Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

OK, here’s something that just has to warm the cockles of your heart - a spelling bee contestant in Nevada was wrongly ex-spelled from the contest and has now retained counsel and may sue the school district.  The student wants to re-open the contest and replay the final round with two other contestants, to see who represents the school district in the state competition.

I wonder if the Seahawks can sue to go back to any one of three or four pivotal points in the Super Bowl where they might have been victims of bad calls by the referees.  I can hear the ref on his microphone from the field now: “Please reset the clock…no, reset the calendar…to February 5, 2006 at 6:25 pm PST.  Also, refill your beer glasses to the level they were when the whistle blew…Still 2nd down. (whistle sounds)”

A version of this happened to me back in the fourth grade.  As a culmination of classroom spelling contests, a group of us advanced to compete in a school-wide spelling bee in the grade school auditorium.  Mom, you’ll have to help me out here, I don’t remember whether it was at night with parents in attendance, or during the day with just the schoolkids and teachers.

Anyway, it came down to two of us left standing - me and a sixth-grader, Kathy Cunningham.  I was given a word and confidently spelled it “j-u-d-g-e-m-e-n-t”.  I couldn’t believe it when Mr. Nichols, the principal, said I was wrong. “j-u-d-g-m-e-n-t” made no sense at all.  I looked it up in our dictionary when I got home, and saw that my spelling was permitted (although a less preferable “variant”). 

I remember thinking it was more than a little unfair.  I’d much rather have gone down, if at all, on a much harder word.  I took losing that contest pretty hard.  I probably bitched and moaned like the girl in the article above, but my parents apparently had better sense than her parents have.  Either that, or they couldn’t afford a lawyer.

I hope Kathy Cunningham went on to do something with her life.

Nancy, our Salon blog-buddy in North Dakota who’s in the extreme final stage of being in The Family Way, seems to be getting a little cranky about it.  And, she’s employed her resources as an attorney to post an official Eviction Notice to the increasingly unwelcome tenant of her uterus, threatening progressive levels of unpleasantness if she (”The Alien”) does not vacate by tomorrow.

What Nancy may not be aware of yet is that The Alien has retained a public defender with contacts in the office of North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan.  The defender, surprisingly, has enough juice with the Senator that he has introduced legislation known as the New Homestead Act of 2005, to wit:

The New Homestead Act of 2005 includes a number of new tax incentives and other financial rewards for those individuals and businesses that are willing to locate in high out-migration rural counties. This legislation would give people who commit to live and work in high out-migration areas for 5 years added incentives…

Five years, Nance.  Plus, the public defender contends that The Uterus is old enough to qualify as rent-controlled habitation (if not historical property).

We’re here for you, Nancy.  All of us who’ve been parents have gone through periods of difficulty.  Just not this early and with such vehemence.  Good Luck!

I just finished making my first-ever batch of guacamole to take to a Super Bowl party at a house across the street.  I have to confess that I’ve never really gotten “into” the Seahawks - I don’t own a shred of Seahawk gear to wear to this thing.  Part of it is that I probably exhaust all of my partisan energy on Saturdays chasing the Buckeyes around the tube.  Also, the Ken Behring ownership era made me actively hostile to them, and wasn’t ameliorated when Paul Allen bought them and, as a condition of “rescuing” the fair franchise from that cabal of dirtbags, shook us down for a new stadium to  the tune of half a billion dollars.

So, I didn’t hop on the bandwagon this year when they inexplicably started winning.  I mean, a year ago you couldn’t give away a ticket to their games, and the only way they ever got on TV was to leave town or have some local benefactor buy up all the extra tickets.

So, I’ll take my goopy and decidedly bland offering over to the party and catch up with the neighbors.  I may watch the halftime show this year, but not for the Strolling Bones - a friend of ours from our online book club lives in Detroit, has been working with the Super Bowl committee there for the past year, and will be dancing on the field (along with a cast of thousands, I’m sure).  She assured me everything will be buttoned up tight.

David Horsey, the political cartoonist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has been in Detroit all week and has published a really amusing series of cartoons related to the game and atmosphere surrounding it here.

OK, gotta get my game face on.

I haven’t had time to go anywhere picturesque to try out the new toy, but yesterday I grabbed it and wandered around the neighborhood just because I couldn’t stand seeing it sit on my desk anymore.  I didn’t venture beyond “point-and-shoot” mode.  I was just getting used to using the viewfinder and zoom.  Unlike my S300, the viewfinder in the S2 IS is digital through the lens instead of optical, so I have to recalibrate my expectations - the actual photo will be much better than what I’m shown in the viewfinder.

Just to demonstrate what the zoom can do, the following three pictures were shot standing in the same place (no, that cute piece of gingerbread is not Chez Perils):

I was kind of astounded when I sucked these onto my laptop and looked at them.  I think this is gonna be fun.

On the photography front, I’ve done an upgrade.  I’ve been enamored for a while of the keen photographs on display by my fellow northwesterners over at New Dharma Bums, especially the breathtaking closeups of wildlife in their yard and on strolls around the area.

I’ve been using a Canon S300, a 2.1 megapixel with 3x zoom.  It’s been just great for most of the photos I want to take.  Its compact size means I’m more likely to have it strapped to my belt when opportunities arise, and I have a waterproof case for it that cost almost as much as the camera, that I use when I’m out kayaking.

However, my close-up shots, even only using the optical zoom and not the faux “digital” zoom, are often annoyingly fuzzy.  I found out that the Bums’ camera is a 5 megapixel Panasonic with a 12x zoom lens, but is not that much more bulky than my S300.  It’s one of a class of sub-SLR digitals - the SLRs being, I think, of such a size that I would balk at carrying it around much.  I started nosing around a couple months ago and became fixated on a similar camera, the Canon S2 IS. It also has a 12x optical zoom lens, and adds to the Panasonic the ability to record movie clips in stereo up to 1gb.

Reader, I bought it. 

I ordered it online on Saturday, and obsessively clicked FedEx’s package tracking window to follow its route from Newark to Indianapolis to Seattle to the delivery truck on Wednesday morning, and worked fitfully while waiting for that thrilling ”thump” on the front porch.

I haven’t really had much chance to use it, as I’ve been pretty much chained to my desk all week.  But every now & then I’ll pick it up, turn it on, open the manual and learn about another feature.  I think the damn thing’s more complicated to use than the Space Shuttle!  I mean, you can ignore all the buttons and levers on it and simply point and shoot with it, but I bought it in order to overcome the shortcomings of a pretty nice point-and-shoot camera I already owned, so I’d better put in some time learning to use those extra features.

I ventured out in the yard hoping to espy some wildlife upon which to visit my awesome new zoom and capability, but there was nothing - nothing - moving in the depressing afternoon drizzle.  Later, Mrs. Perils came in with news of a dead robin on the front steps, but she dispatched it before I could compose what I thought would be a humorous anti-Bums natural tableau.

So, watch this space.  I’ll have a little time this weekend to actually leave the house and search for blogworthy photos.

as a blogger.  I know it, you know it, the American People know it. 

I was simply uninspired during my week in Milwaukee, and since my return Friday night, I’ve been working almost non-stop.  Even though I don’t practice as a CPA any more (I’m an accounting software consultant), all of my clients are doing year-end stuff they only do once a year, and they often can’t remember how they did it last year.  So they call me, thinking I’ll remember.  Hah!

Anyway, I completed a Joshua Tree post that had been stuck in the chute for a couple of weeks.  If you like the photos here, I’ve put a much larger collection on a different website here.

Our flight home from Palm Springs was late enough on Saturday to allow for another day of climbing and cavorting in the dry, warm desert. Andrew did a great job of selecting routes that would challenge Mrs. Perils, and even kept a couple aside that would not completely emasculate dear old Dad.
This one is a fun, easy one called “Cyclops”. It starts out in an enclosure that looks like the skull of some dead avian creature, and finishes through a tunnel-like structure that looks like an eye upon a piece of the landscape.


We got to the airport in Palm Springs in plenty of time, as our flight was delayed an hour. We ducked into a cafe in the airport for dinner, and caught the last few minutes of the NFL game between St. Louis and the Seahawks. The most salient piece of information we gleaned was that it was still rainy and cold in Seattle.
Sometime during dinner the Most Recently Former Republican Senator from Washington took a table in the cafe, ordered a beer and read a book. The only other time I’d seen him in person was in the mid-70s when I was organizing the Whidbey Island Century bicycle ride for Cascade Bicycle Club, and the MRFRSFW graciously allowed us to use his Mutiny Bay beach cottage as a rest stop. He was a sometime bicycle enthusiast and had ridden across the country during the BikeCentennial days. At that time, he was the state attorney General, and one of a group of moderate Republicans, along with Dan Evans, whose good-government and positive environmental leanings I had respected. I was always puzzled by the MRFRSFW’s hard right turn and environmentalist-baiting when he became a Senator. In the cafe in the here-and-now, I had to short-leash Mrs. Perils, as she was starting to snarl and paw the ground menacingly.
From all the flying around I’ve been doing, I have platinum frequent-flyer status with Northwest, and, since Alaska Airlines code-shares with them, I can sometimes get upgrades if there’s space. When we’d checked in, the agent told me my fare classes were too low to honor my NWA certificates, but I decided to ingratiate myself with the gate agent when we got there anyway. At the last minute, it turned out that there was first-class space available, and he reticketed both of us, to my delight. Our seats, as fortune would have it, were one seat behind the MRFRSFW. I chuckled to myself a little as I wondered if Mrs. Perils perceived the irony in her desire to launch a populist putsch against the ostentatious gluttony of the Republican regime from seat 2D of our 737.
My turn to be abashed came as we were exiting the plane and a former boss a couple of seats over recognized me and proffered his hand. We had not, of course, had any opportunity to shower or otherwise prepare ourselves to return to civilization (let alone a first class cabin), and I looked approximately like this:

What the camera doesn’t disclose are the cartoon stink waves that are certainly emanating from me and everything I was wearing.

Since we’ve returned to Seattle, it’s rained almost non-stop, and the memory of our short visit to the desert has taken on a fever-dream unreality. I’m glad I have the photos - they’re an antidote some days to the drip and shiver. To see a larger collection of these photos, click here.

I’m flying to Detroit today in order to visit my Mom in Toledo over the weekend, then head for Milwaukee Sunday night to work for the week.  It’ll be quite a change from life in the high desert.  I have a couple more pictures, and a couple things to say about the JTree trip, then we can talk about something else.  Heading for my gate soon - play nice while I’m gone!

Wednesday was sort of frustrating for me. I had left a couple of things unsettled, workwise, and once I ascertained that there was no - no - cell phone access from within the park, I knew I’d have to drive out until I got a signal.
Once I got my phone message, it turned out I needed to go online to fix something for a client who urgently needed it, so I headed down to the town of Joshua Tree and settled at the Beatnik Cafe to guiltily buy a double espresso and connect my laptop to their dsl line. I fixed that client, made sure everyone else was fire-banked, recorded a “gone fishin’” message on my cell phone, turned it resolutely off for the duration and headed back to camp.
I got back in time to take a long walk in the desert, and seeing the sunset soothed my sense of having wasted a valuable few hours. (As always, click to enlarge.)


The next day, our son was determined to find at least one climbing route that both Mrs. Perils and I could essay. We ended up on this one, called The Bong, I think because it requires possessing (or developing in an awful damn hurry) crack climbing techniques. Well, to my great surprise, I smoked it! Well, that’s a bit of overstatement. More than a bit. I carefully picked my way up while, as you can see, my son kept me very tightly roped. So tightly roped that, if I’d fallen off the rock, I’d have actually ascended rather than descended. After I was done, he walked up the route and collected the gear without any rope support. Still, it was my first completion of an outdoor route. I rock!

After a day’s climbing and hiking around, we head back to camp. The moon was tending towards full, and just rising as we neared camp.

One of our delights was clambering up the rocks behind our camp to a place about 60 feet above our site that they called the “porch”, in order to watch the sunset in the west…

…and the moonrise in the east.

After the sun goes down, the temperature plummets quickly to somewhere near 35F. While our meals were cooked on a propane camp stove, a campfire makes it possible to linger for a while before rolling into the tent. There’s no source of wood in the park, but someone had bought some firewood on their last trip to town. In order to start a fire, however, you need a certain amount of kindling. None of us had any wood-splitting tools with us (I could just see TSA’s reaction to the Xray image of a hatchet and array of wedges in our luggage), so we riffed through our rental cars and found some barely adequate hardware with which to flay a block of wood that was reluctant to part with any useable splinters.

Dinner was a delightful Thai dish prepared by J, one of our son’s camp acquaintances. J lives…pretty much wherever she is. She doesn’t have a car, own or rent a house or apartment or, apparently possess anything that can’t be packed up in her backpack and carted off to her next adventure. She earns money periodically by leading Outward Bound expeditions. This lifestyle has made her into a fantastic camp cook. Our Thai dinner consisted of Asian noodles, vegetables and sauteed ginger, garlic, and other mysterious spices that she seemed to have in abundance in sealed plastic bundles.
Her piece de resistance each night, however, was/were the desserts she prepared in a cast-iron Dutch oven. Here she’s preparing one of these delights. Once assembled, the Dutch oven is placed in the campfire amongst the coals, there to incubate until its essences can no longer be contained under the lid, and the aroma of chocolate-banana-oat-cranberry concoction overwhelmed us and we greedily fell to it.

Our trip began with a shuttle pickup at 5 am Tuesday for a 7:50 flight to Palm Springs. I had been up pretty late the night before completing work that I should have had done (natch) the previous week. So, I’d had about 2 hours’ sleep when the alarm went off.
Once in the air, I consulted my Palm Pilot and realized that I hadn’t entered my car rental information. Since I’d made the reservation a couple weeks ago, and since I rent cars so frequently from several different companies, I had no idea whom I’d rented from. I had my laptop along, but it was no help because I have all my commercial mail go to my Yahoo mail address, which is not available offline.
When we landed in Palm Springs, I opened my laptop to search for free wifi. I got a signal, but they wanted $8 to connect, so I demurred. We walked to baggage claim, and the now-daunting row of car rental agencies stretched off into the distance. If I close my right eye and squint just right, my left eye becomes something like the Magic 8-Ball, with all its attendant reliability. With no other option, I rolled my head to the ceiling and awaited the pentagonal proclamation.
Unfortunately, my cranial typefonts have not enlarged themselves to compensate for my presbyopsy, and I squinted as the milky message morphed from “Dollar beers at the bar” to “Dollar Rent-A-Car.” I was dubious, as I seldom rent from them, but, since they also had the shortest line, I headed to their kiosk. I fully expected to have to peregrinate from car company to car company armed with nothing but a cheesy smile and a nubile, scantily-clad credit card that begged to be abused, but this time I lucked out - my reservation popped right up at the Dollar window, and I had my keys well before our luggage arrived. I knew it all along.
(As with almost all of my photos, click to enlarge)

A lot of the terminal space at the Palm Springs airport is open-air, and if it’s all you experience of the desert, there’s enough kitsch around to placate you, not the least of which is this peyote-dream of a bighorn sheep.
Moving on - we drove around a bit in Palm Springs as I looked for a place to buy a spare CF memory card for my camera. I may die of thirst once we get to the park, but I won’t run out of space to record the event. Driving out of Palm Springs, we encountered a surreal windmill forest populated by wind turbines of myriad heights and sizes, their blades rotating languidly.
Our route to the entrance to Joshua Tree National Park took us through hard-scrabble desert towns that brought to mind the kind of parish where Robert DeNiro ended up in the movie version of John Gregory Dunne’s novel True Confessions after his ill-fated tilt at the corrupt nexus of religio-political power in film noir LA.
We had received some vague shopping instructions from our son, and stopped in at the grocery store in Yucca Valley that he had specified. Vague as his needs were, ours were pretty specific: 4 dinners, 5 lunches, 4 breakfasts. This task was complicated by the fact that we would have only the water that we carried in with us, and no refrigeration. And by the fact that Mrs. Perils seldom shops for more than one meal at a time, since we have the luxury of living within walking distance of our grocery store. For a while, these factors combined to flummox us, but we eventually filled a cart with a creditable camp larder, and headed into the park.

The landscape in the park is a bit reminiscent of what you’d expect of an African savannah (never been there, so it’s idle speculation on my part). Carroll the Blogless, in a comment below, rightly described it as a Dr. Seuss-scape. The Joshua Trees and rock formations seem born of a fever dream.
We found our son’s campsite, reunited with him, met some of his friends and went about setting up our campsite. As we were arranging our tent and acquainting ourselves with the essentials that we had - and hadn’t - brought, I kept hearing what sounded like fiddle music of a sort some distance away. As it turned out, two of our son’s campsite companions and climbing buddies were accomplished classical musicians, one a double-bass player studying at Boston University and the other a cellist studying at the Juilliard School in New York.
The “fiddle music” I had heard turned out to be the bass player practicing on a fascinating portable cello belonging to the cello player. This tableau added to the sense of a Seuss-scape, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Horton’s elephantine visage above the rocks.

It was barely midday when we got our camp situated, and our son was keen to show us around and to get Mrs. Perils onto a climb. Accordingly, we hiked a half mile or so to a bolted climb called The Loose Lady. Perils Fils led, placing gear on the bolts for Mrs. Perils to follow. What the hell is he standing on here? Notice he’s trailing the rope, and vulnerable to a fall back to the last point where he placed gear. He would tell you that he’s safer on that piece of rock than I am climbing the stairs to bed, and on some nights I’m sure he’s right.

Mrs. Perils followed him into the cloudless blue ceiling as I photographed and soaked up the warmth of the sun and the rocks and stayed the hell out of the way.

When Perils Fils (okay, that’s the last time I’ll do that) left Seattle for JTree in his VW Fox, he was ferrying two friends and all their gear, and reluctantly had to leave his guitar behind. We arranged our affairs so that we could bring it down as carry-on baggage, and he rewarded us throughout the trip with eclectic acoustic jazz riffs.

Hunger comes on as quickly as desert nightfall when you’re camping, and our son, perhaps apprehending that we had no clue what shape dinner should take, chopped potatoes, onion, squash and prepared a delicious stir-fry dinner. Later, the moon, 3 days short of being full, rose over the rocks towering above our campsite and provided so much light you’d swear, once your eyes adjusted, that it was high noon.