So. Kathy Dunn, the Mennonite minister who married us, is moving to Kansas to take up the reins of a church there. Where in Kansas? The same place as the hometown of my office-sharing coworker, Shaun: Mcpherson.
But wait! That's not all!
Kathy's sister? Works for KUAC, 89.9 Alaska Public Radio .... out of Fairbanks. That's her, in the lei, in the upper left photo. She also used to work for Doug Geeting, a pilot in Talkeetna, one of the places we were looking at for air tours, and knows the owners of Chena Hot Springs. Kathy told us to say hi to her when we get up there. I mean, I know Fairbanks isn't that big a community, and everybody knows everybody else, but... it's pretty cool.
Alaska just got one step harder. The airline called today to say that one leg of my journey, in each direction, was no longer going to be flying at its previously scheduled time. That threw the rest of my itinerary completely off. My two choices were essentially 1) get a full refund and look for a flight on another airline, or 2) add yet another plane change and layover. I let go the kind, helpful service rep and started looking through Expedia. The cheapest fare I could find at any time between now and September was $400 more expensive than my current ticket. I could do this, sure, but it would pretty much mean I'd have to give up the flight over Denali.
So. Layover it was. I called back and got through the voicemail hurdles (ye gods, those spoken menus are annoying) and met Ivan. Ooooh, Ivan. What a royal screwup. English was not Ivan's first language. I don't blame him for that. What I do blame him for was keeping me on hold for an hour and a half. Literally. He'd keep coming back on and asking me to repeat information. He kept telling me that the connection I'd been initally called about was fine and that I didn't need to change it, that he only needed to change the return flight, which the previous CS person had told me was fine. He also reaaaaally didn't impress me when he kept telling me my flight was on the 8th. It isn't. It is on the 2nd. He kept robotically repeating my itinerary back to me and getting it wrong each time, though in a different manner with every iteration. I kept correcting him. He kept putting me on hold while he "contacted his supervisor". By the end of the call, I was seriously ready to get stabbity on Ivan.
The hook to this is that they couldn't get Alaska Air to change my final leg of the journey, so I was stuck trying to get to Seattle from Kzoo. Not a bloody easy thing to achieve. If I'd been able to just wipe the ticket and start over, I could have had the perfectly sane, two-connection trip from Kzoo to Cinci to Minneapolis direct to Fairbanks that I found on the Delta website. Now, I go three stops: Kzoo, Cinci, Salt Lake, Seattle, Fairbanks.
Fuck. I'm going to be in transit for ... sixteen hours. Each way. Thank God the return flight's an overnight, so I can sleep.
God knows I love ya, Layla. Make sure to special order some clear sunny days, 'kay?
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change things build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
- Buckminster Fuller
Yay, Bucky. One of my true heroes. Eventually I need to read some of his books.
Due to the notoriously schizophrenic April weather, Kzoo's formal Earth Day fest is actually held on May 20th. This means that I've not done anything to really celebrate Earth Day yet. To hold me over till then -- here's a really good essay.
I agree wholeheartedly. I'm not perfect, nor have I done everything I possibly could to reduce my use of fossil fuels, but I've done a whole lot during the last year, and hope to do more this year. It's the attitude described in the essay that I want to highlight -- that buying a hemp hoodie or a green-slogan teeshirt is not really helping. Switching to a car that gets 5mpg more is not really helping. Not driving a car at all, and using carshare when you need a car -- now that's helping.
Of course, it's pretty easy for me to make pronouncements like this, being a DINK. When you're poor, or have a bunch of kids, or a dependent elderly parent (or all three), your flexibility for making big life changes goes down dramatically. However, each time we make a choice, big or small, we need to see if there might not be a better, cleaner, solution to the problem.
Today's been pretty weird.
On Sunday, I started getting these weird visual distortions, which are usually the precursors of my migranes. I dutifally slammed two ibuprophens and a cup of coffee, the usual cure. I laid down for a half-hour and let the mix do its dirtywork, and it mostly went away, but left me with the kind of post-headachy thing that hurts when you lean foreward too far or shake your head "no" too vigorously.
Monday I woke up again with the weird fuzzy eye-corner dimming that precursors the weird visual distortions. I can't really explain them -- I'm getting to the point where I can even tell when the precursors are coming. The edges of my vision go a little dim, and my whole eyeshot gets harder to focus; it's like when you purposely look past someone so as not to make eye contact -- only when you try to make eye contact, you *can't*.
Anyway, I slammed back the cure again, along with a big glass of water and a multivitamin, but took the cellphone with me in case the symptoms worsened while I was on the road and I had to turn around or worse, stop and have Paul come and get me. Thankfully, they cleared up pretty quickly; I'm glad the cure still works. Still, I spent most of the rest of Monday in a fuzzy haze, and it was difficult to concentrate.
Today: More of the same; no visual weirdness, thankfully, but I can't get my head to work. It's soft and hazy and faintly headachy. I'm exhausted, and I keep wanting to nap.
The scary thing is that when I don't get to caffeine and ibuprophen in time, and the migrane takes full hold, it gets really hard for me to verbalize. Anyone who knows me understands why not being able to talk is terrifying to me: I normally can't shut up, and when I can't string a full sentence together, I get really worried. It's like not being able to remember the name of that one thing, you know, the thing with the thing? Only for lots of things, not just that one thing.
My grandmother stroked out in front of her first-grade class in her fifties, and continued to have strokes, small and large, for the rest of her life. My mom once recognized a stroke when Gram called mom to ask for something and got caught on the same word, over and over, and couldn't progress with her sentence. When I'm going through a migrane, sometimes I feel like that. Part of me is a little scared I'm that I might be looking forward to a stroke in the next 20-40 years.
Readers: Do any of you suffer from migranes? What helps? Hinders? I've tried to keep a migrane journal from time to time, but there doesn't seem to be any specific trigger. I've even had them when I'm off caffeine altogether. I think this may be a good time to go stop caffeine again, though, just to be safe.
The strawberry plants are all pushing up these star-shaped leaf clusters, which can mean only one thing: flowers will be up before the end of the week. I am insanely excited by this prospect.
I bought organic garden sulfur for the berries and possibly some blue hydrangeas for the backyard. The blueberries will be going in to the center of the herb wheel soon, along with some purple carrots, which I'm planting for green-groundcover around the outside. Their frondy tops will look cool among the petunias and marigolds.
I also got two pretty-cheap longspurred columbines, which again make me insanely happy. I love those flowers.
My attempts at low-carbing have again been foiled, this time by generosity. Passover has passed over, but a week or so ago, we found a couple huge bags of dry goods on our back steps -- our Neighbor Nora had left us a huge blessing of food that was non-Kosher for Passover. In amongst the Wheat Thins and Pasta were eighteen pounds of King Arthur Flour (oh joy, oh rapture!) and so of course, I baked Nora a loaf of bread and delivered it on Thursday evening so that she could have nice hot leavened bread as soon as the sun went down.
But...
Man, those Wheat Thins. They stare at you.
I am weak.
Worked hard in the garden all day yesterday and a good chunk of today. Paul, bless his oversized heart, helped me bust sod on the curblawn and install a permanent herb wheel. I'm not usually in favor of posting pictures to the web that show the front of my house, but if anyone's interested, I can email a picture.
We got up early, drove to River Street Flowerland on its Second! Day! Open! and got herbs, flowers and mulch. I spent about $80, but when you compare that to the $85/hr I used to pay for a psychologist, this is damn cheap therapy, and it'll make our dinners taste much better.
I'm a firm believer that you should only plant what you're going to actually eat, so here's what went in:
Cliantro (salsa, baby!)
Chives (regular and garlic)
Thyme (vulgaris, silver and last-year's lemon)
Parsley (oh, tabbouleh, how I loves thee)
Sage (last year's, kept gasping in the weak interior light)
Lavender (bathwater and homemade soap)
Nasturtiums (THANKS, TISH)
Baby basil (THANKS KAREN)
Oregano (chili chili chillah)
And no, smartypantses. No rosemary to go with the parsley, sage and thyme. Like the way it looks, but it's not a perennial in Michigan, and I don't use it all that much -- I still have a half-pound of the dried stuff from when my indoor creeping rosemary keeled over.
We also planted a flat of pansies, a few petunias, some marigolds and one big fat orange gerbera daisy that we couldn't leave there all by its lonesome. I also got a big whonking bleeding heart to join the one in the front garden.
Sunday, I wandered over to Neighbor Emily's house and helped her move around some hollyhocks in preparation for her radish, carrot and lettuce planting. She and her boyfriend Dan just bought a house up the street from us, and since they're both vegans, they're really excited about getting the whole garden thing going. The person who owned the house previously was an insanely good gardener, and apparrently loved to garden with edibles. Emily's brand new to the whole farming thingy, so I wandered around the grounds with her and helped identify what-all she had inherited. There're at least two mulberry trees, a huge onion/shallot patch (we're still not sure if they're all onions or all shallots, or a mix), a flourishing strawberry bed that's already starting to bloom, runaway peppermint, hidden lemon thyme, and today we even found a well-established lavender that we'd missed before, poking out from under a shrub. Emily's awesome, and spent last saturday and today running around with great enthusiasm, yanking up groundcover, transplanting rosebushes, and getting ready for planting. I can't wait to see her new bed all laid out.
YAY SPRING.
Um... I never... ever used to get dressed up in stupid clothes, go to a woods, and um. Do stuff. In costume. Nope. Not me. And I'd never find anything like this to be funny. Uh-uh. Not funny at all.
the reality, it burns. it buuuuuuuuuurns!
The scene: Alton is making poached pears in vanilla-bean syrup.
He is showing how to cleanly core the pears by using a cordless electric drill fitted with a 3/4 inch paddle blade.
As he lowers the pear's backside onto the spinning drill, he shouts: "NO, MISTER PEAR, I EXPECT YOU TO DIE!"
Gourmet food, power tools, and pop-culture references, all in one hip package with goofy hair.
</nerdgasm>
So Paul and I got some good financial news the other day. When we bought the house, my brother-the-contractor told us that we'd likely have to have the whole place rewired. Knob and tube was everywhere. Last year we had a team of guys come out and remove all the exposed K&T in the attic and basement, and hang some new light fixtures as well.
This time we had a guy come out and take a look at the wiring on the first and second floors, and to see how difficult it'd be to have bathroom fans put in. He looked over all the electrical stuff and said that we'd only need to have a few things replaced, and that the bathroom fans would be a snap to install. The figure he quoted us was 1/5 what we'd originally budgeted.
We'd saved up the entire chunk of money to have it done, and now we have all that extra in our savings, as opposed to in our walls. HOORAY!
This means, of course, that I'll get to have the patio redone all-the-way, as opposed to half this year and half next. This makes me very very happy indeed, as the current patio is a mix of uneven bare dirt, pea gravel, weeds and cracked, ancient concrete. When we get done, we'll have a lovely herringbone brick patio large enough to have our grill and the picnic table on, and we'll also have a leetle tiny waterfall, something that I'd originally planned to cobble together out of bits and pieces. The landscaper says it'll be cheap, a snap to implement, and much better to do all at once with the patio, because we can run the electric under the brick through conduit. Unfortunately, there's not a possibility for a solar pump; there's three trees overhanging the patio, and even with an extra fifteen feet of cord, it won't reach far enough to get to steady daylight.
Still. WATERFALL. PATIO. YAY.
Are you a prose writer? Do you want to be? If so, go here and read the List of Twenty Worst Literary Agencies and learn how not to get burned.
Chelsea police chief, fire captain killed in helicopter crash 4/13/2006, 11:17 p.m. ET By TOM KRISHER The Associated PressSCIO TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) — The city of Chelsea's police chief and a captain of the city's fire department were killed Thursday when their helicopter crashed while they were searching for a man who ran from a traffic stop, authorities said.
Police Chief Scott Sumner, 42, and fire Capt. Matt Tuttle, 28, were aboard Tuttle's private helicopter when it went down shortly after 3 p.m. about five miles west of Ann Arbor, Washtenaw County sheriff's spokesman David Egeler said.
A few months ago, Matt was out flying his helecopter for fun, and landed at the farm. He stayed for a bit and gave my father a ride, which was no doubt a huge thrill for dad -- he loves to see the land from above. Matt was a good, good guy.
This is an incredibly hard blow to a small community as Chelsea, and two young families have just been torn apart. If anyone's got some good vibes or prayers to share today, please send them the way of the Tuttles and the Sumners.
Teeny baby beets pushing up through the squirrel-cratered soil.
The TAKTAKTAK TAKATAKA TAK TAK of the U of M marching band snare line's first spring practices out behind Yost. The sound carries a full mile, even over urban landscape.
First daffodils in front of the house.
Skies so blue and cloudless they seem unreal.
The overnight swell of buds on the maple trees.
The screech of tires and thud of heavy bass: lambs frisk and gambol, our neighbor cleans the dirt off his spinnaz, yo.
I woke up this morning with a bug in my ear about the Taki Soma court case, and the newly-founded Friends of Lulu Empowerment Fund. I've got mixed feelings about the whole thing, and haven't spoken out yet because I was a) waiting for further information, and b) didn't want to risk hurting the feelings of some close friends because of my opinions. Well, I've decided to speak my mind anyway, and hope the friends-in-question still love me enough to be my friends when I'm done.
Let me first start out by saying, perhaps not as eloquently as Heidi MacDonald, that what happened to Taki was incredibly wrong and that she has amazing courage for standing up for herself, and taking on what many perceive to be an indestructable, blacklisting old-boys club at the risk of her own career. Go Taki! I am behind you, and your legal actions, one hundred percent.
That having been said, I do have quite a large problem with the way the incident was originally reported. In the initial article, Ronee Garcia Bourgeois was vague enough with her description of the accused that another man in the comics industry was starting to get eyeballed for the crime. That's not Taki's fault, that's terrible reporting. In fact, based on the description, I too fingered the wrong man, and was incensed that the charity I'd been supporting all this time was being run by a lech. Then my husband read the article, and said, wait, that's not Mr. X___, she's talking about Mr. Y___. Now, I agree wholeheartedly with Ronee's well-intentioned desire to do something about the situation, but the manner in which this information was disseminated has reportedly driven an innocent bystander to take legal action to defend his good name and the honor of the charity he heads. This is the absolute last thing that we need in an already fragmented, faction-and-label-obsessed industry.
In Ronee's defense, she did break this story wide open and get people talking. She also did a couple of follow-up columns that brought together other female creators who have suffered mightily over the years from gender discrimination. She's done a lot of good in her reporting, and that's why it stings that there's extra baggage attached to it.
I also have to say here that I am a little leery of the new Empowerment Fund. Lisa Jonte has written a very concise entry that pretty much sums up my feelings, and fellow Tart Katherine Keller has also spoken out about her doubts.
See, here's where I cross the line into potential misunderstandings with my friends. I don't agree one hundred percent with the direction of Friends of Lulu, and the idea of them having a fund, while excellent in intent, will be terribly tricky at best, and disastrous for them at worst. In the past, Friends of Lulu was rumored to mismanage their funds. It's been quite a while since these allegations, and the current board has nothing to do with the earlier activities, but the stigma still exists. At the moment, comics people are falling over themselves to donate money, and are not only being generous in their own right, but are encouraging their friends to do the same. This is excellent news, and is a positive indicator of the comics industry as a whole, but who's going to administrate these funds? Who's going to make the call on which court cases qualify and which ones don't? Saying "Oh, we'll hammer out those details later" is not an acceptable answer at this point; rampant speculation over Lulu's use of these funds will only hinder their fundraising.
What I certainly hope will happen is that FoL will be careful and cautious in how they create this fund, and will seek legal counsel and work out all the necessary details in the gathering and distribution of monies. If they succeed, the fund will be of tremendous benefit to the entire comics community, men and women alike. Failure to do so could mean hard feelings at the least, and the end of FoL at the worst.
The qualms I have about Lulu's direction stem from certain ways they're carrying out their mission. Ideally, they exist to make comics available to everyone. This is laudable, and this I agree with completely. However, their recent anthology was called "Broad Appeal", and contains 100% female creators. Recently, a similar anthology, again containing 100% female creators, was published by Dark Horse under the title "Sexy Chix" and there was quite a bit of ballyhoo about the sexism inherent in the title. Which title is sexist, and which is satire?
I am of the opinion that if we're going to break down the "Old Boys' Club" stereotype of comics, then herding female creators into their own "Girls' Club" is not the answer, and serves, in large part, to underscore the gap between the two rather than bridge it. In the most recent FOL newsletter, I saw a call for entries for the next anthology, which is to be a theme of women's perspectives of traditionally male topics. I dunno. I just see that as, forgive me, broadening the differences, rather than looking at our similarities. I'd rather see something more in the spirit of the new Flight Anthologies, where male and female creators come together under one ungendered title to really showcase their talents. I'm not even saying the topic has to be apolitical; have the topic be "bullying", and see what you get: everything from gender discrimination to political discussion to schoolyard antics would be fair play.
In the end, I still have a Lulu membership, because I feel that the organization does more good than harm in the end.
I'm also friends with one of the boardmembers, Katie Merritt, and I happen to think that she and her husband Dan are two of the finest people breathing, let alone involved in comics. I've seen Katie in action at several shows, and have travelled with her and Dan, and I know that she's straight-up about making comics available to everyone while still fighting for more attention to gender issues. She's often the face of the organization, at least here in the midwest, and I can totally get behind her and the cause she represents.
And it's not just FoL -- Sequential Tart and Girlamatic also fall under this heading sometimes. Neither is exclusively female in their authorship or readership, but I'd like to see them both push for more non-gender-centric interaction. I've made some of my absolute best friends through SequentialTart, and some of the best webcomics out there are on Girlamatic, and I want to continue to see each grow and evolve over time.
I also find it pretty sad that we still keep needing to have this sort of discussion, and I'm not the only one who feels this way. This is not to say that the mainstream’s a waste, nor that every reader of mainstream books is a grabby lech; neither of these is remotely true. However, when an industry doesn’t have any real inclination towards change, and has an abusive minority that sometimes obscures the integrity of the larger whole, that doesn’t generate overwhelming encouragement for women to make comics, nor does it encourage fresh female readership. This ouroborean cycle keeps women out, if not by intent, then by practice.
I think the only real answer to this kind of public harassment is to broadcast its unnacceptability as loudly and as frequently as possible; as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” This requires men to stand up, too. I've been very, very pleased at the majority of the male response to the incident; over on the Engine and the Bendis boards, where Taki is apparrently a regular, the male posters have been overwhelmingly supportive of her, and her decisions. This is good, and this is a good start. To make this behavior unacceptable, we need both men and women to take a stand. If one jerk decides to make an inappropriate move, but is surrounded by other people who aren't afraid to speak up, chances are good he won't get too far.
Be brave. Be like Taki. Stand up and be counted among those who will not accept this kind of behavior. Moreover, demand better of your friends and coworkers. Don't wait for someone else to say it's not okay. Do it for your sisters, your girlfriends, your wives. Do it for your own self-respect.
And ladies? Make independent comics. Lots of them. Make stupendously good comics, so good that no one can argue with their quality. You don’t need a lot of flashy gimmicks or marketing; most readers of independent comics are just as likely to accept a female-created comic as they are a male-created comic (or a transgender-created comic, but that’s a rant for another day).
EDIT: Link to Lea's site removed at her request. Apologies for any misunderstandings. Will do better fact-checking next time.
I (obviously) didn't make it out to APE this year, but I did read some commentary about it, including this link to a video blog of the show.
I just have a question -- since when did APE become an arts-and-crafts show? I mean, it's a tiny hall, with room for maybe three hundred exhibitors. Demand for these spaces is so great that the reg forms go online and are taken down again within a matter of one, maybe two months, and then the wait list starts. They don't jury exhibitors in, but it seems like they'd at least be screening for, I don't know, comics creators. Puppets and fiber arts and ipod covers are all really neat, and deserve to have their due, but... at the expense of comics artists at a comics show?
I'd really, really hate to see APE go the way of some of the midwestern comics shows, where actual comics creators are shunted aside to make way for everything from Harry Potter knockoff replicas to teeshirt vendors to washed-up Playboy models. I mean, if you're going to go that way, fine, but stop billing it as a comics show if the focus is no longer going to be on comics. Call it a "Pop Culture Con" or whatever.
Call me a purist, but I think a comic con should be about comics, especially one of the few shows in North America where the small and independent pressers get their chance to shine.
Here's a link to some highlights of a thread currently going on over at Something Awful, wherein a supposed White House staffer leaks personal (as in hygene) information about big WH names. I know it's not true, and I know it does nothing to further discussion in any way, but sweet Jeebus is it funny.
Incidentally, this little tidbit is very good, and has nothing to do with Donald Rumsfeld's "ledgendary" flatulence. Italics is from an earliler post; the plain-text response is from the "leaker".
Illustrated_Man posted:I don't eat at chain resturaunts, I don't shop at wal mart period, I only shop at chain stores that have unions, I wish we had a decent public transportation system in this country so I didn't have to drive a car. I do everything I can to not contribute to fuck tards like the OP. I hope that one day we have a revolution and march on DC killing everyone in a suit and tie.
I don't mean to turn this into something personal, but you exemplify something I want to underline. Your strong, inflexible views make you a person who is easily manipulated into supporting or hating a particular candidate. By being such a rigid, reactionary person, you perpetuate the system we use of dividing people into irreconcilable interests and riding them into office. You may not drive a car, you may not eat beef, you may not vote, but you speak and write, I know that much, and to the extent you do this and perpetuate your inflexible extremism in others, you help divide your kind and empower us and those like us. Think about that.
Touche, pussycat.
Ergh. Just found the first outright negative review I've seen of Vogelein. In five years of its existance, I suppose that's a pretty darn decent track record. Most people at least give it an "eh" or an "I don't much like fantasy", which is totally understandable. I wouldn't be a fair reviewer of, say, a comic about car culture, because I think it's kinda silly. Each to their own.
Another thought, in passing: I was talking to a friend on Sunday as we were out for walkies, and she was saying how much she liked the first book, and getting a little gushy about it. Well, here's the thing: I don't think the first book was great. Not at all. It had a lot of flaws, first and foremost the art, some of which was pretty cringeworthy, to the point where I redid quite a few pieces before publishing the graphic novel. The story was cobbled together out of bits and pieces, and I kind of duct-taped it up and sent it out there with a hail-mary prayer, hoping that it'd hold together long enough to survive. It did, much to my surprise.
Here's the other thing: I really don't consider myself a writer. I certainly don't consider myself a good writer. I see the way real writers, storytellers like Layla and Speed and Spike and Rachel all write and I am in awe. They write effortlessly, like breathing. I labor with my writing. It's painful, and I'm still pretty (make that very) insecure about it.
The current book, I'll be frank, is still undergoing some rewriting. What happened is this: I wrote and wrote and wrote until I hit a brick wall. I tried and tried to get over, but couldn't. I knew the start and middle of the story, but not the end. So I said screw it, and started painting. I've since come to the end of my knowledge. I'm now beating the story with a stick until it lies flat, and it's not been a hundred percent successful yet.
The saddest thing is that I'm not practicing what I preach. I had no business getting this far into the story without a better knowledge of my characters, without knowing the end of the script. That's utter insanity, and the only saving grace is that I have neither an editor nor a schedule. If it can be straightened out, it will, but there's no telling how long or how many redactions it'll take.
Initial reaction to the first 40 pages has been strongly positive, but there's not a single book with a good start that can't be utterly wrecked by a misdirected ending. It's heady stuff, and I'm still not sure if I can pull it off.
I think the thing is that I am a good re-teller; that is, I can take events that I've seen or heard and put them together with good visuals and pacing and dialogue, but making up stories from whole cloth is much much more difficult for me. Well, no. Let me rephrase that. Making up whole good, original, believable stories is much more difficult for me. It's times like these that I wish I could just take a month somewhere in a retreat and try to pound out the story.
Yikes. I gotta toughen up my skin if I'm gonna push this next book out. In response to negative reviews, Neil's advice is best: write something so good that they won't be able to say anything bad. Yeah, easy for Neil to say.
Ah, this isn't supposed to be a pity-party. I know I'll never be truly great the way that some writers are. I'm okay with that. Since 90% of everything is crap, though, I'm shooting for the 90th percentile. The upper echelons of mediocrity, as the lyric goes. So tonight, back to the target-practice.
Was walking home on Saturday,minding my own business, and some crusty old dude who I've never met before stops his truck opposite of me. I was on the sidewalk, going east, and he was in the street, going west. He's mid-sixties, maybe seventies, could be my grandfather, and is driving this gibungous truck. He leans out the open window and shouts to ask where I'm going. "Home," I answer. He asks me if I want a ride. I pull out my best snotty, indignant teenager tone and say simply, "No." He looks all insulted and drives on.
Dude, what decade do you think this is? Since when is it appropriate to drive up to women you don't know and offer them rides? It'd've been utterly different if I were broken down at the side of the road, but I was walking down a residential city street and he was actually blocking traffic to do it. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
I have been getting hit by a spammer lately, and I went to delete some of his comments, I accidentally nuked the last five "real" comments. So, if you made mention of something recently, and your comment is suddenly gone, blame the spammers. Sorry. Please keep posting; I love the feedback, even and especially when peoples disagree with me or set me right on misconceptions.
So Layla and I got all up with the crazy yesterday, and started planning all the things we want to do in Fairbanks.
There's so much to see and do and so many places to go, but we don't want to overplan and spend that week tearing around all crazy-like. But there are a couple really extra awesome things we want to do.
Like Go Flightseeing over Denali Park. And go to Chena Hot Springs where we can hopefully stay in their yurt. And taking a day-hike with picnic lunch and dogs-in-tow (which is kinda like Hal-en-Tow, but not) through Layla's unbelievably beautiful, crazy wild, mindbendingly humongous, squirrel-condo-infested backyard.
We also plan to drive north towards the Brooks mountain range, the Arctic Circle, and the Yukon, and will probably car-camp at least one night. Here's some photos a guy took along the way there, up the Dalton Highway, so you can get an idea of where we're going.
And here's another thing I wasn't quite able to get my head around until yesterday: There really are only a few roads in Alaska. Here's a map, so you can see what I mean. Find Fairbanks. It's smack in the middle. Radiating out from Fairbanks, like spokes on a wheel, are five or six major roadways. That's it. Those are all the roads there are. See, I was laboring under the misconception that Alaska was like Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where there are a few major paved roads and all the others are just gravel dirt tracks, some no better than a rutted country lane or logging trail. Um, not so in Alaska.
See, case in point: find Fairbanks, and then look about 2-3 inches east. You'll see a horizontal < of roads leading away from the city, one of which terminates in a town called "Chena" (of the Hot Springs Fame) and the other of which essentially stops at the Yukon River and pair of towns called Circle and Central. We'd discussed going to both places (Chena Hot Springs first, and then Circle and Central) but it's the classic case of "You can't get there from here"... even though the three towns are probably no more than forty or fifty miles apart, we'd have to leave Chena and drive all the way back to Fairbanks to get on the other road, and then drive out to Circle and Central. Living in a city in the lower 48, even with all the relative wilderness contained within my state, it's hard to get my mind around going to a place where there aren't any roads for hundreds of miles in any direction. LIke, the only way in to 3/4s of the state is by river or plane. Wow. That's cool.
I mean that. It's nice to think that there are still some relatively unspoiled, untraveled, untrafficked places still on the earth. The UP is really neat and all, but there's something disconcerting about the sheer amount of human detritus -- old and new -- up there. It's wild, but there's evidence of humanity everywhere, from abandoned hunting shacks not much bigger than an outhouse to huge empty mining traces. And there're a lot more people up there than used to be... Wikipedia says over three hundred thousand. By comparison, Alaska, which is forty times its size, has just six hundred thousand people.
Wow. Alaska's big. I mean, I knew that. We all know that. But getting my brain around how big Alaska is... wow.
I so can't wait to go there.
In the first three hours of my day, I've received a visit from the Jehovah's Witni and a phone call from some other obnoxious religious tract-pedlar. I was polite but firm to both, but the Witni -- one of whom I recognized from when they rang our bell at 9am on Christmas Day got a bit miffed when I didn't even let her start her spiel. "Spiel," she sniffed. Yeah, lady. Spiel. Now get offa my porch.
"...I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night." -- Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
Because I have neither oats nor barley.
This weekend I did spring planting. On Saturday, Paul's mom, Neighbor Nora and I went to the local nursery and bought a little North Star Cherry tree, which I planted close to the house, to try and avoid the same fate that befell my last cherry tree. While we were out, Paul raked up all the leaves, bless him. I spent the remainder of the day raking and grooming my beds, gridding off the big bed and securing the trelli, moving the strawberry daughter-plants into better positions for this year's growth, and running bean strings for the pole beans. By then I'd run out of daylight, so we went in and watched the extended version of Fellowship of the Ring, which though butt-numbingly long, was superior to the theatre release.
Sunday, I went out and planted the lettuce seedlings I started a month ago in amongst the strawberries, then seeded the entire big bed with carrots, beets, sugar snap pole peas, radishes, spinaches (space and New Zealand) and more lettuces. All of them are 30-to-60 day crops, which means that right as they're maturing, it'll be time to set out the peppers and tomatoes. I'll either yank up all the plantings or thin them to the point that they can cohabitiate with the other plantings for a while. The carrots and beets will still probably be a little on the baby side, but oh darn, we have to eat baby carrots and beets!
I planted according to the book Tish lent me, Carrots Love Tomatoes, which means that things got spaced a little weirdly -- rather than planting all the beets together, for instance, they instead got planted in squares where they'll be joined later by plants they grow well with. And who knew that cucumbers and radishes help each other out? That's really cool. So the square that will eventually hold cucumbers now has radishes. I'll keep replanting radishes there throughout the year, as the cukes will only use half the square, but for now, no cukes yet means more radishes.
And, though I didn't do it on purpose, I did manage to plant on the waxing crecent moon, which is theoretically a good thing. Though I just found something that said root crops should be planted on the waning moon. Oh well. Guess the lettuces will do well and the carrots'll be scrawny. Or whatever. ;)
Of course, it's supposed to snow all this week. We'll see if anything even survives. Thanks, Michigan!
We're speaking as guests in Richard Rubenfeld's graduate-level art seminar at Eastern Michigan University.
Part One 70MB
Part Two 65MB
These are big enough files that I probably won't leave them on the server for very long. Rather than listen directly, you'll probably want to right-click and save them to your server.
Or you can BitTorrent here:
Part One
Part Two
and the generic "see all the torrents" page is here.