Nevada, Great Basin National Park

Well, Nevada is just as hot and dry as you imagine it to be. However, if you get to a high enough elevation, it cools off. Also, traveling early or late helps. I know all of these things. Did I do them when I was in Nevada? Not so much, no. In fact, not at all, really. I'm not what you'd call a "morning person". In fact, the only way you could call me a morning person while maintaining your poker face would be to declare it Opposite Day first. So we didn't get out of our hotel room much before 8 in Nevada, and we rode a short distance to Great Basin National Park, where we dorked around for most of the day.

We did get up to some elevation there, and I dragged my girlfriend on a short hike. It's not particularly comfortable to hike in motorcycle boots, just in case you were planning to try it. The elevation made the midday heat more bearable, and we saw some neat sights and took some good photos up there. We even met an interesting gentleman who learned the international sign language for "Holy Crap! Check out the deer up there on the shoulder!" while trying to pass us as we stopped in the middle of the park road to take pictures. See? In all fairness, doing the hand motions from "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" that I learned in third grade might not count as International Sign Language. But the gentleman spied the deer before he spooked it and let his car roll quietly back down the mountain a few score feet so we could finish our photography. We all pulled into the next scenic turnout together and had a nice chat. If my girlfriend can find his business card, I'll add a link to his travel blog here. He's retired and touring the country, blogging his adventures. I was a little jealous.

Unfortunately, the time spent in the park meant we were stuck at Stateline through an afternoon power outage that crippled the gas pumps in every town we had enough gas to reach. Stateline is a fascinating place: a gas station and diner on the Utah side where taxes are low, and a casino on the Nevada side where gambling is legal. We took pictures of the old manual gas pump (how cool would it have been if it had contained actual gasoline!?!?!) and tried to decide what to order from the greasy spoon diner there, since they were cooking with gas. We ate some very greasy food and browsed in the gift shop and eventually the electricity came back on. This allowed us to press into Utah, where we rode through the sunset and into Green River.

One final note on Nevada, before parting: their Cattle Crossing signs are ... special. They were special enough that Rose and I both noticed and commented on them when we drove past them. Maybe it's the free-range law in Nevada that gives cattle the right-of-way. Maybe it's male chauvinism. Either way, in most states I've visited, the cattle crossing sign looks approximately like the one here on the left. Not so in Nevada! They have very fancy cattle crossing signs that look like this one on the right. It makes me want to write a lame joke about Steers and Queers. Or Steers That Are Queers. Or something. Maybe the critter depicted on the sign is just a very happy, free range steer. Either way, I leave you to ponder the question, since neither Rose nor I could answer it.

Now, as you may know from viewing my "Words I Like" section over there in the right-hand border of this blog, I have a pretty dim view of the Interstate Highway system as a means of tourism. As an engineer, I'm well aware of its purpose (Ike ordered it built out of the frustration he felt trying to marshal armies across Europe in WWII) and as a dedicated, lifelong roadtripper, I'm aware of its usefulness. Still, as a motorcyclist, I tend to look down on the "Superslab" as it's known among us two-wheelers. It is, as Charles Kuralt noted, a great way to get from one end of the country to another without seeing anything along the way. The exception to that rule, however, is I-70 through Utah. In ordinary daylight, the scenery is breathtaking. In the cool gloaming, as the night replaces the day, the soft light reflected by the jewelled earth tones of the landscape are achingly beautiful in a way that my words cannot touch. So I'll shut up now and let you see it, with a note that credit goes, as always, to Rose for the photos.

rain fell on alabama

in alabama, there's this big cultural thing about how "stars fell on alabama". every little municipality here has its name on the city limits in a star-shaped sign, it's all over the license plates and bumper stickers. i am here to tell you, brothers and sisters, that the song got it WRONG. meteors may have graced the atmosphere here once or twice, but what FELL on alabama was RAIN. in buckets. in sheets. in giant waves pushed by the tires of semi-trucks coursing down i-85 in the dark of night. thus, i feel nothing but unlove for the rain that fell on alabama last night.

i tried to be prepared. i saw clouds overhead, so i checked the weather radio before i went roaring off into the hills to find this little restaurant by the lake, just to be sure. yes, i have a weather band radio. it came in the CB unit for the bike. this does NOT make me a geezer.

the weather radio said that we had a weather front in birmingham moving EAST. for those playing along at home, montgomery is SOUTH of birmingham. it is not EAST. east of birmingham you find such exciting destinations as atlanta. i, gentle readers, am SOUTH of birmingham. naturally, all my brilliant geographical knowledge did not avail me dryness yesterday.

luckily, i was able to kick up my feet and watch the weather channel for a couple of hours at the restaurant where i ate dinner. unluckily, i had to drink coke instead of the delightful $1 beers that the bartender was serving up. had i known how long i was going to be stranded, however, i might've had a beer or two. as it is, i'm an optimist, so i kept drinking coke and looking for the sky to clear.

luckily, the busboy gave me good directions home that did NOT involve the twisty, hilly road i'd ridden out there on. twisty, hilly roads are BIG! FUN! when you're in dryness and light. they are sucky, anxiety-riddled death when you are in dark wetness. unluckily, i hit another cell of the storm about 10 miles from my hotel. i had to pull over under a freeway overpass to sit it out.

luckily, the overpass loomed almost immediately after the hard rain started and was relatively safe and dry. unluckily, i sat there for 30 minutes looking at the dry, comfortable gas station on the far side that i couldn't get to because i had passed up the exit while i was so fixated on JUST. MAKING. THE. OVERPASS.

bonus fun: my leather gloves were apparently dyed black on the cheap. when i came home, all of my fingers and a ring around my palm were stained dark black. i looked like i'd been very thoroughly fingerprinted!

yosemite!!!

rose and i left out of napa and rolled on down the road toward yosemite national park. yosemite, of course, was not part of The Plan (TM, Pat Pend) so we didn't have any hotels (let alone any towns) scouted out as landing zones. we drifted into Jamestown, CA courtesy of a AAA road map and a gracious good wind. we pulled up to the first hotel in town, a cute old B&B on main street with a wooden sign hanging from the balcony. it was locked. there was a guy standing outside jiggling the front door handle. he'd forgotten his key and was locked out. we figured if a registered guest couldn't get in there, we sure couldn't. so we rolled on down the street to the next place. it, likewise, was a cute old B&B. they had exactly one room open, so we took it. what a good decision that turned out to be! the National Hotel was precious, right down to the teddy bears waiting to snuggle with us in our twin beds. the water-closet style bathroom, shown here, was actually pretty recently updated. they also had the text from an original sign posted in the guest rooms, just after it was built at the end of the gold rush as a hotel for miners.
the hotel was built in 1849, and has been in continuous operation since then. the bar and barroom are made of hand-carved redwood. it was both simple and gorgeous, and i regret that i didn't get a photo of the glass chain decorating the mirror behind the bar. i've never seen anything like it. the hotel has apparently been through 2 devastating fires, but the bar has been saved every time! i guess the miners knew a good thing when they saw it. we had the most amazing 4-star dinner of our entire vacation in the cafe out back, shaded by a canopy of grapevines that have obviously been trained patiently over the long years. some of the parent vines were as big around as my calf. (!!!)


the next morning, we actually rolled into yosemite. it was just as pretty as everyone said. i now understand why ansel adams spent so much time taking photos in the park. the contrasts there are sharp enough to cut yourself on... mosses so green they're almost black, rocks so white you have to look twice to figure out if they're snow or rocks, beautiful groves of ancient trees, shattered fields where fires raged, impatient minivan drivers, dawdling rv drivers. around every single bend in the road there was something we wanted to stop and photograph. if we had taken all the pictures we wanted, we'd still be there.alas and alack, we had to hit the road. we couldn't stop indefinitely in yosemite to take pictures. in fact, we didn't even stop for lunch! we ate at a little gas station/cafe/souvenir shop on the far side of the park on the edge of Mono Lake. from there, we headed off into the wilds of nevada on US Hwy 6. we were still off the route that was part of The Plan (TM, Pat Pend) but if we made decent time across nevada, we would be on track when 6 intersected 50 in Ely. So we bid California a fond adieu, and rolled east for Nevada. in closing, this is just about the only picture i took that came out nicely. all the above shots? yup, you guessed it. my girlfriend's work.

Oh, What a Night!

Actually, it was the sunset, not the night, that was spectacular. In that I mean it was literally a spectacle. I am in Cazenovia, NY this week, which is a very small town about a half hour from Syracuse, NY.

One of the things I truly adore about my current gig is that I travel on my own. I have a reasonable degree of control over where and when I eat dinner, which hotel I stay at, who drives the rental car, etc. And this means that if I'm willing to hop in the car and schlep my happy hind end an hour and some change up to Lake Ontario for dinner, I can do so. So I did.

Dinner was nothing outstanding, just a fried fish sandwich, albeit a good one. I found this place called Rudy's just off the campus of SUNY Oswego and I ordered my fried zucchini sticks and fish sandwich and sat out on the picnic tables out back, weighing down my napkins with my beer, watching the sun set into Lake Ontario.

When you're from the gulf coast, moonrise over the water is a fact of your life. Sunrise on the beach is a beautiful thing, and is generally the nicest time of day. But you never get to see the sun drop into the water when you live on the gulf coast. It doesn't work that way. In fact, the fact that the sun rises over the water can be so deeply ingrained in one who was raised on the Gulf Coast that she could roust her sister out of bed at a ridiculously dark hour to drive to Santa Monica beach only to watch the sun rise over the condos across the street. Not that that's ever happened to me, but it could. ;)

All of which is to say that on the rare occasion that I am able to catch a gorgeous sunset over the water, I very much strive to catch and enjoy it. The waves crashed, the seagulls begged, the sun set, I drank my beer, and I enjoyed it deep beneath the level of my skin and my mind and all the way into my feeling soul. 3 hours in the car is rarely spent on a more worthwhile pursuit.

Napa Valley and the North Coast

After San Francisco Pride, Rose and I rode up through the city to the Golden Gate Bridge. She'd never been, and I'd never gotten to take pictures. We had to get up to the north side of the bay anyway, so rather than taking roads we'd already been on, we opted for a new route. It was a long drive in nasty traffic, but I love that bridge, and I got to take geeky pictures with the cross-section of the cable. What's not to love? I have to give my girlfriend all the praise and credit when it comes to the photos. She took my (borrowed, fancy) camera and her (simple, old) camera and her tripod and made great and gorgeous shots. I made some pretty crappy snaps that manage to make the golden gate look like a tinkertoy. So, if I haven't mentioned it yet, all the (good) photos I've posted are her work. I'm the author, she's the illustrator. It's a great partnership! And here's one, courtesy the tripod:


So after pulling out of our space in the crowded Golden Gate overlook, we waved at the German tour group on their rented BMW motorcycles who were pulling into our parking space, and turned our noses northward for Napa. A long-time friend of mine found herself living out there recently and decided to finally tackle some of the things she had on her list of "stuff to do before i'm 40". She had to change the title to "stuff to do before i'm 50" but she's working her way through it. One of her things was to learn to fly a plane. All well and good, but plane rental is expensive. She got tired of renting and decided to buy, because that's the sort of woman she is; as she somehow managed to avoid living beyond her means when she was young, she can afford it. I, personally, am spending half my disposable income paying for my dissolute and misspent youth. So she sent us out to the airport and arranged us some time with her flight instructor and her plane and off we went to see the sights of the Northern California Coast. Truly, it is a beautiful place.


We flew over the San Andreas fault, the Point Reyes National Seashore, an elk herd, a hidden little surf beach, the Monterey County Open land trust, the only oyster supplier in the bay area, and the flats where they make sea salt. Tremendous! And as a super-bonus for you, dear reader, I have an out-of-chronology bonus winery shot that we took a few days earlier when we were driving through the valley. The road ahead was supposed to lead us to Lake Tahoe and thence across Nevada on US Highway 50 (according to The Plan) but as you may recall, Lake Tahoe was on fire this summer. Okay, the lake itself wasn't ON FIRE, as such. But the forests surrounding it were on fire, and said Highway 50 was closed. So we had to change The Plan. My aforementioned long-time friend is a California native, and she made the wonderful suggestion that we drive through Yosemite National Park and wind our way across Nevada on Route 6, which would put us back on 50 close to the Utah border. It was a perfect Plan B! So we said goodbye to San Francisco Bay and headed off for Yosemite.

San Francisco Pride

I rode my motorcycle to San Francisco and all I got was this T-shirt.

which, actually, i love. the shirt is the negative of that jpg image, which is fine in a place like san francisco where the summer temperatures are around 75 F. in dallas, we make white t-shirts for pride because (even though we have pride in the early fall) it's still blazing freaking hot and nobody wants to wear a black t-shirt when it's 100 out. seriously, rain is an improvement on the weather at dallas pride, because it keeps the temperatures tolerably low.

After tooling around Napa Valley all day Saturday, attending the Dykes on Bikes Pride Party, and eating lovely seafood at Fisherman's Pier on Saturday evening, we queued up for the parade bright and squirrelly Sunday morning. The DoB (aka: San Francisco Women's Motorcycle Contingent) were very excited because they finally were near the end of their struggle with the US Trademark office to protect the name of the organization and make their unofficial name into the official name. The parade draws 400 or so bikes every year, and about a million spectators, and that requires a pretty high level of organization. We had to stage up between 7 and 8 to start the parade at 10. I am NOT, repeat NOT a "morning person". My day usually only has one 5 in it. Verily, it has also only one 6 in it. On this day, I was ON. MY. BIKE. at 6 AM. And in case you'd forgotten, San Francisco is COLD in the summer. It's especially cold in the dawn's early light.



But I lined up, I got my coffee, and then I lay down for a nap. And, no, I didn't spill any of that coffee. Apparently, the nap created something of a stir. I, naturally, was dead asleep and didn't know that I'd created a stir until the sun started peeking over the tall buildings of Market St. and woke me up. But my girlfriend and her friends thought it was so funny that people kept stopping to take my picture that they took pictures of the people taking pictures. I picked up a passenger for the parade, and we had a great time riding down the route and waving at all the people. One of my favorite features of the parade is that the Dykes on Bikes go first. If you've ever driven a stick-shift in gridlocked traffic, you know how not-fun it is to do stop-and-go in first gear. it's really awful on a bike because your clutch is operated by your left hand, and you eventually get a cramp in it, no matter how many times you've squeezed those grip exercisers that were ubiquitous in the 80's. where did they go? anyway, with the bikes at the front, they get to set the pace and they don't have to stop every time a marching band out front decides to hold up the parade so they can grandstand for the ... um ... grandstand.

After the parade, we went to the Pride festival. It wasn't drastically different from any other Pride festival i've ever attended except that it was very big and I'd heard of the bands that were playing. Oh, and it was cool out. People were in the most AMAZING costumes, elaborate things made of feathers and glitter and paint that would've totally melted in the Texas heat but which were made possible by all the cold water out in San Francisco bay. And city hall was flying a pride flag out front. That was pretty damn amazing. Not only was I proud, but the whole city was proud with me. I'm not sure I can explain how that feels, but it's kinda like how it felt when I was in survival school in the Air Force and at the very end of the week we spent as POW's in an "internment" camp, our formation was ordered to about-face. we expected to see the People's Republic of Berzerkistan (thanks to Gary Trudeau of Doonesbury for that very awesome fictional country name) flag that had been flying overhead all week and which we'd been forced to salute and pledge allegiance to. But the US flag was flying there instead. We all cried a little. It's like coming home, but it's more... it's a like a homecoming you desperately need don't dare hope for because you knew it can't happen... and then it does.

it's not so much that i'm addicted...

...when compared to the population of folk who play, it's that i'm so very addicted when compared to my demographic. :) i'm only 63% on the general score, but compared to other women my age, i'm at 99%. i gotta start recruiting some friends!

Your Score: Well on your way!

You are 63% Addicted!

You play a lot, and you're starting to get hooked. Keep it up and soon you too will be part of the ever-growing group that is totally addicted. Or, see the warning signs now and get out while you still can!

Link: The World of Warcraft Addiction Test written by survivedestiny on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

a-sante-sana-a-squashed-banana!

do you remember that scene from "The Lion King" in which Rafiki (the crazed old babboon advisor) gives Simba some ridiculously cryptic advice and then skitters off across the plain, chanting nonsense about squashed bananas to himself? Simba looks dumbfounded and a bit sour-faced afterwards.

no?

well, i re-enacted it. sort of. mostly, i made a squashed banana and a sour face.

in my defense, let me open by saying that i have no recollection whatsoever of putting a banana into my briefcase. i've been on the road a lot lately, and i've also had my sister's ex-service dog living with me. either of those could be the ultimate reasons for the stray fruit. it's possible that someone handed me a banana, either my girlfriend as i was dashing off to the airport, or one of those nice people who keeps the continental breakfast stocked up and clean at my hotel. it could've even been one of my students. any of those people also could've simply put the banana on top of my bag and then the unattended banana could've fallen into the bottom of the bag.

my sister's ex-service dog (who has been visiting my house since hers was invaded by a screaming baby) likes to pick things up and bring them to people. part of her training, you know, to be useful and bring you your dropped cell phone or keys or wallet or whatever. she's very good at it, and your articles arrive at your feet drool-free and with no extraneous tooth-marks. this is much more than i can say for my own black lab, who only brings me things when she wants them thrown back out so they can be retrieved. molly mauls everything she gets her slobbering jowls around. and lest you think you could outsmart her by using something clearly bigger than her head, like a basketball, let me assure you that she's popped her share of basketballs. poof. not bigger than her head anymore, and much more satisfying as a chew toy that way.

so somehow a banana ended up in the bottom of my bag. and apparently, it stayed in reasonably healthy and unharmed state for some time there while i had a travel respite. i was home for almost three whole weeks attending distance learning classes and filing expense reports and other hateful forms of paper-based torture. so back out on the road i went... and i noticed an odd smell when i was on the shuttle from my parking lot to the terminal. it was kinda like kettle corn, sweet and salty. when it got stronger, it was more sour. i thought it was an odd smell for a shuttle bus to have. then i got to the admiral's club to have a drink and dinner and wait for my (delayed) flight to board. and i smelled that smell again, but stronger, it seemed. i thought i must've gotten something on my shoes or my hands or something. so i washed up and checked my clothes for odd spills. finding nonesuch, i thought that was the end of it. then, when i was sitting on the plane i went to put my computer back into my bag and i smelled that odd smell again, but strongly. it was now unmistakably coming from my bag. it was sweet-ish, but also kinda sour, like vinegar.

and then i did something extraordinarily stupid and one which i caution you never to try. i put my hand down in my bag to find out what was making it smell like that. my fingers squished into the banana... or what was left of it. i pulled it out of my bag, which was also stupid, but i couldn't very well leave it in there, could i? i made a dumbfounded face, a brief visual inspection ensued, and i quickly identified it as fermented squashed banana. the lady next to me made a sour face and nearly blew sprite out her nose. she seemed to be laughing, but i'm going to go with "laughing at" rather than "laughing with" here. i quickly found an airsick bag and disposed of the former fruit.

on landing, i got to my hotel and removed the rest of the squashed banana from my bag. alas, there was no way to clean the bag with the materials and facilities available to me in the hotel. which is really alright, because after a year's use, the bag was starting to wear out. so i chucked it. i went to work the next day with my (recently washed) gear shoved into the plastic laundry bag that hotels always have hanging in the closet. that afternoon, i stopped by my friendly neighborhood office supply store and bought myself a new bag. i like it better than the old one, too. it's comfier in the shoulder straps, and it spreads the bulk out so it's easier to fit underneath the seat in front of me.

never in a bajillion years...

...did i think i'd be agreeing with pope benedict xvi on any of the controversial topics of the day. but here's one we agree on. until we have some sort of scientific theory more sound than "proteins came together in a primordial soup in a random way to spark First Life, and maybe lightning was involved" about how the whole process of evolution was kicked off, i'm happy to believe that there's room for the touch of a Maker in there. however, that's no reason to eschew the mounds of evidence that say favorable adaptations stick around and change whole species because those adaptations better equip individuals to thrive.

for the link-averse, the following is the salient excerpt from the article above. and to this i say, "Right on, Your Holiness."

THEORY OF EVOLUTION

In his talk with the priests, the Pope spoke of the current debate raging in some countries, particularly the United States and his native Germany, between creationism and evolution.

"They are presented as alternatives that exclude each other," the Pope said. "This clash is an absurdity because on one hand there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such."

But he said evolution did not answer all the questions. "Above all it does not answer the great philosophical question 'where does everything come from?"'

San Francisco

once we had ridden across all the deserts, we then had to ride through the winds that keep them so dry. california has some un-freakin-believable winds. we didn't quite make it all the way over to the pacific coast highway (Highway 1) but we did ride the Historic Camino Real (Highway 101) which parallels the 1 on the eastern side of the Coast Range. it's not as twisty, or as pretty, but it's faster for it. as an added bonus and a surprise, one of our friends from bakersfield finagled a little time off from work and joined us in the morning for our ride out to the 101. we enjoyed a fantastic twisty ride with gorgeous and unique scenery, a local guide, good eats, and great company. here we are, taking pictures of each other taking pictures:


the winds made the 101 just as exciting as the pch, i promise! i've heard other people tell stories of riding down the freeway with the bike leaned over like it was in a turn just to balance out the wind. and really, deep down, i thought they were exaggerating. motorcyclists are just a skosh shy of fishermen for dramatizing things.

so there i was, riding my behemoth of a bike up the 101 freeway in california, and i had to lean her over to keep her flying straight. it was bizarre. my friend (in the pic just above) who was riding with us from phoenix to san francisco has half as much engine as i do, and with her passenger, she had twice the load. her engine was maxed out, so we slowed down a bit below the ambient speed. even then, the wind made handling the bike an electrifying experience. and i mean that literally, in the sense that every single one of my hairs was standing on end... and my senses were crackling with the sights and sounds and smells... and the hot, dry air made me feel baked and chilled at once... i was aware of every truck on both sides of the highway... and all the passenger cars jockeying to get past the trucks and each other... and the yawning golden valleys on either side of the road waiting to eat me up if i leaned too far or not far enough, misjudged the wind, or misread a car's intention. by the time we hit the traffic jam rolling into san jose, i was ready for a break.

we did just almost require a tow truck to get my girlfriend past the exit to Cupertino, CA, where her beloved mac HQ is located.

then, after about 10 minutes sitting still on the outskirts of san jose in our black safety gear... we decided that we'd had enough of a break from the wind and we began my initiation into the most simultaneously civilized and barbaric practice in motorcycling: Lane Sharing, aka: Lane Splitting. in california, while this practice is not specifically allowed by law, it's not illegal; and as a practical matter, if you want to get anywhere in the gridlocked traffic so common there, you have to do it. so basically, a 4 lane freeway becomes a 7-lane freeway, with bikes running between the cars. at very low speeds this is tolerably safe, even if it is white-knuckling to the biker. studies have shown that it actually improves cyclist safety because it cuts down on the oh-so-common rear end collision that occurs when a distracted rush-hour driver fails to see the bike because they're looking for something car-sized. ask anyone who has ridden long in california, and they'll tell you all about their personal safety rules (usually a speed above which they won't try it) and the number of mirrors they've dinked or the times they thought OMGIMGONNADIE! i had been leading up to that point, but i declined the privilege during this exercise. and, even with my behemoth of a bike, i made it. we stayed reasonably close together, went just a few miles an hour faster than traffic, and when the traffic started moving consistently, we just slid back into a gap in the regularly-scheduled lane space. i'm not sure whether i liked it or not. it was definitely a mixed experience, but that's what i said about snow-skiing before i learned how to stop. well, i knew one way to stop, but that was basically to throw myself into the snow, and the results made for a very MIXED experience of skiing. it was always exciting, but not always fun.

this was us in california, one of my favorite pictures from the trip:

Alamogordo, Tucson, Phoenix, Bakersfield, and San Francisco

for the next three days of our trip, we weren't tourists. we were riders. we just pounded out the interstate miles gettin' where we had to go. at our first gas stop out of New Mexico, we pulled off the freeway to get gas and gatorade (the staples of desert riding!) the convenience store operator was also a rider himself and had a fabulous route suggestion that would save us time and miles getting into Phoenix, it bypassed Tucson and covered some prettier miles on the old US highway route. ordinarily, we would both have leapt on the opportunity to get off the freeway, save time, save miles, and see Something Pretty. unfortunately, rose was experiencing an intermittent microphone problem with her CB, and that meant we couldn't take the cool route because we had to go to Tucson.

Tucson, you see, is the headquarters for J&M, the manufacturers of our CB units. so we glued our wheels to the interstate and pushed on into Tucson. it was hot as blazes, but the kind folks at J&M fixed the microphone free of charge and got us back on the road quickly. they even gave us good directions that bypassed the nasty interstate construction and traffic logjam attendant thereon. the directions were perfect, too. as we approached the freeway on-ramp from the city street, we could clearly see TRAFFIC NOT MOVING on the freeway. we figured we had been led astray. we'd have to sit in NOT MOVING TRAFFIC for a couple of miles until we got out of town and out of the construction. i'm not sure i can adequately express how miserable NOT MOVING TRAFFIC is when you're in the desert, straddling a 6-cylinder engine, wearing a black jacket, black gloves, black helmet, and deprived of any mechanism of air cooling aside from the hot exhaust coming out the tailpipes of the NOT MOVING TRAFFIC in front of you. but lo, as we accelerated up the ramp, it became clear to us that the on-ramp joined the freeway about 50 feet past the end of the construction zone. the traffic behind us was still NOT MOVING. we, on the other hand, were MOVING. yea!

we stayed over with friends in Maricopa, AZ which is just south of Phoenix. the next day we stopped off at a really unique little diner in Gila Bend, AZ for breakfast. The place was called "The Space Age Diner" and it was all decorated up to make you feel like you were in a space ship. Or, like you were in what people in the 50's thought space ships would be like, really. It paid tribute to all sorts of space stuff, both the historical and the fictional, the decor was fun and funky and the waitress kept the coffee coming. my girlfriend, the NASA groupie, loved it. i couldn't ask for more, especially at that hour of the morning. i'm literally rendered mute without coffee, and if i'm not i should be.

one of the other staples of desert riding is Getting Up At The Crack Of Dawn.
at that point in the day, the temps are relatively low but you can still see well enough to ride safely. so we did. those of you who know me know that i am more the Getting Up At The Crack Of Noon sort of girl. so mornings are all a little blurry in my head, but they mostly involve lots of coffee and me squinting at the horizon and asking "is that what sunrise looks like?"

sometimes the answer was "no, that's a power plant" or "no, that's a big truck with lots of yellow lights". eventually, i'd get it right. the sun would come up, and then it would be, as my friends in college liked to say "Africa Hot."

so, when you're powering out the miles on the interstate, there's not much to see. it goes like this: "oh, look! a... well, i'm not sure what it was. it went by so fast." but we played silly motorcycle games and we took pictures of each other. so for three days, the ride looked like this:
Riding with friends


Me on the Valk


Africa Hot

hey, look! my new niece!


welcome, baby girl. just wait 'til you can reach the passenger pegs. you're gonna LOVE motorcycles. (sis: i'm just kidding!)

in other news, richmond is nice. by the time they were done delaying my flight last night and got me out of town, we were several hours off schedule. the plane was mostly full of boy scouts on their way home from philmont scout ranch in cimarron, nm. i have a soft spot for them because almost all of my uncles were boy scouts, rising to the top rank of eagle scout. my grandmother used to look on in amusement when my sisters and i pulled out the scout manuals for guidance on how to tie each other up with clotheslines. she did occasionally comment that the eagle scouts in question would probably be horrified to know that we had learned their secret code language and their special knots.

anyway, the practical implication of a plane full of boy scouts, instead of the usual sunday night road warriors, is that by the time the beverage cart gets back to you in row 28, the only drinks left are diet soda and bloody mary mix. if i'd had any cash on me, i'd have gotten the real thing. as it was, i made do with my virgin bloody mary. probably for the best, since i didn't get to my room until 2 am. if you're going to drink that late at night, you need to drink so much that you don't notice the tiredness. unfortunately, that usually disposes the rent car guy very poorly to handing you any of his precious stock of keys. it's not usually too bad, getting a cab to your hotel, but then you have to get up in the morning and figure out how to get to work.

waiting on the weather

i was supposed to fly out for richmond tonight at 6:35. it is now 7:05, and my flight has been delayed a third time, to 8:00 PM. eventually, i'll get out of dfw tonight. (see, i'm still an optimist!) and then i've got a class to teach.

so i'm sitting at the airport waiting on the weather delays to clear out, so the regularly scheduled flights can resume. i wonder if the dudes responsible for scheduling these things ever get frustrated by such persistent rains. knowing that it's just going to rain and scramble these flights, i wonder if they have trouble motivating themselves to make up a schedule in the first place?

anyway, i had a marvelous weekend visiting my godsons, until the last hour and a half. the children took complete leave of their senses and abandoned all their usually publicly acceptable manners and acted like heathens at lunch. i've been out to eat with them about a bazillion times, and it's usually pleasant. the kids wheedle a bit about what and how much to eat, they struggle with the instruction to sit upright and mostly still, but they do it. i don't know what got into 'em today, but they weren't fun to hang out with at lunch. which was not a great way to wrap up the weekend, but that's what i got.

Carlsbad, NM

the roadtrip was originally scheduled to begin at o-dark-thirty on tuesday. but then i decided that i could work a crammed half-day on monday so that we could get a little closer to our tuesday goal (El Paso, or thereabouts) on our first day. Dallas to El Paso is a hella long day, so getting part of the way there on Monday would spare us a Hellacious Tuesday.



so the new plan was to leave at noon on monday, ride as far as we could or until we lost the light, and then start at o-dark-thirty on tuesday from a better launching point (which ended up being Abilene). but then, since we our tuesday was going to be easy-peasy instead of hella-hard, we decided to add an extra stop into the trip. and thus, we set our GPS for a waypoint of carlsbad, nm.



carlsbad is an unreasonably hot place in the chihuahuan desert (where there are NO dogs, wtf?!?!?) that lets you enter an unreasonably cold place 750 ft below the floor of the chihuahuan desert.

 
when you arrive at carlsbad caverns national park in an air conditioned car, you have difficulty arriving in the appropriate clothing to enter the cave. when you arrive on a motorcycle, outfitted for riding across the desert, you have no chance.

rose had never been to the caverns, and i had only been once when i was about 12 years old. i remembered a lot of the more lurid details of the place (rocks that look like nekkid bits! teehee!)
 
  but did not remember how cold it was. and it's a deceptive cold, because it's wet. and of course, you enter it from the desert, which is the epitome of dry heat. so at first, it feels all welcoming and cool and refreshing and great. then you notice the goose bumps, then the shivering sets in, and then your jaw locks up and you die huddled on a bench trying to warm yourself on a fluorescent bulb just enough to call for help. srsly. rose claims that she had no such trouble with the atmosphere in the cave, but i think she was just playing tough. damn that butch-girl ethic!

still, once i got back to the surface and thawed out my jaw muscles, i was able to tell rose that i really enjoyed the cave and would love to go back some day for a tour of the parts we didn't get to see. but only if i get to bring my sweater. and lest i make it sound like a bad place to go, the cavern really was quite beautiful. it's a natural marvel and i would love to go back for more. in a sweater.

i have a niece!

a new one, that is. she was born last night (and thus now shares a birthday with her two older sisters) and is named Rebecca Faith. she's 9 lbs and change. congrats to my sister and my brother-in-law and to the new big sisters. i'll get a picture up here as soon as one comes available.

13 days, 7 states, 4500 miles, and my hiney hurts.

so, after i whacked off all my hair, i set off across all the deserts on my motorcycle, along with my girlfriend. we actually had a good deal of fun doing this. i'm going to try to make a series of short posts regarding the various legs of our trip, but this one is a starter and a summary:

Deserts we crossed: (see Desert USA for a basic map)

• Chihuahuan Desert
• Trans-Pecos Desert
• Sonoran Desert
  • Arizona Upland
  • Borrego Desert
  • Colorado Desert (It's in California. WTF?)
• Mojave Desert
• Northern Mojave
• Southern Mojave
• Great Basin Desert
• Sevier Desert
• Painted Desert (by the broadest definition)

Mountain ranges we crossed*:

• New Mexico
• Antelope Ridge
• Guadalupe Mts
• Sacramento Mts
• San Andreas Mts
• Cedar Mts (as nearly as I can tell, this was the Continental Divide)
• Arizona
• Peloncillo Mts
• Dos Cabezas Mts
• Dragoon Mts
• Picacho Mts
• Maricopa Mts
• Gila Bend Mts
• Plomosa Mts
• Dome Rock Mts
• California
• Chuckwalla Mts
• Little San Bernardino Mts
• San Gabriel Mts
• Tehachapi Mts
• Temblor Range
• Caliente Range
• Coast Ranges
• Sierra Nevada
• Cathedral Range
• Nevada
• White Mts
• Silver Peak Range
• Monte Cristo Range
• Toquima Range
• Monitor Range
• Sulphur Spring Range
• Pancake Range
• Grant Range
• Egan Range
• Schell Creek Range
• Snake Range
• Utah
• Mountain Home Range
• Confusion Range
• Fish Springs Range
• Coal Cliffs
• San Rafael Swell
• Roan Cliffs
• Colorado
• Rocky Mountains (Continental Divide, again)
• Sawatch Range
• Sangre de Cristo Mts

This list format makes it seem like we crossed a lot more mountains in Nevada than we did in Colorado. The funny thing is, Colorado was ALL mountains and Nevada was mostly high-altitude desert with mountainous accents here and there. But since the whole of western Colorado is one gigantic mountain range, it collapses into "Rocky Mountains" and leaves Nevada looking like the Mountain Champion State. Not so. Hopefully, some of our pictures will bear that out, as I get them posted in the coming days. Oh, and we didn't cross any mountains in Texas. Texas has a few mountains, but they're only in the part that's south of New Mexico, and we didn't get there.

Miles we rode:

• Day 1 - Dallas to Abilene, TX: 345
• Day 2 - to Alamogordo, NM: 344
• Day 3 - to Maricopa, AZ: 457
• Day 4 - to Bakersfield, CA: 550
• Day 5 - to San Francisco, CA: 336
• Days 6-8 - farting around the Bay Area: 274
• Day 8 - to Jamestown, CA: 138
• Day 9 - to Ely, NV: 483
• Day 10 - to Green River, UT: 333
• Day 11 - to Salida, CO: 387
• Day 12 - to Dalhart, TX: 347
• Day 13 - back to Dallas: 467

National parks we visited:

• Carlsbad Caverns
• Yosemite
• Great Basin
• Arches

Other unusual sights/attractions:

• San Francisco Gay Pride Festival and Parade
• Space Age Cafe in Gila Bend, AZ
• Artesa Winery in Napa, CA
• Flying tour of Point Reyes National Seashore and San Andreas Fault, CA
• Royal Gorge Bridge in Cañon City, CO
• Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, TX

* As far as I can tell. Mountain ranges, especially as they're rendered on road maps, don't have crisply-defined boundaries.

i got a haircut!

every few years, i like to grow my hair out. i grow it out until it's as long as i can stand it to get, and then i whack it off short and start all over again. i usually start growing it out about the time the phrase "yes, i know this is the women's room" starts to roll off my tongue even before the woman coming through the door can try to tell me i'm in the wrong place. unusually short hair, unusually long legs... sometimes the first impression is wrong. and eventually, that gets old.
it takes me about two years to grow my hair out to 12 inches, and i know that because the last time i got my hair cut was when my nieces were in the NICU. they're turning two this month, so that's how long my hair's been growing. i wanted to cut it before my monster road trip because my mop of hair is NOT something one wants to deal with on a two week motorcycle adventure. it's especially not something one wants to wear in the desert, and as i already mentioned, i was crossing ALL of them. (seriously: the chihuahua, the sonora, the mojave, the great basin. ALL the deserts)

it's the second time i've done this and donated the hair, but probably the 4th time i've done the drastic hair-chopping thing. this time, instead of just taking a borrowed pet trimmer to my own head, i got rose's sister to cut my hair for me. she did a great job! i like the process, i like the way it makes me feel lighter in body and spirit, but i really like knowing that all that time in maintenance and upkeep isn't just going into the trash. so, since 1 pic = 1k words, i'll just say that i donated the hair to Locks of Love and let you read the story below...

before the cut!

a foot of hair...

i'm ready. are you?

cleanup. with STYLE...

ta-daaa! high speed, low drag, easy-maintenance hair for the desert...

CB mania. Breaker 4. Over.

I have been riding my motorcycle for almost a year now. In celebration, and because I'm stupid, I'm riding it out to San Francisco next week. Why does that make me stupid, you might ask? San Francisco is a perfectly lovely place to go and ride motorcycles. The answer is because I'm starting in Dallas. And if you recall your American Geography lessons from elementary school, everything east of the Sierra Nevada range in California until you get to ... well ... Dallas is part of the Great American Desert. So, yeah, what that means is that I'm going on a very long ride through deserts and mountains to end up in San Francisco. Mark Twain never said that "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco," but he could have. In fact, he implied the same thing about Paris, France in an exchange once and the famous quote morphed from there. Still, the fact remains that San Francisco has cold weather, and lots of it, and often even in the summertime it is a chilly place to be. Blame it on all the leftover seawater they get from "The Deadliest Catch", I guess.

In preparation for the ride, and by way of spending the cash-ola that I got for Christmas, I decided to get a comms system for my bike. This means that when my girlfriend and I are riding together, we can actually exchange phrases like "I'm out of gas." or "Did you see the hair growing out that guy's ears?!?!" Usually, we have to wait until we get to the next gas stop to swap such observations. Further, we've been on a long and mostly unsuccessful hunt for a way to play our iPods that doesn't interfere with our ability to communicate important facts and get each other's attention. The solution, it turns out, is a J&M CB system. This lets us talk to each other and many of the other vehicles on the road, which is useful if you ever get tired of your entire 60 GB music library and need other forms of entertainment. It's also very, very helpful if you're trying to figure out what the weather and traffic are like a few miles up the road and whether you should pull over or try to make the next town. So we bought the system for me (Rose already had one for her bike) and let it sit on our kitchen table for about a month while we mulled over the options for installing it.

We ended up doing the installation ourselves, and it turned out better than I expected. Rose had to re-install hers because she'd had a malfunction in her driver/passenger intercom system and had sent it in for service. Hers had been sitting on our dining room table for three or four months while we mulled the installation options. There's nothing like "the last minute" to get you motivated to tackle these sorts of projects, eh? I was having a particularly difficult week with asthma and allergies and a navel-gazing moody spell, so I let Rose handle most of the installation work herself. I did put the antenna mount on my bike (which involved the use of power tools and was thus quite good for my moody psyche) but after that, I pretty much stayed out of Harm's Way - aka: The Garage. I have to say that she did one helluva job, and that is unalloyed praise.

But... (sorry, honey, i have to post this part. it's too funny.)

When she called me to come out for the first test broadcast of my new system, I came out to the garage and held the microphone and mashed the button and transmitted. Yea! It worked! And then I noted that the bike wasn't "on". None of the lights were on, none of the instrument panels were glowing. She didn't even have the keys in the bike! Problem: if the accessory will run without the key in the bike, it can drain your battery while you are sleeping with the keys on your nightstand. This problem is easily surmounted if you're methodical and ALWAYS turn everything off, but it's a Disaster Waiting To Happen when you're easily distracted (oooh! shiny thing!) and forget to turn off the accessories sometimes. You can guess which of the aforementioned cases applies to me.

The logical thing to do at this point was to pick up the manual and see what it said about installation. And I know my girlfriend NEVER reads the manual. It's a part of her life philosophy that she developed while working hel(l)pdesks. So, on page 3, in fine print, in the third item of a numbered list, was the instruction that you should power the thing from a switched circuit on the bike, or better yet from a fuse-enabled accessory terminal. Well, I just happen to have one of those! I installed it so that the Mobile Dog Unit could have taillights. Some day, I swear I'll write about that. Anyway, I took the covers off and moved the power wire from the positive battery terminal (where she had connected it) to the accessory terminal so that it would only allow the CB to power on when the bike was on. Yea! And lest I make myself sound all fancy and knowledgeable about this stuff while bagging on my girlfriend, let me admit here and now that it took a bit of trial and error to find the right port on the accessory terminal. I didn't get it right the first time, and I had to cut off all the wire ties I'd used in my first run at it and re-route everything. You can bet I tested the wiring setup before applying any wire ties in the second run. Anyway, with the wiring fault corrected, I was happy with the installation and I was forgiving of my girlfriend because (after all) the important instruction was pretty well buried.

Then, I happened to be tidying up after the installation, and when I got to the little nest-like pile of tools, spare bits, empty water bottles, and dirty spoons that seems to accumulate wherever my girlfriend works for more than 2 hours, I discovered that there was a Quick Start Guide to the installation. And then the forgiveness EVAPORATED INSTANTLY. It might have even FLASH BOILED, it went so fast. In LARGE BOLD TEXT on the quick start guide, was the instruction "Do not EVER connect this accessory DIRECTLY to the BATTERY!" Yeah. So it's a good thing I read the manual, eh? My mom figured that out about 25 years and two Barbie Dream Houses ago, of course. I've been the Designated Instruction Reader in my household for as long as I can remember.

walky man, and tampa

so, i promised a photo of the canadian walky man forever ago, but my phone was roaming the whole time i was in canada, so i could never upload the image. i remembered to upload it last week two weeks ago while i was in missouri, but then i ran out of time at the airport and didn't actually post it here.

so, without further ado, the SUPER JAUNTY canadian walky man:

i think he looks a lot perkier than the standard issue american walky man. maybe it's just me. i mean, he has feet! and he's shouldering bravely into the wind!

and in yet another bathroom weirdness post, i leave you with the following message that was printed on paper and taped up in the bathroom stalls of the Tampa Municipal Building:

Ladies, in consideration of ours please cover before disregard products in** can.

Now, the obvious flaw here is that "can" is a euphemism for toilet, but those of you who've ever had to plunger a tampon out of a ladies' room in your day know what they're trying to say. The next problem, which you'd have had to be there to appreciate, is that where i typed the ** there was white-out on this sign. Let me say that again: THERE WAS WHITE-OUT ON THIS SIGN. I was so curious that i turned the paper over to see if I could make out what they'd decided was so inappropriate that they had to white it out. Turns out the word "in" originally read "into". This set me to giggling. In two lines of text so grossly grammatically incorrect, they'd decided that "into" was the wrong preposition, and "in" should be used instead. The remaining corrections are left as an exercise for the reader, if you can bear to think about it any longer.

travel roundup - jeffcity, mo

i just now am sitting in the airport in kansas city. it's not all that large an airport, and it's not all that fancy. but i'm in the admiral's club, enjoying my comfy chair and the fact that the bartender brings the drinks to me, and it could be a LOT worse. again, tonight, with the dallas weather and me being lucky: this is probably the fourth time this year that i've been scheduled on the one and only flight that is actually leaving for dallas because the weather has caused all the others to be cancelled. i guess that's the hidden blessing in the fact that i almost always end up on the last plane of the night. usually, by the time my flight is scheduled to land in dallas, the afternoon thundershowers have been robbed of their fuel by the setting of the sun, and so my flight is able to land.

whew. i really didn't want to spend the night in kansas city. getting here has already been an adventure, and all the adventure i need for a while. my flying day on the way here very nearly took over the top spot as my worst travel day ever. but it managed not to, and for that i'm grateful. the bullet-list of BadThings (tm, pat pend) that happened to me on my way out here:

• I missed my flight out and got redirected through St. Louis
• The TSA inspectors in Dallas decided that my hair gel might be in a container larger than the allowed 3.4 oz.
• The TSA inspectors in Dallas decided that my hair gel might be a threat to national security since it was in an unlabeled bottle and might not even BE hair gel
• The TSA inspectors in Dallas decided (after long deliberation) to throw away my hair gel and my Downy Wrinkle Releaser (the wonder drug that works wonders for the ironing-averse)
• The Dallas ticket agent who re-routed me through St. Louis neglected to change my second-leg ticket, so it still said I was flying from Kansas City when I was clearly standing in St. Louis.
• The delay caused by unraveling the Kansas/St. Louis conundrum caused me to check in so late that I was pulled aside for super-special seekrit sequiriti screening. At least those TSA agents were nice.
• The airplane from St. Louis to Columbia, MO seats TWO ACROSS. Not two on either side of the aisle, but TWO ACROSS the whole plane; it's tiny.
• The Enterprise desk in Columbia lost my reservation.
• The Enterprise employee was not at the desk for 30 minutes, so I didn't know he'd lost my reservation until I finally tracked down his manager with my cell phone.
• The desk clerk in my hotel SSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHH'd me while I was in the lobby talking on the cell phone about my travel misadventures. I think she took offense at the f-bomb I dropped regarding my hair gel.
• THE TSA THREW AWAY MY HAIR GEL!!! it was in a 3 oz. bottle, in a quart-sized plastic bag. clearly, they are haters of teh curleez.

the good things that happened?

• i got pizza and cookies for dinner.
• the hotel had NOT lost my reservation.

and now, in spite of the evil weather that's coming on... i think i'm going to end up on a plane bound for dallas tonight. i had to drive up to the airport instead of flying back here on the tiny plane from Columbia. the weather in Columbia was threatening, and they tend to cancel flights on those tiny planes for much less weather than it takes to cancel a big jet flight. i had the time to drive up, and it was more appealing than sitting in Columbia on the hard plastic chairs for four hours to find out they were cancelling my flight. i actually got to the Kansas City airport before i'd have arrived if I'd waited for the flight in Columbia to take me. plus, they don't cancel the freeway for light rain, so i was guaranteed to get there, barring the usual highway travel perils befalling me.

and here's something funny for you... the airport bathrooms in Columbia, MO (where they have one gate and everyone waits outside security because they don't open it until the plane lands) were a helluva lot nicer than the ones in Minneapolis/St. Paul. in Columbia, there were self-flushing toilets and automated paper towel dispensers. the place was clean and smelled not unprofessional.

travel notes and coincidences

so i'm at the chili's too in minneapolis/st. paul airport. and i managed to sweet talk my waitress into placing an order for me off the lunch menu even though i arrived during breakfast hours. that was good, because i was none to excited about a breakfast burrito from chili's and i really didn't want to pay $9 for a cup of yogurt and a plastic tub of cereal. i don't mind so much paying $9 for hot food.

while i was eating, i decided to use the washroom. that's canuckistani for "restroom". and i had to go outside of the restaurant to use the ones provided by the airport. and they were by far the most disgusting airport bathrooms i've ever seen. honestly. i've been in a texaco gas station with external bathrooms that you have to get a key from the clerk to enter, and they were cleaner, better maintained, and working more efficiently than the ones here. yuk. just yuk.

on the way back to my table, i happened to trip over a U-19 (that's rugby for "high school") team on their way to the national playoffs. unfortunately, due to some bad flight karma, they were sitting at chili's mid-morning on saturday while the games were going on one more hop down the line. they hope to make the last game of the afternoon. they were stunned and amazed to find that texas a&m had a rugby team and had had one long enough for an old geezer like me to have played on it. :) i wished them luck and now i'm off to catch my flight. and to see if i can't find a bottle of hand sanitizer. i know the CDC now disavows antibacterial sanitizers, out of fear that they're contributing to the rising percentage of the bacterial population that is antibiotic resistant, but i feel OOGY after useing that restroom, even after washing thoroughly with hot, soapy water. ugh.

on, one quick note: coincidences - when i wasn't playing rugby and wasn't interested in playing rugby and really just needed a break, i never ran into rugby people out in public. it seems like, now that i'm contemplating getting back to some involvement with the sport again, i trip over it at every turn. coincidence?

in response to the question "what do you do, and why do you like it so much?"

i'm an "applications engineer" or a "solutions architect" depending on who you ask and what day it is and whether or not the wind is coming from the north with a hint of snow on that day.

i spend most of my time teaching engineering modeling software to engineers. i like this for three reasons: primarily - i get to teach and that's probably my favorite activity of all time, unless my students are functionally illiterate! secondarily - i'm doing enginerd stuff with my brain that keeps me interested and challenged. tertiarily - i'm toying with modeling software, which i've always loved. any sort of lab experiment in which i get to recreate something that happens in the real world is my real joy.

the rest of my time i spend doing sales demos of and consulting for the software that i teach. demos are fun for me because i was always too extroverted to fit in with the other engineers. seriously, my excessive gregariousness was once described as a "character flaw" and was always a job liability for me. now, i put that flaw to good use earning myself a commission. (my sister's favorite joke: how do you know when you're dealing with an extroverted engineer? she talks to your shoes instead of her own!) consulting is fun because usually the reason people hire me as a consultant is that they don't know how to model something complicated. essentially, i end up teaching them how to use the software to do the hard and/or complicated stuff. and that's really fun for me, because i not only get to troubleshoot, but then i get to teach my solution to the clients.

it's the best possible set of tasks for me, and the fact that i'm responsible for upwards of 9 different software titles and each of those runs on at least two, if not four graphical platforms just makes it better. boredom comes easy to me and it's the kiss of death for my performance, but with this much variety in my workload, i haven't managed to get bored at this job yet.

grade eh!

i'm in regina, sk tonight. and no, the name does not rhyme with "tina".

so far, so good. the only thing unusual or noteworthy so far is that the pedestrian crossing signals here are weird-looking. the green walky-man is very jaunty looking, his shoulder raised as if to forge his way through the prevailing "plough winds" as they're called here. he also has feet, which i've never noticed on american walky-men before. i'll snap a picture of it, if i can remember to do so tomorrow. i have no idea if i'll be able to post it or not. i'll try.

additionally, i had a delightful elk steak with cherry sauce for dinner. and on the wall, on my way into the steakhouse, i saw a large and glossy poster bearing the following ad slogan for the canadian beef association:

Grade Eh. Canuck beef is better.

i wished AGAIN that i had a camera with me. these guys have the american beef association and their "beef. it's what's for dinner" beat hands down. maybe they have better material to work with, but i would actually buy food as a result of the canadian poster. the american one just makes me smile and hum a few bars of that copland tune the american beef people used in their tv commercials.

i <3 Dahlia Lithwick

if you're scratching your head and wondering who that is right now, hie thee hence to slate.com and just peruse a few of her articles. she's an insightful journalist who never fails to cut through the b.s. with common sense and a really good look past the hyperbole to the issues at hand. i love her articles, and i hope if i ever get to have a cup of coffee with her, i'd like her, too.

her latest is on the blogosphere and what can be done or what should be examined about some of the hypersexual threats aimed at women bloggers these days at clicky. unsurprisingly, this is an issue of keen interest to me. not that i attract the sort of attention that tends to bring on detractors, but i would hate to think i ever attracted a stalker. i just don't want to have to choose between sharing these little random slices of my brain with you and the sense of security i cling to when i lie down in my bed at night.