A lot can happen in a year!

So, it’s been a year since I posted on this blog and thought I’d do a quick update.  First of all, our family ranks have swelled with the arrival of Natalie Elise Augustine.  As you can see from the picture below she’s a beautiful little girl and I’m not saying that just because I’m the proud daddy.

 

 

Cheyenne is all grown up now and is talking about getting an apartment in Bangor with her boyfriend so they can be closer to their job.  Where did the time go???  How did she go from a little girl to a young woman so fast?? 

Rowan is growing up fast too.  A couple of weekends ago we went to the Owls Head Transportation museum for a mighty machines day and he got to climb around on some of the equipment.  So did I. 

 

It brought back the days when I used to operate heavy equipment… back in the good old days before computers.

On a sad note Aunt Madeline died last week after a long illness.  She was the family matriarch in Canada – Dad’s sister – and she will be missed by many.  It will seem very strange going to Red Bank and not going to visit her.  In the past when there was any type of big family event it always took place at Mad’s house, now I wonder who will take up the mantle?  All things change, but I’m very much saddened by her passing.  We miss you, Aunt Mad.

Secret Halloween Costume Unveiled

But first, here’s a couple of more pictures of Aunt Mel and Uncle Mike.  What’s in the box?

 

It’s a tiger!

 

Resting up the day before Halloween.  It’s the only time he’s cuddly. 

 

And now for your viewing pleasure…  THE AMAZING CHICKEN COSTUME!!!!

 

You can see how thrilled he is to be in the Amazing Chicken Costume.  :-)  Check out that huge candy basket.

 

Cheyenne and Phil showed up with some diet busting Chinese.  Thanks a lot, Chey.  Hey, is it just me or is everything in this picture red?  Red truck, red coat, red hair, red bag.  What the???

 

What are you doing here Poppa?

 

Time to eat! 

Halloween Movie

Just so you can understand the power of the chicken costume I made a short movie to post here.  Starring Mom and Rowan.

Mel and Mike Visit Maine

Melanie finally brought her new husband to Maine to visit.  Turns out he’s a pretty nice guy even if he is from Rhode Island.  :-)

They drove up I95 Friday and missed the Bath exit and wound up going through Augusta and down Rt 17 to Rockland.  Strangely enough they saw Bonnie running along side the road when they hit Rockland and picked her up.  How’s that for a coincidence?

We stopped by their hotel room on Friday and visited for a bit ,then they came over Saturday morning.  We went to Augusta for lunch and a trip to the book store then came back to our house and had Moody’s take out for dinner.

Here’s Mel digging at some ice cream.  Do not get between the pregnant chick and her food!

They went back to their hotel after watching a movie then came back over on Sunday morning to visit.  Bonnie went to breakfast with them while Ro and I stayed home and built a fire.  I was showing him the finer points of table manners…

when they all showed up after breakfast. 

We sat around the fire for a few hours and visited before they had to take off back to the southlands of Rhode Island.

Bonnie got a ride down the hill in with Jake…

And Mike and Mel got a chance to relax a little before the long drive south.

Looking forward to next time guys!

Camping Out

A few weeks ago I decided to test some of my camping gear out in back of the house and Bonnie and Ro came out and sat with me until it got dark. 

First they helped me set up my shelter…

Ro telling a couple of jokes

He had to make sure my fire pit was set up right

 

Then it was on to some important business.

  
Don’t over cook it little buddy!

After dinner it was time for a little puppy love.

And man, does Bonnie love her smoors! 

I tried to find a picture of her not eating one, but I couldn’t!

Man, she’ll be furious when she sees this picture!  :-)

Punk’d

Oh I wish, I wish I’d had a camera with me last Sunday.  Bonne and I took Ro over to Mom and Dad’s for another cookout and Dad told Bonnie he’d seen an animal in a hole over by the big tent he uses for storage.  They went over and Bonnie, ever curious, was bent over looking at it when Dad reached down and grabbed a string.  He gave the string a good tug and pulled some kind of furry raccoon tail or something from the hole and Bonnie shrieked and did her “I’m freaking out” spider dance, waving her arms and running in place and screeching. 

I told him to let me know if he does something like that again because I wanted to film it.  That would have been a hit Youtube punk’d video!

Here’s a few pictures from the first cookout two weeks ago.  As you can see we all had a good time and George and Helene came over as well.

Working Out

Last night Ro and I were working out in my basement gym and I’ve got to say I really liked his form.  Check out his shoulder press technique…

Get a good grip on the bar

And up over the head!

Pretty impressive eh?  Now what does any self respecting weight lifter do after a heavy lift?  You guessed it… Looking good baby 

We were going to do a little boxing…

Bob and weave, bob and weave

But he ran into a little problem with the gear, so we decided to do it later.

Stupid wrist wraps….

All in all it was a good workout, but I don’t really trust him to spot me yet when I’m lifting heavy as he has a tendency to drift back to the mirror.  He’s a true Augustine alright; he’s never met a mirror he didn’t like.

Well hello Gorgeous…

Time to start writing here again

September 23rd!!!  Man, the time has really gone by since my last post.  Well, since then we’ve gotten comfortable in the house and things are going really well.  Rowan keeps us running all the time,but that’s to be expected with a kid his age.  He’s like me when I was a kid according to my mother… a little demon.  (My words, not hers.)

Poor Bonnie has had a couple of rough episodes in the last week.  This past Saturday I was out in the driveway with Ro and we were working on a couple of masterpiece drawings on the driveway using chalk.  He bent over and picked up a piece of chalk, then a couple of more and was cradling about five pieces in his arms when he went to pick up one more.  Well, apparently his little nervous system was maxed out because he pitched over into the little chalk bucket face first and got himself a little cut on his cheek.  He starting crying and I picked him up to comfort him and check the damages (a nice little cut on the right cheek) when Bonnie came flying out the door to see what was happening.  She took him and did that Mommy stuff and pretty soon he was smiling again.

Meanwhile, I’d started cleaning up a mess in this metal locker we have in the garage.  A big bag of rock salt from last winter had been leaking some kind of disgusting stuff into the garage through the locker and I’d gotten rid of the bag a couple of weeks ago.  It looked like something was still leaking so I pulled out my dry suit (scuba diving suit) and some other stuff and wiped out the mess that was inside.  When I went to throw my dry suit back inside I cut my thumb on one of the metal shelves.  It was a bit of a bleeder, so I grabbed it tight and walked out into the driveway where she was playing with Ro and told her I’d cut myself.

She said, “What?  How bad?”

So I showed her and she freaked out and ran in to grab the first aid kit.  She didn’t want me coming in because she didn’t want me bleeding on the floor (how’s that for compassion?) and brought the kit outside.  We were right behind my pickup and Ro was crawling around in the back.  She put the kit on the bumper and it fell off spilling bandages, antiseptic pads and all kinds of stuff all over the garage floor. 

Anyway, I managed to upstage Rowan with my injury dujour, but I have a feeling that Bonnie had better get used to playing paramedic to the two of us as he gets older.

We went out a couple of months ago and bought a huge first aid kit and consolidated the rest of the stuff we had kicking around.  I think we now have enough firstaid stuff to carry out an appendectomy if it becomes necessary. 

Catch Up

We’re in the new house!  Actually, Bonnie and I took a week off the day of the move and we had everything pretty well taken care of by the end of the week.  We worked our asses off, but it was worth it.  I’ll post some pictures of the house and area later.

Last weekend – January 9, 2010 – to be exact, Bonnie and I did the first ice climb of the season.  She hadn’t been on the ice for about a year or two, but she did great even if she was a little nervous initially. 

Is she cool or what?

It was pretty cold with temps staying in the teens and a good bit of the ice had snow cover on top of it, so when climbing I had to knock it away with my ice tool.  The ice itself was a little punky in some spots, but for the most part it was pretty good climbing.  Next time we go I’m going to check out Ever Drip, a route on the north west side of the spot where we were at.

Me climbing the icicle.

Dave Maddox showed up and his daughter and her boyfriend came out a short time later and climbed with us.  The more the merrier! 

Bonnie getting ready to climb.

Rowan?  Where was Ro all this time you wonder?  Why, he was belaying of course!  Ok, he was home with his grandmother, but don’t worry, he’ll be out there with us before too long!   Here’s a recent photo of the little guy.  He’s almost nine months old now and he’s already wearing 18 month old clothes.  We’re putting all of our extra money into food so he doesn’t starve.

Daddy’s little lady killer.

The Big Move

We’ve found the house of our dreams and are now looking forward to getting into it.  This comes at a big price of course, namely our sanity.  Saturday, December 5, 09 was to be the first foray to the new house with some of our belongings.  It isn’t our house yet, but we do have permission to move stuff into the garage, so we set out to fill it up.  When the signing happens on the 14th we want to be able to move right in.

Saturday was spent cleaning out the basement and above the garage.  Bonnie packed up tons of stuff and we moved it all out to our garage, which we’ve been using as a staging area.

Of course Sunday was the first snow storm of the season.  I got up, shoveled the truck off and loaded it up and made the first trip to the new house.  Bonnie couldn’t help move at first because someone’s got to take care of Rowan.  She did get some stuff packed up, but babies are such high demand little critters it’s hard to get anything done. 

We threw Ro in the truck on the second trip and he slept and Bonnie was able to help out this time, and man, did it go a lot faster with her helping.  I called Chey who put some of her plans on hold and she watched Ro while we made a couple of more trips.  In the end we emptied a good bit of our garage and got a lot of stuff stored over the garage at the new house.  Sweet.

Bonnie has been going crazy keeping track of all the details of the financial side.  Seems like there’s some kind of little emergency every day that has to be dealt with.  Ahh, such is the nature of buying a house.

Getting Big!

Guess who’s sitting up by himself now?

Yup, once he figured it out he got it down cold.  Ok, he’s still a little wobbly, but before too long he’ll be asking me for the car keys and I fully intend to enjoy him while he’s still a baby.

Awhile back I promised to put a picture of Chey on here of when we hiked Mt. Katahdin a few years ago.  It’s the highest mountain in Maine at just over a mile high and it’s a pretty tough hike – especially if you’re out of shape like she was at the time.  Not to mention the fact that we got up at 4:00 am, drove to Katahdin, climbed it and then drove home again.  Look at her expression in this photo.  I love it.

 

Here I am on that same hike, cool as a cucumber.  :-)

One of these days we’ll all hike to the top.  It’ll have to be when Ro is older of course, but before I get too old to hobble up there. 

Thoughts on the Economy

Notes:

-Jobs are still being lost – just at a slower rate
-Jobless recovery?  Who are they kidding?
-Double dip recession?  The 3.5% increase we saw was due to cash for clunkers and the real estate tax break.  There really hasn’t been a break in the recession.  This was an artificial bump in a chart – something made because of the government’s stimulus package.
-Fiat money system.  You can’t keep printing money and putting it into circulation without debasing the dollar eventually.  Hyperinflation could become a real possibility.  Look at Germany before WWII.
-History shows that every time a government has tried to print it’s way out of debt that it debases the currency of the time causing an economic disaster.  Ancient Rome did the same thing, although it took hundreds of years before it finally fell.
-The banks on wall street are taking stimulus money that they should be lending to U.S. consumers and are investing it instead.  With a 0% interest rate that’s quite a deal for them and very hard to resist for companies that are only in it for the bottom line.  The more money they can make the happier they are.    To hell with the rest of the country.
-The U.S. has built up massive debt over the last 30 years with the advent of credit cards.  It’s not that credit cards are a bad thing, it’s just that most people who use credit cards do so irresponsibly.  If you don’t have the cash to pay off your debt at the end of the month then you shouldn’t spend, but people do and that’s part of the problem with the economy today.  U.S. citizens consumed like crazy, buying everything from cell phones to new cars on the credit cards running themselves into mountains of debt.
-Now that we’re actually seeing the evil of our ways and trying to spend less, the country is in big trouble.  Spending creates need.  When consumers are buying stuff inventory levels drop and businesses must manufacture things in order to keep up with this demand.  Well, we spent and spent and spent, and now that the bubble has burst and people are looking around and saying, “Well, I wish I hadn’t bought all this stuff now,” so they stop buying.  This creates a vacuum where there used to be a demand for goods and services, and with this drop in demand people are getting laid off from their jobs, and the cycle goes around and around.  The more people that get laid off the more people are being thrifty with their money.  The banks are supposed to be loaning the trillions of dollars to the consumers so that they can go back to consumers, but with the higher standard the banks are demanding for credit card holders it’s harder for users to get approved for credit.  With this lack of cash being spent there is no demand and thus more jobs lost.  Until this trend is broken there will be no recovery.  There can be no recovery.
-If the government keeps giving money away they might as well put money straight into the bank accounts of all it’s citizens instead of trying to run it through the banks.  People would take the money – whatever it may be, let’s say $10,000 – and spend it on something extravagant that would help boost the economy. 

This will never happen of course, at least I hope not.  But it does show the idiocy of what the government is currently doing to the economy. 

Hiking report for Chairback Gap 11/8/2009

On Friday Dave Maddox and I loaded up his truck and took off for the Gulf Hagas area.  We got there around 7:00 pm and grabbed one of the campsites along the side of the road just after you pass the Katahdin Iron Works.  We set up Dave’s tent, made a fire and some coffee, and hit the rack early so we could get a good head start the next morning.

We got up around 5:00 am on Sunday and were on the trail a little after 7:00.  It was fairly cold and we hit snow almost immediately.  The trail goes uphill fairly steady at that point for a couple of miles and we were taking it easy as the snow obscured the footing just enough to make it dangerous.  I was taken out of that area by ambulance once and have no desire to do it again!

Our goal was to get to the Cloud Pond lean-to, which is about an 11.3 mile hike; however, after the first couple of miles I was thinking that it wasn’t going to be possible given our slow pace.  When we hit the Chairback Gap boulder scramble I knew we wouldn’t make it to Cloud Pond.  The slide is steep and was covered in just enough snow to make it slippery and dangerous.  We took it easy going up and Dave still managed a pretty nasty slip about 1/4 of the way up. 
Boulder Scramble up Chairback

It took us a little under four hours to get the 4.3 miles to Chairback Gap.  It was about 11:00 am by that point and if we were going to go another seven hours we’d be on the trail way after dark.  Since we were having a hard time seeing the blaze marks with all the snow we decided to set up camp at Chairback and just climb to the top of Columbus and see what it looked like up there. 

 

Dave on top of Columbus

It’s a small hike and little boulder scramble to get to the top of Columbus.  There isn’t a whole lot in the way of a view, but we did get a few pictures while were up there.

After we got back from the top we got some wood together and got a fire going and just sat back and enjoyed the evening.  I’d forgotten how quiet it gets in the back country.  It’s so peaceful up there when the conditions are right…

We turned in around 7:00 as it was starting to get cold.  I had my mp3 player with me with some podcasts on it and I listened to that for awhile before I fell asleep.  I usually like to write in my journal, but I forgot it this trip!!! 
Me and Dave

We got up Sunday morning around 5:00.  Dave had basically frozen his ass off all night even with his –20 sleeping bag.  I was a little chilly if I didn’t have my –15 bag zipped up properly, but for the most part I felt fine.  Bonnie is often disgusted at how warm I stay when I’m sleeping.  Anyway, I think part of Dave’s problem had to do with the fact that we were sleeping on a platform in the lean-to and that cold air was circulating underneath us all night long. 

 
Lean-to – this is where we slept

A couple of notes about the trip:

1.  Bring my freakin’ journal next time!

2.  The little butane stove doesn’t work for shit in cold weather.  The next time I go on a cold weather trip make sure to bring the good camp fuel heater.  The butane stove would eventually heat the water up, but it took a long time and the flame never really got what I would consider to be hot.

3.  Dave wants to look for a better sleeping mat.  He thinks part of the problem of being cold was the fact that the sleeping mat wasn’t adequate. 

4.  Get new gaiters.  The ones I have are old and no longer adequate.

5.  Need new cold weather gloves.  Also, when hiking in the winter bring a pair of lightweight liners next time, so as not to have my warm gloves all wet and sweaty when I really need them.

6.  Have a set of warm dry clothes in the vehicle for the trip home.  Driving home with wet pants and boots sucks major ass.

7.  Get a new filter for my water filter.  Also, evaluate how long the pump filter will work in cold weather before it freezes up.  Will probably have to melt ice and snow in order to get water in the deep snow.  I’ve done this in the past and it works well.

8.  Cell phone coverage in the back country continues to be a problem.  I was able to text Bonnie a few times, but for the most time there was no signal on my phone.  Dave’s worked a little better, but he went a good bit of the time with no signal as well.  Instead of becoming dependent on cell phone communication it makes sense to be better prepared to do a self rescue if needed.  Also, an extra day or two of food in the field is a good idea.