Idiot Wind
Max and Derek actually drove over 12,000 miles, it turns out. That
encompasses a route from Las Vegas to San Diego to San Luis Obispo to San
Francisco to Eugene to Seattle to Vancouver, a wandering path through Canada
that ended up in Idaho, I think, across a Dakota or two, with a slant down to
Chicago. There, they regrouped, restocked and lost one of the original
four travelers (Tyler the drummer). Off again they went to Michigan and
lost Max's brother somewhere. Then, some route that ended up in Maine,
then Vermont to stay with Derek's aunts and uncles, then Boston to stay in
Derek's great-aunt's fancy digs, then D.C., then a slant across the South that
traversed Tennessee and Mississippi and ended in New Orleans. From there,
they made the long trek across Texas to Austin, then to El Paso, on to
Albuquerque, up I-25 and home to Colorado. All of this was done on a
minimum of actual money, save that required for gasoline, which they found
difficult to barter for. Max apparently survived quite nicely on a)
breakfast: 6 packets of instant oatmeal and water on a camp stove,
b) lunch: a can of something, c) dinner: boiled pasta and a ladleful
of sauce from some giant bottle he bought on sale. Derek had a little more
variety, and they did occasionally splurge (e.g., In-and-Out in CA), but except
for the kindness of strangers and family ties, they ate like the homeless.
Actually, perhaps just like the homeless, as they found about halfway through
their trip that it was easy and productive to just go down the street and ask
restaurants if they had any food for free. It's a simple concept, but
something I wouldn't have thought of. Der and Max say that it usually only
took 4 restaurant visits before a waiter or chef would say, "Sure, sit down and
I'll bring you something." This apparently worked all over the South,
including New Orleans and Austin. In the latter, they stayed two nights in
a co-op on someone's couch. Max looked for climbing spots everywhere they
went and Der looked for musicians to chat up. Der has promised to organize
his notes on the trip, which in a hundred years, might be viewed as a 21st
century Lewis and Clarke log.
~~~
As much as I agree with Glenn
Greenwald most of the time, I often wish his writing wasn't so ponderous.
~~~
I have found that when I bring up tessellation or philately, most adults blush
and think they are activities banned in Colorado Springs. As it turns out,
I was tessellating today, tiling the upstairs bathroom with the Rialto 6" tile
that Sweet Junie so wisely selected on her last visit. I have now tiled
with 12" ceramic, 12" slate, and 6" porcelain. The ceramic had its own
challenges but it there was a lot less grout to contend with. The slate
was a piece of cake, irregular by nature so I didn't even use the little rubber
crucifixes to space them, I just eye-balled it as I went along. However,
the slate was tougher to grout and harder to clean up, so there's a Conservation
of Tiling Work effect in here somewhere. Der and I put down the
Hardibacker, which included doing the easy part (laying down the big 4' x 8'
slabs) and the hard part (scoring an odd piece for the area next to the shower).
I laid down the thin-set and Der drilled in the screws and has become quite a
master at it, mating the cement board with the underfloor without countersinking
so much that the screws retained little purchase with the backerboard. A
day went by, while I waited for the backerboard to set. In that time, I
figured out how much of each paint (Pale Gold I and Pale Gold II) I had in each
non-full can and attacked various parts of the house that Sweet Junie had
scheduled for colorization. One area was a wicked piece under the upstairs
walkway from the master bedroom to the other bedrooms. I climbed up the
10' ladder and proceeded to paint, only to be distracted by something, perhaps
the lyrics to Blood On The Tracks, and moved my elbow to the wrong
location and pushed over a pint of Gold Pale 2 off the ladder, which then
caromed off the ladder cross-member and spread itself like a thin film over
everything within a 10-foot radius. 45 minutes later I had cleaned up most
of that mess and realized that my massive in-house re-do was going to require a
final multi-day cleaning effort on every square foot of tile and hardwood as
neither Der nor I were what you would call spill-avoidance experts. By
now, the backerboard was set, and Der and I set tile, these nice 6" tiles called
Rialto Something, which provided a little of the grip you need when you get all
warm and slippery out of the shower, and didn't have that White Porcelain
Bathroom Hegemony feel to them. A day passed while I worked and read a
little more of Gabe's Rhode Island Notebook, then I got up at some ungodly hour
and had my coffee and my Blue Monster and answered a few emails and started
mixing up a batch of Keracolor Sanded Biscuit grout. Grouting is actually
the fun part. You get your rubber squeegee thing out and, in my case, a
plastic ladle, and dump the grout on the tiles that sit like mesas on a desert
of backerboard. Then, you squish the grout in to the cracks and attack the
joints at 45-degree angles and the tiles sigh to the grout "you complete me",
and you know you're doing the right thing. There's a thin layer of grout
on the tiles no matter how artful you are with the rubber float, but no matter,
you'll get it in the next step. After making the floor one big surface,
albeit some of it grout and some of it tile, you cool your jets and have a beer
or work on an algorithm to display Verdana 10 font at an arbitrary position with
a paged LCD controller, which was what I was doing, then you take a big bucket
and fill it with clear water and take a sponge with a rough side on one side and
a fluffy side on the other and clean up the ridiculous mess you made.
This, amazingly enough, actually ends up making your grout lines smooth and
lovely, particulary if you attack them at the suggested 45-degree angle.
But it does make for many a bucket of gray goop, and it took me a couple of
dozen bucket, each dumped in the toilet and refilled in the nearby bathtub, to
get all the excess grout off the surface of the tile. No, you're not
done yet. You wait another couple of hours and do it again, or you're
going to have a haze on the tile that you don't want to live with. Then, a
couple of hours later again (and this time I used a kitchen mop), until you can
run your sponge or mop over the surface and get only clean water. At this
point, leave the poor suffering tile alone and let it cure. Later, you can
dump some absolutely amazing DuPont sealer on it and buy new towels and bathmats
and such like I did for my Sweet Junie who intimated that she might be a
little tired of the maroon towels that have been in that bathroom since the
Gulf War.
~~~
Speaking of Blood On The Tracks, it occurs to me that this is one great
example of micro-flash-fiction:
They say I shot a man named Gray and took his
wife to Italy,
She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me.
I can't help it if I'm lucky.
I don't think of Dylan as a poet, much as others try to persuade me, but this
is just bloody brilliant in its economy, tone and close.
~~~
I was trying out DHL for a package to China. It's quite a trial doing your first international shipment on a new carrier. I've used UPS for regular shipments to Spain because they have a bang-up interactive menu tree for filing the SED and doing the commercial invoice and avoiding getting the NSA into the act thinking you're shipping the latest cryptographic algorithm to terrorists. DHL, which as far as I can ascertain morphed from Deutsche Telekom, has a very helpful, almost-not-OCD-Teutonic site that is every bit as good. I had to enter my address and particulars a few times more than I wanted to, but in the end, all was well and the package seemed to be on its way to Shenzhen. I was looking for a particular NAND chip and it was hard to find in the US in small quantities. If you read the recent article by James Fallows in The Atlantic, you discovered that Chinese manufacturing is not so much about cheap labor (although that's true), but more about the fact that it's like Silicon Valley in the 70's -80's, where there are thousands of small firms in a network of co-dependence and you can get anything you need in the same day you ask for it. So, it will take less time to ask our Chinese partners to get a half-dozen chips locally and DHL them back to us than to try to get them locally in the US. Go figure.
~~~
If George Burns could do it, so can I: Good night, my flower.
Sweet
Junie and I engaged in a whirlwind tour of California last week, starting with a
flight to San Diego to visit with my parents. They both bemoaned the fact
that we were only there for 24 hours and promptly began to stuff us with fare
from their favorite local restaurants, which included a small Greek bistro in
Rancho Bernardo and the Original Pancake House in Poway. I've been to both
many times, but Junie had to get used to the senior Dr. Bahr deciding what
everybody was going to eat, and in what order. The next day, we ran down
to San Diego and boarded the Pacific Surfliner, picture to your left. The
seating was airplane style and the view of the ocean quite nice most of the way
to Grover Beach, where BIL Roy was picking us up. There was this weird
stop at Lompoc, which was actually a stop at Vandenberg Air Force Base, where
one person got off and one back on and just behind the train stop was chain-link
fence that stretched for miles. A half dozen missile gantries dotted the
horizon, presumably dating back to the 70's. After a wonderful stop in
Grover Beach/Arroyo Grande/Casa Rawlings in the mountains east of Pismo Beach,
which included meeting up with my brother Mike, her daughter/my niece Laura who
is studying to become a veterinarian at CSU, and Daly, my grand-niece or
something and progeny of my sweet niece Dana whom I used to hold in my arms and
rock to sleep, Roy and Linny dropped us off at the SLO Amtrak station to take
the Official Amtrak Bus to San Jose. This because there is only one train
from there and it would have put us in too late to meet up with the Paulsens for
our Fabulous Dinner at Maurizio's in Morgan Hill. Lin and Roy left and the
bus arrived and the new driver mounted The Seat of Authority and turned over the
ignition and nothing happened except prolonged grinding. This went on for
10 minutes and then for another 10 minutes I chatted him up and found out that
this is not the first time and he is Really Ready to quit and go drive tourist
carts at the local zoo or something. I rebooked us on the Amtrak train
that I had thought would get us in too late and Junie and I jumped on and were
on our way to Silicon Valley. Both of our cell phones were low on juice
and there were no outlets ready-to-hand, so we used all available mobile
resources to a) find a rental car, since we would be late for the one we
reserved, b) call Casa Paulsen and regret that we would not be able to make
dinner, c) call a zillion motels to find one with a spare room. My cell
phone ran out of gumption before all this completed, but Junie's valiant little
Samsung Jazz hung in there and we ended up in a new Holiday Inn by the SJC
airport. It turned out that it was also the venue for the Bay Area
Firefighter's Olympics, so the entire facility was on tilt with buff young men
in various garb: customized baseball suits, iron-pumping sleeveless T's,
even a team of seemingly normal people with dart-champion logos all over their
tops. There was probably a number of bowling teams, too, but I didn't
notice. I had a meeting with an Important Client in Menlo Park, so
of course Junie and I took the opportunity to cruise the main drag there after
wandering past vast walled enclaves with houses the size of medieval walled
cities. We did have a wonderful prix fixe lunch downtown and then wandered
over to Important Client, at which point Junie read Proust or something in the
rental while I had meetings. Oh, the rental, right. It turns out
that the rental that I had secured was unavailable, due to my untimely Amtrak
incident. So, that morning I took a shuttle to the airport from the
fireman-obsessed Holiday Inn, got out at Terminal C, grabbed a cab, and headed
to the same off-airport Budget Rental Car where I had made my initial
reservation. The Budget turned out to be a combination rental car agency,
office supply store and upscale junkyard as far as I could tell, but the lady at
the desk took pity on the fact that I really needed transportation. She
suggested the Ford pickup, seeing as how the actual car I had rented wasn't
available, and then dropped the price by 20%, and then did a walk-around and
noticed the bugs on the windshield and the Camels in the ashtray and gave me
another 20% and we had a deal, except she also apologized that the pickup only
had an eighth tank of gas. But, I digress. Junie and I bullyed our
way from Menlo Park to SF in this big mess of American engineering and drove
around SF and for the 4th time I wondered if I should try to call CDY but didn't
and then we headed to North Beach and found a place to park. We wandered
around and found Mangorosa, which is North Beach on Brazilian steroids, but they
didn't open until 6. Next up was The Rose Pistola, which we loved the last
time here, but they were also closed. We had a plane to catch at 8 at SFO,
so we settled for something lesser after cruising Chinatown and declining to
take home a Peking Duck. The flight home was uneventful, but as I drifted
off, as I often do on planes, I still had this pang that, yet again, I had
avoided CDY, when I would really like to take him to lunch or something.
