The reason we’re in Portland is to take part in a writing retreat. We just tacked on a few days of sight-seeing beforehand. The retreat started today, and so there won’t be much here but placeholders and filler for the next few days. This is supposed to be an intensive writing retreat, so my energies are elsewhere.
Here is a time lapse I took of Mt. Saint Helens the other day from the last viewpoint on the road up that range. This is sitting on a retaining wall about four miles from the volcano, looking into the crater.
Yes, it is brief. Worked great at first, but then the camera stopped taking all of the pictures I’d asked of it. Had I known, at that viewpoint, how cool this would eventually look I would have shot it over and over and over again.
I shot it using the now apparently unsupported Gorillacam (free) app.
The retreat continues tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll make some nice progress on this particular project. Wish me luck.
We are watching the 1989 Iron Bowl, it is like giving an education, really. The Yankee, you see, was up north and not yet interested in football. When she moved to the South she said her allegiance was for sale. Whatever big time football game someone took her to first would be the team she’d cheer for.
I took her to an Auburn game, and she was hooked.
Here’s Carl Stephens with some of the best words in the world. I recorded that at the game that night. We sat in the upper deck, on the west side over the 20 yard line. As we’d only been dating a few short months by that time I was trying to play it cool and not sound too overwhelming, but there’s so many things you have to know about this place. How Auburn played that night wasn’t one of them, as the Tigers came out flat in their season opener. But that was 2005.
This is about 1989. For some lovely reason the local television stations have taken to filling weekend programming with old Auburn football games this summer. This is brilliant television, really, and there’s no better choice than the first Iron Bowl in Auburn. Pat Dye called it the most emotional moment in school history. David Housel, who’s never been shy about bad historical hyperbole, likened it to reaching the promised land. The players that played there that day said the place has never been louder or more crazed or desperately intense.
Take it away, Jim Nantz:
Is it football season yet?
So we’ve watched the first three quarters, and it is great to see Reggie Slack — who’s selling insurance these days after a cup of coffee in the NFL and a Grey Cup appearance in the CFL. The third play of the game:
It is nice to see Keith McCants again, who was just an incredibly talented, scary good football player.
He’s had some legal problems, but by all accounts is the guy you root for. And he’s lobbying, on his Facebook page, to be on the next season of Dances With the Stars. Seems that his career is now mostly Retired Star Football player, but becoming a star in the South may let you do that. The best part is just hearing the crowd and the marching bands, before the stadium was filled with piped in music. You can forget the original atmosphere if you aren’t careful.
Haven’t shown her this yet:
Seriously. Can it be football season now?
Rode 38.5 miles on the bike today. Felt very nice and the sun only came out late in the journey. Saw this:
It is like they are saying “A payphone! Use me!” This now costs $.50. I couldn’t tell you the last time I used a pay phone, so this $.15 increase was a novel surprise. Perhaps the calls should get cheaper as demand has gone down …
I would say pay phones, perhaps like pawn shops and check cashing stores, should be a status indicator, but that phone was at a nice gas station in a fine part of town. We got Gatorade there and pedaled on.
Great soccer game today. The U.S. women’s side was quite good, but not great. The Japanese played solid, but not spectacular. The Americans couldn’t close the deal and the Japanese ladies would not quit, coming from behind twice to force penalty kicks. And from there the sense of inevitability gave way to a little disbelief. But the Japanese were great and deserving winners.
More to the point, that was 120 minutes of great, clean sport, played well by two teams. It was wonderful see a contest about the game, not about some scandal or overwrought subtext — the healing of Japan thing got overplayed, but that was unavoidable. This was 11 a side playing hard and, for the most part, playing very well. Great experience, even if the other team won.
Now if only the spectators and media would be more interested prior to the Big Game, but perhaps one of these days. What was intriguing was how the narrative for the Americans was not about gender or equality, but about sport and competition. There’s a subtle shift that started taking place in the televised coverage that is worth noting.
Steaks on the grill tonight. We low-grilled the meat, baked potatoes and fried some okra. After dinner we commemoration National Ice Cream Day by buying a pint on a cone at Bruster’s. They close at 10. They aren’t really amused when you show up at 9:45, but we got the obligatory ice cream celebration in just under the gun.
Didn’t quite work out that way. On the other hand, the silver lining of those drunken, soggy, incontinent clouds, is that I think I discovered the secret. Somehow it seemed easier to go up hills with three pounds of water in my shoes.
I think the weight helped push the pedals.
So we rode 17.19 miles. The temperature when we got home was a brilliant 73 — we saw a guy in a hoodie, in Alabama in July — so that was grand. For a time it was hard to see. The rain was actually refreshing and cool. It was patently dumb, so I called an end to the ride. The Yankee said “It will stop by the time we get home.” It did. She is very smart.
But by then we were home. And we resolved that this better be a pause, and the heavens better populate our fine community with feral cats and dogs learning about gravity, or else we would kick ourselves for packing it in.
It rained more.
We made shrimp and crab cakes from Whitey’s in Florida, and corn and tomato salad from Ajax Diner in Mississippi as this week’s experiment from the Off the Eaten Path book. Both tasty, but I think there’s only so many ways a corn and tomato side can turn out. Now, the shrimp and crab cakes were almost divine. Not bad for two people who’ve never made them before.
How long did it say to fry them? I asked this after taking over, because the oil was popping and burning my now very upset, in pain co-chef. On one of the last crab cakes a bit of oil jumped out of the skillet and headed directly to my face. My flinching to the left — and truly, it was only a flinch — meant the dollop of hot burning sulfurous dripping sauce landed on the bridge of my nose, rather than in my left eye. Next time I’m breaking out the shop goggles.
Shop goggles, I say. I probably have some from my high school in a box somewhere. Everyone hated the shop goggles, but we were teenagers:we hated everything that had to do with safety and responsibility and sanity. It is amazing all of those people graduated with ten fingers.
I believe our teachers — fine, fine gentlemen — would have built a XX Days Without An Accident sign if only their students wouldn’t have interpreted it as a challenge. I’d tell you stories, but OSHA’s statute of limitations has not yet expired, and I graduated from high school 16 years ago.
Anyway, I am now the only person in North America to have eaten crab cakes with a dollop of aloe vera on just the bridge of his nose. If we’d made them earlier in the day I could have been the only person in North America to have eaten crab cakes with a dollop of aloe vera on just the bridge of his nose and wet socks, a feat that may never be duplicated.
We’re aiming high around here; it is the weekend.
Oh, need a tune stuck in your head?
Don’t even pretend to be upset. You’re sharing that with everyone in your office come Monday.
Allie, watching her house guest. She and Pluto tolerated each other nicely while we were cat sitting.
Give me thoughtful:
The art/painting/door covering/history lesson at Dreamland’s Montgomery store.
The famous neon. When the lights are glowing the ribs are cooking.
Every other picture I took this week was fireworks related. The one problem with the Fourth of July is how quickly the evening burns itself away. Seems like a long time ago already.
Lord, it was hot today. Walked out onto the back porch and was slightly baked by the convection currents. The thermometer suggested the heat index was 110 degrees.
I have a reasonable tolerance of heat, but be it psychological or physical, anything over 106 just hurts.*
So I hid inside and read. I watched a little television. I caught up on the site. Everything is up-to-date. The July photo gallery is current. Until very recently the photo gallery section was criminally behind. No more.
Also, I transferred a lot of video from blip.tv to boxes holding iframes here. Blip is great. I still use them, but I like to have them linked on the home site, too. So that got done.
Late in the afternoon, when it was only 92 or so, I took The Yankee’s bike to the bike store for a tuneup.
“You’re the guy that brought in the Felt, right?”
That’s right. Good memory.
“I fixed it. It will be ready on Tuesday.”
These are nice guys, they give good advice and have actually offered us a few freebies, but I hope they never run the world. Dropped my bike off late Friday. It was ready by late Saturday. I can pick it up on Tuesday?
I caught up on Falling Skies, TNT’s newest superlatively promoted summer program. Aliens invaded and they’re stilling kids. Somehow John Carter, who left ER to become a librarian and then a professor of history, must save them.
The acting is a bit wooden, but it is post-apocalyptic with optimism, and so that deserves a look. My rule of thumb for science fiction is three episodes. Intrigue me by then or lose me forever. I’m giving Falling Skies a fourth episode, but only because of Will Patton. Tomorrow night’s episode better give me something more. (I’m sure they’re all rushing in to re-write and re-shoot as they read this.)
I even cleaned off a bit of the Netflix queue. Watched it already? Delete. Indy film? You get a short leash. I nixed one this evening because, for the first three minutes there was no dialog. There was a lovely window shot, an introduction to two characters who just stared at each other and then a dream sequence. Three minutes worth of this. Gone.
I did watch One Week, which offers a grim scenario — you get a cancer diagnosis, decide you don’t like much about your life and then buy a motorcycle.
Even if you don’t care for the movie, the scenery is worth seeing alone. Beautifully shot film.
*When we got married the heat index was around 122 degrees. We were married outdoors. We are very smart.
