Friday, 19 April 2024
Life, the universe, pies, hot-pink bunnies, world domination, and everything
She lay on the back in the timothy
and gazed past the doddering
auburn heads of sumac.A cloud — huge, calm,
and dignified —
covered the sun
but did not, could not, put it out.The light surged back again.
Nothing could rouse her then
from that joy so violent
it was hard to distinguish from pain.
Jane Kenyon, “In the Grove: The Poet at Ten”
Date: April 30, 2016
Categories: At the Top of the Blog, Random craziness
Hello, everybody! Welcome to May! I hope you like the new poem.
As you may have noticed, the squids and pies are back — sort of. The formatting is still awkward, and, at least for the moment, comments will no longer turn pink when they reach ten pies. But I’m hoping to solve those problems soon.
Here’s what happened: the old comment-rating plugin that I modified for pies and squids appears no longer to be supported. When turned on, it generated masses of error messages. I hoped that reinstalling it would solve the problem, but I couldn’t find it in the WordPress directory, so I reluctantly deleted it. When I did that, all the old pies, squids, and pinking disappeared. I have backups, so they may not be gone forever. I’ll keep fiddling with it to see what’s possible, as time permits.
Meanwhile, I’ve found a new plug-in to take its place — whether briefly or forever remains to be seen. So pie and squid away, please.
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P.S. Don’t miss the major late-breaking news on the April random thread: Kyra and POSOC have Kokonned at last!
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Happy Orthodox Easter!
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I like Grayscale pies & squids, but they do seem a little bland….
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They acquire color when you press them. Apparently you can also un-pie and then pie again, ad infinitum. I haven’t explored all of their subtleties.
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I tried to try the new qualities of pies and squids by pieing my own comment, but a message telling me to login/sign up popped up. Since I’ve been inactive on MB for the past month, I’m not sure if anyone’s noticed this
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YYS12, is it working now? There’s a setting for not requiring logins, but it’s a little hard to parse.
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Yes, it’s working now.
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Now, I’m pretty sure there’s some mood of the brain that causes me to do this, but for some reason whenever I try to draw something I love, it always turns out looking bad. No matter what it is, be it fanart, friends, or my personal characters, I can never seem to draw them just right. If I draw some random character it turns out looking just awesome. I don’t understand why. Is this a normal thing or what?
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It’s completely normal! I’m not an artist or a neuroscientist, but it seems the most logical explanation is that there’s actually little if any difference in drawing quality–but when you’re looking the faces you love you’re hyperaware of the differences between the drawing and the original, just because those faces are so intimately familiar to you. If something about your best friend’s face were to change in real life, you’d notice it right away.
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I need to get someone to come to the Museum of Natural History with me so that they can take pictures of me at the volcano displays in the Hall of Planet Earth wearing my Katia Krafft hat and glasses, but I am sure anyone I explained that to would find it too weird.
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Life update time, since I’m wearing my HPB shirt today and decided I should check in! I’m winding down my junior year of college. I generally actually like reading days and finals week, because nothing is scheduled and I can do exactly what I want, and my friends are still around to hang out with. Plus, this year, I have only one final and a small project to finish, and more than a week in which to do that. Easy going from here.
I’m really looking forward to the summer, when I’ll be working at my college consortium’s 1-year-old Center for Collaborative Creativity and living on campus. I’m extremely excited for the job. I’m also excited, as long as I’ve got a full-time job I like, to see what it’s like to have a full-time job. Often time this college can feel like a FULL time job, where there’s always something I could and “should” be doing and any time for myself can be called procrastinating, from early in the morning until late at night. So having a job that’s confined to set hours, with evenings free, with several of my friends around, might actually be quite a nice change.
Before I start that, I’ll be home for about two and a half weeks. My parents and I will be living at our lake cabin for most of that time, since our house is being remodeled. I’m hoping that will mean sailing when my parents are home and reading most of the time when they aren’t. Speaking of reading, I’ve been able to keep up a daily reading habit since spring break (mostly by reading a book during breakfast, rather than reading the news), and I’m currently reading Seabiscuit. I recommend it! Any great books that you all have been reading recently?
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I’ve been reading and now re-reading Derek Lundy’s “Godforsaken Sea” in the free moments I’ve gotten this semester (not enough), and it’s really, really good. It’s about the Vendée Globe sailing race, in which sailors leave from a city on the French coast and head down the Atlantic to the Southern Ocean, around Antarctica, and back up through the Atlantic to the harbor the started at, circumnavigating the globe. The really crazy part is that they’re all alone on their boats and aren’t allowed to stop in any ports or get outside assistance, on pain of disqualification. This book is specifically about the 1996-97 race, but it’s held every four years, and now I’m pretty psyched to watch the 2016-17 one this November!
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…[C]ollege can feel like a FULL time job, where there’s always something I could and “should†be doing and any time for myself can be called procrastinating…. So having a job that’s confined to set hours, with evenings free, with several of my friends around, might actually be quite a nice change.
Truth!
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Mmm, I always enjoy reading day and finals week — it’s so quiet around campus and everyone is all busy and focused. All very hallowed halls of academe.
I’ve just finished reading Seanan McGuire’s new book, Every Heart a Doorway! It’s about a school for teens who had adventures in magical worlds and now are stuck back here on earth. It’s too short, but it’s absolutely wrenching and delightful.
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On my final paper for lit seminar my prof [who I also had for my intro major class in the fall] has written “Congratulations on completing a stellar first-year campaign.” tfw you earn a prof’s respect!
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In honor of the anniversary of the Battle of Puebla, today I TPed the French consulate with red, green, and white paper.
(Of course I didn’t really, but it’s surprising how few people know about the French Intervention in Mexico.)
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Unfortunately, because of the way history works, one country’s celebration is often another country’s humiliation. Some British friends of mine call the Fourth of July “Good Riddance Day.”
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At the America’s Cup race village, the Bermuda pavilion is decorated with a triangle motif. They saw the opportunity and they went for it.
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Today kicked butt! There was only one race because there wasn’t enough wind, but it was a really close one, and Team Japan won, which is a surprise because they’d been the weakest team in the competition so far. (But their theme song is the catchiest, “Geronimo” by Sheppard.) I’d never seen a race before, but the finish line was right by the harbor entrance and the boats would go up almost all the way out of the water on their hydrofoils and pitch at crazy angles on turns– it was crazy to see them flying by!
They had two hosts doing interviews and commentary up on a stage, and that helped me understand a lot. They interviewed the captains of every team, and the first question the female host asked the French captain was what it was like when his foot had almost been cut off in a training accident…
“Eet zucked.”
I saw the hosts doing spectator interviews at one point and came up to thank them, but when I said I’d never watched sailing before, they wanted to interview me, so… My face was on the big TV! I said I’d learned about the America’s Cup through Team Japan’s event in the Flatiron District, which I had, and even though the hosts had a thing of trying to tease people into supporting their home teams (the male host was American, the female host was British), he said “Well, you must want them to do well, so let’s hope it’s a close race between USA and Japan.” Afterwards, after the race, I ran into a woman from the Japan shore team I’d talked to at the event and she said she’d been happy to hear me say that.
They had a simulator where you could try controlling a boat on a virtual course, but I think it was broken/rigged because every time I watched, the yellow boat won. While I was in line, there was this French guy behind me with his family who was pointing out what the people playing were doing wrong, so I said he sounded really knowledgable and he said he raced. When I got up to go, I was the first person not in line with anybody else, so they had to call up someone from behind me, which meant the French guy. So now I’m scared, because I don’t know anything about sailing and I can’t even drive and this guy said he races boats and of course I know how famous the French are for sailing, and I say, out-loud, “Well, this is going to be a bloodbath.”
But he got blue and I got yellow and he just couldn’t control where he was going, so I was just staring at my screen the whole time and I tried to steer along the paths that were marked and I didn’t really see the blue boat at all. And I got across the finish line and he said “You beat me.”, and that’s basically why I think the simulator is broken.
So about an hour after the race, sailors from each of the teams were signing posters, and the line was really long, but I thought it was worth waiting in, and they handed out silly little white sailor hats, and I got one just for fun. (But which I realize now that I was still wearing when I walked back through the 9/11 memorial and asked a serious question to a docent, which must have looked really goofy.) Some of the little girls in line had neon pink yacht captain’s hats with fake gold braid, which I realized was a rare product that appealed to both young girls and dictators. When I got almost to the end of the line, somebody called “Hey, you! You, you beat me!”, so I turned around to see the French guy holding out a baseball cap from behind the line barrier. “Get them to sign this!”
His group had gotten into the wrong line, and I assume they were leaving, but they still wanted something signed, so I took the cap and got that signed along with my notebook and poster. I was trying to explain to the sailors why this guy was yelling at me, but what I said was “I beat him in the simulator and it isn’t often an American beats a Frenchman at sailing on their first try”, and I didn’t realize how awkward that was to say in front of the guy from Team USA when they had come in behind France in that day’s race. So that was awkward, but I laughed it off and they were really nice, and I gave the French guy his hat back and he was pretty happy about that.
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I guess I should describe Day 2 now, this is probably the most time I’m going to get as a I have a big project and paper due Friday…
For once, it was sunny, and my nose actually turned a little red by the time I went home, but it was okay today. Walking through the World Trade Center plaza feels really different in full sunlight than it does on an overcast day. The memorial is still very sobering, but with the sunlight in the trees, it also really feels *peaceful*.
I got to the marina about half an hour before the first race and it was already really packed, but I found a spot on top of the base of this big lamp/statue thing next to a nice Russian family. I was in the shade of the statue, so I felt nice and cool even though it was pushing into the low 70s and I was wearing dark colors. This race had nine legs, so there were a lot more turns and… paths (?) and such that you couldn’t all see from our vantage point, so I got confused until the end, which was still right at the marina entrance. Even though there was enough wind to sail, it was still pretty fickle and sometimes it got blocked by the buildings, so the sailors had some trouble, but ultimately Artemis Racing (Team Sweden) won.
There were fifteen minutes until the next race, so I ran to find a spot closer to the big TV screen so that I could look back and forth between the river and the screen when the boats went out of view behind the trees and hear the commentators. This time, I didn’t get confused and I could see the graphics they superimposed over the live helicopter views identifying the boats and showing the course boundaries. Team France won by a good margin.
I heard that Mark Ruffalo and Richard Branson were riding as passengers with the teams during their practicing and between the races, but I didn’t see either of them. I think they were probably at the harbor reserved for the race boats on the New Jersey side of the river.
But it was the last race that was really memorable. Team New Zealand got caught on the starting buoy and ended up in last place, but all of the other boats were mixing it up pretty well. Team USA got in front and stayed there for a while, but then the UK team caught up and they were neck-and-neck. Everybody was going crazy because the promo videos they’d been playing all weekend had talked about how the America’s Cup had started out as Americans vs. Brits but that no British team had ever won (the slogan on the British banners around the race village was “Bring the Cup Home”, even though winning this weekend wouldn’t have gotten them it, just the change to challenge Team USA for it at the official race in Bermuda next year), and that for the first forty years of the race, those races had been in New York. So now we were back in New York in the 21st century for the first time in 90 years and the two front-runners were… UK and USA!
Then Team Japan caught up with them from behind and the three of them were all switching off first, second, and third as it got to the final turn, so everyone got even more excited because it looked like it was going to be really close, especially as a new gust of wind came in…
BUT THEN!
From the very back of the fleet, Team New Zealand caught the gust and passed Sweden and France, and then they kept going, getting faster and faster, until they passed the US-UK-Japan trio and crossed the finish line far ahead of them.
Does anybody else remember that commercial from when graduate-age Musers were kids for the video game that would alert you to random people around you who also had the game and challenge them to battle? (I know it sounds like Pokemon StreetPass, but that’s a much later development than the commercial I’m thinking of.) There’s the one boy with the blue character and the other boy with the red character and they lock eyes and you see their characters getting ready to fight and then there’s a green blur and it says “Bob Defeated”, “Jim Defeated”, and then you see a third boy riding away in a car with a green character and it says “Marcus Victory”. I’m probably remembering it wrong, but that’s what the third race was like.
That was really incredible and everyone was super-psyched, but it was the end of the races and the awards ceremony wasn’t for an hour. I walked around the race village trying to pass the time, but I’d already done most of the stuff on the two previous days, so I just hung out and got into a conversation with some boys who walked by talking about the Team France captain, Franck Cammas and how he holds the Jules Verne Trophy for the fastest nonstop sailing circumnavigation of the world. This was something I’d read about, so I was really glad to be able to contribute to the conversation and even add that the late Steve Fossett had at one point held the record but not the trophy because he hadn’t paid the necessary application fee.
“That is a really stupid reason not to give someone the trophy, especially with the kind of money he had.” One of the boys said.
“I’m sure it didn’t bother him too much, though.” I replied.
“Oh, of course not, when you’re a billionaire and you have the record, who needs a trophy?”
“I’m sure he was laughing all the way to the bank.”
“Or the plane crash.”
And I guess it’s been nine years, but that still struck me as too soon, or maybe it’s just that I don’t like to joke about accidental death, but the conversation kind of stopped after that.
I had to go to the bathroom and there was a pretty long line, but I managed to get back to the stage in time to watch the awards ceremony. Actually, I got there with plenty of time, because it ended up starting about twenty minutes late, which wasn’t the most pleasant turn of events when everyone was already in a tight crowd in the hot sun. But I managed to find a space relatively close to the front where I could see between the shoulders of the tall people in the next row, and all of the teams came out and waved and did a brief interview.
The three teams that had earned the most points in this weekend’s races, New Zealand, USA, and France, got medals. Team France took off their baseball caps and threw them into the crowd, which was doubly special because none of the stores in the race village were selling merchandise for their team. The girl next to me caught one, and I presume it will be worth a lot someday. As the first-place winner, Team New Zealand got champagne and super-fancy leather bags, and somebody in the back of the crowd shouted “Throw the bags!”, but of course they didn’t. The top three teams all got into a champagne fight trying to spray each other.
After the awards ceremony, everybody tried to get close to the teams as they were leaving for autographs or pictures, but the security people were pretty good at keeping them moving past us. I did fist-bump with one guy from Team New Zealand, though.
But then I had to go home and go to our GIS class prep session today and I found out my whole project is due on Friday instead of just the paper and freaked out. So it’s back to school and stress and boring old everyday life. But…. the website for the New York-France transatlantic race is finally up and that’s in three weeks, so if I survive finals…
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KaiYves,
That was exciting. Thanks! In some ways, reading about something described by someone who really loves it is even better than being there.
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I know Muse Academy is mostly interested in more esoteric sports, but what would you say to implementing a sailing program with an eye towards creating a Team Iceland sometime in the next two decades? Soft power, prize money, world domination, etc.
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The Viking Longboat Team already combines square-rigged sailing with rowing like mad. As for sailing modern sailboats — why not? It doesn’t cost anything, so if there’s interest, let’s go for it!
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With the world’s best Hardware and Software engineers in our corner, I’m sure we can make some advancements in boat design, too.
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I agree with Robert! Thanks, Kai!
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In preparation for feeding ourselves this summer, my friend and I bought a toaster oven from a departing senior. Yay adulting!
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If you have a stove, pots, oven mitts, a strainer, and a kitchen spoon, pasta is way easier than you’d think, especially with a peon minion assistant sous-chef who can watch the stove if you have to run to the bathroom, chop a tomato to go with it, or catch up on your readings for class.
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Yeah, I think pasta will be another go-to. We’ll have access to a stove in our dorm.
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You can eat plain pasta with cheese on top just fine, but adding a little olive oil to it after you strain it– BOOM, Italian-scented heaven!
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After three years’ experimentation (when I lived in a stove-less apartment), I can confirm that the following are possible in a toaster oven:
Lasagna
Meringues
Tiny cupcakes
Paninis
Cookies (baked approx. 4 at a time)
Banoffee tart
I can confirm that the following are probably NOT possible:
Roasted potatoes
Pizza from scratch
Cholent
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Thank you, I appreciate the tips! We actually will have access to a common stove and oven in our dorm, which will vastly increase the possibilities. (Although laziness may prevail. We’ll see!)
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I found my oldish iPod! I’m using it to listen to music when I write, which I usually do on an iPad, and I keep accidentally using the volume controls on the iPad to adjust the volume iPod.
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I loved my old iPod nano, and I’d probably still use it for music if it didn’t have the battery life of…. well, of an eight-year-old Apple product.
hooray for music! I tried to make a playlist for my current writing project but it ended up being entirely Car Seat Headrest songs.
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exams exams exams why so many
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Because WORLD DOMINATION, Sel. You know that!
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Projects projects why so many why GIS so hard?
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Two down, about…ten? to go (two of which are on a Saturday and last four hours each), plus big research paper that I haven’t started yet. The most frustrating thing about all of this is fitting in the hours of practice I’d like.
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Played Bartok tonight in front my class and teacher for a sort of pre-exam run-through. About three lines in, my G string managed to flatten itself nearly a semitone (and not only were those notes subsequently dodgy, the resonance of all the strings was affected). Oh well, at least I can tune in between movements right? Nope, by the time I had turned to the pianist she had launched into the 4-bar introduction, so it was too late. I haven’t listened to the recording yet but I’m sure it’s questionable in many places…
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Update: so yeah I sound awful
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Send in the squids!
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Thanks, I’m all fine now. In moments of stress I get the severe impression that all progress has suddenly been unlearned, but practising today was good! So keeping things stable when nervous needs work, but to my relief everything I’ve acquired thus far is still fundamentally there.
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Happy Friday the Thirteenth, everybody! This is the day on which MBers acquire all the luck that superstitious people lose to the Nocebo Effect.
So, how’s it going?
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Five hours of sleep, so tired I dreamed about trying to sleep, still work to do, will probably not meet the hard deadline and have to accept the professor’s flexibility, which he was fine with but is undignified, could not find a non-brown banana when trying to consume edible matter as fuel…
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Hahaha, it’s done, I’m still alive! The lady at the food court gave me an extra bag of apple slices, I think she must have taken pity on me because of how tired I looked… I can go home and take a shower with that nice bath perfume stuff I bought at that tea store and decided I was going to save for a bad day…
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Well, I suppose people round here aren’t too superstitious because my luck was somewhat mixed. On the good front, I had a decent day and succeeded on dyeing my hair less orange. Goodbye sunset surprise, hello strawberry blonde.
On the less fun front, my lower right wisdom tooth started hurting. This led to a weekend-long quest for decent, non-prescription painkillers that won’t interfere with my ability to drive. (Anyone who still believes that SA is a first world country, or that structural violence isn’t real, I will *bleeping* fight you). I also learned that my response to prolonged physical pain still is to become a fount of murderous rage. Oh well. But I finally got the correct medication last evening without being too much of a jerk to the pharmacist. I just hope that this is only growing pain and goes away soon.
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Is there supposed to be some kind of joke in how “Capri Sun” looks like “Capsicum”? Like one can make your mouth burn but the other will refresh it?
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Lovelies, the universe has once again brought Cat’s Eye and myself together, and I can confirm that they are a) in one piece, b) still cool as heck, and c) gallivanting around Europe in the most stylish of ways.
Sadly, I failed to take a photo. A report follows:
After a series of coded communications, I rendezvoused with the agent in an excellent clown-themed cafe. We filled ourselves with cake in the most spylike of ways, and having thus readied ourselves, braved the icy wind of England in May to trek across town. Agent Cat recited Shakespeare as I punted us down the River Cam, battling a strong prevailing wind and the usual vicious swans. (By law, all swans in England belong to the Queen, and thus, I suspect, are government spies.)
Having crashed into a couple of other boats, which ruined our attempts to befriend a very attractive fellow punter, we headed back to shore, moored our craft, and undertook a thorough investigation of some neighbouring colleges, Cat very nearly blowing our cover by stealing some lilacs, and I daring to walk on the grass (strictly illegal if you are an undergraduate, and rumoured to result in rugby-tackling by the authorities).
As the day drew to a close, Cat and I found ourselves in a churchyard sharing a surprisingly good bottle of French supermarket wine. We proceeded across town once again, stopping on the way to buy french fries, which a friendly Belgian waffle vendor (a fellow revolutionary, I suspect, or at least a sympathiser) topped up with curry-flavoured mayonnaise. These finished, I saw Cat off to the train back to London. Though the flaring international tensions surrounding Eurovision have delayed our usual plotting, I have word that Cat is well and back on the Continent.
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Well done, Agents Eye and Orange! Every hour of whimsy added to the flow of time brings the world closer to the Kokopellinnium.
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Sounds like a lovely time!
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I have a job now! I work at an ice cream place and I take orders and mix up ice cream and ring up sales and wash dishes. It’s terrifying and I’ve messed up a lot but I think I’m starting to kind of get the hang of it! Also I get free ice cream sometimes, which is cool.
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Congratulations, AL! You must be one of the most popular people in town.
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Last night I had a dream that I was extracting my own teeth. Isn’t that some form of symbolism in dreams? Like, it means something?
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Maybe that you went to bed without brushing your teeth?
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Dreams about your teeth falling out are surprisingly common, actually. Nobody is really sure why.
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One of the classic stress dreams, isn’t it? Like the one about the major test that everyone but you is prepared for.
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I finished my work on Monday but I still have dreams that I have homework to do.
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Ahahaha, it’s done, I’m done with everything, I survived my first year of grad school, I don’t know how well my last essay went because I had to rush to finish it right under deadline, but I think a lot of it is good and maybe I can re-write it and submit it to a journal if the teacher says so… But it’s done and I’m alive and tomorrow I’m going home…
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Way to go, KaiYves!
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(Two posts from me in the same week? What is this madness?)
Does anybody know that frustrating feeling when you have an emotion inside and it feels so good and you just want to share it with others somehow but you have no talent? And then when you try to express yourself it ends up looking/sounding sub-par, and nothing like your feelings at all? Is there a remedy for this?
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it’s not about talent it’s about skill and the remedy is to practice and work and develop the skill until you can accurately depict what you want
(it’s happened for me once.)
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If Barbie was the size of a real woman, her proportions would look freakish, but if a real woman shrunk to Barbie’s size, she would fall through the floor of any plastic dollhouse, because it wouldn’t be able to bear her mass.
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The specific gravity of the human body is close to 1, so your shrunken woman would weigh about the same as a Barbie-sized popsicle. That’s much heavier than a hollow plastic doll, but it’s considerably lighter than a stone or metal figurine would be.
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So not heavy enough to break the floor, I guess I got that wrong. Sorry.
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I’d call it an empirical question, being unfamiliar with the structural engineering of plastic dollhouses.
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A friend of mine has called my attention to Aquila, a British children’s magazine that may now be the closest thing in existence to Muse-that-was. I’m not sure whether it’s available in the United States, but the website is worth a look:
www . aquila.co . uk/
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Ahhh, that’s wonderful! That their June issue will be focused on Roald Dahl (and that the description contains the sentence “This issue is packed with phizz-whizzing mischief of the most gloriumptious and wondercrump variety”) makes me love it already.
There are “Rest of World” prices on the subscriptions page, so you can get the magazine in the US for 15 pounds more on a yearly basis than a UK subscriber could.
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I admit I’m biased, but I think Tolkien definitely won the Epic Rap Battle he was in…
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“News flash: the genre’s called ‘fantasy.’
“It’s meant to be unrealistic, you myopic manatee!”
Now there’s a rhyme I didn’t see coming.
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Did I ever post my “Ernest Shackleton vs. Robert Falcon Scott” ERB?
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E-mail from political group: “I’m e-mailing for $5.”
Me: “I’m moving this to Junk Mail for free.”
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Is it possible for a lowly inexperienced teenager like myself to create a simple point-and-click adventure video game?
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I’ve heard that GameMaker can make a variety of 2D game styles. There are some point-and-click tutorials for GameMaker online.
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“The Third Man Factor” reads like a very strange mix of a PopSci article on neuroscience, a book of adventure/survival stories, and a creepypasta.
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Happy Towel Day, everybody! I trust you’re all equipped.
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and the Glorious Twenty-Fifth!
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Indeed! I’ll have to get a lilac towel.
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Planning on eating a hard-boiled egg at some point today though unfortunately there’s no bread in the house so I can’t make soldiers.
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I did not know that these were both the same day, and I forgot about both of them, so I spent most of the day doing nothing of importance.
…I did do laundry, though, so I’m reasonably sure I know where my towels are.
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I swore that I’d never become one of those people on MB who only drops in quarterly to give a life update, yet here we are, my friends. (not that that’s bad, just that I thought, surely with all the time I spend on the computer I could be more engaged?)
Tomorrow morning, obscenely early, I fly to Portland to speak at a programming conference about collecting gender information respectfully. I am excited and scared. Do any of you live in Portland? I’ve never visited. What should I do on my vacation days there?
Here is the video from the talk I gave about emoji and Arabic and other things too I guess. I have linked it to people but I have not myself watched it. I hope you enjoy it. https ://www.youtube (.)com/watch?v=C3ox1zQcV_I&feature=youtu.be&t=3h43m33s
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I’ve never been to Portland and I don’t know how much free time they’ll give you, but Mount St. Helens is an hour and a half’s drive away.
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Dodecahedron:
One of my writers lives in Portland. Here’s what he recommends:
Much to choose from. Hope she has fun.
Outdoors: Multnomah Falls, Forest Park, Columbia River Gorge, Mt Hood, Bend, Oregon Coast
Food: too much to even start. Depends on the neighborhood.
Books: Powells, 10th and SW Burnside
Neighborhoods: NW 23rd (chi chi), Pearl District (chi chi), SW Hawthorne (hipster), N. Mississippi (hipster), etc.
Good beer: anywhere and everywhere
Music: depends on neighborhood. Crystal Ballroom, Wonder Ballroom, Mississippi Studios, Aladdin Theater, Doug Fir
Transportation: MAX light rail, Portland Streetcar, car.
Biking: Skyline drive and west hills, Sauvie’s Island, Springwater corridor, Waterfront loop, Willamette River loop (details online)
Shopping: Portland Saturday Market (arts and crafts, good food and music, open Sunday too)
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Yes, DEFINITELY Multnomah Falls/Columbia River Gorge. Its beautiful, and there’s tons of hikes up there. I agree with pretty much everything else on that list too… If you don’t mind standing in long lines, you might also consider Voodoo Donuts, although personally I find them pretty overrated. And then of course the Oregon Coast is awesome too, if you want/can take the drive out. You might also want to check out the Shanghai Tunnels – not necessarily getting a tour, but there are some businesses that you can just walk into and check out the hole in their floor. My great-aunt took us on a little tour of Portland last year and we looked down into some tunnel at the Dan and Louis Oyster Bar. Plus, then you have OMSI which is really cool. And I have to say, probably the best pizza I’ve ever had was at a place called Pizzicato. There’s a few of them scattered around Portland and it’s SO GOOD. Powell’s is really nice/fun to walk around in, too. There’s a LOT of stuff to do in Portland, really.
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How convenient! I will have a day-long layover in Portland this summer. I’ve heard the light rail goes straight from the airport to downtown Portland, and I might just spend the whole day at bookstores.
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The light rail took about 45 min to get to city center from the airport, but it was remarkably easy to find from baggage claim, and seemed clean. A polite man tried to help me with the ticket machine, but I use New York ticket machines all the time and didn’t really need the help – it was nice anyway. The main thing that confused me was that they didn’t actually check my transit pass. You don’t swipe it, just… keep it with you? $5 for a day pass is pretty great though, and the blocks in city center are tiny so it’s very walkable.
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Hm… I think I’m a zero-width joiner.
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Thanks Robert (and Robert’s writer) and The Plaid Turtle!
We weren’t planning on renting a car but I’ve been informed that there’s a nice part of the coast that’s named “Astoria, OR” and I now really want to go (my street address back home is in Astoria NY, and idk, I like the name). Renting a car is still very expensive for me as a 22 year old, and there’s plenty of other stuff to do, but it seems a shame to spend six hours on an airplane and not even see the opposite coast. Unfortunately a lot of the scenic parts of the Cascades are in the opposite direction of the coast by an hour or two, and I only have two days here after conference talks end.
I love the light rail and I’ve already made plans to check out the Saturday Market with a friend of a friend who’s attending the same conference. Since I woke up at 5:30am local time I might try to walk over to a well-recommended donut place (Blue Star – i’ve heard it’s better than the popular one) for when it opens in an hour or two.
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Alice and I kokonned in Astoria, OR once upon a time. There might be pictures somewhere on the ‘blog.
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Cat’s Meow:
You described the Kokon at https://musefanpage.com/blog/?p=12279#comment-461959 and mentioned a picture, but I’m not sure whether it was ever posted.
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Whoops, I totally forgot about towel day. But it was sort of fitting, since I just remembered to bring a towel on my trip to the Wild Coast. The NPO I volunteer at has a small primary school here which my boss is visiting, and I’m tagging along. But I made coffee for everyone once and straightened out the library so I can pretend like I’m not entirely on vacation. It’s absolutely beautiful, and I’m enamored with our sister school as well. Starting to try and plan an excuse to come back and do some kind of project here… At the risk of sounding arrogant, I’m also , warm fuzzy being-the-kind-of-person-you-idolized-as-a-kid-moment, because being the kind of person who travels solo across South Africa to catalogue books for a children’s library in a small village on a cliff facing the sea is pretty much what kid-bookgirl dreamed of. And everyone is so nice!
I have to head back to Jo’burg on Saturday though, but I’m thinking of stopping and spending a night in this little village I like on the way. But anyhow, tomorrow is the day I get to go to the seaside, and that’s going to be the absolute highlight. After all these years, part of me still belongs to the ocean. I think it always will. Even though it’s a different sea, it’s home. And it’s funny really- I would always describe myself as the least spiritual person I’ve ever known, but when I was thinking about how to describe my relationship to the seas it just is a deep kind of spirituality. And I’m rambling, sorry.
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Yup, it sounds like you have a life I envy.
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Eh, it’s not all perfect all the time 
But I noticed that I have this tendency to post a lot of negative things on the blog, and wanted to balance that out. As for me, I think going on an archaeology trip to Turkey would be fairly awesome.
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Was anybody watching the National Spelling Bee tonight? What a finish!
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(No? Well, it was perfect: a nail-biter with a happy ending.)
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I heard about it on the radio today! The winners were so cute.
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I’ve been going for walks down the country roads around here, it’s very nice. There’s some residential streets right by where we live that I’d never walked down before, just because they aren’t on the way to anywhere.
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After I described to my mother a dream I had last night, she remarked on how I not only dreamed in color but in texture. Is this anything abnormal?
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I think I experience all of my senses in my dreams, and I don’t remember ever having had a dream in black and white. I don’t know what other people do.
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I dream in color. I mostly can’t feel anything unless I’m holding/touching something with a distinct texture, I can’t remember ever smelling anything, and I can taste things on the rare occasions when I eat something in a dream.
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Hello, Rosebud! We haven’t seen you for a while. How is life? Do you have any good library stories?
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The New York-France transatlantic race started yesterday, and in the first 24 hours, six boats out of 14 have already diverted to get repairs. They’re all still in the race, but the fact that five of those diversions were because of collisions with unknown floating objects underscores just how much debris there is in the oceans.
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pretty terrible day yesterday.
the symphony was doing an outdoor memorial day concert across the river, rehearsal 4-6:30, they provided dinner, then concert at 8pm. When we do outdoor concerts, they’re under a massive tent, usually amplified, and with stand lights. I’d been to the venue once or twice before but never drove it, so I was using my gps, and somehow it decided the best way for me to get there was to make a u turn on the interstate. So it took me about twice as long as it should have to figure out how to get there and I ended up having to negotiate the second half of the drive without gps completely, which was stressful.
Anyway, I get there, figure out where to park after driving in circles for a while, rehearsal starts. It’s loud. Very loud. We’re amplified because outdoors, so there’s monitors onstage, I’m not really sure why. I’m sitting second chair for this and after the first two pieces the concertmaster announces that either the monitor goes or she does, and leaves. So that’s great. (she came back a piece later after they turned it off).
The orchestra’s CEO comes onstage and announces that we’re going to be taking the break early because it’s going to start to rain. So they divide us into these trailers by section. It’s about 4:30 now, they’re planning to start up again in 15 min. We end up staying in the trailers the entire rest of the rehearsal, doing nothing.
At that point rehearsal time is over and they don’t want to pay overtime, so we go to dinner, eat, come back, weather’s cleared up, they’re mopping off the stage. Turns out the stand lights shorted out during the rehearsal rain, so we don’t have lights, which people are not happy about.
It’s maybe five minutes before the concert is going to start. Everyone’s onstage with their instruments out. There’s a line of pretty ominous looking clouds and the principal second, who’s sitting on my other side, has some fancy weather app on his phone that he keeps checking. He’s like “rain in one minute” and starts packing up, so I do too. There’s maybe a few drops. Everyone is sitting around warming up.
Suddenly the skies open and it starts to pour. Not everyone has their case onstage, and some of those who do can’t get their instruments packed before they get wet. The wind’s blowing the water onto the stage and everyone’s getting soaked. Complete disaster. Water damage to a wood instrument is a serious thing – repairs can cost from a couple hundred dollars into the thousands, and many people in the orchestra have very nice instruments. That’s not to mention that we were amplified, and all those mics and monitors and electric sound gear are now getting drenched with water. There was so much rain – everyone was huddling at the back of the stage and still getting wet – i was soaked through to my underwear.
Someone along the line somewhere screwed up bigtime in not canceling the concert. My guess is that several grievances will be filed. We’re supposed to have an orchestra meeting after the rehearsal tonight, so that should be interesting – a lot of people are Very Not Happy.
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Lizzie,
At least you got a good story out of it. That thought has helped me through many an ordeal.
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well, and my violin was fine – if it wasn’t I would be much more upset. As it is, I’m just looking into getting a burner violin for our next outdoor concert.
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I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that a lot of musicians do that.
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many of the upper strings, at least – don’t know how much among the lower strings / winds. I think part of the problem though is that most people enjoy playing their primary instrument more than a cheapo one, and so if we’re not doing backup stuff (which we weren’t) they’ll use the better one.
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I know a lot of marching band kids who do that. People buy upgraded, nicer instruments for high school concert band, but keep their beginner instruments to march with. They’re cheaper, and as an added bonus the beginner instruments are generally sturdier and can survive more. Plus, the fine sound and nuance of higher model instruments doesn’t matter as much in a marching band setting.
It doesn’t matter as much for brass players, but woodwinds have pads in their instruments that will be destroyed if they’re saturated with water.
That concert sounds like a real pain in the neck, Lizzie. I’m glad your instrument’s okay.
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Hey there, y’all! I guess it’s been a while since I posted, so I figured I’d give a little update on what I’ve been up to.
I am almost done with my first year of being a full-time college student, so that’s pretty neat. I’m still doing a radio show on the college station, we moved into out new studio a few months ago so that’s been an interesting change. I’m also still working as a writing tutor at my college, and I’ve submitted a proposal (as part of a panel from my school) for a national college writing tutor conference; I’ll probably find out in the next few days whether I get to present.
As I believe I mentioned in the R&R thread (which I assume is still not accessible?) some time ago, I have been in a relationship with a very lovely person since January 
Less-awesome news is that my guinea pig Floyd passed away a few weeks ago. The remaining piggie, Gus, was acting really lonely afterward so two weeks ago I adopted Horace, a rather fat piggie who is white with pink eyes (I call them “laser eyes”) and likes to snuggle. Horace doesn’t “replace” Floyd, of course, but all guinea pigs are special and important. Sidenote; my main reputation is apparently “that dork with the guinea pigs”. I am mostly ok with this.
So yeah, that’s been my life lately.
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Hello! I think R&R is back – if you’re logged in – but I’m not sure. Unless a new one’s been made, I think the current thread is pretty old though, so you could try searching for it.
Congratulations though!
And I’m sorry to hear about your guinea pig, but I’m glad Gus has a new friend.
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I’m logged in, and I’ve tried searching for it. Oh well.
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Rós,
Keep trying! Sometimes I have to tweak the permissions a bit.
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What’s the title of the most recent version? I’m having trouble finding it with obvious search terms.
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I tried searching “romance” and the first (most recent therefore) result was version 2014.2.
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That’s right. It’s time for a new one. R&R threads are categorized as “Life.”
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It’s up, thanks!
Do comments on private threads not show up under the “Recent Comments” bar, even for those logged in?
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Selenium:
So it seems. Even I can’t see them.
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