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Sitting in the Ashland Hostel at the moment, enjoying a few minutes of internet access before I head to bed for a good rest after the five hour drive down here. Tomorrow's drive to Midpines, CA is even longer--almost eight hours--which pleases me to no end considering how much I despise long distance driving. However, after pricing flights and seeing where the other participants were coming from, driving down here myself was sadly the only real option.

I am hoping this course will end up far better than the NOLS Waddington Ranger course. In a nutshell, I left that course after eight days (via helicopter) because I was bored. My grand mountaineering expedition into the wilds of British Columbia, wherein I wished to learn loads of new skills, was an incredible disappointment. Not the fault of NOLS or the instructors either, I think I just had unrealistic expectations for a course that was geared for people with such a wide range of previous experience. I am somewhat embarrassed too, as I spent a very large amount of money on that trip and I got nothing out of it except learning a new knot and how to make spice cake in the wild.

The thought that is running through my head on a daily basis lately is how incredibly spoiled I am. Six grand wasted because I was bored. An incredibly well paying and stable job left because I was frustrated. While on the NOLS course, we crossed a raging river and later a crevasse that was at least 200 feet long and 25 feet deep. Neither was even a blip on my "fun" radar. At what point did mountaineering become too easy? I mean, really, Paul, what the hell?

Sort of relatedly, a friend through the old job is having a bit of a mid-30s crisis. Like most people, she has pulled out the idea of creating and finishing a bucket list. This sounds all well and good, except I have made and completed two bucket lists already in my life. The first during my freshman year of college and another a few years later, after the first was completed. The second one was finished early last year when I finally made it to Italy.

While on that trip I started writing items down for another bucket list. And, I have hardly looked at it since getting back. Nothing on there really strikes my fancy like the items on the other two lists did (examples: falling in love and climbing Mt. Hood). I feel like I am simply out of good ideas for what to do with my life. This summer was meant to be yet another attempt to "reboot" and try a different path to see if I can kick my self out of this apathy. Not exactly promising thus far.

Then there is the fact that I am on the verge of running out of money. I have drawn a line on how much I am willing to take out of the retirement portfolio this year. At this very moment, I have just enough money in my spending account to make it until the beginning of September. So, I really need to get a job or take a plunge in another direction. Let's hope the EMT course at least tickles my noggin' just a bit.

»Link.  Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren, and Mary Louise-Parker?! Wow, I am definitely going to go see this.

»Link.  Via the North Atlantic countries, including Canada, Nova Scotia, Scotland, France, and then finally into Africa. Sounds incredibly ambitious, and I love this quote: "Ah, yes...the sea. A bit of a problem, true, but we'll manage. Got to have the vision first. That's just a detail."

After many weeks of effort, I have finally finished reading the entirety of the EMT Basic textbook. Since the entire text tops out at around 1,200 pages, I am not too disappointed that it took me nearly four weeks to plow my way through all of it. The course itself does not start until this coming Monday, but when I take a responsibility on I tend to take it extremely seriously. When it comes to being an EMT, a person's life will likely be at stake based on what I know and remember. Huge responsibility and if I accept that responsibility, I have to be prepared.

Such a Boy Scout.

My reward: a few days of playing with my all new iPad. Naturally, the first application I want to build is an EMT Basic study guide with flash cards for anatomy, slideshows for important skills, and assessment tools. Nothing in the App Store really comes close to what I want. There are a few anatomy and medical study guides, but they are mostly poorly designed and inadequate to the task. The Grey's Anatomy ones are the best, but suffer from being out of date and not very configurable for learning or testing. As always, I want better.

»Link.  The Col du Tourmalet is one of the toughest climbs of the Tour de France. A writer for the Telegraph took part in the Étape du Tour, which allows amateur cyclists to tackle this climb themselves the week before the Tour. Punishing, exhausting, brutal, and a great accomplishment.

»Link.  Going by the map, I might have to make a trip down to Northern California.

»Link.  Look at that shadow spreading across the sky. Amazing!

»Link.  I missed the train on these Old Spice commercials. I am thankfully catching up on them now and using up all of my spare memory capacity.

»Link.  Apparently, in the world of quantum mechanics 4% is a really big deal. I am sure there is a joke here about quarks (up? down?), muons, or quantum electrodynamics...but hell if I can figure it out.

»Link.  The Daily Show has a new correspondent named Olivia Munn. Unlike most of their zany correspondents and reporters, she plays the straight man (er, woman) and does it brilliantly: "It is as if these cameras prosecute not on reasonable suspicion but on irrefutable evidence."