Separated at birth?

Did you ever wonder about "eyewitness identifications" when court cases are being discussed in the media. I've had a nagging worry stuck in the very back of my mind for a long time. What happens if an "eyewitness" identifies you as being the person that committed a crime, even though you didn't, and you can't adequately provide an alibi.

An event that happened when I was 19 started this train of thought that has wandered in and out of my "things to worry about" lobe and a recent event has once again planted it firmly at the top of my brain matter holding list.

The worry centers mostly around the situation of someone sees a crime committed and the person actually committing the crime resembles you enough that the description and police artist sketch are a pretty good match. Some time passes and you are identified as the suspect based on the witness description and you can't provide an alibi... could you absolutely prove where you were at at 8pm on December 11, 2008?

Mistakes in identification are very possible. When I was 19, the submarine I was assigned to visited Esquimalt, Canada. It's a quaint little town nestled on the western coast. I was sitting in a bar, peacefully drinking an adult beverage of my choosing when all the sudden there is a lady pounding on my back. Having attacted my attention and aroused my curiosity as to the reasons for this assault, I turned around. A very surprised look came to her face and she started apologizing profusely.

It turns out that from 20 or so feet across a semi-dark bar, I looked exactly like her boyfriend..who was supposed to be at sea on a fishing vessel. Upon discovering "him" drinking in a bar she expressed her displeasure about his apparent lying by attacking "him" which turned out to be me.

Presuming that one should be able to identify resonably well someone that could be labeled "boyfriend"...the idea that she could mistake me for him at a distance of 20 feet (in less than favorable lighting conditions, true) means we must have looked a lot alike.

Now we come to the moron that killed 8 people in a nursing home in North Carolina. I found a picture of him, in the on-line Honolulu Advertiser of all places, that disturbs me a bit. While I don't think he looks exactly like me (I think my eyes are much kinder), he does enough that someone catching a look at him while trying to find cover to keep from getting shot, would no doubt have provided a description that would have matched me, and if confronted with my face in a police line-up could have easily been convinced I was the person they saw at the shooting.

This is even a bit more disturbing when you consider my current life. There are sometimes periods of 3 or 4 days when I absolutely cannot prove where I was. When Cyrilee travels I often drop her at the airport on Monday and retreat to the hill with no in person contact with anyone until I pick her up on Friday.

Anyway you decide... seperated at birth?...

An Alternative Picture of Migoi

Just testing the picture posting capabilities of the blog.

..take care...t

Pre-scouting the scouting hike for the long walk...

Although it might be difficult for many of you to believe, I do actually have at least two functioning brain cells that sometimes bump into each other and spark a hint of smarts. When I decided to do the long walk for my mid-life crisis, the two cells whacked into each other long enough to form the coherent thought of... 'boy, you really need to prepare for this thing so you do not end up dead or worse out there.'

Knowing that I don't have a lot of actual backpacking experience... which isn't to say I don't have experience hiking (skipping around the woods with a quart of water and a pocket full of fig newtons) or camping (living for a few days semi-outdoors without the pillow-top mattress)... I fully accept that I need to work into this backpacking (skipping around the woods with a quart of water, a pocket full of fig newtons, and your entire living necessities on your back) thing pretty slowly.

My idea is, that over the next year, I will hike out several of the section of the Ozark Highlands Trail in 2 to 5 day increments. By the time the long walk happens I should have a goodly idea about most of the trail and how to exist out there for at least 5 days. The only real difference between 5 days out there and 20 is setting up food drops along the way.

The start of the process of hiking out sections will be on April 18 and 19. I found a nice 10 mile part in section 5. I figure I can do 5 miles a day pretty easy as a starting point. Today we went out to find the trail head near Ozone where Cyrilee will drop me off and the point where the trail crosses a county road, where she will pick me up the next day...marked them both on her GPS.

Today's expedition also let me take some notes...we found out that at those two points I can text on my cell phone. This is good information to know when the long walk comes around. When I arrive at these points I can turn on my cell phone for 5 minutes and send Cyrilee a text to let her know I'm fine.

As I said before, I installed an app on my phone that lets me text my location. A url results and it can be followed to show a map. I will post these urls and when you follow them, you can click on the "hybrid" tag at the top of the map and see an aerial photo of the place...too cool huh.

The Ozone trail head can be seen here: http://loopt.us/owXbCg

The pick up point can be seen here: http://loopt.us/biEarw

Then we had a late lunch/early supper at Mexico Veijo, it can be seen here: http://loopt.us/Rkx4Tw

Very interesting country out there...the walk should be fun...

take care... t

Hairy Ole TechnoMonkey...

Been working the last couple of days at upping the techno quotient of my little world. As I've mentioned before I am now also on Twitter.

Twitter is an interesting application in that it expands your social networking reach. It has a very limited scope as far as the amount of information you can put on your homepage...which is a good thing since pretty much everyone in the world can see it...best to remain a bit mysterious. Basically you can put your name/user name (you don't have to use your actual name), a location (you can be as vague as you like), and a short 140 character bio (lie your butt off if you so desire).

Once you have established your page you can then "follow" ANYONE else who has a twitter account and ANYONE else who has an account can "follow" you. What this means is that when someone you are following updates their status, it will show up on your "home" page. Updates can only be 140 characters long. By the same token, when you update your page, all those following you will see it on their home page.

This can be expanded to an RSS feed to your email reader (such as Outlook) and if your phone is web capable you can check it from your phone. You can also do @replies to others which is most often used to respond to something someone else posted. Plus there is a 'direct message' capability that allows you to send a 140 character message to a single person.

Who do you follow? Anyone you want to.... currently I am following around 40 something folks...I know face to face about 4 of them, I'm patiently waiting for all of you to establish Twitter accounts so I can follow you. A lot of them are businesses and news feed type accounts such as the Northwest Arkansas Times, the Walton Arts Center, Arkansas State Parks, but some of them are just folks that share certain philosophies with me, or are just plain funny.

If you look to your right..you will see that I've added a Twitter feed to this blog. It will show the last five updates I've put into the twitter account.

Another addition I made was to link to LoopT. LoopT is a program that uses the GPS capability in my phone to send a URL to my twitter update. If you follow the URL you will be able to see a google-type map of where I was when I did that update.

Email me or chase me down if you want me to help you set these type of things up....

We'll see how this works out.... take care...t

Less excitement than usual...

For some odd reason I have managed to get through a couple of days without causing any serious excitement.

Did some more plumbing work. Replaces all the innards and the seat for the main floor guest half bath. The bolt on it were also pretty corroded but I managed to get them off through the somewhat ingenious, if I do say so myself, use of two sets of vise grips. That whole, squeeze this rather bulky body into those tiny spaces where plumbing resides came up again. Not sure how to solve it. I have one more to do in the future, the basement bath needs refurbishment and it sits in an even more confined space...I guess I'll just think small thoughts.

Spring has sprung and the grass has started growing again. In Hawaii our lawn was so small that a mowing type machine wasn't really necessary. A bit of a different story here. As we headed over to Martha's for green chili (REALLY good chili, Martha, thanks) we were talking about the need to get a riding mower soon...as in really soon.

Have you seen the prices of riding mowers though....I was wonder exactly which appendage I would need to relinquish in order to obtain one. As we turned a corner near Martha's we saw a riding mower with grass catcher and utility trailer sitting in a yard with a for sale sign on it. We took down the number, I called and the guy said he wanted a price for it that seemed like a really good deal. So we turned around, went back and discovered...it was a really good deal. Since we were in the Jeep, I will go back in today with the pick up and pick it up.

Continuing preps for the long walk. Spending time moving the body forward under its own power, finding and inventorying the gear I have, doing research on my spare time, and we're going out to scout a section this weekend. My plan is to do an experimental overnight along a treail that is at the beginning of section 5. There is a 10.2 mile section between a numbered highway and a county road that has a creek crossing about the 5 mile mark.

This section should be good for a first trial. Five miles isn't much to have to do in a full day, there will be water to resupply from at the night stopping point, and Cyrilee can pick me up at the county road the next day. I plan to do this on the weekend of April 18 and 19.

Another YEAH!... the sofa and two chairs that have been on back order for a month should arrive today between 11 and 1. Now if folks dare to venture this far off the beaten path we can at least offer them a place to sit when they arrive.

I'll see what I can do about generating more excitement for the next posting... the little bluish birds keep ending up in the stove, and now have started ending up in the fireplace also. I need to screen off the tops of the chimneys... me with a compromised balance system, on the roof...that's bound to create some excitement. Guess I need to find those climbing ropes.

take care.. t

Total structural failure....

As I predicted just the other day, the loft toilet suffered a total structural failure during my efforts to replace it today.

The most amazing thing happened. On Saturday, I was out helping take down limbs damaged by January's ice storm. Something over 8 hours of chainsawing, being 30 feet up in the air, 20 pound pieces of wood falling from the sky, unstable tree limbs shifting as they were cut, and holding limbs 4 inches from where they are being chainsawed (thank you Chris for keeping all my body parts attached while we were doing that)...not a single injury.

Today, I managed to puncture myself twice in the short bit of time I was replacing the toilet.

That whole replacing the wax ring, especially the getting all the old wax ring out... the very least fun job ever. Two indispensable items to have... rubber gloves (I wore two pair), I'm thinking the inventor is owed lots of beers. The other, Murphy's Vegetable Oil Soap, it actually does a great job of dissolving the old wax from the wax ring.

It's not quite operational yet. The water supply line is too short to reach to the new tank. Will have to pick up an appropriately sized one tomorrow. I offered to place the old toilet on the front porch to be used as a planter or a seat, it has a cushy type of lid, but Cyrilee declined my offer. I keep trying to live up to the image presented in my profile picture, but she keeps interfering..lots of rules.... no tannerite in the house, no shooting in the house, no toilets on the front porch. How am I ever going to become a proper hillbilly under these restrictions?

Had another encounter with the lunatic bluish birds. Went to the basement yesterday afternoon to retrieve some firewood from just outside the garage door. When I opened the door between the garage and the basement I saw something flying around in the garage. Before I could close the door it flew into the basement. Took me a bit to herd it back into the garage and through the now open garage door.

I got smarter... before I got on the treadmill today, I moved some boxes around so that when I got off, deprived of the proper amounts of oxygen levels in my brain, I wouldn't run into the stairs again...I'm thinking hitting it in the same place twice would more than double the pain.

..take care... tim b

Timbo does the Limbo...

..or at least Tim becomes involved with the limbs. One more round of limb removal from the January ice storm...this time with heavy machinery. Martha and Larry, Lynn and Chris, and Misty had planned an effort to finish removing the hanging, broken tree limbs that resulted from the (use your best old man remembering long past events voice here) Ice Storm of '09. Since there is a standing request to my local relatives that I be invited to any event with the high possibility of death or dismemberment they kindly invited me over for the Saturday festivities.

What I found most amazing about the whole experience was that anyone can walk into an equipment rental store and rent a piece of hugely hazardous piece of equipment...the man-lift. We're talking about a piece of equipment that can hoist two people, forty five feet up in the air and swing them around a bit. You could almost hear the lift saying... "How can I kill thee...let me count the ways....".

You could get a bodily appendages in any one of about 187 scissoring pinch points, which would sever said bodily appendage without even slowing down. You could run afoul of overhead power lines, not a good thing if you're standing on a piece of all metal machinery. You could man-lift yourself right into an immovable overhead object, such as a tree limb. You could lean too far out of the cage while forty five feet in the air and have a rather painful reunion with the Earth. Boy, did we have a good time.

For some odd reason I never got to operate the man-lift...I think they've been reading my updates on the renovation...it was probably that "Hunka, hunka burning love" post that kept me away from the control.

I did get to flail around for a while with the pole chainsaw..it was pretty cool. A chainsaw at the end of a five foot pole. One good thing about it...I didn't worry as much about whacking off my own kneecaps with it as I do with the regular chainsaws. However, others around you are probably in bigger danger...especially when you're bouncing around thirty feet in the air.

Despite all the possibilities for serious problems...we all managed to get through the day with no injuries, all the trees cut down, and pizza at the end... thanks for inviting me along...

..take care... t

Getting ready for the long walk....

Only 393 days left before I step off the edge of sanity. My phone has what it aptly, in this case anyway, calls a D-Day counter. You can put up to 8 different days and it will give you the day count from now until that date. You can also put one of those counters on the "home page" of the phone so you see it every time you look at your phone.... 393 days.

Past history tells me that when preparing for something like this a good method is to make sure you do at least one thing each day that moves you toward your goal...no matter how small that thing. Of course at least once in a while you have to do a bigger thing, NASA didn't get to the moon by simply recalculating the distance every day.

This will be a pretty new experience..I've never done much backpacking. It's true, I've spent a lot of time wandering around on non-paved surfaces, surrounded by trees, but this is a bit different.

I've hiked quite a bit. I've camped quite a bit. I have not combined the two very often. As much as I like being in the woods, I also like that cold beer, hot shower, and pillow top mattress at the end of the day... I'm thinking those things will be in fairly short supply in the highlands of the Ozarks.

My hiking has always been with a pack with just enough stuff in it to survive the night if I got lost. Contrary to some rumors that keep circulating around...I've never been lost. I prefer to stay in the Mark Twain mindset... "I was never lost, but I was confused for 3 days one time."

When the first civilian GPS's became useful due to the removal of the selective availability function, Cyrilee bought me one almost immediately..as in removal on May 1, I got my GPS on May 11. When I was first learning to use it...not having a good grip on how to not get "confused" while using it, I thought... it might not help me stay found...but I'll have this cute line drawing of where I was at. I've gotten better at using a GPS since then.

Almost all of my camping has been industrial strength camping. I've camped with the Girl Scouts (I was a leader/trainer for them for about 6 years) but none of it involved being much out of sight of the vehicles. My camping in Hawaii was at MudFest...we had a chafing dish and propane grill, not exactly 'light' camping. We did however have a blast up there...literally.

So this will be new...over the year or so I have to learn how to get enough stuff on my back to live for a week or so "out there". I know it can be done...others have already done it, I just have to get that info in my head.

First step... it would appear that the gods have favored my foolishness. Right after I decided to launch into this, I discovered there is a free seminar on backpacking at the Lewis and Clark store this coming Monday. Time to get thee to a classroom.

..take care...migoi

Be careful what you ask for....

Some folks have suggested that I expand my literary ramblings to spaces outside of Facebook. I'm instantly reminded of the old Chinese proverb... 'sometimes the gods punish us by giving us what we ask for...'

So here it is. Don't expect any type of consistent pattern as to timing, subject, or coherence. Those things are just not in me.

Thanks for visiting.

migoi