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.