Category: Life

We meant to go camping but the camping wasn’t meant to be. Saturday, a comedy of errors. Dithering meant a late disembarkation. We had to return to the house an unprecedented three times for forgotten items. Then there was driving, driving out east on Wash. SR-14. A failed foray towards a hot springs on the [...]

70 degrees this morning and suddenly last night the first time since last fall the air has gone soft and you can smell things, sometimes things you don’t want to smell, but we take the bad with the good because this city’s winter climate is the cross we bear until it unfurls into something so [...]

It’s another week in the life of my general medical excitement. And what have I learned this week? Last week involved eight separate biopsies from inside my bits. All came back normal (phew) except for the section in which I’m currently having my Cronn’s-inspired fun. I am a heterozygote: genetically partially deficient in Thiopurine Methyltransferase. [...]

It is likely that in the next few days I will be taking the dare and the plunge and dyeing my hair dark or dark-ish, though not permanently. Here’s a photo from yesterday, so you can see where we’re starting. After my last pinkening, I’ve lost some of my former nerve. Instead of washing out [...]

A quick poll of myself shows that these three songs go through my head more than any other: 1. Mah na Mah na (The Muppets). I sing this to myself. A lot. And the whistling. 2. “All the Things She Said” by T.A.t.U. What’s worse than bubble-gum Eurotrash girlpop? Having it stuck in your head [...]

Seems like the entire grim (but wonderful) corpus of Cormac McCarthy has recently been swept into movie lately (“No Country for Old Men”, the forthcoming version of “The Road”). Looks like it doesn’t stop there. I stumbled across this preview of a screen adaptation of Jose Saramago’s Blindness: an epic, grueling work by a Nobel-prize-winning [...]

SATURDAY NIGHT, CONDON, ORE. It’s very late and very dark. I’m asleep because that’s what I do often when it’s very late and dark, in our hotel room in Condon. Off to the side of the bed I suddenly start hearing some shambling, scuffling noises. Then some exhalations of exasperation and then a timid, persistent [...]

Today was one of knowledge, seeing and experience: the kind of day I hold as the highest value in my esteem. We are staying in the Hotel Condon, built in 1920 and recently restored–carefully, tastefully. There is a pervasive obsession with the Rat Pack here. Most of the time the public areas are bathed with [...]

Yesterday’s drive into Condon, was during the long-shadow part of the day in the dryland wheat farming hills of north central Oregon. Wind farms have been expanding ferociously in this corridor, and ones of truly epic proportion are clustered in the dozens, hundreds in total. Here is a quick, 20-second clip of the beautiful shadows [...]

You, dude who feels it necessary to use the women’s bathroom on my floor at work. I don’t really mind the whole Ally McBeal gender-neutral pisser. I am all about equality. But when you leave the seat halfway up* and dribble pee on the seat it makes me want to track you down and break [...]