Need I Say More?

This is way better than reading about my weekend migraine. Consider yourselves spared.

Happy Birthday, Drew

No wonder you were so against getting a manual mower. Your parents used you as child labor. And didn't even give you any clothes to wear while you labored. Did you used to wear your underwear backwards? Was it good for another day that way?

Oh yeah, and happy birthday!!!

Rapha Roller Race, Portland

Dean's alternative universe lives on on YouTube.

My Worst (Strike That) One of My Worst Nightmares

I have read about this practice in Japan (I believe those uniformed helpers are known as "honorable pushers"), but I've never actually witnessed it until this video.

As someone who keeps a three-foot bubble of personal space around her at all times, this is absolutely chilling.

Random Notes Friday!

• Something I would like to see: A montage of all the scenes in movies and TV shows of men wearing one of those women's negligee robes with the fluffy boa trim. Whenever men get caught without their clothes, the available closets always seem to be well-stocked with these things. I've never owned one. Am I missing something?
• What is it with black SUV drivers? Why are they all assholes? Is it that a certain dicky kind of person gravitates to the black SUVs on the car lot? Or is there something about the black SUV that makes an otherwise sensible person drive like a kitten torturer?
• I just realized that my boss drives a black SUV and she's like one of the nicest people in the world (and no, she doesn't read my blog). Her husband drives a black SUV too, and although he tends to forget to use his rear-view mirror while backing up, he's nice too. There goes my theory.
  
• French cops on rollerblades. That will not stop being funny. Yep, still funny.
• I am looking at the notes in my raspberry, and (I swear) one says, "Did he say I'm worth my weight in squirrels?" I know I'm becoming a little deaf, but what even sounds like "squirrels"? Girls? Epidurals? Okay, maybe pearls...but that's an odd thing to say.
  

I Hurt My Hand on my Dog's Fur

Bathed and brushed two collies. Don't know which is worse - the short-haired version that shoots gobs of hair at you like a skunk shoots stink until it has clogged the drain, slimed your hands, and lays piled in drifts on the carpet, or the long-haired version who keeps his hair in the hope that he can turn it into mats if left unbrushed for more than 20 minutes.


Okay, it's the long-haired one. Getting the old winter fluff out from between all the long hairs is a painful process for both of us. My hands hurt, and I'm too tired to vacuum.

Although the name "collie" is said to be shrouded in history, it is thought that the name originated from the old Anglo-Saxon word "coll," meaning "black." I, however, claim that the word "collie" is Gaelic for Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.


If I'm lucky, Drew will come home tomorrow and be disgusted enough to vacuum. He ought to do it. After all, I mowed the lawn today.

Vaycay Fotos - The Final Chapter: The Cask of Amontillado

We were passing through Wyoming, and glad to be summiting a pass so that the truck's engine could take a breather from pulling the trailer.

We had to pee so we stopped at a rest area.

And there was Abraham Lincoln,
miserable and mortified, standing shoulder-deep in a trap of stone bricks.

This, we learned inside the rest area-slash-statue-viewing station, was the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Monument, of which the State of Wyoming seems to be quite proud.

And no, they did not run out of money and decide to stop carving at the shoulders. It was planned this way, by an alleged art professor. If you want to know his name you can look it up. I see no reason to impune his name as well as his "vision."

It was completed in 1959. I like this picture of the head being plopped into place. Rather undignified, but not really as undignified as its final resting place.

If he only knew what Wyoming had in store for him, do you think he would have worked so hard at his job? I wonder.

We're sorry, Mr. Lincoln. It wasn't our idea.

Vaycay Fotos Part 4: Please Just Stop Already

A little Zion National Park for effect. We had to hike up into the back country to get away from the Spring Break crowds, which was fun, but next time we plan to bring more food.


All these pictures (except for those taken in truck stops and through car windows with my raspberry) were taken with my Canon Rebel XTi - the camera that gets no respect. It's the entry-level model of Canon's fancy pro-type cameras based on the 35mm SLR body. Thus, for the pros and elitist amateurs out there, it is branded as a kindygardener camera. But it has all the basics necessary for a true amateur to take decent pictures.

Everything except a lens hood, which is so embarrassing. My Rebel sticks out like a racing bike with a kickstand because it doesn't come with a lens hood (and one isn't even offered as an accessory - I checked today). Drew and I didn't even know the name of what I was missing ( we called it a rubber lens shady thingy), but all the cool kids seemed to have one.

A camera with a lens hood

I don't care. Let them laugh. I bet I still got better pictures. Mine have Drew in them.


The downside to having Drew as a hiking companion (besides the constant complaints about sore feet, knees, hips and/or back), was that he occasionally insists that I take pictures of geological phenomena that look like rude pictures.

Hence, the butt-crack hill photo.

In Which I Buy Myself a New Chore

I bought a lawnmower online today. In spite of the fact that my new mower will be quiet, eco-friendly, better for the lawn (it snips instead of whacks), and a constructive way to get exercise and fresh (cleaner) air, forces from all sides were conspiring to keep me from purchasing a manual reel mower.

Spoiler alert: through the grass-roots (hah) resistance help of People Powered Machines, I totally won.

Drew thought it was stupid to do something manually that you could do faster and louder with a gas-powered machine. He was all firm in that Captain America way that if I bought a manual mower, I was the only one who would be using it. I felt as if I was asking Dad for a new puppy. "I swear I will feed it and walk it and clean up after it. I promise. Can I? Can I? Can I?"

Once I promised to never ask him to mow the lawn with the quiet, eco-friendly mower, I had, well, not necessarily his blessing, but his non-forbiddingness.

Today I went shopping. It turns out that the gas-powered devices have won the battle for shelf space in all the major (and local) home and garden stores. Yes, they sell a manual reel mower, but it is the old-school type that they only use in period-piece movies. The modern, silent, non-contact, welded steel jobs that need sharpening like once every 8 years and are engineered like Japanese cars are not offered. It's a good thing I did my research first and knew what to look for, or I would have bought one of the prison models and would have been disappointed and Drew might have seemed to be, you know, right.

So I came home and bought a slick awesome one for about the same price they were selling the old-school one at Home Depot.

Another day. Another world-saving action. And Captain America thinks he's so cool.

Did I mention that I drive a Prius?

VayCay Fotos Part 3 - The (nearly) Final Chapter

For your marveling pleasure, I give you Bryce Canyon.





That is all.

VayCay Fotos Part 2 - The Early Years

We stumbled into (while actually stumbling) a truck stop in Idaho called the Garden of Eden. Public Service Announcement: They have Garden of Eden Truck Stop Mugs with your name on them. Get one.

Meanwhile at the Garden of Eden, Jenny found her own blond Guardian Angel with Blond Baby Jesus and Flowery Cross. It was not at all too glittery.

I call this Road Trip at Sunset. Contact me for reasonably priced prints.

This was my favorite souvenir from Wyoming. Not at all too pearly and shiny. If you can't read the bottom of the pig, it is the State Motto: The Equality State. However, the words on this particular pig seem to be crossed out by the reins from the saddle pictured on the right, that seem to be laying in the Wyoming dust. Nice, huh?

This is proof that southern Wyoming has a layer of smog from all the chemical and mining processing plants dotted along the highway.

Oh, by the way - update for the Captain/Chief: a week and a half in Colorado Springs and Dean has staked out the most coolest bike shop in town and convinced them that they need to hire him without further delay.

Check in often for important vacation photo updates!

Vaycay Fotos Part 1

I had no idea how much I enjoyed having Dean and Jenny around until we left Colorado Springs and left them behind. Beside the laughs, I can now feel myself getting older by the minute. Any time now I'm going to start playing the oldies radio station and wearing elastic waisted pants with sweater vests.

Bryce Canyon is ridiculously baroque.
More on this later, as I took about 100 pictures at Bryce alone.

More Bryce ridiculousness.

Butler Indian Ruins. Just us and some old abandoned houses. In caves. If the housing crisis gets really bad, I know some places that aren't being used right now.

This guy already listens to classic rock. Imagine what he'll be listening to now, without Dean at least attempting to help him.

Raspberry Flavored Notes from the Road

I bought a new Blackberry. But since it's red, I consider it more of a Raspberry. It was useful during the approximately 70 hours I spent in the passenger seat of our Ford pickup the last week, half of it while pulling a U-Haul trailer over the Rocky Mountains (if you don't think a pickup can whine, wait until you ask it to pull a trailer doing 75 at 7,000 feet and climbing).

I started writing notes to myself while listening to The Road by Cormac McCarthy. He tends to lapse into poetry, and although I may be alone in this, some of it is ghastly purple colored.

Although I loved it when trees in a forest fire became "heathen candles," I must draw the line when commuters nuked inside their cars were purported to have "10,000 dreams ensepulchered in their crozzled hearts. " I don't know what a crozzled heart is, but I plan to develop one, just so I can use the word some more.

Here are some of the notes I made. Now that I read them, I realize how little entertainment value there is in them, but it's all I got, except for pictures, which will take some time to upload and edit (I got a little carried away).
And, no, I don't know what's up with the fonts. I tried to tame them, but they would not be tamed.

Apparently one must order food to be served alcohol in this Utah establishment. Dean plans to order one hundred beers and a taco.

Wyoming is smoggy. There are smokestacks in all directions.

There are trucks the colors of every jelly bean in the jar. How come trucking is seen as such a macho vocation?

Here is a porn exit. The only service here is porn. Looks like they had gas pumps at some time, but they must not have been nearly as lucrative as the porn.

Easter sunday and we are here and in need of wine. Blue laws are still in place here in Colorado. No drinks over 6 percent alcohol can be purchased in grocery stores and no liquor stores may open on Sunday - especially Easter Sunday. We feel like such reprobate winos.

If you see a pair of black skid marks on the road, you can bet you will see a dead deer on the side of the road. About every mile or two in some places.

By the amount of empty houses out here in the deserty areas of Utah, it seems like the odds of any particular modern-day pioneer's making a go of it around here are about 50-50. Either that or the folks here opt to move and start over about 50 yards away on their 40 acres of scrub when their old house starts to looked a little out of date.

Someone has performed random acts of Christmas out here - on randomly selected scrub junipers.

We passed by Mesa Verde, thinking we didn't have time to wait in line to see Indian ruins. Then we notice some just visible from the road - a small pull-out called the Butler Indian Ruins. There are 3 cars here (including ours). There was an iron railing and a wash between us and the caves both of which were easily breached with a little energy and some good hiking boots. You could see the little adobe-bricked rooms - just like at Mesa Verde, only probably a little snugger, and with no park rangers. Or crowds.

Drew heard his first "my heck" in Mormonland yesterday. Now it's his favorite new swear word.

There's a Remington print in our room tonight. I had to convince Drew that the Indians in the painting (the ones being perp-walked by some other Indians on horses) were horse thieves and not slaves.

Today we saw Zion National Park and a herd of buffalo with a pet cow. Oh, and we hiked 1488 feet straight up to Angel's Landing . No big thing. We weren't tired yet so we kept going another mile or so up the trail. On two granola bars for breakfast and lunch.

We are going through a town called La Verkin. The name was so off-the-wall that I had to look it up on my raspberry as soon as I had a signal (oddly, signals seem to come and go out here in the far red corner of nowhere) first I tried a French-to-English dictionary. The French would not claim such an ugly word. Wiki theorized that the name was a bastardization, or Mormonization, of the Spanish name (and pronunciation) of the town's river, La Virgin. That's where we felt the urge to buy cheese in a can.

Here I am, sitting in a Best Western in Boise squirting cheese out of a can on to a Triscuit cracker and waiting for Drew to come back from the store with some wine - completely medicinal for long-distance-driving-induced swelling - to round out my meal. Guess its time to go home.

Less Talking, More Doing

Gearing up for Dean and Jenny's Great Overland Reverse Pioneer Excursion to Colorado Springs at O-Dark-Thirty Saturday morning.

Moving and long distance drives. Two of my favorite ways to suffer.

I've got to go wash something, program something, write something down for the dog sitter, groom something, or sleep.

See y'all on the flip side. Ten-four, over and out.

Get Up Offa That Thing, Mr. Fry

Stephen Fry has a new podcast, or blogcast, if you will (and if you won't, hey, no big thang). The second installment is partly about his revulsion towards dancing, which, even for non-dancers, borders on the pathological.

I know, I will listen to almost anything spoken in a Scottish, Irish, Welsh, or, as a last resort, English accent. It's part of my own pathology. But Mr. Fry almost always tells me something I didn't know, or haven't heard, in the most ever-so-correct King's English. It's quite stimulating, yet soothing at the same time.

His troubles abiding the dance remind me of Drew's issues. Drew, of course, is not so messed up that the very fact that he does not excel at it make him unable to appreciate it, or in Mr. Fry's case, even witness it (did you follow that? I may have gotten lost there in the middle, but I think I left a trail of bread crumbs). But it does give me a small appreciation of what it is like to lack the dance gene.

And I call it a gene, because in those possessing it, it can possess us. Can you listen to Madonna's Vogue without doing a little, um, voguing? Can you listen to Haddaway's What Is Love without bobbing your head like Jim Carrey on SNL?

If music makes you twitch, and get up, and flop around like a flounder out of water, you've got the gene. You don't have to be a good dancer, you just have to need to dance.

Those who do not have it can sit quietly and happily listen to James Brown's Get Up Offa That Thing, and those who do are absolutely powerless to sit still.

I am really happy for Dean's generation, as they are so much more free to dance with or without a partner of whatever gender. When Drew and I were in high school, we either had to troll for a dance partner, or sit and wait for someone to settle for us. Luckily, I did not grow up in the generation of girls forced to wait for an invitation, and I went trolling when I needed to.

As I believe the dance gene resides on the X chromosome, I'm pretty sure that I have a double dose, which can be a blessing and a curse.

I am completely at sea in social situations, and can be shy to the point of muteness. But when put in a situation that includes dancing, I lose all my inhibitions, and become the picture beside the definition of "dancing fool." This can be helpful, allowing some people to realize that I'm not the arrogant prig I seemed at first, but am actually quite jolly and possibly mildly retarded.

That is okay with me, as "retarded and jolly" beats "arrogant prig" in my book. With the exception of presidents. But it's hard to get used to the amused looks.


Where was I? I was going to mention the fact that dancing, although you can do a pretty good job of avoiding it, will normally be thrust upon you once a year or so, which is unusual for any other activity. Say you hate bowling and you don't like standing up in front of a bunch of people, throwing gutter balls. In this case, it is easy to avoid ever having to bowl. But dancing is different. Weddings, holiday parties, bars, dancing can jump out at you, and you can not always gracefully decline.

I suppose someone like Stephen Fry, who has excelled at so many things (acting, writing, film production, knowledge vacuuming), would find it most unpleasant to be forced to do something he does not understand and finds completely, Britishly ridiculous. Luckily Drew is of sturdier stuff and can abide a little dancing every once in a while.


More luckily, these days I'm free to grab anyone else with the dancing gene to join me, and do not necessarily have to force Drew out on the floor. Although he is my favorite partner.

The Captain Steps Up

Drew is on a temporary assignment as Battalion Chief for a couple months. His rotation started on Friday. For you uninitiated, this means he gets to wear a white shirt, drive the Fire SUV, and tell everybody how to put the water on the fire.

At the same time, his faithful sidekicks were both promoted to Captain. Of course, they will not be taking on the mantle of Captain America, but they are welcome to use any other country name in their superhero title. Captain Belgium sounds nice.

Needless to say they were in the mood to celebrate at the fire station on Friday.

Celebrations at the fire station consist of the consumption of mass quantities of meat, followed by several gallons of ice cream, followed by largely unsuccessful attempts at watching an action-packed, explosion-filled man-movie, interrupted as they inevitably are by fire calls (or more likely, lame calls for bogus fire alarms and tummy aches) or spontaneous, meat-induced napping.

I made one of my once-a-year appearances at the fire station to help celebrate. Nothing has changed. The living room is still full of giant-sized recliners lined up in front of the TV, the kitchen is a maze of refrigerators - one for each shift to cut down on (but by no means eliminate) inter-shift pilfering - and ugly dishes. Citizens, you can rest easy knowing that your tax dollars are not being wasted on china (or forks with all the tines facing the proper direction, for that matter) for the fire stations.

And lastly, I dare you to place your face on the carpet in the dining room and not come away with a methicillin-resistant strain of staph infection. It would be safer to lick the engine bay floors than to touch that carpet.

Congratulations to all the up-and-comers. See you in a year or so.

Here. Look At Something Pretty.

We often run into Avalon's paintings in galleries at the coast. Here are a couple we saw in Newport. The kindly proprietor allowed us to take these photos.

All done with pallette knives. All. I like to limit myself to pallette knives sometimes, but the effect is not the same. It keeps me from being too literal. For Avalon, pallette knives don't seem to have any limiting effect at all.

All done with a pallette knife. I said that, right?

Highlights from My Night Out

I went to see Craig Ferguson last night. Well, actually, Drew drove me to see Craig Ferguson last night. Well, actually, I-5 was a parking lot and we had to reach the Aladdin Theater, which is on the other side of Portland, in an out-of-the-way area that is by no means charming, and then have some dinner so as to prevent me from dying, so I worried that we wouldn't make it in time, and the traffic would continue to suck, and that we wouldn't be able to find anything to eat, and that we would miss the show, while Drew continued to drive.

As you may know, there is a Secret Bridge you have to cross to get to Milwaukie Avenue ("where bars go to become saloons)", where the Aladdin Theater is, and it is tricky navigating your way through Portland (or should we say Rosaria, because it's more, you know, Tolkein-y) to get access the Secret Bridge. Luckily, Drew knows the most pathologically circuitous route possible, which must be good for points somewhere, but made me worry about missing the show. Oh, and the part where we tried to share physical space and time with another F-250 bent on our destruction. HEAR THIS F-250S: YOU WILL LOSE AND THE PRIUSES OF THE WORLD WILL WIN. EVENTUALLY.

Where was I? So we made it across the Secret Bridge and found parking. It was 5:30 and people were already in line for the 7:00 show! This made me extremely worried, (a) because it was cold and rainy, thus I could not see myself standing in that line like an idiot, and (b) I was losing consciousness from hunger (yes, you can still worry while unconscious).

So we found a German restaurant nearby, and if you know German restaurants, this could go very well or very, very, badly.

It went well, if you don't count my looking at my watch every two minutes, and the bill (holy, moly, it's expensive to have a decent but not spectacular meal in this saloon-infested land). I worried about whether I read the bill correctly.

By the time we reached the theater, the lined-up people had long since gone in, but Drew found me a seat in the balcony on the aisle with a clear view of the stage (whew), and THEN he went and got me something to drink. (Duuuude. He's really not bad.)

Craig Ferguson's opening act was a Randy Kagan, who was funny and freshy-fresh. He writes for the Late, Late Show.

Craig Ferguson was that delicious blend of too-clever and so-silly; but the couple in front of us may have been funnier. How deaf do you have to be to not hear a comic using a microphone in a small theater with refrigerator-sized amps for the rock acts that they usually host? However deaf that is, that's how deaf he was. Oddly, he seemed to be able to hear everything but the punchlines. For those, he would look at his wife with his "huh?" face, and she would repeat the punchlines.

So our experience went something like this:

punchline: "...there are Osmonds more Hispanic than this guy."

["huh?" look] "THE OSMONDS." [laugh]

punchline: "I guessed that the bowling helps them pass the time between dental visits."

["huh?" look] "DENTAL VISITS [laugh]

punchline: "well, maybe if it was a swanky Belgian octopus..."

["huh?" look] "SWANKY BELGIAN OCTOPUS." [confused chuckle]

punchline: "because I have a huuuge cock."

me: "oh, come on, say it, say it!"

["huh?" look] [nervous laughter]

me: "chicken."

What Year Is It in The Land of Heloise?

I did not know that Hints from Heloise, a column dedicated to extreme homemaking, still existed until I resubscribed to Vancouver's ultra-right-wing paper, The Columbian (motto: What Would Cheney Do?).

Why did I resubscribe? I don't know. Not enough sources of red-hot fury in my life? I thought I could use a reality check on what the other, unthinking, unfeeling, unwashed, half thinks (apparently they think that firefighters should work seven 12-hour days a week according today's winning editorial letter-writer).

I'm getting off track. I wanted this post to have little other than this helpful hint, sent to Heloise by a helpful hinter from Chino Valley, Arizona:

Dear Heloise: My husband doesn't like the crumbs in the bottom of the cereal box.
When it's bran flakes, I use a colander to strain the crumbs off and save them until I'm making bran muffins. If it's cornflakes, I crush them further for crumbs for coating fish or the top of casseroles.

I hope Gloria Steinem doesn't read The Columbian. This might just send her into a spiral of depression from which she could not recover.

Cue Tina Fey's brilliant "Bitch is the New Black" rant on Hillary Clinton, stat!

A Brave New World Covered in Paper

Remember when our computers promised to usher in the Paperless Office of the Future?


We made six hotel reservations online last night. Between the print-outs of the reservations and the print-outs of the confirming emails (all highly urged for our protection), I just printed out the last of 35 pages of important confirmational information. And that is being careful not to print out any of those empty pages with one line of web-garble.

End rant.

Note: Did you pay any attention to what you just read or are you too busy wondering why that computer has an enormous steering wheel? Because that would be the correct response.