I want to say that my personal hygiene has really taken a nosedive since I started working from home, but if I’m being honest, I didn’t shower all that regularly to begin with. Fortunately, I have enough out-of-the-house meetings and appointments that I’m forced to wear non-sweatpants a couple of times a week (and I’m not even counting yoga pants here!). If you spent a lot of time outside, you are probably at least kind of gross, too. Let’s find out! Continue reading “Quiz: How Gross Are You?”
As hard as I try not to embody gender-based stereotypes, I am perpetually Team Mom. I can’t help it. If we’re camping, I will follow you around picking up after you and organizing all our gear into neat piles. I want to make sure you’ve gotten enough to eat. Please let me pack you a lunch.
These qualities are generally considered endearing—who doesn’t want a smorgasboard laid out on the picnic table and a cold beer waiting when you finish pitching your tent? But I do have this one habit that drives people bonkers. Continue reading “I’ve got [sunscreen] on a cloudy day”
A little over a year ago, I headed to Mexico with a group of women who are, in one way or another, associated with Big City Mountaineers. I’ve written a fair amount about BCM before, since I’ve worked as an instructor and as a volunteer, but basically: BCM is a nonprofit that teaches critical life skills to under-resourced kids during the course of weeklong wilderness backpacking and canoe trips. One of their primary fundraising tools is a program called Summit For Someone, in which participants do cool stuff like climb mountains or embark on their own wilderness trips while fundraising for BCM. Continue reading “How I climbed a mountain without making it entirely about myself”
I’ll never forget a monthlong glacier trip I did in my early twenties with a backpack I borrowed from the guy I was dating at the time. He was bigger and broader than me, and so was his pack. A week into the trip, the skin on my hips was raw, and I spent another 20 days miserably adjusting and readjusting and padding and un-padding and generally wishing I had a way to carry 85 pounds that actually fit me. By the time I got home, I was ready to burn it, and not just because our subsequent breakup wasn’t exactly amicable. Continue reading “It’s nice to have gear that fits you”
A year and a half or so ago, my mother-in-law announced that she’d always wanted to visit Finnish Lapland, but that she didn’t know anyone who’d want to go with her. It’s too cold there, everyone around her in Milwaukee kept saying, and anyway, why Finland?
Good news, we told her. We want to go to Finnish Lapland. Continue reading “Puhun vähän”
