Memed Again

Memes. I thought they were all dead. I'm presented with the option of blogging about Joel on Software, or the meme that She Says tagged in my general direction. I'm almost done with two programming books, so I'll offer a take on that tomorrow instead, although I could just as well compare Hostel II and Wrong Turn II, which Pooteewheet and I managed to watch in one double feature night. There are a number of similarities, although I don't recommend either.

1. Name one person who made you laugh last night.
Joel, in Joel on Software.

2. What were you doing at 0800?
Working. Specifically, on the same sizing issue I was working on at 4:00 p.m. on Friday when I finished for the day.

3. What were you doing 30 minutes ago?
Driving home from Ikea.

4. What happened to you in 2006?
Vacation with Eryn to Arizona. Left a job I'd been in for almost five years (with a slight interruption).

5. What was the last thing you said out loud?
"Are these your fruitloops?"

6. How many beverages did you have today?
Three cups of coffee. A bottomless Diet Pepsi at Ikea (let's guess "3"). Two big plastic containers full of water. The milk in my knockoff raisin bran at lunch.

7. What color is your hairbrush?
Blue.

8. What was the last thing you paid for?
Half a dozen hotdogs at Ikea.

9. Where were you last night?
At home, watching Wrong Turn II and Hostel II and figuring out bills for the rental properties.

10. What color is your front door?
Brown. Actually, that's the entry door from the garage, but that's the one I use.

11. Where do you keep your change?
In several Penzy's spice jars

12. What’s the weather like today?
Around 65 and very pleasant. I took my jacket off as soon as I hit the parking lot to come home.

13. What’s the best ice-cream flavor?
Coffee, with grounds.

14. What excites you?
Bicycling. Games with friends. Really difficult coding problems (challenging work of any sort, really). Writing.

15. Do you want to cut your hair?
No. I had it cut recently. But they got my sideburns crooked and I had to mend them myself.

16. Are you over the age of 25?
I am as far past 25 as She Says.

17. Do you talk a lot?
People find me quiet at first, then later wonder why I won't shut up.

18. Do you watch the O.C.?
Ish. No.

19. Do you know anyone named Steven?
Yes. He used to look like Sampson, then he cut his hair. I hope it didn't affect his ability to lift rogue servers.

20. Do you make up your own words?
Not too often. I'm more comfortable mocking people who make up their own words, like "Timebound".

21. Are you a jealous person?
Depends. Are we talking about another guy with my wife? Or another guy riding my bike? Because if someone touches her spokes, so help me... Naw. Not so jealous.

22. Name a friend whose name starts with the letter ‘A’.
Adam. His brother is Apollo.

23. Name a friend whose name starts with the letter ‘K’.
Kyle.

24. Who’s the first person on your received call list?
My wife.

25. What does the last text message you received say?
I don't get text messages. I get email. Lots and lots of email. The last one wanted to know what my preference was for birthday treats at work. Donuts, bagels, or bars. I responded that as long as it wasn't a Krispy Kreme, it didn't matter.

26. Do you chew on your straw?
No. I sip my cider through a straw. That's how I met my mother in law.

27. Do you have curly hair?
No. But when it grows long enough, it starts to curl a lot. It doesn't grow long anymore. Ever.

28. Where’s the next place you’re going to?
Came from Ikea. Sitting at home. So.....work!

29. Who’s the rudest person in your life?
Me. I'm very blunt and uninhibited about what I say. I can censor, but I often choose not to

30. What was the last thing you ate?
A potato chip at Ikea.

31. Will you get married in the future?
You mean if my wife dies or leaves me? If a cute British bartending cyclist won't let me into her knickers any other way...yes.

32. What’s the best movie you’ve seen in the past 2 weeks?
I rewatched The Descent. Otherwise, it's been dismal. I've been watching Heroes on Netflix. Maybe that counts. That's enjoyable.

33. Is there anyone you like right now?
I like a lot of people. I like Mean Mr. Mustard. I like Brad. I like Kyle. I like my wife. I really like my daughter. Romantically? Then just Pooteewheet until the British cyclist comes along.

34. When was the last time you did the dishes?
I have rinsed off dishes in the last two days. I haven't physically loaded, turned on, and unloaded the machine since last week. Right now I'm in trouble for not getting my daughter ready for bed because I'm blogging. Minor trouble, but the point was made.

35. Are you currently depressed?
No. But thanks for asking.

36. Did you cry today?
Does on the inside count? No.

37. Why did you answer and post this?
She says has uncanny powers of persuasion.

38. Tag 5 people who would do this survey.
LissyJo, Pooteewheet, Cookie Queen, Mr. Mustard (just because he should blog something), and Kyle, who can carry around the answers in his non-blogging head until our next gaming day.

AND, feel free to change out one of these questions for anything else you want to ask and answer.

The O.C. question must go. It is stupid and not open ended enough to generate any real insight. I would add: "Have you watched any television series, regularly, to which you be ashamed to admit your regular viewership? What was your favorite episode?"

Jesus Posting

What? It's a post about Jesus...in case you couldn't make it to church today. Or just don't go at all. Or were wondering if there are a lot of non-preachy Jesus-related videos on YouTube. I didn't include a link to Jesus attending the porn awards. You'll have to find that one on your own.

Jesus the Musical:


Depeche Mode, Personal Jesus:


Green Day, Jesus of Surburbia (Live)


Rowan Atkinson, Amazing Jesus


Marilyn Manson, Personal Jesus


Tom Waits, Chocolate Jesus (one of my favorites)


Ministry, Jesus Built My Hotrod


Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus


Wilco, Jesus, Etc.


Eric Schwartz, Keep Jesus Off My Penis


Kevin Smith stand up on movies and Jesus


Al Franken's Supply Side Jesus


Not strictly speaking, Jesus, but it's good to end on Monty Python's Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

Two Ways My Brother is Not Like Me

Based on my experience cleaning out some extraneous crap at the rental property management shed over the last two days - sort of an added bonus to steam vacc-ing the previously flooded basement - I have verified two very important differences between my brother and me:

1.) As previously noted to and confirmed by other family members, he has a feathered hair fetish. I think this might be related to his early infatuation with someone from my class who went on to be a Japanese veterinarian.

2.) He is willing to date women who wear overalls. Hard to believe we have the same genes. That's a deal-breaker for me. I don't care if it does sound shallow in a Seinfeldian sort of way, it is.

Overheard at Home Depot

Customer talking to Bloomington Home Depot clerk: "My neighbor bought a really good astringent for his bomb shelter. Do you know which one it might be?"

One of Many Reasons Why I've Never Wanted to be a Cop

Or maybe I just don't want to be a forensic on-scene law enforcement person. I'm not sure who handles this sort of thing. From the Pioneer Press this week in the article, "Bail lowered in hallway rape case", I quote:

"The test showed fluid police initially thought was semen was not..."

Ugh. You have to scrape up what you think is semen and then you find out it's something else that just looks like semen. It tricked you. Fool's semen. So the next time you encounter semen, either on your own or with the aid of a friend, do you then have to pause to examine the results more carefully, just to bone up on your policework?

Probably How Not to Interview

I was sitting upstairs today while two coworkers interviewed a college intern/potential hire in the area next to where I was reading. This is part of the interview:

Interviewer: "What 3 words describe you?"
Intern/Potential Employee: "...Stubborn...............thoughtfully insistent."
Interviewer: (pause)... "What does that mean?"

Netflix Green Screen of Death

I decided to ride my stationary bike last night and watch some streaming Netflix. Seemed like a good coupling. But then I went to kick up the first season of Heroes (how fortuitous!) and it green screened and told me I had a problem with my video driver. So I checked the video drivers, and they were pretty much up to date except for an update to the new Samsung driver. Tried again...failure. So I biked and watched Dawn of the Dead via the DVD player on the machine instead. That worked just fine.

Today I went looking around the net and found three methods to fix the issue. This first fix involves disabling your hardware acceleration on the system. That would suck. That affects all your video. Why would you do that, particularly if DVDs and non-Netflix things run just fine. The second fix is installing a full codecs package that updates everything. One site I looked at had half a dozen people on their comment board alternating between (I paraphrase a bit so they don't find me) "this sucks, I can't uninstall it and it doesn't work" with "you're a loser, this is the best" followed by "eat crap and die, nothing works anymore" then the repsonse "you're a hater" punctuated with "it takes an extra ten seconds to start every video, but I guess that's ok" then "why do you losers come here - you know it works, you're not trying" ending with "why don't you try our total codec pack, it's better!" No thanks.

This seemed to be the obvious solution. Potentially recommended by Netflix (although that's second hand, like all good urban legends), only affects Windows Media Player, which is what Netflix uses under the covers, and is easily undone. So here is the green screen of death in Netflix streaming player fix that worked for me:

Open Windows Media Player, (right click) go to tools, then options, click on the performance tab, drag the video acceleratoin bar to none, click on advanced, uncheck the enable full-screen mode box, apply all settings (you may get a warning that it will reset where you are if you currently have a video on the screen...oh well).

Viola! Heroes: Season I and stationary biking.


Pathetic second option:
DO THIS TO FIX GREEN VIDEO SCREEN ON PC Click Start Choose Control Panel Click Display Icon Click on Settings Click on Advanced Click on Trouble Shoot Reduce the Hardware acceleration slider from Full to half way or one quarter. Thats it.....


Third difficult method:
All in one codec pack

New Business Phase I Hate

I hate it when someone says something like, "I asked Jim to check on that." And then person number two responds, "Did you timebound that?"

Gives me the willies just typing it.

Vacation Videoblogging

The end of the vacation posts, I promise. But Eryn's grandparents really need the videos, and LissyJo needs a new singing video for my niece to sing along during her obstipation. Grandpa Grumpa Little Dumpa should fit the bill nicely.

Eryn and Pooteewheet climbing at Garden of the Gods:


Eryn in a rock sandwich at Garden of the Gods:


Throwing sand at White Sands:


Sledding at White Sands:


Singing the Hokey Pokey:


Good advice to Grandpa:


Grandpa Gumpa Little Dumpa:

Ka-pow

When I was in the Wells Fargo bank parking lot in Eagan today, it was difficult to park because there were so many cops, and a tow truck. I don't know what the deal was, because there didnt' seem to be anything in particular going on, other than two cops with three squad cars having a guy filling out forms and dropping things into a plastic bag. Voluntarially that is, he didn't look to be under duress. It was more like he was identifying things. When I came back out to my car, I noticed a crimped brass shell sitting next to the car, so I wandered over and told the policeman about it, who came over to get it. Now I have to wonder if I missed a robbery (with subsequent apprehension) just before I got to the bank. Weird.

Speaking of bullets - right after I got my brand new screen, the computer took one. It caught Vundo again, a particularly annoying version of the infection that neither VundoFix nor VirtumondoBeGone could cure because a virus dll, gebbcyy.dll, was hanging out on some faux explore.exe process . I went so far as to post on the Atribune site to see if they could help me remove it, but before they got back to me, Norton grabbed a new set of virus definitions and one of them actually seemed to catch and clean the Trojan. At least it looks that way. No more random popups. No more spiking CPU, not even a little bit of spiking when I'm looking at ProcessExplorer. The quarantine indicates it grabbed the offending file as well as piles of registry entries. I feel much better about life when I'm virus free. I don't know how you all mentally handle your biological STDs. I'd be miserable with worry.

PLDs

Per my bike club. Excellent. I fully endorse PLD discrimination:

In accordance with our Risk Management Policy, the TCBC Board of Directors at its October 2, 2007, meeting unanimously voted to ban all Personal Listening Devices (PLDs) on all TCBC bicycle rides effective immediately. PLDs include such items as iPods and radios or headphones of any type, except for tandem communication systems. The TCBC Board believe that using PLDs while bicycling, either in a group or alone, is unsafe and poses an unnecessary risk to the user and other riders. Safe bicycling demands the riders' complete attention and the total use of their available senses 100% of the time. Riders who fail to respect this policy will be removed from the participation list of the ride they are on. Habitual offenders will not be welcomed on future TCBC rides.
Best Regards, The TCBC Board

Vacation, Day ? - Casa Grande and the Tonto (Salada Ruins)

I had meant to blog about the last day of vacation early this morning, but last night around 10:15 my brother called to tell me one of the tenants in Richfield had flooded their basement. They said the washing machine had malfunctioned. But when we got there, it was fairly obvious "malfunctioned" meant they had filled the washing machine to level with the top with clothes (level when wet, so they were actually packed in the machine - they had to have been tamped down), to the extent that it messed up the water sensor, set it to large load, and left the building for eight hours. There was water everywhere - in the laundry room, which is large, out of the laundry room and across every inch of the downstairs living room, and even beyond that into the back bedroom. I had to take the steam vac to the floor for five hours (literally - my back hurts), and we'll still have to go back tomorrow night to do another run once the water has seeped downhill out of the wall and carpet toward the drainward wall. Did I mention all the kitty litter in the drain backing it up? She's not even supposed to have pets.

Anyway, at least waiting until tonight means I get to enjoy blogging on my new 22" Samsung LCD 226BW. Oh yeah...they might not love me at work, but Mom and Dad love me enough to make up for it. So shiny...so big...hoo ah. The pictures of me inappropriately touching animal statues have never looked so fine.

Before the last vacation pics, I also spent several hours mowing up four week old grass and a bunch of dry leaves, and I spent the evening at Sarah and Pete's wedding, held very close to my house at the Tropics Trail at the New Zoo. Being able to sit with a beer on the bench in the aquarium area without any little kids around is exceedingly fun. Michelle, who I used to work with, told me she was from Eagle Grove. I biked within a block of her house when I was on RAGBRAI. If you're not familiar with Eagle Grove, I have video: 1, 2. Kurt, who I also used to work with, told me about his travels to Glendive. He's SEEN Glendisaurus!

On to the last bloggable day of our vacation to Arizona. I leave it to Pooteewheet to blog about almost getting hit in the face with toast. I'm going to show pictures of our trip to the Hohokam ruins at Casa Grande, and then to Tonto National Monument, where there are Salado ruins, way way up on cliff, where it's hard to breath.

Here's the full Casa Grande set.

Here's me, between Casa Grande and Tonto, kissing an owl. He's kind of creepy, like one of those pictures of the young girl and the old girl in the same picture. Is he an owl, or a many toothed monster? I touched both of them inappropriately. You may wonder why I've moved from bad touch to bad kiss. Can't really say. Sometimes the spirit moves you. But I promise I won't ever get (fully) naked.


This is a link, not a picture. It takes you to a close up of a wall at Casa Grande. Most of the ruins are just chicken wire with plaster over the top to replace what's been touched so many times it's no longer original anything, other than dust. And this picture shows why, but you have to view it in close up so you can see the inscription. If your grandparents ever tell you how things used to be much better in their days, as my grandmother was telling me while we were at Casa Grande, you can just point to this graffiti on the wall, written in 1891, and note that vandals have been around since before your grandparents were born. This wasn't even the oldest graffiti - some of it was from the (18)60's.

This is Casa Grande. Big big adobe-type house in the middle of nowhere. The roof is supposed to protect it, but it encourages pigeons and owls and, hence, droppings, so I don't know how much protecting it does. Six of one, half dozen of the other. Anything that looks smooth has been replastered. The graffiti is generally on the inside, before they sealed it off.


A picture from further back, so you can appreciate the gas station-style cover. Maybe Casa Grande was a gas station for Atlantis...who knows? Not me. Not you. Could have been.


Eryn lounging in a door. You might think, "Hey, this is why they need to plaster everything all the time!" And you'd be correct. But as you can tell from the break above the door, she's leaning against new plaster and chicken wire, not centuries-old adobe. The Hohokam got even with us by leaving their dirt all over Eryn's Chococat shirt.


Pooteewheet in adobe jail. I bet she can dig her way out. It looks like they used to pee out this window.


The exhibits claimed this was a petroglyph of some animal that was being hunted. But I've been to (what was formerly) Camp Snoopy, and the only thing missing is a mouth harp. I don't know who the Nostradamus of the Hohokam Indians was who saw this in a dream, but he was spot on.


After we were disappointed with Casa Grande, I noted that one of the exhibits said there were other ruins nearby at Tonto National Monument. My mother said it was indeed close and we should go. But close meant it was almost two hours away over mountains and scary hairpin turns where any sane human - i.e. not from Arizona - would not travel faster than 45 mph. We barely made it in time to sprint up the hideously long and steep stepback to see the Salado ruins at the top, and the trip back to Tucson was up and down over mountains in pitch black night. It all seriously freaked me out.

The Salado ruins. That woman in the picture had her kids up there. Her husband pushed a stroller up to the ruins. Doesn't sound so bad...until you check out the next two pictures.


Eryn, is she tired from going up...or coming down? "Dad, I promise I'll be good, just don't make me go to the f*ing ruins. This is how they died, climbing up and down and up and down and up and down the g*ddamn mountain. If they'd have just built their ruins next to the reservoir, they'd still be alive and driving their cars to the Casa Grande gas station for $2.78/gallon fill ups and sending postcards back to their friends pretending to be Rod Plant. Do you have an oatmeal bar? I'm out of energy."


This isn't meant to show you the pretty reservoir, but rather our cars. In the lower right, that tiny little strip of road...those two little dots are cars. We're parked a little further away from the trail head.


Pooteewheet. She asked me to take this picture, despite being so seriously ill she was going to hurl. Look at her cheeks - death warmed over. Or maybe she's just embarrassed because I asked if she wanted to get jiggy wit it in the Salado storage room. "Let's make the ruins come alive again," didn't work for her. Prude.

She barely made it back down the hill. I think she missed most of Eryn's repeated chanting of "Grandpa grumpa, little dumpa", which doesn't sound particularly funny, but which amused Eryn to no end and made some amusing laughing echoes off the cliff sides. Grandpa didn't like the rhyme as much as she did, basically making it self-fulfilling. Stare at Pooteewheet's chest as much as you want, I do, but you'll find no Snoopy petroglyph adorning her breasts. Commendations to anyone who comes up with a guess as to what her shirt says in ancient Native American. I vote for "I walked and walked up to these ruins and it feels like someone poked me in the butt with a trident."


No...no. I'll be good. I promise. I'll be good, Salado Witch. I'll stand in the corner and count, just like I'm supposed to. Mom...Dad...I'm sorry...I'm so sorry...


Everyone in Arizona is a communist. Don't believe me? Explain this...


The rest of the Tonto National Monument, Salado Ruins, pictures.

Vacation - Interlude - Hot Tub, Multipurpose Tools

There are a bunch of pictures for the inlaws and family right here. Mini golf, carousel rides, train rides, motorcycle rides, new boots, Halloween decorations, et al. Everything we did in Tucson proper that didn't fit into an event category. Over here, we have all of Pooteewheet's pictures from Karchener Caverns. I'd already been without her on a previous trip, so she went alone. You can't take pictures in the caverns, however, so this is more of a study in desert wildlife and fauna. Some very pretty pictures.

I will highlight two pictures from Tucson. One, me in a hot tub examining the "temperature duck" to determine how long my regionally appropriate beer will stay cold. My mother collects rubber ducks and Eryn's hobby is to play with them (although Grandma sent her home with several ducks of her own). Eryn moved a selection of them into the hot tub, presumably so you would all have to be subjected to this picture.



Great Grandma gave Eryn some tape. At first she claimed she had meant to get her scotch tape instead of duct, electricians, and piping tape. Then she claimed it was emergency tape, and she didn't know how it go into the gift bag she bought Eryn. But Eryn was happy and put it to good use taping all of John's tools together. Allison reminisced with me on the phone about how she'd once been duct taped to the tree in our front yard only to have my cousin bang her head into the trunk. Good times. She fully approved and sanctioned Eryn's plan for the duct tape.

Vacation, Day 7 - Chiricahua

I told you I bought a 2 gig camera chip. Did you think it wasn't going to get used? I've been giving it some thought, though. And I think next major picture taking event, I'm only posting a few pictures to Flickr per day. Quality over quantity. The extra 100 pictures or so per event will still exist on my drive, but you won't be subject to 35 pictures of my bald spot from different angles. Don't thank me until after you've been subject to me in a hot tub with rubber ducks.

We stopped early after White Sands, not too far from Tucson, and spent one more night on the road, in Wilcox, Arizona, so we could check out Chiricahua National Monument (nice panoramic picture at Wikipedia at the bottom) the next morning. It's famous for...more rocks! I admit, we may have overdone the rocks on this trip. But it was pretty neat, and next time we go to Arizona, I think Pooteewheet and I may set aside some time to go hiking, even if it means camping out. They have some 13-17 mile hikes that lead from the base of the mountains all the way to the tip top, higher than the area below where Eryn and I are standing.

Climbing up here made me a little nervous, and I'm a guy who slept against a 21 story window drop for two years. I wasn't convinced the cement was sturdy enough. I had more faith in the rock I was standing on.


Another picture of all the pillars. You can climb around down there, although you have to watch out for rattlesnakes. Two little girls who were running around told us to be careful because they had heard one off the trail (they were very earnest).


Pooteewheet on a big rock. It's much higher than it might seem in 300x400 resolution, and she had to shimmy up a little ledge to get up there. I crawled up to get the camera from her so I could take a picture - there was a nice breeze.


I don't know why I'm in this pose in two different locales. But it's very similar to how Eryn poses when someone's taking a picture and she's freeforming. Quit looking up my shorts.


Grandma, sitting where there's no bouldering necessary. When you're 92, bouldering is way way down the list of activities you want to participate in. Underneath that tree smelled like the best pine air freshener ever made...you know, almost like a real pine, but better.


All the Chiricahua pictures.

Vacation, Day 6 - White Sands

Where's Day 5!? Day 5 was a traveling day. We pretty much pushed all the way down to Alamogordo, just shy of White Sands, so we could start at the park in the morning. If I have one important thing to say about day 5, it is this...if you ever find yourself in Las Vegas, New Mexico, stop at Charlie's Spic & Span Bakery and Cafe. It was absolutely delicious. The tortillas were baked fresh, the breakfast was incomparable, and I could buy a cup of Starbuck's to go.

If you're in Alamogordo, don't stop at the Kmart. They'll sell you the wrong sled for cruising down the dunes at White Sands, and their customer base includes this guy who apparently sees belonging to the Confederacy as a heritage issue, even though he's in New Mexico. I guess slavery does involve heritage issues when you consider the split up families and multi-racial children, although I doubt that's his point.


Maybe Heritage Not Hate guy was just sight-seeing like we were. Could be he thought White Sands meant something entirely different.

Eryn and I stopped at White Sands last year when we were taking Grandma south, but it was raining so hard a large part of the park was closed. This year it was all open and we got to go back into the center of the dunes. Looks cold, doesn't it? I kept expecting to slide all over the road while I was driving. It even looks like there's a fish house on the ice.


Here's Eryn fully enjoying riding a sled down the sand. This was the sled we rented from the park. The sled Jen bought at Kmart we gave to my Dad in Tucson. He'll probably have to pull rocks with it, because there's not much snow. There are a few pictures of Pooteewheet tumbling out of the sled if you head over to the Flickr set.


The whole family. Eryn's hot. Little Miss Brown was literally burning, and she was crabby with me for telling her not to jump off the catwalk before I could check for snakes and lizards and spiders that might be lounging in the shade.


Pooteewheet wrote this, not Eryn, but it's a good picture because it shows that they take a snowplow to the area to keep the roads clear, packing the sand up in little walls just like here in Minnesota after a 10" storm.


Grandma and Eryn standing in some ants so we could get a good picture.


SAND FIGHT! Way in the back you can see the crappy red sled Pooteewheet bought at Kmart. Eryn filled it full of sand. Pooteewheet left us out here after we figured out the sled was a bust while she went back to the visitor area to get a different one. It's sort of creepy sitting out in the dunes with no car and no one else around.


Another picture of Eryn with the sun to her back. This one looks very nice close up and cropped.


Tripod prints! It's because we in the White Mountains. I didn't meet any French kids, but there was an Italian couple at the visitor center. She wanted to go to the bathroom, so she dropped her purse on a bench and told him (I assume) to watch her purse. He was filming with a video camera, and smacked the LCD window shut, then made a multi chopping gesture with the hand, while mumbling under his breath in Italian. It was like something out of an old movie that takes place in Rome.


Finally, a picture to make Mean Mr. Mustard sad. After the apocalypse, there will be no one left alive to eat the Red Vines as they're slowly buried beneath the sands of our demise. Should he take a space ship into the future and end up here, chased by ape men and fleshy headed mutants, he will undoubtedly kneel down, head and arms thrust at heaven, Red Vines clutched in his fists, screaming, "Damn you. Damn you all to hell!" He's sort of likely to do something like that in the here and now anyway, so it's not such a stretch.


Here's the rest of the White Sands set.

Rod Plant

An aside on the whole vacation thing. While I was traveling, I took the time to pick up a number of postcards and mail them to Kyle at work. Not because I thought he might enjoy looking at all the pretty pictures, but because it was an opportunity to send him cards with a gay subtext from his friend Rod. My hope was that because they were postcards and fully open to examination, the admin at his office or his local postperson might read them first, noting that despite Kyle having been married, he had still found time to attend and be part of the audience participation for Puppetry of the Penis, had carnal relations with a really old guy in Paris, once engaged in a Mexican meal with 8 cabana boys, reminded Rod of large cacti and cave formations, and decorated his basement as some sort of queer eye styled orgy room. That wasn't the full extent of it, just a few of the highlights, but you get the postcard. While traveling to Tonto National Monument near Globe, Arizona, (where Linda Carter when to high school) we drove past a copper mine and saw a building labeled as the Rod Plant. That's how Rod got his full name.

But the best part is that I pulled the original address for Kyle's workplace off USWestDex, only later finding the real address at his company's website. So several of the early postcards went to the wrong address where his company had previously resided, now occupied by an office for the Catholic Church. It's almost enough to make me believe in divine intervention. They must be absolutely horrified.

Vacation, Day 4 - Garden of the Gods

Day four we pulled into Colorado Springs. It was the only day we stayed at a motel we hadn't set eyes on before getting a room, and it was a close call, just down the road from a few liquor stores and a pawn shop. But the desk guy was great and the rooms were great.

Although it was getting late as we pulled into town, we stopped off at Garden of the Gods to look at the local rock formations and crawl around the boulders, shadowed by the incessant warble of the Questioning Four Year Old, "Why do they call it Garden of the Gods? Why? Why 'the gods'? Why the Garden of the Gods? Why do they call it that?" We explained garden. We explained gods. We explained garden of the gods. We explained it in terms of her rock collection. We explained it in terms of Hercules the Disney movie. It was more tiring than the bouldering.

A basic idea of what to see at Garden of the Gods. Rocks and trees. But very picturesque.


Kissing camels, or a fire-breathing camel, or a camel that's had too much to drink. It all depends on your state of mind.


Eryn and I lending a hand to stabilize the park. All the land at Garden of the Gods was once owned by a guy who would let you see the balancing rocks and would take your picture in front of the best one. When everyone began to have cheap cameras he built a fence around it. His children later made up for it by donating the land to the city and entry is now free. Apparently people cheered when the fence surrounding balancing rock was torn down.


Much better in close up. If I don't use the picture I'll post in the next few days of me in a hot tube with a beer and rubber ducks, I'll use a close up of this one to replace my blog picture. I didn't really have any sort of plan in mind when I did this, other than posing, but it sort of looks like I'm trying to ride a sandworm, ala Dune.


Cute picture of Eryn, who was happy to be out of the car and would have stayed for a full day if she could have. On a rock. Off a rock. On a rock. Off a rock. "Why's it the Garden of the Gods?" On a rock. Off a rock.


An even cuter picture of Eryn in a rock crack. We checked carefully for rattlers first.


Here's the complete photo set with rock climbers, a picture or two of grandma, etc.

Vacation, Day 3 - Little Big Horn

Day 3 was almost day 2 of vacation. When we disembarked from Amtrak, Grandma informed me that my Dad had told her we had to leave directly from Williston as a big snow storm was on the way. It was a little drizzly, but it didn't seem that cold. Of course, that doesn't mean there's no snow in the mountains of Colorado. In the past, that might have been a problem, particularly as my Dad was in Denmark and out of reach, but with my trusty blackberry I could kick up weather.com and peruse the reports. Boulder, 74 degrees. Denver, 76 degrees. Colorado Springs, 74 degrees. "Grandma, there's no snow south of here, it's supposed to be genuinely nice." She replied, "It's going to snow." I said, "No it's not. It's nice, even the seven day forecast is good." She replied, "In Yellowstone! Snow!" "But Grandma, we're not going through Yellowstone." She still wasn't completely convinced until I informed her that regardless of the weather we were not leaving, we were going to our hotel for a good night of rest.

The next day we had a nice breakfast at the Sidney Elks. Then we visited my great uncle, Fred who I guess was in Operation Market Garden. I'd never heard that before, so that was interesting. Grandma didn't say Market Garden, but she did note he'd been in the Netherlands in WWII and Fred had seen a lot of combat, so that's probably where he was. I didn't get a picture of Fred, but I did get a picture of Glendisaurus, the Glendive Triceratops in his home town. This is me giving Glendisaurus a belly kiss.


Proof that he, or she, is really a Glendisaurus and not some other Argentinian flavor of dinosaur. I wish this sign had said why they felt compelled to create a triceratops on the edge of town.


Our touristy stop for the day, on our way to Wyoming, was Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. The last time I had been there it was still Custer National Battlefield. It's nice to see George's pa renamed the place in '91. Interesting fact, all the grave markers are placed where the bodies were initially found after the battle, so they're all over the place and you can see the ebb and flow of the battle across the hills and how soldiers were isolated into pockets by looking for clumps of graves. This one with the black face is where they found Custer.


Later, they put in some markers for where Native American bodies were found as well, as best they could determine from the evidence and where the Native Americans left markers.


None of Custer's troops are actually buried under their markers. They're all buried in a mass grave on the hill under this big marker. Behind the marker, where you can't see it, is the grave for the horses that died. They were used as a wall during the fight to stop the bullets. Eryn was very concerned about all the dead horses.


This one seemed most interesting of the many graves, given the next picture commemorates the children and women who died as well.


Part of the Native American memorial on the site. I believe one of the names on the memorial is "Stabs". And here you can see "Kills Him" and "Plenty Lice." Eryn found the names fascinating. I don't think kids see the attraction in being named "Plenty Lice" or the potential irony of being named "Kills Him".


The Native American memorial. The funding they'd been after for such a long time to build it showed up under GW in 2003 under an interior appropriates bill. It's very pretty - you can see it better if you click through.


The whole thing, end to end.


It was a bit chilly out for snakes, but this sign amused me. As long as you're not on the trail, you should be safe?


You can see the rest of the Little Big Horn Battlefield set here.

Vacation, Day 2 - Sugar Beet Enemas

These are a few pictures from the Sidney, Montana, area proper. Here be beets. Sugar beets. A big freaking pile of the things. There are hundreds of these piles and thousands of weirdly-geodesic beet-filled trucks, some of them kicking up rocks into your window.


This is me doing my best to inappropriately touch a giant sugar beet. In retrospect, I should have stood on that little ledge and bent over in front of it so it would look like it was being rectally inserted, but hey, hindsight is 20/20.


This is my grandma's old house. I spent a lot of time in the very hot upper floor during summers at the farm. She sold it about a year ago, and the first thing the new owners did was to paint it the exact same green and pastel purple as the local movie theater. Grandma hates it. But then, she told my wife and daughter a story about how my parents wanted to have me sent to a special school where they kept kids from growing, and I quote, "freakishly tall." She said I stopped growing just in time to avoid this fate, which must have involved anti-racking, lots of coffee, absurd amounts of weight lifting, computer games, a healthy supply of cocaine and daily beatings. I'm not irritated with her for telling my family the story. I'm irritated with my parents for depriving me of all that fun and her for not applying more pressure to have me sent to said school. Now she has to look at this picture as long as Flickr exists.

Vacation Day 1 - We Amtrak

Taking grandma to Tucson requires making one's way to Sidney, Montana. We couldn't drive, because the point of the exercise was to take grandma and her van to Arizona. That leaves two options. One, fly into the Sidney airport like that idiot teen who wanted to visit his girlfriend in Sydney, Australia, but couldn't spell or figure out where Australia is in relation to Montana. But, despite my many hours in a small engine plane, including solo-ing, I have an unnatural fear of riding in small planes with someone else at the yoke. No damn way. I don't even like to fly commercial without checking to ensure the maximum number of engines possible between source and destination. Option two, the train. Amtrak from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Williston, North Dakota, 11:00 p.m. to 11:00 a.m. Some advice - spring for the sleeper car if you can afford it. I slept like a baby, except when the train would stop. Pooteewheet slept like a baby, only when the train was stopped. Eryn slept all the time. It was sort of like the three bears, except without a cute blonde sneaking into my bunk in the middle of the night and complaining I was too big.

Here's Pooteewheet taking out her lack of sleep on a stuffed dog in the dining car. He's a bomb-sniffing dog from the State Fair, so I don't know what she's trying to cover up - probably an explosive temper.


A light from what are probably Amtrak days gone by. The women's lounge, next to the Lav Area. We still have a breastfeeding room at work, but I don't think this is the same thing. I went in search of it, just in case it was one of those 100-virgin things, and they really meant it was a room full of women for me to peruse (hey...if it really is an Amtrak harem, peruse is the correct word), but all I found were the bathrooms. In defense of Amtrak, the light never lit up, so maybe I just didn't purchase the right level of sleeping berth.


Lots of Flickr photos from the Amtrak ride.