24 March 2012

Cold Steel Tanto

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I have always tried to go with the “fast and light” ethos – in Boy Scouts, in the military, in hiking, and in backpacking and climbing. Strip all excess weight from pockets and packs. Cut every once. Especially in this heat, I don’t want anything that is not needed weighing me down when I go out on foot.
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I have a great daypack here, a North Face “Recon.” I like it because it has enough compression straps to tighten it down into a very small capacity pack – and small packs do not temp you to fill them up with a lot of junk. “Simplify, simplify”, said Thoreau (and Yvon Chouinard). In a pinch, the Recon will expand to hold a respectable amount of extra stuff, and I only started using it as a bigger capacity pack during the floods when I was foraging for food. Since then, I have been regularly expanding it on food runs and shopping trips to bookstores. A great versatile pack.
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And yet I have been wondering why this pack always feels so heavy when I am starting off from home with it empty. I go through the pockets again and again, dumping out any extra pens and paper, loose change, paperbacks, small flashlights, etc. Even though it is heavy-duty North Face construction, it still felt too heavy for their designers’ proven mountaineering roots. It didn’t make sense.
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So I was astounded recently when for some reason I dug deep into the very bottom of the pack’s padded computer sleeve, which I only use once or twice a year. What is this at the very bottom? It was something I’d been searching for ever since the flooding in October, something I thought was lost downstairs when the water was knee-deep. There, wrapped in padding at the bottom of the sleeve, was my heavy knife, my Cold Steel 7-inch Tanto blade (a Magnum Tanto II) in a thick leather sheath. I had always kept it under my pillow, but I must have put it there in the bottom of the pack when I was packing “bale-out” bags in case the floods forced us to move out, and then I forgot about where I had put it.
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Not only is this a very thick and heavy blade – much too heavy to carry around every day – but it is most probably very illegal here. I got it for home defense use only, because 7-inch blades (like the USMC’s traditional K-Bar) are combat knives with their deep penetration. Damn! I’m glad I didn’t try to visit the embassy with it.
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-Zenwind.
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07 March 2012

Hardware Meltdown. Offline

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Sometimes I hate being right in my predictions. The terrible heat seems to have killed my computer, so I have no regular access to the internet.
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-Zenwind.
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03 March 2012

Too Hot to Compute

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Our winter here is over, and we have gone straight into the Hot Season. Brutal temperatures and humidity. I am afraid to have my computer running for very long because I think the heat might kill it. So my postings here will be sporadic and usually made up of pieces of draft material that I never finished. I am not spending much time researching online or trying to polish my writing.
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One of the reasons we are feeling the heat more than usual is that we now live in an upstairs room that heats up quickly. Before the floods we lived downstairs in a tiled room without windows, and it stayed relatively cooler there. Moving back down there is not a good idea since it was flooded for three weeks and that dampness will never leave.
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One of our dreams is to someday have the house re-wired with a good, safe, grounded system. Then we could install air conditioning. Until then, it is Sweat City.
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-Zenwind.
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