4/1- Blizzardry

I am a complete and total bad ass. I am laying here, ready for bed, wrapped toasty in my blizzard resistant tarp burrito bed as I write. Thank you, Kia. I'm assuming your blessing of me to the Gods of Olde have given me demi-human abilities to resist the forces of nature. Yes, I play Dungeons & Dragons and I make no apology for that.

Where to begin on today. If starting by when I last woke up we'd have to go back to yesterday morning. I arose in a comfy bed with almost everything left in the house still needing to be shipped off to storage, the place still needed to be cleaned, and half my roommate's stuff was still there with him no where to be found. To this moment I still haven't found him.

Ang arrived to my rescue and helped with frustrated amusement at my packing skills as we spent an hour or so fitting a two bedroom-ish amount of stuff into a studio to small one bedroom sized storage unit. This was all followed up by a Denny's breakfast before heading home again.

The house was still a mess and the roommate still AWOL. I knew I wasn't going anywhere at that point and departure would be delayed another day. I spent the rest of the night annoyed and frustrated outside of a brief goodbye visit from Loreli and family over cupcakes.

I was up until about 5am. With a bedless house I tried sleeping on the bathroom floor, being too lazy to break out the bivy, but gave up after an hour. Instead I just started my day early.

Dead tired errands are no fun, particularly with what I found out was a 70lb pack on my back. I had taken all the left over food in the house. By 12:40 I was on a cheap bus to Colorado Springs to close in some ground. I have a dentist appointment on the 7th to make.

The day up until then had the crescendo of that odd feeling I've been wrestling with in my last two posts with bonus emotions to boot. On top of this heightened "am I seriously giving all this up right now" I felt completely used up and played by my roommate, who had been a good friend before. In fairness, I have no idea what happened to him, and I hope he's alright, but on no sleep I make only self pitying conclusions.

So the bus down was less than enthusiastic, as was the first bit of walking. It honestly didn't all kick in until after a few breaks of just sitting and being still for a moment.

That's about when the snow kicked up. The light flurry whipped into a blinding fog in about 10 minutes. Ducking into a gas station I called Todd again for guidance to a less populated area then poured over some maps.

They only had $20 big book maps so I tried snapping off a picture of the one I needed but was busted by the lady behind the counter. She was pretty cool about it, just didn't want freeloaders, so I bought a coffee and chatted with her some as the storm got thicker outside.

By now I was completely in the walking man mindset. I was getting giddy about the prospect of sleeping out in that blizzard rather than frustrated. Once my coffee was done I donned my arctic gear, complete with goggles, and dove into it. I had only to cross the street before I found a stretch of field behind a little strip mall. It was too blustery for people to see where I was going from the road so I just picked a spot and dropped down.

The logistics were interesting. I was sorting out the bivy under the tarp to get out of the snow. Then climbed into the bivy and pulled my bag and shoes under with me and tucked the tarp under everything like a burrito wrapping itself from the inside.

I won't bore you any longer with the logistics or mechanics of it. The point was just that it made me feel like Survivor Man which lifted the remainder of my stubbornly wallowing spirits out of the pooper.