oh how the mighty have fallen

It was only a few short months ago that I ran a marathon.  Not a very pretty one, but I ran it.

Yesterday, I ran three miles at my marathon pace, and almost died.  Today it hurts to walk and sit down.

What the heck?

I’ve put on so much weight and lost so much fitness that I am right back where I started from.  Sucks.

I am not running today.  Its cold and windy and I hurt from yesterday.

This morning I made laundry detergent.  Did I talk about this before?  I make my own.  It cost like $2 for a 5 gallon bucket, and it works as well as the over priced crap at the store.  And its a chemist thing.  We like to mix up potions.  :)

Part of the process involves grating a bar of Fels-Naptha soap and dissolving it into a small pot of water.  I usually do this outside because when you cook a bar of that soap in your house, all you can smell is soap for a week.  So, I use the side burner on my grill.  However, today the propane tank was empty.

Being an ingenious person (and a scouter as well), I pulled out my Jet-Boil Helios stove and proceeded to cook my soap on that.

Have you seen these things?  For hikers who cook on stoves, they are the cat’s pajamas.  We took this on the last campout and it totally rocked.  It can boil water in that pot in about 2 minutes.  The thing sounds like a blowtorch, just roaring.  I love it.  Here’s a pic of two fashion models pretending to cook on a Helios while camping:

(Nobody’s hair looks like that when they are camping)

On the far right you can see the clear plastic windscreen below the pan sitting on the burner.  This really helps when there’s a breeze in the air.  For backpacking stoves, just a little breeze can really slow down cooking time.  When I first bought this stove, one of the snaps broke off.  I took it back and the store (LL Bean) gave me a new one without question.

So anyway, the point I was making was that I had to cook on the Helios.  Not thinking about how fast this stove will heat up a pan, I just let it sit.  Well, I saw it was starting to boil, I pulled it off the stove.  But the pan had gotten so hot, that the water kept boiling.  Unfortunately, when soapy water boils, it foams like crazy, and it foamed right over the top of the pan and all over the porch and my Helios stove.   At least my stove it now very very clean.