Mr. & Mrs. Link

Assateague Island is a bureaucrat’s dream.  Part national park, part state park across two different states with all sorts of new rules and regulations that vary depending on which side of an arbitrary fence you are on.  But it’s also a place where you can camp a hundred yards from the beach with wild horses.  Which is really cool.

It has been on the bucket list for a long time.  Tiff and I actually had a reservation for early this year, but the weather went nasty and we decided not to go.  So when some friends invited us to join them for a weekend, I had to take the offer, despite the fact that Tiffany was stuck on-call for her Medicine Rotation and couldn’t make it.  Medicine is one of the toughest rotations – in her write-up, Tiffany neglected to say how many activities she had to forgo for work.  She doesn’t complain about it – she never does.  But I sure miss her when she’s not there!

Once Brian and I finally found the campsite (after accidentally going to the Federal Park instead of one of the state ones), we had a great time. We red-cupped the beach for several hours as the sun slowly set, then grilled dogs and burgers for dinner. Brian and I had been in charge of firewood and as we drove in we passed a guy who was selling it off the side of the road. We went a bit nuts and filled the entire RAV4 with firewood. So we had plenty of firewood for the night.

Which was good because it got very windy – and very cold. It’s almost a blessing that Tiffany couldn’t make it because she’s not cut from Montana stock and she’s more sensitive to the lower end of the temperature spectrum. Eventually, we turned in, but the wind got even more intense.

My tent survived the night – although from inside it seems like to blow over at any minute. Several other tents didn’t fair as well. Kelly’s tent blew over with her inside. And hers wasn’t the only one.

And the next morning, true to form, the wild horses rolled through camp. They weren’t shy, and one suspects, they weren’t hungry either.

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I’ve gotten pretty far behind in posting, so we’re going to have to go back in time here.  All the way back to early September when Tiff and I joined some Capitol Hill Tubing Society friends Andy and Brian on an overnight camping trip to the George Washington National Forest.

The initial plan was a full loop that I found in Backpacker Magazine.  But we got a late start and dramatically underestimated the distance of the hike.  Worse, where we assume that we would be able to fill water bottles on the hike, the majority of it was along ridge-lines where there weren’t water options.

So instead of doing the loop, we knocked out the vertical on the trip and set camp at the summit of Meneka Peak.

Since it was just the one night, we packed in steaks and potatoes and had a delicious dinner around the campfire and relaxed.

It’s rare to camp on an actual summit.  Usually, you camp in a protected nook or valley where the ground slopes upward around you.  Camping on a summit is a strange feeling – the ground falls away from you in every direction, so you feel a bit like melted butter on top of a pancake – like you’re going to slide right off the side of the mountain.  It was  a bit disconcerting – both Tiffany and I kept waking up all night with a strange feeling that something wasn’t quite right.  Of course, everything was fine but things just felt weird.  I’ve camped all my life, but I’ve never had quite this feeling of vertigo.

Final point, despite all of the camping and hiking Tiff and I have done over the past years, this was the first backpacking trip we’ve done on the East Coast.  All our overnight trips have been in the Rockies and all our camping out East has been from the car.

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Tiffany and I have lived in Maryland for more than six years, and we’ve never done the obligatory Maryland crab dinner.  That’s like not eating a steak in Montana or voting Republican in California!

Fortunately, our awesome neighbor Brian introduced us to his family (who live just down the street) and they hosted a Memorial Day Crab Feast (their first too).  They served up half a bushel of crabs pre-cooked in the regionally mandated Old Bay Seasoning, kebobs and chicken breasts hot off a fancy new grill.  Throw in some icy cold beers on a smouldering day and the day was perfect.

More after the jump!

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Every year since 2007, we’ve done a weekend camping/hiking trip down to Old Rag in Shenandoah National Park.  That makes this year the Fourth adventure, and for the first time we did it on Memorial Day Weekend.

Day One is camping.  For the first Old Rag Adventure, we actually camped in the park itself, which turned out to be a bad idea.  ”Quiet hours” are very strictly enforced at 11 pm.  We stayed up until 11:30 and then called it a night.  As we were settling into our tents to go to sleep, we were assailed by no fewer than four police cars and eight Front Royal Police Officers who had made the 45-minute one-way drive down to our campsite after the Park Ranger called them to complain about us at 11 pm sharp.  It was a mess; they wanted desperately to cite us for something for the trouble of the drive, but we were above reproach.

Anyway, since then, we’ve camped in the horse fields of Graves Mountain Lodge in Syria, VA.  It’s a great deal, and it’s free from both quiet hours and restriction on fires.  For a minimal investment of cash and beer, it’s a great night.  And we got a lot of firewood.

(Bierwagen had a stroke of genius at some point during the night.  So far, we’ve always camped/drank first and then hiked the next day.  The problem is, as we get older, we don’t recover from the drinking quite like we used to.  So the new plan: hike on day one, camp that night.  That lets us leave at a leisurely pace the next day.)

In previous years, we’ve had the camping fields all to ourselves, but this year it was full of horse trailers and upper class rednecks who were camping out for a week before the annual Blue Grass Festival (think a blue caller Woodstock).  We actually met some of our neighbors, including a shirtless horse rider who told us about his plan to stay for two weeks and to be “lit up the whole tahm!”

There was Savannah Marie (not our sister) who was 10 years old, large and in charge.  Imagine Rosanne at ten.  Her dad was two sheets to the wind and friendly as hell.  At around midnight, he rode his horse into the middle of our camp, proclaimed loudly that he was “The Great White Warrior” and then rode off drunkenly into the night (I think Bierwagen might have captured that on film; I missed it).

Day Two was the hike.  We slept in as long as we could before our tents turned into saunas.  While we waited for the hangover medicine to sink in, we broke camp and got ready for the 10-minute drive to the Old Rag trail head.

It was a very hot day – it would get up to 90, and sticky.  It was also Sunday on Memorial Day weekend.  I’d never seen the parking lot that crowded.  It didn’t help that the famous upper lot has been closed… for good.  They got a green light to build a larger lot, so I guess that’s progress.

We parked, paid (it was May 30, the second to last day on our Annual Pass) and off we went!

As we walked, I happened to look down a side-trail and saw a rather unique sight.  A million butterflies just camped out there in the sun.  Probably mating or something.  Anyway,  Tiffany has always dreamed of being swallowed in a cloud of butterflies; and this might actually be her chance.  So we took a short detour:

Tiff and I have done Old Rag more times than I can remember.  It’s a really, really fun hike.  It starts with a challenging climb that eventually morphs into a series of rock scrambles.  The scrambles can be tricky – especially if you’ve never done it before.

With the Memorial Day Weekend crowd, there were some traffic jams.  Seriously, traffic jams on a mountain.  There were also some very interesting characters including a guy climbing in flip-flops, an unwashed hippie with no underroos and a butt-crack on display for the whole world.

This year’s Old Rag adventure featured two Old Rag virgins: Matt Mauer and Jeff Marty made the summit for the first time!

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Matt, one of Tiff’s MD-PhD classmates and Becca, his brilliant and beautiful new wife tied the knot on Folly Beach just outside of Charleston, SC.

More pictures after the jump:

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What the hell is going on with social media lately?

My personal use of Facebook has recently declined as a result of their ever-changing format attempting to drive my actions to their whims.  But this may be too far.  I will definitely not be recommending people join anymore.

A friend recently decided to deactivate her account and found the following in the absolutely tiny print at the bottom.

“Note: Even after you deactivate, your friends can still invite you to events, tag you in photos, or ask you to join groups. If you opt out, you will NOT receive these email invitations and notifications from your friends.”

What?  The only option, then is to actively go and unfriend every single one of your friends and manually untag every picture.  This is NOT what I signed up for.

Awhile back, I griped because LinkedIn used duplicitous layouts to trick me into inviting my entire contacts list to join their network.  They sent every person in my list an email – from me – inviting them to joint their program.

Now, I’m hearing that one email isn’t enough.  They are sending weekly “reminders” to anyone who didn’t respond.  They look like this:

LinkedIn
Dear <Name Stolen From Me>,

This is a reminder that on April 7, Jed Link sent you an invitation to become part of his or her professional network at LinkedIn.

Your invitation will expire soon! Follow this link to accept Jed Link’s invitation.

<Link Removed>

Signing up is free and takes less than a minute.

This reeks of MySpace desperation, and it’s as dishonest as it is annoying (an invite never expires, who are they kidding?).  LinkedIn has jumped the shark.  Help me punish them.

It would be easy for me to just deactivate my account.  But then LinkedIn doesn’t suffer.  And I want them to suffer.

So here’s the plan.  If you get this email, mark it as SPAM.  From now on, I will mark every LinkedIn message I get as SPAM.  Eventually, they won’t be able to send these emails and their business model will shrivel up and die.

Edit – I can actually start now by marking all the OLD emails I’ve received as SPAM.

I maintain a LinkedIn profile as an afterthought.  Today someone invited me to “Connect with them,” and when I clicked Accept, the following page came up:

Pretty standard, right?  Just log in to accept.  Bzzz.  Incorrect.

In tiny letters at the top, it tells you that you are now connected with that friend – which by implication means you’re already logged in.  Huh.  I didn’t read that tiny print.

The Username (which is already filled in) and Password field in the front-and-center of the screen is actually a gateway for LinkedIn to log into your email account so that it can harvest all of your contacts.  That’s not exactly clear, and if you’re not paying too much attention, and your passwords happen to be similar, you can just log in.

After you log in you get a list of contacts.  Unless you read the fine print, you might assume that this is your current list of connections on LinkedIn.  Bzzz.  Incorrect. It’s a list of every single person and email address from your email account.

Since, at this point, you may still think you’re trying to accept that original request, you click “Next.”  Bzzz.  Incorrect.

You just told LinkedIn to invite every single email address in your email account to connect on LinkedIn – whether they have a LinkedIn account or not.  They’ll ALL get an email (from you) inviting you to connect.

Think about that for a minute.  Anyone you’ve ever emailed has now been invited to connect with you.  That guy you bought something from on Craigslist.  That friend of a friend who was CC’d on a party invitation.  There are probably people in there you don’t necessarily want to reconnect with too.   Thanks LinkedIn…

And the best part:  Facebook has a feature that lets you reply to a thread by replying to the email.  Gmail saves all of those addresses.  So LinkedIn added a comment – from me – on about 50 Facebook threads.

Not happy with LinkedIn right now…

After 3.5 years of very hard work, my thesis committee gave me the go ahead to move on and give my thesis seminar. After begging my mom and step dad to bring my sister and fly all the way from California to come to my seminar, they finally agreed. My mom got over (took some serious pills) her paralyzing fear of flying and they came. It was so amazing to be able to give my talk to a room full of my collegues, family, and friends. I was so touched by how many of them took the time to come to my seminar.

I was very proud of my accomplishments and had a lot of fun giving my seminar. Admitidly, it was very difficult to hand my project over. It was my life’s work, but I feel very lucky to be handing it over to a very motivated and bright graduate student who I believe will bring the project great places.

It’s such an amazing feeling to complete a PhD (or at least the work necessary for a PhD- I still have to write the rest of my thesis out). I really am an authority on something and had a ton of people coming to me for advice. Now, I’ve started back in the clinics and know nothing. I’m the least knowledgeable of everyone on the team and that is an interesting place to be. Jed calls this my “last mountain”, and he’s probably right. I look forward to the challenge ahead, but for now, enjoy my first triump in my quest for an MD-PhD!

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Back on the second-to-last day of January, we hit the slopes at Whitetail with Ben Cox and some of the old kickball crew.  It was a windy 17°F and it snowed the whole time.  And it became clear that Whitetail is the class of the three hills that we have passes to.

First, for Tiffany, they have a wide range of green circles.  And for me, there’s a high speed quad and blue squares that cover more vertical than any other hill round here.  And they’re the legit blue squares too (they’d be black diamonds at Liberty, Wisp or Camelback)!  The black diamonds still aren’t up to par with the Rockies (they’re basically narrow blue squares), but the high speed lift lets you do a circuit (up and down) in as little as 15 minutes.

So, on the second-to-last day of February, we met up again with Cox and some of the old kickball crew again to conquer the slopes once more, this time in warm 41°F weather with the sun out.  The snow was very slushy and heavy.  The slopes were packed with thousands of people.

At the beginning of the year, Tiffany acquiesced to a season pass at three local hills (Liberty, Roundtop & Whitetail) despite having skied only once and despite that one experience being less than ideal.  She was decent with the “wedge” or “snowplow” turn, but a long way from good at it.  She stuck pretty much exclusively on the bunny slope.

But she took a lesson her first time out this year, and slowly began to leave the wedge behind.  She conquered the bunny slope that day, and moved on to a green circle at Liberty called Dipsy Doodle.

After a few more times out, she owned the Green Circle.  She progressed to more challenging green circle terrain at Wisp, and really started to master the parallel turn.  She’s well beyond the bunny slope, able to conquer any green circle in front of her.

And then, at Whitetail, she aced her first blue square run called “Stalker.”  It was a big-time threshold.

It’s always fun to watch Tiffany ski.  Inevitably, she’s surrounded by less experienced skiers going a lot faster than she is.  And inevitably, those skiers wipe out all around her, leaving her as the last one standing.

Here are some pics.

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There are some shots in there of people being lowered from the chairlifts with a harness-cable system.  More on that soon.