Cool Shit We're Doing Thread

[BananaStand]

Work: I have a job. I do financial planning and analysis for an airline service company with operations at 19 major airports nationwide. It's a lot of spreadsheets followed by translating spreadsheets into english for everybody else's benefit. Everyone I work with is overwhelmed and intimidated by MS Excel. They think what I do is difficult, complicated, and time consuming. It isn't. Not even close.

Most days I open a spreadsheet. Do about 3 minutes of work on it, and then just leave it open on my screen while I fuck off on FTR for a couple hours.

Side-work: I mentioned it briefly in a short-lived post in another thread, but I have a little online side business doing some text-based interactions with pretty far out-there folks. It's mostly passive income, but when I do have a weekend to sink into it, I can usually scoop a grand.

Home: I have 3 kids. All girls. None of them teenagers yet. Most people like to taunt me by saying that 'the hardest years are ahead'. That terrifies me so I did some research. It turns out that you can feed, clothe, and educate a kid in Africa for like...70 cents a day. So right now my goal is to save up enough money to send them there.

I'm divorced, so I only have the kids half the time. The rest of the time I'm doing some hodgepodge of activities that occupy my time but couldn't really be called "hobbies". Work outs, errands, chores, video games, side-biz stuff, and smoking weed.

I date. But only superficially. I'm kind of a cold, self-centered ass hole, with some sociopathic tendencies. I recognize this, but I'm not enough of a sociopath to actually hurt people. So a couple of times per year I will engage with lady until it gets to the point where I have to put in real effort, then I mercifully move on. Mostly I just like knowing that I *could* have a long-term girlfriend if I wanted one, and that's all I really need right now.

The other major activity I'm involved in is hiking. A few years ago I realized I'm getting older and my health isn't going to stay good all by itself. I'm not a religious workout fanatic. I am guilty of more than a few food-based indulgences. I hate jogging and I don't like any class-based workout regime.

So a couple of times a year, I will set out on a mission to reach the summit of a mountain. Reaching that summit tells me that I'm not yet a pathetic irredeemable fat-ass. As long as I can make it to the top, I feel like I don't have to worry too much about what kind of shape I'm in.

There are 48 mountains in New Hampshire that exceed 4,000 feet in elevation and 200 feet of prominence. I've climbed 21 of them.

Some of them are relatively easy treks.



Others are somewhat difficult excursions.



I got to some places only real badasses can get to. The peak pictured below is about 10 miles from the nearest road. From the summit, the only man-made structures you can see are the weather station on top of Mt Washington, and some ski-slopes carved into the side of another ridge about 10 miles away.



And I had some friends to keep me company