Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

As I’ve mentioned, one of the big reasons we like Ashland is the outdoor recreation available in the area.  However, owing to our staying out drinking until 2:30 Sunday morning, we were a little slow out of the blocks to engage a gorgeous day.  Knowing where to nail down a righteous cup of espresso is essential in the amelioration of this condition, and Evo’s (right) tattooed baristas know what they’re doing.

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We finally found some mojo, and headed east of town for a 5-6 mile hike called Grizzly Peak. It has a lot of great vistas back to town, as well as of California’s Mt. Shasta to the south.

I’ve added a category at the left for tales of our trip to Ashland, Oregon.

We arrived here Saturday, but through a quirk in our ticketing don’t see any plays until Tuesday night (Comedy of Errors).  However, we did meet a couple of my friends who had been here the week before on Saturday night.  We went to dinner and they gave us their impressions of what they had seen, and in one case laid on us the responsibility of arbiting a disagreement between them once we see The Visit.

We were sitting outside at a brewpub while having this high-minded conversation.  Meanwhile, in the tree canopy above us, a psychotic squirrel was cavorting from branch to branch, taking bites of green hickory nuts and then tossing them away.  “Away”, however, happened to be the vicinity of our table.  We took hasty measures to protect the beer supply, an indispensable component to the discussion.

Later, Mr. Squirrel rained down some less physically dangerous, but infinitely more disgusting, gifts on our table, and we asked for our check.

After they saw their evening play, we met again at a bar where many actors show up after the late performances, and tried not to stare like the rubes we are.  We stayed out way too late, made promises about meeting in Seattle for plays and dinners, and stumbled back to our lodgings.

I don’t know what it is about VWs that stimulates the creative juices in their owners.  Maybe it’s more like creative types are more likely to buy a VW in order to play dress-up.  I encountered the two vehicles below within the last week, the beetle in a parking lot in Ashland, OR, and the Vanogan near Gasworks Park in Seattle.  While not up to Christopher Keyes’ vintage auto show photos, they definitely make you look twice (and hope not to be caught by their owners returning from a human sacrifice ritual in a nearby basement).

I feel the need to mention once again that we’re headed for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon tomorrow.  This will be our 11th year.  We started going when our son was in middle school and we tagged along with a group from his school.  After he graduated, we bought a membership and started going on our own.

Ashland is just south of Medford, and just north of the California border on I-5.  It’s a small, picturesque town whose main industry is the Shakespeare festival, which runs from February to November each year.  What’s terrific about it, in our estimation, is that you can walk up a street, verge onto a gravel road, and be walking on Forest Service land within a mile and a half.  The Pacific Crest Trail winds through the Siskiyou Mountains just outside town, and there are so many hikes in the area that we’ve extended our visits a little longer each year as we add them to our repertoire.

The last several years, we’ve also been taking a day to drive over to Crater Lake, which is a real treat, although snowpack around the lake may limit our hiking opportunities.

Oh, yeah.  We’re also going for the intellectual stimulation of the plays.  We’re seeing:

• Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III
  
• Comedy of Errors
  
• The Visit, by Friedrich Durrenmatt
  
• A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
  
• The Royal Family by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber

That’s a pretty full week of theater.  After seeing the Hanks above, we estimate that we have to see only one more Shakespeare play to “hit for the cycle”.

Our plane is at 10:30 tomorrow.  I’m PUMPED.  More later, from the road.

I believe I wrote my last tuition check today.  I’ve been writing them since 1987, for private elementary, middle and high schools.  Now, an intensive summer quarter of Spanish is all my son, my only child, needs to graduate from the University of Washington.  As well as he’s done since engaging his major (English/creative writing), I don’t envision him in graduate school real soon.  He hasn’t shown, so far, many signs of the “academic personality”, preferring action-oriented recreation and employment.

It’s not really that much of a fiscal relief - his private high school was much more expensive than the UW - but it will represent a sea change as we begin to disentangle our other financial interdependencies such as health insurance, car insurance and other expenses that I’ve paid while he’s been a student.  In this sense, I may be the patient, 22 years behind his mom, of post-partum issues.

Last night I bought an album from iTunes and was transferring it to my Archos Recorder 20 mp3 player when it made a couple of whimpering noises, stopped recording and displayed “HD Register Error”.  After repeated, unsuccessful attempts to revive it by cycling it on and off, I gave up in despair and decided to try it again in the morning after giving it a full charge.

This morning, after readjusting battery contacts and muttering imprecations I’ve found to be effective on electronic devices, I was able to coax it to register as a drive on my PC.  I’ve been tiptoeing around since then as I copy its contents to a spare hard drive on the PC.  I’d hate like the dickens to have to re-rip all those CDs.  I feel like I’m holding an injured bird in my hand, stroking its faltering heart while it whispers its final songs in my ear.

We’re leaving for a week-long trip tomorrow, and I’m not sure I can face travel of any kind without my cache of tunes.  I usually shop pretty carefully for things, but I can visualize myself walking into Best Buy and making a panic purchase of whatever mp3 player they have on their shelves (probably a Creative Nomad or an iPod, paying a lot more than what I’d pay online, plus sales tax.  Maybe I’ll just try to string the Archos out for one more trip.  Any suggestions?

Re-Defeat George Bush

My dentist’s office is in Seattle’s International District, home of many interesting shops, restaurants and including the incredible Uwajimaya’s.  However, I admit to being stumped by Seattle’s need for the services offered at the right.  I wonder if it would bring my insurance premiums down.

It was dental day for me today, the normal 6-month checkup, plus she (my dentist) was anxious to see how my obscenely expensive implant and gold crown was holding up.  She has a habit of asking questions while scraping and poking in my mouth, questions that require answers in sentences and paragraphs rather than grunts or eyebrow signals, but I feel like it would be impolite to spit out her tools and fingers to deliver them.  We’re about the same age - we met her and her husband at a barbeque quite a long time ago - and we both have kids about the same age.  She made a statement about how expensive it was to have two kids at the University of Washington, and segued into a discussion that I was unprepared for, involving exotica such as gum grafting, orthodonture and even more hardware to remember to wear at night.  If I didn’t trust her implicitly (and I do), I’d have attached more significance to the juxtaposition of the two topics.

She suspects that my lower front teeth are migrating and might benefit from a retainer worn at night.  She already has me (and my wife) wearing plastic nightguards on our upper teeth.  Maybe she thinks we’re at the point in our marriage where conversation plainly articulated is not as salubrious in the bedroom as it once was, and is doubling as a marriage counselor.

And more than once she’s used the phrase “As we age…” to preface a pronouncement about some phenomenon taking place in my mouth.  There is a bit of comfort in having that said by a contemporary, and it sets me to wondering how my parents and mother-in-law feel (their old health-care providers mercifully retired from practices whose competence had no doubt eroded) when a 20- or 30-something uses a similar entree.  I hope it’s said with a degree of respect and empathy that I perhaps would have found lacking in myself at that callow age.