Idaho, Montana, Wyoming.
Cheap and easy to get reciprocity for your license. Draftsmen are dirt cheap and available. Lots of work, Cowboys need fences, I make the drawings and you stamp the page.
We get paid in cows, but I like range fed beef...
Ski Bum 101?
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MikeK
Re: Ski Bum 101?
I'd love to check out those parts... it's a big commitment for me. Not like I can drive out every weekend and work on my shack. I'd obviously have to move, buy another house and get a job, and then work on doing whatever to get rid of said house and job.
Also, this goes without saying, but I don't know shit... well I've never been out west or to northern Canada, or to a lot of places... so I'd like to take time to check it out. My wife said something about buying a camper van and travelling around for a few years to figure that out... I dunno... I'm a pussy... it's hard to put everything down and start over again.
Also, this goes without saying, but I don't know shit... well I've never been out west or to northern Canada, or to a lot of places... so I'd like to take time to check it out. My wife said something about buying a camper van and travelling around for a few years to figure that out... I dunno... I'm a pussy... it's hard to put everything down and start over again.
Re: Ski Bum 101?
Sorry I have been busy posting love letters to one of my old buttbuddies over on Bigwalls. It takes a lot of time and emotional energy. Then there is the whole translator thing, it doesn't pay well, but its a public service I perform for the more ignorant wall rats.RJ - you need to get your posts up man! I looked and you are only at 39! You actually got a place where they don't get deleted, get on that shit!
http://www.bigwalls.com/forum2/index.php?topic=1613.0
I can't imagine why Skully doesn't call me anymore... so shallow.
Last edited by Rokjox on Thu Sep 17, 2015 3:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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MikeK
Re: Ski Bum 101?
That's OK - I'll let it slide until ski season... then we have a quota on stoke 
Re: Ski Bum 101?
I've known only a few who ever came west and then returned happy to the crowded subdivisions of the east. Of those very few, one is my oldest stepson and his wife who now live in Queens. They never did anything like I do, Joe never learned to ski, was too old by the time I came around to make changes in his behavior. To the good...
He is now a dept. head for Columbia's stage productions, scheduling all the acts and events that Columbia University puts on. He had a fellowship at the Lincoln Center and got his Masters at NYU. All of which I would have screwed up had I been around too soon. But had he stayed here, he likely would not be about 100,000 in debt to the school loan people. One reason he cannot return, he couldn't pay off his debts in 20 years if he was here promoting stage acts and lectures, ha-ha!
I guess if you are going into Theatre, NY is the place you need to be... but if you want to climb, ski, hunt, bike, fish and play in the vastness, you come here, more or less.
Dude, by your standards, our land is dirt cheap, and a house that would cost you a bazillion bucks there is being auctioned off in raffles as abandoned or foreclosures. A place next to one of mine was built just about 7 years ago and sets empty right now, the fucking bank can't even water the grass or cut the lawn, they are deliberately letting it get run down so they can depreciate it and get SOMEONE to buy it as a fixer upper... the tenants wear them out so fast renting them newer places is a fools errand. LOTS of that kind of thing.
And why buy/build a cabin when you can get a prefab dropped off at your lot in a few days?
LOTS of people selling their cabins, the Inter-mountain west is dying from over construction, if you went to Nevada, you can buy a pretty nice place, all closed down and boarded up for maybe as low as $30,000 in the mining towns. In Boise, I got a buddy who is just a working guy, no family, damn few friends, who bought a tiny flat for pocket cash, he is less than a mile from the capitol or thereabouts. Owns his place outright, off money he made working as a laborer... no banks involved... ...but he still can't get laid... sex is more expensive than houses in Idaho. A "relationship" is the most expensive commodity you can buy, I guess. Bring one with you, most of the young women have kids and are on some kinda welfare. But if you are that kinda guy, you can pick up a damn good looking YOUNG woman for pretty cheap, guys in their 60's seem to have a lot of them. I could sell Idaho brides to Russians, thats how cheap they are here.
Check out some of the Realtor websites in Idaho, Montana or Wyoming and you may get a shock at how easy it IS to move west if you have any momentum stored away at all. Biggest problem is leaving the people in your life behind, that won't move with you. Many people who try and relocate move home within the first two years, about 1/3 move home again within three years... most who make it that long never return but to visit Momma occasionally. Second biggest problem is finding good paying work. Idaho and most of the Northwest is a stubborn economic near failure, with about 25% actually living on a wage WELL below the Federal Poverty Line. About a third of our little kids live in Poverty officially. A few bucks goes a long ways.
My auto registration fees went up on my three cars this year. The most expensive now is 78 bucks a year! Insurance is CHEAP here, as most people in Idaho have learned to drive at some point; unlike, say, Kali. Or NY.
Moving to a better place than you now live isn't hard, its a little scary and sometimes a lot lonely, but it's not hard. Hell, people from back east move to TUCSON and love it, and Tucson is a PIT of heat, gangs and cockroaches; and EVERYTHING either bites, stings, pokes or is poisonous: fucking IDAHO looks like paradise compared to that.
He is now a dept. head for Columbia's stage productions, scheduling all the acts and events that Columbia University puts on. He had a fellowship at the Lincoln Center and got his Masters at NYU. All of which I would have screwed up had I been around too soon. But had he stayed here, he likely would not be about 100,000 in debt to the school loan people. One reason he cannot return, he couldn't pay off his debts in 20 years if he was here promoting stage acts and lectures, ha-ha!
I guess if you are going into Theatre, NY is the place you need to be... but if you want to climb, ski, hunt, bike, fish and play in the vastness, you come here, more or less.
Dude, by your standards, our land is dirt cheap, and a house that would cost you a bazillion bucks there is being auctioned off in raffles as abandoned or foreclosures. A place next to one of mine was built just about 7 years ago and sets empty right now, the fucking bank can't even water the grass or cut the lawn, they are deliberately letting it get run down so they can depreciate it and get SOMEONE to buy it as a fixer upper... the tenants wear them out so fast renting them newer places is a fools errand. LOTS of that kind of thing.
And why buy/build a cabin when you can get a prefab dropped off at your lot in a few days?
LOTS of people selling their cabins, the Inter-mountain west is dying from over construction, if you went to Nevada, you can buy a pretty nice place, all closed down and boarded up for maybe as low as $30,000 in the mining towns. In Boise, I got a buddy who is just a working guy, no family, damn few friends, who bought a tiny flat for pocket cash, he is less than a mile from the capitol or thereabouts. Owns his place outright, off money he made working as a laborer... no banks involved... ...but he still can't get laid... sex is more expensive than houses in Idaho. A "relationship" is the most expensive commodity you can buy, I guess. Bring one with you, most of the young women have kids and are on some kinda welfare. But if you are that kinda guy, you can pick up a damn good looking YOUNG woman for pretty cheap, guys in their 60's seem to have a lot of them. I could sell Idaho brides to Russians, thats how cheap they are here.
Check out some of the Realtor websites in Idaho, Montana or Wyoming and you may get a shock at how easy it IS to move west if you have any momentum stored away at all. Biggest problem is leaving the people in your life behind, that won't move with you. Many people who try and relocate move home within the first two years, about 1/3 move home again within three years... most who make it that long never return but to visit Momma occasionally. Second biggest problem is finding good paying work. Idaho and most of the Northwest is a stubborn economic near failure, with about 25% actually living on a wage WELL below the Federal Poverty Line. About a third of our little kids live in Poverty officially. A few bucks goes a long ways.
My auto registration fees went up on my three cars this year. The most expensive now is 78 bucks a year! Insurance is CHEAP here, as most people in Idaho have learned to drive at some point; unlike, say, Kali. Or NY.
Moving to a better place than you now live isn't hard, its a little scary and sometimes a lot lonely, but it's not hard. Hell, people from back east move to TUCSON and love it, and Tucson is a PIT of heat, gangs and cockroaches; and EVERYTHING either bites, stings, pokes or is poisonous: fucking IDAHO looks like paradise compared to that.
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MikeK
Re: Ski Bum 101?
I don't eat much red meat anymore. Can I trade for Japanese mushrooms?Rokjox wrote: We get paid in cows, but I like range fed beef...
See that dark splotch surrounded by a blue line? That's where I'll most likely go.
Now look at that really bright one at the bottom of the page, due south of my dark spot. That's where your step son lives.
Right now I live in the second bright spot to the left of the blue line, directly below the lake (that other big dark spot is lake Ontario).
If I were to head to Northern Canada it's even more remote. The east isn't all crowded sub-divisions.
Re: Ski Bum 101?
Man, I messed up that wolf joke. I got six diffenernt endings today, and all of them was funnier than the one I used. A waste.
I just got a couple old pics of a ski climb up Mt. Carter a couple dozen years back, I will scan them and make a post out of it, maybe you guys can look at tiny pieces of the skis and tell me how old it is, we can't find the trip in my buddies log.
Old pics, everyone has huge hair everywhere.
I remember a couple NY women I knew in college used to say that NY had some upstate wildness somewhere. I guess that mega-guey chinese guy didn't buy it ALL up. Its just that I am so damn convinced that I got a pretty good mix of urban and wildlands nearby that i am frigging SMUG about it.
I got a son whose b-i-l is a lifetime army quartermaster of some sort. He probably checks out hand grenades to the underage recruits or something... He just spent the last 6 weeks sucking sun at the Joshua Tree Facility in the amazingly fertile Mohave region of Glorious California, land of sand and (salt) water. He doesn't really do much except drink and shoot shit, but we occasionally got to take him out and amuse him, (you guys got wives, right? It's not usually my choice.)
So we once took a bike ride, that ended poorly as his bike was a kmart job, weighted about 40 lbs and only had one functioning brake... so we sold him a better bike dirt cheap... he still hasn't put new brake shoes in that either, so he has an excuse to not ride it, I guess. Still hasn't paid for it, either...
So THIS time, we went out to the Blacks Creek firing range and worked on scope's zero points for a couple hours, then drove another 15 minutes to an undisclosed location he had never even heard of. He didn't like the cuffs, but once we took the sack off'n his head he shut up.
So we took him to a little graffitti filled snake hole in the ground that lets into a cave, about 30 miles from here that he had no idea existed. (A Boise Lifer at that... get out some guy!) Anywhere else, it'd be too famous, and get dynamited. but here it gets less than about 1 rescue a year, so the cops are familiar enough with it and yet they tolerate the occasional broken leg or stuck fatty plugged into the bottom of the Birth Canal. It goes about 100 yards from entrance to exit (surface distance), but you make at least 3 or 4 down drops of various small distances, a lot of crawling and looking for holes into drops (too much damn paint, all the arrows go every which way) and the short ropes that connect them, a bunch of small rooms to drink beer in and a final climb back out thats about 5.2 but in the dark, underground, so it has a big fall possibility (maybe 40 feet if you really try and pitch?) of some small risk (people HAVE managed to fuc-it-up somehow and hurt themselves) . As he isn't a climber, he managed to flop off the slab, onto his back in a short thump of a fall. You'd think he'd never landed on his pack before. Next time he won't forget his helmet.
It takes about 45 minutes if you run through it and know the way underground, but about 2 hours the way we do it. According to how many beers we are carrying. The sons B-I-L absolutely loved it, had no idea such a place existed, wants to bring the wives next trip. (...well, THEIR wives, not my wife...) Crazy stupid idea...
But we did our jobs per wifely direction, and we now can leave him safely home for another couple months.
Anywhere I been this little crack would be either closed or controlled entrance, but here its a hangout for drunk HS kids to take their dates. One of many, actually. I doubt that Dan will ever forget the experience.
And we used HIS truck, HE gets to clean the ash-mud off'n it. Life is good.
Dave now owes ME a "Dinner with Smucks" weekend... My wifes cousin been bugging me since he moved here a few months ago to go DO something...
I just got a couple old pics of a ski climb up Mt. Carter a couple dozen years back, I will scan them and make a post out of it, maybe you guys can look at tiny pieces of the skis and tell me how old it is, we can't find the trip in my buddies log.
Old pics, everyone has huge hair everywhere.
I remember a couple NY women I knew in college used to say that NY had some upstate wildness somewhere. I guess that mega-guey chinese guy didn't buy it ALL up. Its just that I am so damn convinced that I got a pretty good mix of urban and wildlands nearby that i am frigging SMUG about it.
I got a son whose b-i-l is a lifetime army quartermaster of some sort. He probably checks out hand grenades to the underage recruits or something... He just spent the last 6 weeks sucking sun at the Joshua Tree Facility in the amazingly fertile Mohave region of Glorious California, land of sand and (salt) water. He doesn't really do much except drink and shoot shit, but we occasionally got to take him out and amuse him, (you guys got wives, right? It's not usually my choice.)
So we once took a bike ride, that ended poorly as his bike was a kmart job, weighted about 40 lbs and only had one functioning brake... so we sold him a better bike dirt cheap... he still hasn't put new brake shoes in that either, so he has an excuse to not ride it, I guess. Still hasn't paid for it, either...
So THIS time, we went out to the Blacks Creek firing range and worked on scope's zero points for a couple hours, then drove another 15 minutes to an undisclosed location he had never even heard of. He didn't like the cuffs, but once we took the sack off'n his head he shut up.
So we took him to a little graffitti filled snake hole in the ground that lets into a cave, about 30 miles from here that he had no idea existed. (A Boise Lifer at that... get out some guy!) Anywhere else, it'd be too famous, and get dynamited. but here it gets less than about 1 rescue a year, so the cops are familiar enough with it and yet they tolerate the occasional broken leg or stuck fatty plugged into the bottom of the Birth Canal. It goes about 100 yards from entrance to exit (surface distance), but you make at least 3 or 4 down drops of various small distances, a lot of crawling and looking for holes into drops (too much damn paint, all the arrows go every which way) and the short ropes that connect them, a bunch of small rooms to drink beer in and a final climb back out thats about 5.2 but in the dark, underground, so it has a big fall possibility (maybe 40 feet if you really try and pitch?) of some small risk (people HAVE managed to fuc-it-up somehow and hurt themselves) . As he isn't a climber, he managed to flop off the slab, onto his back in a short thump of a fall. You'd think he'd never landed on his pack before. Next time he won't forget his helmet.
It takes about 45 minutes if you run through it and know the way underground, but about 2 hours the way we do it. According to how many beers we are carrying. The sons B-I-L absolutely loved it, had no idea such a place existed, wants to bring the wives next trip. (...well, THEIR wives, not my wife...) Crazy stupid idea...
But we did our jobs per wifely direction, and we now can leave him safely home for another couple months.
Anywhere I been this little crack would be either closed or controlled entrance, but here its a hangout for drunk HS kids to take their dates. One of many, actually. I doubt that Dan will ever forget the experience.
And we used HIS truck, HE gets to clean the ash-mud off'n it. Life is good.
Dave now owes ME a "Dinner with Smucks" weekend... My wifes cousin been bugging me since he moved here a few months ago to go DO something...
Last edited by Rokjox on Mon Sep 21, 2015 11:32 am, edited 1 time in total.
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MikeK
Re: Ski Bum 101?
We got a little bit of woods here. It ain't bad. Not all of it has been bought up by lumber companies and Chinese conservationists.
Got computer troubles these days. I think the old girl is dying. I'd love to shoot it and give it a proper burial but I think it's going to IT services. I've got work to do too! Don't know what the fuck I'm gonna do? Back up some files and take a nap? Draw things on paper? Quit and go ride my bike?
Got computer troubles these days. I think the old girl is dying. I'd love to shoot it and give it a proper burial but I think it's going to IT services. I've got work to do too! Don't know what the fuck I'm gonna do? Back up some files and take a nap? Draw things on paper? Quit and go ride my bike?
Re: Ski Bum 101?
Run down to Goodwill and pick up another computer for $15. Wahtever is laying on its side. Takes about an hour to rewire the harddrive into the case. cause I can never get the trick to the case until I can find the hammer.
Then either dup the disk or use it as primary.
Then either dup the disk or use it as primary.
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MikeK
Re: Ski Bum 101?
Meh... work computer. One of three... problem is they all do different stuff.