Our Trip Out West, Part 4: The Canyons of Utah

We left Grand Canyon National Park and headed east, because that’s what you have to do in order to get around the Grand Canyon.  It’s a very large hole in the ground.  You have to go around it.

Fortunately Arizona is fairly scenic in that part of the state, all red rocks and outcroppings that made me think of any number of novels where the good guys come up against castles on mountains that they either have to conquer or warn about something.  I’m not sure what I would have warned anybody in Arizona about – drought, maybe? – and conquering really isn’t my speed, but it kept my mind occupied while the empty miles rolled by and we retraced our path into Utah. 

Other than the mountains, the best part of this phase of the trip was stopping in a tiny little speck on the highway called Gap, Arizona, which as far as we could tell consisted of a convenience store and some signs indicating that a school was somewhere in the vicinity.  I never did see the school though Kim and the girls insist it was right there to be seen, but we and almost every other driver on the highway stopped at the convenience store for snackage and drinks.


Yes, we stopped at the Gap Store.  No, we didn’t think to take any pictures of it until long after we’d left.

We had two goals for the rest of this day, the first being to reach our hotel – what turned out to be a rather charming place called the Riverside Ranch Motel and RV Park just north of Hatch, Utah.  It sits on a large plot of open land by the highway, and you can see for miles from your room.  It’s run by a guy named Bill, who minds the place for his daughter now that he’s retired.  Bill’s pretty laid back.  He was out doing something in the RV part of the establishment when we got there, but our room (and that of two other guys who stopped at about the same time we did) was left unlocked for us.  He was happy to talk to us for a while – I’d imagine he doesn’t get too much company out there – and when he found out that Lauren raised turkeys for 4H he recommended a movie called “My Life as a Turkey,” which is apparently available on YouTube and which we still need to see. 

We didn’t stay too long to talk with Bill, though, because we had another goal before we landed for the night: Bryce Canyon.

You’d think we’d have been canyoned out by then, but you’d be wrong.  For one thing, the Grand Canyon is its own thing – there really isn’t anything like it in the world.  And for another, so is Bryce.  It’s much more human scale, and when you get right down to it, a good deal weirder.

We like weird.

So we hopped back in the car and headed off to Bryce.

We eventually found our way into the park – a long ride down a highway followed by a twisty sort of turning road that takes you through a couple of stone archways. 

And then, after a brief detour because of a missed sign, we made our way to Inspiration Point just as the light was beginning to fail.  We parked in the little lot and climbed up the slope to see what was on the other side.

It is astonishing what wind, rain, and erosion can do to rock.   

And then we hiked further up the slope for a slightly higher perspective on the whole thing. 

After a while the light began to fade in earnest and we had to head back to our hotel, but it was quite a sight, up there on Inspiration Point.

The next day we spent much of the morning foraging for breakfast.  The restaurant next to our hotel was closed for retirement and scheduled to reopen whenever they found someone who would take it over, which would likely be longer than we had time to wait, and restaurants – like other forms of human settlement – are not all that common in that part of the world.  So we drove south on 89 until we came to a nice little German bakery in the middle of nowhere.  You could get pastries – most of which were nut-safe, actually – and a meat and cheese plate, and it was a fine meal out there on the range.  I’m not sure what a German bakery – run by actual Germans, if the cashier’s accent was anything to go by – was doing out in the Utah scrublands, but it was good food and welcome.

Fueled and fed, we made our way to Zion National Park.

Zion is one of the most popular National Parks in America, and if you plan to go there you should expect a crowd.  But it’s popular for a reason, as it is singularly gorgeous and fairly easy for the casual tourist to get around in.  Once you park, at least.

We entered the park – our nifty Grand Canyon pass got us in for free, so it’s already paid for itself – and drove slowly along the road toward the Visitor Center.  It is a ride filled with astonishing views, so you don’t mind the fact that you’re creeping along at about 20mph the whole time, and there are pull-offs every so often if you want to stop and appreciate the scenery for a while.  We did both, riding and stopping, and enjoyed it immensely. 

When we got to the Visitor Center there was a plaintive little sign announcing that all parking was full until possibly Christmas and that we should find a parking spot in the little town just south of the park’s official border.  This turned out to be not all that hard.  There are problems that can be solved by throwing money at them, and a parking lot is a grand symbol of that.

Now all we had to do was get back to the park.

Fortunately Zion, like the Grand Canyon, has an effective network of shuttle buses.  In fact, it has two.  There’s one for the town, where you ride it up to the border of the park and then walk across a footbridge to get into the park itself, and another for the park that takes you from the Visitor Center up to the canyon and various points of interest along the way.  The line to get onto one of those park buses stretched for about a hundred yards or so, but with double buses arriving roughly every four minutes, it moved along nicely.

And the ride was suitably scenic. 

Our goal was to find the Weeping Rock, which has what they call a hanging garden.  Water seeps through the rock from above until it hits a layer that isn’t as permeable and then it goes horizontally until it comes out and drips down the side.  This makes two things happen.  First, the outside drips eventually carve an alcove into the rock where you can stand and enjoy the scenery.  It’s about ten degrees Fahrenheit cooler there than anywhere else in the park.  And second, plants take root in the rock overhead and form the garden. 

It wasn’t hard to find – about a ten minute walk from the shuttle stop.  We stood there in the spray and took it all in. 

And then we wandered back down to the shuttle and found a stop that served us lunch and allowed us to purchase souvenirs.  I mostly buy keychains and such, because we use them for Christmas ornaments.  Eventually we will be able to decorate our entire tree just with reminders of places we’ve been.

After lunch we found the shuttle again and made our way back to our car and on to the next adventure.

Our Trip Out West, Part 3: The Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon is one of those things that need to be seen in person, because the pictures really do not convey the immensity of the place.

It is a vast thing. 

It’s two hundred and seventy-seven miles long, a mile deep in most places, and about ten miles across on average.  The Colorado River is three miles from the south rim, and therefore seven miles from the north.  The National Park Service estimates that it should take you about three days to hike down to the river from the south rim, and warns against anybody trying to do that on their own.  There are signs here and there listing the rescues that they undertake for people who ignore those warnings, and if you truly miss the point the gift shops sell a fascinating inch-thick book that does nothing but describe all of the people known to who have died in the Grand Canyon since white people found it, helpfully arranged in chapters by cause and updated to 2015.  The south rim is roughly a thousand feet lower than the north rim, all those miles away, which means it has completely different weather.  When you add all that up, you will understand why you can watch an entire rainstorm cruise up the canyon without getting wet yourself. 

Honestly, even standing in front of it live and in person you often get the feeling that you’re looking at a painted backdrop because the sheer size of the place is just that difficult to wrap your head around. 

One of the things that stuck with me most about the Grand Canyon was a sign at one of the viewpoints that quoted an early Spanish explorer.  He reported that men who had been sent into the canyon came back reporting that boulders they had thought from the rim were the size of men were actually the size of houses, and that other rock formations they thought were the size of houses were taller than the Tower of Seville.  It’s deceptive, looking on from the rim.

We got there a bit after 8pm, though that’s misleading too since Arizona does not recognize Daylight Savings Time except when it does.  It’s an hour earlier than Utah  at the Grand Canyon unless you’re on the Navajo reservation, in which case they do recognize Daylight Savings Time and it’s the same time as Utah.  And if that makes no sense to you then you can take it up with Benjamin Franklin or Woodrow Wilson because I found that the best strategy was simply to ignore the clocks as much as possible.

We still had some daylight when we got there, no matter what time it was. 

In order to get to our hotel in Tusayan, where most of the hotels are if you’re visiting the south rim of the National Park, you actually have to go through the park.  So we paid our admission – got a nifty little pass that allows us to get into all of the national parks for a full year, actually, so perhaps we’ll be doing more traveling soon – and we headed into the park.

The first stop we came to was the Desert View Watchtower, which bears no small resemblance to Bohus Fastning, a medieval fortress that we visited in Sweden a few years ago.  Maybe that's just what watchtowers look like.  There's an old line among historians about how the fact that there are ancient pyramids in Egypt, Sudan, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica really does prove that a pyramid is a good shape to pile rocks in if you don't want them to fall down.  Sometimes it is just that simple.  The Desert View Watchtower is not that old, though - it's a purpose-built observation tower, and you can climb up inside to get a good view of the east end of the Grand Canyon.  Or you could if it were open.  But it had closed about an hour before we got there, so we milled around outside and were suitably impressed anyway.  

As the light faded we headed out through the park and found our hotel.


It was a lovely hotel, really, once you mastered the art of parking in its labyrinthine lots and skirted around the tour buses parked randomly in traffic while discharging vast quantities of Asian men in white robes.  We had a very nice room with comfortable beds and the whole thing was located at one end of a commercial strip that featured one of the best Mexican restaurants we’ve been to in a long time.  If you’re ever in Tusayan, Arizona, you should stop by the Plaza Bonita for some really good food.  We liked it so much that we ate dinner there both nights we were in Tusayan, though that also might have had something to do with the fact that it was a) within walking distance of the hotel and b) open late for dinner, since neither night did we get there before 9pm.  Still – good food.

We started early the next morning, driving up to the Visitor Center to get oriented.  Despite dire warnings about the lack of parking, including signs on both days we visited advising us that the parking lots were completely full and we should try to find parking somewhere in New Mexico, we never did have any trouble finding a spot.  Let that be a lesson, folks – the signs only tell you what they want you to believe, not what’s actually there.

We went in and dutifully watched the movie that they show every half hour – a cinematic tour de force that no doubt won some kind of award – and then went off to see it for ourselves.

It’s no more comprehensible in the morning sunlight, really. 

From the Visitor Center we walked over to Mather Point and then west along the rim until we finally got hungry enough to eat lunch, sometime in the middle of the afternoon.  This turned out to be quite an adventure, as our target restaurant was not the first place we went into (that was a rather fancier hotel) nor the second (a place called the Arizona Room) nor what we hoped it would be once we got to it (turned out to be a walk-up ice-cream-and-dog stand), so we ended up back at the Arizona Room where we enjoyed a lovely meal overlooking the canyon.

Somewhere in there we got to see the rainstorm go by.  It was gorgeous in its way, especially since you could see the lightning across the way.  It changed the lighting in the canyon quite a bit.  

By this point it was getting late in the afternoon, so we took the shuttle bus back to the Visitor Center – the park has a large and efficient shuttle bus system that should be a model for public transportation systems everywhere – raided the gift shop for souvenirs, and then drove out to the Tusayan ruins.

No, not the commercial strip where our hotel was.  That was fine.

The ruins are an 800-year-old Native American village on the very eastern edge of the park.  We’d passed it on the way in the previous night.  We got there about ten minutes before the museum closed but it’s small enough that you can get a good sense of what’s in it in that amount of time – some artifacts, including some twisted twig animal figures that I thought were fascinating, and a bit about the culture that produced it all. 

And then we got to explore the ruins, which are in pretty good shape and right out there on the trail.  There are polite little signs asking you not to walk on them, and we took that advice. 

From there we worked our way back down the road toward the Visitor Center again.

We stopped at the Desert Tower again, which was open this time.  You can walk in and up the four flights of stairs to the top, or you can stop halfway and go out onto an observation area and see from there.

Then we moved on to Moran Point.

Thomas Moran was one of the multitude of artists drawn to the Grand Canyon over the last couple of centuries because of the scenery and the way the light plays upon it.  He painted his most famous works from what is now Moran Point, and since Tabitha fell in love with one of them back at the Philadelphia Art Museum a couple of years ago we decided that this would be a good place to stop.

I can see why he liked the vantage from there. 

Of course, it’s not all scenic splendor at the Grand Canyon.   

The next day we decided to try the hotel buffet since it was pretty much the same price as the local McDonalds for breakfast.  All meals cost about the same in Tusayan, apparently.  I’m not sure how they coordinate that but nevertheless ‘tis true, ‘tis true.

We checked out of our hotel and headed back up to the Visitor Center, where we got on the various shuttle buses that took us up to Hermit Point and found ourselves surrounded by Wisconsinites.  They’re everywhere, fleeing the state for parts unknown.  I’m not sure what that implies, but there you have it.  Eventually we made it all the way out to Hermit’s Point, the furthest reach of the National Park shuttle lines. 

It’s just as lovely as the rest of the canyon. 

After a while, though, it’s kind of overwhelming and you just have to head elsewhere.  So we shuttled our way down to the Visitor Center, got in our car, and headed back toward Utah.

Our Trip Out West, Part 2: We Head South

We started our journey south from Salt Lake with a hearty breakfast, because that’s what travelers need.  Fortunately there is always a Denny’s close to hand here in MERCA! and it is jalapeno bacon season there.  You cannot go wrong with jalapeno bacon, I say.  Rested, fed, and with a full tank of gas and our sunglasses on, we headed south out of Salt Lake and toward the Grand Canyon.

We got all of five miles before we stopped, though this one was planned. 

Our friends Zac and Mindy had moved from Our Little Town to Salt Lake last year in pursuit of employment that was not entirely at the whim of Wisconsin’s psychotically anti-education government and this trip was a good opportunity to catch up with them.  Kim had managed to see Zac during her grading week, and we were going to spend some time with them on the way back from our Grand Canyon trip, but we were coming from Wisconsin after all and had brought cheese!  And you can’t keep cheese in the car in the summer in Utah.  So we drove to their house, navigating through several of the different varieties of labyrinths that the Utah highway department is pleased to call a left turn lane (seriously, guys, just pick one), and dropped off our Wisconsin bounty.

And then we were off for real.

Utah is a long state, and there’s not much in it beyond the natural features of the landscape.  We got to stare at them for quite a while.  They were worth staring at, really.  

Rural radio in Utah is also entertaining, when you can get it, which is a nice thing on a journey like that.  They have more than just the usual country/oldies/right-wing-talk mix that you often find on the highways.  Rap, for example, is surprisingly popular in Utah if radio is any indication.  This was a pleasant discovery.  Not that I am a great fan of rap music, but more because it confounded my expectations and stereotypes and that’s always a nice feeling.  People are people, I guess.

Other things were a bit harder to explain.  Such as this: 

I can see why they wanted to sell it, really.  There is not much call for boats in the Utah scrubland.  I hope someone buys it.  And builds a lake to sail it on.

These things took us a while to figure out: 

They’re everywhere as you drive south, those white letters plastered onto mountains and outcroppings.  Eventually we noticed that the letters corresponded to the nearest town name (that one is probably Kanab), and the only reason we could see for such a thing would be as a handy reference for passing aircraft.  Polite of them, really.

So we were having a grand old time headed south, stopping at various gas stations (never pass up a chance to stop for gas in the Southwest – you may not get another chance for a while) and enjoying the scenery.  And then things got serious.

US 89 south of Panguitch looks a lot like most of the highways in southern Utah. 

It’s a two-lane ribbon of asphalt surrounded by open land and mountains that runs from one tiny little town to the next without the bother of cross streets, sharp corners, or clutter.  You can see pretty much everything from anywhere.

We had stopped in Panguitch for gas and snacks and were headed on toward our destination.  Kim was driving and I was in theory navigating, though at that point my job duties were, shall we say, minimal ("stay on 89 until further notice").  Nevertheless I was looking down at something when I heard a loud bang and then heard Kim gasp.  When I looked up I saw a white cloud of debris rolling toward us about a quarter mile up the highway, out of which came skidding along what was left of a sedan.  We pulled over to the side of the road and I went running up to see what I could do.  Those old firefighter reflexes die hard.

The sedan came to a halt on the northbound shoulder, and the time I got to it there were already several people attending to the driver.  It’s something of a comfort really, to know that in times of crisis people will stop and help. 

The entire driver’s side of the sedan had been sheered off – panels, doors, tires, everything.  The driver was awake and conscious – he’d missed being sheered off too by about three inches – but wedged into his seat by the dash.  His legs were clearly broken.  The others who had gotten there first were with him, and since my training was in firefighting and extrication rather than medicine there wasn’t much for me to do.  I did call 911, which is a tricky process out there in the open land and which took several minutes.  I was the second person to get through to them, and since the first person hadn’t provided much detail they asked me for whatever information I could give them.  “Multi-car accident with injuries,” I told them.  “No fire.”  “On our way,” they said.

From what I gathered, the sedan had drifted over into oncoming traffic – trying to pass?  simply inattentive?  who knew – and clipped the side of a pickup truck and an RV.  The truck had lost its driver’s side front tire, and the RV was raked from stem to stern, but neither driver was hurt. 

Eventually the emergency services people showed up – first the cops, then the fire and rescue teams – and they cleared the road and cut the guy out of his sedan.  We watched them load him into the ambulance before the cops shooed us down the road.  I’ve tried to find news reports on the accident – surely there must be some somewhere – but so far no luck.  I wonder what happened to the guy.

We headed on south.

It was a hot day, and you could see the temperature climbing on the dashboard thermometer as we got closer to Arizona.  By the time we reached the Glen Canyon Dam on Lake Powell it was well over 100F.  But the dam is an astonishing sight, so we got out to look anyway.  

We didn’t stay long, however.  That’s a lot of heat to watch a dam.

We drove on into Arizona, watching the landscape go by.  At one point you go through a giant red mountain of bare stone, weaving your way down to the valley floor before heading off. 

It was after 8pm by the time we got to Grand Canyon National Park, and much cooler.

Our Trip Out West, Part 1: Arriving in Salt Lake

We spent most of the last week or so cruising around the American Southwest. 

There’s a lot of empty space there.  Southern Utah is for people who think Colorado is just too crowded these days, and when people think southern Utah is too busy they move to northern Arizona.  You can go miles and miles with nothing but the road and the scenery for company.

And the other drivers.  Because this is America after all.  There is nothing quite like the feeling of being on the open road without a town on any horizon, trapped behind some behemoth RV pegged at exactly eight miles per hour below the posted speed limit, which is a whole number multiple of anything you’d find east of the Mississippi River and forever tantalizingly out of reach.

This was Kim’s second time in Utah.  She spends a week each summer grading AP chemistry exams, and the last two years have been in Salt Lake City.  She has always wanted to tour around that area – to visit the Scenes Of Natural Splendor that dot the former Mexican territories – so this year the girls and I flew out at the end of her grading to meet here there.

We managed to get to O’Hare International Airport despite the best efforts of the Illinois Department of Transportation, who took the opportunity that day to rip out all of the interstate leading to the airport and replace it with promises of a better road in the near future, probably on a day when I don’t have to get to O’Hare.  The flight was uneventful – we brought enough snacks that we didn’t have to worry about the various allergens in the ones provided by our airline, and I had volume two of the Game of Thrones series weighting the plane down slightly to starboard where we sat – and a couple of hours of air travel later we were there.

Kim met us at the airport and we rented a car and drove to a nice little hotel in downtown Salt Lake.

Have you seen The Book of Mormon?  I have.  There’s a song entitled “Sal Tlay Ka Siti” (say it out loud) and it is extremely difficult to visit there and not have that run through your mind at least once.  I have no idea what the people who live there think of the song, or the musical in general.  I can’t say I thought to ask.

Our hotel was only a couple of blocks away from where all the chemists were staying, so we wandered over and said hello.  They seemed like nice people.

Salt Lake is an impeccably clean city, from what I saw.  Even the gas stations had manicured lawns.  And the streets, at least in the downtown, are indeed wide enough to give credence to the old story that Brigham Young mandated that he be able to turn his team of oxen around in them. 

We didn’t stay long, though.  We had plans for the next day.  Grand plans.

The Bucket List Meme

A while back several of my friends posted a Bucket List meme on their Facebook page – one of those “Have you ever” sorts of things that were popular back in the wild, wild youth of social media (c.2009).  I really enjoyed reading them – you don’t get stuff like this on Facebook anymore, among the clickbait, political arguments, and sponsored advertising – and I thought I should post my own version.

But two things kept me from doing so.

For one, my life has been pretty much a straight sprint for the last month or two and it has been difficult to carve out the time to think about such things.  It’s not a very complicated task that the meme sets out for you – put an X next to the things you’ve done – but that gets me to the second thing, which is that a list like this really begs for explanation.  How can you put an X next to something like Rode In the Back of a Police Car without telling people what got you into that situation?  It’s just a tease, that’s what it is.

For the record, I have never ridden in the back of a police car.  Or the front.  Fire trucks, yes – both front and back and several times in the hose bed, in full turnout gear and in street clothes and in dress uniform, full lights and siren as well as just cruising off to drills – but never a police car.

I find myself with a bit of time tonight – a breather in between sprints – and I thought I’d go through the list and annotate it.  So here it is.

Have I ever:

Fired a Gun

No.  I have never had an interest in firing a gun, don’t understand why anybody would want to fire a gun, and have no intention of ever firing a gun.  I realize that this puts me several miles out of step with my native culture here in ‘MERCA! but so it goes.  I’ll add it to the pile with my tea, my books, my soccer and hockey games, and my dislike of beer.


Gone on a blind date

No.  All of the women who have dated me knew what they were getting into from the start, and I commend their bravery.


Skipped school

No.  I liked school (see “miles out of step” above) and once I got over the shock of getting out of bed I enjoyed it most of the time.  I did skip a few classes in college, mostly in order to work backstage and never more than one or two class periods total for an entire semester.  Hey – those classes cost money!


Watched someone give birth

Yes – twice in fact.  I was there in the room when both of my daughters were born, though I posted myself at shoulder level rather than further down as my doctorate is in the liberal arts rather than in medicine. 


Watched someone die

Yes, also twice.  And that is all I am going to say about that.


Visited Canada

Yes, a couple of times though never for long, most recently when we drove through Ontario from Niagara Falls to Michigan on the way back to Wisconsin, maybe a decade or so ago.  I remember eating at a Tim Horton’s somewhere along the way – they took American money 1:1, which was probably a profit for them but I didn’t mind paying that price in US currency so I figured it was okay.  And I remember the fact that even before you needed a passport to travel between the US and Canada it was a bear to get back into the US.  There’s a whole lot of rules and regulations here in the land of the free.  It took us maybe ten minutes to get into Canada, but nearly three hours of stopped traffic to get into the US.


Visited Hawaii

No.  I believe I am just about the only person on my side of the family who has not, in fact.


Visited Europe 

Yes, either two or three times depending on how you feel about Britain being part of Europe.  Every time was to visit friends.


Visited Las Vegas

No.  It’s not on my list of places I need to visit, either.  I have been in casinos a number of times without gaining any understanding of why they are attractive.  I don’t really need more buffets.  And my idea of entertaining nightlife generally involves more reading or hanging out with friends and family than I imagine the tourism board of Las Vegas would appreciate.


Visited Washington DC

Yes, many times.  The joy of growing up on the East Coast is that you get to do that.  The Smithsonian is a national jewel, the Lincoln Memorial is the most sacred spot in the entire United States, and my friend Matt and I once spent a thoroughly entertaining half hour watching a semi try to make an acute angle turn at one of those complicated half-mile-wide intersections that you only get when someone plops a grid system of streets directly on top of a wheel and spoke system of streets and things meet tangentially.


Visited Asia 

No.  My dad always wanted to go to China, but this desire was something I did not inherit.


Visited Africa

No.  While I am perfectly happy to agree that Africa is a glorious and worthwhile place, it holds no attraction for me.


Visited Florida

No.  Florida is where the US keeps the people who are too crazy to live in Texas, and that’s good enough for me to stay very far away from the place.


Visited Mexico

No.  I’d probably enjoy it, even if it is one of the few places on earth where I’m more likely to be shot than here in the US.  Maybe someday.


Visited Australia

No.  And this is something I have always wanted to correct.  I generally travel to visit people, not places, but the one great exception to that rule is that I’ve long wanted to visit Australia.  I’m not sure why.


Seen the Grand Canyon in person

Not yet, but I expect this to change in the very near future.  Stay tuned!


Flown in a helicopter

No.  This is another thing that I have always wanted to do.  Way back when I was but a wee lad there was a short-lived cop show called 240-Robert or something like that, and it featured as one of its characters the pilot of a police helicopter (played by the same actress who would later play the very tall blonde cop on Hill Street Blues, as I recall).  I thought that would be a great career at the time.  Didn’t work out that way, unfortunately.
 

Been on a cruise

No.  I’m not really much of a boat person, to be honest, and since mostly what you do on those things is eat I figure I can do that at home.


Served on a jury

No, but not for lack of trying.  I’ve been called for jury duty three times.  The first was in Philadelphia when I was in college, and they never did actually ask me to come down in person.  The second was in Pittsburgh when I was in graduate school.  I asked if they could postpone me to the summer, as I couldn’t miss teaching classes (there are no subs at the college level), and I figured most people would want to skip serving in the summer so they’d be glad to have me.  They agreed, but never did call back.  The closest I ever got was here in Our Little Town, where I actually had to go down to the courthouse a couple of times during the month that I was on call.  They got to jury selection only once – a property line case, as I recall – but before my name came up the case was settled and we all went home.  I’d like to be on a jury at least once, though.


Been in a movie

Yes if you count television movies.  In second grade my class became the background for a made-for-tv movie about a developmentally disabled kid, and we made it onto television.  I’m the one who walked directly in front of the camera and blacked out the entire screen for a second.  You can’t miss me.


Visited L.A

Yes.  I was there for a college friend’s wedding and spent 36 hours in the place, not that I was counting.  Most of that time was spent in a car, either on freeways that were dozens of lanes across and moving at about a dozen miles an hour, or in tiny little alleyways.  My friend got divorced not long after that, so I’m not sure what that says about the whole experience.


Been to New York City

Yes, many times.  My brother lives there and we visit when we can.  I’ve had friends there.  I’ve gone there with friends.  It’s a great city – you can find just about anything there, and it really does sound like it does in the movies.  It also, just as the song says, never sleeps – my brother and I once walked to a grocery store at 11:30pm on a Tuesday night and half the shops on the way were open, the sidewalks were jammed with pedestrians, and the traffic was at its honking best.  The first time I was there was with my parents, though – I have no idea how old I was, but it couldn’t have been more than 5 or 6.  We took the train up from Philadelphia, looked at the dinosaurs in one of the museums, and peered into the fog at the top of the Empire State Building.  In 7th grade we took a class trip up to New York and I got to go all the way up to the top of the World Trade Center.  You can’t do that anymore, sadly enough.


Cried yourself to sleep

No.  I’m either fine or I stay up.


Played in a band

Yes, indeed – a folk-rock band called Not The Catfish, mostly because we never did figure out a better name.  Everyone should be in a band in college.  It’s a lot of fun and requires no talent.  We weren’t bad, really.  And we had a lot of fun.

Recently colored with pencils

No.  My artistic skills are limited to prose.


Sang karaoke

Yes.  There was a bar on the outskirts of Pittsburgh that my friends and I would visit most Wednesday evenings just for that purpose.  I got to hang out with the bassist from Rusted Root one evening that way – he was a very nice fellow.  Once in a while the DJ let you bring your own CDs and she’d edit out the vocal tracks for you.  That’s how a friend and I ended up singing the confrontation scene from Les Miserables – two straight guys singing Broadway in a Pittsburgh bar.  I’m not sure they knew quite what to make of us.


Swam in the ocean

Yes, for certain values of swimming.  I’m from Philadelphia.  We vacation down the Jersey shore.  That’s what we do.  I’ve run, frolicked, rafted, and jumped waves, and somewhere in there I must have done something that looked like swimming.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.


Paid for a meal with coins only

Not to my recollection, unless you count ice cream.  I have never been rich, but I have certainly led a fortunate life.


Made prank phone calls

No.  I have no patience for being on the receiving end, and therefore no interest in being on the giving end.


Laughed so much you cried

Often.  It’s a lovely way to spend time.


Caught a snowflake on your tongue

Yes.  I grew up in a place where it snowed and I was a kid for much of that time.  Of course I did.


Had children

Twice!


Had a pet

Yes, many of them.  Cats.  Rabbits.  Hamsters.  I’m not sure the turkeys or chickens count.  I’ve also had pet projects and peeves.


Been skinny dipping

Yes.  There’s a lovely little beach just for that here in Wisconsin, in fact.  Don’t forget your sunscreen.


Rappelled down a building/tower

No.  You can have all my nopes on this one.


Gone zip lining

Yes.  My uncle had one at his house in Tennessee, and we had a little one in our backyard for the girls when they were younger.  But the big one was last year in Colorado – a quarter mile across a valley, and you had to climb a telephone pole up to a platform first.  It was a lot of fun.


Been downhill skiing

No.  I’ve been cross-country skiing a couple of times, but – as the old show Benson once put it, “Why would I strap two boards to my feet, get jerked up a mountain on a wire, and come down at 60 miles per hour with no brakes?  With any luck I’d hit a tree.”


Been water skiing

No.  All the reckless danger of downhill skiing plus the potential for oxygen-deprivation that you get with swimming.  No thanks.


Been camping in a tent

Yes.  I went a couple of times in high school, and a couple of times after I got married.  Each time the main thing I enjoyed about the experience was the time spent with someone I loved.  But I can do that at home, too, and far more comfortably.


Driven a motorcycle

No.  I have driven a moped, though – one of my back neighbors when I was a kid in the 70s bought one and we all took turns zipping up and down the common driveway that bisected the block lengthwise.  No, we had no helmets, pads, or training.  Now get off my lawn.


Jumped out of a plane

No.  Why would anyone jump out of a perfectly good airplane?


Gone to a drive-in movie

Yes.  Kim found a drive-in not all that far from here a couple of years ago and we went to see a double-feature of Planes 2 and Maleficent with the girls.  Maybe it was the quality of the movies, but it wasn’t something I’ve felt a need to repeat.  Although they did have a snack shop that sold truly greasy burgers, and that was a forbidden treat.


Done something that could have killed you

Yes.  Nearly everything can kill you if you take it far enough, after all.  And some things can do it faster than others.  I’m still here, though.


Done something that you will regret for the rest of your life

Yes.  Nothing big, but little things that I wish I had done differently.  Whatever Sinatra might have to say about the matter, I think that if you don’t have any regrets then you haven’t been paying attention.


Rode an elephant

No.  The girls got a chance to do that, though, at the Bristol Renaissance Faire one year.  It was expensive, but then when were they going to get another chance to ride on an elephant?  And they never have – the elephant disappeared after that year, presumably to more elephant-friendly confines.


Rode a camel

No.  From what I gather camels are both foul-tempered and intelligent beasts who will hurt you just for the sheer thrill of it, and I can get my fill of that from watching politics.


Eaten just cookies or cake or ice cream for dinner

Yes.  The things that I have made dinners out of over the course of my life vaguely horrify me now that I’m a parent.


Been on TV

Yes, a surprising number of times.  In addition to the television movie, I’ve been on the local news quite a bit.  That’s what happens when you run a museum in a small town – you become newsworthy, at least for a few years.


Been in newspaper

Yes, for much the same reason.  Of course, the motto of the newspaper in the town where the museum was located actually was, “If it happens in [our town], it’s news to us.”  So the bar for getting in wasn’t all that high.


Stolen any traffic signs

No, but I was party to the disappearance of a flashing construction sawhorse once.  We put it back a couple days later.  Seriously - what are you going to do with a flashing construction sawhorse?


Been in a car accident

Yes.  Never any big ones, thankfully, but I have changed the shape of a number of things on the road.


Stayed in Hospital

No, not if you mean overnight.  Other than being born, everything that's been done to me in a hospital was on an outpatient basis.  I’m okay with that.


Donated blood 

No.  I hate needles.  If they could punch me in the nose and give me a cup to collect the blood as it ran out, I’d be fine with that.  But the needle thing?  No.


Had to pay a fine in the past 12 months

No.  I’ve paid very few fines in my life, actually.


Eaten snails

No.  Snails are vermin.  As the Nac Mac Feegle put it, “With enough garlic, they taste of garlic.”  I can put garlic on better tasting things.


Gotten a piercing

No.  See above, re: needles.


Gotten a tattoo

No, for the same reason.  Also, I really don’t have anything so critical to say that I’d want it etched on my person permanently.


Driven a standard car

Driven?  Yes.  Driven successfully?  Not really.  My dad tried to teach me when I was in high school, on a ’72 Nova with a slipping clutch.  Kim tried to teach me on her car shortly after we got married.  In both cases I did manage to get the car from point A to point B without permanently damaging either persons or vehicles, but also in both cases neither of my teachers saw it as worthwhile to continue my lessons.


Ever owned your dream car

No.  I don’t dream of cars.


Been married till death do we part

Yes.  20 years and counting!  Life is good.


Been divorced

No.  I’m happy where I am, thanks.


Fallen in love

Yes, several times.  I have never regretted any of them.


Paid for a strangers meal

Not directly, though yes if you count donations to groups that do that sort of thing.


Driven over 100mph

Yes.  I can honestly say that I didn’t actually mean to do so, but it was late at night, there was nobody else on the road, I was driving through a forest on a straight highway, and the rental car didn’t make the same kind of rattling and clanking noises that my car made when it got over 55 mph, so I didn’t notice how fast I was going until I looked down at the speedometer.  That was an interesting surprise.


Worked in a pub

No.  I’ve never worked in food service at all.


Been scuba diving

No.  I try not to engage in hobbies where if I screw up I can’t breathe.


Found a dead body

Yes, for certain values of found.  It’s not like other people didn’t know where it was, but for a while I was tasked with guarding one at an accident scene when I was a volunteer firefighter.  She was a young woman who had stopped to help an earlier accident and then been hit by a drunk driver coming over the hill.  I hope that driver spent the rest of his life in jail.


Lived on your own

Yes, in a number of different places.  I liked it, but I like living with my family even more.


Rode in the back of a police car

No.  See above.


Written or published a book/story/poem/song

Yes.  That’s what a dissertation is all about, really.  And if this blog counts as publishing, well then I’m some kind of latter day William Randolph Hearst, am I not?

News and Updates

1. Well that had an impact.  Now my spammer is pinging me at 3 or 4-hour intervals instead of 5 or 7-hour intervals, and with 140 hits instead of 135.  Nice to know my writing gets results.  Next step: I figure out how to make money from this.  Stay tuned.

[EDIT (four hours later):  Now it's up to every hour and a half!  Pretty soon it will just be a constant barrage and I will have the most popular blog on the internet as measured by hit count.  Ad revenue, here I come!]

[EDIT 2 (6/4): Every time I post something, the spamming gets more intense.

I have you now, my little spammer.  Dance, monkey, dance!]

[EDIT 3 (6/5): Well, for a while there they took a break (see the little gap there toward the right?) - I'd say they were ashamed of being caught out, but that would assume spammers have shame.  I think they just got tired.  And now they're back.

Dance, monkey, dance!]

2. If I have to click on a link to see the rest of a list, the rest of the list will forever remain a mystery to me.

3. So the ammosexuals are already talking about assassinating people if the election doesn’t go their way in November – that must be a new record, even for them.  “Freedom” my ass – all they want is the ability to kill whomever disagrees with them, immediately and without consequence to their precious snowflake selves.  Threatening violence against elected officials and promising to use “the bullet box” if the ballot box doesn’t work out in your favor is a signal of just what kind of power-mad would-be petty tyrants those clowns are.  It is also treason, and should be treated as such.  Honestly, anyone who makes or seriously repeats this argument should be rounded up, sedated to immobility, and deposited in a locked and well-padded room until the sane people get tired of feeding them.  Either that or tried in the courts as the traitors they are – coordinated assassination campaigns against elected officials easily comes under the Constitutional definition of “levying war” against the United States – to suffer the obvious legal consequences of their stated goals.  Their call, really.  I’m good either way.

4. I spent the day discovering how far behind I am in my various work projects.  This is what happens when your biggest deadline turns out to be a week earlier than you thought it was.  So it looks like it’s going to be a fun-filled, thrill-packed weekend of academic work.  And technically I’m not even under contract until Monday.  Good times.

5. On that subject, I made the mistake of reading the comments in the online version of Our Little Town’s newspaper under an article about the importance of education and the value of the professors who provide it, and wasn’t that an eye-opening experience all over again.  Apparently we professors live lives of wealth and luxury, constantly jetting off to exclusive vacation spots on the taxpayer’s dime while doing no work whatsoever.  All I want to know is how did I miss out on this?  I’ve been teaching at the university level in this state for two decades now.  Not once have I been offered any such compensation and yet even so here I am working – on a weekend evening, no less.  I think I’m owed some back pay.

6. So far George RR Martin seems to be averaging a corpse every four pages and a dastardly plot every ten, which is quite a pace for a book as thick as my thigh.  It’s basically a well-written medieval soap opera crossed with a Machiavellian primer on Renaissance Italian politics.  I can see why it’s so popular.

7. Bernie Bros scare me.  I listen to them complain about Hilary and the nominating process and declaring that they will not sully themselves to vote for anyone other than Bernie, and all I hear is “Nader, 2000.”  That worked out just so, so well for the country, didn’t it?  People forget that when Bill Clinton left office in 2001 the United States was more or less at peace (as much as we have been since 1946), had experienced nearly a decade of economic growth and private sector job gains, and enjoyed a budget surplus of over $100 billion.  Clinton was, in fact, one of only two presidents to post budget surpluses in the last half century – both of them Democrats, oddly enough.  Within three short years of Republican rule under George W. Bush we were involved in two undeclared wars – one justifiable, one a Freudian farce, and neither of them paid for by any kind of taxes or even given any professional accounting because God forbid right-wingers actually be asked to chip in for anything – and not surprisingly racking up the largest deficits in human history.  By the end of W’s reign we had gone through two recessions and had racked up a budget deficit measured in trillions, and the good times so painstakingly achieved in the 1990s were mere figments of memory.  So spare me the calls for purity – I’m going to stick with the people who will do the least damage, and none of them are running on the Republican ticket this election cycle.  I miss having a responsible conservative party to complicate my electoral choices.

8. Boneless wings are just high-end chicken nuggets.

9.  I still haven’t had time to dig out from the last semester – there is a pile of paper nearly a foot high on the white banquet table in my office – and the summer session is about to begin.  And I discovered that since the software that powers our Online classes was just upgraded, it no longer has the capacity to create in bulk the personal discussion areas that we use to communicate privately with our students.  Oh, I can still create them individually – a process that consumes time, energy, and whiskey in copious quantities – but there you have it.  Why is it that when computer people talk about upgrades it always seems to end with degraded functionality?

10.  The turkeys are now about as tall as they’re going to get, but still only about half as wide.  In this they remind me of myself, circa 1984.

The Hit Parade

Apparently I am being spammed by some soulless moron.

Blogger has a nifty little feature where they keep track of all the people who visit your page.  Not individually, of course – I’m sure there’s a software package I can buy that will allow me to do that, but to be honest that’s more work than I feel like devoting to an issue that is mildly amusing at best – but in the aggregate.  It tells me broad things – how many hits the site gets overall in a given time period, the top ten traffic sources and individual posts, where the traffic comes from (Brazil is big this week) and so on.  For some reason it also tells me what browser people use when they come here.

People still use Internet Explorer.  Did you know that?  I didn’t.

I like to see what people find interesting here.  It changes over time, though history posts are usually popular and the political posts are always guaranteed to spark an interest.  I don’t do whole posts on politics much anymore because they depress me too much – seriously, Donald Trump is an extinction-level threat to the survival of the American republic and the fact so many people in this country either refuse to see it or are okay with it would have been enough to make Gandhi take up an axe – but I throw in my views (see what I did there?) and once in a while I still devote an entire post to the topic.  People also seem to like the turkeys.  I do too.

The stats feature has become rather useless of late, however.  Somewhere out there – and I’m fairly sure I know the referring site, even if I refuse to dignify their moral vacuity by naming them here – there is a spammer who has found me.  Every five to seven hours like clockwork he (statistically you can be fairly sure that spammers are male) pings this blog with about 135 random hits, mostly of the recent things.

Now this has happened before.  The goal here is for me to click on the traffic source link so they can either infect my computer with the latest and greatest malware or simply bombard me with advertising links.  Or both.  The internet is full of people who aren’t worth the space they take up on the planet (go ahead, read the comment section of your local newspaper’s online edition – I dare you) and you just get used to it.  It usually lasts for a few days and then the spammers move on to some other target, one that might actually make them money.

But this has been going on for three weeks now.  It’s getting tiresome.

No, I’m not going to click on your damned link, Mr. Spammer.  No, I’m not interested in whatever you’re selling.  Eventually I will simply stop looking at my stats and your efforts will become even more useless than they already are.

Until then, I just shake my head in wonder at the limitless crassness of the internet and move on with my day, just that much more annoyed at the world because of it.