:: Wednesday, April 30 ::

Last week, I went to the Grand Canyon for the first time ever. The highlight of the trip, by far, was the hike down to the bottom of the canyon and back up. Somehow, miraculously, this was all accomplished in about 12½ hours on Saturday (5 hours down, 2 hours at Phantom Ranch, and 5½ hours back up).

I would not normally think myself capable of such a thing, but I went with my friend, Howdy, who seems to do things like that rather frequently. It was certainly hard to be bothered about the hiking part with all the wonderful scenery and changes in vegetation and landscape, although the last couple of miles were somewhat grueling. Also, for those of you who know how clumsy I can be, it is no small matter of pride to me that I didn't fall down the entire time we were hiking. In fact, aside from a couple of minor scrapes and a fairly uneventful run-in with a prickly pear, I completed the journey unscathed (if a little sore). We lucked out with the weather, too. It was probably in the mid-80's when we were at Phantom Ranch, but much cooler in the higher elevations, especially on the trail back up, which was pretty well-shaded.

After the hike, it was fun to look at all the signs around the visitor's center and elsewhere warning against doing a foolish thing like walking all the way to the bottom and back in a day. The best was the illustration of someone vomiting on the trail, which also stated that hikers sometimes "pay the ultimate price -- DEATH."

I'm sure I'll have little stories to tell here and there, but for now I'll just show you some photos I took. They start the night before our hike, at the South Rim. Some were taken on the way down the South Kaibab Trail. Most of the ones after the photos with the river in them were taken on the way back up to the South Rim, on the Bright Angel Trail (notice the lush foliage in some of them with the red cliffs in the background). The birds are California Condors and they were way cool -- there were about 15 of them flying around and landing right next to people. They're not shy birds at all, which is part of the reason they're so close to extinction. The photos at the very end are of some cliff dwellings near Flagstaff where the Sinagua made their homes about 800 years ago.

:: Wednesday, April 23 ::

You may have noticed that I haven't really had anything interesting to say for awhile. It's not that nothing interesting has happened, it's just that by the time things get from my brain to my keyboard, they no longer sound interesting; something gets lost in the transition from thoughts to sentences. I did start updating more frequently a couple of weeks ago because my mom got on my case. "Why aren't you updating your web page?" she asked me. "Are you okay? What's wrong?" I tried to explain that I want the content to have some level of quality and I just haven't had the time or energy to put into it lately, but she was having none of that.

At any rate, I guess my point in updating today is to say that I'll be gone for awhile, but because I haven't been so good about regular updates, you probably won't even notice. Still, I'll be gone for at least a week, maybe more. The initial reason is that I'm going to the Grand Canyon for a few days and do not want to look at a computer the entire time I am away. If, during that time, I remain incapable of stringing together sentences in any kind of entertaining/amusing/useful/not-too-terribly-painful way, I'm not going to force the issue.

So, until inspiration strikes, adios, mis amigos.

:: Sunday, April 20 ::

I'll have to confess that Bulletproof Monk wasn't as good as I thought it would be. It was so much worse, that it actually ended up being better, if that makes any sense. I think my friend, Shari, summed it up best when she re-titled it, "Dude, Where's my Enlightenment?" Anyhow, I feel somewhat bad for making several of my friends go see the movie with me, but I did warn them, and some of them even read the reviews ('Craptacular', according to one review that I heard about, but did not read). Still, when this movie hits the beer theater circuit (for those of you lucky enough to live in Portland, or another city that combines cheap movies, beer, and food), you might find it worth checking out, if you like that sort of thing. The highlight of the movie for me was seeing Chow Yun Fat say, "freaky ass".

Ooh, and if you haven't seen the front page of The Mercury this week, it's worth checking out (but hurry, because it will be gone soon). Sad to see our beloved, gilded, blinding Joan of Arc statue toppled in such a way, but the Laurelhurst regime was getting a bit haughty.

:: Wednesday, April 16 ::

It looks like I was wrong when I made fun of the namesake of the Etheree for using gratuitous quotation marks. The sample Etheree was by Mary Margaret Carlisle from Webster, TX. It is she who should bear the brunt of my ridicule for her unnecessary punctuation. Shame on you, Mary Margaret.

On another topic, Chimera sent me a link to googlism.com yesterday. Go search for your name and see what Google has to say about you. I found out that, among many other things, I am: in danger, a hypocrite, commanded by the highly talented, in presence of the enemy, a normal human who works as a librarian, increasingly obsessed with jack, the most dangerous man in north africa, and learning to make marks on paper with felt pens.

:: Friday, April 11 ::

Ooh, I have a new game. I came across the phrase "premier provider" on a corporate website today and got to wondering how many results google would return for a search on that phrase. ~142,000 was the result. "Solutions provider" had almost double the number of results at ~270,000. How many sites has google indexed with your favorite corporate buzzword? (Make sure you put quotes around your phrase when you type it into a google search box; otherwise, it will search for all the words separately and greatly increase the number of results).

Haiku getting stale?
I don't see how that can be.
Try another form.

Also, unlike the namesake of the Etheree, see if you can do it without gratuitous quotation marks.

:: Thursday, April 10 ::

This is an excellent example of user interface design in a rather unexpected place: the men's room.

Also, it turns out that the current meaning of "once in a blue moon" was created by a misunderstanding, and cemented into being by Trivial Pursuit. The first time I remember hearing the saying was in an episode of The Smurfs. If memory serves, I think it was the episode where Smurfette didn't want to be blue anymore, so she gave her color to a white rose. But then she was unhappy and wanted to be blue again, and she probably almost got eaten by Azriel or something as well.

:: Tuesday, April 8 ::

Two quotes, regarding time, that pop into my head every now and again:

You would see, you would see,
If you were three again,
And did it all the same.
Fate drives you insane.
Fate drives you insane.

-- From the song "Time has got nothing to do with it" by Peter Murphy

Time doth transfix all flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.

-- From the Shakespearian sonnet I had to memorize my junior year in high school

:: Thursday, April 3 ::

I was amusing myself the other day by trying to come up with a tag line for this web site. Some possibilities included:

• Nerdygirl.com. Boring the shit out of you since 1999.
• Haiku happens
• Nerdygirl.com. Still not a porn site. (my personal favorite)

:: Wednesday, April 2 ::

I used to have this really cool book when I was a kid. It had all these distorted pictures on it, and it came with a piece of foil. If you rolled the foil into a cylinder and placed it on the circle, where the book told you to, the shape would be magically undistorted in the reflection. I can't remember what became of that book, or what it was called, or how I would find a new one, but if you know, you should tell me. That would be so rad.

:: Tuesday, April 1 ::

As a wee lass, growing up in California, the first signs of spring were different. It was the re-appearance of the ice cream man that meant spring, as well as the blooming of poppies and other flowers. In Portland, it's merely the re-appearance of all the people who live here that truly tell whether or not spring has sprung. Like worms after the first rain, they simply emerge from wherever they were hiding.

where's my rocket car?

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