The Industrious Squirrel

Trips to Silver City and the Wheeler Geologic area

I took a vacation and met Kira in Silver City NM on her bike tour. We spent several days in town while I worked and then went camping in the Gila forest. We hiked in and camped one night near the Jordan Hot Springs. The town of Silver City was fun and we saw lots of galleries and a local museum. The hike was nice with lots of river crossings. The hot springs was almost exactly body temperature and was very clear. We saw lots of tadpole and young frogs and all the stages in between. Photos.

In July we went to the Wheeler Geologic area near Creede CO. Again we just stayed one night in the area and camped a second night at the trail headed before I headed home. Kira continued on hiking and camping in the La Garita area. The geologic area was very impressive. It is made up of Hoodoos formed by soft volcanic ash underneath hard volcanic rock. The hard rock protects the soft rock from erosion causing pillars and other interesting rock formations. The trail takes you all the way around the geologic area. We also scrambled up a little canyon in the interior of the formation. Overall I was very impressed with the hoodoos and would definitely recommend the hike. Doing it in one day is possible, but would be a bit rushed. Photos.

Trip to Grand Canyon

We went to the Grand Canyon for a hiking and camping trip. This trip was delayed by COVID and had originally been planned for early April 2020. We almost made it in 2020, but they closed the Grand Canyon a few days before we were supposed to arrive.

We hiked down the Tanner Trail and camped for three nights at the river. The second day we hiked west along the Beamer trail and the third day we hiked east along the Escalante trail. The Tanner trail is about nine miles and the elevation change is almost one mile. It is steep at the beginning and at the end. On the way down my legs got really tired and I was glad to have hiking poles to keep myself upright. The way back out was more of a workout, but much easier on the legs. Hiking up and down both took about 9 hours.

The weather was nice while we were there, though it was pretty hot down in the canyon. I usually think of climbing up and it getting colder, but dropping a mile into the canyon meant that it was 17 degrees warmer at the river than the rim.

Here are a couple of the best photos. The rest are available here.

Silent Meditation Retreat

I’ve wanted to do a meditation retreat, but between the cost and the time commitment, I’ve never gone. So I decided that I’d try to recreate the retreat experience in my home. I settled on a period of three days and, with lots of help from a friend, made up a schedule and ground rules.

Overall it was a good experience. I definitely had some trouble with distractions. Staying in my home made it easier to be tempted by the internet and books. Even cleaning was looking like a fun activity. But it was good to spend a lot of time meditating. I didn’t have any “breakthroughs” or anything, but I did have some productive journaling and introspection.

The main type of meditation that I did was a mindfulness meditation. I’ve been doing mindfulness meditation regularly but not daily for several years and typically do a 30 minute session. One of my goals was to find out what a longer mindfulness session felt like. In my original schedule, I planed to start at 60 minutes and then two 90 minute sessions, a 120, and finally a 180.

That first 60 minute session felt really long. The first 90 minute session was also on the first day and I was not able to complete it. I just couldn’t stay focused and it felt like my “attention” muscle was worn out. After that I changed the schedule to have 60 minute sessions. That worked better, but it was still difficult if I wasn’t fully awake at the beginning of the session.

On the third day, my second hour long mindfulness meditation went really well. I was able to stay focused and my mind was mostly clear. After most sessions, my mind feels a bit more clear and relaxed, both tired and energized. This session had that same feel, but to a much greater degree. I also felt a new sensation of being extremely focused and present. All my actions and even physical movements felt like I was doing them with 100% intention and I had no distracting thoughts. That effect lasted for about 10 minutes and was very cool.

Something that I didn’t like were the noises of my apartment. I’d like to try another day of meditation somewhere with no distractions and no noise.

Wind River Range

We went to Wind River range for a hiking and camping trip right before Labor Day. The weather was great and we even had mostly smoke-free skies.

We spent the first two nights in the car at the trailhead. The first night was planned, the second night was because it took a full day to fix the two flat tires we got on the drive up. Then we spent five days and four nights hiking and camping around the Cirque of Towers area.

The plan was to hike this route: https://www.alltrails.com/explore/trail/us/wyoming/cirque-of-towers-big-sandy

I’ve also posted a gallery of photos.

Utah Trip

We had made reservations to camp at the bottom of the Grand Canyon in early April. As COVID became more serious and stay-at-home orders started coming out, we decided to leave Denver before it’s stay-at-home took effect.

It was still a couple weeks before our reservation at the Grand Canyon, so we started by going to Grand Junction and doing some hikes in Monument Canyon and a bike ride near Gateway.

After that hiked some of the Paradox trail.

At the end of March, Colorado issued a state wide stay-at-home and so we moved on to Utah. In Utah we did some biking and hiking near Blanding and Lake Powell.

Eventually the area of Utah we were in closed to out of county visitors and we moved over to Capitol Reef National Park.

Finally, we found out that the Grand Canyon was closed and we wouldn’t be able to do our planned hike. We headed back to Colorado, did one more hike in Monument Canyon and returned back to Denver to join the quarantine.

We’d horded enough food prior to the trip that we didn’t have to stop at an grocery stores on the way and we slept in the car or a tent. Our only contact with the world during the trip was at gas stations. Even there we only had to go inside a few times to restock water.

New Photo gallery

I’ve updated the look of my photo gallery and changed how the photos are stored. My goal is to make the gallery work better on mobile devices and modernize the look and feel. I also moved the hosting of all the photos from my website to Amazon S3. I’m planning to switch my web hosting to a private server and it will cost less if I don’t store my photos on that server.

Here’s a comparison of the look of the old gallery to the new:

Old album list
Old album
Old photo detail

New album list
New album
New photo detail

Fall Fun

I’ve done some short trips this fall with friends. In September I went down to Colorado Springs for the balloon festival.

Candle sticks
The field was tightly packed
Lion and Frog balloons
Skydiver landing
Lion balloon during glow

In October I went to Glenwood springs.

Glenwood hot springs at night
Chad at Caverns Adventure Park
Glenwood Springs from Caverns Adventure Park
SpeleoBox at Caverns Adventure Park
Fairy Cave
John Denver Sanctuary
Aspen from the north hills

I’ve also been to a couple shows at the center for performing arts: Verdi’s Requiem and Barber of Seville. Both were quite good!

For Halloween I dressed up as Spock:

Divorce

My divorce was finalized last week. Bill has stayed in the house while I moved to an apartment.

I doubt anyone will be surprised to hear that getting divorced after a 25 year relationship has been emotionally and logistically difficult. Dividing up our stuff and money, transferring accounts and titles, switching utilities, and moving have taken a lot of time and energy. I’m thankful that I wasn’t working during this period.

I’m changing the name of this blog from “Assistant to the Lounge About” to “Act III”. I’m thinking of Act I as childhood and education; Act II, my years with Bill. This all very arbitrary, but life feels different now, and the changes feel similar to how it felt when I graduated college, moved into an apartment and got a job.

I’m also changing the sub-title. This blog started as the chronicle of my retirement: “The fun begins when you quit your day job.” But that doesn’t fit anymore, so I’ll be updating the sub-title to match my current activity or goal.

The first sub-title is “letting go”.

Digital Ocean Review

I converted billandchad.com from a physical machine in my house to an online server at DigitalOcean. I’ve been wanting to try out Digital Ocean for hosting chadweisshaar.com, but haven’t made the switch because of the size of my photo galleries. billandchad.com hosts my NextCloud instance and the touch table game repository and it is less than 5GB. This means I can use the smallest Digital Ocean server which costs $5 per month. Running the server in my house was more expensive. I was paying $5 for a static IP (which probably wasn’t required, but did make it easier) and about $3 for electricity. Plus the cost of occasional hardware replacements.

Getting setup at Digital Ocean was easy. One of their preconfigured machine setups is a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP) server which is what NextCloud needs. I had to setup SSH keys, had to install a couple extra PHP packages, and make some apache configuration changes for NextCloud. Doing the NextCloud migration was a bit of a hassle, but that was a NextCloud issue.

Since setting up NextCloud, I’ve also built a stand-alone web app on this server. To do that I installed GIT and the SSH plugin for Visual Studio Code so that I could develop right on the Digital Ocean server, but also have source control and a backup on my home machine.

Everything has been pretty simple and convenient. Their monitoring tools are adequate for diagnosing performance issues and their billing is automatic. I do need to log in occasionally to do software updates, but I was having to do that for my local server anyway. Overall I’m pretty happy and will probably move chadweisshaar.com over to them eventually. I “just” need to re-write my gallery webpage to use AWS instead of storing the photos locally.

Not having a home linux server does have some downsides. For one, it was just cool to have part of the internet in my house. But I also used the server to run my own DHCP and DNS. I had an ad blocking DNS server for my phone and also allowed me to create some short urls (like tt.com) for friends to use to connect to the touch table. I miss both of these capabilities.

Touch table Space Base

I’ve finished converting Space Base for the touch table. Space base is a fairly quick card drafting game where you buy cards to fill in 12 columns. Each turn two die are rolled and you can take rewards from either both die or the sum of the dice. Cards give money, income, victory points and some have more complex abilities that need to be charged before use.