Housekeeping Post – Adding a Blogroll

This is a quick housekeeping post. I’ve decided to add a blogroll. I’ve always been down on blogrolls, but I’ve decided to lighten up.

Tangent: Here’s why I’ve been down on blogrolls. You go to some blog, and the last post is like 8 months old, and it says something like, “Not much happened today. Watched Law & Order. Ate some soup.” And then on the right there’s this giant roll of like 75 blogs, and you click on one and it takes you to a another blog that hasn’t been updated in, say 14 months and it says something like, “Rained again today. Ate some chicken.”

The other reason is I have a sort of quiet, just-below-the-surface, semi-latent, quasi- passive/aggressive antisocial streak (which is probably part of the reason I so enjoy the types of solo backcountry adventures I often blog about) and this manifests itself in countless little meaningless gestures of social rebellion like not responding to Linked In invites (ha- showed them!) and acting all kind of snotty towards people who watch popular TV shows, like “Dancing with B Actors” and “Law & Order” (Christ I hate that stupid show) or whatever. I’m not sure where this streak came from, but I suspect it had something to do with a childhood of being picked last for sports teams (yeah well who wants to run up and down a stupid field anyway?) or that time in 6^th grade dance class when it was ladies choice and I was the last guy picked to dance (yeah, well I’m tired anyway, I’d way rather just sit here and take it easy…) (Really, I was the last guy picked. If they’d had a Least Desirable By The Opposite Sex award in grade, junior high or high school, I would’ve won it hands down. How I wound up with Awesome Wife is thoroughly beyond me.)

OK, but I’m adding one anyway. There are a couple of reasons, primarily consideration to those who’ve linked to me, but also because after staying up late on nearly 100 nights to draw dumb graphics and research everything from Weevil genetics to the flight-load capacity of Clark’s Nutcracker, it’d feel good if I thought someone actually read this blog on occasion. So I’m linking to these 4 blogs:

Desert Explorer. Steve and I met Gerald back in May in Twin Corral Box Canyon and chatted about all the close calls with rattlesnakes we’d experienced. Gerald is a hard-core desert rat, ultra-light backpacker and former special forces guy whose blog details many of his desert adventures and links to his website, which is full of useful info related to ultra-light backpacking and backcountry desert adventures. Gerald was the first guy to link to- and say something nice about- my blog.

UTRider. Mark is a local cyclist, both road and mtn, and occasional racer, who blogs regularly about his rides, with plenty of photos, mostly in the Wasatch, occasionally further afield. You can think of his blog as all the good cycling stuff of my blog, but way more of it, and without all the geeky-obsessive wannabe-botanist/ entomologist/ hydrologist stuff. Mark included my LOTOJA post in a compilation post he did of LOTOJA race reports last month, and was kind enough to include my blog in his roll.

Periodic Ponderings. Kristin has always been one of my favorite coworkers- intelligent, helpful and one of those people who can be direct, honest and charming all at the same time. Her blog reads the same way, and she was also kind enough to include my blog in her roll early on, when a couple of coworkers first learned about my blog and probably thought I was nuts. (They still do. But they’re nice to me anyway.)

Up In Alaska. Jill doesn’t know (or link to) me, but I always enjoy reading her blog. She’s an adventure racer who lives in Juneau, and her blog does a wonderful job of giving me a feel for a part of North America I’ve yet to visit, along with wonderful tales of her ultra-racing adventures. And to be completely honest, I don’t think there’s any male cyclist between 15 and 50 who can read Jill’s blog for a couple of months without getting just a little bit of a crush on her.

OK, that’s it. That’s as sweet and syrupy and gracious as I get. Back to bugs and trees.