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Saturday, July 11th, 2009
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11:44 am
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Yesterday I woke up to the radio saying "Paul McCartney's appearance in Halifax has caused quite a stir!" and imagined him spontaneously popping in to existence downtown, abusing his secret teleportation powers to get a haligonian donair, perhaps. (Ick, why, Paul McCartney, why?) But no, he just flew there in an airplane, on a pre-planned trip, to play a concert. I was quite charmed to see Halifax's mayor and the NS premier put on goofy wigs and pose for an Abbey Road shot to join all the fuss. Hee hee.
I just worked 3 10-hour shifts in a row for the first time in er, a while. Normally I do this every two weeks, but basically the whole first half of 2009 has been a confusing patchwork of vacation juggling in the pharmacy. (Mostly my fault of course! Although my opposite number did go on a three week cruise.) Ooh, ooh, I'm out of practice! I'm very sore just from the amount of standing this involves. I was going to say I feel like I ran a marathon, but I have run a half-marathon before and this is NOTHING like that, so I feel like I just.. uh.. ran a 5-k? And not too fast? This is getting less interesting by the word. Well anyway. I'm back to my normal work schedule until, hmm, labour day I'm taking one day off, and then nothing else until OVFF in October. And I'm realizing again that dude, my normal work schedule is really awesome. I work 7 days out of 14 and I get a 4-day weekend every second week. I'm such a slacker. But I'm a slacker who gets paid well enough to fly off to random locations on really quite a lot of those weekends. Hooray! Motivation to work full-time: lacking. Not that I could physically hack working full-time anyway, not in a profession where you stand all day.
I figured out this morning that I'm going to have flown enough this year to get MVP status with Alaska Air for next year. Besides the dubious benefit of getting to board early with the first class people (oh boy, an extra 15 minutes crammed in to an airline seat!) (Actually, at some airports, that really is better than waiting at the gate, not naming any names, LOGAN.) this means I get all kinds of extra bonus miles on flights next year, which means MORE CONS! I am so madly in love with their mileage plan. My credit card gets me miles with them, and we put all the big household expenses on it, with the result that I've gotten, hmm, 7 free flights in the last two years. I gave a bunch away because travelling is more fun with company, but like, my being at Duckon at all was totally "Brought to you by the Alaska Mileage Plan!"
I read Starship & Haiku, which I'd won in the Interfilk auction at Concertino, during my commute this week. It was nothing at all like what I expected based on hearing Kathy Mar's song of the same name. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was quite a grisly post-apocalyptic story, mixed with a grim little piece of hope. It's the same kind of mix you find in a lot of Octavia Butler's work. I was surprised to find such an excellent novel from an author I'd never heard of before - Somtow Sucharitkul - but google tells me most of his books were published as S.P. Somtow, which sounds more familiar. (He is the director of the Bangkok opera! He sounds like quite the character.) Time for a trip to Pulp Fiction to look for more! Because the 300 books in the to-read pile stacked precariously by my bedside aren't enough, obviously. The song somehow manages to be absolutely faithful to the book's spirit and still have the same message I originally got from it, despite the book being so vastly different from what I had in mind from the song.
Now I am working on book 5 of the Merchant Princes, Charles Stross' crazy economic-science-fantasy-soap-opera series, mixed with slowly creeping through Consciousness Explained, which seems to me to call for a few days of digesting assertions between chapters.
Joe is off playing paintball this morning. I somewhat guiltily hope that he's not very good at it, because then his outfit will be way more fun to photograph when he gets home. Or do they just issue you a burlap sack or something? Oh well, I already have enough incriminating photos for this week: yesterday was Blackmore Memorial Mustache Day at his office. Theobald Blackmore was some character in one of the WWII games his company makes, who, I hope I'm not spoiling anything for you here, dies in the game. He had a goofy mustache. Now once a year everyone in the office grows a scraggly beard and then shaves it off, leaving only a mustache, for BMMD. (And then shaves that off too, because the dress code doesn't actually call for 1970s Pornstaches on everyone.) Or the girls (not that there are a lot in the office - welcome to the games industry!) glue on fake moustaches. Oh hah, the company already posted their pictures! Seph is the one crouching down who looks like the Dread Pirate Roberts. Swoon! That's my handsome, handsome man. Ooh, I totally have an appropriate icon for this.
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| Monday, July 6th, 2009
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10:37 pm
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Ah, today was satisfyingly musical.
I had my first banjo lesson! Clawhammer is very strange to get used to. It's all down strokes and the hand is held rigid, whereas the fingerpicking I do is all up-strokes and depends on a lot of finger motion. I can't decide whether this will be better or worse for my wrist. The tone is so different! The nail side of the finger hits the string, so it rings out louder and brighter. It's not as noticeable on the banjo, but when I tried on the jola, it was quite striking. I think I'll bring the banjola to my lesson next week and see what my teacher makes of it. Anyway, I'm quite excited. He played me a clawhammer tune that was mostly single-strikes and it was so pleasant and so different in sound from what I do. I feel like I've been in a rut with my finger-picking, so it will be nice to pick up a new trick. By the end of the summer I'll bet I can play a few interesting tunes.
Before my lesson I spent some time sorting through new songs. I added a bunch of recently learned covers to my songbook, plus finally printed out a copy of Every Pretty Thing, and then did a trial spin through a bunch of songs I've been considering learning (mostly ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) orawnzva tunes that caught my eye at Concertino,) sorting them in to "Yes, just practice more," "Listen to the melody more before trying to play," "Need to correct the chords, 'cause this ain't right," and "Need more than one intervention to make playable."
I think tomorrow I will finally retype my songbook index, which is something like 15 months out of date, judging by all the pencilled-in handwritten additions and subtractions. And maybe start to think about what I want to do with my music website. I want to make it easier to trawl for leadsheets and mp3s, but then I'm not sure where to put my explanations/stories about the music. Maybe put three links for each song instead of one - PDF, MP3, Lyrics/Story/Extra-random-things. Also I'm not sure what to do about the living-room-recorded mp3s for songs that are on the album. I want to make full-length audio available so people can learn the songs easily, but it also seems silly to keep the crappy versions around when there're such nice versions on the CD. Maybe streaming full-length audio on a bandcamp.mu site? Although what a weird disjointed website that would make for. Hmm hmm hmm. (Streaming full-length audio on MY server is definitely beyond my HTML ken, which is forever mired in 1996.) I'll have to think on it.
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And of course I have to rewrite the main text on the site because John is dead. I keeping getting to that part of the website problem, waving my hands around a bit, and deciding to go do my laundry instead.
I came across The Friggin' Falcon today, which he used to recite from memory. I can hear his voice so clearly when I read it, and at the two lines that he always forgot, I can see him pause and stare at me, as if the information is somehow contained in my eyes, and then just before I would start in with my "What? I'm supposed to know it?" fake-exasperation he would remember it and carry on.
It's getting easier. It's not easy. But it's getting easier.
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I am hunting for a new laptop. This one has been good to me, but it's 4 years old and gets all swappy and pondersome when I do such daring things as launch Firefox. I went out to many different stores to ogle laptops today, but found a perplexing roadblock: every manufacturer except, seemingly, Apple and Dell, has taken to cutting the left shift key in half and cramming a \| key in there. Why, laptop manufacturers, why! Don't you want people to capitalize their sentences? This explains a lot of youtube comments I guess. So I think I will get a Dell Vostro 1220 or 1320, which is very close to what I have now, only not from 2005, plus has an internal CDRW drive. A macbook is #2 in the running, though, despite my hatred for MacOS, since Joe pointed out I could still run ubuntu. But the vostro would be lighter. Hmm. I will waffle on in to the night, since Toby-cat has declared that it is time for him to sit on my hands.
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| Sunday, July 5th, 2009
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8:25 pm
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Okay, I'm feeling less sad about missing the Diablo Dam tour now. It turns out the dam tour doesn't actually, like VISIT THE DAM. You cruise around the lake, they tell you about the history, and you can stand on the top of the dam briefly. The powerhouse and the awesome incline railway are now forbidden to the public for "security reasons." Augh, what kind of a frickin' dam tour doesn't show you the powerhouse? That's the whole POINT of going to a dam! And like, what terrorist will have their plans spoiled by not going on a powerhouse tour? They still know where the dam is. Hint: ON THE LARGE BODY OF WATER, NEAR THE SIGNS SAYING "DAM." ♪ Roll on to an undisclosed location, Columbia, roll on... ♫
I did the old Diablo dam tour when I was little. The incline railway was the coolest thing ever, and I remember being totally amazed by the giant turbines. The only thing the current tour has in common with the old one is the chicken + jello dinner afterwards.
I wonder how much of the grand coulee tour is restricted now too? I could see that you had to leave all your backpacks etc. behind, which wasn't true when I went 20 years ago. Which isn't that bothersome, but seems symptomatic of the same impractical paranoia that's led to the ridiculous security theatre in airports these days. I sort of wonder if the broken elevator to the powerhouse is real or not. They don't have an estimate for when, if ever, it'll be repaired. You can go on a walking tour of the outside of the dam and that's it.
I am in retrospect even happier we went on the Bonneville tour, where the tour guide ushered us in to the powerhouse and cheerfully encouraged us to take pictures. He just seemed excited that people wanted to know about hydro power.
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| Friday, July 3rd, 2009
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11:33 pm
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OMG I am in love:
The homeopathic emergency room. (Youtube)
My store sells homeopathic remedies, which I'm not happy about, though at least they're harmless. My boss puts up with my open disdain for it, and we compromise by not stocking any cleanse kits, which I absolutely refuse to be within ten feet of.
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10:42 pm
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It is very reassuring to me that spending a week straight in a tiny car with my husband just makes me want to spend MORE time with him, instead of making of us stabby axe-murderers. Yay! I won the marriage lottery. Or cleverly selected a fine fellow, whichever. (Or perhaps most accurately, what Joe's gramma said when she heard he was getting married: "Well! There's no pot so crooked you can't find a lid for it.")
What a fabulous day at work! Nothing special happened, I just really like my job. I spent the commute to work thinking "Wah, I don't want to go to work, wanna stay on vacation. Oh well, I don't have to want to go to work, I just have to go to work." ...and anyway after a few hours I was happy as a clam of course. It was wickedly hot outside and lots of people lingered in our store enjoying the AC. I had a fun moment with one of the regulars, who had clip-on shades on his glasses for the first time ever as far as I had seen. We got halfway through the transaction before I recognized him. "Oh! It's YOU, Mr. Name! I didn't recognize you with your sunglasses." "OH! It's Brooke! My, your hair has grown." Heh. My hair has passed the point of maximum unruliness and is beginning to lie flat of its own accord again. It'll still be months and months before I can even manage pigtails, but ooh I can almost TASTE the ponytail coming. Probably a year before I can have a ponytail. Maybe I'll finally learn to braid my own hair! All those years of having hair down to my hips and I never bothered, but lo, I feel fancier here in my old age. Okay, my marginally less young age. I spend too much of my time around 80somethings to say that without immediately imagining a group of my customers laughing themselves hoarse at me.
I finished the Neverending Story today. I wanted to strangle Bastian throughout most of it, but I give in, uncle uncle, the last few pages redeem the entire book. Now I am reading the two new-to-me Octavia Butler shorts in Blood Child. I think now that I actually have read them before, maybe in the anthologies they originally came out in. But they're still very, very good. Sigh. Such a talented author whose career was cut so tragically short. At least we have what we have from her.
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| Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
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4:26 pm - What's! On! My! Camera!
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2:08 pm - What's! On! My! Camera!
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12:40 pm - What's! On! My! Camera!
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| Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
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10:14 pm - New song! Every Pretty Thing.
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Every Pretty Thing. (MP3)
God it's been like nine months since I wrote a song. I was starting to think they weren't coming back. But they always do.
It's not linked on the main webpage because honestly I'm not really sure where to start to update it to be the Brooka song page instead of the current thing. But here are the lyrics and chords:
( Every Pretty Thing )
.....
I didn't think I was going to write a song about John. Other people wrote them and the various memorials came and went. But here it is. It's not so much about him (How could I capture that boisterous tangle of joyful contradiction in a song? I cannot.) as about how glad I am that he introduced me to filk, and to the friends who have been such a comfort to me since he died. There are so many hands reaching out to me and I am grateful beyond words, but maybe not beyond lyrics.
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6:57 pm - Day 6! Winthrop to home.
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I has a Canada! Just in time for Canada Day. We are celebrating by lying on the couch and petting the cats, who claim to have died of starvation while we were away, but seem rather suspiciously fat and alive.
We got up early and had muffins at the motel, then zoomed out of Winthrop. An hour later, on a gravel road in the middle of nowhere, it finally dawned on us that perhaps this was not the state highway. Oops. We got to herd elk with our car! Finally we got back to Winthrop and identified the wrong turn we'd made, stopped for ice cream, and got going on the correct highway. I'm glad we made the wrong turn, though, it was really a beautiful drive up in the woods. We stopped at a scenic overlook between Ross and Diablo dams to take pictures and for Joe to climb over the fence and prance around on a clifftop unsafely while I yelled "Oy! Get back here!" We went looking for the Environmental Learning Centre on the far side of Diablo dam, which turned out to be a summer camp and not a dam information centre, rats. But looking for it meant we got to drive over the top of the dam twice, whee! We spotted a sign saying "Dam tours start in Newhalem" and zoomed off to Newhalem hopefully, but alas, no tours today. Drat! This one had a boat and everything, it sounds really cool. Well at least we got ONE dam tour in successfully this trip.
We stopped in Newhalem to have hot dogs in the shade of a restored locomotive, and I bought a Skagit Valley Hydroelectric Project t-shirt because that's how I roll. We carried on to Burlington, then hopped over to Chuckanut drive up to Bellingham, which was lovely as always, and then took the I5 to the border and Highway 1 home. (We stopped at the duty-free, where Joe was NOT IDed buying two litres of liquor. Gin: no problem. O'Douls: DANGER DANGER! Heh.) A giant crane next to the Port Mann bridge had a tiny Canada flag waving from its hook. Hee hee. Happy Canada Day, crane!
Okay time to unpack and have 2 or 3 showers. Whee! That was a fun trip!
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| Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
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10:25 pm - Day 5! Wapato Lake to Winthrop
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Oooh today was mildly thwartsome. No dam tour! AAA learning experience! But lots of pleasant drivering around anyhow.
We packed up our campsite in the morning and 5 ducklings came to nibble on the tent while we were rolling it up. Awwwww! We went to find breakfast and wireless in Chelan, and after wardriving around the tiny downtown for a while, found a nice café with an open wireless network. Which promptly stopped working as soon as breakfast was served, harrumph! I began my descent in to Cranky Lady, which fortunately Joe is good at diffusing by imitating ungulates. (His impression of a masticating elk is really darling.)
We took off for Grand Coulee down 97Alt, which is the wrong way by the way. Pro-tip: pick a navigator who isn't having a nap in the passenger seat. Eventually we wound up on the sort-of-right highway and promptly ran out of gas. Doh! The prius got 800km on our last tank of gas, and we weren't even at 600km yet - but we'd been driving up a lot of hills and using more gas for the distance. Oh you tricksy thing! Anyway, this occured in a cell phone dead zone with the nearest town 15 miles in either direction. Joe took the cell phone and went running for the hills to see if he could get reception, but no dice. From my perspective he then disappeared for 3 hours, without even taking a water bottle, and I spent the time fretting that he'd set off to walk 5 hours in to town. What actually happened was that two hills later he decided there wouldn't be any reception any time soon, flagged down a passing farmer and got a lift in to Coulee City, and waited 90 minutes at a gas station for the nearest AAA tow truck to get there. The nearest AAA tow truck: not very near, actually. In the meantime a semi with a GIANT SNOW CONE drove past me. I was too slow to take a picture. Seriously, it was like 15 feet tall. Anyway, Joe + AAA finally drove back up to the car 3 hours later, to my great relief (I was starting to calculate how many hours I should let go by before hitching a ride myself,) and we got a can of gas in the tank and were back rolling. (We stopped at the gas station where Joe had to wait and got celebratory ice cream. And filled up the tank, natch...) Next trip we're bringing Joe's set of two-way radios.
So! After we were ice creamed up, we booted it to Grand Coulee Dam. Oh MAN, highway 155 up to the dam is GORGEOUS. I'm not saying that just because it's a gorge. Okay I am, but it's also BEAUTIFUL. Crazy canyon cliffs and weird rock formations and Roosevelt Lake sparkling and lichen everywhere. We got to the dam just in time to miss the last tour of the day. But this was not as tragical as it sounds, since it turns out the elevator to the third powerhouse is busted, so the tours this week aren't actually going in to the powerhouse, which is like, the only point of going on a dam tour. Well, not the only point, but it's way less cool. We took some pictures of the very impressive spillway and the powerlines and carried on.
At this point I was becoming a very, very tuckered out little leprechaun and we decided to go find a motel instead of camping another night. (Last night's campground was gorgeous, the bed was comfortable, and the wind make the tent flap smack in to itself very, very loudly in my ear all night and I barely slept at all. Doh! Probably it wouldn't be so windy in the Cascades, but if it was and I didn't sleep again, I would be a liquid puddle of stabbings tomorrow, which ain't my kink.)
Annnnyway, so we carried on to Twisp, and said TWITHP! 8 or 9 times, but Twisp's hospitality industry is a little stunted, so here we are in Winthrop, at a pleasant motel which only barely complies with the town's twee cowboy theme. We had a nice, greasy dinner at the local pub. Saloon? Whatever. Joe left his ID in the car and they refused to serve him O'Douls, which is dealcoholized beer. Intriguing!
Tomorrow we'll be going the rest of the way West through the Cascades and then coming home.
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10:20 am - Day 4! Portland to Wapato Lake
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We are camping! We have not been eaten by bears. I can see a bunch of mosquitos huddled around our tent lantern studying strategy diagrams, though, so I suspect we will be eaten by something.
We checked out of our nice motel this morning, and went to find CDBaby's warehouse near the airport. There wasn't really a marked door or anything so I almost chickened out and mailed them instead, but Joe said he'd take them inside for me (and make fun of me) so I crinkled my nose in resolve and went over myself, and a nice hipster girl pointed at the loading dock, where a dude with a mohawk and a chain around his neck with a master lock smiled and said "New stock? Great!" and took my CDs. I'm guessing there's a mandatory rock'n'roll dress code there, it's awesome. We trucked out of town and got fast food at a truck stop for breakfast. I had really greasy chicken and biscuits from Popeyes, which always seems like an exotic regional American thing when I'm ordering it, and then I feel really sick because OMG the grease, and then I forget a week later, more fool I. We carried on the very scenic highway along the Columbia River Gorge! It was a bit hazy because it was so hot, but there were lots of pleasant river views.
About noon we pulled in to Bonneville and went to the fish hatchery. The rainbow trout were very wiggly, and I got a couple of pictures of Herman the Sturgeon, who is like 75 years old, longer than Joe is tall, and has his own fan club. We went in to the interpretive centre and watched a video that included a truck with a fish vacuum. Hee hee hee. And a hose that squirts live fish! Also I bought a tin of Herman the Sturgeon breath mints, which are inscribed with "YOU'RE FIRED" for some reason. It was so WTF that I couldn't resist. I looked for wooden nickels, but they didn't have any.
Then we went over to the Bonneville Dam, and went to the underwater fish ladder viewing gallery (not very exciting,) went to take pictures from the viewing tower on the roof (rather more scenic! I love dam spillways,) and then misheard the directions for the powerhouse tour meeting spot. After running around the 5 floors looking for the tour, I was too cranky to actually go on the tour when we found it, so I went back to the car to read while Joe listened to the talk. This turned out to be accidentally clever, because after the guy had talked for 30 full minutes about mostly stuff we'd already read on the exhibit signs, I was able to sneak in to the tour on their way to the powerhouse. Woo! So I didn't miss my dose of turbine-ogling after all. There was a disassembled turbine they were refurbishing! They're refitting them so the gap between the blades and the housing is like 1/4" which is some GODDAMN impressive millwork. This is so they don't smoosh as many fish, which apparently is the major limiting factor in how many turbines they are allowed to operate! I had no idea.
On our way out of the dam, we stopped to look at the Bonneville lock. It was an impressive bit of engineering, but there weren't any boats going through, so it wasn't very thrilling to ogle.
We got back on the highway and had lunch in The Dalles at a Taco Del Mar, which randomly had free wifi, so I was able to see that CDBaby had processed the new stock I dropped off, yay! We carried on to Biggs and crossed the Columbia in to Washington. By this time we'd left the lush greenery of the Gorge in favour of the dry, rocky landscapes of the Interior that I enjoy so much. They're very dramatic in their tone-on-tone way. And there are so many wind turbines these days! Heart heart heart. We drove up highway 97 until Chelan, stopping for ice cream in Yakima on the way. Man, it's so odd to come to the green (very irrigated) Yakima Valley in the middle of the brown and tan hills surrounding it. Splort! Green! Splort! Now leaving Yakima, back to brown! We got in to Chelan and had a light supper at the Apple Cup Café, which is the most Washington diner imaginable. I got a cup of their apple crisp to go to have for breakfast tomorrow, mmm. We drove down Chelan's main drag, which still has most of the businesses I remember from coming here every summer when I was little. Tomorrow we'll get to spend some time in town when they're open, and I'll drag Joe to the dinky museum.
Then we went hunting for a campground. There's one in town which was PACKED with RVs and tents cheek by jowl and had no privacy, though it seemed to have a few tiny vacancies. The thought of staying there made Joe frown (o/~ unhappy campers lift us up la da dee da o/~) and we followed a sign that pointed to camping in Manson, only actually it was pointing back at the campsite we'd just come from, and while we were discussing how there really wasn't anything but poncy mansions and timeshares in Manson and we should really turn around, we came to a tiny sign saying "Wapato Lake Campground, next right," which turned out to be another several miles down the road. It's a teeny little campsite on a teeny little lake, and it's beautiful and mostly empty, this being a Monday night! Well, this being a Monday night and this campground not being listed with AAA or on the highway signs. Woo! Yay for Joe being disappointed and driving in random directions! He woke up the campground owner (oops) and we think we got charged a little extra for that (fair enough!) but we have a fabulous site right at the shore of the lake. Joe set up our really, really tall tent (he can almost stand up in it! I can stand up and like, run laps in it,) and accidentally let in about 12,000 mosquitos whilst inflating the bed. (The inverter + extension cord works super sweet for the automagic pump thing. Woo! It's nice to have a hybrid car with a huge battery for this kind of application...) But he went on a one-man killing spree and got 11,993 of the mosquitos, so there aren't that many waiting to eat us after all. Outside there are cute tiny bats flying around nomming on the skeeters. And ducklings! There's a mama duck with two tiny ducklings nesting outside. Whee! Our last camping trip together 11 years ago was sort of a disaster, so it's pretty wonderful for this beautiful spot (+ this ridiculously comfortable bed setup) to be the reintroduction.
I'm going to fall asleep listening to crickets chirping and waves hitting the lakeshore now. Goodnight internet! Or well, good morning, it's not like I'm going to post this from my tent. Heh.
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| Monday, June 29th, 2009
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3:33 pm
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We're at The Dalles, having lunch before heading out to find a campground. But anyway! I dropped off a big pile of CDs at CDBaby this morning, so now finally It's back in stock! Anyone who was thwarted in their efforts to order the album can go for it now. I'm so sorry about the weird delay! Hopefully they'll let me keep them stocked up adequately from now on.
Man, the dudes at the CDBaby warehouse were hilarious. I can assure you that they employ 100% indie rock stereotypes, it's COMPLETELY AWESOME. I <3 CDBaby.
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| Sunday, June 28th, 2009
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10:57 pm - Day 3: Eugene to Portland
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I am in Portland! In a very clean and pleasant Motel 6 downtown, which somehow cost the same as the er, charming place in Eugene. Well, today's a Sunday. I suspect a vacancy would have been trickier to find here yesterday too. Mirabile dictu, I escaped Powell's with only 14 books!
We checked out of BJ's Cosy Castle of Cockroaches late this morning (okay, no cockroaches, it was clean. Just kind of decrepit.) and had tacos for breakfast. Mmmm tacos. Tacos in Oregon bear no relationship whatsoever to the "tacos" in Canada. I like both, but mmmmm you can't get the real stuff in Vancouver. We hit the road and drove to the coast on highway 126, which is a really pleasant drive through lots of foresty bits and wetlands, and then drove up the coast on 101, which is terribly scenic and follows the ocean. Lots of sand dunes, beaches, cliffs, sea stacks, and still lots of evergreens of course. We got to Tillamook and Joe spotted the Tillamook Air Museum, which is subtly housed in a 100 foot tall blimp hangar with 50-foot tall letters saying AIR MUSEUM. We decided to go check it out, and I'm glad we did, it had great stuff! WWII planes and artifacts (like, including a luftwaffe bomber jacket,) fragments of the Hindenburg, cockpit simulators... neat stuff! They had vintage plane rides for $65, which we didn't have time for (and I would have been too chickenshit for in any event,) but which Joe wants to head back for some day. The gift shop had these beautiful/garish blimp earrings that John would have loved. I spent a half hour inside checking the museum out, and Joe spent an hour and a bit, but they had free wireless for no apparent reason, so I hung out in the café catching up on LJ while he got his airplane nerd on.
I'm glad the air museum was so great, because the cheese factory was kind of a disappointment. I haven't been in 20 years, and in the mean time the informational exhibits about cheese-making have been scaled back whilst an enormous tourist mill comprising two ice cream shops, two huge gift shops, and a conveyor belt that dispensed crying babies (Joe thought maybe they were being pressed in to cheese) have been added. Total mob scene. And they were out of cheese curds! I tasted some very delicious garlic cheddar, though, all was not lost.
We kept on up the coast until past Cannon Beach, then when 101 veered off the coast we turned on to 26 and headed to Portland. We'd been doing so well with listening to the same music (The Bravery! Led Zeppelin! Radiohead! Men Without Hats! Sufjan Stevens! Joe even patiently listened to my album and to a bunch of Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer) so we took the opportunity of this boring stretch of highway to listen to separate music on headphones - Joe listened to some weird electronica I'm not in to, and I listened through to Walk in the Day, which I downloaded just before I left home. (s'very nice!) We got in to Portland around 8, and the seafood place (Jake's) I picked randomly out of the AAA guidebook turned out to be very excellent AND two blocks from Powell's. I had 8 oysters for dinner, and 6 oysters for dessert. Mmmmmm I could eat nothing but raw oysters for a year. Okay not a year, that would mean they were rotten or spawning for half that time.
So, Powell's. I was very good and did NOT go in to the children's room, and I did NOT buy the scandalously cheap ($50!) copy of Goodman & Gilmans they had. Augh, it was only $50! But I don't NEED a pharmacology reference. Honestly, I've only ever consulted the copy at work when I was writing songs that involved the mechanism of action of a drug. But but $50! But I was so good. Here is what DID follow me home today:
1. Tatja Grimm's World / Vernor Vinge. This is his first, I think? Haven't read it yet. His early stuff is sort of hit and miss for me, but when it hits, it hits good.
2. The Revolution Business / Charles Stross. Book five! Just out. I hate hardcovers but OMG this series. Actually, OMG everything Stross writes. He just really turns my crank.
3. Smallpox: the fight to eradicate a global scourge / David Koplow. Combination history and interesting analysis. It looks like he argues against eradication! I'll be curious to see what angle that comes from.
4. Lavinia / Ursula K. LeGuin. I usually go in more for allegory than straight-up historical fiction, but it's LeGuin, so.
5. The Healer's Calling: a spirituality for physicians and other health care professionals / Daniel P. Sulmasy. I was leery of this because the author is a monk and the book is from an unapologetically christian perspective, but skimming it it seems to be very much up my alley. In includes a section arguing against proselytizing, and seems (at first glance) to be a very humble approach to finding the awe and beauty amid the very depressing and frustrating aspects of a profession ultimately and necessarily centered on sickness and suffering.
6. True Names and the opening of the cyberspace frontier / Vernor Vinge & others. I think it's a novella by Vinge plus a bunch of essays, but it's maddeningly hard to tell. But whether the rest are fiction or not I'd still be interested to read them, judging by the titles, so yoink.
7. Placebo: mind over matter in modern medicine / Dylan Evans. A popular overview of the evidence around placebos. The bibiography makes me hopeful that it won't be too sensational to read.
8. Toast / Charles Stross. Collection of shorts. It's Stross, so I bought it.
9. Consciousness Explained / Daniel C. Dennett. Spider Robinson was going on about it in his latest, so I bought it on a whim. It was a NYT bestseller, which usually means it will be dumbed down and sensational, but flipping through it the syllable count is so high that I think it might be one of those bestsellers like A Brief History Of Time, which everyone bought and no one actually read, so there is still hope. He co-wrote a different book with Douglas Hofstadter, a point in his favour, and the chapter headings are really interesting. We'll see how far I get with it.
10, 11, 12. Magic Street, Pastwatch: the Redemption of Christopher Columbus, and Invasive Procedures / Orson Scott Card. He's such a dick, but I still buy (nearly) all his books because goddamn can that man write a compelling characters. (Except the first three Ender sequels. Ick.)
13. The Margarets / Sheri S. Tepper. I somehow missed it coming out in 2007! I love her books so hard. I keep meaning to go reread Grass/Raising the Stones/Sideshow and write a song about them.
14. !!!!!! Bloodchild: Second ed. WITH NEW STORIES / Octavia Butler !!!!!! I had NO IDEA this was re-released (I treasure my copy of the first edition and have lent it out a dozen times) and have never read the two added stories. Butler is my favourite author, and it was so heartbreaking to hear the news of her death a few years ago. What a wonderful treat to discover new stories from her that I haven't read. Squee!
...meanwhile, I've barely read 20 pages of The Neverending Story, which is the book I was reading when we left home. But tomorrow we start actually camping, presumably in the debatable land of No Internet, so I expect I will get more reading done. Between dam tours. Tomorrow is the first one, we're going to Bonneville!
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| Saturday, June 27th, 2009
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10:56 pm - Day 2: Seattle to Eugene
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I am in Eugene! In a Klassy Motel. There was a spider in my bed, but the bathroom is clean, so close enough.
We started the day with vixy visiting us at her own house, which is a neat trick! She was delivering my birthday present, which was an orange tea set with octopus tentacles all over it. An octo-eye is peering at you from the lid of the teapot. It is completely adorable! We packed up, waved goodbye to the GIANT HOUSE OF GIANTITUDE, and went to drop off the key at the BrainPan, where the move-out was already in full swing, with Cap'n Dave directing the burly filk moving crew, with poor miss vix feebly meeping on the couch inside. Get well soon, miss!
We headed out of town but stepped on a breakfast mine and ended up at IHOP with Fishy and Lauren instead, after getting lost around the edges of some huge show'n'shine on Greenwood. Joe wished we had time to go check out all the old cars! But it seems like there must have been a lot of show'n'shines today, because I5 was full of old cars too. After breakfast we hit a target to get a cassette adaptor, which has made listening to music in the car way, way less brain damage. We stopped at the library to get our internet fix, and then went looking for a post office but never found one that was open. So I'm just going to drop my CDs off in person on Monday! If they let you do that. If they don't I will mail them from inside Portland I suppose, which ought to be speedy.
Finally around 13:00 we got on the road and headed down I5 to Eugene. We stopped at a rest stop on the way and Joe climbed a tree in the scenic Grove of States, where they had a tree for every state. There were a lot of doubles - most of New England was represented by Sugar Maples, for instance. We got to Eugene at 7, drove around for a while looking for a motel with a non-smoking room available, and checked in. Then we went around in circles for quite a while trying to get to slantiness's place, but found it in the end. Then we went bowling with ASH Productions! This involves a lot more disco lighting than normal bowling, even if the bowling alley pretends they don't do disco bowling on Saturday nights. Joe won both games, although we were all about equally bad at bowling. I blame my 5-pin bowling upbringing, although actually I'm not any better at 5-pin than 10-pin. Okay, I blame... the barometric pressure!
Tomorrow we are off to the coast to take the long way to Portland, including stopping at the Tillamook cheese factory. Last time I was there I won cheese curds in a trivia contest! And they have a cheese conveyor belt. It's kind of a no-fail tourist attraction, unless you're lactose intolerant.
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