Bullying, Be Gone!

Last Friday, I went on my first proper hike of the season. Not my first walk, but the first proper hike, at Tryon Creek State Park across the river from where I live and some ways south, which is lovely and fun to walk at, even though it's a pain in the butt to get to it by bus. Despite there being a highway type road going through the area, lots of businesses, and lots of houses, there are only two bus lines that go that way. Well, technically three I guess. There's the line 40, which gets me across the river, then there's the 35R and the 35T. There's like an hour between each of the 35's, and of the two, 35T is the one I take to get to get to Tryon Creek State Park because it has a stop right at the beginning of a paved bike path that goes all the way down to Lake Oswego, but also connects to the trail system in the park. (There is a small law school near there as well.) The 35T goes along Terwilliger, hence the T. Meanwhile, the 35R goes along the highway that follows the river, hence the R.

( Ramble / rant about how annoying it is to get to the area by bus, and about snotty rich people who built an entire suburb that's a monument to bougie opulence )

( And behind door number two, a long account of the hike itself. )

Soooo... stats:

Distance hiked: 4.14 miles!!!
Min elevation: 80 feet
Max elevation: 408 feet (I will note that the starting elevation was fairly high. Let me check... ah yes, starting elevation was 395 feet. Elevation of the point in Lake Oswego where I stopped recording was 99 feet.)
Moving time: 02:25:47
Stopped time: 00:32:27 (Inaccurate because I paused the recording for lunch, and turned it off when I got to Lake Oswego)
Average speed: 1.4 mph
Max speed: 3.1 mph

To get a truer estimate of the time involved, I left the house around... maybe 10:30 or 11 am? Even when I got home I didn't remember exactly. The time I got back home was FIVE PM. So I was out there for at least five or six hours. Sure, about half of that was either resting up, eating lunch, or waiting for the bus, but still... I was basically out all afternoon.

If I go back next month, I think I'll do it in the first week, week and a half of the month and take an Uber or a Lyft right to the visitor's center and go from there. Then take the bus back home.

Links to pictures, via BlueSky:

The interesting Ghost Tree I saw that day.
Beaver activity.
Shy snake.
Trillium flowers.


1 = Most of the trails there, I personally think you would have to be fucking insane to want to jog or run along them because they're narrow enough and tricky enough to navigate that I often get worried about falling and breaking my ankle just walking them at a sedate pace. Then again, I think everyone who jogs or runs without being chased by something trying to kill or otherwise attack them are crazy people who need to get help for the self-harm that is running/jogging when one is a species of barely-bipedal apes whose evolutionary path to bipedalism can best be described as "a cross between 'hold my beer' and 'there I fixed it.'" Seriously, our knees are just a polite suggestion, our backs are a sternly-worded letter, and really the only things we humans have going for us are our powerful brains, our social nature, and the fact we made stamina our dump stat.

"#WritingQThursday Let's talk your characters' names. What do they mean? Do they signify anything special? Does your character have any nicknames, and if so, what's the story behind those?"

I usually put a lot of thought into my characters' names. Everyone but the minor side characters has thought out names. "Random extra #47" gets a random name from a list of most popular names, if they get a name at all. Dalia, her name means "a strong branch," for instance. It's also a pun, because she's black and her name is usually pronounced the same as the flower, 'dahlia.' (Sometimes it's pronounced "Doll-yah.") Her middle name is Delphinium, which is the name of a genus of poisonous flowers because Morgana's family has a history of at least one of their names being named after poisonous flowers. (It's a goth thing for them.) Like Morgana's middle name is Belladonna (AKA deadly nightshade). Morgana's mother's first name is also Belladonna. (Her middle name is Hemlock.) Morgana also has a brother named Oleander. (Dalia canonically chooses her own first and middle name, after having her parents read a lot of possible names for her out of a baby names book. Chooli also chooses zeer own name, naming zemself after one of Nizoni's cousins, Chooli Peshlakai. Said cousin was the first person Nizoni came out as trans to.)

( Rest is VERY long )