Category: Uncategorized


I Shouldn’t Be Alive

While working today I kept the TV on Animal Planet. They were playing some sort of marathon of themed shows, like Shark Week, but only for Sunday afternoon I guess. Today’s theme was ‘I should be head, but luckily I am not’, but not in the sensationalist Fox When Animals Attack shows of the last decade, but a more analytical view of events. They introduced the participants, gave same character background, described the day, re-enacted the events and throughout the re-enactment had interludes from experts describing why something happened. There were two that stuck out in my head.

  1. A woman attacked by a wolf while running in a campground
  2. and two boys who set sail in a rowboat for a day of fishing

The reason these two stuck out in my mind were because I have found myself in two similar situations. I never felt in any immediate danger, but looking back things could have turned out worse. Fortunately they did not.

When my brother and I were in high school we stayed at a cabin with our friend Kagan on Hartstein Island. Since we had run around the woods, dug for clams on the beach, went in the public swimming pool and played basketball we decided it was time to take the boat out on the water. When I say boat I really mean inflatable yellow raft. As soon as we launched the craft we decided to row to the other side of the channel to another island and come back. Great idea, right? …. right. As we worked our way across we noticed that we had gone aways down shore, but no big deal on the way back we just find ourselves roughly twice the distance down the shore as we crossed the channel to get back. This just meant a little more walking, but unfortunately they don’t build those plastic oars very well and of course, the one we had, broke at the base of the head. We now had an oar head and oar handle to paddle with. Keep our arms dry and paddle with the handle or get wet up to our elbows and paddle with the oar head? Neither were getting us very far, so we decided to take turns jumping in the water and pushing the raft back. Awesome idea and worked well at the beginning until we got cold and the entire raft wet jumping in and out of it. As it became later in the afternoon it got a little chilly which only worsened with the wetness. Eventually we made it back to shore, put the raft on our heads and walked down the road back to the cabin. Needless to say, this adventure could have turned out worse had the weather turned, the currents were stronger or the islands were further apart. Today’s show of the two boys who ended up at sea for more than 5 days reminded me of how fortunate we were in our situation. If I was to choose two people to find myself in a bad situation with it would be both Kagan and Eric.

The wolf attack story reminded me of a time when my borther, dad and I were camping in Canada while on a road trip. Late in the afternoon we had finished setting up camp and with two hours of light left my brother and I decided to explore the woods surrounding the camping area. There was a slight hill within eyesight of our site, so we decided it would be neat to see what was on the other side. We went up the hill and found ourselves in a small meadow bounded by the hill we ascended at our backs and aspens on all other sides. We approached the tree line, but didn’t enter. We heard a few deer running in the opposite direction of us. Pretty typical of deer in the woods, so I didn’t think anything of it. As we walked around the waist high grass some more I noticed the tip of a cougars tail and it’s ears as it slinked away about 40ft out. In a stroke of brilliance I decided to follow it. My brother agreed, so we followed slowly and quietly. In reality the cougar probably put a lot of distance between us and him pretty quickly, but as we were stalking our prey I kept running through scenarios of what would happen if it was stalking us and attacked us. Plus, I had a big stick, so we were safe. After 15 minutes or so, we turned around and headed back to camp disappointed we didn’t get another glimpse of the cougar. I don’t think it was hubris, ego, or overconfidence that led us to follow the cat, but just being naive about the consequences. Fortunately luck was on our side again and nothing bad happened. Watching the show on wolves getting used to humans and attacking in campgrounds made me realize we could have been hurt pretty bad if the cat decided to attack instead of leave.

Finally, I will leave with a good note of caution for anyone around Wolves. Typically they do not like water (or so the experts on Animal Planet said), so if you can get into water when a wolf is attacking it probably won’t follow.

Another Seattle Sunset




Sunset

Originally uploaded by jonketo

Before my soccer game last night I noticed these great rays, so I snapped a quick pick. I really need to move, so Magnoliar doesn’t keep geting in the way of the sunsets.

Peekaboo penguin




Peekaboo penguin

Originally uploaded by jonketo

I took advantage of the great weather and went to the zoo. It was fun to see the night exhibit before it closed, but there were so many kids!

So I setup a vimeo account after I got back from Hueco this past December. I had yet to post any videos anywhere except facebook, so I thought I would post one to my blog. Enjoy!

Jon v The Fin from Jon Keto on Vimeo.

Bengal Tiger




Bengal Tiger

Originally uploaded by jonketo

Choi and I tried to climb in Goldbar this weekend, but we everything was seeping, there even some snow and someone had cut some trees down, so nothing was climbable. We turned around immediately and came back to take pictures at the zoo. The tigers were pretty active, so I snapped a few shots of them.

My Cat Loves My Shoes

It has some new pics and a brand spankin’ new look!

http://mycatlovesmyshoes.wordpress.com/

I am trying a new little experiment to see the investment it takes to get another cat blog started. Who knows what will happen. I won’t be able to compete with icanhascheezburger or cute overload, nor do I intend to. Just want to post some more pictures on the interwebz.

Another Fall in Leavenworth




The Beach

Originally uploaded by jonketo

For the last month or so I spent a day each weekend in Leavenworth bouldering. The weather has been consistently getting worse each time and that was emphasized with a slight drizzle last Sunday. It is probably time to just hit the gym and get fitness before heading to Hueco in December. It wouldn’t be good to try and send something hard and reinjure my hand before heading on a trip. At this point I think I will call it and be a gym rat for the next month.

On a good note, Eric sent a sweet V6 in Forestlands called Cruise Control. As much as we have different climbing styles he ending up climbing it very similar to the way I did it. He is getting stronger because I am not climbing like a tall person. This will be good for Hueco.

Seattle Sunset 7.24.09




Seattle Sunset 7.24.09

Originally uploaded by jonketo

Back to staying up late, blogging and making panoramas! And integrati g flickr with my blog.

And I can post from my phone!

WordPress FTW!

I had a great epiphany this morning. Why do some work I am behind on when I could convert my blogger blog to wordpress? Obviously I didn’t come up with a good answer, so hours later, my blog has been converted. Here are the steps I followed.

1) Created an account on wordpress.com

2) Published my old blogger blog to blogspot.com as opposed to ketox.org

3) Used the cool import tool to convert my blogspot blog to wordpress

4) Exported the wordpress blog to and xml file

5) Imported the wordpress xml export to my wordpress blog at http://ketox.org/jon/press

I tried using the import tool on my hosted server ketox.org, but there were some errors, so I went through the additional step of exporting to a blog on the wordpress.com servers. This reduced any potential problems with servers and configurations that I saw on forums when I was trying to troubleshoot why it would not work my from my hosted server. I would actually recommend this method to others as well since the wordpress and blogspot servers can communicate with each other and if your wordpress version is up to date then the import and export should not have any issues either.

The second technical problem to tackle (or first maybe, since the conversion task simply involved clicking buttons) was to get all of the traffic still going to http://ketox.org/jon/blog to go to my new url at http://ketox.org/jon/press/. Using some simple mod_rewrite all the permalinks to posts and archive links permanently redirect to my new wordpress blog. For example, an old link to a post like this:

http://ketox.org/jon/blog/2009/01/new-year-2009.html

Will go directly to the new WordPress version! Awesome! The same is true for old archive links like this:

http://ketox.org/jon/blog/archive/2004_09_01_archive.html

Double Awesome!

After getting the redirects to work I spent some time going through the comments to delete spam and other comments. It was both good and bad, made me happy, made me sad. I got to look at the last 5 years of my life. It made me super glad I started this thing and has reinpired me to continue doing this. That way when I am 80 I can go back through it and remember all the funny little things that have happened to me.

Anyways, the new theme can be temporary. I chose it pretty quickly, so I can change it. I also have to go back through and fix up some images that have become broken over time. I figure this is just as good of a time as any.

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