For those of you who are either into classical music or heavy artillery (or both), my favorite yearly event is happening this Thursday at Tom McCall Waterfront Park. It's the Oregon Symphony's concert in the park, the one where they play Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture with real cannons! So good. Also, there's a neat-o fireworks show at the end.
So, if you're in the Portland area, I highly recommend you check this out. Also, if anybody knows of a way to get a job playing the Howitzer in the orchestra without enlisting in the Army or Air Force or anything like that, please let me know. That would be so cool.
Okay, this site rules for maps.
Ruben has got me remembering huge rainstorms in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, and one very odd trip through Poland. We were on the bus heading either to or from Warsaw and there were whole villages under water because the Oder River had flooded. Maybe it was while we were on our way out -- I remember we couldn't head South to Prague from Kraków on account of the flooding -- there was no getting through.
Anyhow, the road was up higher than the villages off to the side and there were literally only rooftops poking out. The road itself was covered by a thick sheet of water. There were many, many tire tracks in the grassy meridian where cars had slid off the road. At one point, we saw a car full of people that had slid off and some long boards they were carrying in the back had slid forward and trapped them in their car. The bus driver stopped, and a bunch of people got off and helped them, removing the wood and cutting their seatbelts to extract them. Then we drove off and left them there with their wood and broken car. Farther up ahead, there was a bus that had slid off the road and a bunch of kids standing around it; we didn't stop for them.
All the while, the rain kept pouring down. The power was out in Wroclaw and sandbags were everywhere. And with all this going on outside the window, the driver put on a movie to entertain us: Twister.
Over the weekend, I went to Washington to see my family. After driving along 84, I have a severe case of hero-worship for everybody who was involved in re-paving it. It was the smoothest drive I've had on that road in the seven years I've been making it. Of course, it will be torn to shreds after the winter, but it sure is nice now! The simple lack of ruts in the road made the Columbia River Gorge seem even more beautiful than usual. I'm thinking it might just be one of the most beautiful spots in the world.
On the way back, I stopped for a bite to eat at The Nomad in Boardman. There was a grumpy old guy at one of the tables who said he wasn't going to eat anything. He had on big thick glasses, a Lowes hat, and
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suspenders. I think the two women with him finally ended up convincing him to order a sandwich.
Have just read Bridget Jones's Diary. Am now thinking in manner of Bridget Jones, Helen Fielding, or similar. (Without the alcoholism, nicotene addiction, and obsession over counting calories.) Am not all that similar to Bridget Jones, in retrospect. Is v. strange, considering how well I felt I related to her character.
I hope I'm not giving away any trade secrets here, but I feel compelled to tell you all about the concept of woven meat. This is not anything I ever would have come up with. Seriously. Ever. That's probably why I am struck by the sheer genius of the notion.
To the best of my knowledge, it all started when Duane and Nancy decided to make sandwiches and weave the deli slices. They wanted to make sure there was meat in every bite, and were hoping that, by weaving two different kinds of meat, a unique taste sensation would be created. Apparently, the woven meat looked really cool, but the ol' taste buds didn't pick up on the new arrangement.
I'm not sure which one of them hit on the idea of woven bacon, but am happy that I was able to join the fun (as a spectator/photographer). I watched as Duane wove whole slices of bacon and dropped it in a pan. Nancy cut her slices lengthwise, so they were thinner, enabling her to make a tighter weave. I must admit, I doubted Nancy's technique at first, but it turned out well in the end.
After the bacon was woven and cooked, the masterpieces ended up on bread with lettuce, tomato, and avocado. The sandwiches were beautiful. I think they should have remained open-faced, but that would have been pretty messy. As Nancy bit into her sandwich, she exclaimed, "There's bacon in every bite!"
"You know what we need now?" Nancy asked.
"Jobs?" Duane answered.
"No, clear bread! So you can see it!"
The conversation moved into a more generalized discussion of all the different kinds of bread that could be created to show off the woven meat creations of Duane and Nancy.
When Nancy gets her film developed, maybe she'll let me scan in a few photos so you can all see the products of their hard work.
If today was my birthday, I would ask for a storm.
I want rain. I want wind howling through trees and loud booming thunder that rumbles right through me. I want the placid, light gray clouds outside to give way to a dark stormy mess. I want lightening to flash through the sky and a warm rain so heavy that I am drenched between the time I step off the bus and enter my front door.
And inside, in a softly-lit room, I want to snuggle up in a blanket and while away the afternoon, dividing my attention between the storm outside my window and the good book on my lap.
Ahhh!
Knowing that LifeGem makes diamonds from cremains, how is the flash piece on their home page not just... well, creepy?
Dearest relatives and loved ones, please please never suggest that I wear your cremains as a piece of jewelry. Thanks.
Can you even imagine?
Person A: That's a lovely ring. Where did you get it?
Person B: Oh, thank you. It's my grandma.
Person A: You got it from your grandma?
Person B: Well, kind of. It is my grandma.
Person A: ...
Person B: ...
Person A: (runs to nearest bathroom to vomit)
(Link via 50 cups)
I scanned in one of the photos I developed. It came out too dark and didn't scan in well and has scratches (see below for explanation), but I'm still a little excited about it because I made it all by myself in my very own darkroom. It's a photo of downtown Portland from across the river. As an added bonus, you can judge me by my shoes.
This reminds me of another thing that went wrong when trying to set up the darkroom on Saturday: I lost my negative carrier (the thing that holds your negative so it stays in the right place and remains flat), so I had to cut a rectangle out of a piece of cardboard (or corrugated fiber board for the nitpicky). You can see how uneven that made the edge of the print, although I think it looks kind of interesting.
Saturday began with my cat and I in heavy competition for laziest resident of the house. I had a huge lead on him early in the day -- it wasn't me who woke me up at 7:00am to be fed. But then I decided to get my darkroom put together and the day quickly changed from napping and household chore avoidance to a sort of whirlwind of activity. Theo remains the champion of laziness.
The darkroom project ended up being more of a Charlie Brown after school special than I would've liked -- nothing went exactly right. Turns out that for really old enlarger lenses, it's nearly impossible to find a retaining ring (which I needed), and they allegedly cost around $50. Blech. Fortunately, at the local hardware store, you can get some plastic cinch ties for way cheap. Also, if you take the lens with you and get the dude behind the counter interested in your project, he'll even put it on for you.
I bought my enlarger, an Omega B-22, at a trade show last year, thinking it was a pretty good deal. Now I'm not so sure. For one thing, it turns out that the electrical components are a little dicey. If the cord hangs one way, the light won't come on. If it hangs the other way, the light does come on, and you get a little spark for extra special effects. I am going to look into rewiring it, but some electrical tape fixed it up for the short-term.
I also bought a used Time-o-Lite for timing the exposures. This was a fairly good deal, except it's pretty old and the outlet to plug in the safe light didn't work. So, I'm going to take that back and get a fully functional one. Also, it turns out that the electrical outlets in my darkroom/guest bathroom don't work, so I have to call the guy who built my house and get him to fix that. Extension cords made this easy to get past, though.
Anyhow, after about five hours of preparation -- shopping, setting things up, problem solving, mixing chemicals, etc. -- my guest bathroom was magically transformed into a darkroom. A board lay over the tub to hold the trays with chemicals; the wash basin was on the floor of the tub, under the tap. I had a table over the toilet, where the enlarger was set up, and a lamp with the safelight hanging over the shower rod. A dark piece of cloth hung over the door, with a towel shoved in to catch the extra light from the top, and the bathmat shoved up against the bottom. A makeshift clothesline stretched from the shower rod to the opposite wall. Peter Murphy was playing on the portable CD player and a little fan provided airflow. There were more electrical cords than I expected, but everything was ready for actually using the darkroom.
I made three prints.
It turns out that one of the condenser lenses is scratched. So, I have three prints, all of which came out too dark, that have identical scratches on them. Lame.
I'm not giving up, though. The tough part -- setting everything up -- is done; now I just have to figure out now if I need to buy a whole new enlarger or if I can just replace the glass parts. I'll keep you posted.
Ooh, I hope Sabonis comes back to Portland. Have you ever seen him pass? For such a big dude, he's incredibly smooth. I like it best when he looks the other way, and does a bounce pass under the unwitting defender and then someone swoops in and scores. Perfection like that is just pretty to watch.
I was thinking about the English alphabet this morning, and decided that the letter 'x' isn't really all that useful. If there were an alphabet survivor game, I'd totally vote 'x' off the alphabet. The thing is, you usually pronounce it as a 'z', so the letter 'z' could suffice. Also, you can replace any actual 'x' sound with 'ecks', which is much longer, but how often does it really come up? Of course, if your name is Alexander, you probably disagree. Alecksander would be hard to get used to.
Then I thought maybe the 'k' should be the one to go. It is, after all, the least commonly used letter in the whole alphabet, and the 'c' shares many of its duties anyhow. But if you were to re-write 'kite' with a 'c', it would be 'cite', and that's already a word using the soft 'c', so it would get confusing. Also, the word 'looc' is too weird. I don't like it.
I ultimately decided that all the letters should stay, and that there should be more words like 'syzygy'. It's a nice low, buzzy murmur of a word, and is fun to say. Of course, my deciding this means absolutely nothing, but it kept my brain occupied this morning.
Oops, I was wrong about the 'k' thing. It looks like 'z' is actually the letter that gets the least playing time.
Re: comments -- to get the counter working, I had to break everything, so I lost all the comments. We are starting afresh. Comment at will. When I get home, I'll see if I can re-enter the lost comments, or you can just put them back in your own damn self. (I intended that to sound more humorous than snotty, but electronic communication doesn't always "sound" the way we want it to.)
Comment test.
So, I've sort of got the snorcomments working... It's not counting things, though. I'm still working on that part. Not actively working on it anymore, but working on it nonetheless.
I like this list.
And this one. Nothing screams romance like Jiffy Lube.
I finally got around to updating the surveys on my site. New entries were lying dormant in my inbox for brimley hate, brimley love, and the ever-popular, judging people by their shoes surveys. I apologize for being such a slacker and forgetting to update these.
There is good news, though: I managed to do a bit of research on the comments front, and should have those up eventually so that you can all amuse each other while I'm away or have nothing to say. The goal will be to incorporate the surveys into the comments so they'll be all automated and you won't have to rely on my lazy ass to get them posted, but that might not be so easy. We shall see.
It does look like they'll be easy to set up, so as soon as I get an hour or two to do some tests, it will be up. I really want for this to happen soon, but there's a saying about the road to hell and how it was paved, so I'm not making any promises.
Today, I got the best search string ever in my referrer logs. Someone went to Google and typed in, "I lost my luggage and cows are attacking me". Fabulous!
Meanwhile, back at the lab, Cherz is rocking out.
Things seem to be calming down at work, which means that there's a chance I'll stop neglecting all two of you (three, if you count my mom). Nothing interesting comes to mind -- I have no clever stories to tell you, nothing anecdotal comes to mind. I know, go read James' blog. She's got some good links -- I particularly found the Webmonkey article on coding to the standards to be interesting. Also, since I keep telling myself I'm going to redesign this site and say byebye to table tags for formatting, I found it inspirational.
Speaking of formatting, thanks to Royal Rodent for letting me know about the icky Netscape positioning problem.
Deleted domains. I'm a little sad I never knew about RentAChicken.com. That would have come in handy. (Link from Scott)
Surely there are more than three big donuts in America. (Mad props to Howdy for sending the link)
Have you ever done karaoke? I actually "sang" for the first time on Wednesday, goaded on by Josh and Tom. I met both of them through nanowrimo last November. Our friendship was forged when when we all took our laptops to a karaoke bar to write. People kept coming up to us and asking what we were doing with our laptops. "We're writing novels," we told them. This was said in the same tone one might use to say, "We fight crime!"
Anyhow, T and J gave me a bit of guff for not singing -- this was our third time at the karaoke bar and I had previously managed to avoid being on stage. I'm not much of a performer anyhow, and my singing voice is, well, painful. But I told them that if they picked a song (a short one) I'd sing it. Tom chose "My Sharona," pointing out that the worse it is sung, the better. I made them go up on stage with me, and they chimed in on the chorus, which helped out greatly. On the whole, my performance was hideous, yet fun.
I am equally amazed and annoyed that I still come across people who think I'm stupid because I'm female. Maybe 'stupid' is too strong a word -- 'incapable of understanding complexity' is more accurate. But aren't we past that? Can we get there soon, then? Seriously, it rankles.
I'm used to the occasional e-mail telling me that I don't update my blog enough. It doesn't happen a lot, but it's not so out of the ordinary. I thought it was really funny, though, to hear this from my mom. She called me last week: "I haven't heard from you and you haven't been updating your web page very often. Is everything okay?" Isn't that sweet? So I'm mostly updating today so my mom doesn't worry about me. Really. I've just been busy.
While I'm here, though, I will tell you about my Sunday evening. My friend, Super Nancy (she's a superhero now) came over and we ate a simple meal of pasta and salad and I even made brownies. We took the brownies (no, not that kind of brownies) and met friends Amy and Rainer at Cinema 21 where we saw Margaret Cho's new movie, Notorious C.H.O. I laughed a whole lot. It's not for the faint of heart, the prudish, the easily-offended, or even the sort of conservative 'sex jokes make me uncomfortable' type of person. It is rather funny, though. I also found myself admiring Cho's "F*** you, I like me anyway" attitude. I think it's because she can laugh at herself that she doesn't come across as being too overbearing. Also, she makes some really good points about how we see ourselves, and how much advertising money is spent every year to warp that.
After the Cho fun, we headed over to Southeast Portland, under the Marquam Bridge to watch people play with fire. Apparently, the first Sunday of every month is fire night. Lots of people showed up to watch the fire performers show off their skills with poi, flaming sticks, a flaming whip, and lots of other things that were created for the sole purpose of lighting them on fire and dancing around. I teetered on nervousness the entire time; they seemed to be safe with it, and only one guy caught his pants leg on fire, but it went right out. Still, I was ready to be really nervous at any given moment. I suppose that's part of the fun.
One of the best things about fire night was Camp Pee Pot, which consisted of two people in yellow rain gear (though it wasn't raining). The iron-on decals on the backs of their slickers identified them as members of Camp Pee Pot. The stuffed zebra on their blanket led me to believe that the zebra car was theirs as well -- it's a Sentra painted with zebra stripes. Sometimes, it seems that there's not enough whimsy in the world, and these people are doing their fair share to change that. The woman was making and distributing free grilled cheese sandwiches. The man was sitting on a blanket playing a Theremon (sp?) -- those things where you move your hand around to change the frequency and make music. Camp Pee Pot rules (though a quick search on google makes me think I might not enjoy all of their hobbies).
Happy Birthday, Mom!! I love you!
(You're my favorite.)
