Fifteen Feet

The man who did not beg

2012-02-13T07:00:00.001-08:00

A page from my Prague journal. Not a happy story. I debate whether to share it. But travelling is sometimes less sightseeing and more just plain seeing:

Friday. A day originally planned for hedonism. Wandered down to Husava near Bethlehem Square. A walk filled with traffic and city, working people, playing children, tourists. Found the small memorial to victims of Communism, including Jan Palach (a student who set himself on fire) beneath the shrubs near the statue of St. Wenceslas. Sat beside the memorial for the longest time, thinking. Nazis, Communists, riots, water cannons, freedom, replaced now with the callousness and complacency, shallowness, consumption, rush, that comes with capitalism. A generation who does not struggle, a gift won by their parents. Do they realize? Tourists who drift and gape. No one weeping in the square. No one laying flowers on the graves. Yes, don't waste flowers in this way. There are better ways to honor the dead.

I escaped into Old Town Square intending to eat myself silly, searching the market for bramboraky (potato pancakes) and trdelník (round pastry)...Paid 10KC for a public bathroom. Highway robbery. Trying to decide between 100g of Old Prague Ham or a duck sandwich, I stopped to take pictures of a weaver at a loom. Nearby an old man was reaching into a trashcan. Did not notice him at first, but then after finishing my pictures realized the man had pulled out first one and then another coffee cup - one was a Starbucks - and was trying to sip what little was left from them.

Is it possible for a man who has lived through the Nazis, through the Communists, to stand in the very heart of this city and drink drops of coffee from the trash while all around people pay for painted eggs, tours, candy, great hunks of meat, sugared pastries, overpriced restaurants, admission to a clock? Why does no one stop? Why aren't we lifting this man on our shoulders and celebrating him?

Once I realized, I scrambled for money to give him, and came up the quickest with two 20KC coins just as he was leaving. "Prosim!" I said, holding it out to him. He said thank you in Czech, nodded and smiled - he had not been begging; he had not asked for it. "Prosim," I said again, stupidly, not knowing what else to say, because prosim means please, here you go, and you're welcome. I felt greater and lesser all at once, a saint for charity, and the lowest sinner for my gluttony, that I could think of eating pastries while men still suffer.

Here was a black hole in the marketplace, a void that sucked into it all joy, all color, all bustle. Not from the man, for he was blameless - a saint himself, an angel speaking Czech. The darkness came from what minutes before had been the cheerful crowd, the crowd who had ignored this man with sinister blindness. Where is human kindness? And now I, wracked with guilt, walked towards the Karlův Most, not caring about the traffic. Why hadn't I given him more? Why not have emptied my pockets? What is it to me? No grand lunch for me; I found a 30KC sausage and ate it gratefully, thinking that the man could buy that with my 40KC, at least...But why hadn't I given him more? He might buy himself a whole cup of coffee now, but why hadn't I given him more? He disappeared into the market, humble and bowed with age, and I, stunned, walked towards the bridge.

I want to drink; I want to sip grey coffee in a small and thoughtful place. I need to write to understand this, and now put it to paper on the benches between the Manes and Charles while the happy music from a nearby tent mocks me with its sureness.

Beheading the Lion: Part the Second

2012-02-10T07:00:00.000-08:00

Beheading the Lion: Part the Second
In Which I Bite Off More Than I Can Macerate

(Part One can be found here)

In Spanish sea lions are called lobos marinos, "wolves of the sea." This name is far more befitting. Like wolves, they mingle in gregarious packs of both males and females, even multiple families. The dominant bull, the Beachmaster, puts so much effort into defending his turf that he often forgets to eat, eventually weakening to the point where another bull easily takes his place. Thus the Beachmaster is constantly changing; there are no dictators among sea lions.

When the adults go out hunting for the day, they leave the youngsters in a nursery area with one or two nannies to watch over them. These nursery kids were the ones I played with most often, dependent on who the nanny was for the day. If the nanny was a particularly uptight lady, she would come over and break up the fun, shuffle the youngsters away, and heartily bawl me out for overstepping my bounds.

A true lioness would have just eaten me.

Besides, sea lions look rather more like dogs than cats, a thought that returned to me as I stood next to my dog looking down at the dead sea lion we had uncovered.

It seemed like a young and healthy lion, so the first thing I did was check for bullet wounds. Although all marine mammals here are protected, sea lions have become an especially reviled scapegoat for the failing salmon fishery, an anti-mascot for fishing just as spotted owls are for logging. When officials aren't looking, locals don't hesitate to pop a sea lion with a 7mm.

I'll confess, I too have been aggravated by the sight of a bobbing brown head beelining towards me through the water just when I've gotten a fat fish on the line. The sea lions will tear off chunks until there's very little left to reel in, Old Man and the Sea-style. It's easy pickings for them, and easy curses from me.

But the universal hatred of sea lions in my hometown, the perception that the world would be a much better place without them, that they are good for nothing...this I can't stand. This is misdirected anger, but such is the nature of a scapegoat. I get it. It's much simpler to shoot a sea lion than a dam, or a policy, or a pollution. In the midst of so much helpless frustration, it gives the shooter a satisfying "I've solved a problem!" sort of feeling. We act on our gut and we go by what we can see before our eyes...and we are a people who like to take things into our own hands. We've been on this land for generations.

But they've been here longer.

I digress - There were no bullet holes on this sea lion, nor did it have any other signs of particular distress. It was just plain dead. Unsettling.

The dog, always the optimist, thought this was the greatest beach find in the history of beach finds, something he could roll in for the rest of his life. I had to agree; it seemed a shame to let a perfectly good sea lion go to waste. But as for me, I was thinking of our local museum's educational collection of skulls. I imagined its head being passed around from kid to wondering kid as the instructor asked, "Now what kind of animal do you think this is? Look at its teeth. What does it eat?"

Yes, it was perfect. I would claim its head in the name of education! (And perhaps, possibly, sea lion appreciation?)

Mind you, this is my modus operandi. I'm responsible for many of the dead things in the local museum...no,no,no! Not for killing them. Heavens. For finding them and bringing them in.

Getting the proper paperwork was easy enough, but I had to get it quickly. A seven foot carcass doesn't usually go anywhere on its own, but with winter's stormwaves soon approaching, I knew that any day the sea might reclaim its offering, never to be seen again. Several days later I returned to the beach with a permit, a garbage bag, a hunting knife, and then...

Well.

The lucky thing about this sea lion was that it had been deposited extremely close to the parking lot. The tricky thing about this sea lion was that it had been deposited...extremely close to the parking lot. The day I went to finally fetch my head there were people out on the beach - a beach normally free of people - and so I was forced to wait for them to leave, loitering around in my clear plastic raincoat, humming up at the sky, carrying a huge unsheathed knife and a garbage bag...not at all creepy.

When at last I had the beach to myself, I knelt down and got to work, fearing that any moment a family with young children or a church group or a sheriff would suddenly come strolling up over the foredune, and there I would be - bent over, splattered in blood, hacking away at a sea lion. I prepared myself to say, "It was dead when I found it! I...I have a permit!" Really, there's no good way that conversation could have gone.

Fortunately no one came. A blessing, as I had my hands full enough as it was.

Disclaimer! Warning! - If you should happen upon a dead sea lion in your home or driveway or mailbox, please do not lay into it with a hunting knife. Dead sea lions can transmit leptospirosis through direct contact. Please notify a certified biologist, like me. We will come and creepily (but properly!) dispose of it.

So now at last I was safely back in my car with my treasure: a sea lion skull. Except, except...it was a perfectly wonderful educational skull trapped within about ten pounds of sea lion face. "How on earth am I going to clean this thing?" I suddenly realized.

In the past I've tried cleaning skulls manually. I wouldn't wish this on anyone. I've put them into mesh nets and slung them over a dock to let the wee fishies do their thing. This works, but it takes a ridiculous amount of time. I read about burying bones, but this discolors them, and about boiling bones, but this weakens them (and really, did I want boiled sea lion in my kitchen? No, no I did not.)

So I finally decided on a technique I had never tried: MACERATION. Or in English, "putting it in water until it rots clean."

Now, if you really want to macerate a bone correctly, you should strip all the flesh off it first and then keep it in a sealed container at a constant, preferably warm temperature. Because I'm a cowgirl, I did none of this. I plunked the entire head in a bucket, filled it with the hose, and set it in the side yard. Also added a bit of pond water for good measure, figuring that all those little mandibled beasties might do it some good.

Five weeks later, I had an impressive bucket of sea lion stew.

The trick to this process, you see, is to change the water often enough to keep the water from turning so murkily anaerobic that every last bacteria in it dies, stopping the decomposition process. And this meant, much to my consternation, that I had to handle, frequently, a concoction that immediately rose to #1 in my list of All Time Worst Smells. (This list is not a mild list.) It made my eyes water, my throat close up; with hose and bucket I could be seen crouched on my driveway crying, "Dear God in heaven, why? why?" feeling like a scene from a Hitchcock movie, seriously reconsidering my commitment to children's education, retracing the steps in my life that had brought me to this juncture. The smell would haunt me with headaches and bad tastes for hours afterwards. It was an undiscovered WMD.

But I stuck it to it, determined that somewhere under that grey, somewhat sea-lion-head-shaped horror I had created there was a skull...somewhere, somewhere.

And it was.

After several months, and with one last triumphant tip of the bucket, I picked up my beautiful, perfectly cleaned specimen, a prize that would have been lost back into the ocean, now a sea lion that would teach, maybe even inspire. A sea lion that will pass through the hands of school kids for generations - I hope.

Because I'm not doing that again.

Raucous Caucus Debacus!

2012-02-08T07:00:00.000-08:00

Last night I went to my first-ever caucus. As an observer. My home state has regular old boring ballot boxes, and since I happened to be in a caucus state, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to see what all the fuss was about.

I somehow imagined people sitting around a living room with glasses of port and trays of modest, homebaked cookies, reclining with neighborly good-humor while debating the merits of each candidate. When I learned it was to be held in the local high school instead, my mental image changed to a standing-room only crowd holding high-decibel heated arguments and spitting when an enemy candidate's name was mentioned.

Raucous caucus! Heck yeah!

No.

It was neither raucous nor...Well, it was a caucus, so it had that going for it. We all sat around clustered into precincts while the invocation was given, stood to say the Pledge of Allegiance, then listened as mild yet convicted citizens rose to endorse each candidate one by one, thusly.

What Each Candidate Has Going For Him:
Ron Paul - National defense, stop policing the world, get gov't off our backs
Rick Santorum - Walks the walk, a good guy
Newt Gingrich - Knows how to get things done in Washington
Mitt Romney - Most likely to win (which, in a way, means, "he'll get the votes of moderates," which, in a way, means, "he's the candidate least like a true Republican," but it wasn't quite spelled out like that)

Everyone was extremely civil, referring to Obama as "the current President," which I thought was rather nice considering the acridity that's been plaguing the primaries.

My first thought about the caucus was, "Wow, this is fantastic." A chance to meet neighbors for the first time, a place where politics can be discussed openly and unabashedly. In a ballot box state such as mine, you can conceal your party alignment forever, if you want. There's never a need to tell anyone if you're a Republican or Democrat, and most people are too polite to ask.

But here there are no secrets. You see who's with you; you see your local party more or less in its entirety. There's something old fashioned and wholesome about it, something that stirs up ideas of town hall meetings and patriot pioneers gathering underneath shade trees to debate the topics of the day. Suddenly voting isn't a lonely slip of paper, but democracy at its finest, a chance to sit shoulder to should and divide opinions before reuniting as one community. It made me feel involved, even though I was just an observer.

My second thought was, "Holy cow, all of these people are crazy-go-bats." Many parts of the night felt as though they were scripted by a comedian trying to poke fun at every Republican stereotype under the sun. There were people dressed in tricorn hats and red colonial uniforms. There was the celebrating a local candidate for the fact that she loved her guns (this raised many cheers.) There was the (joking?) reference to the fact that our country might not exist in another two months thanks to the current president. And there was the overwhelming assumption that everyone in the room was completely on the same page, a true-blue dyed-in-the-wool Republican walking lock step with all of the party's flagship issues.

Not so much.

There's something inherently wrong, I think, with the mentality of, "I don't care who our nominee is, so long as he beats the current president." Democrats are just as guilty of this as Republicans. Such a statement is a declaration of narrow-mindedness. To assume that the incumbent represents the worst of all possible candidates is a prejudice that would be heartily tested if one of the Republican B-listers somehow made it to November. I might buy, "Any of the four current nominees would be better," if this mantra hadn't already been initiated three years ago, long before there were any Newts or Mitts or Ricks to attach to the abstract.

Uncomfortable as the uber-Republicanniness made me, I realized that I would have been just as repulsed by its equivalent Democratic counterpart. I feel liberal when I'm with conservatives, conservative when I'm with liberals.

This made me feel better. This is why I am a moderate. This is why I detest labels and pigeonholes, and would be perfectly happy (except for not getting to vote in primaries) if I was not attached to any party whatsoever.

Or as one speaker last night described it, "a person who refuses to take a stand."

Hmm.

Beheading the Lion: Part the First

2012-02-06T07:00:00.000-08:00

A funny little story from 2008 that I never got around to telling. It ended up being so long (because I, hem, got distracted and went off topic) that I broke it into two parts.

Beheading the Lion: Part the First
In Which I Reminisce About Lions I Have Loved and Lost

At the very start of winter here in the Pacific Northwest, there is a delicate window of opportunity between the departing storms of tourists and the oncoming storms of the ocean. In that window, the sky and the land and all the sea look exactly like a snapshot of the worst the winter has to offer - grey and cold, with heavy wet sand and trees sheared by the cutting wind. But it is nothing more than that - a still, silent picture of what is soon to come. The waves have yet to turn angry, the surf pulls in and out with sullen patience. The sea is waiting to strike. The clouds wait to rain, the wind waits to bite.

But not yet. Although winter will unleash itself soon, in that brief early window of warning the beach is a wonderful, wild place to explore. And so, one day in early November, I took the dog out for a walk. We had the sand to ourselves, miles untouched in either direction. The hills in the distance watched us like wise old men, beards of fog trailing across the sand into the ocean.

While I was hunting for shells along the tide line, the dog looked for smells. How often I had to drop everything to stop him from rolling in an old carton of bait or a washed-up fish head! Near the end of the walk he spent longer than usual smelling around the edges of a curious mound of sand. I went to investigate. My dog was digging now, and I leaned in to help him uncover his prize. It was a black flipper. I brushed away more sand, and attached to the black flipper was a hide of deep brown fur, and attached to the fur was a dead sea lion, seven feet from nose to tail.

I would like to think that I have a better understanding of sea lions than most people, not because I'm particularly insightful, but because of a job that put me right in the middle of a sea lion colony. Before that, I knew them only through brief encounters - a head bobbing in the harbor, a playful visit while scuba diving, watching through telescopes, waving hopeful to catch the attention of a sleek body gliding past the viewing window of an aquarium. I remember a colony at the waterfront in Cape Town that would haul out onto the docks and amuse tourists with their bickering. Sea lions have always been part of the coastal landscape to me, something just there, sleeping brown blobs that will occasionally move or bark in tandem, but tedious to watch and too distant to understand.

That all changed on the Island. (Location: Undisclosed.) There the sea lions were not distant and mysterious, but my neighbors every moment of every day. Anything that involved the water involved the sea lions. When I went to the surf to wash the dishes or take a bath or launder my clothes, they were right there, trying to see what I was doing. When I went for a swim to cool off, they came to join me, and after a while I learned how to imitate them. I swam upside down, as they preferred. I learned how to flip and quickly change directions, how to have the most fun with bubbles, and how to keep my eyes open, always open, until the salt no longer burned and the border between air and water became a very insubstantial thing indeed.

They were masters of the water, yet could take nothing seriously. They showed me that any new object was a potential plaything, especially man-made flotsam like ropes and PVC pipes and plastic forks. I joined them in their rowdy games of tug-of-war and keep-away. When I ignored them and went back to watching fish, they snuck up behind me, gathering there in anticipation. As soon as I turned around they scattered in all directions, a game of "no see me." They never let me catch them. I could almost hear them snickering.

Each day when the sea turned, the sea lions rushed to the breakwater to bodysurf the waves of the incoming tide. I tried this rough sport a few times, never quite as good as they were. Whenever a neighboring surfer passed me with a backwards glance, I couldn't tell if the look in his eyes was of pity or smug mockery. But they all seemed to delight in the fact that I made the attempt, and pointedly stayed close beside me, as though encouraging me on. (Or perhaps just for laughs.)

When at last I couldn't keep up anymore I would watch from afar as they grandstanded - riding on top of the very crests of the waves, throwing themselves high above the water with aerial acrobatics, leaping, spinning, somersaulting, touching nose to tail - until the tide slacked off and the water went calm once more. Time to haul out for a nap.

On the land, it was a different story. Whereas they circled me playfully in the water, it was I who had the advantage on dry ground. My sleek and graceful friends transformed into awkward creatures with harsh voices and horrible smells, gracelessly humping along the sand inch by inch as I nimbly, nonchalantly passed them by. Often they piled along the beach so thickly that it became a challenge to walk anywhere without stepping on a fin or whisker. Any small disruption to one would cause him to wake up and complain, which made the ones around him wake up and complain, which bothered everyone else, a chain reaction, until soon the entire beach was one long line of groaning, whining, squirming sea lions. They did this to themselves, too, especially in the middle of the night. Their culture dictated that if one accidentally woke up, everyone should wake up...including any poor humans who happened to be trying to sleep in tents nearby.

They never quiet got used to the fact that the part of the beach where we lived was no longer theirs to command. And so it was that I and my coworkers would be sitting around the table eating popcorn or listening to the shortwave, and suddenly a youngster would flop into our midst, carelessly knock over a camp stool with his flippers, bump jars and bottles off the top of the cooler, then throw his head back, whine "Maaaaaaaw!" and proceed to pass gas strong enough to make birds drop out of the sky. We would stand up and shoo him out, and all the way he would complain, "Maaw! Maa-aaah!" while his nearby comrades grumbled at us for being inconsiderate.

They felt - and were - entitled to everything on the beach. Objects on land were meant to be climbed on, no matter if they were chairs, tents, other sea lions, or a radio someone (me) was trying to listen to. Once an offending obstacle had been successfully climbed, a sea lion celebrated the accomplishment by snorting out a blast of salty water from his nose, falling asleep on it, and emanating noxious smells.

One day I was reclining in my hammock with a good book - and believe me, any book is good if you're stuck on an island - when a friendly lion fellow decided that the very exact place he wanted to be was underneath me. I didn't necessarily mind this, even if it would draw in more flies than were already swarming around me, but what I did mind was that one of my few precious pairs of sunglasses was resting on the sand right where he was about to flop. I made a snatch to save them. An arm coming down from nowhere must have been a startling sight for the sea lion, because he suddenly lunged up and hit my hammock from the underside, flailing around and giving me a decent eight seconds of rodeo action. I was still clutching the sides of the hammock for dear life when he finally retreated back down the beach, complaining about the unfairness of the world in general.

I miss those fellows - those smelly, graceful, graceless fellows who filled my days with stories. I lived with them as equals, both of us trying, wide-eyed, to understand each other's strange habits. The sight of the dead sea lion brought back all of those memories in one great rush, and I suddenly realized I'd been staring down at it for an unnecessarily long time...

Thus ends part the first.

Pictures of Prague: Part II

2012-02-03T07:00:00.000-08:00

More things of interest, as seen through a viewfinder:

It's a door! Covered with heads! I sat and pondered this for some time. The best I could come up with is that these heads are placed similarly to where doornails would be. Ergo, each man represents a nail, a commentary on how Communism belittled the people's very bodies as menial components easily sacrificed to support the structure of the greater machine...little acknowledging that without such support, the machine could not stand. Gives new nuance to "hitting the nail."

Speaking of heads, I overcame one of my greatest food phobias and sampled, for the first time, HEADCHEESE. Not just headcheese, but headcheese suspended in MYSTERIOUS CLEAR JELLY. It was incredibly tasty. I might have to start looking for a new "scary food" to make jokes about.

This picture is not a picture of that meal. (The headcheese picture, in all honesty, looks nasty.) This is a picture of pork knuckle and Czech dumplings. Don't ever let anyone tell you the Czechs don't know how to cook. The food in Prague was all fantastic, and included the best bacon and sausage I've ever tasted. You can eat your way from one end of town to the other...and then drink your way back on Turkish coffee, mead, and mulled wine.

This building makes actual unicorns weep. It was located in the more modern outskirts of the city, where hulking grey concrete cubes built during the Communist era dominate.

The best thing about this poster is not that it advertises hallucinogenic alcohol in a kiddie-friendly form, but that the green fairy flaming kiddie nightmare cone is "kosher."

Here's a menu that really, really tried. I think this was supposed to be dessert. Other sections of the menu included "From piggy" and "From the moo-cow."

Looming over the city nightscape and the dancing lights of the Vltava, Pražský hrad (Prague Castle.) Despite the fact that it sat atop a steep hill, I often found myself arriving at the castle whether I intended to or not. For that reason it came to represent the heart of the city to me.

A New Posting Schedule (let's see if it sticks)

2012-02-02T07:00:00.000-08:00

Hoo-rah. Did you notice? It's a big accomplishment that I, of all people, should post every day this week. Boy, do I feel savvy. But then it occurred to me sometime in the dead of the night while I was fighting both delirium and a JPG that blogging is a Great Big Time Suck, and I have actual work to do. Posting every day? What am I thinking? I'll burn out faster than a, than a...

There, see? Now I've gone and lost my ability to make analogies. Man down. Fuse blown.

My future goal is to use Fifteen Feet as a future newsreel for any future escapades. A rambling, rhyming, guilt-wracked, off-topic newsreel. Soon my workload will increase exponentially until it reaches the point of physical impossibility. Tune in! Watch a nervous breakdown in real time!

Therefore, for the sake of sanity, no daily posts. But for the sake of my poor neglected blog I'm making a commitment to update regularly on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Done. Said. Public. Committed. At least until this fall when all hell breaks loose.

The reason I've been posting so much lately is that I've been trying to get around to the point of my story, but I've come to realize that my pace is glacial and my attention is...what's that?! Ah, right. The point of my story will make an appearance here sooner or later. (Besides the fact that it already has.)

I'm not being evasive. It started in Prague.

A Love Song to the Mother of Cities

2012-02-01T08:00:00.000-08:00

Praha, dobrý den, I greet you,
golden city spires that heat the
sun; the Prašná brána glowing
in the morning shine and showing
Gothic-y disdain, as ever,
to Špillar's Nouveau endeavor.
Down the Krakovska I drift and,
děkuji Praha!, the rifted
cobble gives my feet no falter
(Reagents' unintended altar);
with each stone a thought you foster
like an endless paternoster.
Who am I to castles climb
above the Sister of the Rhine? Oh
hail the roiling rushing river
Vltava, má vlast forever!
Lifted by Smetana's grace or
by a becherovka bracer,
either way, Boheme, I raise
a glass to health, nazdravi!, praise! for
with Orloj or metronome,
the time you trace is now your own.

For Prague I could go on and on...

If anyone's wondering what the heck I'm saying:

Mother of Cities, The Golden City, Praha = Prague
dobrý den = hello
Prašná brána = the Gothic Powder Tower
Špillar = designer of the Art Nouveau mosaic on the Municipal Building
Krakovska = a street I frequented
děkuji = thank you
Reagents = fellows who were defenestrated during a Catholic/Protestant kerfuffle
paternoster = an elevator that never stops moving
castle = the Prague Castle, sitting on a hill above the city
Vltava = the longest river in the Czech Republic
Má vlast = "My Country," a symphony by Smetana
becherovka = an alcohol
Bohemia = another name for the region
nazdravi! = Health! A toast!
Orloj = the Astronomical Clock
metronome = well...it's a gigantic working metronome. It sits high on a hill that once had a huge statue of Stalin. They say it counts down the time until Prague is invaded once again.

There, now I can't be accused of being cryptic.

Eating Out: The Prague Edition

2012-01-31T08:00:00.001-08:00

A page from my journal:

Last night's pizza dinner reinforced what seems to be the trend in restaurants here. Here's how it goes...

1. You sit down.

2. "Mluvite anglicky? (Do you speak English?)" you say. "No," says the waiter. This might be short for "ano," which means "yes" in Czech...or it might be the only English word he knows.

3. Waiter immediately wants your order; what do you want? What? What? What? Hurry up!

4. The menu is poorly translated. Your phrase book keeps opening to "At the Post Office." Panicking, you make a Hail Mary and point at something, sincerely hoping that syrem means "cheese" and not "headcheese."

5. Food takes forever to come. (Actually, it's not bad in most places, but this pizza joint was abysmal. Also, don't ask why we were eating pizza, of all things, in Prague. Just don't.)

6. Optional intermission: adventures in bathroomland.

7. Food comes. It is thankfully more cheese than head. "Dobrou chut!" says the waiter. (Enjoy your meal.) "Dobrou chut!" you say back, because (curiously) that's the thing to do.

8. Nazdravi, you eat!

9. You must flag down the waiter, who is trying very hard to ignore you, otherwise the bill will never come.

10. Before your party can correctly divide the bill, your waiter is hovering over you. Pay now! Pay now! Pay! Pay! Hurry up! Get out!

That, pretty much, has been my experience.

Pictures of Prague: Part I

2012-01-30T08:00:00.000-08:00

Some of the things I came across during my Praha week:

I drool over interesting gargoyles. I guess the feeling is mutual. Because of its age and turbulent history, Prague has some amazing architecture going on. So many different styles, from Gothic to Art Deco to Neoclassical...It's as if the city designer was handed a slip that said, "Please build incredible things; no genre!"

Painted eggs for sale at the outdoor Easter market. A pysanky paradise.

I might have bought one of these boar skins, but I'm pretty sure customs wouldn't have approved.

A traditional children's folk dance at the outdoor market. I'm not sure what the story was, but it went somewhere along the lines of: the girls celebrate the advent of spring by picking flowers, milking cows, and parading with the milk tins, then the boys come along and beat the girls with sticks until they run away screaming. (Don't worry; the sticks have ribbons.) This photo shows the part where the boys are threatening to hit the girls. All the while, younger children on the edge of the stage merrily dance and sing.

???

Watching this was one of the times I really wished I spoke Czech.

A McDonald's right outside the Museum of Communism. Two red symbols of terror. (Three, if you count the trash can that is clearly labelled as a bathroom.)

Top, a motivational poster greeting Czech workers during the height of the Communist era. Below, a translation for us schmucks wandering the museum.

If you're going to San Francisco, do the hair/flowers thing, but if you're going to Prague, take a can of spray paint. This is the John Lennon Peace Wall, which was once used to write covert Beatles-related messages opposing Communism. It's still being overwritten daily with fresh messages of love and peace. Now instead of carrying the secret hopes of a few Czech students, it's an international canvas for anyone who comes to visit a new free Prague.

The Beginning.

2012-01-29T08:00:00.000-08:00

"Let's go to Prague," my good friend said.

"Sure. Why not?" I said.

...

Maybe that's not exactly how that conversation went down. It was probably more along the lines of, "I'm going to Prague...wanna come along?" We're starting a tradition, I guess, where she picks some random far-flung place to visit random far-flung friends and family for her spring break vacation, and I tag along for the adventure. I hope it's a tradition; I rather like it.

For example, several years ago we went together to Ecuador, and although it was my third time there, I felt like I had never seen the place before. Certainly not like that. Ecuador in a week! Two days in the jungle! Two days in the city!! Two days in the mountains!!! Nearly get killed by a snake, eat bull testicles, play soccer straddle the equatorwaaaaa-haaa! If living in a country for several months gives one a true local's taste of it, speed-touring through a representative cross-section of a country is like falling Alice-in-Wonderland-style into a promotional TV travelogue.

That's what I was expecting for Prague. Shutter snaps of Central Europe!! Vienna, Bulgaria, Warsaw! (Obviously I was not really looking at a map, just randomly naming places in the nearby...continent.)

Instead, I discovered that once I got to Prague, I didn't want to leave it. A week spent in the heart of one city doesn't have to be a snapshot. It can be intensive...and intense.

Thus began one of the strangest trips of my life. I'd call it life-changing...but really, aren't they all?

The Reminder.

2012-01-28T07:00:00.000-08:00

speculam in rebus talibus crastinam invenio

This has been my wallpaper for nearly two years.

nihil nimis difficilis somnianti

Fiddly

2012-01-27T00:18:00.000-08:00

Could not read that last post without going back and editing it.

It's always that way with me. Every time I reread something I wrote, I have to revise it. A post goes through several versions before it ends up here, cemented, visible to the naked eye. But then...if I should happen to read it again...

Tinker, tinker, tinker.

That's the great thing about my blog, y'all! Not only does it have new posts every now and then, but the posts that are already up are constantly changing! It's alive! Yes! Go back to the beginning and read it all over again. It's ALL DIFFERENT. It's the BEST.

(I might be exaggerating. A little.)

Lost Draft: 20 Things to Do

2012-01-26T16:17:00.000-08:00

While browsing through my unpublished drafts, I came across this 2007 list of things to do before I die:

1. Learn Morse code
2. Join a protest
3. Apprentice to a master sushi chef
4. Write a musical play
5. Take a homeless person out to lunch
6. Travel as a crewmember on a sailing ship
7. Walk across the Brooklyn Bridge
8. Build a treehouse

Five years later and much more the responsible adult, here are some things I would add:

9. Make a quilt
10. Publish a novel
11. Memorize the constellations
12. Start drawing a long-form webcomic (maybe even finish it)
13. Learn how to spin a car 180
14. Get my black belt
15. Fund a scholarship
16. Go to Antarctica
17. Bake a good loaf of sourdough
18. Dive with a whale
19. Play the fiddle
20. Shoot a clay pigeon

The list is always changing. I crossed out the original #5 and #6, since those two are (dun du-du duuuh!) ACCOMPLISHED!

In their place I'll put:

5. Try jellied eel
6. Get a PhD

And I've had plenty of chances to try to shoot a clay pigeon...I just haven't hit one yet.

But last year I did begin another one of my long-time goals - I started sponsoring a child. She's six, she lives in Mozambique, and the few letters and drawings we've exchanged so far have been wonderful. I'm excited to be in her life as she grows up. I hope I can help inspire her to stay in school as long as possible. I worry for her and the gender constraints she might face as a young woman in Africa. Maybe someday I'll get to meet her. What an amazing day that would be!

(Edit: Yikes. The above sounds...sanctimonious. Complete fail in tone. Really I just wanted to say !!!!! but that's kind of hard to put into words. Seriously, people, I'm super excited about my sponsor kid. That's what I get for writing while I'm distracted.)

Back to the list, though, it's really not all-inclusive. There are so many things to do, learn, make. Life, why are you so short?

Fair disclosure: I haven't included any goals that are imminently about to be fulfilled...

Too many pixels in my life

2012-01-25T22:47:00.000-08:00

Oh my goodness, this blog is keeping me from going crazy right now.

These days I'm spending all of my waking hours using the computer. Screens. So many screens. And so how do I relax from the computer? I write a blog post, naturally. Man, I've forgotten what a book even feels like.

I was good and pulled myself away to visit the gym today, but it's still too darn windy to go outside for some fresh air. (Well...I can get fresh air. It's just that I get it at 100mph all at once. I risk inflating like a balloon.)

Thank goodness for forums to vent: cars, showers, and blogs!

Synezthszesszsss...

2012-01-23T22:46:00.000-08:00

Synesthesia. An unpronounceable name for an indescribable sensation. That's what I wanted to title this post. Or, if I was personifying the word, I might have titled it, "The Tiny Matriarchal Nation of Mild and Unassuming People Who Feel Embarrassed About Being Roped Into a Medical Term." (More on this later.)

Actually, I originally went for "Confessions of a Synesthete," but it turns out someone has an entire blog named this. And a colorful life they must have. I guess I could have gone with Synestacular!, which could also be the name for a travelling science museum exhibit, or perhaps "Synesthesia: Apparently I Have Every Form of It."

Well, no. That's not quite true. I don't taste pistachios when clocks chime, for instance. And besides, it turns out that synezthssss is fairly common. Nearly everyone has some variety, otherwise circular clocks and rectangular calendars would never have caught on. So perhaps the better title would be "In Which I Further Establish My Own Normalcy in Line with the Rest of Humanity."

This synesszths to which I refer, of course, is the condition where...words...and colors...er, collide to form vast new galaxies...wait, that's something else.

How do I describe it? (Let me count the ways: female, female, red, yellow...) At first I thought this would be easy, but I might as well try to describe that dream I had where the dinosaurs went to war with the Muppets. To Wikipedia!!

Synesthesia is a neurologically based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.

Now you know what I'm talking about, right? It's the criss-crossing of perceptions, like if someone sees green when they read the word "library," tastes strawberries when they hear Dvorak's "New World Symphony," hears a cat meowing if they see a hexagon...that's synesthesia. It's the blazing of neural pathways, formed during the brain's early development, between sensory regions that aren't usually connected. And though it's not uncommon, it's unique from person to person, with as many possible combinations as there are possible perceptions.

(It's also apparently sponsored by Skittles: "Taste the Rainbow!"®™©)

Oh, these kinds of strange neurological phenomena hook me like nobody's business, a fascination that began when I first read Dr. Oliver Sack's "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat." Thus my delight when I discovered that, though I'm not quite worthy of a Dr. Sacks chapter (and that's probably a good thing), I can count myself among the proud number (blue) of the synesthete community...even if I can't pronounce its name.

I have three of the most common forms of synesthesia: OLP, color-graphemic, and time-space.

1. Ordinal Linguistic Personification, or "Number 72 Loves His Beef Wellington"

Anyone who has been around me long enough has inevitably heard my "letters have personalities" conversation starter (or stopper), which I like to throw out there because:

A) It is strange, and the reactions I get are amusing

B) I secretly want to find other people who can sympathize with what the heck I'm talking about

C) It's more dinner friendly than the "jungle parasites" conversation

OLP people begin personifying numbers and letters at a very young age, perhaps the moment they learn them, and once designated these personalities become fixed for life. If someone with OLP sees the letter H as a cocky Frenchman at age 6, H will still seem to be a cocky Frenchman at age 86.

H is not a cocky Frenchman for me, but I do have my own unique set of personalities for letters, numbers, colors, days of the week, months of the year, words...etc.

For instance, the letter F is a young, rather weak-kneed fellow who would get into trouble if it wasn't for the older, wiser gentleman G living right next to him. Troublemaker E loves to drag F into his antics, but can't do a thing with his other neighbor, the perky and somewhat daft lady D... and so forth.

So when I seen a word, I don't see just the meaning of the word, but a complex interaction of personalities. Perhaps this explains my unusually good ability to catch spelling errors. "If" and "of" are pleasing to my eye because the strong letters I and O put docile F in his place, but if I see something like "fo", it looks as wrong as a dog taking a man for a walk. Of course, I have to know what the correct word looks like to begin with, otherwise I'd think there was nothing wrong, per se, with a dog walking a man.

In that regard OLP imparts a bit of an editor's advantage, but sometimes the personalities are more confusing than helpful. I can never quite remember that the "subject" comes before the "object" in a sentence. O and the word she commands is very dominant, while S and her word are submissive. I want to rank them in order of their energy, so "object" always tries to come first.

The letters in my words sometimes shift vertically according to their relative dominance, making it difficult to scan text quickly. This is extremely exaggerated, but I see MOCK TURTLE SOUP sort of like:Besides an active emotional life for each letter, each word has its own personality too. This is dependent on the letters it contains and the order they're in. A word like "Eiffel" is a veritable frat house, thanks to E's loose morals. "Synesthesia" is a tiny nation of like-minded, mild, mostly female letters.

Words retain their identities no matter where they are. Within a sentence, the words interact with each other like a room full of people.

For example, in that last sentence there were three distinct social cliques, plus some aggression between the beginning and ending. The dominant words are marked in bold, the submissive by parentheses:
Withinasentence,thewords......interact(with)eachotherlike......aroom(full)ofpeople.

I never mind these interactions much when I'm reading, ignoring them sort of the same way that I might ignore all the conversations around me as I beeline towards the dessert table at a crowded buffet. But when I pause to consider the structure of the sentence, the interactions are always there.

Only once did I meet someone who experience something similar to my letter-personification, although the personalities of her letters were completely different than mine...and therefore heresy!! Truly, someone saying something like "the letter B is male" might as well try to convince me that the ocean is filled with toothpaste.

Recently while ~~procrastinating by surfing the internet~~ looking for anyone else who might have the same thing, I finally turned up a name for all this craziness: Ordinal Linguistic Personification. It's been officially documented only lately...although it's probably as common as mud, if subsequent forums and message boards are any indication. And everyone says the same thing - "We thought we were the only ones who had this!"

Actually, finding other people with OLP is deeply annoying. The conversations always descend into arguments about which letter is having an affair with which, etc. Or else the conversation consists entirely of dry, unreadable, unrelatable lists:

A is a boy
B is a polite lady
C is a vicar
D is a prostitute who's just trying to earn enough money for college
E is a dopey British man with a knife
F is my dog Steve

That kind of thing. Since no two people every have identical synesthesia, these discussions essentially become as pointlessly circular as blind men describing elephants.

No. I don't want to hear about who populates your alphabet. Please don't list the fights your colors have had, or the favorite foods of every number between one and a thousand. Because you are very boring when you're like this. Also, you're wrong.

Oh heck...As long as I'm throwing around graphics, here are the genders (sans personalities) of my cardinal numbers:While such arguments tend to be dull beyond salvation, I have to admit that it's very hard not to go around educating people that the number 2 is, in fact, a lady. (Whose personality is very similar to the letter R and Saturday and December and red....ah, can't stop!)

Truth be told, I'm really more of an EP (Everything Personifier) because I do this with all inanimate objects, including rocks, telephones, my own fingers...huh. (I never really thought about that last one until just now. What are you looking at, Mr. Pinkie-on-the-right-hand?) My place setting is a tangle of love and angst on an operatic scale, with the hot-headed fork in a relationship with the napkin, yet having a burning undying love for the spoon, who is in a committed relationship with the knife, who has a history with the napkin yet is far too much of a gentleman to leave the love of his life. The plate is a bachelor.

Come on now, synesthetic researchers. Come up with a name for that one!

2. Color-Graphemic, or "Your Middle Name is Too Purple"

Speaking of red, the colors in the above examples are far from random. For me, 2 is always red, 7 always blue, and so forth what have you. This is a different type of synesthses...syn...ssszz...

Okay, seriously. Can everyone in the synesthetic community (or "Synesociety") please agree on an easier, cooler term to use? I suggest brain wizardry.

Anyway, color-graphemic brain wizardry links the perception of colors with numbers and letters. It's the most common form of brain wizardry, and one that's easily measurable. And when I say that, I'm referring to the Synesthesia Battery, an online test that measures synesthesia based on colors, genders, and spatial relationships.

The Battery takes a bit of time, but it's a great deal of fun. Go on and try it. If you turn out to be a synesthete, I'll buy you a cookie. (Which you will not be able to eat, because it will have a personality and a backstory of tragic failure and redemption.)

I scored high, but here's my secret. This test measures mostly color-graphemic synesthesia - sorry, brain wizardry - and my numbers and letters have colors only because they and those colors share a common personality. The number 8 and the month of December are both red because, like the color red, they are both brassy women. Because their personalities align so much with the personality of the color red, they will always and forever be red.

But there are 26 letters, 10+ numbers, and only about 10 colors, so invariably I'll have a problem like the letter N, whose personality doesn't match that of any color. Consequently, I'm lost. G is like a Cherokee filling out a questionnaire that reads "White or African American, check one." And so the color of the letter G constantly shifts in my mind, sometimes dark green, sometimes dark blue or gray, a chameleon varying between the various shades of his personality.

3. Time-Space, or "Get Your Elbow Out of My September"

When I read James Gurney's Dinotopia as a kid, one section jumped out at me more than any other, and years later I was able to remember it almost word for word:

"You of the West," Malik said, "think of time moving in a straight line, from past to present to future. Your eastern brothers regard time as a circle, returning endlessly in a cycle of decay and rebirth. Both ideas have a dimension of the truth. If you were to combine geometrically the movement of the circle with the movement of the line, what would you have?" He snapped his mouth shut and peered at me with an uncanny resemblance to my old schoolmaster.

"The spiral?" I ventured.

"Yes, yes. Or the helix. They are our models of the passage of time."

"So time moves on, but history repeats itself."

This made so much sense to me. Time as a spiral! Yet even though it logically made sense, I couldn't undo my perception that years move in a forward line, months move in a circle, weeks move in an oval, and days move up and down.

Time-space synesthesia may be the most common of all the synesthesia. In fact, it's reasonable to believe that the human brain has incorporated this cross-wiring into its normal structure, a product of trying to convert an abstract concept - time - into something that can be communicated and, more importantly, recorded. All human civilizations develop a physical representation of time, whether it's marks on a clay cylinder or moons on a deerskin canvas. People are predisposed to time-space synesthesia.

Trouble arises when the mind's representation of time does not match the actual passage of time, and therein lies my problem.

There's a wonderful BBC News article called "Can you see time?" by Victoria Gill (9/11/09) that details many of the forms of synesthesia, especially time-space. While I was reading it, I came across an illustration (based on an illustration by Carol Steen) that made me nearly jump up out of my chair. It's the representation of how one synesthete views the calendar year:

I was a bit stunned by its familiarity. "That's it! That's it! That's just like mine!" I said. My second thought was, "What on earth happened to this person's poor year?" I wanted to take a bike pump to it.

I say this because, for comparison, here's mine, with the months' colors and the approximate dates for the 3, 6, 9, and 12 o'clock positions. It truly is that round.

Also, what is going on with the man in the middle of that illustration? Do...do some people mentally pivot around in the middle of their year? (And if so, do they feel trapped by time?) Does time rotate them, or do they work it like a hula hoop? Hmm, the article mentions nothing of this.

My circle floats vertically in my mind. The blank space in the middle does not exist, or if it does, it can't be looked at directly, an elusive timeless place beyond the water lilies, sort of like Aslan's land in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Unfortunately, because my weeks and years are so uneven I sometimes think I have a lot more time than I actually do. (October through December race by at an alarming speed.) And after the 6-o-clock position on the clock, I reverse my weeks and start climbing up through them backwards. The month of November:

But wait, it gets worse.

The way I envision a single week is actually like this:

So when I think of November, the looping week combined with the backside of the "annual clock" gives me a internal picture that looks something like this, if November 1st is on a Sunday:

(I've just realized that I gave November thirty-one days. Well, ignore that last Tuesday, because I'm not gonna redraw the whole darn thing.)

Unless I'm using something that puts time in its proper perspective, like a day planner, I struggle to track time realistically. You'd think I would learn how to ignore the idea that November takes up 1/6 of the year, but this mental image is so deeply embedded that I find myself completely surprised, year after year, when it's suddenly December. Where does the autumn go?

So that's what I can say about synesthesia. It's more in-depth than most of the other posts I've seen online about it. It's not nearly as in-depth as I could make it, but no matter. Since no one else sees the world quite the same way as I see it, it's more of an academic exercise, a self-affirmation, to attempt to describe it, friendly colors, frantic months, feuding forks, and all.

Mystery

2012-01-23T00:56:00.000-08:00

The burden of knowing
falls to the eyes
alone, and growing
from infinite lies
of vision and reasoning
out of what shows,
they mark without measuring,
thus presuppose.

What, when a mystery
weighing unfairly
on visual history
hints, oh, but barely,
of oceans of knowledge
untravelled, but wide,
can sight's simple sortilege
hope to provide?

Things I Clearly Don't Understand

2012-01-20T17:13:00.001-08:00

Reading back through my blog after this long hiatus is somewhat depressing, mostly because it

A) Makes me think that in the last few years I've lost both my sense of humor and my ability to write, and

B) Documents the slow decline in my online self-documentation, also known as the No-One-Cares!/None-of-Your-Business! malady.

There's definitely a fine line between blogging too frequently (reduced to describing what clothes you're wearing, what you're eating) and blogging so infrequently that everyone forgets you're alive.

Readership: It's a Double-Edged Sword.

I'd love to change the format of my blog, but this template seems to be grandfathered in. I'm kind of afraid to touch it. If I could improve on anything, I'd widen the text field to make it easier to read. CTRL+ works pretty well, too. (CTRL+ is the lifesaver of many a strained eye.)

If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's not to directly link to random sites nor use images other than my own, if I can help it. I, in my young and innocent blogging youth, never expected the occasional subsequent vitriol I got from sharing fun internet tidbits. So a blog isn't quite the same as a casual dorm newsletter - check. If SOPA had passed five years ago, I'd probably be in jail.

I've decided to give comment moderation a try after getting my latest round of comments like, "This text interesting I was reading Good Blog! Click on link too recieve 20% gasoline coupon." Because I've never done comment moderation before, it'll probably mean that I'll accidentally end up deleting everyone's comments.

Ha-aha-ha! CENSORSHIP!

Blown In

2012-01-18T16:32:00.000-08:00

A Colorado weather report:

My goodness, today has been FRIGHTENING. I've never been in a windstorm quite like this one before.

Yesterday, deceived by the cheerful sun and blue skies, I went out to the park. At first I thought, "Hum, this wind is rather harsh," then I started having trouble walking against it. I was thinking, "This the is the strongest wind I've ever felt," when I suddenly noticed a dark cloud in the distance rising with alarming alacrity, and moments later was being pelted by every loose bit of dirt and dust in the entire valley. By the time I dove back into the car (total time spent outside: 7 minutes) I was spitting grit out of teeth.

The paper that day, as I struggled to get it out of the mailbox before the wind could tear it from my fingers and blow it all the way to Kansas, read, "Severe Winds Predicted..." Yes.

It's been so deceptive, this wind. From inside the day looks perfectly manageable, all bright and breezy, with the first real warmth we've had in a long time. It lures me out of the house. Yet the moment I step outside, just as soon as I'm too far from the door to dive back into it again, I'm surrounded by the most tremendous sound.

It's a hard sound to describe. In print, it might look something like;

WHoOOORRRROOAARRRSHHHHHHH!

It's the sort of sound that makes a person crouch down. The sound you might hear if you were in the middle of a mighty breaking roller, or inside a kettledrum. It's the sound of wind tearing through the trees at 95mph.

I've heard disturbing weather-related sounds before. When I lived in the rainforest, we could hear the rain coming from miles way. It was a murmur in the distance at first, the patter against the leaves, then slowly multiplied a million fold like someone turning up the volume on an applauding audience. Whenever we heard it, we'd have conversations like:

"Rain's coming."

"A'yup."

*pause*

"Better get the clothes in."

"A'yup."

Actually, the conversations were never as relaxed as that. We were always stressed about drying our clothes. It rained so frequently, and was otherwise so incessantly damp, that the few precious hours of baking hot sun were the only chance we had to get the mold completely dried out of our clothes/mattresses/sundry items. If our clothes were still on the lines when the rains came, it meant another whole day of attempted drying. So our conversations were more along the lines of:

"...Rain?"

"Rain? Aaa! Rain!!!"

*group stampede to tear all the clothes off the lines*

I've also been in some pretty frightening thunderstorms, the sort where lightening is flashing all around, trees are exploding, etc. Those things are scary. But they don't generate a constant fear. It's more of a fearful anticipation, waiting to see where and when the next bolt...and thenCRASH BOOM! You jump ten feet off the ground, but you're still alive; you haven't been hit. Getting through one of those kinds of storms is stressful in the same way that watching a suspenseful thriller is stressful.

Now a windstorm like this, this generates a feeling of immediate NO, sort of like when the VCR suddenly eats that suspenseful thriller you've been watching and starts spitting out tangled loops of tape while shrieking like an injuring animal. This does not call for an edge-of-your-seat, wait-and-see type strategy. The body's instincts say, "I am not going to deal with this. Do not want." Immediately you either go rip the VCR out of the wall (does anyone still have VCRs?) or else go make some popcorn and ignore it while it catches on fire.

That's my reaction to the windstorm. I go outside, am knocked over by a blast of sticks and dirt and leaves, the whole world roars at me, and I retreat. Do not want.

This storm's been going for days now, and is supposed to last until tomorrow. I can't do a darned thing outside until it quits. I've heard about getting snowed in and rained in, but whoever heard about getting blown in?

And now something has just clunked down loudly on the roof - the days have been filled with mysterious clunks and cracks - so I'm going to go investigate whether a tree has fallen, or whether an elk has been picked up and dropped down, or whether we still have a roof over there at all.

Lost Draft #1: A Walk in the Dunes

2012-01-16T19:07:00.000-08:00

As I've been nosing around my blog, trying halfheartedly to stoke it back to life, I came across a surprising number of blog drafts that I never remember having written. Some of them are mere sentences, others are almost complete. Here's one from 12/15/07, and why I never published it, I couldn't say.

I probably meant to write more.

A Walk in the Dunes

I went for a walk in the dunes. I did not take my camera. The day was bright and cold, an overcast sky, and the whisper of the trees and the rustle of the grasses spoke of rain. But I went anyway.

I stood out on the crest of the highest dune, looking out towards a horizon that could not be seen, then jumped over the edge and ran down in great leaps of cascading sand to the bottom. I followed my dog, walking until the roar of the highway behind me was replaced by the roar of the ocean in front of me. The sand, hard packed by the dampness of winter, showed every foot that had ever crossed it. Mouse prints threaded between the light, long tracks of birds. Tracks of a lizard, a snake, a mysterious hopping creature that I could not identify. Then a wide-padded creature that left sweeping traces of its long claws, disappearing over a dune too far to follow with the straight, purposeful stride of a predator. My dog's tracks too, swirling around me like the flourishes of an old-fashioned signature, and my own, a clear line traceable all the way to the forest's edge.

I followed some fox prints into a low lying island of trees, a place I usually dare not go because of childhood warnings of quicksand, which forms in the wet bottom area, and of devil's chimneys, pockets of air in the sand that form when a dead tree is buried, able to swallow a hiker in one misstep, with no clue left behind but a broken set of tracks. Stay high in the dunes, they say. But I followed the fox until its footprints were lost in a steep stretch of loose sand. Once gone, the tracks did not reappear. Fox ceased to exist. Red fescue dotted the slope, and also tiny trees with palmate leaves, bonsai hangers-on from the days of dinosaurs, and delicate moss clinging as precariously as film to the ground. I could not tread too lightly; my feet were heavy, awkward.

The tree islands, some say, are able to move when they're still young. They walk along their root paths, pushed along by the shifting sand. But this island was beyond wandering, young but fixed, and so dense that I, following game trails, was quickly covered over by its darkness. In a clearing in the the middle I found an old fire pit, a secret place where someone once came to sit in the sand and the trees, all shadows and silence. The mushrooms of fall were still there, toppled over and rotting, chanterelles that had miraculously been left unplucked past the harvest. It seemed like a true, inland forest, but kicking up the fallen pine needles destroyed the illusion, uncovering the sand just beneath.

A walk across the slope of a dune is a curious thing. The foot makes contact on its side, not sole, and though you are neither climbing nor sinking, every step must be made slightly higher than the last. In the summertime when the sand is quick and dry, the tracks at the beginning of a walk are gone before you return; the devastation done to the slope of the dune disappears in a breath of wind. But in the wintertime, the sand turns to stone. The hills are carved and cut, and the sand takes on mysterious shapes. The crests of the dunes where the wind blows over forms layered scallops and ridges, spires and buttes, sticking up like mini-dioramas of Zion and Bryce Canyon and Arches National Park.

To clarify

2012-01-16T17:16:00.000-08:00

The below post refers to the fact that blogging is clearly very low on my list of priorities.

Nevertheless...

I.B. Procrastinator

2012-01-16T17:13:00.000-08:00

Well...poop.

No...really...

2012-01-01T22:42:00.000-08:00

Arg. Lame. I meant to start posting in November, and now it's January!

Curse you, the flight of time!

But no, really, I will be actively posting again very soon, and perhaps some exciting bits of news will show up here.

Or if not that, then some interesting essays.

Or if not that, then some napkin drawings.

If I were especially devoted, I'd make it my New Year's resolution to resume blogging. But no, I only make one resolution a year (so as not to divide my attention on trying to accomplish it!) and alas Blogger, you are not the One.

But I will resume blogging, by crikey, since I'm brimming with so many dumb stories to tell. Plus now that I haven't updated in forever I'm assured that no one will be reading them. Sort of like standing stock-still on the stage until everyone has left the theater before tearing off all your clothes and dancing in little fairy rings. This is my goal.

Eh...hmm.

Fifteen Feet is coming back to life!

2011-10-17T23:15:00.000-07:00

Waa...? I have a blog?

Oh yeah, I completely forgot! Man, don't you hate it when that happens?

Fifteen Feet's hiatus is about to end. Probably. Maybe not. But chances are good that sometime in the next few months I'll start updating it again regularly. And if I do, rest assured that it will be thoroughly random and perhaps vaguely interesting. Random, at least.

So check back soon!

Mr. Wiener

2009-11-23T01:18:00.000-08:00

Okay Mummy Dearest, since you wanted more pictures...

Here's Mr. Wiener!

A statue outside a roadside hot dog stand that turned out to be the home of the BEST hot dogs ever!!

Every time I drove past this statue I was tempted to take a picture of it, so my very last day in the area, resolved to complete my mission, I did it. In the car with me were two friends from the ship who had previously *also* driven past the stand, but instead of thinking, "Need to take picture!" they had both separately thought, "Need to eat hot dog."

Now, these two friends happened to both be vegan, and I in their company was eating green also, so we parked next to the statue and charged over on foot to the drive-thru window crying, "Do you have any veggie dogs?" While we waited we were able to go take our fill of Mr. Wiener pictures. Yes, the name of the statue is Mr. Wiener.

The serendipitous part of this story is that those were the *best* hot dogs served on the absolute *best* hot dog rolls, and I think I could've eaten ten of them. (Plus since they were veggie I didn't have to cloud out thoughts of slaughterhouse floor scrapings.) The random American flag comes from the fact that the dogs came in American flag holders!

Even Mr. Wiener can't resist eating his own delicious head!

Three Funniest Things Heard While Handling Docklines

2009-11-12T20:10:00.000-08:00

All of these were said while I was on the ship, working a dockline in the middle of a docking maneuver.

Number one-
Man on land: "Nice yacht you have there!"
Me: "It's, um, a schooner, actually...but yeah, thanks."
Man: "Are you the owner?"
Me: (handling a relatively unimportant line on the bow of a 130ft tall ship while coming in to dock, clearly not at helm) ". . . No."

Number two-
(while going through the Ballard Locks)
Man on land: "So... Is this some kind of fishing boat? Are you kids all in school?"
Crew: ". . ."

Number three-
(overheard, while captain is fighting the helm against the wind, just nearing the dock, now thirty feet away, now twenty feet, now ten...)
Woman passenger to captain: "Got much wildlife around here?"
Captain: "?!? Not now!"

Hey look! A bunch of sailors dangling over the water!

Back on Land, Sad Sailor

2009-11-08T23:06:00.000-08:00

My ship has come in, but I'm very sad to be a landlubber once again. I miss that the rooms don't all rock and that I hear no water lapping near my head as I go to sleep. I miss the steady action... but I don't miss jumping to the whims of the first mate. And I definitely don't miss having to hike three blocks to go visit the shore head. (Hooray for free showers! Showers forever! Showevers!)

I also miss the constant singing. Granted, it was usually just *me* doing the constant singing - I was compared at one point to the Singing Bush in "The Three Amigos." No one around; just me scrubbing the sole boards and singing, singing, singing. (But look, you have to sing while you clean heads or else you just go crazy, that's all.) There were also the chanties we sang while we worked the sails, songs you heard a million times yet never tired of - John Kanaka, The Esoquibo River, Cape Cod Girls. On a few crew-only sails we chantied to other songs...Memorable especially was when a particularly loony crewmate led us in a chanty that went "Man!...boy!...man!...boy!" over and over again. (The same crewmate who substituted "Pi-ka-chu!" for our traditional "2-6-heave!" while sweating up the lifts.)

I checked off a few of the goals I set for myself this season. Walked from the tip of the bowsprit to the end of the main boom without touching the deck. Learned how to splice line together. Helped set the anchor. The biggest by far was flying the topsails, the three additional sails to our usual four that we aren't allowed to set when passengers are aboard. The wind was mild and agreeable the day we chose to do it, but by the time we had everything ready to go, gusts and gales were blowing around us, and waves were breaking hard on our bow. But we had spent all that time preparing and weren't about to let a little weather stop us, so just outside Seattle we raised all seven at once, all hands to every line, then sent out our Zodiac tender to capture a few quick pictures of our ship in all her glory. As soon as the pictures were taken we dropped the sails fast, but the wind was yanking and ripping them all to skelter and threatening to whip any inattentive sailor right over the lifelines. While taking down the main topsail I myself was jerked down from my perch on the fife rail and dragged along the deck a few feet before I had the presence of mind to drop the line; the others on it were bunched together deck-of-cards style before they did the same, halyard dancing above us like a tiger's tail, sail canvas slapping against sail canvas with a crack that seemed to call back the ghost of the ship's battle around Cape Horn.

But alas, we were not off the Horn, only off Elliot Bay, and there was no one around to see our glorious show but a few ocean tankers, a distant ferry, and a curious Coast Guard. It was a good moment. A ship without all her sails flying is like an eagle with its wings folded in.

Translation Party!

2009-11-08T22:52:00.000-08:00

I was just introduced to Translation Party, a fantastic website that translates an English phrase back and forth between Japanese and English until the translation no longer changes. Now my sides are hurting with laughter. This was the best translation transition so far:

Original:
We like to bake and eat chocolate chip cookies each and every night.

Thus the long conversion to equilibrium:
We like to bake and eat chocolate chip cookies each and every night.
我々を焼くために、チョコレートチップクッキーを食べるように、それぞれ、毎晩。

We have to bake the chocolate chip cookies to eat, each, every night.
私達が食べるためにチョコレートチップクッキーは、それぞれ、毎晩、オーブンで焼く必要があります。

We have to eat chocolate chip cookies, respectively, every night, you should burn in the oven.
私たちは、チョコレートチップクッキーは、それぞれ、毎晩食べている場合は、オーブンで焼く必要があります。

(*side note* - Apparently Japanese is a violent and vindictive place. I do not wish to go there.)

We have chocolate chip cookies, respectively, if you eat every night, you need to burn in the oven.
場合には、毎晩食べて私たちは、あなたのオーブンで焼く必要がありますチョコレートチップクッキーは、それぞれがあります。

In this case, we are every night, if I was chocolate chip cookies, eat the bread in the oven, each is required.
この場合において、私たちは、毎晩、もし私がチョコレートされたチップクッキーを、それぞれ必要とされるのオーブンでパンを食べる。

In this case, we have every night, the chocolate chip cookies, I would eat bread in the oven for each is required.
この場合において、私たちは、チョコレートチップクッキー、私は、それぞれが必要ですが、オーブンでパンを食べると、毎晩している。

In this case, we are chocolate chip cookies, I require each, and eat bread in the oven, that every night.
このケースでは、チョコレートチップクッキー、私はそれぞれ必要とし、オーブンでパンを食べている、毎晩。

In this case, chocolate chip cookies, my oven every, every night, you need to eat the bread.
このケースでは、チョコレートチップクッキー、私のオーブンごとに、毎晩、あなたのパンを食べる必要があります。

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Wa! No wonder there are so many bad Japanese translations!

Give a Sailor Her Grog!

2009-09-23T17:15:00.000-07:00

Hey look, I'm alive! Funny that while I have access to a computer, I avoid it at all costs, but now that I'm back sailing on the ship again, I lunge at the internet every chance I get!

Yes indeed, I'm back aboard the Adventuress and sailing along merrily as you please. This season I come back to the crew knowing my port from my starboard, my jib from my jibe, and that makes me "seasoned," I guess. An old salt. Neptune's own daughter. But I still don't feel entirely comfortable when I'm 70 feet up in the rigging.

I wish I had some fun pictures to post, but I forgot my camera cord at home, so the pictures are still trapped on the camera.

What to report so far? Well, I visited Olympia for the first time. The town is charming from the water. You look down the length of the deck along the very tip of Budd Inlet, last southern stand of the Puget Sound, and a mere four hundred feet away is a dancing fountain with the capital dome looming up behind it. Better yet, the same distance in the other direction is a seafood shack with better oysters than I thought the Sound could ever offer. But the downside is that the water of Budd Inlet is the backwash of Washington State, never flushed out, nasty and brown and devoid of all life but the hardiest filter feeders. I became rather depressed while searching for minnows for our educational aquarium, because I couldn't catch any that weren't deformed, diseased, or covered in tumors. I was at last tempted to go for one of the massive lion's mane jellyfish that dotted the waters. ("Hey kids! Here's our aquarium. Yeah, touch this!") So if the Washington legislators want an environmental project, they don't have to look very far.

What else? This year is bringing new challenges - learning to trim the sails myself, learning navigation, tying a turk's head knot, taking on the role of passenger herder in the event of emergencies. Also, I'm the Marine Science Officer (capitalized!), which gives the the glorious job of standing out in a tidal mud flat at 4 in the morning with a net and a bucket going, "Here, little moon snail! Here, moonie, moonie!" I's a'stockin' the aquarium, yeehaw.

Unagi....Nooooo!

2009-03-13T00:48:00.000-07:00

Yes, blogging world, I'm still alive.

I've just been avoiding the internet like the plague. Perhaps it's because I'm spending all of my waking hours doing projects that already involve me staring at computer screens, and I'm worried that my long-range vision is well on its way down the tubes without me aggravating it with frivolous internet usage.

But Mr. Frozen Foods Man at the front door was trying to persuade me that his Peruvian mahi-mahi falls in the category of "responsible seafood" - or at least "not from China seafood" - so I had to check out the ol' reliable Seafood Watch page to see if he was telling the truth.

Seafood Watch has updated their site splendidly. If you haven't already gone there to check out your fish choices, you really should. (I've got a link to it on the sidebar just underneath the PNW Tree Octopus photo, yo.) They've added an entire section on sushi, so I dove right into the Things To Avoid category and found...

*cue ominous music*

This!

Aaaa! Freshwater eel ranks closely behind salmon as my most favorite food in the whole wide world, and tonight I discover that not a single fin of it is sustainably raised!

Curse you, ethics and knowledge! Ignorance truly is bliss.

Guess I'm going to be eel-free for a while.

Life Aboard the Ship

2008-12-05T17:34:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm off the ship now, more's the pity, but it doesn't sail in Puget Sound in the winter. Too much rain. Too much wind, as well, which you think wouldn't be a problem for a sailing ship... and it wouldn't, if it was just us crew, but when you have a deck full of 45 kids and parents and are trying to do quick maneuvers, things get a little dicey. We tried setting sail once on a dark and blustery day, but only managed to just put it up, sharply heel over, get a few "oohs" and "aahs" from the passengers and then drop and sea stow it, which is to say that we furled it as quickly as possible, and none too neatly, just to get it out of the way. Sea stowing is grand with a sail that weighs 2500 lbs...

So I'm off, but way back when in the day, "Life Aboard" was one of the classes I often taught. And a lazy class it was, too, for it mainly involved taking groups below decks, pointing out a few of our living arrangements, and then answering the barrage of questions that followed. The class was essentially a long answer to the question: What is it like to live aboard a ship?

Well, every ship is different, isn't it? On some, the crew get their own private bunk for their entire stay, decorating it the way they like and unpacking as much as one can unpack within a bunk. Not the jolly crew of the Adventuress! We had 37 bunks aboard, and only one of those was private. (The Captain's.) Well, I suppose the First Mate had a designated bunk too, but since the rest of the crew used it in the daytime as a couch, it could hardly be counted as private. For the rest of us, we picked a bunk for the duration of a trip, whether it was four day's worth of day programs or a six day overnight, and then when it was over a blank bunk sign-up sheet was pinned up to the main mast. Since the lower bunks were used for other things in the daytime, like the seating around the table in the main cabin, it was protocol to pack up one's things every morning and stow them in the upper bunks, a fact I always told the kids after asking the question, "So, if you came aboard, how much stuff do you think you would bring?"

Typically, the kids were simply amazed to learn that we actually lived aboard the ship. I guess they thought it was a day job.

We used the ship as a metaphor for the planet, showing that we had to conserve the resources we had aboard, and - hey, look! The planet has limited resources too! Space was one resource, and after I showed the kids how we used the bunks for multiple things, I would lift the floorboards and show the storage down in the bilges, or show the lockers that were cleverly worked into every nook or cranny.

So what won't I miss about living aboard?

I won't miss the heads. You can't throw toilet paper down a marine head. Instead we had painfully tiny trash receptacles next to the toilets that would have worked for, say, six people. Sadly, we often had more than thirty, most of whom were teenagers. Gross. Enough said.

I won't miss the bunks. The first one I ever slept in had a clearance of about an inch when I was laying on my side. Made me feel lucky to be as small as I am. That first bunk was also home to "Def Leppard," the electrical plug for the anchor light, that had a nice big scary label on it, something about don't touch this or you'll be electrocuted.

I won't miss six days without a shower. Although I do have to admit, not having ship's showers made me surprising familiar with the Shore Heads of Puget Sound. (I should write a book.) It was not only the shore heads I got to visit (Elliot Bay has the best, FYI), but many fitness clubs that opened their locker rooms to our use as their way of supporting to organization. Mmm. Free spas.

I won't miss munging the soles. Mung is the mysterious black layer that builds up on the edges of the sole boards, and so every now and then we would lift the sole boards one by one and scrape down their edges, wipe them top and bottom, and vacuum underneath. Which wouldn't have been quite so bad, except think of the sole boards as gigantic, awkward, heavy puzzle pieces that you can only grip by two metal bolts, resulting in strained backs, smashed fingers, and, for me, lovely bouts of arthritis in my hand. Jolly fun.

But there's far more that I will miss...

I will miss Lucy, the merry little heater that warmed the main cabin in the colder days of late fall. I'll miss the view of the main cabin on those nights, when Lucy's glow flickered on the walls, with the blue light shining on the main mast and the red light glowing from the hall we called the bowling alley. It was like our own little Las Vegas down there.

And I will miss hiding out in the Engineer's hidey-hole from ten to eleven when I had the eleven o'clock anchor watch. There's no point in going to bed for an hour and getting up again, and the hidey-hole, the most hidden room on the ship, almost always had little treats for the crew squirreled away in it.

I'll miss the anchor watch "ninja walk" that was necessary to creep about above decks like a ghost, and the amazingly strong calf muscles it produced.

And I'll miss those unexpected little moments that only come from living aboard a ship. The seal on the dock that lunged into the water just in front of me when I'd walk to the shore head at night. The gronking grating racket of the blue herons at 3 in the morning on an anchor watch. The cradle-like swaying that rocked me to sleep. The feeling of the wood straining and the ship lunging when the sails caught the wind.

I guess it's a darn good thing I'm going back to it next year.

I would pat it on the head...

2008-11-21T14:31:00.000-08:00

57 seconds

Created by Bunk Beds.net

I would have done better if I didn't cry like a giant sissy when if bit off my arm. But c'mon! My arm!!
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Scenes from the Adventuress

2008-11-20T23:16:00.000-08:00

The view from the bowsprit, a good place to take a nap. This was a wonderful fall day, the last sail of the season!

Looking up the main mast, where we flew the flag of the Adventuress. The ensign, the American colors, flew off the stern. The color of the sky here was not unusual later in the season. (Read: lots of rain.)

Mt. Rainier from the Port of Tacoma, the main boom quarter-tackles in the foreground.

Sunrise over Blakely Harbor, Bainbridge Island, with the morning fog burning off the water.

Murder Mystery

2008-10-16T15:40:00.000-07:00

After six days aboard a ship full of teenage girls, the crew was ready to kill each other. So we did.

Murder Mystery started yesterday. It is like the game of Clue. Everyone draws a victim, a location, and a weapon, and when you kill someone you take over their current assignment and make it your own. You cannot have any witnesses to a murder, and you have to actually touch the weapon to your victim.

So...

One of the crew, "D", kept a tortilla in his pocket all day until he could use it as a murder weapon in the engine room. "M" was suffering from a cold, but she managed to hide the lead line (a 60 foot length of coarse rope with a massive lead weight at the end) under her pillow in the crew cabin until "Dn" came in to bring her a blanket and was promptly murdered. "S" ended up trying to lure another person into the very small Pee Head whilst holding a guitar, and the Captain met her end with a drawing of a moose in the deck house. Meanwhile, I remain innocent and alive, since I can't quite figure out how to get my victim to come alone with me into the forepeak hatch while also trying to sneak in a three-foot long fender.

Good times.
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New "People" in My Nautical Life

2008-10-01T13:48:00.000-07:00

Jefe - The small gray pontoon powerboat that guides the Adventuress in and out of harbor. "Jefe" means boss, which is appropriate, since he shows he is the boss of everyone on board (including the Engineer) by refusing to start at inappropriate moments.

A-ya-shee - The small wooden sailboat/rowboat that balances out Jefe on the other side of the ship. Unlike Jefe, she is always cooperative and quite forgiving of the kids who, new to rowing, make her go in drunken circles.

The Llama Pinatacorn - (That should be a ~ over the "n", but I'm not sure how to write that character.) A prank gift from the good ship Zodiac, who makes random appearances within our voyages. The Llama Pinatacorn is at once a llama, and pinata, and a unicorn all combined into something far greater, and far more frightening.

The Duty Llama - Our ship is ful of llamas. The Duty Llama makes its home on the chest of the Duty Officer of the Day, making that task much more bearable.

The Barfy Brown Bag - Previously I had only one massive black duffel bag for all of my stuff, which resulted in a ten minute rummage every time I needed, say, a sock. The Barfy Brown Bag provides a miraculous alternative to this with its copious pockets and nooks. Acquired from a second-hand store for the whopping cost of $7, the Barfy Brown Bag features a nauseating poo-like color scheme on its outside and an entrenched odor of airsickness on its inside, which, luckily, sticks only to the bag itself and not my clothing.

The Mechanical Advantage Band - An up-and-coming new rap group. White girls go ghetto. I take the stage with a leopard print belt as a necklace and hollah, "Now is the time we talk about the wheeeel! It turns the ruddah, behind the keeeel!" Keep your eyes peeled for our album.

The Truck - The very highest point on the mainm'st. If you can kiss it, you get ten points.

And last but not least...

Mr. Floaty - Victoria B.C. still pumps all of its sewage, untreated, directly into Puget Sound. There's a grandfather clause in Canadian law that allows them to do this. One of the groups opposing this is People Opposed to Outfall Pollution, and their mascot is Mr. Floaty. Unfortunately, the Adventuress was in Victoria before I came aboard, so I missed out on having a picture of myself hugging Mr. Floaty. (Similar pictures hang on the fridge in our galley.) Mr. Floaty sings the song,

"I'm Mr. Floaty, how do you do?
You come from Victoria, I come from you!"

You have to love that.
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Haul Away for the Windy Weather, Boys!

2008-10-01T12:16:00.000-07:00

My repertoire of sea chanties is growing. I now find myself at odd moments of the day belting out, "Bound for South Australia!" or "Carry me to Shimbone now!" or "John Kanakanaka to-rei-oh!" And after a rather failed attempt at leading a chanty (I wasn't paying attention to the rhythm of people's hands) I semi-succeeded in my second go, though . . . does anyone's voice sound good when it's belted out as loud as possible into the wind? Eek. Not mine.

Our ship is quite musical. I think the act of sailing stirs up with it other lost archaic desires, like sewing ditty bags, knotting decorative lanyards, and rediscovering that every human being has the capacity to be a musician. Just last week our ship was home to three (four?) violins, a banjo, two three-string music sticks, an accordion, three guitars, and four-ish penny whistles, all of which came out to make an appearance at some point.

Also, at last, we began to take aboard three-hour classroom trips for kids, mostly 5th to 8th grade, which are organized so as to cram every available minute with some activity. Ding! the bell rings, and I lead my group of kids in a lesson about Marine Life, and then Ding! Now we talk about Plankton... (Ding!) I mean... Now we talk about Watersheds! Ding! I am scrambling around in the costume box to dress up as a Cascade Mountain for our skit, while the kids enjoy "quiet time" up on deck, and then we the crew go flail around with costumes and funny accents until Ding! Yay! It's time for Nautical Skills!!!

And so on, and so forth, and then there's an hour to cram in lunch and everything else before the next clot of children comes scurrying over the side of the ship. It's a little frantic, but great fun.

The fall season is halfway through now, so I've been ticking off things I've yet to do one by one. The other day it was shimmying out on the bowsprit to help furl the jib. A few days before that I finally got to drive Jefe, our small boat. Another crewmate and I casted off the ship's docklines and leapt into Jefe, where I promptly proceeded to flood the engine. So as the Adventuress grew smaller and smaller in the distance, I finally got the persnickety thing going and then roared across Commencement Bay in the drunken weave of one unfamiliar with outboard motors, catching up to her and docking at her side. A few days before that I got to "cowgirl," which means sitting out at the end of the main boom and guiding the leech of the mains'il as it comes down for everyone else to furl. Luckily, I had a couple of excellent Tonto-ers teaching me as I went.

So I am learning by the day, and that's just the way I like it. They say the sailing life is terribly addictive. Have I been bit?
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The Schooner "Adventuress" - Part I

2008-09-05T16:54:00.000-07:00

I am slowly being indoctrinated into a different world. A different universe, one that never sets foot on the land. The people of the sailing world, especially the tall ships world, maintain a culture unique to themselves.

I should back up to talk a bit about the Adventuress. She was built in 1913 at the expense of a man named John Bordon, a young entrepreneur who, in the footsteps of Teddy Roosevelt, wanted to go out and hunt big game under the guise of conservation. Specifically, Bordon wanted to procure the skeleton of a bowhead whale, which because of the value of the bones was not yet to be found in any museum, and donate it to the American Museum of Natural History's new whale exhibit with a plaque above it proudly declaring that he was the man who had harpooned it. He took with him another young man, a naturalist by the name of Roy Chapman Andrews, who later in life would traipse around the Gobi Desert in his signature broad-brimmed hat and become the inspiration for Indiana Jones.

Because she was to travel into Arctic ice, the Adventuress was given a thick hull and sturdy ribbing. Because Bordon was a bit of an aristocrat, she was also fitted inside with spiral staircases, a bathtub, an organ, and a galley any cook would kill for. Her designer was man named B.B. Crowninshields, who had worked on racing yachts early in his life, later applying that knowledge to drawing up plans for distinctive schooners with graceful lines and unusual speed. (One of his earlier ships, the Martha, shares our waters in Puget Sound. We see her frequently, an almost spitting image of the Adventuress.) But the Adventuress was considered his greatest work, with an undercut stern that lets her turn easily in a breeze, and sails that allow her to go close by the wind.

She was launched out of the shipyard in Boothebay, Maine, crossed to the west via the Straights of Magellan, and headed up for an ill-fated trip to the Bering Sea. Several men on board were simply friends of Bordon and had no useful knowledge, aggravating the rest. Andrews was put off by the cavalier attitude of his patron, who seemed to have a short attention span for the natural sciences. The team never saw a bowhead whale, but put out once for a nearby humpback as a consolation prize. Bordon was poised to throw the first harpoon when the humpback upended the little boat, and the men aboard had to cling to it in the icy waters while the Adventuress worked its way in to pick them up.

The mission was curtailed when the Arctic ice began to close in on them, but it was not without its accomplishments. Andrews managed to get ashore to study fur seals on the Pribilof Islands. Their pelts were extremely valuable, one of reasons the United States had acquired Alaska, but their numbers had declined so much by 1913 that a moratorium had been placed on hunting them. No one knew anything about how they lived, how they bred and raised young, so Andrews went ashore to make observations and take video, the first ever of the fur seal.

After the Adventuress returned to Seattle, Bordon had already had his fill of whale hunting and turned his attention elsewhere, selling the boat. There is a rumor that she then went up to Juneau and served as a floating brothel for a few years, but I'm not sure if it's true or just a joke among the crew. But she definitely ended up in San Francisco in 1915 operating as a bar pilot for several years.

And that's as far as I've gotten in learning her in-depth history, so I'll have to buff up a bit more for Part II.

The picture I posted down below is a bit misleading. It shows her decked out in full sails, all seven of them, whereas we usually use the bottom four - the mainsail, foresail, staysail, and jib. The other three - the main topsail, fore topsail, and flying jib - are hardly ever put on the ship because the Coast Guard doesn't think she would meet stability requirements. (Although rumor has it that they came to this conclusion without ever actually putting those sails up.) We can't use them with participants on board... but we can when it's only the crew, so there are high hopes among us all that before the down rig at the end of the season we might be able to take the sails out of storage and really deck her out. Everyone is very excited about this idea. Putting more sails on a boat, to a sailor, is like putting more cylinders in an engine, or more loop-de-loops in a roller coaster. You can make almost any crewmate's eyes light up with the magic phrase, "We could get out the topsails..."

Is the Adventuress a ship or a boat? Both. The Navy defines a ship as a vessel which can carry aboard it a boat, and since the Adventuress has two little boats (Jefe, a powerboat, and A-ya-shee, a wooden row/sail boat), she can officially be called a "ship." But she is also a "sailboat," so boat works as well.

What else can I say? She measures 110 feet on deck, 135 when she's all sparred out. (Meaning that her main boom and the bowsprit overshoot the deck.) She can sleep 37 people, but I'm not sure if that includes when the crew dogpiles all over each other in the deckhouse, or when I sling my hammock out on the deck. (Which has only happened once but, I vow, will definitely happen again! It's the best way to view stars, you see.)

That's all I have for now. To be continued.

More Handsomely on the Blogging!

2008-09-03T18:46:00.001-07:00

Wowza. So I've been thrown into the sailing world without a moment's notice, no time for catching a breath! The past weeks have been intense. By day one I was hauling on lines and by day seven I was manning the helm. (Albeit with the captain right by my side.) Our ship has more lines than I can count, and I've had to learn them all quickly and accurately, so that when the mate shouts, "Tack the lifts!" or "Ease the gaff vang!" I can run over and uncoil the right line without bringing the boom crashing down in the middle of the deck. We have a main-m'st, not a main mast; a foc'sle, not a forecastle, jibs, halyards, peaks and throats, oh my!

Luckily, the crew is loud and lusty when it comes to singing. We sing chanties to haul up the main sail and fore sail, the two heaviest of the bunch. We are woken up at 7am with a song and put to bed at 10pm with another (which I have sung a few times myself.) So much better than alarm clocks. I've had to stand anchor watch in the middle of the night for the past week or so, so I'm a little short on sleep, but the stars have been gorgeous, and even the one night it rained I was able to stand at the helm and just watch the water glisten off the shrouds. I've climbed up the rigging to the cross trees, not quite to the top of the mast, but it was high and precarious enough to make my heart beat. And, and... I've seen more of the San Juan Islands in the past few days than I ever have before! Hooray!

Our first trip out after the training sail was an Elderhostel group of about 19 people ranging 55 to 75 in age. They were a rollicking bunch. We spent several nights doing nothing but singing, and it was so much fun to watch them lay into the lines with as much enthusiasm as any of the crew. So many interesting stories too! One of them had working on the lighting in the Kingdome, another had worked with Coco the gorilla, and there were three mischievous sisters from New Zealand who egged everyone else on into the most hilarious antics.

As to the crew, there are 17 of us in total, mostly in our twenties but going all the way up to 60s in age. I've been arbitrarily assigned as Assistant Galley Coordinator, which means I can dive down into the galley and bake cookies if the mood strikes. Kneady Bubbles has also found a happy home aboard the ship, and I've been growing it so our chef (who is a gourmand and once worked for restaurants in New York) can use it. Um, um...

I'm totally running out of time, so I will write more, oh so much more, later!

Landlubber Today, Sailor Tomorrow

2008-08-23T15:25:00.000-07:00

By a strange long series of events, I suddenly find myself a crewman aboard a sailing ship. I was shanghaied.

My ship for the next two months is the Adventuress, which looks something like this:

I'm not quite sure how I got here or what exactly I'll be doing, but I know there's singing involved. Sea chanties, to be exact. It's even in the handbook.

"Here" is the Puget Sound. The Adventuress plies the waters between the San Juans to the north and Tacoma to the south. It's an educational vessel, purpose: teach people about ecology, sustainability, community, and other good tidbits. I believe I'll be pointing at the water a lot saying, "Look, kids! Plankton!" And singing sea chanties.

But at the moment I'm a bit fried. This is day three of my travels to get to the ship. This morning started with a boat ride which for me was transportation but for everyone else was a whale watching ship, so I had to rouse myself from napping a few times to go stagger out on the deck and train the binos on breaching killer whales, which were multitudinous indeed. It's amazing how far across the surface of the water the sound of a killer whale's breath travels.

I shall post updates when I have the internet... or perhaps not at all, not at least until November, when my feet stay on dry ground once again.

If any of you find yourself in the same place as the Adventuress, come find me for a free ride. The calendar is to be found on the Sound Experience website, the organization in charge of it all.

Me Pointing at Things

2008-08-04T13:48:00.000-07:00

I pointed at a lot of things on our Alaska trip, apparently. I feel that a pointing finger placed strategically within a picture adds so much interest to the composition, don't you?

Here are some of the things I pointed at:

Me pointing at British Columbia. They're a bit full of themselves, aren't they?

Me pointing at the Exit Glacier. Whoops, these aren't in any kind of order at all. The Exit Glacier is nowhere near British Columbia.

Me pointing at spinach. For supper. Yummy.

Me pointing at the infamous "Yukon Sour-toe." You can drink it fast, you can drink it slow, but your lips have gotta touch the toe. And yes, it is a real severed human toe, thank you very much.

Me pointing at a gorge we took a hand tram across. It was a very long ways down, and the door on the basket wouldn't shut, so whoever wasn't pulling the rope had to lean against the otherwise open door. Fun.

Me pointing at a black bear, one of our first official wildlife sightings. This was in fact in British Columbia.

Me pointing at delicious moose dinner, the steaks we got from the gal at the visitor's center. Served up with a little spruce tip jelly. Mmmm. The best meal of the whole trip, I thought.

Me pointing at the Burwash Landing (Yukon Territory) giant gold pan, biggest gold pan in the world. Is that man bleeding? I couldn't tell.

Me pointing at a fairy slipper. They're rare to see because they are over-collected by flower fanciers. A fairy slipper plant has to be 13 years old before it will flower.

Me pointing at a lake at Snag Junction, the Yukon. We camped the night there and swam in the lake the next morning. It was cold...we survived.

Me pointing at salmonberries. Ketchikan had more ripe salmonberries than I've ever seen in my life. They're one of the first summer berries to ripen, so we were lucky to time it just right. I had to use my hat when my hands got too full.

Me pointing at a can of refried beans, de-canned and festooned with spoon. Using cans of refried beans turned out to be a lot harder than we thought, so we were left with quite a few at the end of the trip.

I am slowly working through my thousands of Alaska pictures, attempting to organize them. That takes care of the "Me pointing at things" category!
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The House of Falling Legs

2008-08-02T13:26:00.000-07:00

The cabin I am living in requires fortitude. Fortitude and a sharp eye for little crawly things.

For some reason the summer has been unusually buggy. There are mosquitoes in the mountains. I don't remember there being so many mosquitoes in the mountains, but I do remember Al Gore mentioning that previously mosquito-free cities like Nairobi, built at elevation to escape malaria, are experiencing a rise in the mosquito altitude line and getting infestations that they never had before. Perhaps that's happening here, @#*& global warming. But I digress.

The cabin I am living in is the catacomb of choice for every insect within a ten mile radius. Though the doors and windows are always shut, they find their way in regardless, finishing their pilgrimage from great distances to come die on my countertop.

Correction: The countertop is where the gnats come to die.

The moths come to die in hidden places, like underneath my toothpaste.

The crickets come to die in the middle of the floor, where I will step on them in the morning.

How is it that one building can attract so many tiny carcasses? They're everywhere. If I space out and forget to check my cup in the morning, I will inevitably feel something that is decidedly not water but in fact hard and pointy, much like many little legs, against my tongue. My bathroom looks like someone thought to liberate volumes of mounted insects by pulling out the pins and dumping them everywhere. Case in point - I dropped my facecloth by mistake the other night and went to pick it off the floor. No problem, right? A little dust, a little hair... oh. And a large unidentifiable many-legged exoskeleton stuck to the cloth. Nasty.

The spiders flock to my cabin like mourners to a graveyard, gorging themselves, I suppose. They are mostly well-behaved spiders, except for the fact that they A) like to web up the bathtub, even hours after I've showered, and B) find their way into the clothes I drop on the ground. Yes, I have the bad habit of dropping clothes on the ground and forgetting them until the next morning. I do not "do" orderly. It is not such a problem if I remember to shake out my clothes before putting them on.

If I remember...

There's nothing that can jog your memory quite like a fast moving spider inside your sweatshirt early in the morning.

Crouching Spider, Hidden Moth Carcass. The House of Falling Legs.
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Wyoming Mirage

2008-07-31T16:46:00.000-07:00

I am moving slowly these days. Such is the summertime.

Here is the picture I wanted to attach to my post about driving the West. Heat shimmering off the highway makes the pavement bleed into the sky, but an approaching semi truck affirms the road's substantiveness.

Viva la Reunion!

2008-07-24T13:52:00.000-07:00

My family reunion is the best that ever there was. So much for humility.

It started in 1951. My grandma was one of three sisters who married three best friends, and deciding that they did not want to lose touch with each other, they picked a central location to meet once every other summer - the Colorado Rockies. We have met without fail ever since, and it is a grand old time.

There is a certain sort of tradition to these two weeks. The poster boards come out, with each day listed along with information like who is cooking, who is cleaning, what the meal is, and what sorts of funness is occurring. Other traditions follow: the plastic cups we all write our names on, the multi-colored place mats made out of... some kind of mystery polymer.

The days begin with a leisurely breakfast, or if it is a hiking day, with all of the hikers bumping shoulders in the kitchen packing lunches and trying to squeeze in a bite of breakfast. Hiking is our main event, and every two or three days we trek anywhere from 3 miles to a lake to 12 miles to the top of a mountain, sometimes old hikes and sometimes new, and always with the brown sack lunch in the late morning and the hasty retreat as the afternoon thunderstorms roll in.

In the afternoons we usually go downtown, a tourist paradise filled with chocolate shops and souvenir shops, lolling around with a caramel apple in hand or retreating into a park by the river. The town of Estes Park is gradually becoming gentrified, but there are still all the bits of classic western kitsch - rubber tomahawks, leather cowboy jackets, feather headdresses, rabbit furs. Cowboy Brad singing his John Denver songs in the park around a campfire. The summers are crowded here and the shops are always full of people, but there are quiet places along the river walk where you can sit and sip bubble tea or coffee and watch the world go by.

After dinner it's time for the games. Tonight it was frisbee golf on a course we made across the front and back yards. (We played a Scramble. I was terrible, but I blame it on the fact that I was holding the dog also.) Another favorite is our version of volleyball, which used to be deadly back when the dads were young men, but the addition of the children of my generation permanently slowed down the violence level. We might pile into the cars and go to our favorite miniature golf place, Tiny Town, "A Nice Place for Nice People." Or, like last night, go-kart racing, so fiercely competitive that it is the only time in the reunion when grown men can crush children against the rails and laugh manically about it.

And then comes the late night games, the card games, which mostly revolve around Skip-bo, Hearts, Apples to Apples, and the best game on the face of the planet, Rook. Huzzah! For anyone who knows Rook, I have to brag that I took the bid the other night in choose-your-partner, called no trump, and made it exactly on the nose. (If you do not follow Rook, this is a happy accomplishment.) All new inductees into the family must jump through that hoop that is learning Rook, simultaneously learning 30 new names and dealing with the effects of altitude at 8,000 feet. New family members have it rough.

One of my great uncles used to make pancakes for the entire clan once a reunion, but now that he's gone we haven't had pancakes for a while, so I decided to put myself through the grinder and take on the role with my faithful friend Kneady Bubbles the First at my side. Kneady Bubbles performed valiantly, making perfectly nice and fluffy sourdough pancakes. I made a x8 batch the first time and a x10 batch the second. I could so work in Roadside. (For non-GF people, I could so work in a crazy busy breakfast restaurant.)

This reunion has been the Gathering of the Babies. We had, at our peak, one 6yr old, two 3 yr olds, two 18 month olds, one 9 month old, one 3 month old, and one yet unborn! Yowzah. When I first arrived after my 21-hr drive push from Oregon, I staggered in just at dinner time and was met with the whole crowd gathered to pray. But there were still a few minutes to go, so at once I had what seemed like a dozen babies shoved at me. (Okay, maybe two.) Luckily my better senses told me not to hold my 9 month old niece in my teetering state (Drop the Baby!) although I did have plenty of time after sleep to cuddle, and cuddle, and cuddle... My niece is a very bouncy little girl. However, despite all the babiness of the hour, I remain convinced that being an aunt is definitely the way to go. Even heaps of babies could not stir the mommy gene deep within.

What else to say? My father and brother-in-law finally succeeded in building a zip line that doesn't kill anyone, and all the lil' childrens have been having fun going down it. I took one of the greatest hikes of my life a few days ago. (The post is forthcoming.) The wildlife viewing has been prime, especially a very gregarious marmot that made friends with my backpack while on top of the Twin Sisters. And, best of all, I have managed to gross out a nice percentage of my family with pictures of the Dawson City "Sour-toe." So life is good.
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Is It Wyoming Yet?

2008-07-17T09:37:00.001-07:00

Ah, the glorious experience of waking up in the backseat of my car at 5 in the morning, when the first blue haunt of sunlight is beginning to lighten the broad flatlands of Idaho's southwest. I crawl up into the driver's seat and pop open a bottle of Starbucks frappuccino, roll out of the dark and sleeping streets of the town which I came to, also in the darkness, and drive back to the freeway on-ramp. Now the horizon has turned pale, and... was that a sign for I-84 East I just passed? Is this... is this road going up and over the interstate? Is this road siphoning me onto I-84 West???

Getting onto the freeway in the wrong direction at 5 in the morning, when the next exit is 15 miles and 15 minutes away? That's a very special feeling.

But I finally got turned back towards the east and got to watch the sun rise over the most boring stretch between Oregon and Colorado (apologies to the competing boring stretches of Utah and Wyoming): the road between Boise and Twin Falls, Idaho. Bleh.

Day one of my two day drive is Oregon, all Oregon, with just a little piece of Idaho thrown in at the end for fun. If you look at the map, you can easily see that Oregon is not geographically as large as Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming put together, but the road is 55 mph all the way. It starts in the wet coastal forest, goes up and over the coastal range into the fertile Willamette Valley, and then climbs up again into the Cascades, where the forests are dry and peopled (treed?) by lodgepole pines. After dropping down the other side of the mountains, trees disappear and are replaced by sagebrush, and it is the sagebrush that continues to dominate the scenery until Colorado.

I used to think of Utah as being the most desolate place in the country, but I have changed my opinion substantially. It has mountains, at least, and although they are mostly the tough and jagged kind, all rock and no majesty, they fit in well to the rest of the stark landscape. The word for northern Utah is "salt." White salt flats stretching off in the distance, shimmering in the sun, the Great Salt Lake putting out fingers of bitter water towards the freeway, salt marshes prickling with sharp grass. The rocks are reds and browns and coppers - the plant life, too - and crop up in fantastic formations such as the Devil's Slide, a steep narrow chute that dives from a mountain to the road. (The exit for it always sneaks up on me around a sharp bend in the freeway, but it was closed this time for construction, so I did not have to veer to catch it.)

But by the Devil's Slide I feel like I've been driving...well...far longer than I should have been driving. Where the heck is Wyoming? Wyoming is the home stretch, welcomed this time of year but grueling in the winter, when black ice covers the road and powder snow is blown across it in a sideways blizzard so dense that you cannot tell the difference between the pavement and the sagebrush. Wyoming is beautiful in its own way. Fawn colors, khaki, beige, every shade of tan man ever thought up a name for, rolls away from the road, and the road itself turns into a sky-colored mirage. The freeway is marked by giant red gates every 100 miles or so that say "Road Closed - Return to..." fill in the blank to be the nearest town of any great size. This is so that when snow drifts close off the freeway in the wintertime, they can divert traffic before we go plowing into oblivion.

Wyoming is also the land of Little America. If you do not know what Little America is, you will by the time you get there. There are signs - "Little America, 200 miles. 50 cent Cones!" and "Little America, 175 miles. Kids stay for free!" and "Little America, 150 miles, Are We There Yet?" etcetera to the point where you, the driver, with nothing else to occupy your attention except the occasional fireworks stand, start to wonder, "What is this mysteriously wonderful Little America?!" (Answer: a tricked-up gas station.)

Wyoming at last breaks its hold just a little south of Laramie, where a big old timey wooden sign proclaims, "Welcome to Colorful Colorado!" and immediately stands of green bushy ponderosa pines spring up, and the deer frolic, and grand snow-capped peaks burst out of the ground. And there you are. The Rockies.

(Finally! And now maybe I can part ways with Bosco for longer than a day? Sorry Bosco!)
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Like Balls on a Roulette Wheel We Are Flung

2008-07-14T21:33:00.001-07:00

Surfacing for air: a decompression.

Twenty one hours alone on the road is a long time to decompress. The first three hours are pure excitement. The next three become something akin to work, as in "I should be getting paid to do this." After that, the miles begin to creep backwards. Every minute I glance down at the odometer, but the number stays the same. There are still 1100 miles to go. It is a fierce and solid number, and there is nothing I can do about it. I pull off to the side of the road to take a break, but the miles are still there. The CD in my player has run out and everything my radio finds seems jarring on the ears - I spend two minutes listening to static on the AM thinking that it is the sound of applause about to die out - and then I turn off the radio and howl at the road like a wild woman (something you can only do when you're alone), but the miles are still there to drive.

After that there is nothing but time to think about things, and I have a very noisy mind. Big questions become small and manageable; little ones well up to take their place. Sometimes I sing my thoughts out loud, and sometimes I talk them, and sometimes I talk to God... but I don't talk to God too often, because when I talk to him, when I really talk to him, I get tears in my eyes. I think it is that the conversation is too honest, that it cuts down through the masks to the heart of me and who I am, what I am trying to be, real and raw. Often painful.

But you can't cry while you're driving. So no... I don't talk to God too often.

Sometimes, sometimes... when my thoughts are on repeat play and the fault lines on the pavement are hammering away a steady beat, then I finally find the rhythm of the road. The car stops moving. Instead, the land moves around me. If I am on a winding two lane highway, the ribbon of pavement seems to whip beneath me like a high pressure water hose. But if I am on the freeway, it becomes more like a video game. There are cars to pass and cars passing me. I weave and dodge with the cruise control on, focusing on the two possibilities - Are they gaining on me or am I gaining on them? Never tap the foot on the brake, that is the goal of this game. Every vehicle I encounter takes on its own personality by its shape, its color, and the way it moves. Is it timid? Does it reek with machismo? Polite, clever, lawbreaking? And yet I never see the faces on the other side of the glass.

The radio catches a moment of European electronic techno, and suddenly I picture myself in a different place entirely, under the water, laying back on the sand watching the fish swim above me. Scuba divers hardly ever stay put in one place. Generally you don't want to touch anything around you, lest you kill it or it kills you, or sometimes the only thing beneath you is a deep swallowing darkness, a silent enemy. But when there is sand - try this if you get the chance - you can lay back and look up at the fish, their silhouettes black against the bending light of the surface. Watch them pause and circle, flick their tails and be gone, one after another. Watch as the bubbles rise up from your regulator, flat on the bottom and round on the top, big and small, wavering up in a delicate dance to the surface, when the only sound around you is the hiss and blurb of your breath and the constant snapping of the shrimp hidden beneath the rocks. I don't know why techno made me think of this.

But I am back on the road, drinking milk out of a quart carton. The scenery is blearily monotonous, and in my boredom I notice even the slightest things. There is a dead creature on the side of the road lying on its back, all reddish fur with four paws sticking straight in the air like a cartoon. It looks wombat-ish, but I'm pretty sure eastern Oregon doesn't have wombats. Miles later I pass a dead cow lying on the other side of a barb wire fence like a fallen fiberglass statue, its legs sticking out from its side. The heat makes the dead things bloat. And then up on the hill, a large metal horse in mid-lunge, and beyond it a corral for the wild horses caught by the BLM, and I think about the times I have seen horses running in the wild. Not this time, though. Not this drive. Only hawks and pronghorn antelope to keep me company, and the rolling sagebrush looking the same for every mile, and Cheerios in odd places in the car, and now an empty quart of milk.

Twenty one hours alone on the road is a long time to decompress.
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The Car That Ate An Antelope

2008-07-11T19:50:00.001-07:00

The sunlight is coming in shafts through the trees, the peacocks down in the valley are wailing plaintively, and as I stand beside Bosco considering my life's next chapter of plunging into the great unknown I am faced with an old familiar question: Should I take The Antelope?

Well of course I should. Why the heck do I drive a small SUV if not to throw my bike into the back of it whenever I please? But the process of putting The Antelope in single-handed is daunting, especially since the first time when Bosco was still shiny and new and I managed to get a nice big grease smudge all over the upholstery. But I like to bike. And....I like my Antelope.

(Mind, "The Antelope" isn't its model but its name, like Fred, or Joe Jackson, or Fluffy. It is a good name.)

So it's fiddle off the front wheel, grope around for a nonexistent "good grip" as the handlebars swivel around to smack my knees as the whole bike slips back on the remaining tire. A regrip, and now I've forgotten to avoid pressing the greasy chain against my clothing (but I'm wearing dark colors - whew!), and now the sharp bits of metal where my front tire used to be are threatening to gouge plastic and break windows, and now I finally have it hoisted up halfway into the car (I see for the first time "Made in China" written on the side. My bike was made in China??? Did China even make anything back then? Aaah, my bike is Chinese!!), and now the petals are punching down into whatever it is underneath the sheet I've spread across the rest of the packed stuff, but has it done damage? I like to keep it a mystery. And now I am spending two coils of rope lashing The Antelope to every tie-point my car has to offer, because I picture it flailing around in there and doing mighty, terrible things if I don't.

That's how Bosco and The Antelope get along. One of these days I should probably invest in a bike rack.

The entire time I was wrestling to get the bike inside, between mild expletives, I found myself asking questions. So many questions. Why do people travel? What's in it? Why don't more people do it? Is it a way of life or a break from life? Can it be a constant? And why do I travel? What do I hope to find, and what have I found already? If I forget everything from my past travels, have I really ever travelled at all?

The answers could come in cliched bits like, "Americans have always been on the move!" (Like some 1950's "Ride the Train" poster), or maybe something about the struggle of man vs. nature, I don't know. I didn't want to go down that route. There's something far more satisfying in the asking of the question, and I seem to be doing a lot of that lately. The questions come easier than the answers. Maybe I should be a philosopher, heh? Or a police interrogator.

But I have at least one question answered for today. The Antelope is strapped down and ain't going anywhere but Colorado. So that's a "yes."
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And Then the Road Ran Out

2008-07-09T16:18:00.000-07:00

Is it over? It happened so fast. The mileage on the dash says 7502, so I must have gone somewhere. And yet here I am back with familiar sights and familiar sounds, and all that’s left of the trip is a car full of stuff and a head full of music, a camera full of pictures. A bracing, grinding halt.

Today I’ve been facing a curious teetering between two states, exhaustion and complete boredom. I’m lugging my body around the house like one of the undead while my mind is still racing for things to do and places to go. But it’s a fatigue deeper than coffee can go, despite the millions of things I have to do between now and Friday, when I hope to start the two day drive to Colorado. Today I feel like one of those skits in a comedy show where one person hides behind another and puts their arms out in front to do simple things like brushing teeth (and shoving the toothbrush in their eye) or eating a sandwich (and spilling it all down their shirt.) That is an accurate depiction of my efficiency rating at present.

Despite that, I’m starting to tick off a few minor chores. I've been washing my sleeping bag in the bath tub, not an easy task. It takes some muscle, sort of like washing a dead Saint Bernard. It turned the water into a lovely deep brown “sleeping bag tea.” Which is funny, because I wasn’t expecting it to be that dirty, but I guess the last time I can definitively remember cleaning it was back in 1999. I’m also slowly extracting items from the inner rubble of Bosco, an explosion which resulted from quickly sundering all of TSO’s belongings from the rest of the stuff in a rush to make his ferry, a bit akin to yanking a tablecloth out from under a full setting of china, but with fewer pointy shards. Before this we had to leave Bosco parked unattended in Tacoma for 24 hours, so I left it a little chaotic as a theft deterrant. But I have to admit, my side of the car has more or less been in a state of explosion since the Yukon, so right now it is really just more exploded. When the option is to spend time organizing or make a “that’ll-do” and hit the road, I hit the road.

The 7502 miles is from my driveway to my driveway, but it isn’t a perfectly accurate measure of our trip because it includes a lot of backtracking (like zigzagging around Washington State this last week) and noodling around in the cities. We logged 35 miles in Ketchikan, for example, and I don’t think Ketchikan even has 35 miles of road. So the actual distance may have been closer to 6000 miles, seven weeks travelling, six weeks solid tent camping, access to one oven, two instances of watching television (not counting the ones inside interpretive centers), seven cans of propane, six crossings through international customs, five ferries, zero flat tires, and four boxes of Jujubees. Plus we got eaten by a bear.

So I’ve missed blogging about pretty much everything between Juneau and the civilized world, but I will get around to catching up, I promise. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and after my family’s reunion, which is going to be two weeks worth of my clawing up the hiking trails behind everybody else gasping some excuse about how I’ve been locked in a car the past seven weeks and have no muscle mass left.

Ah… Alaska, the Yukon, the north. When will I go back?
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Impressions

2008-06-26T02:25:00.000-07:00

Impressions of Homer:

-artsy fartsy
-tourists confined to segregated area (known as "the Spit")
-pay money, catch halibut, take pictures with halibut
-$20 sandwich: white bread, PB & J
-locals say "yeah, lots of eagles, beautiful mountains, blah blah blah"

-alarming lack of fresh seafood
-bald eagle wants to eat your dog

Impressions of Seward:

-cool without trying to be cool
-every marine creature and bird comes here at least once in their life, for it is lush
-city camping on the beach, heck yeah (minus irritatingly loud Asian family next door at midnight and again at 5am)
-amazing tours, no advertising, which you discover after you've already left

-alarming lack of fresh seafood
-Exit Glacier biding its time to retake the world

Impressions of Girdwood:

-11pm? time for everyone to wander the streets!
-dead cars going "dust to dust" in random spots in the forest
-sketchiest city campground ever

-best combination camping/defunct gold mine ever

-reasonable lack of fresh seafood
-ski lodge wants to eat your baby and your dog

-now featuring bread-free bakeries

Impressions of Haines:

-we're friendly, but we don't like you

-10 art galleries, 1 artist

-uncluttered by plumbers, mechanics, or anyone who knows how to replace toilet paper/soap/towels in bathrooms

-our faces will break if we smile

-thousands of eagles can be seen at all other times of the year, just not today

-8oz wrongfully delicious Muffin Cake

-fresh seafood, but guarded by a cranky old man who will snap at any moment

-we are only tolerating you, give us your money

Impressions of Juneau:

-amazingly buff Juneaun thighs

-grey, cold, warm, sunny, rainy, grey

-quality souvenirs for the low low price of $999.99!

-finding skyline from water comparable to Where's Waldo? with massive cruise ships

-fresh seafood location: pricey restaurant plate

-Seattle's younger, rowdy little cousin

-it's 6pm and we're going home and we don't care that you're on vacation because we're here all year and if you have to get on the boat before we open and can't buy your little Made in Tawain "Alaskan" eskimo child doll then you're screwed, aren't you?

-gelato

Swoop! Southeast!

2008-06-26T01:38:00.000-07:00

TSO and I have been travelling WiFi dry for a little too long, and in the time we've had a connection, I have not had time/motivation to write. It's hard to look at a computer screen when the alternative is hundreds of mountains and glaciers and swooping eagles and the like.

Yes, I shook the Anchorage blues. We went down into the Kenai Peninsula, which was originally supposed to be a short little side jaunt. I thought it was so close to Anchorage that I didn't even factor in the mileage to our trip total. So... it turns out that the Peninsula is actually like an upside-down "Y" with Homer at one tip and Seward at the other. and each over 100 miles from Anchorage. We ended up visiting both.

Okay...okay...triage...

It's very late and I have to get up in 4 hours to go catch the ferry to Sitka. What should I write about?

Well, the mosquitoes here are every bit as big and bad as the warnings say. We have mostly avoided running into them, but our last few campsites have been some of the worst. We stayed at Huck Hobbit's Hostel in Slana, where they came by the thousands, and fell asleep staring up at the hundred or so that had gotten themselves trapped between the outside of the tent and the rain fly. When I took off the fly in the morning, a visible cloud of mosquitoes lifted straight up into the air. Then there was the campground in Haines, Chilkat Lake?, where I had to get up in the morning before our ferry left and boil water to wash the dishes. The water came from a hand pump, like most of the water in state/provincial parks, with an advisory to boil it first. It takes about half an hour to do enough for dishes and drinking, and in that time every mosquito from a five mile radius came and hovered around me, attracted by the heat and steam. A good fifty or so kamikazeed directly into the uncovered clean water bucket, which made washing dishes interesting. I finally busted out the mosquito hat that I brought, the first time I've had to use it on this trip. The actually mosquito net, however, remains packed and untouched. Oh yes. We are rough woodsmen now, aren't we?

Bears have not been a problem, knock on wood. The only ones we've seen have been A) on the side of the road while driving, B) in Denali while on the bus, and C) with enough people watching them already that they were no surprise. The first ones like that were the ones I mentioned in the Kenai. Today we encountered another similar case, but much worse. We went to visit the Mendenhall Glacier just outside of Juneau, discovering that apparently every person aboard every one of the four massive cruise ships parked outside of town was doing exactly the same thing. It was the most crowded "tourist" site we've seen yet, so bad that we had to practically march in a line as we walked up the trail. (We finally did break away and make it to a more remote spot much closer to the glacier.) But when we first arrived, I parked Bosco next to a large group of people surrounding a tree, taking pictures and pointing up at a little black bear high in the branches. The poor bear was agitated, but there was no way down, so it crawled around and gnawed on branches. Several hours later when we came back to the car, the tour buses and people were gone, and so was the bear.

We finally hit a nasty part of the Alaskan Highway several days ago, as we were driving from Tok to Haines Junction. This bit is all torn up, apparently a permanent thing, alternating between pavement unexpectedly turning to gravel, massive divots and waves marked only by a little orange flag (or sometimes not at all), frost heaves, and construction delays. It wasn't quite as bad as the drive from the Canadian/US border to Chicken, Alaska (a steep dirt road made muddy by a recent rain), but it was enough to shake and shimmy poor Bosco, who is beginning to take on a few extra rattle-y noises. The populous Kenai clubbed my Lower 48 driving sense back into me, so the first time I met a massive dip in my lane, I took it, causing things in the back to catch air and rearrange themselves, and then immediately realized that there was no one in the other lane for probably 50 miles and that I could - hey! - actually cross the yellow line to avoid things. It's funny I've forgotten this so quickly, considering how free and easy driving was for most of the Yukon. The Yukon - Where Road Markings Are Suggestions.

The drive from Haines Junction down to Haines is probably a leg that most people skip, since the RVers continue down the way they came and the cruise shippers never stray so far from the water, but this stretch was, I think, my favorite drive yet. The road goes up and over a mountain pass, one that was fiercely guarded by the coastal Tlingit so that they alone could control trade with the Interior Peoples. It starts in the taiga (Russian for "little sticks"), a forest in miniature. The permafrost stunts the growth of the trees, so that they can grow several hundred years and still look like a sapling. Occasionally there are "drunken forests" where the permafrost has melted under the roots of larger trees, causing them to tip this way and that like a bad hair day. Lakes and kettle ponds go past, and then the road climbs above the low treeline into the tundra, with massive snowy mountains in every direction. When it finally descends below treeline on the other side, massive trees quickly appear, the wet coastal forests of southeast Alaska.

And that's where we are now, one big jump from the Kenai to Southeast, and all I can say is "Finally!" For some reason I thought that it wouldn't take long to get from one to the other - the mileage in numbers certainly doesn't look intimidating - but when we finally turned around in Seward and set our sights on Haines, it took four days to get there!

I've got far too many stories to tell. We have a 25-hour ferry ride in our future. Maybe they'll have WiFi?

Shakin' Anchorage

2008-06-15T13:37:00.000-07:00

After weeks of driving through the bush, tiny towns and narrow roads where the most exciting thing happening was wildlife or weather related, we came down into Anchorage the other day. It began ominously. The road first grew decent shoulders, and then took on another lane, and all of the sudden we were driving past Jiffy Lubes and junk shops, fast food places and giant plastic monkeys holding a sign that said "Gorilla Fireworks!!" Then came more cars, more people, insanity, and there we were in the city of Anchorage.

Somewhere I read that Anchorage has a million people, but I think I was sorely misinformed, because TSO read out of the Milepost that there are only 600,000, which is plenty enough anyway. I also read that the Anchorage area contains about %70 of Alaska's entire population. I think I read this from the same source. It may not be accurate. It may, in fact, be a gigantic lie intended to mislead me, a lie that I will pass on in full confidence to future generations, a perpetual sewage pipe of ignorance dumping into the clear stream that is the human existence. But I digress.

Perhaps it is because I'm finally hitting travel fatigue, or perhaps it's because I do not like cities and had gone so long without one, but Anchorage immediately gave me the blues. The Anchorage Blues. We struggled to find a campsite that night, mostly because I was tired and not reading the AAA book correctly, sending TSO back and forth on a wild goose chase over the same stretch of highway, finally locating the campground and narrowly beating out a hundred frenzied RVers for the very last site. And the site was fair enough - our neighbors were friendly, descendants of native peoples, who let us enjoy their campfire with them - though we were rained on all through the night and into the morning.

We camped along the Turnagain Arm, a fjord of the bay that drains completely at low tide, leaving vast mud flats. Clay flats. There are stories aplenty of people (usually foolish tourists) who have wandered in to the quicksand like clay and been trapped as the tides come in, sometimes ending with the people losing their legs to get free, and sometimes ending with them just drowning. The warnings were enough that when we walked down to the edge of the clay, we did not stray from the rocks. Turnagain Arm took one look at us and growled... and we kept our distance.

The next morning we caught the open air weekend market in Anchorage itself, which was grand in that I had studied enough of the Anchorage map to get their without dilemma. Getting away and "casually driving the city," however, turned out to be different story, and as I circled the block a fourth time looking for nonexistent parking spots and getting stymied, again, by another one way street, I decided that I do not like Anchorage, at least while behind the wheel of a car. Oh, to ditch Bosco and explore the city on foot! Unfortunately there was no sign that said "Ditch Your Car Here," and so I panicked and flung us in the direction of south, out of Anchorage towards the Kenai Penn.

Anchorage got shoot up by a big earthquake in the 60's, and has now payed it forward by shaking me up. Blah, the Anchorage Blues!

We are now at a laundromat in Soldotna, and my clothes are dry, so that's the end of that story.

A bit more Denali

2008-06-13T14:14:00.001-07:00

Right.... well now I'm not quite so rushed for time, so more on Denali.

The park only has one road going into it, 14 miles of pavement that you can drive yourself and then another 70 miles of unpaved that you must ride a park bus to reach, at least in the summertime. You can walk into the park, you can bike into the park, but you cannot take your car past mile 14. This results in something amazing - a wilderness barely touched by rampaging tourism, where the road winds narrow and unmarring through the tundra and around the mountain passes, a silence and remoteness. Almost everyone stays within striking distance of the road, which means that if you wander but a mile away, you are alone.

Wandering from the road isn't nearly as foolish as it would seem. Treeline is at about 2500 feet, so most of the park is covered by tundra or low-bush taiga, meaning that any rise allows you to see for miles and miles around. Backcountry campers can go anywhere with only one rule - You cannot pitch your tent within sight of the road. But because the line of sight goes so far, it can sometimes mean quite a long hike in. Of course, this works well for the day hiker's purposes. We were able to traipse about easily wherever we roamed and never fear getting lost, because every now and then - whoop! There's the road in the distance! No problem.

Denali impressed me in so many ways. Where other national parks insist that you stay on the trail at all times, Denali has very few trails after the paved section, and so there the signs read, "Get out and explore the backcountry! Get away from the road! Don't worry about trails! Just make sure you spread out in a group so you don't create a new one."

Denal also impresses in its commitment to environmental sustainability. Alaska so far has been a desert wasteland as far as recycling goes. People don't even accept the most recyclable of items. But in Denali, recycling was the rule. Trash cans were in short supply. We road the park bus in to about mile 66, where sits the brand new Eielson Visitor's Center, built to replace the older, smaller one that had previously been there. It is the most environmentally friendly building in the entire Parks system, built with out of recycled and local materials, with natural light and heating taken into account in its design. It is powered by a hydroelectric generator in a nearby stream, solar panels, and boosted by propane generators when needed. Best of all, it is built with a low profile. The parking and pullout for the buses is on the roof, so the actual structure is worked into the side of the hill in a way that makes it very difficult to see from the road - no large and imposing structure plunked down on the tunddra. It opened for the very first time last Sunday. We got to visit it on its third day of operation. Good timing for us!

More on Denali later, I'm sure. I could write all day about that park!
A

Cicily...I mean...Talkeetna

2008-06-13T13:55:00.000-07:00

So now we are in Talkeetna, just about 100 miles north of Anchorage. I'm sitting outside from a coffee house in the sun, and between the sunshine and the dust on the screen, I can't really see what I'm typing, so apologies if typos abound.

Talkeetna is a funky little town of about 800 people, depending on how many of the nearby backcountry hermits you count; a town of artists and tourist dives, bars decorated with furs and antlers and gift shops as far as the eye can see (which is about three blocks), reindeer pigs-in-a-blanket in the bakery and free cookies in the new/used bookstore. We have been in town for a day and a half now, and already we run into people we know at every corner. Today I tipped my hat at the mule wagon driver - we met each other yesterday - and just now as I was typing the owner of our hostel with her two young children came past to get ice cream and we had a little chat. It's a tight and friendly town, fake and real at the same time.

We are staying at the Talkeetna International Hostel, which caters especially to Denali mountain climbers. Some are just off the mountain, having made the summit or not, and since yesterday three guides have been staging the gear needed for a 12 person guided ascent. It's been fun watching and talking to them. They were much more generous than the sort of machismo I would usually expect, saying that I should climb the mountain...that I could climb the mountain. Ha ha. It warms my heart to hear it, though I suspect they're just tying to beef up their clientele. The backyard of the hostel is crammed full of mountaineering tents, so that our little three-person is nearly the largest thing there. (One and only one tent beats ours.) The porch is perpetually crammed with backpacks and ice picks, with sleeping bags, boots and tarps hanging down from the rafters. All in all, a pretty nice place to stay.

Talkeetna brags that it is the town that "Northern Exposure" was based on. I can see it, especially if I rewind the place back a few years to what it must have been like before the bigger crush of tourism came. It sits at the end of a 14 mile spur road, a dead end met by three converging rivers and the Alaskan Railroad from Anchorage to Fairbanks, and here also is the last place in the country where you can flag down a train anywhere along the tracks to stop and pick you up. There are liberals here, Obama signs on yards, and churches. We sat on the grass of the elementary school last night and watched a soccer game play to 10pm. Last night around 1am was the first time in at least a week or so that I noticed something approaching "dark" out the window. Still light enough to walk around without artificial light, but I could no longer read in my tent. Dark. I'm not so glad to see it again. Acouple of weeks is not long enough to miss the mood and stars.

What else to say? I am dozing in the sun. There is an amazing cinnamon roll sitting, waiting, across the table from me. I know it's amazing because I had one yesterday.

Now it's down south towards Anchorage, which is becoming less exciting the more I learn about it. I've heard things like, "Anchorage isn't Alaska, but on a clear day you can see it from there," and "The nice thing about Anchorage is that Alaska is only a half hour away." Apparently Anchorage is like any other generic sprawling fast food chained stripped malled commercial monstrous city down in the lower 48. Perhaps we shall give it a quick nod before going off in search of quainter climes. And salmon!

Denali is Not Mt. McKinley

2008-06-11T12:44:00.000-07:00

Denali is amazing. Both the park and the mountain. You can call the thing Mt. McKinley if you want, but it was only ever named that because an early pioneer wanted to honor a presidential candidate back in the states, a candidate that never came to Alaska. TSO and I were joking that if the same thing happened in the present day, it would be Mt. Kucinich, perhaps?

This is my turbo Denali post, because I find myself, as I often do, strapped for time with a random WiFi connection, this one at the Science Center in the National Park. So.... turbo post. Here is a brief summary of Denali:

There is only one road into the park. Only park buses are allowed on it. It is a fallacy that only the morning buses see wildlife, but nevertheless everyone crowds onto them in the slim hope that their viewing will be improved. We took the 11am bus. It had six people. We saw grizzly with cubs (x2), caribou, ptarmigan, stuff, lots of other wildlife things. It was good. Then did lunch in the tundra and hiked in gorgeous mountains...

You know what I'm realizing? Turbo posts don't really work, do they? Ah well. It was worth a shot.

Eine Kleine Alaska

2008-06-07T02:25:00.000-07:00

Just a few snapshots to help y'all visualize our trip:

Getting Bosco ready to go. He is loaded to the hilt. The sleeping/camp site stuff goes up top, the cooking gear and canned goods go below. We just did a major repack in Tok, so this is a picture of our old system.

Mile O of the Alaskan Highway, one of the pictures in my Me Looking Far Too Excited About Signs series.

A typical campsite, our little tent. We've been lucky to have picnic tables at every site, so we can use the cook stove without too much difficulty. You might be able to see my hammock strung up in the back. I spent one night in the hammock, but it got a little cold and the mosquitoes were fierce.

Buffalo! Wild. With mountains. We saw a lot of these. Buffalo and mountains.

The Dempster Highway. We only drove 40 miles in, but it was wonderful. It is all unpaved. The Alaskan Highway has about the same sort of scenery, but it is paved and not even remotely dangerous. Now I'm seeing a lot of "I survived the Alaskan Highway!!!" bumper stickers for sale in the gift shops, which seems akin to saying something like "I survived I-5 from Portland to Seattle!" Actually, Seattle is much more dangerous. Maybe it's different with an RV, but I am quite underwhelmed by the danger level of the Alcan. Drive it. It's fun!

The Visitor's Center, Tok, Alaska

2008-06-07T01:32:00.000-07:00

"Where is Nunivak Island?" I asked Deb, the nice lady at the Visitor's Center. She was bent over sorting out mailers; I was staring up at a mounted muskox head above a sign that said, "This muskox was taken on Nunivak Island, the only place where muskox can be hunted."

"Up north," said Deb. "This is Alaska..." She held out her hand and pointed to where we were, and where Fairbanks was, and where the island was.

"And it's the only place where you can hunt muskox?" I said.

"Is it?" She looked at the sign below the head as though she had never actually read it before. "Hmm. I'm not sure about that. I'll have to check."

We started talking about wild game meats. I had been on a mission. A caribou mission. I have been going into the local grocery stories calling out for caribou, hoping a packaged steak will jump at me from the refrigerated shelf. So far, the only thing even remotely caribou has come heavily seasoned in the form of a sausage. TSO and I tried muskox just south of Dawson City, and it was quite good. But I want to eat ALL of Alaska's animals. Mmm, yummy. Sea otter.

So I inquired of Deb where a foolish traveller like myself might find some of the more watchable wildlife in fillet form, and she frowned.

"You can't buy wild game. They only allow farmed game to be sold in stores. Caribou, yes, but there's no such thing as farmed moose. The Alaskan government doesn't like it, for some reason. They farm moose in Russia and Norway, but some rancher up in Fairbanks tried for years to get a permit for it and the government wouldn't let him. The only way to try moose is to meet someone who hunts them."

She then went on to tell me about a recent kerfuffle in Anchorage, where an older single woman woke up one morning to discover that a moose had died in her backyard. This isn't that unusual; over 1000 moose have died in people's yards in Anchorage just in the last few years. Alive, the moose belong to everyone. Dead, in your yard, they are yours and yours alone. The city won't come remove them. So the woman, having no means to get rid of an entire moose carcass by herself, posted a note on Craigslist for someone to come and get it for dog food. Craigslist notice and got nervous, thinking that someone might instead go and try to salvage the moose for meat, get sick, and sue the site. Or something. So they took her posting off, and I'm not quite sure how that story ends.

But after we'd been chatting a while, Deb and I, she glanced side to side and said, "Are you going to be around in the morning? When I come to work, I can bring you some moose to try."

"That you shot?" I said.

"Yes. I don't meet many people who want to try it. Most people don't really understand hunting. But it's much better than buying meat. I know exactly where it comes from, no hormones, and I respect the animals I hunt. When my husband or I get a moose, we're so grateful. We use everything. It's really a blessing to get a moose."

I found out with a bit of talking that her husband had moved to Tok when he was a little kid, the very year that the Alaskan Highway had opened to civilian travel, 1947. He was the eldest white man in town.

This morning, TSO and I returned to the Visitor's Center. Deb brought us moose steaks and caribou sticks (like jerky.) We gave her canned albacore tuna and chinook salmon from my hometown, which she was familiar with, a happy trade. I'm so glad to make friends along the road, however fleeting they are. Thank you, Deb!

And so tonight we had the best dinner ever... Moose steak with spruce tip jam, wild rice pilaf, carrots with mustard, and of course, the very necessary desert, an uncooked smore. Raw smores are the best thing ever. After moose steak.

Dawson City is Quite Old

2008-06-04T20:00:00.001-07:00

We have just made it into Alaska, but for the past few days we have been resting and exploring Dawson City in the Yukon Territory. Dawson deserves at least a couple of posts. Here is one.

We rolled into town after a long day, a day that started by hiking in the Tombstone Mountains on the Dempster Highway. The very fact that we drove on the Dempster made me giddy. This is the highway that goes all the way to Inuvit on the Arctic Sea, waaaay way up north. It is unpaved all the way. (Except the last 6 miles. Random.) It makes the Alaskan Highway look like the Jersey Turnpike.

So we trotted around for awhile in the brushy tundra and snow, yelling "Hey bear!!!" at intervals, and when we'd had our fill we drove back up the dusty road to the real one - the paved one - and on to Dawson. We rolled into Dawson with the music of "Amelie" playing in the car... resulting in a very surreal experience, for Dawson City is like a movie set in three dimensions, or a piece of Disneyland's Frontierland expanded, or a old timey photo brought to color. Every building looks straight out of the early 1900's. Not a chain or recognizable store name in town - no McDonalds, no Safeway. Just Klondike Kate's, The Drunken Goat, Sourdough Joes, The Midnight Sun.

In the summer, Dawson has 3000 people, half of which are young seasonal workers supporting the tourist trade. (The other big business is gold mining. Still. Which strikes me as a bit of an anachronism.) The result - the town is all a'bustle with young travellers looking for nothing more than new friends and adventures. We made a couple of both.

Toe.

I need to write Dawson part II another time, because right now I'm in Chicken, Alaska, and we have to keep driving to Tok before the soughdough pancake contest is over. Wee!

Whitehorse

2008-06-01T10:50:00.000-07:00

This is my turbo post about Whitehorse, the Capital of the Yukon Territory.

It's nice.

It's not as cold as you might think.

Everyone here is very fit and trim, as though they were air-lifted in from Denver. They are also very young, cool, and friendly.

There is a vibrant arts and culture scene here in town. Even a guitar busker out on the street. Local musicians abound. One of the most famous ones also drives a city bus.

There are Starbucks here. Two of them. I am sad to say that I visited one instead of the local alternatives, but only because it was late and they had a bathroom. And also coffee.

It's still light at midnight. It's still light at 3am. It is light all the freaking time. You hardly ever need a flashlight, unless you are hoping to read a book during the couple of "dim" hours in the night. We were playing guitar last night around 11pm, forgetting the fact that, oh yes, it's late and perhaps people are sleeping. The light is very deceptive.

Whitehorse is definitely a town I could sink my teeth into. I feel like I could spend a year here easily. But for this morning, it's back into Bosco and north to Dawson City, the Klondike!

Sucky Times in the Yukon

2008-06-01T10:36:00.000-07:00

I should really say "Sucky Times and Otherwise," because it really hasn't been so bad...

But I have this nasty foolish tendency to wait until I'm next to dying before going to visit a doctor. Some freakish mutant British Columbian stomach virus came and whalloped me last week, which was putting a serious damper - such as making every meal a traumatic experience - in my otherwise merry adventures. Here we were in Watson Lake on a Friday afternoon, and did I go take my last chance to see a doctor? Nooo... because I am dumb. Apparently.

So Nathan and I got to get off the beaten tourist path late on Friday night and visit the Whitehorse General Hospital, and I got to learn about Canadian health care, and now I have magic happy pills that have made the sun come out and shine again, and Nathan gets gold stars and the official designation of "Good Friend in Rough Weather."

Morals of the story:
1. Don't get sick while travelling.
2. Jujubees do not substitute for medicine, despite their pill-like appearance.
3. It's good to keep a healthy travelling buddy around so that when you do get sick, you can tell the doctor again and again, "It wasn't the drinking water. No...it wasn't the drinking water. I'm telling you..."

Arrived in Yukon

2008-05-30T10:24:00.001-07:00

Yesterday we finally crossed out of British Columbia into the Yukon Territory. The Yukon! The word alone makes me think of adventure and far away places. For the past few days we have been driving up the Alaskan Highway through large tracts of wilderness, with nothing to see on either side of the road but endless forests of lodgepole pine and aspen. The road cuts a wide swath through the trees, which I suppose is to help motorists from hitting wildlife and to keep the trees from falling all over the road.

In the wildlife department, we've done pretty well. Our most common spottings have been wild bison. Who knew? I thought that the days of wandering buffalo where done and gone, but up here they still travel about as they please. We stopped in to Dora's Cafe in Fireside, BC yesterday to get some ice cream, and she told us about how one bull had shattered her restaurant window (quite by accident) and how the herd wanders into her RV park every fall, forcing her to shut it down until they decide to move on. They're easy to spot while driving, which is perhaps why we've seen more of them than anything else.

But we have seen a few black bears, one tiny token caribou, an elk, and a beaver hard at work. The first day on the Alaskan Highway I spotted a bull moose on the edge of the road, but even though I saw it from such a long ways away, I could not believe it was an actual moose and not a sign or a statue or some other fake-moose-let's-fool-the-tourists, and so I overshot it by a long ways before gasping "Moose!" and turning a sharp U-ey. Hopefully it's not our last, because we couldn't react quickly enough to take pictures!

This idea that the Alaskan Highway is oh-so treacherous and scary is a big fat myth. It's a lovely road to drive, with nothing to imply shredded tires or abandoned cars or all the other horror stories I heard before we left. The scenery lulls me into a sense of hypnosis after a while, with nothing much happening, and then we round the corner someplace to see a massive towering snow-capped mountain and my jaw drops. I highly recommend the drive.

Well, it's off to Whitehorse now, and since Nathan is being very patient with me right now while I take advantage of this Wi-Fi spot, I'd best wrap it up and move along. We have to go pan for gold so we can pay for this trip!

Dawson Creek

2008-05-27T11:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Nathan and I realized that we've only been driving/camping for three days (four today), and we could hardly believe it. We were in Seattle on Friday, but it seems so long ago! So now, after a lifetime of travelling, we find ourselves only slightly past the middle of British Columbia in Dawson Creek, which is Nebraska. Seriously. Dawson Creek looks a lot like Nebraska, or at least as best I can remember that flat and rolling state.

I'm in a bit of a camping stupor. We've just broken camp for the morning and are sitting at the picnic table facing the daunting beginning of the Alaskan Highway, and Nathan has just informed me that the next 410 miles are paved. Fantastic, since I just spent an hour slapping headlight protectors and a grill screen thing on the front of Bosco, all to ease a bit of the damage I'm imagining will ensue after 1500 miles of a solid gravel shower. If we make it to Anchorage without a busted windshield, I am going to buy myself an ice cream.

Cooking with a propane stove is excellent. I think I'm getting spoiled. Spam has also been elevated in my opinion. Spam is the King of Canned Meats.

This morning a friendly neighbor wandered by the campsite and introduced himself. I do believe he had spent the entire morning wandering around offering advice to people, because after chatting we me he went over to the next campsite and did the same thing. He warned me of buffalo on the road ("They're stupid. They don't move for nothing.") and of the eagles that perch above populated campgrounds, waiting to swoop down and snatch cats and little yip-yip dogs that aren't being watched by their owners. He told me that he had seen firsthand a tug of war concerning a poodle between an eagle and and RVer. The eagle won.

Ooooh.... I guess I should probably go. Much many miles to drive yet. Yes.

Have Car, Will Travel

2008-05-20T23:41:00.000-07:00

Just a quick little post to announce that we are now travelling, TSO and I! I will have to post more later...when I have more time...and am not falling asleep on a couch in Seattle...

Suffice to say, all is well, the car is loaded to the gills, and we will be conquering Canada within the week. Rah!

Yes, no, yes, I'm not posting

2008-05-14T02:26:00.000-07:00

Because TSO and I are trying to get ready to go to Alaska and it's so crazy and there is so much stuff to do AAAAAA FREAKOUT!

But we've been also doing some lovely fun stuff together, and at least one of us isn't too lazy to write about it, so go check out the fine and excellent writing at Travelin' Shoes.

Maybe one or both of us will manage posts from the Great White North after we hit the road, which will be - God willing - very soon.

Big Name Comes, Small Town Fawns

2008-05-13T20:34:00.000-07:00

Well, it finally happened. The Democratic primary has grown so rampantly out of control that they've gotten desperate, so desperate that they're even campaigning on the Oregon Coast.

But we haven't reached the level of the actual candidates yet. We're only on "spouse level."

Still, it was pretty exciting to hear that Bill Clinton was coming. Has a president current or ex ever visited the coast before? Not in my lifetime. The closest thing was when JFK campaigned here 40 years ago, a fact a learned from the woman standing in front of me in line as we waited to see Clinton. She had also seen JFK. She had been in high school.

The rally, or whatever you want to call it, was a mellow event. A week of raining had finally given way to mild and breezy spring weather, so we coastal type folks were in a merry mood, chatting to each other as we stood in a line that stretched for blocks. Everyone knew everyone. I had driven down from my hometown, but amazingly even I came across a few people that I knew. After about an hour and a half of waiting, they opened up the doors to the middle school gym, and we packed right on in. Amazingly, there was no security check of any kind. Most folks opted for the bleachers, but I choose the floor, so that when Clinton finally came out (on time!!) I was standing only 20 feet from him.

Bill Clinton is remarkably charismatic in person, very easy and relaxed as he speaks. But our crowd was judicious, and there was definitely rationing of applause for only the agreeable points of his speech. I, for my part, was very clappy about the part where Clinton promised more wilderness area designations for Oregon - we fall far short of the acreage of neighboring states - but this is not a welcomed idea for a community build on timber dollars, and so the rest of the gym stayed awkwardly silent. Other clunkers included his proposition that the future of transportation lies with lithium - I think - battery powered cars, ("They're too expensive!!" shouted one woman behind me) and that the lithium -or whatever it was - lies in great abundance in the ground of South America. (And so we are supposed to go dig up the rainforest? Hello?)

Also lacking was his understanding of our Northwest salmon situation, a problem he summed up in a way that very much implied he had been briefed on the plane ride over. "More salmon for everyone!" he said, or something close to it. His analysis of the issue was based along the premise that there are so many salmon just a'swimming on out there in the Pacific, and it's a fight between Alaskan fisherman and Northwestern fisherman to see who can go haul them in, as in, "stop letting Alaska get all the salmon and give them back to Oregon."

Which might work if salmon were whales, or if salmon were oil reserves, or if salmon were stock options. But salmon are salmon, and with a very few exceptions (i.e. ocean dead zones) if you find your local fishery depleted, you can only point the finger at yourself. So when Clinton started with his garbled notion of problem/solution, I wanted to yell, "Get a job!" Or, no, what would the phrase be? "Get a fisheries education or at least a rudimentary grasp on things that every third grader in Oregon already knows!"

Oh well. I suppose it's too much to ask for our local problems to go on the national scene anyway.

Clinton's best moment of the night was the announcement that Hillary would end No Child Left Behind, a line that filled the gym with wild cheering and applause. He followed this by saying, "That's a sure fire winner. I could be in the middle of Idaho 400 miles from the nearest Democrat and get applause from a herd of elk with that one."

After the speech, he came down into the crowd for hand-shaking and signature-signing, and the gym turned into a gigantic mosh pit. With me in the middle. So I got to know some of my South Coast neighbors a little bit more on that day, and isn't that what democracy is all about? Coming together?

Here is a picture of da man:

And here is proof that I was actually there. Or my eye was there, anyway. You have no idea how awkward it was to turn around to take a picture of myself when everyone behind me was so fixated on that big ol' flag. They thought I was a wee bit odd... because I broke eye contact with Clinton - aaaAAAAA!

And I had a warm and fuzzy video to upload, but since Blogger is being dumb about it, I'll have to try to post it later.
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The Daily Gripe

2008-04-24T17:35:00.000-07:00

I guess it's a sign that I'm getting old when I start my day by scoffing at the newspaper. Here are the latest things to push my buttons:

1. McCain's idea of the economy. I was happily working in the kitchen the other day, listening to an NPR interview, when it suddenly occurred to me that McCain was repeating the same thing over and over again with only the slightest variation in phrasing. His solution to our current predicament is to A) eliminate unnecessary earmarks and B) lower taxes. This is all fine and noble and good, but I desperately wanted to ask - So, we make our government run at maximum efficiency and we give the citizens more money in their pocket. Then what? The government still needs money to run, especially if McCain wants to keep this war going, and where does the money come from? Right now, we're borrowing heavily from China. Wouldn't it be a lesser evil to tax the snot out of ourselves rather than borrow from another country? And if everyone has more money in their pockets, they will most likely go out and spend it on cheap goods, ie ones coming from outside the country. So we end up borrowing more and increasing our trade deficit further. This is a solution?

Any time I hear McCain say "earmarks" I want to slap the TV/radio/newspaper. The two he frequently cites are the "Bridge to Nowhere" and the DNA study on grizzly bears, which he laughs at as being a paternity suit. The "Bridge to Nowhere," if I'm not mistaken, was a scuttled project to built a bridge between Ketchikan and its island airport. I've ridden the ferry to that island several times, and it's not so bad. A bridge is probably unnecessary, but certainly not unreasonable, especially after you've hauled luggage up and down the ramp to the ferry a few times. As for the DNA study, a bunch of scientists quickly jumped up and said, hey, the grizzly is nearly extinct in the Lower 48 and that study contributed a lot to conservation efforts. (It sounds very much like a study I might have worked on, had things gone differently.) So McCain is off base on both counts.

2. The border fence. Stupidest idea ever. The entire time I've heard people talking about it, I keep asking, "What about the wildlife?" It reminds me of a conference I went to in Belize on the Central American Wildlife Corridor (now called the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor), a cooperative effort between all the countries in Central America to preserve an unbroken strip of wild lands from north to south to allow for the traditional migration of wildlife. The meeting brought together people of all stripes, from researchers to farmers, to try to create this unbroken corridor, and the very act of trying was itself a great source of pride.

The first time I heard about a border fence, I thought about this corridor. Any fence big enough to stop people would stop...pretty much everything else. I've seen coverage about how the fence would affect ranchers (cut them off from their water supply) and towns (cut buildings off from the town), but nothing on wildlife.

Finally, finally yesterday in the paper there was an article on the wildlife. Thank you! And yes, it turns out that the fence would be so disastrous that it would endanger much of the wildlife, and in one instance probably cause the extinction of a rare sub-species of pronghorn. Many of the scientists who work in that area are promising that they will physically lay down in the path of the fence if they try to build it. President Bush, in all his great wisdom, has already granted environmental waivers to the agency building the fence (Homeland Security, or Border Patrol, or something, I forget.) But out of the goodness of their hearts, the agency has offered to pay Fish and Wildlife $800,000 to mitigate the damages.

So, will the F&W use that $800,000 to helicopter the pronghorn back and forth across the fence? Maybe they could use it to cryogenically freeze all the wildlife for a time when there aren't any more fences.

3. Ethanol, the biggest scam of our generation, and yes, I am getting momentum from the recent Time Magazine issue that pretty much said the same thing. But it's much worse than I thought. On the surface, ethanol is just barely more efficient than gasoline, but that's before you factor in the land, water, and fertilizer needed to produce it. On the fertilizer issue, the increased crops of corn in the Midwest have resulted in an increase in fertilizer being washed down the Mississippi, which in turn has caused a widening dead zone in the Gulf that is putting fishermen out of business. On the land issue, many US farmers are switching from soybeans to corn, which increases the soybean demand, which is being answered by South American (mainly Brazil), which has to clear out more rainforest to convert the land to farming. So by using ethanol, we are essentially killing the ocean and the rainforest. Green!

While we're all in a huff trying to fill our gas tanks, much of the world is struggling to fill their stomachs. One tank's worth of ethanol equals enough corn to feed one person for a year. I suppose if we were in dire straights, we could ask, "Do I want to eat for a year, or drive for 400 miles?" What yahoo thought that burning up food for fuel was a good idea to begin with?

Ah, you powerful corn lobby, scourge of dietitians and spawner of conspiracy theories everywhere! I'm referring to conversation I had once upon a time with an oil man I was sitting next to on the plane. We were in Ecuador; he was looking for new oil in the jungle. We started talking corn. He pointed out to me that you hardly ever see corn syrup on the label of foods outside the US. I already knew this. I had learned much earlier that Coke made in the US is sweetened with corn syrup, while in other countries it usually has sugar instead. (I've heard several Coke lovers exclaim, while drinking one abroad, "Hey, this is what it used to taste like!")

But then the oil man insisted that nearly every food in America uses corn syrup, and that I would be hard pressed to find one that didn't. He was right. Nine times out of ten...well, check the label. Is it cheaper? More readily available? Or is the corn lobby an evil entity spun wildly out of control with power? My oil man insisted the latter, and with confidence plainly stated that the reason so many Americans struggle with obesity is because of corn syrup, which is harder for the body to process.

I shrug off that sort of thinking. I'm not one for conspiracy theories anyway. I just don't think people are all that organized. But gradual misguidance, that is something I genuinely fear, and that seems to be where the ethanol debate is right now. Oregon, being a forward-thinking state, has put forth a renewable energy agenda which heavily includes ethanol. (They want to build refineries in the state, shipping in trucks of corn from the Midwest. Intelligent.) Oh...moan...ethanol... And now I can't go to the gas station without tapping into a blend, whether I like it or not.

Ranting...ranting...

Insert happy thought here.

Road Tripping - The Alaska Edition

2008-04-23T13:32:00.000-07:00

Monster Library Student, you asked me to write about my plans to go to Alaska with TSOldtimer, so here it is. We're going to Alaska! Woo!

Is that sufficient?

No? Hmm.

In my mind, the fewer "plans" I have to write about, the better. The last time I planned out a detailed road trip was when I drove for ten days between Massachusetts and Colorado with my friend Jessica. I spent weeks in advance mapping our route, a wide horseshoe swing through the South, making reservations at the critical stops and checking every place beforehand to make sure things would be open for service at precisely the moment we wheeled up. I had each day figured out to the minute, roughly.

Things went well for day one and day two, but on day three the first little snowballs of the impending avalanche starting rolling down the hill, and by day six I found myself freaking out behind the steering wheel as darkness descended on Tuscaloosa, Alabama, looking for a campground that didn't exist, completely off schedule and approaching critical meltdown point.

Moral: Road trip + schedule works only for the very lucky, anal, or oblivious.

Since then I have taken two additional "meandering" type road trips, both with no particular agenda, and both have been fantastic. The first was a wide loop from Colorado to Oregon back to Colorado again, the one where I discovered en route that tizzy and GFGroupie were up in Seattle and thought, "Hey, it's only three hours out of my way, weeee!" and randomly drove there. The second was again going from Colorado to Oregon, but this time I took a dip through the Southwest with only two specific sites to see, leaving the rest of the trip to soak up the scenery and become One With the Road.

I come from a family of planners. My childhood family road trips were often supplemented by a map, supplied by my mom, which showed our route and highlights for each day. So I am predisposed - nay, infused- with the desire to chart and plot and plan. But I've since learned the value of being swept along on whim (or, equally good, on a plan that you didn't make yourself, as there is no sense of responsibility or obligation.) A rough skeleton idea is the best, as long as you have a bit of moxy.

I am convinced that you can just take a car and start driving anywhere in the lower 48, and with a lick of common sense you'll be fine. The furthest you can go without gas are the 100 mile stretches in Wyoming and Nevada, and even the Mojave Desert is a breeze with working AC. There's hardly a spot where you won't find a hotel or food or at least a cell phone signal, wilderness roads and winter extremes excluded.

But the drive north to Alaska is a little bit different. At least, it seems different to me, the novice, the rookie; it seems strange and adventures, slightly dangerous, like taking a ship that has sailed close to the shoreline and turning it out into the open sea. Every story I hear conflicts with another:

"Take extra gas!"
"Only amateurs take extra gas."

"This road is scenic and less-travelled, well worth it."
"People die and get robbed and murdered on this road."

"The road is well-maintained, just like normal roads in the Lower 48."
"Bring along extra tires, headlights, belts, and engines for when your car gets shaken apart into a million pieces."

There are a surprising number of people in my town who have made this trip before, which is nice to know. In the past two weeks, I have watched two families leave to do what TSO and I are about to do. Unfortunately, having real live people to glean advice from has only thrown more pieces into the murky stew of my expectations. I am under the impression that if once upon a time a traveller saw a broken down car on the side of the road, they will forever say, "That was a dangerous road!" and if they once passed through a herd of mountain sheep they will say, "This place was filled with wildlife!" as though the sheep are chained there on a regular basis and I should expect to see the same. The trip makes the tale.

The idea of driving north to Alaska was born out of a lunch I had last spring with a couple in my town. Both had lived up there, the wife in Anchorage and the husband...darn near everywhere else. She had family in Seattle, and so frequently made the trip back and forth, a hard three day drive that became as much of a boring commute as anything. (Three days on that road, mind, would be like going from Maine to Seattle in the same amount of time. No small feat.) The more she talked about the drive, the more I determined that I should one day go and do it.

Actually, it became, "I'll do it this summer!" But life happened, and I got distracted, and then there was the nagging problem of not having anyone to go with. Diving alone in the Lower 48, as I've said, is one thing, but there is something about crossing over the Canadian border that crosses the threshold of my comfort zone. (Scary Canadians.) "I'll do it someday!" I said, and maybe in the back of my mind I pictured myself with silver hair behind the wheel of a gigantic RV, following the Alaskan Tourist Bureau's motto "Come see Alaska before you die!"

But TSOldtimer came back from Spain and said, "Let's adventure!" and I immediately thought "Alaska!" And so fancy slipped into suggestion which has slowly been coagulating into actual factual plans, and I guess now us two rovers are going to end up in the Great White North, although I can still hardly believe it. I will be standing up there on the deck of a ship watching glaciers calf into the ocean while whales leap all around and say, "Are we really going to Alaska? Really?" Maybe it will sink in once I've seen a totem pole or two.

We were originally thinking about going, well, now - but thank goodness it didn't work out that way. My town, which never gets snow, got an inch of snow Sunday morning, and all of the Northwest has been hammered by an unusual cold front that has the orchard growers hauling out their frost fans. It's the weirdest weather ever, and it goes all the way up our route to Alaska, which is, at its warmest, still plunging into the 20's at night. (Spring? Hello? You out there?) So hopefully when we leave in a few weeks the weather will start behaving itself, and maybe - being optimistic here - this cold spell will have frozen out the first crop of these humongous Alaskan mosquitoes I hear so much about.

Mmmmm...Yay! Alaska! Anyone else want to come along for the ride?

Point of interest - I have been sipping a "Devil-may-care" cup of coffee the entire time I've been writing, which explains why I've been rambling on for pages and pages. But all you folks wanted me to blog, so... ha-ha! Take that, no editing!

The Big Bad "D"

2008-04-21T18:52:00.000-07:00

Considering the big PA primary is tomorrow, this seems like an appropriate time to talk politics again. I was truly hoping that both parties would still be unresolved by the time Oregon got to vote, but I suppose it was too much to ask. The only remaining contender to McCain is Ron Paul, and though his devotees still hang from the freeway overpasses, doggedly waving signs and flags and chucking campaign stickers down at passing traffic in the hopes that something will stick, I'm afraid that he has descended down to the voting tier that includes John the Baptist, Yosemite Sam, and Bullwinkle.

I wish that Oregon had an open primary, because then I could register as an independent and be done with all this partisan hullabaloo. But regrettably, it does not. To make matters worse, now that McCain has the nomination, the Republican ballot is woefully boring, with no major contest and many unchallenged candidates. So I did what any red-blooded American hankering to make a difference would do. I went and re-registered as. . .

(dum dum dum)

I have to confess, I have always, always been a moderate. Not that I'm moderate on every issue, but I side with some of the things each party has to offer and think they're absolute doofuses on other things. Both of them. I've never really seen either one as being better or worse than the other. In fact, if it wasn't already being used by some funky AARP campaign, I would consider this to be my perfect political symbol.

But I come from a long line of Republican kin, so there was certainly a very real risk of being disowned by the family. Plus, I have to admit that I've grown comfortable with the Republican label. It's a bit hard to think that now I am officially a Democrat. But now I can also officially say that I don't hold much stock in either party, and am now proudly bipartisan. One America!

It's amazingly easy to jump parties in Oregon. You can do it again and again to your heart's delight, so long as you get your mind made up a few days before the ballots are mailed out. It is so easy, in fact, that some conservative radio hosts have been lately encouraging Republicans to switch over so that they can cast a vote for Hillary - i.e. sabotage the Democratic chance in November. This, to me, is a despicable mindset, a divisive and pointedly unpatriotic way to go about an election, and anyone who switches for this reason should be strung up by their hanging chads and forced to watch all 30-something presidential debates end to end, including pundit commentary. The very idea irks me so much that when I re-registered, I was sorely tempted to include a note that read, "I am not a saboteur! I am inspired!"

And now I have an interesting ballot in front of me. There are scores of contested races on the Democratic side, and since I've been paying attention only to the presidential race, I have to go do some homework to figure out how to vote for them. I really only switched ships for the sake of the Hillary/Obama contest, so I might just vote on that and nothing else...oh, but...grr, errm...it seems terrible to leave something blank on the ballot. I guess that's left over from college testing days when I had to fill in the little bubbles for the answers, and it was better to fill them all in on a guess than not at all. I suppose it doesn't work that way for democracy.

At least I have one figured out:

Which is not to say that I've made up my mind for November. All candidates get an equal evaluation past the primaries, says I. One election at a time.

How to Burn Time

2008-04-21T02:26:00.001-07:00

Oh, wow people! I take a month off from blogging and suddenly everyone is up in arms! It's mighty nice that I've been missed, because to tell the truth I thought for sure I could slip out of the Blogosphere with nary a ripple. Such a relief it is, a warm and tingly feeling, to know that I have angry ranting friends to threaten... I meant, encourage me.

I think I've set my goals too high, because I was hoping that each and every thought I wrote would be well formed, complete, and meaningful, which means I've absolutely scared the crap out of myself as far as ever writing anything again. The thoughts have been forming - oh, they've been forming - but they never go past that embryonic "fishy-gill" stage. You know, like the photograph biologists put into textbooks to freak out middle school students, where they say that this little pink tadpole which might develop into a shark, or maybe an elephant, or maybe a human being, and the plain fact is that if you too, little Jimmy, had taken a wrong turn in the womb, you would have been birthed as a tunicate. But wait, I'm rambling. The point isn't so much that my potential blog posts haven't been developing, but that I've been so absolutely distracted that I seem to wander off and leave them as in a daze, the writer's ADD, never fully able to concen. . . look! A chicken!

Enough of that nonsense. Here are the things that a person can do instead of blogging:

1. Make ceviche. This is where you chemically cook raw fish by soaking it in lime juice. So far I have lasted six hours, and my ceviche hasn't killed me yet. One point of interest though - if they tell you to use papaya, use papaya. You would think a mango would fit the bill, as it is an orangey football shaped sort of mini-papaya, but alas, it does not.

2. Finally learn what all those terms you've been using at the coffee shop actually mean. No wonder I've never liked macchiato...!

3. Put gas in car. Change oil in car. Detail car. Put gas in car. Fix window on car. Fix transmission on car. Have long conversation with manufacturer about why the heck your car needs transmission fixed. Put gas in car. Change tires on car. Go back to the beginning and repeat (with variations) ad nauseum or until cash flow completely dries up. Check out library book about bike tuning.

4. Become a zomie sub-human parked in front of a television with no one for miles around who can say, "You're watching that?!" See how long it takes to no longer have a pulse.

5. Learn to fingerpick. After several days of fingerpicking, consider locating a guitar.

Okay, now I'm just being silly. Honestly, in the morrow I'll sit down and write something more coherent.

Legal terms: "Morrow" may refer to any point of time between April 21st 2008 and June 17th 2008. Offer not valid in Canada.

Why I'm a Blogging Slacker

2008-03-06T23:33:00.000-08:00

"Procrastination: The guilty knowledge that writing is the least interesting thing you could be doing right now."

This excellent reason was given to me by "101 Reasons to Stop Writing," a clever site which I wouldn't recommend unless you have a strong taste for self-deprecating humor and painfully accurate demotivators. There's a lovely article there about Amazon's Kindle bursting into flames which is well worth a read if your hackles rise at the mention of the phrase, "electronic book."

I know I promised more drawings, but I'm currently working like a child on a sugar high, barely starting one thing before I'm immediately starting something new, so nothing is getting finished. But it sure is fun! I have a new drawing toy that I'm very excited to talk about... all in good time. Plus I have randomly been asked to design a semi-professional logo, which is charming, since I've never really even done a semi-semi-professional logo. Gots to roll up my sleeves and plunge into uncharted territory...

Oh look, a quick cheesy unrelated drawing. It was supposed to be a stick man. This is as close as I can come to a stick man. It's a stick blob.

Dear, dear, dear, I'm rambling because of the fact that it's late.

Really...

2008-02-21T17:20:00.000-08:00

(This is what I do with my free time. Er... drawing and darning.)

Is it just me, or has the appearance of text on Blogger changed? Maybe it's just been too long since I looked at my own blog page.

AaaaaaMountain!

2008-02-09T00:28:00.001-08:00

Allrightallrightallright . . . so I haven't been in a writing mood lately. (Been in a drawing mood! Expect to see things soon.)

I had to slap something up to keep the dust off the ol' blog.

ems of a Solitary Mind

2008-01-22T13:10:00.000-08:00

I don't profess to be a poet. I'm not even quite sure what delineates prose from hesitated speech, or poems from TV jingles, or who makes the final call when it comes to "accidental poetry," a bit of text that reads like a poem even though it wasn't written that way.

But I do know that there are certain words or phrases that flash into existence and stay, a permanent firework or frozen bolt of lightening. Caught on my tongue, I find myself rolling them over and over again like a mantra, examining them, dissecting them. They are bits of thought that don't say much, but somehow reach deep into some sensitive piece of the mind, a green sprout with deep roots, unfurling but one, tiny flower.

I don't know what to call these things. Poems? Hardly. Something much less, maybe only "ems." They are more accurately described as "sticky words," because once they lodge into place, I can't seem to forget them. Here is a long-lived one, as an example:

Benedict Pond on September 14th, 2005
So many people leaving
__________________so fast
It's getting dark . . . sort of.

I've been getting a lot of little ems lately. Here's another, while walking along the dike, watching the winter robins:

Robin on a wire
can make
the ugliest fence
a treat.

Every time I look up at the distant hills lately, I hear the phrase, "the Western hills and rivers..." and so I tried to make something more out of it.

The Western hills and rivers
are wild beyond reproach
But oceans turn to islands
where works of men encroach

The Western hills and rivers
are vast and green and grand
But islands turn to outlines
where loosed the works of man

The Western hills and rivers
are silver in the dawn
are golden in the evening
by nightfall, they are gone.

Some more expanded ems:

These winter days are too damn short.
____ I sleep before I wake.
The days flash, the sun has no shame
____ that the moon lingers past its time.

My dog smacks his lips like an old man
in his sleep.
And I, tireless, stroke him on the ear
and think of open times, running times,
Times of deer and pigeon
Boundless, winded, weaving trails
and scents brought on the wind.
I am having the dreams of my dog.

Do you realize
when you bend to pick the pebble,
that smooth pebble, all rubbed with age
and agate specks, and flashing flecks of silver
in the stones around it,
Quartz, gray dots of granite,
black from the ancient forge,
crumbling yellow sandstone
ground beneath your foot unseen
Round stones, sharp stones,
embedded in the soil,
tiled against each other,
layer on layer,
measuring days, remembering years
beyond the breadth of man.
Do you realize,
you fleeting moment,
you mortal ghost,
with young hand, fast heart,
distant eyes
so blind to the labors of the earth,
the indignities of being thrown against a lady’s window?

Yeah, I know, no Poet Laureate am I. It beats reading the back of a cereal box, anyhow.

The Author's Corniche - 4

2008-01-11T23:02:00.000-08:00

Counting pages is a dangerous thing.

I learned this the hard way, when I was much younger and the idea of writing was still new. I had broken through the terrible 20 page barrier, and it suddenly occurred to me that I might actually be able to write a whole book. A whole book! I had always been an avid book lover. In elementary school, we used to get those order forms for newly released paperbacks, and each quarter I was allowed to pick a couple, mostly based on title, which is how I was introduced to such wonderful things as "How to Eat Fried Worms" and "There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom" and many others which I don't remember. I gobbled them up.

But then I realized that I, a mere mortal, might actually be able to produce an entire book of my own, and suddenly the perilous doors of opportunity where thrown wide open! This was in high school, now, past Judy Blume and on to Victor Hugo and Ken Kesey, but as far as making words of my own, I was still but a youth. In my excitement, I spent less time doing the writing and more time checking to see how many pages I had, fiddling with the margins to match the size of a standard paperback and seeing how many pages that produced, calculating extra pages for chapter titles and indexes and the like. The page count was king. Many pages meant that I was a real writer.

Thankfully, that book attempt failed. Getting bogged down in the formatting should have been my first sign that I was not actually interested in the story I was telling, because if the author's attention wanders during the writing, where will the poor reader's attention end up? I suspect it is the folly of many beginning writers. I was young and easily distracted, and so I cast off my failed book with only a little disappointment. Thank goodness, for it was terrible. Even a thousand monkeys in a thousand years would not write such a mess. When I try to reread it nowadays, it is like bringing a smelly cow into the room. My comments go along the lines of, "Oh, well, that's not so bad," to, "Uh...hmm, yeah, that's pretty awful," to, "AAA! AAA! MAKE IT GO AWAY!!"

But older writers, people who are just seeing those open doors of opportunity, perhaps are tempted to press on despite all such warning signs - like counting pages before even the first draft is finished - and rush the final product off to the slush pile a publishing house, where its sole purpose is to torment the eyes of an underpaid intern. I see this quite a bit when I read comments from aspiring authors on writing sites, people who are searching for just the right font to write in. Warning signs!

I hope to say I know a little better now, and that if I am thinking of anything beyond the first draft, I'm into red flag territory. After watching the demise of one book, (a book for which I had already planned the cover design, ha-ha), I was so humbled that I immediately turned to the other extreme, writing with the mindset that nothing I wrote would ever be seen by anyone, ever, until long after my death, when it would be discovered in a dusty desk drawer ala Emily Dickinson, and then probably be returned to the drawer to complete its decomposition. I chose, as a font, the unassuming Arial, which has all the literary promise of a tax form, and refused to think of anything as formal as titles, plots, or - dare I say - endings.

My phobia of becoming a Johnny-Too-Quickly still lingers, but I've crept a bit out of my shell since those early days. Several years ago I switched to Times New Roman, which looks dangerously similar to "real book" type... (Yes, I realize I just mocked people who search for the right font. Go away.) And last year I broke another long-standing rule and began to read anecdotes from publishing houses, more for entertainment than research, because I still hold that the word "publishing" should not enter one's vocabulary until the last change is made on the very last draft. Gone, too, is the mentality that no one will ever read what I write, and this has brought both good and bad. Bad, in that I don't write quite as freely or honestly, and good, in that I make things tighter, disciplined with the constant looming question, "What will others think?" Yes, the critical invisible audience, forever a paranoid writer's companion!

But counting pages? No. I do not count pages. And I pay no attention to the fact that this is the hundredth post on Fifteen Feet. Nope. I hardly notice at all.

Story Time, Kids!

2008-01-11T22:02:00.000-08:00

I wish I was clever enough to think this up as a joke, but sadly, it's a very real and very published book.

Rascal and the Dragon Droppings
Author: Paul Jennings
Description:
Rascal does a tiny poo. 'Weak,' say the kids.
The little dragon tries again. What will his next poo be like?

The caption says, "Bomber did high poos. 'Great,' said the kids."

That cat will give me nightmares, I'm sure of it...

Note to the Rest of the World: Please Retain Judgment Until November

2008-01-10T14:07:00.001-08:00

While Iowa and New Hampshire jerk the rest of the nation around, leaving behind not front runners, but rather a slew of floundering candidates strewn about the political field like beached whales, the evening news comes on to cheerily inform us that Iran has decided to play cowboy and charge a bunch of US battleships for no particular reason. In my mind, I envision Current President with his finger hovering over the "Blow Middle East to Little Bits" button, and I'm compelled to say, "Noooo! Hold off, potential new wars, until we can get someone else into the White House! We're so close!"

The election year is gearing up, and change is in the air. It's apropos that primaries happen during bowl season and the NFL playoffs. I can spend several hours watching grown men pummel each other on the field, and then switch over to debates and spend several hours watching grown men (and woman) pummel each other with microphones. Reporters are so giddily eager to report that they cannot stand the long wait until November, and so the news networks have been broadcasting election results the moment they hear the first ballot drop.

Wolf Blitzer: "And with two percent of the vote in, it looks like Obama has the clear lead, with Clinton and Edwards battling for second. What an outcome! We'll have analysts on to talk about this following the commercial break. Remember, only two percent of the vote is in, so nothing I say for the next hour means anything at all!"

It's a bit like watching a football game where the ball is invisible, and you don't know the score until after the final whistle. But that's half the fun, watching the political analysts make complete jackasses out of themselves in an effort to fill four hours of coverage. (Which, yes, I end up watching.) The current trend in election coverage, beside the ridiculously early results, is AMAZING TECHNOLOGY!! CNN apparently had the most money to burn on pointless gadgets. It began before Iowa, when Blitzer and some other pundit demonstrated a touch screen where they could drag a button across the screen and deposit it on top of a candidate's face. This made no sense whatsoever, and seemed to serve no purpose other than to cover the candidates' faces with buttons. They never actually used it for the real caucus coverage, but simply showed it a few days before to say, "Hey look what we've got! And we'll use it, too, if we can think of a good reason!"

This wasn't the worst of it. At some point, the news people must have sat down and said, "We have to keep the graphics moving!" MSNBC solved the problem of horrible static graphics by pivoting their bar charts back and forth ever so slightly, just enough to induce a headache, which was not nearly as bad as CNN's decision to mount video screens on pendulums from the ceiling, making them rock back and forth like someone had accidentally hit them, so much so that the camera had to sway to follow them. Seasickness and politics, together at last! In the end, CNN won the prize for "Most Ridiculous Concept" with their Magic Pie Chart, and - I am not kidding, that's what they actually called it. The Magic Pie Chart, which popped up magically from a piece of cardboard held by Anderson Cooper and was as legible as newsprint on a squirrel.

(In this still picture you can actually read it, but imagine it jumping around all over the screen.)

But enough about coverage. Let's talk results!! After Obama handily won the Iowa caucuses, every other candidate, Republican and Democrat alike, tried to make the case that they were most Obama-like. They wanted to out-Obama Obama. His catch word had been "change," and suddenly "change" was the word of the day for all the candidates. Change, change, change... that's what the American people want! Mitt Romney babbled, "I brought change. In Massachusetts, I brought change. I have done it. I have changed things."

And Hillary, in my favorite quote yet, said, "I want to make change, but I've already made change. I will continue to make change. I'm not just running on a promise of change. I'm running on thirty-five years of change."

Yes, change hit the political lexicon like a sack of quarters, but Obama-rama was sweeping the nation, and who could stop him? On Tuesday, so many new voters lined up outside of polling places that New Hampshire was beginning to run out of ballots, breaking records for voter turnouts. Everyone said, that's it! Obama will run away with the nomination!

Alas, no. Clinton lives to fight another day. And why? According to the pundits, those of most infinite wisdom, is has something to do with the fact that she "cried" on Monday, and by "cried" they mean that her voice choked up for a moment after the exhaustion caused by something like 70 straight hours of campaigning. Voters apparently said, "Oh! Poor Hillary! She is so sad! Let us make her President - that will cheer her up!" When women see a woman cry, they want to vote for her. (Which is silly, because as every woman knows, you cry to make men do something, not other women! Maybe this works backwards in politics.)

Personally, I think it's all a load of nonsense, but then... I have had enough encounters to make me wonder how the average woman thinks. (Buying a car, for example, when I said, "I want safety!" and the dealer said, "But look at the pretty colors!" and I said, "Safety, I want safety and fuel efficiency, durnit!" and the dealer said, "Do you want a blue car?") Oh please, for the love of American politics, don't let Hillary have won the vote because she cried. As one reporter said, "How far can you run a campaign on sympathy?"

McCain, as everyone expected, trounced the rest of his party. Or as the New York Times said:

Clinton Is Victor, Defeating Obama;
McCain Also Wins

In the midst of all this, the news channels briefly mentioned that Wyoming had voted for Romney, whatever. (The "whatever" was theirs, not mine.) Wyoming moved their primary up ridiculously early to try to catch a bit of national attention. Are you serious, Wyoming? The only time the nation pays attention to you is when they're trying to get from Colorado to Montana. For their foolish impudence, the GOP slashed their number of convention delegates in half, and similarly punished the other states that tried to jostle earlier into the limelight, New Hampshire, Michigan, South Carolina, and Florida.

Oregon's primary, I should mention, is more or less symbolic. We don't vote until May. The state has taken a c'est la vie attitude, knowing that moving us up closer to Super Tuesday would do nothing at all, since at that point everyone is focusing on big bully states like California and New York. Help! We need primary election reform!

*Gasp!* Writing even a little about the process has drained the life force completely out of me. Must go energize with...something...comic books...perhaps chopping wood...

I swear, this is the longest freaking election ever.

Yet Another Political Blog

2008-01-05T20:58:00.000-08:00

It'd be so easy right now to turn into a full-time political blog. What a great time it is for American politics! I love an election year.

Four years ago, I missed much of the primary broo-ha when I went to work on the Galapagos. Sometimes I heard a snippet or two on the shortwave radio, when I could pick up the BBC or the Royal Canadian Broadcasting Network, and then later in the fall, just when things were getting interesting, I went up to work in Alaska. This time I was even more cut off, since most of the local news had to do with the salmon run, but I did manage to catch one of the Kerry-Bush debates in the house of a bunch of Forest Service lackeys over in the big city of Ketchikan.

In both situations I was surrounded by coworkers less than impressed by the political process, with a why-should-I-care? mentality. But then, biologists tend to be a cynical lot all around, since our line of work often deals with documenting the destruction of our line of work. That cynicism often includes politics.

For me, this is all like a visit to the circus. If you haven't been paying attention to politics lately, you've been missing out. The debates last year were hilarious, with their hundreds of people crammed on one stage (or thereabouts), classy moments like Guiliani getting interrupted by an apparent attempt by God to smite him (and the other candidates taking cover), watching Gravel foam at the mouth, listening to Kuchinich talk about his UFO experience, and the entertaining inability of nearly everyone to answer a question with a "yes" or "no."

I've been watching tonight's New Hampshire debates, when the weather hasn't been blacking out the station, and here are some of my shallower thoughts:

Guiliani - Good gravy, he actually sounds somewhat likable and is making sense. Did I enter a parallel universe? I think he is playing casual until Rommey self-destructs.

Romney- Squirming under the pressure, fun to watch! Everyone but everyone on the stage is taking pot shots at him, since he is currently the most vulnerable and the least likable. I remember back in the early debates when the was the most composed, but now he's lost his cool.

Huckabee- Whoops, he's gotten completely overshadowed. I don't think anyone sees him as a real threat, so they're ignoring him unless he proves them otherwise. He's not coming across as a heavyweight here, but more as a farmer who wandered into a corporate business meeting by mistake.

McCain- Oh, he's good. Despite Romney's attacks, he maintains his cool and gives a solid message. He's not being swayed, which certainly makes him look like the most mature of the bunch. His campaign later reported that he was "the only adult in the room," and I'd tend to agree.

Thompson- If McCain is the adult, Thompson is the crotchety old grandpa who leans into the conversation and speaks his mind whenever he feels like it. "Crazy old grandpa!" the kids used to say! Nah, really, he's making a lot of good points, but I think he'd need a lot more caffeine to make it four years as President.

Ron Paul- (Not to be confused with "RuPaul.") Well, he says a lot of my own thoughts, asks a lot of challenging questions that I think the entire nation is asking, but it is so off of the mainstream Republican theme (and therefore "disloyal") that most of the rest of the candidates A)snicker at him, or B)quickly interrupt him. For example, he made the point that terrorists attack us not because we are wealthy and comfortable, but because we have a military presence in their countries, which I thought was excellent, but everyone else quickly told him what an simpleton he was. Again, he posed the question, "What if China came and did to the USA what we did to Iraq?" and again was quickly thrashed as being a loony. Which is a shame, because I think the GOP needs to come to terms with the Ron Paul viewpoint if they want to win in the general election.

Republicans in general- Yikes. Very heated, many cheap shots, covered much of the same ground as previous debates, but with a rearranged political field. Hooray! Isn't this fun?

After the Republicans had their say, the Democrats joined them briefly on stage and shook hands. It was a wonderful moment, first, to know that one of those people will be president, and second, to see genuine civility in some of the hugs and brief conversations between otherwise hated rivals. Yes, I do think some of it was genuine, and although their mikes were turned off, I had fun making up the dialogue:

Edwards to Huckabee: "Want advice on being a running mate?"

Ron Paul to Richardson: "Hey! Are you a nut with no chance of winning? Me too!!"

Hillary to McCain: "Since we see each other in Washington all the time, will you hug me? Everyone else up here is getting a hug..." (He did.)

Okay, now the entire time I've been writing, the Democrats have been debating, and their debate has been so quiet and civilized compared to the Republicans that I've been spacing out. I've picked up a few lines, but I feel like I've heard it all before. It's too bad Biden's not here to throw out a few of his humorous barbs. Alas, with what I have to work with:

Richardson- Yes, he still seems competent, but not presidential. His typical attitude has always been, "I can't believe everyone doesn't agree with everything I say!"

Obama- He is very on top of everything here. I'll be really surprised if he doesn't just plow through all of this to the presidency, just because he seems so unflappable. Actually, I don't know if that's really true; this is where paying attention right now would be a good thing.

Edwards- When he's not talking, he seems fidgety. When he is talking, he seems exhausted. Actually, all of these candidates look exhausted. I wonder if this is how the famous Howard Dean scream happened, breaking under sheer primary exhaustion?

Hillary- Oh Hillary. How much I want a woman president. I just don't want that woman president to be you.

Right. Now I'm going to go back to the project that I was supposed to be working on!

Reflections on the Year Gone By

2008-01-04T13:03:00.000-08:00

(I really should have made this the first post of the New Year, but I got so excited about politics!)

How did I do with my blog in the past year? Here is my personal checklist:

I gave myself a place to decompress - Check. I managed not to clog up my team blogs with overflow thoughts that made people scroll down through the endless text saying, "Oh gosh, when is she going to shut up?!" So yes, check, a success.

I kept in touch with friends- Check. Blogging has been a great way to keep up-to-date, although it's easy to forget to read other blogs for a few weeks and then suddenly have to rush to catch up. Still, without this format, would I have known about MSL's library romances, or Alice's Barbie doll, or Snarke's air conditioner "Bert?" No, no I wouldn't. Yay for blogs.

I enlightened my readers to the joy and wonder that is me- Well... you can't make play-doh with nothing but salt, I always say... I didn't exactly give anyone a lot to work with. I, apparently, am not an "open person." Personally, I think I talk about myself and all my deep inner feelings far too much, but then I have people say that they don't know a thing about me, and I need to open up. Hmrph. It all comes from randomly selecting a pineapple for a "which fruit are you most like?" exercise in my childhood days...

I enlightened my readers to the meaning of human condition- Well... you can't make cement with nothing but water, I always say...

(No, I don't really know what that means either. But it looks meaningful, so there you have it.)

I wrote more- Yes! Check! Without Fifteen Feet, most of these rampantly random thoughts would never have made it to type. (A debatable plus, I'll grant.) Writing here might have distracted me from working on other projects, and it certainly cut back time I would have otherwise spent doing e-mails and other blogging, but mostly it has been an entirely unique outlet. This is a very good thing. I think I'm using a different part of my brain to write here. (It's true! I do use my brain when I write!) In addition, without the banter of back-and-forth blogging that I've gotten used to on my team blogs, I have been forced to write complete thoughts, something more akin to the essay form, which I haven't really done much since college.

I was discovered as an superb writer and offered prestige and money- Um... still waiting on this one. Someday, you see, someone will stumble onto this website and suddenly realize my brilliance as a writer, the sparkling words that trip off the end of the tongue, the fast patter of wit and fancy rolled into a marvelous literary rollercoaster which extols the glory of my technique, and on that day I will be called up and whisked off to some far off publishing house where men in black suits will stand around on floors of marble and raise a toast to my genius. This has yet to happen, but I'm patient.

So that's all. (See how masterfully I draw the post to a close?) No resolutions, only reflections. I'll do the resolution part sometime later, maybe July.

Politics....working?

2008-01-03T20:30:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting here staring slack-jawed at the television screen. I can't believe it. Is it actually possible that my two favorite candidates are winning the Iowa caucuses?

Yes, that's right. I am currently quite fond of Huckabee and Obama. But what were the chances they would both win their respective races?

What is this strange feeling I feel? Could it actually be... hope in American politics? Could it be possibly be that our system actually let the best people win? Wow! I didn't know it could work like that! I always thought that was just a line out of my old Social Studies text book.

I am giddy with the idea that my choice in the general election might actually be between Good and Better, rather than the traditional "lesser of two evils." Where I could vote and be happy, rather than saying "ick" while looking at the ballot.

Again.... wow!

December 12th...

2007-12-12T01:48:00.000-08:00

...and I have yet to post? Yikers, the month is half-gone! Honestly, I don't know where all that times ends up. If I blink, I will be 50.

Let's see, deep reflections on the fly... Very difficult to do. I might have to settle for shallow waters, with dreams of deeper posts wafting on the twilight of my consciousness.

Bleh, what a horrible phrase. I suppose it's best that I try not to write anything heady right now, after all. I'll end up drooling out thoughts that will sound much wittier now than in the morning.

Here's my one and only rumination: Forced perception. Especially now during the holiday season, when the whole commercial world is trying to shove "traditional Christmas" down our throats, so long as there's a buck to be made. I just saw an ad on TV for a stage show that involves tap dancing Santas (who are really women in costume) spinning around a Christmas tree and high-kicking, sort of like a "Night Before Christmas" on methamphetamine. Combine that with all the big box stores and their holiday ads - "Buy this! Give that! Christmas isn't complete without all this stuff!" - and I feel a bit nauseous. I have a mental picture of myself staggering around a deserted town square in the snow, searching for the real meaning of Christmas. (If I found it, they could make it into "Kt's Holiday Special" and sell lots of matching merchandise, and so the cycle continues.)

The thought on forced perception is that our traditions have become so rushed and hollow that things only take on a sense of meaning because we have always done them, and done them increasingly every year (ie lights, gifts, etc.) or because our society is shouting them in our ear, and to ignore the shoutings would make us feel like we're missing out on something. Shouting, I say - it really is true. Every facet, from radio to TV to the newspaper ads to the signs next to the road all push in the same direction. Stuff, money, self-satisfaction - these are the things that equal happiness. It's an empty chase.

Laugh tracks, there's an interesting case. Modern laugh tracks make me want to gouge my eyes out... although, I guess that wouldn't really help the situation. Recently I watched (against my will) a few current sitcoms, and closing my eyes heard nothing but a steady stream of HA-HA-HA repeating in the background, a chant so hyper that it made me wonder what they'd done to really get the audience to laugh that hard. I suspect it involved alcohol. What made it especially disturbing was how unfunny the dialogue was, the jokes that were supposedly sending a crowd into hysterical fits. Who were these people, with lives so grey and downtrodden that they would laugh at the sort of phrases you might read on a credit card offer? And were we, the bored viewer, expected to baa along like mindless sheep? ("Other people are laughing! It must really be funny!")

Maybe I'm jaded because my favorite funny shows are actually funny and have no laugh track at all - Scrubs, Arrested Development, everything from the BBC. No one is telling me how to laugh, and I get to enjoy subtle little flashes without a big pause for audience response. While I was musing over all of this, I suddenly observed that one of my favorite shows, MASH, has a (*gasp!*) laugh track, and that I hadn't noticed it all along. The curious thing is how mellow the laughing sounds, circa 1970's, compared to today's background roar, as though in the past several decades someone has been gently leaning on the "Volume Up" button. Not many shows have worthy writing, and so the track becomes the adult version of key jangling, providing just enough of a distraction that viewers hang around. What would the dialogue sound like without it?

Hmm. It makes me want to slap, well... everyone. Knock some sense back into the world, with all its fluff and fakery. Isn't that a jolly wish? I, the Ghost of Christmas Slapping, with a wreath of cut-up gift cards around my head and train of carollers behind me.

I'll incorporate it into my holiday special somehow. It will look lovely on a lunchbox.

A Story: In Which I am Challenged by the Land of my Fathers and Emerge Victoriously

2007-11-29T23:34:00.000-08:00

Where I grew up, it is very wet. It is so wet that a typical week in November looks like this:

It is so wet that the fairway on the golf course moves like the surface of a water bed. It is so wet that people sit in bathtubs filled with air just for the variety. But this November, it has not been wet. The weather this month has looked mostly like this:

Until this past week. Finally, finally, it started to rain good and proper, a genuine Northwestern soaker.

Now, I've already established that my years away from home has degraded my immunity to the rain... as in, when I go stand in it nowadays, I clutch myself tightly, look like a bedraggled cat, and whine, "This is weh-he-he-het!" When I make fun of eave-hugging, umbrella-loving, dry boned non-Northwestern pansies, I can now point at myself and say "Ha!" And then I say, "Huh?" and then I go run in the corner and weep.

But not this week. No. The rain, knowing me well, kicked back and began working as lazily as rain can work. The day outside could be blue-skied and sunny, each dew drop a prism of rainbows beckoning me out to frolic - or, in this case, hang my Christmas lights - and as I leashed up the dog and pulled my galoshes on, it would invariably happen. There I would sit, one foot shoed and the other socked, and suddenly the rain would start hamming down on the roof. Sometimes I would try to wait it out, but finally I would pull off my one galosh, curl back into a blanket, and then, of course, then the rain would stop and the sun would shine and the birds would burst out of the bushes like a feathery fireworks display. The rain was doing as little work as possible to keep me inside.

Finally one day I took a stand. I was sitting with my one shoe on, and the rain had just began hammering the roof, but did I let it stop me? Ho-ho! Not this time, you rain, you cloud! You damp enslaver! I pulled on sweatshirt, raincoat, leather hat, work gloves, sunglasses, safety glasses, and all other manner of apparel and leapt into the front yard with my Christmas lights in one hand and my slingshot in the other, ready to do battle.

I should explain, hanging the lights in my yard, with its tangle of tall alder and maple trees, is really more a matter of trying to figure out how to get them up so high. The traditional method was throwing a tennis ball attached to a string, but this year I thought I would get serious with a slingshot and a 2lbs lead weight.

So there I stood against the elements, facing straight into the sky and the pouring rain, shooting my slingshot, and what should happen? Naturally, the drizzle turned into a torrent of apocalyptic proportions, while simultaneously the sun burst through the one hole in the clouds, exactly where I was trying to gaze into the tree branches.

The hat came off. The glasses came off. Off went the gloves, the rain jacket, as each wet layer hampered me more and more and I untangled string for the 500th time, my adrenaline surging. I might have also been laughing maniacally, I'm not sure. "Bring it on! Bring it on!" I cried to the forces of nature. "I'm an Oregonian! Bwa-ha!"

At last, defeated, the rain let up and slid away over the horizon in a dark gloom, thinking perhaps to dampen some inlanders. I had won the day. I was wet and cold and tangled in a spool of cotton string, but I had won.

And so I went inside and had some hot chocolate.

A Thanksgiving Buffet of Posts

2007-11-20T23:46:00.001-08:00

I have been having many random thoughts, visits by late-night vignettes, which in the spirit of the holiday I thought I would collect into one multitudinous feast. And so...

Adventures in Cooking!! After all this time, I finally learned how to cook tempeh, which mostly involved simply finding a place nearby that sells it. Actually cooking it is easier than boiling ramen, if that's possible. However, in my fridge my hazelnut syrup (for coffee) is stored right next to my soy sauce. The two bottles look remarkably similar. Having already established that dumping soy sauce on tempeh was a good and honorable thing to do, one day as I was cooking I grabbed the bottle, turned it over the tempeh, and lo - the liquid came out clear. Brown sugar works with chicken, and honey works on potatoes, but hazelnut syrup does not, does not, work on tempeh.

I am currently reading the Bible through from cover to cover, my first concrete linear reading (having a good bookmark helps), although I'm reasonably sure that I've already read all of it in bits and pieces throughout my life. I'm in Psalms, and yes - I'm proud to say that I made it through every word of Leviticus and the long, mind numbing genealogies. Strangely, my biggest struggle was with Job, but only because I've read it so frequently that my mind was spacing out as I went over it again. It doesn't help that I read right before I go to sleep which, while it puts the holy words into my subconscious, also typically turns the last few verses of the night into a hazy slush. But my nightstand lamp went out a few days ago, and I have repeatedly forgotten to replace the bulb. The other night I reached for my Bible, then realized I had no way to read it. Another distraction attempt by the Devil, I mused to myself, lying there in the dark. "The Devil Blew Out My Bulb" would be a great title for a book, though definitely not an autobiography.

The other day I was thinking about manatees and African politics. It occurred to me that most nations form around the ethnic groups they contain - the Vietnamese are a distinct people, the Koreans are a distinct people, etc. The only place this doesn't hold up is the Americas, where the original ethnic groups have been smeared out of prominence, and Africa, which has distinct peoples and country borders that have absolutely nothing to do with each other, the continent having been carved up post-WWII by, I picture, a bunch of mustachioed Europeans in smoking jackets drawing random lines on a big map between glasses of sherry. Now the countries cruise along on autopilot, the status quo too strong to buck. Imagine if everyone just shrugged off convention and redrew the borders to make some sort of sense, or even bolder, if the continent rejected the idea of nations and existed in a tribal state, as in the days of old. It could never happen; someone would start grandstanding for power or money, and there'd be fights and micro-dictators and blood feuds all over the place, the strongest take all. People are so ostentatious. This wouldn't happen if we were manatees. Manatees are always relaxed, never flustered, never irate. They will not even raise a flipper to defend their own young. Manatees would never try to make a power grab. Their motto is eternally "Whatever." We should try to be just a tiny little bit more like manatees, with care.

Today I walked past a log on the beach, a chunk of wood bleached and broken by the jetty waves. On a whim, I counted the rings - 327. I placed my finger on the spot where the tree had been a sapling circa 1680, thinking about what it must have been like. I touched where the first white men came to the coast, the early 1800's. I covered the last part with my hand, the twentieth century, and the part that included me was hardly as wide as my fingernail. It was a clean cut, a tree that had probably been logged. Most of our Oregon forests are in a ~50 year rotation, no more 300 yr trees for the foreseeable future. It felt like such a special piece of wood, but I had to leave it behind to decay.

Maybe this will be the year that I seek out the legendary "Tofurky." Like chai and hazelnuts, it's an Oregon speciality!

Happy Thanksgiving! God bless all you happy readers!

Raccoons on the Roof

2007-11-16T13:52:00.000-08:00

I have been sitting very quietly
Listening to the noises outside

The wind is blowing
But it's not the tap of tree branches
There are raccoons running across my roof.

I look up and follow the sound
Tracing their path on the ceiling
They run with purpose
They are charging down the shingles

The footsteps stop above the window
And I half expect them to come swinging through the glass
SWAT team style
I'm not sure what they would want
Maybe dried apples, or pickles, or chocolate?

They come every night
When the clock has three digits
The pond fish live in constant fear
Of snatching claws in the water

There are raccoons on the roof
And the dog cocks his head
He is not sure how best to defend the house

I have been sitting very quietly
But my imagination is running across the roof

Here's My Soul, Cheap as Free!

2007-11-15T01:33:00.001-08:00

Ugh. I just filled out another job application to, you know, stay in the game. Even if it's half-hearted, it helps me rub off the rust. And I feel like such a resume whore now, like I'm standing on a street corner saying, "Hey big boy, come check this out!"

Blah blah blah, look at me and all my skillz, I am so teh bomb. This whole cover letter/resume system we've set up is utter crap. Am I right? (I hear the voice of Turk from Scrubs saying, "Hells yeah!" Uh-hmm.)

Truly, I am an artist at heart. We artists don't report to anyone and we don't keep hours. And we also don't get paid. Being of the artistic ilk is a poor endeavour, sadly.

Surprising Alice

2007-11-14T13:14:00.000-08:00

All right, you guys, I have a challenge for you. My good friend Alice over at Backstory has written a wonderfully humorous and insightful story of her childhood Barbie doll that I love every time I read.

If you get the chance, go check it out and drop her a comment. She will be amazed if many random people start to comment on her blog. It is my goal to amaze her.

Cheers!

The Shout it Out! Project

2007-11-12T00:26:00.000-08:00

I can't decide if this idea is brilliant or terrible, but it'd make a great basis for a thesis paper...

I was over at deviantART surfing for artistic inspiration (and finding it, and wondering why I don't draw every minute of my waking life) when I came across this, a project called Shout it Out!

It's all about writing down on paper the things you don't usually say about yourself - the good, the bad, the quirky - the things that you keep hidden for fear that people will judge you poorly, look at you differently, or ignore what you have to say. It's the chance to shout out who you are as a person, proudly and without fear. Because it's a deviantART project, and because deviantART is geared towards artists, the Shouts are all heavily influenced with each person's own artistic style.

The artist who started it says this:

"Someone told me once, that she believed we make life hard for ourselves by keeping things bottled up inside. Whether it be due to shame, embarrassment, fear, pride or some other emotion we don't share the things that are on our hearts like we should. We wallow in them and never realize that everyone else feels the same way. Our conflicts, our dreams, and the things that make us who we are should be free to be spoken out loud."

When I first found out about this, I loved it. It seems like much of the conflict we have as people stems from a lack of understanding, the not wanting/not trying to get to know each other for who we really are. The more you know a person, I am convinced, the more you will be sympathetic to their point of view, even if you don't agree with it. You will be more likely to compromise, or at least stand your ground with kindness, less likely to hate. I believe that communication without competitiveness is a powerful tool. Knowledge to understanding, understanding to love. It was one of my reasons for beginning to blog, and I wrote about it in my first post.

But as I read through some individual Shouts, I began to have doubts. Many of the artists on this site are teens and college age, lots of angst and emo, and no shortage of frustrated sexuality. People seem drawn to revealing their brokenness, their struggles with depression, self-injury, and suicidal thoughts. There were too many of these in the few samples I read, and I wondered, is it more common to find these dark thoughts in artists? Is it because of their age? Is the next generation struggling more than my own?

Other Shouts were bursting with angry thoughts. The freedom opened floodgates for the type of hate and stereotyping normally held back by our PC culture. One person admitted to being fascinated with Nazism. Another mentioned that they partly enjoyed causing people pain. Reading through these made me increasingly gloomy. True glimpses into the thoughts of others, and yet so much darkness to be seen, so much anger.

And so I wonder... is the Shout it Out! project a good thing? Does revealing yourself free you, or does it make you turn your focus inward too much? If your hidden thoughts include hate, is there anything to be gained by revealing them to people who do not know you, who never will? At that point, the thought becomes stronger than the invisible internet person, and my idea of knowledge leading to love requires a living, breathing person. A person can change, can be reasoned with, but an isolated thought is immutable. It can be ignored or rejected but never killed, and in repetition without argument only gains strength.

Which leads me to think that Shouting it Out best serves a purpose only among people who know you, a tool to help people better understand you. But if you knew who was to see it, would you be honest? Would you expose your deepest self? Wouldn't you still hold back, defeating the whole point?

I'm torn. I can't decide. If you guys have any thoughts, please weigh in.

A Pumpkin Carvin' Fool am I

2007-11-09T12:00:00.000-08:00

Pumpkins a'plenty, here they are, proof that my last few days before Halloween were full of carving craziness.

A dove and cornucopia.

A bull rider and a knight on horseback. Aren't carving kits fun? I used patterns for everything this year except for my face pumpkins and the big "Welcome 2 Trunk 'n' Treat" carving, a pumpkin that made the front page of the local paper!

Here's my personal favorite - George Washington praying at Valley Forge.

It was fun looking for ideas appropriate to put in front of the church. I ruled out all the blood sucking scary ghost zombie murderer patterns, plus all of the celebrities. Toyed with the idea of something patriotic, but finally decided that Halloween + political symbols + church had potential to be misconstrued on oh-so many levels.

Here's one of the Disco Pumpkins, white pumpkins filled with changing multi-colored lights. I Never did get a very good picture...hmm...maybe I should try again?

Here are the two Disco Pumpkins in daylight, looking mighty fine.

One nice thing about so many gutted pumpkins - endless supply of roasted seeds. Well, not endless, but the entire family's been devouring them since All Hallow's and we're still not making much of a mark. And right now I have a loaf of pumpkin bread in the oven, and pumpkin soup in the fridge, and we had pumpkin in the stir fry at lunch... You can never have too much pumpkin in life, says I.

Today's pumpkin bread nearly stopped at the eggs/sugar/butter stage. Such a delicious concoction, why bother going on?

Aaa...! I am the Ghost of Rotting Pumpkins, here to tell you to not to wait until the last minute to carve next year....aaaaaaaaaaaah!

Bootstraps

2007-11-05T14:39:00.000-08:00

Having an active imagination does not help during a job hunt. I'm not actually job hunting, I'm vocation/career/purpose hunting, but the first step of both boils down to the same thing. The problem with an active imagination is that as soon as I see a promising opportunity, I imagine myself working it, imagine myself living in that community, commuting (if necessary), imagine what my living space would look like... in short, I imagine everything so far in advance that I feel like I've actually been there, done that, so what's the point? There's a fine line, I guess, between realistic expectations and a fore-lived experience.

One thing frustrates me, as I find myself increasingly mired: It seems the world has so much support to offer young high school and college students when it comes to career advice, but once you graduate - bam! You're on your own. If you don't get it figured out in a hurry, your options are slim. Ah, it kind of makes me miss those days of college coddling - (how I hated them then!)

Pity they never taught Pulling Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps in college.

Aunt Me

2007-11-01T23:55:00.000-07:00

Big news!!

Here's my new little (>5 lbs) niece - Penelope!

I guess I'm still stunned. She was born a week ago and it's taken me this long to post anything. She was a month early, that's my excuse. I hadn't wired my brain to think "baby" yet.

Now, how does one go about being an official aunt?

Halloween Hangover

2007-11-01T23:14:00.000-07:00

Parties are murder on a perfectionist. The last few days have kept me so busy preparing for my church's "Trunk 'n' Treat" party that I nearly imploded, having lain starkly awake in bed each night thinking about what I had left to do, hunching over pumpkins for hours on end, and mostly forgetting about food yesterday except for the occasional piece of candy I bumped into. I woke up this morning aching all over on an adrenaline withdrawal, the taste of Butterfingers still lingering in my mouth.

Weeah.

Last Saturday me and the fam visited a corn maze and pumpkin patch over in the valley for some Genuine Family Fun. After determining that the dog could not, in fact, guide us through the maze, (he kept attempting to lead us into the thick of the stalks), we loaded up the back of the car with many, many pumpkins, some of which later turned out to be mischievously rotting beneath their lovely skin. My plan for the pumpkins was to carve them all and line the walkway to the church, just like swp and I did a few years back at the ol' Gould Farm. Wasn't that fun? I still remember turkey parts floating in jars in the haunted house, and roaming madly through the dark woods. But I digress.

It turns out that carving 14 pumpkins in one's mind is much easier than carving 14 pumpkins with one's hands. By the end of the World Series (why must you suck, Rockies...why?!?) I had hollowed them all out, and then began the obsessive actual carving, in which I somehow gravitated to all of the most complicated patterns I could find - can we say "George Washington Praying at Valley Forge?" Oh yes. It's a lucky thing that the carving kit included two saws, because the first one bit it halfway through my flurry, while working on a rodeo rider at 4:30 in the morning, I think. Cheap Chinese piece o' crap.

Ah, but it was great fun. The idea of the Trunk 'n' Treat is for the people of the church to park their cars in a row and hand out candy from their trunks. Inside, parents can sit down for a while and get cookies and a hot cup of something (not the "something" that some might have been longing for, though, it being a church event and all). It's a safe place for the kids to come to, easy for moms with strollers, and lets folks in the community take a look at our church - building and people - in a non-imposing way.

And man, did they come! Our town only has 5000 people, and over the course of an hour we saw nearly 400 kids. (It felt like they were all their simultaneously, but then, I was a bit frazzled.) I decorated one of our cars with a gigantic spiderweb and child-eating spider (so I said) that kids had to reach underneath to get their goodies. Our other car was a bit more harvest themed, with a gigantic Cinderella pumpkin and two "Spooky" pumpkins, all-white pumpkins that I carved with spots and stripes and lit from the inside with changing multi-colored lights. They were my disco pumpkins. (W, hooray for our trip to the island!) That car was playing some nice Gregorian chant in the background, and one of the kids leaned in and shouted, "Halo 3!" I feel old.

Last night I learned a valuable lesson - If you volunteer to take over a fishing pond, you will never, never be able to escape. Every time I thought I could make a run for it, another clothespin tied to string would come launching over the sheet. (I ended up putting on my unicorn mask just for eye protection.) I quickly abandoned my instructions, "Give two tugs and throw the fish over," to adopt a more realistic fishing situation where I tugged and fought and made the fish leap a few times before finally chucking it over the edge. I was preparing kids for reality. (They needed it. One kid said, "Mommy! The fish won't let go!" Evil laughter.) Finally I ran out of fish and rose up out of the "pond" saying, "Go away you dumb kids! You bother me!" ( More or less.) Luckily, there was another fishing pond outside, so I was able to redirect the rabid candy-buzzed crowd safely away.

The whole thing could best be described as well-mannered absolute chaos, and by the end of the night I was saying, "AaaaaAAAA....Freak OUT!" But it was a satisfying feeling, sort of like finishing a marathon, and I survived with 14 pumpkins to take home and relight on the front porch, plus a very cute giant fake spider.

Most common costume of the night - the white mask thing from "Scream."
Best costume - a little cowgirl with a big inflatable horse in front of her. Her legs made up the back legs of the horse, so it looked like she was riding it.
Scariest costume - a teenage boy in a dress. I'm assuming it was a costume.
Best adult costume - goes to my mom, who made a very convincing baby.

Today may be All Saint's Day, but it's felt a bit more like Day of the Living Dead. My mind says wee! but my body is going eeeh? One of these years I'm going to start thinking about Halloween preparations before October 26...

Fall Flies

2007-10-30T00:50:00.000-07:00

It is amazing how fast time fills up when you're not doing anything in particularly. Me? My days have mysteriously been eaten by chores I never expected to have.

I am frantically working away at my apples before they all go bad (having discovered a new use - dried apple chips.) My church has sucked me into several musical numbers, and so I have been wearing out my voice and my wee little guitar with practice, and now have proper callouses on my fingering hand. Halloween fast approaches, and I somehow find myself with twelve pumpkins to carve for the church's "Trunk 'N' Treat." (Though, granted, I opted to do this to myself.) And today I drifted, leaf-like, into my backyard to rake up Massive Pile O Leaves and put down the last fertilizer of the year before the rains came. Many unplanned chores. The Chore Fairy must whisper into my ear at night.

Last week, just as I was preparing to do a guitar number for my church, I sliced a finger while cutting strawberries in my hand. "Oh," I said, and ran upstairs to doctor it. A few minutes later I wandered back into the kitchen, saw the strawberries sitting on the counter, thought "I won't press the knife down so hard," and promptly cut the next finger.

Aren't I clever? It turns out that fingering a guitar with two band-aids doesn't work as well as one might hope.

So I have nothing much deep to say. As you can tell, my brain isn't there so much.

Thoughts of the day:
-Rotten pumpkin smells terrible, yet oddly alluring.
-Cutting decorative paper chains is fun no matter how old you are.
-Dark chocolate 100% is not meant for human consumption.
-If a store puts up a sign that says "Punch Me in the Face," you really should take advantage of it.

That's all.

And then there was randomness...

2007-10-29T23:02:00.000-07:00

I went to Homestarrunner.com and made this. I am so proud.

(Click to enlarge)

Here's the start of the path that led to my blossoming career as a cartoonist: http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail181.html

Ice Creamy!

2007-10-19T22:35:00.000-07:00

Whenever I'm feeling a bit blah in my drawing skills, I bip over to deviantART, an online art gallery. Anyone with half a brain cell and a computer can upload stuff, often random, sometimes impressive. Browsing through it is good for times when most of my attention has to be diverted elsewhere (like listening to NPR.) There's nothing quite as effective for improving my own artistic attempts as looking through the work of better artist...which...is practically everyone.

(Oh, snap!)

I found this one the other day, and it gave me the chuckles.
It can be found at http://nocturnal-devil(dot)deviantart(dot)com

Oh! My Friends and Enemies!

2007-10-18T00:51:00.001-07:00

she is read as often as she comments.
she is read as often as she reads.

I am a bad, bad friend because I've fallen so far behind in keeping up with everyone else's blog. Please, I blame the MLB post-season! Have pity and compassion!

I will, I vow, catch up with everyone before the month is through. I will be the bestest of friends, oh yoes. (<-- that was supposed to be "yes," but doesn't "yoes" look better somehow?)

Chaos Kitchen Theory

2007-10-17T23:32:00.000-07:00

Oh, hay! I just discovered a bag of forgotten cookies in the freezer! These were from my sad Insufficient Flour Batch of chocolate chip cookies, proof that I cannot read a recipe and have a conversation at the same time. (Disaster was nearly averted when, on the phone to Tizzy, I stopped myself from adding baking powder rather than baking soda to the pancakes. Or was it the other way round? I always get those two mixed up. Isn't white powder, white powder? Eh.)

This time I was chagrined to find that forgetting 1/3 a cup of flour makes chocolate chip cookies abandon all inhibitions about prescribed "cookie shape," spilling out of their little teaspoon-sized lumps (1-2 inches apart) in a liquid dough interpretation of Free Love, intermingling with every neighboring cookie they could reach within the 8 minute bake time. "That ain't right," I said to myself when I opened the oven door, but with a confidence mined from a hundred previous successful attempts at this recipe, I put them on the stove top to cool, perhaps hoping that they would somehow reform back into a tidy, recognizable shape. Alas, after a few minutes I had produced a new dessert, "Brittle Chocolate Doily," which quickly turned into "Brittle Chocolate Dust" as I attempted to pry them off the pan with all the ease of pulling melted wax from a shag carpet, chipping a spatula, scaring the dog, and showering stray bits of failed cookie into the fake flowers on the other side of the kitchen.

Which is not to say that a little chaos while cooking is a bad thing. Quite the contrary; I strive for it. Chaos is the invisible ingredient on all of my recipe cards, the secret element that makes cooking, in my opinion, worthwhile. When family and friends request a favorite recipe - one that I have already made the same way over and over and over again - I get the same sinking feeling as though I have just arrived at a party to hear, "Oh, why don't you sit down and sing that song for us? You know, the one you sang last time?" where all enjoyment is suffocated by sheer expected repetition. Blaaah. The boredom is enough to incite one to...I don't know...substitute roasted mealworms for walnuts in the brownies.

I best delight in my own private cooking experiments, when only I have to suffer whatever becomes of it. Recent discoveries - Coffee does not work well in a salmon marinade. Any type of non-sugary breakfast cereal can turn into an excellent breading. Oysters thrive in stews. Burnt collared green stems smell like cigarettes. Grinding cloves in the Cuisinart results in a permanent frosted look on the plastic. Orange juice does not substitute for milk.

The ingredient ad nauseam of late has been apples, as my premier backyard apple tree has been showered my larder with a constant supply of them. Buckets and buckets of them. I have a tag team effort with the local crows, begrudged though I am with the arrangement, that lets them peck at the apples on the high branches until they come down, and then I pick them up and salvage the undamaged bit. It's very Rabbit Hill, Saint Francis, "There is enough for all," I suppose, if only the crows weren't so blastedly cocky about it. For a while I tried to stave them off entirely, but after my father and I spent an afternoon with a ladder, a pole, a hard hat, and a catcher's mitt, whacking around at bunches of apples with increasing frustration, bringing down showers of several head-bashers at a time (and ducking for cover) while yelling at the dog not to put bite marks in all of them, and at one point climbing barefooted (me) into the upper reaches of the tree with no luck, I resolved to let the crows take their share in exchange for my sanity and the luxury of picking fractional apples off the ground, lazy sod that I am.

Which is a long way of saying, kiddies, prune your fruit trees while they're still young.

The "magic rice bowl" flood of apples has been kept in check by my barrage of apple-related recipes, transforming them into applesauce, apple cookies, apple juice, smoked apples, baked apples, apple ball (where I roll an apple and the dog chases and devours it), and the traditional apple pie, a traditional recipe that I pilfered off of Allrecipes.com. (Grandma Ople's, so it says, and it's marvelous.) But, chaos theory forever presiding, even my apple pie always has an indeterminate of spices thrown in from the spice rack.

Which reminds me, another very important discovery: Many different flavors taste great in a cup of coffee. Sage is not one of them. The jury is still awaiting a second opinion.

Rockin' in the World Series!

2007-10-16T00:37:00.000-07:00

NLCS Champions!

Woot!

I'm not a late comer; I just spaced out on them. They're the Rockies, fer crying out loud. Who would've thought? I just finished reading a blog post dated May 2007 that said, "Colorado? They ain't making the playoffs this year. There's no way this team is winning anything close to putting them near relevance in the next few years. It's a joke to still have them around in this competition."

The spirit of Sweet Irony is alive and well, the Rockies are on fire, and purple looks mighty good on a blue background...

Blog Updates

2007-10-15T15:08:00.000-07:00

A few small changes to Fifteen Feet...

My blog links have been divided into two categories. Everything listed in "Dive Buddy Blogs" are written by friends. "Blogs That Swam Past" are interesting or useful blogs listed here for my own future reference, currently including:
Business Writing - basic and advanced rules for professional writing
Brooklyn Arden - from a book editor
Editorial Anonymous - from a children's book editor
Gurney Journey - the illustrator of "Dinotopia," discussing art issues

More are sure to come.

I've added a few useful sites to "Links from Deeper Waters," but time will tell if they pass muster. If I find that I'm not using them much, or if they aren't thorough or accurate sources of information, I'll give them the boot.

I can tell that this new method of organization hasn't sunk into my head yet, because the other day I spent quite a long time searching for "Luciferous Logolepsy" before finally remembering that I have a link to it.

I've also started tagging my posts, humoring my own crushing need for even virtual order, but I'm afraid the categories only make sense to me, and then only late at night.

Blogger is about to kick me off with a scheduled outage...

My profile photo

2007-10-15T10:31:00.000-07:00

Gotta love them honeybees!

Writing Drains and Baseball Games

2007-10-06T23:19:00.000-07:00

I'm alive.

I've been busy lately dunking my head into the hot caramel coating that is the publishing world, and after reading the blogs of many fine folks who work as cogs in that massive industry, have come to the conclusion that
1) Reading about other people wading through submission slush piles is probably much more fun than doing it myself, and
2) Learning about publishing houses is fascinating on general terms, but encourages the prospective writer in much the same manner as holding a hamburger up to a milk cow. In other words, every agent, editor, editor's assistant, and editor's assistant's intern says, more or less, "Over 99.999% of all writers fail and most of what we see is utter crap, and even if it's not utter crap it will probably never make it through our labyrinthine processes, so abandon all hope, stop writing, and shrivel up into a little ball of shattered dreams while you go back to your pencil pushing day job, you loser."

I suppose the rare (and lucky!) writer might stay blissfully unaware of the publishing process, pop out a masterpiece, and get swept lovingly into the arms of a instant book contract, and that would be grand. The wiser writer might try to see the world through an editor's eyes, learning what the common follies are and how to avoid them, but might also become so discouraged by the odds that said writer scoops up their entire work in progress and throws it into the fire, watching it burn with a maddened eye and cackling something about "freedom." (The computer "Digital Age" equivalent of this would be going to the end of a working file and hitting the backspace key for every single letter. Slow and painful.)

But the editor's perspective is honest, I'll give it that. It's harsh and mean, but at least it's a realistic portrayal of what to expect should you ever be foolish enough to attempt publication. I would much rather read through editors' blogs than the floofy, flouncy blogs of would-be writers, which all go along the lines of "blah blah high art form blah future literature scholars will know what I really mean blah blah and, oh yes. I haven't actually published anything yet." Probably meaning that they are writing a story about the antics of their cat, complete with a sample book cover that somehow includes their name Photoshopped into large glittering letters across the top half of the page. In my own musings on the art of writing, I must be careful not to fall into this category, the hoity class of writers who stuck their pens too far up their noses.

So this I now publicly vow: I will never ever submit a manuscript written on stationary that has the inkwell and plume motif at the top. I will not include glitter in the envelope. Or cookies. Or action figures based on my characters. Or a market analysis. Maybe whiskey. I might include whiskey. I also hereby vow to disassociate my specific writing from anything to do with intent-to-publish, restricting it entirely for the purpose of "fun," and if the thought of publishing occurs to me while in the act of writing, to go soak my head.

There. I feel so cleansed.

But back to the more important matter at hand...

Go Rockies! Woo, we gonna sweep the Championships, hooya! I feel a speck bad for the Phillies, and more than a speck bad for the poor Cubs, but at least the next round pits Colorado against the Diamondbacks. We go, Western Division! They're calling it the Continental Divide Championship. (Does Arizona have mountains? Hmm.) Watch as the Rockies blaze past the D-backs for an unbroken post-season streak! It'll happen.

Still, poor Cubs...

I'm hoping that the Red Sox take it tomorrow, but Yankees/Indians? Whatever. I have absolutely no opinion on that one. A Red Sox/Rockies or a Yankees/Rockies showdown would be pretty fun, though. If the Rockies could blast their way through either of those teams, maybe they would gain some much-needed national cred. The western teams don't get a lot of hoopla, other than the ones in California (which we consider not only its own division, but possibly its own sport.) That's the nice thing about the West. Outside of CA, we only have the Mariners, D-backs, and Rockies to root for. We're all like one gigantic family out here. (Tho I'm for the Red Sox, if the Rockies bail out. Wee!)

So much fun watching the crowd at Coors Field tonight, and wishing I could be in it. The last time I was there, it was raining and mostly empty. CO friends, are you getting tickets to these things? Have a spare one? I'll bring my own broom!

And a random question - Sure, the Rockies have Dinger the Dinosaur as their mascot, which I'll grant you is rather weird. Dinosaur fossils...rocks...it sort of makes sense. But why in the name of the great gravy train is the mascot for the Arizona Diamondbacks "Bobby the Bobcat?" Is there something wrong with selling rattlesnake plushies for the kids to cuddle with?

I am so in love with this site

2007-09-27T15:41:00.001-07:00

Once again, I'm not really sure how I stumbled onto the site Editorial Anonymous, but I can't stop reading the thing. It's written by a children's book editor, and she completely won me over with such posts as "Creative Thinking is a Disease and Must Be Stamped Out," and "My Manuscript Has Had Puppies. Want Them?" Here's a recent post:
---
5 Things Not to Write Any More Rhymed Picture Books About:

1. Insurance
2. Calculus
3. IRS audits
4. Shakespeare
5. STDs

It's been a bad week in the slush.
--

What fun the life of an editor!

I'm a Stranger Here Myself

2007-09-21T22:51:00.000-07:00

I have not been in a writing mood lately, or at least not one that produces blog posts. Actually, I seem to have fallen into an irritating frame of mind, perhaps one that plagues all new bloggers a few months into the game. It compels me to take every random thought, every witty self-aside, and say, "I should blog about that!" I suppose it's good to have a net catching some of these things, but thank goodness for self control. Otherwise, the world would be subjected to my innumerably strange "shower thoughts." (i.e. Thoughts whilst in the shower, which seem much wittier there than when they appear in actual text.)

So while my brain is occupied with other things, I thought I would share a few pictures from TSO's visit, which you can also read about here and here. (His version.) Mine will be shorter because, as I said, I have no current blogging abilities.

Cape Disappointment, a grand place to start a trip, waking up to a morning stroll on the beach. I love low perspective, so I put my camera near the sand and captured the North Head lighthouse. Alas, my poor camera was to suffer many near-sand experiences in the next few days.

The wind off the Pacific is relentless in these parts, so it's not uncommon to see little driftwood structures built to block it. (Hard to start a fire otherwise, y'see.) This one was surprisingly elaborate. I suspect whoever built it had a lot of hands or a lot of time. And look! They left a wee little man hiding inside!

The Astoria Column, a tower depicting the history of the mouth to the Columbia, is difficult to photograph. It's difficult to see, period. The art and text scrolls around from the bottom up. TSO and I walked around a few times to read the bottom half, but it was a dizzying way to try to get a bit of history. Much better was the view from the top and the myriad of tourist shirt colors that we watched from above - hot pink, blazing blue, all the colors of the acid rainbow. I was not excused. I chose to wear one of my eye-hurting "Aloha" shirts, cattle brand of the tourist. But since I was technically touring, I couldn't care less. (Plus, it would make me more locatable in a storm, so there was that safety aspect.) Here is part of the Column in detail, with "Before the White Man Came" on the bottom and the entrance of Robert Gray's ship "Columbia" into the river's mouth.

Indian Beach, Ecola State Park (I keep wanting to call it "Ebola State Park") where we walked up a cliffside trail to gaze out on the lighthouse "Terrible Tilly," so named, I have since learned, because of the challenge it posed to keepers. The waves eventually battered the original Fresnel lens to pieces and now the lighthouse sits dead, quite literally. It is privately owned, converted into a resting place for the ashes of the deceased. The photo is stock. (We saw it without the waves.)

And here is good ol' Cannon Beach, cooperating by finally giving us some sun (the fog had been trailing us all day,) not much wind, and balmy, BALMY 53 degree water. Balmy, I say. It was brisk and delightful, one of those sorts of wades that makes you feel good all over, like you're really alive. It was in no way cold or unpleasant. We could have spent all day wading out to sea, deeper and deeper, the cormorant bones swirling at our toes, until the steep green sides of Japan rose up to meet us. (We would have come dripping out of the water like Godzilla.) Wading the Pacific is much like biting into a lemon at a dinner party, only prettier.

Hey, here's a fun side note. A university team has recently been running scale models on what would happen if a tsunami were to hit this particular area. The fault line sits very close to the shore, so there wouldn't be much warning when the big one started to come. In their scale model, all of the little scale buildings are pretty much blasted to smithereens. It's left them scratching their heads, going "Think, think, think," since, of course, sooner or later such a tsunami will actually happen. The current idea is to try to built vertical towers that people could run to, towers which would supposedly survive the initial blow and still stand above water line. Aren't disaster scenarios fun to think about?

Anyway, I got tired of taking "pretty" pictures.
And then we were back to my home turf, Land of Many Large Sand Dunes. We flung ourselves off the highest dunes just like I did back in my school days (TSO has a video on his blog). Unlike my school days, I felt the effect of the diving for many days afterwards. What happened to my youthful springiness? I would post the video of my own dune dive, but I was purposefully flailing around like a rag doll, which I realize, in retrospect, is a bit embarrassing to watch, unlike TSO's mighty heroics. Hmm. I, too, ended up with sand in my ears/hair/nose which continued to shake out over the next week. Someday I'm going to try diving in a plastic bag, just to see if I can sand-proof myself.

The wind was extremely vicious at the top of the dunes, so much so that I in my bare legs could hardly stand the pain of being sandblasted. We were diving on the leeward side where the sand was the softest, which meant that on each climb back up there came a point just near the crest of the dune where the wind would blast sand directly into your face, and as you were already disoriented from the tumble down, you would have to clamp your eyes shut and grope around for the top of the dune, trying not to overshoot and go falling down the opposite side. (I'm speaking of my own experience here. I don't know why I'm talking in second person.) We had been dodging ATVs while we hiked - they tend to come tearing out from nowhere if you don't pay attention - but after my last dive a group of them came to the top of the dune. One fellow pulled right up to us, took off his helmet, and said, "Wow! Did you do that on purpose? I can't believe you guys are doing that! That rocks!" Or something like that. It's hard to impress hotdogging ATVers, so I took it as a nice feather in my cap. (Since the real feather in my cap had been blown all the way down to California at this point.)

A picture of dune trekking. Sepia tone is oh so a'pretty.

After this day of much blowing sand, my camera suffered greatly, to the extent that even now I am still shaking sand out of it. For a short while the lens ominously refused to open, but I think it worked that out with itself. In case any of you camera-loving folks are wagging your fingers at me, I have to say that my beloved camera was never anywhere close to the actual sand, and that all the sand it accumulated was entirely airborne. If you want to photograph the dunes without such repercussions, you may want to look into getting a bio-hazard suit.

(And again with the second person! I must not be getting enough iron in my diet.)

The next day it was back up to PDX, City of Roses, where we wandered around the rose test garden just to make sure. (The garden is literally a place where they test new variety of roses, destroying forever the ones that don't pass muster.) I have now decided that my mythical future dream garden must include a few roses. Maybe even a black one. That would be all cool and Gothic, wouldn't it?

Thanks to TSO's eyes we were able to find our way downtown. (My reading abilities are still hampered by my recent bought with infection.) We wandered around downtown borderline "lost," enjoying all the wonderful sights and sounds and posters for scandalous things. (Portland is no city of vicars.) Total elapsed time to hear an inappropriate remark from a creepy stranger - 3 minutes. Yeah... I'm not such a big fan of cities, but they have their place, I s'pose. We strolled down the waterfront park until we found ourselves in the neighborhood of Voodoo Doughnuts, and this time I discovered the delights of A) vanilla doughnut topped with marshmallow and Tang powder, and B)devil's food doughnut topped with Coco Puffs. Maddeningly delicious. Afterwards we were sucked into the inescapable pull of Powell's City of Books, one of the largest independent bookstores in the world, a Twilight Zone realm where three hours feels like ten minutes. We entered through the main doors, glanced at each other, and said, "See ya!" The rooms at Powell's are all sorted by color, each color denoting a different subject, and I gleefully trotted between the Green Room and the Rose Room and the Orange Room (and the all-important Purple Room, where the bathrooms are) trying desperately not to fill my arms and empty my bank account. It would be fun to work there, except I think I would end up tipping over one of the bookshelves and just rolling around in the resulting pile of books like a buffalo in a dust wallow. Still, a girl can dream.

The river park gave me the chance to catch this nifty pic of the "Made in Oregon" sign, a PDX landmark. The words "Old Town" hang underneath. I played around with the graphics (chrome!!) to give myself a few jollies. I still remember that sign from times waaay back when I was a little kid riding in the car through Portland, and how they used to (and still do) put a red nose on the deer for Christmas. The deer is the symbol of White Stag Sportswear, what used to be one of Oregon's prominent companies before the time of Nike and Columbia. Guess who owns it now?

(Answer: Wal-Maaaaart... and it's now made in Chinaaaa... Cruel irony.)

The longer I type, the more my urge to blog is resurrected. Interesting. But it's late and I must away, and so suffice to say it was a grand trip and good fun to play the tourist game. Anyone else care to come visit?

I just have to add...

Dear...heaven...and...earth.... Could Blogger possibly make it any harder to work with pictures if it tried???!? I feel like I deserve an award every time I finish smashing a photo in the HTML. Criminelly, that's all I have to say about that.

groan

2007-09-15T23:29:00.003-07:00

As a civic-minded citizen, I appreciate what the town is trying to do.

But testing the tsunami alarm at 6am? Really? Really?!?

One does not ignore such things, and so I got out of bed and staggered around until all of the clocks downstairs started to chime, at which point I realized that real tsunamis don't happen on the hour.

And so I went back to sleep and had a realistic dream that my neighborhood was flooding, and I was trying to evacuate my family, and everyone was freaking out.

(There was kite-flying somewhere in that dream too. I think we might have taken a break from evacuating to fly kites...the switch got thrown from panic to fun to panic again.)

Wah.

When the Bridge Opened

2007-09-15T03:01:00.001-07:00

A tall ship came
The green metal middle of the bridge swung open
And all the traffic stopped.
Some sat idling
and some turned off their engines.

But we,
We got out and picked blackberries.
Fat shiny berries tasting of summer
Leaning on tiptoe with our hands inside the thorns
We went beneath the bridge
...where the shipyards are...
And stained our fingers purple.

And when the bridge swung closed
When the metal creaked and complained
and clicked into its place
The traffic moved on.

But we,
We did not return.
We stayed below
and picked blackberries.