Blue Ridge Parkway? or Heaven? You be the judge...

After our rotten and rainy Saturday on the BRP (Blue Ridge Parkway) we awoke in Boone, NC with bright and sunny skies. Seriously, it was like a whole other country. First, we backtracked a short way to visit Grandfather Mountain. They actually make motorcyclists read a half-page "Hazards Warning" upon entering the park that basically explains that this is a Mountain with twisties and possibly even SWITCHBACKS on it and that you should neither take these things too fast nor too slow, lest you fly off or fall down. This, of course, made me grin from ear to ear with gleeful anticipation. So we took off (at a reasonable pace) and cruised up to the first building on the mountain, which was the Nature Museum. They had some really fantastic displays there. My favorite was the dendrochronology. They had used a tree cross-section as a timeline and marked rings on the tree with historical events that took place in the year the ring formed. Informative and aesthetically pleasing! Also, based on their displays of native plants, I'm fairly certain that I have strawberries growing in my flowerpots out front. They were supposed to be asters, I think. That's what I get for using my compost as fertilizer.

The Nature Museum also included a number of live critters on display. We saw the otters, but they were asleep in the shade and not out being cute for our benefit. How rude! They had some zoo-like animals and others that were quite plainly rescued animals that were unable to survive in the wild. Like this majestic guy, a bald eagle who was maimed by a gunshot wound. Our favorite, however, were the genial black bears. The bears were quite interactive, at least as long as someone on our side of the wall had a packet of treats in hand. Yes, at Grandfather Mountain you are encouraged to feed the bears! This seasoned pro was working the crowd of tourists quite handily. There were kids competing with each other to see who could toss their food closest to her mouth, because if it was close enough she'd snatch it out of the air. Too far away, and she'd let it roll off, to be licked up later, when she got around to it... We sat down in a shady spot and considered our options at that point. We could:

1) Eat a bear and hope nobody noticed
2) Gnaw each other's arms off
3) Go back to town for lunch

We, quite reasonably I think, pointed our headlights down the mountain. We stopped for a quick photo, where you'll notice the pointy bits sticking out of the mountain behind us. Those are, apparently, the nose and beard of the Grandfather. If you look at the mountain from the right vantage, it's supposed to look like an old man in profile, complete with bushy beard. Who makes this stuff up, anyway? We rolled back into Boone, NC for lunch at Tupelo World Cafe where I had Roasted Yam Jalapeno Soup. It tasted as fascinating as it sounds. The menu looked startlingly similar to, but more diverse than, the one at Coyote Kitchen, and it turned out that's because Tupelo's owners were the founders of the Coyote Kitchen. They know good food, that's for certain.

Thence, it was ON WITH THE CURVES, ALREADY!!! We didn't get too many more pictures that day, because we were "burdened" with riding mile after mile after relaxing mile of sweeping curves through mountains, glens, passes, and meadows. After the 13-hour slog from Dallas to Atlanta on the previous Saturday, and the treacherous rainy riding the day before, the BRP on a Sunday was exactly what I needed. I got into my groove. I even have an iTunes playlist especially for this mood, appropriately titled "Sunday Morning". I jammed, I rolled around curves and over hills, past waterfalls and cabins, wineries and horse pastures. It really was heavenly.
Oh, and the forest? The rain from the day before had given everything a clean glow, a little lift. It smelled fresh and fertile and green. How I can describe a smell as green after making fun of someone for seeing a Grandfather in a mountain is surely one of the Great Mysteries of the Internet. We whiled the hours away cruising through some of the prettiest territory in North Carolina. We did get some scenic overlook shots that day, and there was some mighty nice scenery to look over.

There's really no way to photograph it and ride it at the same time, but we had the distinct pleasure of riding the Linn Cove Viaduct that day. I will leave it to your trusty Googling skills to find more photos of it, if you're interested. It made my enginerd senses tingle because the construction of that particular bridge was used as an example of first rate work in some of my engineering classes back in the old school days. It made Rose's biker senses tingle when she recognized, halfway down the viaduct, that her desktop wallpaper for a darn long time had been a publicity shot of her motorcycle riding that same stretch of bridge. This would be the geek equivalent of waking up in a closet full of stuffed animals plus one wrinkly alien and realizing that you were IN THE POSTER with E.T.

It was getting to be arm-gnawing time again, so we grabbed one more scenic overlook shot and scooted on across the border into Virginia, where we both worked for the week. How mundane!

All the road that's fit to ride...

I recently had the opportunity to travel to Atlanta for work, and then the following week I had to be in Abingdon, Va. For those of you who motorcycle, you probably know what turf is between Atlanta and western Virginia. For those of you who don't, it's quite seriously where angels would go to ride a motorcycle, if they had to choose something within the Continental US. Here's a graphic to make it clear:

You should notice two things about that picture. First, that no matter how you route yourself, you end up skirting or crossing Great Smoky Mountain National Park (green blob at map center); and second, you can't draw a straight line from Atlanta to Abingdon because the roads are all bendy. Given that the Smokies are round-ish green mountains with lovely vistas and moderate temperatures that are a human's best friend and that non-straight roads are a motorcycle's best friend, this is then teh perfect place to ride. Ask any angel you meet.

Really, I can't say enough about how fabulous and fun the ride was, IN GENERAL. However, our first day out was rainy, and I assure you that while our rainsuits kept us dry, there was no love lost on the clouds (aka: fog as thick and soft as cotton bolls) we stumbled through when we ATTEMPTED to ride up on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Notice, if you will, the fact that although this photograph was taken at a scenic overlook, there is no scenery to overlook. The background closely resembles a cotton boll. After a little bit of that, we gave up and visited Linville Falls instead. A very short and pleasant hike through easy territory yielded us this neat little vista point:
Rose liked the flowers along the way. They call these "Mountain Laurel" but they look nothing like the Mountain Laurel I know here in Texas, and most disappointingly, they don't smell like my Mountain Laurel. *le sigh* I guess the angels got busy arranging the roads and forgot to perfume the flowers. Then again, it could have been the cotton boll fog just absorbing the smells. We only hiked out to the first waterfall because we were in serious danger of gnawing
each other's arms off at that point. Dark was falling and we had yet to reach a town that would do for dinner and hotel as we'd been ambling along the Parkway and other back roads in South and North Carolina which are known for their scenery but not their plentiful commercial services. Probably because the two are generally mutually exclusive. At a rest stop on our way up to the Parkway Rose found a plant with leaves bigger than her own head. Given that we couldn't see much further away than 100 feet because of the rain and cotton bolls fog, this was a choice bit of scenery for that day. We decided to take a tip from Mad Maps and go for dinner at a place called the Coyote Kitchen. This was a serious leap of faith for me because I've eaten at enough Tex/Ari/Cali/New-Mex style southwest eateries actually located in the Southwestern United States that I'm pretty much a connoisseur by default at this point. I don't enjoy the misguided attempts of yankees trying to make Southwest-Mex food and getting it wrong. Frankly, if I think the place is going to bill itself as a Southwest-Mex eatery, I'm only going to eat there if it is:

1. south of I-30
2. if I see actual Hispanic people in the kitchen preparing the food* or
3. it comes highly recommended.

Furthermore, the I-30 border is a stretch. I used to say I-20, but I found a good TexMex place in Fort Worth that's just south of I-30 so I moved it north just for them.

Blessedly, and under clause 3 above, the Coyote Kitchen was fantastic. They were veggie/vegan friendly, the staff were friendly and attentive and above all, everything tasted fantastic. They had a number of different Caribbean-style salsas, and while I only ate the Mango Lime and Cranberry Chipotle myself, I would say based on these two that all the salsa in there was good enough to feed the angels. Seriously, it was so good I bought the t-shirt. Now I can say, when hyping this place up to random strangers on the street, that I have Been There, Done That, and Bought the T-shirt.

We drifted off that night with happy tummies and thoughts of waterfalls dancing in our heads...
And we woke up the next day to glorious sunny skies and perfect riding weather. But that's for another post...

*Yes, I am aware this is a blatant racial stereotype. I'm willing to accept the potential consequences to my immortal soul so as to avoid eating things like burritos topped with marinara.

GO LOOK AT THE MOON!!!

NASA advises you to go take a look at the moon tonight. It'll look large and lovely as a result of an optical illusion that nobody understands, just like microwaves and non-dairy creamer. There are a few theories on why the moon looks so large when it comes up on the horizon, and there are great explanations of them on that link.

I've experienced that myself... the most glorious moonrise I ever saw actually looked like a massive grassfire in the mesas of New Mexico. It spread thick and red and wavy across the horizon, getting larger and larger as I drove toward it, cursing the fact that I had no cell phone reception and the nearest land line was 14 miles TOWARD the fire. For a while, I honestly wondered if I'd have to ditch the truck in an arroyo and hope the flames passed overhead. Then, suddenly the upper edge of the moon popped out crisp and clear into the cooler layers of air. The atmosphere stopped playing mirage tricks and the orange moon rose splendidly over the mesas and canyons.

It's a terrific memory and one that I hold out any time someone says they don't get what the big deal is about light pollution. Happy memories and good moongazing tonight, internet!

Strict Scrutiny...

Recently, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals heard the case of a Maj. Witt of the US Air Force (USAF). She was a combat nurse, highly decorated, 18 years into her service. She had literally been an Air Force poster child, her image used in recruiting materials over the years. Until, in 2004, someone snitched on her and informed one of her superiors that she had 'the gay' - it's a disease, you see, something like 'the plague' or 'the I'm about to be expensive.' She was investigated and ultimately given an honorable discharge, all just one year before her eligibility for a lifetime pension.

Because I'm a nerd, I read up the review of the case at Law.com and found out some really interesting things which I'm about to share with those of you who are lazy, link-averse readers. For instance, a lot of folks I've heard criticizing those discharged under the Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT) policy dismiss the issue with an argument along these lines: "She knew the rules, she broke 'em, she got discharged, and now she's whining about it? Shut up, already."

The thing is, Maj. Witt DID NOT break the rules. She did have a civilian partner, but she didn't talk about it, didn't write about it, didn't protest about it. In fact, her partner lived 250 miles from base, so she didn't flaunt the fact at the occasional grocery-store run-in with fellow servicemembers. She was abiding solidly by the rules laid out in the policy.

Now, what's nerdy and interesting about this decision of the 9th Circuit, and the reason that it made the news at all, is that in light of the decision handed down by the Supreme Court in Lawrence & Garner v. Texas in 2003 the appeals court has required a higher standard of proof from the military that the discharge was justified. That is, there has long been what the legal profession calls the "rational basis" test to determine whether laws like this are reasonable. Basically, the court asks the government why it must discriminate against some of its citizens. The government then says that it had a rational basis for enacting the law or policy in question, and from there the court has simply ruled on whether it was implemented fairly.

Since Lawrence, however, the court is looking more closely at the rational basis itself, not just the application of it. (In Lawrence, the Supreme Court said that the state of Texas had no rational basis for regulating private sexual behavior between consenting adults, even if they have the gay.) The Lawrence decision gets into a legal doctrine called "strict scrutiny" which the 9th Circuit declined to require of the military in this case. Instead, they've required some middle ground between rational basis and strict scrutiny, probably because applying strict scrutiny would effectively destroy DADT outright. The Supreme Court would be very likely to overturn a ruling like that, so the circuit court walked a line here between making an eloquent point and howling at the moon.

So, the rational basis for DADT has always been that keeping servicemembers closeted was necessary to promote unit cohesion, individual morale, good order and discipline, and readiness among the troops. All laudable goals, assuredly, but quite vague. HOW EXACTLY, the 9th Circuit has asked, did Maj. Witt (remember all those medals and commendations?) threaten good order and discipline? If the protests of her co-workers, superiors, subordinates, and patients are any indication, the only thing about her that damaged morale was her ouster. The only possible way she could have been perceived as a threat to readiness is if someone thought they could use her pension dollars for something else and had to get her out of the way to do it.

This will be VERY interesting to watch. Kinda like watching someone work their jaw in futility when you ask them how, exactly, my impending gay wedding threatens or damages their straight marriage in any way.

proud of these girls!

These are some friends and family of mine who just ran a 5k for Breaast Cancer Research fundraising. I'm proud of "Team Treasured Chests" for their hard work and commitment. That shirt on my sister (on the far right) is from an organization called Save the Ta-tas that donates part of their proceeds to breast cancer research. The slogans and shirts are fun to wear ("If loving ta-tas is wrong, I don't wanna be right!") and the money goes to a good cause. If you have ta-tas or you know someone who does, and you'd like to keep it that way, go browse their catalog.

I am so proud of you ladies!

Carlsbad, NM - redux

Rose and I just got back from Carlsbad, NM. We went there last year on our road trip, but on that visit it was merely a waypoint. This time, we met up with friends from the Dykes on Bikes e-mail list and the whole point was to visit the caverns and the surrounding countryside, like Roswell. Here we are, a small group of Dykes on Bikes, ready to go into the caverns. Your friendly, neighborhood giant amazon is easy to spot. In fact, this theme was so pronounced that our friend Chelli took a picture of a cavern formation to exemplify it. Here: See? That's me on the right. Now, ordinarily, I'd do a whole cool ride report on how fabby the roads were and all the great places that we ate and all the sorts of things I get excited about. In the case of this trip, however, we were in the unenviable position of having to ride from the edge of the Texas Black Prairie across the Western Plains to the edge of the Guadalupe Mountains. The operative words there are Prairie and Plains. The chief difference between them is their aridness, and they're not much to look at beyond that. They do make for some outstanding sunsets and sunrises with the wide open spaces in front of you. Unfortunately, that only occupies about 2 hours of your day, and then you still have the other 22 in which to contend with the pancake-ocity of it all. So: flat, pancake-ocity, and the tumblin' tumbleweeds. What makes the tumbleweeds tumble, you may wonder? Well, I'll tell you - it ain't the sheer joy of skipping over the thrilling landscape. It's the plain desire to look at something OTHER than the plains. That, or the blistering wind. :)

Our chief form of entertainment on this ride, after we'd seen the caverns, was to ride across the prairie/plains taking pictures of each other.





We had ourselves some fun up in Roswell. The Harley dealership out there has a couple of big bikes on display with an alien and an MP, respectively, riding them. We took some silly photos of ourselves hugging the aliens and whatnot before settling in to a nice light lunch of BBQ ribs, sausage, and all the trimmings.




Oh, Cavern highlights, lest I forget: we walked through it with a Ranger who just happened to be starting his route about the same time as us. He showed us all sorts of neat things about the cave that you'd never find without a guide and a flashlight. There are places right along the path where you can see bat bones being fossilized right into the drip-formed stalagmites, and rock formations that glow if you give them a good dose of light. They even have a cave ghost that you can see in photographs... He's a natural rock formation that doesn't look like anything special until you use the flash on your camera. Then those eyes pop out of the darkness at you! The low wall that keeps tourists on the trail and off the stalagmites is full of fascinating little 'easter eggs' if you know what to look for. Our ranger guide showed us a rubber high bounce ball, a glow-in-the-dark gecko, a keepsake penny, a Pennsylvania quarter, an American flag, and a few other neat little peeks and pokes that probably go unnoticed by 99.9% of the cavern visitors. Finally, a fossil that was dug up from the cave and put out on display to illustrate why it's occasionally good for things in the cavern to break:
So, that was Carlsbad. Well, there was the bit about the largest North American Colony of Mexican Freetail Bats flying out of the cave and right over our heads at sunset and then the thrilling ride back down the mountain in the cool night air with the full moon rising. But honestly, you had to be there for that... so I hope to see you out on the road next time.

Fraaaaank says, "I plaaan zis parfet wadding vur yew!"

My dear friend, Brad, has decided to help Rose and I out a little by advising us on our "something old/something new/something borrowed/something blue" wedding traditions. He's a doll, and a good sport when I do something dykey and don't quite reach the FABulous mark. Rose is always thoroughly fabulous, but she has an alter-ego to help her with that. I have to muddle through with neither a gay man's sensibility for fabulousness nor a straight woman's aplomb for aesthetics. So, basically, I'm a dude.

Anyway, in his spirit of helpfulness, Brad photochopped us all into a scene from Father of the Bride to help us all get into character. Anyone remember that movie? I'm afraid it may have set unreasonably high expectations in my parents' minds for what their daughters' weddings would be like. One out of three ain't bad? (My apologies to Mr. Meatloaf...)

P.S.: Mom & Dad, if you read this, I'm kidding about the movie.

she of the abnormally long legs...

Rose and I went by the local army surplus store this week to pick up extra camo pants for our upcoming roadtrip. I used to be in the Air Force, and I fell in love with the camo uniforms while I was there. I found them to be the sexiest uniform item, like, EVAR!!!1!

Ok, not really, but they're so damn functional I forgive them for being unsexy. If you're looking for sexy, you might think about flight suits. I know they don't look like much at first glance, but they're a short zipper away from being silk boxers and combat boots - silk scarf optional. What's not to love?

So these camo pants have giant pockets, the fabric breathes WAY better than denim, and they're reinforced through the butt and the knees, should you ever find yourself in contact with the ground. Hopefully you won't, but even if you did, the cargo pockets are so big you could probably store a trauma team in them to get you back on the road before the next day's breakfast. Why the next day's breakfast? Well, most bikers seem to have this crazed 'kickstands up at first light' philosophy that, had I known about it ahead of time, might've kept me from pursuing the pastime. See ANY of my posts tagged coffee for an explanation.

In short, they make perfect riding pants. We had ordered some extra-long pants for me because the merely long pants were, as you can see below, about three inches shy of being long enough, even when i wore the waist around my hips (which actually does a lot to improve the sex appeal of the pants). I was walking out of the dressing room holding the special order pair of extra-longs when the manager spied me for the first time and said, "You must be the Extra-Long Pants I ordered!" Yep, that's me, Giant Amazon!




Unfortunately, the Extra-Long pants were only available in a waist size that is... skinnier than your resident Giant Amazon. So the next time I post some decadent food item that I've cooked or eaten, feel free to leave me a comment reminding me to go jog that off. Until then, I'll be wearing slightly short, but hip-skimmingly sexy pants in the larger waist size. Maybe I could stuff a personal trainer in one of those cargo pockets?

CALIFORNIA, HERE I COME!!!

... okay, maybe i'm not going to california. but i really like that song lyric and i bellow it at the top of my lungs whenever i can. making it a nice big, bold post topic counts as bellowing. you can blame my mother, who taught me that if i couldn't sing it well or remember all the words, i should make up for it by singing the parts i knew VERY LOUDLY.

so, california legalized gay marriage today! great news. when you get the press release from Equality Texas (which is where the above clicky takes you) you also get the following interesting factoids...

According to a January, 2008 study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, approximately 50,000 same-sex couples were living in Texas in 2005. About 20% of these couples are raising an estimated 17,444 children. They deserve the same opportunity to legally protect their family relationships as all California couples now have.



Equality Texas will continue its ongoing efforts to help build strong Texas families, including those with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender family members.

I had no idea there were so many. Some days, it feels like Rose and I are the only ones. Of course, percentagewise, that's only about 0.5% of the state population, but it doesn't take into account the unattached ones. To look at it another way, it's half the population of the city of Plano - which is 9th in the state, for those of you not familiar with the outliers of the DFW metroplex. That's quite a lot of people.

*crosses fingers* someday, right?

it is good to be my dog.

This is my dog, in the pose colloquially known as 'tits up'. She will sleep like this for hours on end. Shortly after we took this picture, she went to the vet and got her rabies vaccination, where she proceeded to pretend she was shy. Then we went to the park, where she and her cousin-dog went swimming, and she proved what a liar she'd been at the vet's by making friends with every human being and waterfowl within a 3 mile radius. Even the ducklings and cygnets like my dog. What is up with that?

Here's the thing that's weird about taking my dogs swimming at the park: we attract a LOT of attention. I have labs. They swim -- this is elementary. All the dogs I've owned in recent memory have been swimmers, actually. Even my reluctant rottweiler, Duchess, was a swimmer once she figured out how to not imitate a rock. I don't understand why dogs swimming are so fascinating to people at the park, but by all evidence, they are. People stop what they are doing, bring their children over, pull out cameras and gawk for 15 minutes or more. Oh, yeah, they also talk to me.

I've said this before: I'm slightly unapproachable. Nobody stops me in the grocery store to ask directions (which, honestly, is in their own best interest. i hate shopping and i'm grumpy and bewildered when i do it.) or approaches me for anything other than the classic panhandle. I know that conventional wisdom says dogs are supposed to make you more approachable, but kids who would RUN THE OTHER WAY if I said "hi" because OHMYGAWD A STRANGER TALKED TO ME! will stand next to me while I play with the dogs and tell me their life stories. Today, for example, I learned all about some kid's Pekingese, how he taught it to stand up, and how a cat bit him once just for eating French Fries, and ... well, I'll stop before you get bored. Kids have short lives, but that doesn't mean their life stories are short. They can be incredibly detailed.

So here's to my dog(s) and their incredibly short but intensely good lives. Maybe their willingness to get this vulnerable is what lets people around them do the same?

scramble

rose's grandma just passed away. i think the technical reason was respiratory distress secondary to a lung infection, but she was 94 and had been in declining health for a while - so it's no surprise. we got the phone call a little before 1. now there's a mad scramble to buy an airline ticket, pack suitcases, fill out FMLA paperwork, and get her dad to the airport before the 3:30 PM flight to newark. because if he misses that 3:30 flight, he won't make the 10:50 overseas flight, and if he misses that, the next flight leaving for israel is at 4 tomorrow afternoon. and if he leaves that late, he'll miss the funeral. those crazy jews - 24 hours from moment of death to moment of burial. that's the max. i understand, historically speaking, the reasons for it. they believe in the resurrection of the body so they don't embalm (incidentally, that's why you can't tattoo yourself, and if you lose a body part you're supposed to preserve it and bury it with the rest of yourself) and that means that you have a very short window to get the buryin done. sucks for rose's dad. he was just there for passover and has only been home about a week. the silver lining in all this is that he did get to see her and say goodbye while she was lucid. i know that occasionally jews delay funerals for family members who must travel long distances, but rose's aunt ester is a SUPAH-STRICT orthodox jew who didn't come to her mother's bedside when she was hospitalized recently (we heard it was for "water on the brain" but it turned out to be "fluid in her lungs") because she had to stay home and prepare her kitchen for passover. ester does not bend the rules, even in situations when it is allowed by the tradition.

so, in honor of rose's grandma - sister, wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, concentration camp survivor, a romanian jew who settled outside of tel aviv after the horror of ww2 was over - זיכרונה לברכה (may her memory be a blessing).

[ed. note: 2:39 pm and p just called me as she was leaving the airport. they got it all done, and dad will make his flight. so i'm glad that p's dad got on that plane.]

things

things which are underneath the driver's seat of my truck:

• cds of bands that a certain guitarist i know used to be in
• paperback novel by andrew greeley
• audiobook by maya angelou
• softball bat
• sun shade to go in the windshield on those hot texas days
• dog hair
• a bag of scooper bags to remove the waste of aforementioned dogs from public property
• a diaper (not from my nieces, so i don't know where it came from!)
• clip-on sunglasses for my girlfriend's prescription eyeglasses
• mapsco book for the dfw metroplex
• bungee cords
• air fresheners (the reasons for which should be obvious by now)

things which are not under the driver's seat of my truck:

• my cell phone
• a sackful of $100 bills
• jimmy hoffa
• the cheat codes for guitar hero 3
• any cell phones at all, for that matter...
  

ridin' the spyder...

rose had to drop her bike off today to get new tires, and a 40k service. the woman has had her bike only 3 years; she rides a LOT. i hopped in the truck wearing cut-offs and flip-flops, loaded up my dogs and followed her to the dealership... where they were having a "test-drive the spyder" event for anyone in closed-toed shoes and long pants. *le sigh* rose immediately signed up, of course. i hemmed and hawed and stalled and held her helmet while she filled out paperwork and watched the familiarization video, but i realized that i'd spend the rest of the year kicking myself if i passed up the opportunity try one of the little beasts. i blazed home and got geared up to ride and guiltily tossed my dogs a couple of kongs stuffed with milkbones to keep them entertained.

the video was full of french canadians with very sexy accents talking about how much fun it was to design and build a 3-wheeled sport vehicle that was not quite a motorcycle, not quite an ATV, and not anything like a car. they kept talking about the "paradigm shift" involved and how the whole time they were developing it they weren't sure whether they were the triumphant inventors or the crackpot mad scientists, but either way, they were having fun.

then was the familiarization briefing. i'll give you the highlights:

• like a motorcycle, except you can get it with automatic transmission
• like the beetle, it has a trunk in front
• unlike the beetle, the trunk can double as an ice chest
• unlike either a motorcycle or a beetle, it has... um... THREE wheels

then there was the closed course. if you didn't have a motorcycle endorsement on your driver's license, this was all you could do on the vehicle. it was just a circle of cones with a couple of stop signs. still, it was nice to get to tool around in a parking lot and get a feel for it before the road ride.

then there was the road ride!!!! they let rose join our group because it was small, so she got TWO road rides on the spyder today. (jealous!) ummm... first off, it's ZIPPY. that's very common for a v-twin, they're very torque-y engines, generally. i'm used to great torque on my valk, but this was crazy. the acceleration on this thing was HAWT. like pull your arms out of their sockets and leave your helmet a block behind you hawt. even, (dare i say it?) like a bacon bikini hawt.

also, it was stable. this isn't terribly surprising, since it has (i may have mentioned this) THREE wheels. but 3-wheelers can be tipped, especially in corners, especially if you're going fast. the beauty of the Y-arrangement on the spyder is that the drive wheel is the single back wheel, so it's much harder to flip than a 3-wheel ATV. there's a lengthy explanation of the stability control system available on the website, but the basics are that it's monitoring all the wheels all the time and adjusts traction by occasionally braking one or more of the wheels so as to keep them all on the pavement. it's also smart enough to know if you have a passenger on back, and adjusts differently for that than when you're riding solo.

it's a neato machine and was very fun to ride. i think it'd be a helluva lot better in nasty traffic than a motorcycle, simply because you don't have to keep putting your feet down to stay vertical. of course, if i had the huevos to try lane-sharing in texas, a motorcycle would be better. with that wide-front stance the spyder is just as wide as a small car and you definitely could NOT lane-split with it. you could still get two into a single parking space, though, especially if you parked them yin-and-yang style. rose and i are thinking about getting one if either of us ends up in a work-from-the-office job anytime in the near future. for now... it's not in the cards, but it was fun to have it in my hands for half an hour!

looking for the mouse...

HERE is a neat article by author Clay Shirky on the topic of where our society, as consumers of media, are going. His theories are fascinating, and I particularly like the way he makes parallels between modern sitcoms and gin pushcarts from the early industrial revolution. here's a snippet of one of his punchier points, for the link averse:

So [watching less television is] the answer to the question, "Where do they find the time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."


At least they're doing something.


Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

the title refers to the fact that a friend of his has a 4-year old who sprung up in the middle of a dvd to root around in the cables behind their entertainment center to "look for the mouse". because children today think that if their entertainment isn't interactive, it's probably not worth sitting through. as someone who hasn't sat down to watch tv on anything approaching a regular basis in three years, i heartily agree with the kid.

GUM. BO.

yesterday dawned uncharacteristically cloudy and cold for a texas spring. from a low of 50 to a high of 65? this is our winter weather, not our april weather! so, i did the only thing a right-thinking person could do to console herself in such cold temperatures. i made gumbo. i made yummy, dark brown roux, added andouille sausage (because bratwurst does not a good gumbo make!), peppers, onions, okra, mushrooms, and - at the very last possible minute - sweet texas gulf shrimp. yum!!!

the last time i did this, i left it all in my big soup pot and heated the whole mess up whenever i wanted leftovers. this had the unfortunate consequence of overcooking the delicate okra and shrimp and so it was a bit ... mushy ... after a few days. this time, i packed it up in small tubs and froze it. of course, we ate it for dinner last night, but as anyone who's made stew or casserole or sauce knows, the best time to eat it is the day after cooking. after all those lovely ingredients have had time to really SOCIALIZE, get to know each other, converse, buy each other a drink, make out, mingle themselves inextricably, smoke a cigarette... the next morning when they're all putting their socks back on and promising to call each other is really when you should be setting out your bowl and spoon. i'm looking forward to dinner tonight in ways i'm afraid i cannot put into words. forgive me if i drool.

thanks to rose for the lovely suggestion... and for shopping for all the bits with me ... and for not murdering me when i interjected, "crap! i have no celery!" while standing before a nearly-done roux at the stove last night.

hairdos

i got my hair cut today. i love my stylist; he's an atrociously cute gay boy who can give me a men's business cut or a modern girly cut with equal aplomb. today his hair was EXACTLY the same color as his skin, only about three shades darker. it gave him a weirdly monochromatic look, so he said he was going to get some lowlights to break it up and make it more interesting. he sorta looked like a ken doll, really, but after "don't ask. don't tell." was repealed and ken could just come on out of the closet and tell barbie how badly she needed that lip wax all along.

now, last week, i had an amusing conversation with a fairly buttoned-down and well-groomed sort of lesbian i am acquainted with. she and i were with a group of friends at a play in phoenix. the play is a whole other post in itself, but i'll summarize it with the blurb they used in the publicity "lesbian erotic fiction dramatized and set to music." now, i ask you, aware readers - do you think any lesbian story EVER needs to be dramatized? i mean, further than it already is by virtue of the fact that it's a lesbian story, whether fiction or non-fiction? anyway, we were sitting in our seats waiting for the show to start, and the two rows in front of us were reserved. just a few minutes before the show, a gaggle of fashionably mussed and well-dressed lesbians came in and filled up those reserved seats. and the lady next to me leaned over and whispered, "doesn't anybody comb their hair anymore?" she had a point. these ladies were pushing the bed-head look to its fashionable limits. being the straight-shooter i am, i leaned over and whispered back that they had stopped issuing combs to lesbians born after 1980, because of the budget cuts. of course, by the time that had wended its way telephone-game-style down the row of friends, it came out something like "they stopped making combs in the 80s because of the petroleum crisis." whatever.

then i walked out of my hair appointment looking like one of those uncombed gals from the play last week... my stylist gave me a modern girly cut today, and bless his heart if he didn't try to iron it flat so it would lay down against my noggin. curls just don't do that, but if he pastes 'em down with gel and i put my motorcycle helmet on right afterward while the gel sets, i can kinda make 'em behave for a few hours. i can't wait to see what the wedding planner and the photographer have to say about that...

screaming babies

THIS IS AWESOME!

It's totally safe for work, just a serial from the comic strip Non Sequitur on the subject of small children on commercial aircraft. Really, as much as I travel, I've been stunningly (*crossing my fingers, toes, and a few hairs for good measure*) lucky on this score. Yesterday, I was on a plane with a small child and his mother, and they were both very well behaved. He was somewhere between 2 and 3 years old and I base this guess on what I know about language development in kids. At that age, tykes have enough word-sounds at their disposal to communicate pretty much exclusively with their caregivers. I offer you a hypothetical: I'm standing in the kitchen at my sister's house (okay, maybe this isn't entirely hypothetical) and my niece comes in there and says, "muh!" So as I stand there, I start running through all the things that this could signify - Mom, More, Movie, Mickey and the Motorcars, Marvelous Mel's Monster Movie Marathon... I'm at a loss. I don't know what the kid wants. My sister passes by and sees her daughter plaintively trying "MUH!" louder and more insistently at the idiot grownup who is alliterating in the kitchen. "Oh," she says. "You want more milk, honey? Ok. Bring me your cup." Whereupon, my niece toddles off and comes back with a purple plastic elephant, I think; whatever it was did not look like anything I would describe as a 'cup'. My sister performs some ancient Indonesian massage ritual on the elephant that looks like something Indiana Jones does when disarming booby traps in the Temple of Doom and when she finishes, there is a hollow space inside the elephant that she pours milk into. She performs the ritual in reverse, hands the elephant to my niece, and the kiddo toddles off happily, sucking on the elephant's trunk. I think.

Anyway, that's about where this particular flying kid was in his stage of vocabulary development. He made sounds that only his mother could possibly have interpreted as words, but he had no trouble parsing her instructions regarding sitting up and keeping his seat belt buckled. She did a good job keeping him quietly entertained, fed, watered, and calm throughout the flight. So, if you flew to Tucson yesterday with a little boy who likes his Thomas the Tank engine and were sitting next to a gigantic amazon who was working a crossword -- kudos to you and your kid for flying well. Not everyone manages it so gracefully.

rollin'...

this weekend, rose and i got out together for some much-needed road therapy. we rode down to college station to visit my godsons and took the mobile dog unit with us. it's amazing how cars that are BLAZING up the lane to our left will suddenly slow down when confronted with a dog kennel on wheels. i find it hysterically amusing. i imagine that guys who drive old police cruisers get the same sort of giggle when they come up behind someone who suddenly starts driving a lot more lawfully after they catch that shape in the rearview mirror. we seem to create waves wherever we go, and i'm part exhibitionist, so i like it.

there is something kinda magical about driving a motorcycle. people NEVER stop to talk to me at gas stations when i'm in my truck. i've been told in various contexts that i'm not really approachable. sometimes that's a compliment, and sometimes it's not, but for one reason or another... i'm not approachable. unless i'm on a motorcycle. then people want to know "how far you ride that thing" and "what kinda bike is it" and "are you a real girl" and all those sorts of questions. it's TEN TIMES WORSE when i have the dogs with me. this is actually fine with me, because i really am a pretty friendly sort and i love talking about projects i've worked on and, as i said, i'm part exhibitionist. rose and i built that trailer two christmases ago, and it's fun to explain to people how we got the idea and how we engineered it and put it together. it's not complicated, but it is unusual.

rose's dad had a great story for us recently: he works at a deli and this couple pulled up to the store on motorcycles with a trailer just like ours in tow. he got to chatting with them about it, because he thought we were daft to build ours in the first place and he wanted to know what madness had possessed them. it turns out they had seen one on the highway a few years before and had been so intrigued they turned their truck around and followed it for a few miles to snap a picture and study it. he asked what the bikes and trailer they had seen looked like... sure enough it was us. he said he felt proud to tell them that it was his daughter's trailer they'd seen. winning converts over left and right, we are!

of course, we ourselves got the idea from seeing someone else pulling a trailer like this behind their motorcycle. in fact, i nearly flipped rose's bike trying to get a better look at it, because i was still riding on the back of hers at that point. anyway, it's been fun to have it out every time and the dogs sure seem to enjoy it. it beats the heck outta tying them to my pillion with a bungee net. they'd probably sit still if i got them some little doggles to wear over their eyes, but i don't think i could teach them how to counter-lean in the slow turns...

pusher

i hurt my neck last week by sleeping "wrong" on a plane to denver. i had a couple of very bad days and took a lot of advil and did a bunch of stretching and it mostly chilled itself out. yea! then i came home and slept "wrong" on a plane and played a rugby game. why? well, because i'm firmly convinced that people think i'm brighter than i really am and i occasionally have to prove that point. ok, i might be lying about that last part. but have you ever fantasized about how much better volleyball would be if they'd allow tackling? if you have, then you probably understand why i can't give up rugby in any permanent sense.

so i spent an hour or so saturday putting my head and neck into tight corners that really weren't conducive to recuperating the erstwhile injury. meaning: i re-injured it. and then i came home and cried about it until rose offered to go get me a muscle relaxer. sometimes, i wonder if "muscle relaxer" isn't her personal secret code for "pillow over your face" but whatever. i injured myself a while back so i had a couple of pills left over from those prescriptions and she dug one out and gave it to me. and it worked! my muscles relaxed and i drifted off to sleep after muttering some particularly choice nonsense that popped into my head in the twilight of consciousness. this is how rose gets her revenge. she records these silly mutterings in her brain and reminds me of them the next morning after i've had some coffee. i am always properly contrite after being reminded how odd the dark corners of my nigh-sleeping brain are.

i awoke in the middle of the night and i needed to get up and go to the bathroom. you would be AMAZED at how heavy muscle relaxers make you. i was three times my normal bodyweight as i moved across the room. or, at the very least, it was three times harder to move myself across the room.

the next day, i chewed down advil all day long and kept my tender knee on ice and stretched a lot and my neck was JUST FINE. that was great! alas, all the scrapes and bruises that i'd been able to ignore the night before due to the adrenaline of having played a great game of rugby started catching up with me. further, this was when i started to notice that every muscle i owned (except my uterus, really) was in pain. ouch.

sunday night we're settling in to bed and i start crying about how sore i am and rose growls: "do you want a muscle relaxer?!?!" (emphasis mine) i think she was about ready to kill me. instead, i asked for just a painkiller and another round of anti-inflammatories.

monday night... lather, rinse, repeat. this time, when rose suggested i take a muscle relaxer i suggested that she bring ME a painkiller but get a muscle relaxer for herself. it won't shut me up, but it'll certainly make me easier to tolerate.

dear the universe:

please to stop immediately with the stealing of my stuff. in the past week you have robbed me of my bluetooth earpiece (in Houston), my etymotics headphones (in Denver), my ethernet cable (in Huntington Beach), and a copious supply of advil. ok, i probably ate the advil. but i only did so because you keep stealin mah shitz! so cut it out.

yours truly,
thalassa

Holy Crossdressing Chinese Princess, Batman!

Find Out Which Disney Girl You Are! created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Mulan A free spirit, a beautiful soul, all things that most people would tag on a lovely girly girl - but you're more boy than anything! Sometimes you're considered a 'nerd' or 'dork', but that just comes with the package - you even embrace your inner nerd. Go you! Mulan 79% Pocahontas 75% Esmerelda 67% Aurora (Sleeping Beauty) 67% Snow White 67% Belle 63% Jane 63% Ariel 50% Jasmine 46% Megara 46% Cinderella 38% Tinkerbell 29% Violet 21% Alice 21%

mission drift...

for those of you who observe easter: Happy Easter! He is Risen!

now, onto the topic at hand: mission drift

yesterday rose and i went off to help out at my sister's house. they recently replaced their carpet with wood flooring in deference to their highly allergic and now crawling youngest daughter. since the floor went in, their garage has been storage/workshop space. we went, ostensibly to help replace baseboards, but because the garage space had to be reclaimed first, we ended up minding the babies while my brother-in-law hauled trash and returned unused floor bits, etc. we left just as b-i-l's mom came over to dye easter eggs with the kids. (a narrow escape! i liked the clothes i was wearing!)

on our way home, we received a TOP SEEKRIT COMMUNIQUÉ from our commanding general, i.e.: the lady who had invited us over for dinner. our mission was to procure a cheesecake for the consumption and delight of the troops -- under cover of broad daylight. not just any cheesecake would satisfy the general, however. this particular cheesecake had to be unfrozen and ready in the next 15 minutes. after consulting all relevant sources of clandestine intelligence, namely rose's sister and her encyclopedic knowledge of all things procurement-related, we agreed upon a mission plan. we would approach the nearest greengrocer's establishment and attempt to procure a cheesecake in full view of everyone, without even the most rudimentary groucho-marx-style disguise. obviously, it is always best to procure cheesecake components, bivouac in the vicinity of an enclosed heating device and construct it yourself, but the 15-minute constraint prevented this course of action.

when we arrived at the greengrocer's, our driver and our gunner engaged in an evasive maneuver designed to sow confusion and doubt in the minds of the enemy, and to accommodate the gunner's busted leg. (the gunner busted her leg in utah on another mission and is in intensive therapy to recover the use of it before bike weather descends fully upon us). the gunner bravely took over the driver's post while the driver penetrated the perimeter at the greengrocer's in order to recon the location of the cheesecake and attempt to procure it. she had ALMOST made it safely inside when she was accosted by a member of a youth paramilitary organization, an all-volunteer brigade of the fiercest young women American society has to offer. these young women are known collectively as "The Girl Scouts", although intelligence indicates that they break themselves into age-based brigades of "Brownies", "Juniors" and "Cadets". the young scout was, according to the driver's debriefing report, likely a "Brownie". the youthful scout spotted our driver quite easily, assailing her directly but from behind the safety of a paperboard shield which bore her troop insignia and a piece of propaganda about cookies. the driver deflected the attack and kept moving, putting off the assault with a clever line about "buy[ing] some on my way out."

safely inside the perimeter, in the very heart of the greengrocer's base, the driver attempted to ferret out the location of the cheesecake. along the way, in order to maintain camouflage, she was forced to pick up some sugar-covered marshmallows in the shape of a rabbit. the locals use these items to celebrate the annual spring holiday of 'Easter' and refer to the candies simply as "Peeps". intel cannot uncover the reason for naming rabbit candies after bird sounds, and recommend further investigation into these so-called "Peeps". shortly after being forced to grab some "Peeps" for camouflage, the driver spied a bottle of very expensive wine on a very good sale price, and realized it would make an ideal club weapon in case she found herself further accosted by more of the paramilitary youth scouts. failing that, she could drink the wine later and realizing the value-added proposition this presented to her troop morale, she gathered the wine up and proceeded to her mission objective.

at last, when freed of the crowds of locals bearing "Peeps" and "Cadbury Eggs", the driver spied the bakery sign and made straight for it. there, in an unguarded case, she found three cheesecakes from which to choose. selecting the most lovely of the three for presentation to the general, the driver proceeded to the scanning devices en route to the exit. the driver found, with no small measure of luck, an unmanned station and was able to clear her purchases without being spied or noticed unduly by enemy forces. she began to make her exit out a door other than the one by which she entered, so as to avoid the "Brownie" troops. unfortunately, the "Brownie" had anticipated this course of action and had positioned reinforcements at the exit door. the driver considered using her improvised club, but these scouts had a large armored chest with them which was likely their weapons locker. they also had an assault vehicle parked nearby with trained drivers inside. feeling her chances of making a quick assault and good escape were nil at this point, the driver succumbed to the crowd of "Brownies", and emerged a few minutes later with only a slightly thinned wallet and a few boxes of Thin Mints and Samoas weighing down her step.

The ultimate lesson here: Mission Drift is a terrible thing. "Peeps", good wine, and Girl Scout Cookies are the price you pay for failing to stick to the core cheesecake procurement directive. Don't let this happen to you!

i'm headed out to do battle...

i'm off to do battle with the bike. i hit an algae-covered low water crossing the wrong way about a year ago and my bike slid on its left side up the opposing bank after dumping me in a creek and ripping my jeans off my right cheek. the good news was, thanks to my atgatt policy (All The Gear, All The Time!) toward protective gear, i stood up completely unscathed. head intact, skin intact, bones intact, pride... well, my pride was damp but otherwise unharmed. unfortunately, the bike did take some damage. the clutch handle and rearview mirror needed some work. the left foglight was all cattywompus, but still working. i ended up replacing both mirrors with prettier ones, since the left one was past saving at that point. the clutch handle was repaired with a lot of grunting and a little bit of wrenching. the foglight, however, has been doing its best to demonstrate "walleyed" ever since. walleyed (for the non-southern among my readers) is a compound word, pronounced WAWL-ide, and refers to a person whose two eyes point at opposing walls simultaneously. i've tweaked that light, i've wrenched it, i've beaten on it with a hammer... it just won't line up right and then stay that way. so, today it gets replaced. i've had the replacement lamp for about 6 months now, but it's been too damn cold out to work on the bike, let alone ride it much...
so today i'm taking advantage of the fine springy weather and replacing my left foglight. with a nod to my late granny tootsie, who averred that it ALWAYS storms on good friday, but not until the afternoon. so i'm gonna get to it and be done before the storm.

coffee... must have... coffee...

you've seen, i trust, those cartoon sequences in which a character crawls across the hot burning sands of the sahara chasing a mirage that looks like water? and then all the infinite commercial variations in which they bump into something completely improbable in the sahara, like a coke machine? improbable, but utterly satisfying.

i would be utterly satisfied if i could go crawling down to my kitchen and find a mug of hot coffee waiting for me. rose had a meeting this morning, and she had to jump up and run to it without making coffee first. she's a lot smarter before her first cup than i am and therefore infinitely more qualified to operate complex machinery like a coffee pot. although i'd LOVE to have a coffee pot like the one below, i fear i'd only be awake enough to use it after my 3rd cup. and then only when i wasn't on some cold medicine that warns you not to drive or operate heavy machinery under its influence...



EDIT: i ventured down there to make coffee, rationalizing that if i was smart enough to write this, i was also smart enough to make coffee. i spilled grounds all over the counter and i poured brewed coffee on my yellow dog. i made coffee, but with absolutely ZERO points awarded for style.

the new regime begins

HappyBox has met her demise. the were-cricket did her in and it was time for a new thang. so i bought a mac. above, you can see the new queen, ShinyBox, looking down from her cardboard throne on the bones of her fallen predecessor. true to reputation, i've been able to just plug in and run with all my existing hardware on ShinyBox. my keyboard, trackball, printer, external drives, GPS, and coffee cup warmer (thanks, sissie!). it all just works. i'm thrilled!

i got my WoW setup all squared away but of course i'm having to miss wow tonight because i'm traveling. so... i'm blogging from the admiral's club again.

i had some friends in from out of town this weekend and we went out to see the sights in the gayborhood. it was fun, i got to scoot a boot, and then we went for breakfast afterward. y'know, there are some people who really shouldn't drink alcohol... we were sitting next to one of them at breakfast this morning. he arrived late and loud with suspicious stains down the front of his shirt. he'd either spilled a red drink all over himself, or he'd puked on himself. either way, he was sloppy drunk. he spent the entire meal embarrassing his friends and attempting to get our attention as we noshed at the next table over. his name was curtis merillo, and he was from central missouri, originally. he wanted everyone to think he was from the FBI or CIA or somehow affiliated with secret agency of some kind... but mostly he was a jackass. the best part of the meal was when we were leaving. he reached out to try to high-five me, as though we'd shared some victorious experience, his surviving a meal without me stuffing my fist down his loud, stupid throat. so i grabbed his hand, shook it, and in the most pleasant tone i'm capable of using, i told him he was obnoxious and embarrassing and should have a good night. and i skipped off home to get my short night of sleep.

nothing beats the build-your-own crepes at cafe brazil for putting me in a good mood at 4 am. i damn sure wasn't going to let curtis merillo kill it for me.

congrats, lady!

my baby sister got married on leap day. she eloped! i'm proud of her and happy for her, and i just wanted to congratulate her and wish her all the best and many happy years.

It came from the swamp...

I took my dead computer off to my friends' house this weekend. There was going to be an exceptionally high concentration of geekery there, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to use my friends for free tech support. Or for a source of expendable RAM that we could feed to my motherboard, however you want to view it. The good news is, they have a server with the same RAID controller that my dead motherboard sported so we were able to simply plug my drives in and watch them work. Yea! In addition to that, there was some griping and whining about the configuration of the case and how the video card was in the way of getting the drives out and blah blah blah cry cry cry whine whine whine blah blah blah. The hysterical bit about that is that the guy doing the crying was the one who PICKED THAT CASE IN THE FIRST PLACE. He spec'ed the computer for me three years ago, and my dear friend jaasper was the one who got stuck building it. I made stew and kept jaasper fed and watched him do all the crazy kit-bashing. I'd never done it before and while I'm certainly capable of reading the documentation and putting a kit together from scratch, it is far better to do such things with an advisor on hand. If the advisor is further willing to twist the tiny screwdriver himself in exchange for dinner, so much the better. Anyway, in the process of yanking the drives out of the box so they could be hooked up to the server, we discovered the most likely cause of the fried RAM. It was a WERE-CRICKET!!! (and it came from the swamp...)

A scary, hairy, desiccated, fried cricket slid out of the case when we pulled the cover off the backside. The hair was mostly dog-looking, but the way it was fused to the exoskeleton (I guess by the electricity?) the carcass quite seriously resembled a were-cricket. I had a computer bug!

Many, many thanks go to my friends for getting my hard drives back up and running so I could get all my data off them! Now I must merely bide my time, grow my patience, and refresh my web browser every 30 minutes until I see that my new Mac has shipped.

wow.

i don't know what to say about this but that it's just so pretty it makes my heart ache... i shiver listening to it, and not because it's 40 and raining in "hot"lanta. i've always loved this song, i've just never loved a recording of it before.


for laura h: The song is "Hallelujah" by Lenoard Cohen.
swiped from the youtube poster:
Canadian indie singer-songwriter Allison Crowe's uniquely potent interpretation is heard on her album, "Tidings".

woe.

MY MOTHERBOARD ATE MY RAM!!!!

on friday. *sob* happybox is dead.

i was trying to run a long, computationally heavy process on my home PC (which i had dubbed happybox) because my work computer was occupied with deadline-based work. i thought it was taking too long, so i popped into task manager to see how much RAM it was using, and discovered it was using much less than i expected. weird. i checked to make sure i had the right target total in my head and the computer only reported 1GB available. now... i could've SWORN i put 2 x 1GB sticks of RAM in the case, but y'know it's been a couple of years and i have no head for these sorts of hardware details. it's why i've never been a good gearhead. you can't describe a car as having "one of those 2.something litre V-whatever thingies" and expect to be taken seriously. so the total ram available was half what i expected, which meant it was time to troubleshoot.

so i shut 'er down, cracked open the case, looked into happybox and found 2 x 1GB sticks hanging out of the motherboard. right, then. that meant either one stick was not seated properly (and had never been?) or i had some bad ram. so i put rose to work on it, because i was frantically trying to finish that aforementioned deadline work. she swapped the sticks to other slots, but it still only reported 1GB, which meant that either one pair of slots (a channel) or one stick of RAM was bad, but we didn't know which. we tried swapping the sticks into opposite channels to narrow it down, and then the computer wouldn't boot. this meant the RAM in the primary slot was bad, and i assumed that because of this it wasn't reading the (nominally good) RAM in the secondary slot.

i didn't think it through because if i had, i'd have recognized at this point that my bad slot had fried the RAM in it and putting more RAM in the computer would be a waste of money. instead, i went to Fry's and bought more RAM. but when i got home, reason took hold of my brain before i even unwrapped the new stuff... which meant i tried to ID the bad slot before putting the new RAM in, just in case it was what had fried the old stick. either that first round of swapping sticks into opposing channels or something in this later troubleshooting step exposed my poor old good ram to a bad slot on the motherboard. i'll never really know. all i know for sure is that i have at least one bad slot on my motherboard, and by "bad slot" i mean "vicious ram-eating slot." it munched down 2 1GB sticks of ram on friday, and i'll be darned if i'm feeding it any more.

so, in light of this woe and tragedy, i'm buying myself a mac. because if i'm going to use MacOS, it's not going to be windows' bloated, big-brother-like version of MacOS (aka: Vista) it's going to be the real gosh-darned thing. and, well, mac runs wow in addition to VMWare, so all the fun stuff i want runs natively and anything i absolutely must have windows for, i can have on a Virtual Machine. color me silver. :)

happy birthday, sis!

to my beloved younger sister, a wish for a happy day with many happy returns!

rock on, boss...

my boss kinda rocks. actually, he rocks a lot. we recently had an exchange where i told him i was considering transferring off his team to a job that entailed less travel. i ended up staying where i am, because i like my job better than i'd have liked the other one, but it put him on notice. and that was good. so he said he'd take some steps to get me less travel and more variety.

i guess i still don't think that talking about things is really going to change them, because i expected my life to carry on just as it has and eventually by mid-summer i'd see the results of a gradual shift in my assignments. not so. he just told the people who've been borrowing my time that they have advanced all the time they're going to get until the end of june with what they have on my calendar now. color me thrilled and pleasantly surprised.

and to keep this post from being a complete snoozer for those of you who don't care what i do to earn my filthy lucre, i'll share that the carolina pizza & pasta works makes a TASTY shrimp etouffe in honor of the impending Mardi Gras holiday. ayeee! and they make GREAT crab cakes, too. *wink*

it's finally happened...

i've been recognized by the staff of my local starbucks. they know who i am and make conversation with me and recommend drinks i might like based on the variety of drinks i've ordered before. not being a creature of habit, i never order the same thing twice. well, unless it's early in the morning. early in the morning, i just stumble in clutching my travel mug and ask them to fill it up with whatever is on tap and has the most caffeine. that in itself probably ingrains me in the memories of the morning shift, but i'm not much for making conversation at that point in my day.

this recognition was by the night shift. this whole event probably has been delayed by the fact that i travel as much as i do, but i had hoped to avoid becoming a "regular" at starbucks. i suppose it was inevitable, though, given how much i love coffee. and the internet. and coffee.

i'm a nooyawkuh.

i spent last week in the vicinity of philadelphia for work. i was teaching a class at the corporate mothership and it was nice to get to walk around and shake hands with people i only know via e-mail. there used to be a lot of confusion about me and another woman with my name who worked in that office. she would occasionally get my travel itineraries or expense checks, i would get help requests that were directed to her, sometimes my flight schedules would return me "home" to the philly airport. she recently left the company, so the confusion is much reduced, but i still took the opportunity to introduce myself in person to the folks who keep my work rolling along.

then, rose came up to spend the weekend with me. she has a dear friend who lives near philly, the one we visited at halloween. i had been staying with him all week instead of in a hotel near the office, so she came up and joined me.

friday night we spent painting the kitchen. rose has an amazing and fantastic skill (which is for rent, if you make appropriate arrangements with me...) at home renovation: she can "cut-in" paint freehand. that's right... NO BLUE TAPE required. she just stands on top of a ladder with her tongue sticking out one corner of her mouth, paintbrush in one hand, paint cup in the other, and makes PERFECTLY straight lines along the wall/ceiling boundary. i'm pretty good at stringing up painter's tape and working the edge, but by the time i can get a room taped, rose can already be done cutting in so it's ready for paint rollers. i'm seriously in awe. so the homeowner rolled paint on the walls, rose cut the walls in ahead of him, and i? i did the perfect job for a very patient, slightly anal retentive engineer in a kitchen renovation being run by artist-types: i removed all the nasty old pink contact paper from the cabinets. it was foul. and you'd think after all these years the glue would've lost some of its hold, right? not so. apparently, those 50's contact paper manufacturers had not yet glommed onto the disposable world mentality. that stuff was stuck on so tightly, i started theorizing that it'd formed a symbiotic life form with the wood paneling of the cabinets. i fantasized that i was peeling up entire civilizations of some very sticky higher life form, cutting them into strips with a razor and harvesting them so they could go to the landfill, convert more of our household garbage, and someday take over the world! muahahahahahahaha!!! or maybe it was just really late at night and something in the sushi was getting to me.

the next day, we got up and drove to new york city to see Avenue Q on broadway. and by "we got up and drove," i really mean that we all piled into my rent car and i had to do urban battle from behind the wheel of a rented saturn. i survived without too many country-mouse-in-the-big-city moments, and even earned the hoots and applause of all my passengers when i flipped off and honked at some ignorant redneck in a land rover with alabama plates when he cut me off. i got us where we were going, used lola's navigational skills to find us good parking, and did all of that in time to pre-order us some wine for the intermission. w00t!

after the show, we walked down to the empire state building, where we were turned into mice, lured with stale limburger through a maze of passages, elevators, snaked lines, gift shops, hawkers, vampires, and cranky tourists, and finally got out onto the observation deck. it was pretty up there, the view was beautiful, and a bit overwhelming. you know, at one level, in your head that there really are that many people in the city. but until you stand up there and look out at all the twinkling lights, it doesn't really hit you JUST HOW MANY people are in the city. rose showed me all her favorite haunts from her college days, as far as you can see them from the top of the empire state building at night anyway, and then we headed back down for dinner.

we taxi'd to little italy, found a likely-looking spot, and settled in for a truly delicious meal. i had lobster fra diavolo, the red version, and it was served in a bowl approximately the size of a tire. from a semi. f'real. we had to move EVERYTHING on the table just so they could wedge this bowl in before me. the funny thing about shellfish, though, is that it's like 80's hair: lots of hard shell, little actual content. by the time i'd shelled the lobster, the clams, and the mussels i had a manageable-sized meal and didn't feel overstuffed. but i did feel richly and extravagantly treated. so it worked. yum! the fra diavolo red sauce was spicy and tangy and just what i wanted.

i made it home in time to play my geeky game where we wiped out three times attempting an assault on karazhan - a big, difficult dungeon - with a pick-up group of people who weren't really prepared. only a few of us knew what we were doing. it was good learning, but i look forward to trying it again sometime in a group that survives the whole experience. :)

oh, and i got my first official philly cheesesteak. and, yeah, it really is that much better than what you get out here in the hinterlands. i'll have to go back!

Training this week...

in an interesting turn of events, this week i'm a student. and i've been reminded of all sorts of teaching technique things that i think i do well, but will be doubly certain that i do correctly in future. little things like: giving path names two or three times when pointing students to deeply buried files, going slowly in my demonstrations, explaining in plain english...

also, i am reminded of all the horrifying experiences i've had in the past with software that almost, but didn't, work. i feel really badly for the guy whose class fell apart yesterday afternoon, but it was an awful thing to sit through from our end. some of it was his fault, some of it wasn't.

today is a good day, though. by this time yesterday, i wanted to close my laptop in disgust and go play Warcrack. today, i still want to close my laptop and play Warcrack, but without the disgust. i'm just an addict...

contagion

i got an earworm from a guy who got an earworm, so have an earworm... it's a neat song and a good video. if those old microsoft office commercials (you know, the ones where people danced around their offices because they were so happy about their latest excel-created success?) had used something like this, i might've believed them.