Off Piste

 
 
As is often the truth, the moment someone gets a bit cocky, a bit over confident, they get slapped back down to earth. And so it was with me this past weekend.

 
 
It’s Thursday night and Joe Rohrbacher of Just Joe’s Music  on south Highway 97 has turned his store into a makeshift nightclub. A club that will feature local jazz musicians Dillon Schneider (guitar), John Allen (bass) and and Stephen Tate (drums) backing Portland tenor sax player David Evans that evening in concert.

It was one of those nights. After spending much of the day in the dentist's chair I felt totally out of it.

 
 
Back in my pre-Bend days, I thought I could make it as an  television commercial actor and movie extra. Being on camera would be cool but it would simply be a way to get to what I really wanted to do- voiceover work.

Back in my pre-Bend days, I thought I could make it as a television commercial actor and movie extra. Being on camera would be cool enough but better it would help me get to what I really wanted to do and that was to become a voiceover person.

A couple of years ago you would have had to really twist my arm or offer me a serious bribe to get me to ride the Peterson Ridge trail system in Sisters. That trail system was, as far as I was concerned, a mishmash of dusty fairly uninteresting singletrack.

Every May for the past several years, the Central Oregon Trail Alliance (COTA) has sponsored an event called The Spring Fling. It's a day devoted to volunteer work building or maintaining local trails.

Well, it took a few years filled with denial but pro cyclist Floyd Landis finally came clean this week and confessed to using Human Growth Hormone (HGH) and testosterone on his way to his to his winning and then losing his 2006 Tour de France title and being banned from cycling for several years.
According to news stories, Landis simply, “couldn't live with myself any longer.

 
 
This week I attended a gathering that further helped me realize that I am ill suited for the electronic age. Not only am I a luddite but also not the least bit interested in wasting my time trying to keep up with the latest electronic gadgets, gizmos and stuff.

The first thing you have to remember when it comes to spring in Central Oregon is that it's always the season of weird weather. And while the international news services carried a piece earlier this week about it being the warmest spring worldwide in recorded history, the weather information gatherers must not have called Bob Shaw or asked any locals how things were weather-wise here this spring.