

On that same note I decided to simplify life and get rid of all my bicycles except my fixie and my single speed. They are the bikes i love and ride the most. Why would I need anything else??? I have ridden my fixie to work twice since it finally gained a front brake. I have decided that Samoa is to pretty a name for her. The Traveler is a much more fitting name considering how gritty and tough she is (and also how fast she eats crank arms for breakfast).

Work should not dominate your life. Life should dominate work. So if you love what you do and it is your passion make it a major part of your life, but if your don't, then live life to the fullest and let work fund the life that you love. I guess I say this because, lately I have beeen thinking that i do not hate work but it is there to fund the life that the Lord is leading me to live. I can incorporate it into my life but only in the relationships I have and hopefully encouraging people to save for retirement so that the will have the freedom to serve others with there free time when they retire instead of having to work till they are 80.

What a great revelation, my thoughts about work never crossed the boundary of actually furthering peoples ability to serve in there retirement. That definitely gives me some inspiration for work...

Looking for a small house

So I have been looking for a house for the past couple months. The whole time I have been trying to decide how much space do I actually need... Then I think back to the house that I live in currently with my roomates and realized that outside of where we sleep I only use perhaps three rooms most of the time... The bathroom, kitchen and living room. Do i really need anything more (well maybe a big porch to hang out outside on) No!!!!

And because of that I have started to look at smaller solutions. One of the main ones is the weehouse It is pretty cool. Follow the link and you will see what I mean. Once again the search for land is on. I am looking for some land around 30000 to plop the weehouse studio on and then add on bedrooms later as the need arises. I love the idea of a multi building house situated around a courtyard.

The only problem that arises with this so far is that if both buildings are built around a courtyard then one of the buildings cannot face south, which makes for a crappy energy efficiency.

I think reducing how much room that you need to live should be something more americans focus on. We tend to have such large footprints because we drive large cars have houses that are twice the size that we need and then wonder why we can barely afford what we have.

a Dart ----->

Ok it doesn't really dart, maybe a better word would be cruises.

But it is a car that I can love. It has character. The jeep was a bland middle age person that was about to have a heart attack. The Dart is a old person that still has lots of spunk and is someone that even with there eccentricities you can sit down and talk to for hours.

Below is a picture of her. She just got a bike rack put on her and she is still supplying me with a constant diet of talk radio and mexican polka.!!

Screw Green Houses... Right????

I just read a great quote today. Read and ponder...

"Trading in your conventional downtown apartment and constructing a state-of-the-art eco-house in the country may sound good for you and the planet. However the 'Think Green' bumper sticker won't change the fact that you are probably wasting more energy and creating additional air pollution on the two hour daily commute than you'll ever save living the rest of your life in that spiffy new house" (Clark Snell in the Good House Book)

Makes alot of sense doesn't it.

Motobiking and mountain biking

While these are not necessarily the top 3 things I love in this world, they are probably in the top 20 if not the top 10.

This week has been stupendoulous...

A couple of my friends have been telling me how great the mountain biking is on the air force academy.

I finally went on the Falcon trail today with my friend Allison and it was amazing. There was a ton if climbing but the trail swooped and swerved to the trees and reminded me of all the trails I loved in Tennessee. In Colorado trails like this do not exist. I can think of maybe 2 I've done that involve both trees and twisting and turning. As if it couldn't get any better, it is within easy biking distance from my house (4 miles up the bike path)

My motorcycle set in the garage for the past 2 weeks.

I totally screwed up.

I kept putting off getting the tire for it and all of a sudden I could see metal in the middle of the tire. Always a crappy thing to see. I love my motobike. She keeps me from needing a car... She is beautiful... and I love her.

On Wednesday her tire came in and I rushed to get it put on and I drove my motobike everywhere saturday. For some reason leaning into a turn is so much more soothing then having to turn the wheel of a car...

light, sound, touch

The interplay of light, sound, and touch are critical to every aspect of our lives.

Riding Samoa home last night, every little flicker of light on the path was welcome. My eyes darted every which way for the first 10 minutes after leaveing poor richard's. Slowly, as as I came back onto sections of the trail that i recognized, the tension started to ease and I basked in the cool night air gliding past my face.

In a book I've been reading about green houses (not green garden houses, houses with green construction methods) the author talks about what the human body needs to live. One of those needs is light. Not just a lamp or a chandelier that hangs in the dining room, but natural light. I think that when most humans are depressed they stay in dark places.

Not outside where there is a breeze blowing past you as you stare at the night sky, but a place with no air movement or sound .

Sound

the cracking of spokes as they settle in on a new bicycle wheel or the creak of a crank that will almost fall off when I get home from the ride to poor richard's.

the rush of gravel against smooth tires calms the soul...

The creak of the cranks make my heart race as I think of walking home 5 miles in the dark in my bike shoes.

The woosh, crunch, crunch of the tires against the gravel and sand makes takes all the cares of my soul away and lets me flow down the path without a care in the world.

Now if it would just stop raining I could go again tonight... A screw it I'm going tonight anyway

Samoa waits quietly in the garage for the ride downtown tonight.

The Fixie (Samoa)

Scary.... Dark.... Hard to stop.... Smooooooooth


The ride downtown on the somewhat sketchy bike trail is incredibly soothing.

Definitely more fun on the paved sections than the gravel (I think that is the first time I've ever said that) .

Going home I think I will need to take the ipod off and enjoy the sounds of the night with the quiet of the fixie in the background.

I rode from the house down to poor richard's coffee shop. I never realized the joy of riding down a bike path by yourself in the middle of the night. No cars rushing past. No technical drop around the next corner (I hope) No people, or hardly any, to pop out in front of me.

A fixie id great for thinking. The bike and I were wrestling each other for control, but at the same time supremely enjoying each others presence.

Oh yeah!! I named my fixie Samoa. So I think I will have to call her Sam for short. She is getting ridden again and taken care for the first time in a many years. Sam is smooth, light and somewhat scary since I am not totally in control of her.

A chill goes through me everytime I get on her. I am not sure if it's from pleasure, fear or both...

Moab in a parking lot

Moab is a beautiful, harsh playground.

We started out the weekend sprawled in a line of sleeping bags trying to block out the sounds of cars roaring past us. We arrived in moab at 4 in the morning on saturday with a list of campsites. You would think that there would be one free campsite in 10 campgrounds, right??? If a open campsite existed, we could not find it. We pulled over into the raft put in, in Castle Canyon and crashed in the parking lot. (In the picture the road is in the background...)

We headed into town to get all the supplies we forgot. Big surprise for those of you who know me, but in this case it was only ice and gum. I think Jamie might've needed some coffee but we were not about to let her have any.

One of my favorite things about going to moab is the water coming straight out of the side of the mt. The tap is always a lifesaver. Plus the water tastes sweet.

I wish we had a pic of the jeep we took. It looked like a wheelie would happen at any moment. Of course, 5 bikes, 5 people and assorted camping gear probably exceed anything rating a jeep would have for that sort of thing. On second thought I do have one!!


Anyway, with the nose of the jeep pointed skyword we headed out to the Klondike Bluff trail. Almost any trail in moab is cool, but the main features of the Klondike bluff trail are dinasour tracks and a breathtaking view of Arches National Monument. Outside of the rampart resoviour trail, I think this was probably one of the longest mountain bike rides the girls had ever done. This was Dave, Allison and Jamie's first experience with slick rock, and I know at least dave loved it, maybe it is just a guy thing to be awed at the terrain as much as the views.

And as a preview of the next episode please see the picture below. The next episode includes miller light and McDee's icecream at the same time!!!

yurt living?

What is going to happen to the yurt??

As many people know... I have been looking for land to set a yurt up on for the past month or so. In the midst of all this I found this great little fixer upper out near palmer lake, co which is a really cool little town. The house had great views but in all reality was a piece of crap. I would've basically been tearing the whole roof off the house and gutting the inside which would've been a major undertaking considering I wanted to do it all myself. Luckily I got some good advice from a friend before I made any major decisions on it.

So back I go to building a yurt. My ideas are always so much bigger than anything that is feasible but I really am looking forward to building the yurt. My next step is to make sure that I can get it approved by the building department. I think that will actually be the hardest part of the whole process. I am going to draw up plans for the yurt later this week and take them down to the building department for a review. I think the next part will be the structural engineering aspect of the house. I will see. I am going to draw up 2 plans. One using
Wood sides and a Metal insulated roof and the other will be the traditional Yurt Structure. I think that I have a good chance of getting the wood sided yurt approved once I have a structural engineer look at the drawings. It would be alot more expensive then a regular yurt but if it could pass code i think it would be worth it. I think that I may try to use Bill Coperthwaite which you can see below. It really a cool design and can be built in sections. You can see more pics of some of his yurts at Shelter Hub.

The yurt is really one of those things that I feel that I have to build for my own sanity. I love creating things and since my current job does not support being creative (at all) I think that building the yurt is one of the best ways to exercise at at least a little bit of the creativity that is bursting to get out.

It's kind've weird because I think that if I really examine my motives the desire to build the yurt overrides any financial gains that may be had by remodeling a house or anything like that. Guess I better order the plans for the yurt so I can get going on finding the land for it...

Red Rocks open space, the govenment and trail building

Usually, I don't think that the government is really good at much of anything...


but in fact colorado springs government has made a couple great decisions. The first of which was their purchase of Red Rocks open space. Luckily, they did not ruin it. I was out at Red Rocks helping clear the corridor for a new trail and it was amazing how much fun it is to just work. Of course the volunteer opportunity came through the man, but still it is helping to build a trail. The greatest aspect of the day was the expertise of the girls heading up the trail building. I think that I learned more about good trail building on one day then I have in all the weeks I have helped out with trail building.

Go to Red Rocks open space the trails have great curves!!!

terror!!! where???

I know this will seem callous but while the shootings were a tragedy, the murders at Blacksburg should just put how safe the US is in perspective because so many other places in the world are so much worse off. Anywhere 32 people getting killed is horrible but places like Sudan and Iraq have so many more native people getting killed and we rarely hear about it. It is just like we see a daily countdown of soldiers killed in Iraq but was is the toll on the locals. How many 10's of thousands or hundreds of thousands are getting killed...

Back to Cactus

I am back...

When I was looking for a job I had changed my e-mail and cell phone to Eric which tends to get some really weird reactions. I went in and changed everything back today. I am now cactus again... Even at work!!!

On other notes the yurt still progresses. I have ordered a couple different plans and have been sketching different designs. I am excited... the possiblities are building up. Now to find the land with the perfect view.

The man and a fixie

I have left the Glen...


In 05' it felt impossible, but I pulled out the gates on Friday and realized I would not be coming back on Monday. I had a surreal feeling come over me and gunned my jeep to 50 on the entrance road and was gone.

On to a totally new chapter in my life...

Using the man for 2ish years to finance grad school..

Oddly enough I am most excited about being able to easily ride my bike to work and building up the fixie (someone else's shown below)that will go along with the commute. Of course the fixie was inspired by the possibility of not getting this job and having to sell my car.

I think I am attracted to commuting to work on the fixie partly because of the beauty of it's simplicity, but also to counteract working for the "man". I realize that I am trying to justify working for these guys, but at least they are generous with their employees and the places they will be volunteering.

New Job

A year ago I would have never thought I would be working in customer service. I might not even have predicted I would be leaving Glen Eyrie... but it seems like 99% of my plans always change by the time I actually get around to carrying them out.

This is defintely no different. In December, I told everyone about the Grad schools I was attending in the fall. Of course that is not happening right now. I decided when the opportunity arose that I needed to go into Grad school Debt free. In the past I never cared about being debt free. It was more if I needed something I bought it not really caring about repercussions later.

I feel great about leaving the Glen, which is exciting because for a long time I wrestled with guilt about even seeking to leave because I didn't complete all the projects I wanted. I came to the realization that I will never get everything done I want to as long as I stay at the Glen.

But at the same time with all my grandiose visions, I probably will not get everything I want to get done in life and I am fine with that. If some of my dreams are accomplished then that is all I need...

It is not a case of low expectations for myself but the realization that I have way to many ideas to ever get them all done.

In Search of Captain Zero

Any kind've of adventure story usually get me hooked pretty fast, especially ones that are set out in the middle of no where or at least out of the US.

And


I have been reading the book, In Search of Captain Zero for the past week or so. It is a non-fiction novel about Allan Wiesbeck's surfing/driving trip down to Costa Rica with the purpose of looking for his friend Chris (aka Captain Zero).

All the while he is camping, surfing and in general flowing through a life of which I could only dream...maybe. Regardless it is an amazing surfing adventure book which made me do alot of thinking about what I value in life... because many times my desire for adventure and good solid friends play competing roles in my life. Some of my best adventures have been by myself. I hesitate to say the best because the experience is heightened when you can share it with friends.

I say all this yet the solitary times in my life always lead to adventure and crazy explorations. About half of the craziest stories I tell may not have happened if other people had been with me. I think that is the one thing about exploring places by yourself. You are not tied to anyone and can just wander and find the most incredible places.

I tend to ride my motorcycle by myself alot during the summer because there are not that many people who have motorcycles that can sacrifice a whole weekend to explore the mountains. The three of four times that I have ended up on dirt roads in the middle of no where with a nearly empty tank of fuel are the times that I have seen the most amazing views or the random bear wondering through the meadow.

I hate being by myself; whether it is because of some insecurity I haven't quite figured out yet or something else. In spite of all this, the times I really end up worshiping God are the adventures alone. I think that it is so easy for me to focus on people over God that in some ways it is better for me to be alone because then I can get a clearer picture of him, uninhibited by my desire to please people, to gain deeper friendships and for people to like me in general.

Wow all of a sudden the post turned much deeper then I intended...

I do not want to admit that I always try to please people not God, but I think that it may be the biggest thing that leads me away from God .

Snow......................................

SNOWW

I love the snow, but at the same time I am so sick of it... How can this happen? I think it is because The two hobbies I love are biking and riding my motorcycle. Don't get me wrong, I love snowshoeing and snowboarding, but they pale in comparison to riding my mountain bike in palmer park or leaning down into a turn at 80 on the way up to cripple creek.

Maybe it is the speed, maybe it is the thrill of flying through the air (hopefully not on the motorcycle), but winter sports just can't compare. You say, maybe I live in the wrong place right???

Sometimes I think so to but then I think of the other town I love , I realize that a cold winter is a great trade off for not having to live through a sticky summer back home in Tennessee.

I love mountain biking, and I know there are a ton of other people who love it out there to maybe if we all pray hard enough the snow will melt off and we can fly around palmer park again, or we might just have to go snow biking next week at palmer. Then flying through the air and crashing won't hurt so bad.

I finally got the pictures off my phone

But that is still no excuse for not posting anything in almost 2 months.

At the beginning of December I went to Sam's to look for a new vacuum cleaner for our house. It was getting kind've nasty inside and I was hoping to find a great deal. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, I had not fixed my jeep yet so I took my bike and trailer. The bike and trailer are a lot of fun. It feels like I accomplish so much more then I actually do when I haul stuff around in it.

I got a vacuum cleaner for a great deal, but I got lots of weird looks coming home.



But now I've finally got my car working so I guess I do not get to have quite as much fun anymore :-(