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Pass the Poffle

January 16th, 2008

Oh, gads.  If you’ve been reading the blog, you know my personal view on this time of year, dare I say it again: the Dead of Winter.  If the Dead of Winter were a place, it would be Las Vegas - a place of fun and sin and delerious fixated people staying mostly inside doing strange things.  So, I have more confessions to report from this time of anything goes. 

The first one being:  Poffle.  So, while I was doing really well with banishing gratuitous bread and butter meals from my diet, nothing could have saved me from this bout of Poffle.  Ranger M (a.k.a. Weed B****, more on her later) and I found ourselves in the middle of the “storm of the decade” and this brilliant idea came to Ranger M.  An idea more brilliant than ALL the lights of Las Vegas, which was to make chocolate-toffee-coffee cake.  Oh man.  Since we couldn’t say all that, and because it turned out so strangely, we ended up calling it “Poffle”.  I’ll spare you the details and just share with you that you really haven’t lived until you’ve seen a bowl of hot melted toffee disappear into the belly of a half baked coffee cake made with real coffee in it.  Oh my!  The result being so strangely addictive and bad for you, simply worse than gambling on both counts.

Next up on the confessions list:  “el Diablo” a.k.a. Mount Diablo.  Gear Queen and I decided that it would be nice to kick off our Gobi March training in a no-holds-barred and perhaps rediculous fashion, by hiking our local landmark Mount Diablo.  It doesn’t seem like much, but the funny “anything goes” part is that we walked and jogged there from a couple cities away (Oakland) by trail.   For the locals, the deal is we went through Redwood, the EBMUD watershed (which is filled with a rare breed of poop-less cows), through Las Trampas, and finally to Macedo ranch and on up the big hill.   Who knew it all connected so nicely?  We probably could have used one of these fancy altimeter watches. 

Because it’s the DOW, there were Spaghetti-O’s involved, and Foster’s beer (just 1 each, for fear of sounding too nutso) - which is Australian for “Gatorade”, right?  As we hiked back down, now elated and talking about the finer (not the occsaionally nutritionally wreckless) points of ultra-running training, Gear Queen deleriously noted that Mt. Diablo at sunset is in fact the best bar you could go to.  Yes, better than any bar in Las Vegas my friends, I think it’s true.

So, I’m sure, you must have some Dead of Winter confessions of your own.  Post them to comments!  If you don’t, be an angel and sell your outdoor gear on iGearList!

Entry Filed under: iGearList, Ask Gear Queen, good stuff.