i don't know where i am heading

Didn't I say my Uncle Dale was famous? In September, my mom and all her siblings are going to Seattle to watch him throw out the first pitch at a Mariners game.

I shudder to think of the amount of toxins I have breathed in over the past couple of days. I've spent a significant chunk of time in a decaying building full of mold, mildew, asbestos, lead and god knows what else, documenting it for an architectural description I'm writing. It's actually a nice old building, a 1906 school built in a small town east of where I work. I guess it's more correct to say it WAS a nice old building. It's falling apart now, mostly because of a deliberate policy of neglect.

We're on the wrong side of the preservation question with this one. We should be documenting the school before its rehabilitation. Instead, we're documenting it before its demolition. The owners somehow convinced the State Historic Preservation Office to let them tear the building down and put in a parking lot. I'm not saying there was anything underhanded in the process, but after spending two days in the building, I'm certain that it could have been rescued, especially if someone had started paying attention to the water damage in the 1980s. Old school buildings are ideal for adaptive re-use strategies, and while this one definitely has some structural issues (my boss calls the trusswork supporting the auditorium roof "the most optimistic construction [he's] ever seen"), it could be rehabilitated. It just takes desire and a whole lot of money.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation.

One thing is true: Catherine and I do not take lazy vacations. And if anyone is wondering why there's a hole in the ozone, I can probably explain: we (I) drove 1900 miles while we were gone. Fly 2000, drive almost-2000, fly another 2000 home. I am single-handedly depleting the world of its fossil-fuel reserves.

The trip started out fairly slow. We flew into PDX on Saturday afternoon, and arrived at Catherine's parents' house right after lunch. Highlight of the day: the plane didn't explode.

Most of my time in Portland was divided equally between eating, reading and sleeping. We did get out some, though. On Sunday, for instance, we went into town to the Portland Art Museum. Nice museum, but if you go, be prepared to spend as much money as it would cost you to visit the Guggenheim--no kidding. Same price as the Seattle Art Museum, and the SAM is better (sorry, Portland, but it's true). Highlight of the day: paintings from the "Northwest School" in the permanent collection.

Monday, Catherine and I went out to the coast. Perfect weather, we both got sunburned walking on the beach. We stayed out until the fog came in around 4:00. Highlight of the day: lunch at the Nehalem Dock Restaurant, owned by Tom "Wally" Inouye (Pool Service). If you skateboard, you know who that is. If you don't, you probably don't think that's cool. Second highlight of the day: I found a children's book I've been looking for at an antique store in Nehalem. Nehalem apparently rocks on many levels.

Tuesday, we had an incredibly late breakfast (our fault, we had to go running before we ate), then went up to Pumpkin Ridge for lunch almost immediately afterward. We dined w/some friends of the family, and it was really, really fun. Highlight of the day: that meal.

On Wednesday we left Portland and drove to Goldendale to spend some time at the observatory. We timed our visit to coincide with the Perseid meteor shower, which made for a really late night. Between our afternoon viewing and our evening viewing, we had nothing to do, so we drove to Bickleton. It's like starting out from the middle of nowhere and driving 30 minutes just so you could look over the edge to make sure you really were in the middle of nowhere. Highlight of the day: The billboard in Hood River had a huge picture of John Kerry as a windsurfer. Second highlight of the day: Looking at Venus through the telescope in the middle of the afternoon. Third highlight of the day: sweet and sour tomatoes. Fourth highlight of the day: the meteor that left a smoke trail. Anti-highlight of the day: the sliver I got in my thumb from the bench behind the observatory.

I'm not sure how many miles there are between Goldendale and Okanogan. My estimate is "too many." We compounded the damage by adding more miles on, taking a detour to Vantage so Catherine could visit the Ginkgo Petrified Forest. Being petrified, it hasn't changed much since I was there in college. It was really incredibly hot and the air quality was bad (we drove through a brush fire just south of Toppenish, and later saw the Fisher Fire blow up), so we didn't spend much time on the interpretive trail. We did acquire--legally--a few chunks of petrified wood to bring home. Highlight of the day: the cheese and tomato pastry my mom made. Anti-highlight of the day: heat and smoke.

Spent Thursday night w/my mom and dad, and then on Friday, we went camping up the Twisp River w/all the aunts and uncles from my mom's side (except my famous Uncle Dale, who was out fighting fire). Highlight of the day: not getting eaten by a cougar. Second highlight of the day: the swimming hole. Anti-highlight of the day: yellow jackets and heat.

Too hot to hike on Saturday, so we went driving in the backcountry w/my Uncle Ernie. He really needs a mini-van w/four wheel drive. First we went downtown to the farmer's market, then took the Poorman's Creek cut-off up to Black Pine Lake. Then we came back down around and went to Roads End, looking for Gilbert. It's amazing how difficult it can be to find a place when a) it consists of only two old cabins; b) the driver hasn't been there for 35 years; and c) nobody has a Forest Service map. Highlight of the day: relatives. Anti-highlight of the day: relatives.

Sunday, Catherine and I needed some time out (see "Anti-highlight of the day," above), so we drove up to Falls Creek Falls, up the Chewack/Chewuch. It was nice and cool in the spray of the falls. When we came back through Winthrop, we stopped to look at my grandparents' old house. Not even recognizable. Highlight of the day: being given a good deal at the fruit stand because of my family name. Anti-highlight of the day: pizza.

It was really crowded at my parents' house after this because my brother and sister were both visiting. We stayed in a tent in the backyard. Monday we went down to Brewster to visit my grandmother. Tuesday I drove to Tonasket twice. On the first visit, we saw my cousins Wayne and Sheryl, my cousin Ron, and my Great Aunt Pearl and Uncle Emert. On the second visit, we went out to dinner with Shawn and Marsie. Highlight of the day: watching a two-and-a-half-year-old trying to sweet talk firefighters in the Whistler's parking lot. Quasi-anti-highlight of the day: visiting a lot of people I might never see again.

The drive from my parents' house to Mt. St. Helens felt really long, but I guess it was only about 350 miles or so. We drove down through Ellensburg and over White Pass because I'd never been that way before (at least not since I was an infant). It's a very picturesque drive, but not particularly speedy. It was good to get out of the Okanogan Valley and all the smoke. The smoke got A LOT worse around Entiat/Orondo because of the Fisher Fire, but once we were actually in Wenatchee and heading toward Blewett, the air quality was much better. Highlight of the day: the spectacular view of Mt. Rainier.

We spent the last few days of our trip at Mt. St. Helens. I think we liked this part of the trip the best because it involved a lot of reading and thinking, but also a lot of outdoor time. Although we weren't exactly stupid about volcanoes in general or Mt. St. Helens in particular, it's true that we gained a lot of knowledge in the three days we stayed near the mountain. Part of what we learned came from the exhibits at the three visitor centers at the monument. The rest came from the books we lugged across the country to read as we went. We also talked to a lot of locals while we were there. You'd think they'd be tired of talking to tourists after 24 years, but it really didn't seem that way. Highlight of the day: watching the glass blowers @ the gift shop. Anti-highlight of the day: Weyerhaeuser.

We did some hiking on the Boundary Trail and the Hummocks Trail on Friday. The Boundary Trail is really hot and exposed (and steep and rocky in places), but the Hummocks Trail is mostly shady, going through wetlands formed by the eruption. We went back up to the Johnston Ridge Observatory after we were done outdoors and just hung out for awhile, asking the intrepreter questions. Highlight of the day: the boreal toad. Anti-highlight of the day: Weyerhaeuser.

Mt. St. Helens is w/in spitting distance of Portland, so we didn't have to get up at the crack of dawn to make it to the airport on time. It was a nice quiet trip home, I did some of the studying that I'd been putting off all vacation, and had a good pasta salad on Concourse C of the United Terminal in Chicago. Highlight of the day: the plane didn't explode. Anti-highlight of the day: vacation ended.

Confirming my current state of detachment from everything in my life, I decided to go for a run instead of packing tonight. That is freakishly unlike me, given we were w/in twelve hours of departure and I hadn't even started putting things together. I always start packing 48 hours ahead, ALWAYS.

But tonight I went running instead. It was probably a bad idea, since I had scarcely had time to digest dinner, I had a million things to do, and it was starting to get dark. But it turned out to be my best run in months, fast and strong (for me), so I'm not going to second-guess my decision. I'm starting to feel more confident about racing in September. The calf muscle is still wonky, but not painful. More of an absence or emptiness than anything else. Anyway, it has a month to fix itself.

And now I'm packed, and I've done most of the things on my list, including checking my anger. It's still there, so I guess I'll take it with me on vacation, at least as far as the airport, then we'll see.

I can hardly wait to be gone.

Box parts/groove plane to garage.

Move door back into garage.

Piano box up.

Backpack.

The Fountainhead.

Call home.

1 or 2 study books? 1. Or both.

Car wash?

Dinner? Running?

Check yellow list, too.

Check anger.

Cell-phone charger.

CDs?

Gas cards.

Blanket.

Catherine gave me my birthday present today, several weeks early: she put a down payment down on an electric piano. We had to move some furniture to fit it in, but it is way cool, and if I had to throw away a couple hundred books to make room for it, so be it. I haven't had a piano since I left home in 1985. We've been talking for years about getting one, but they're so damn expensive. Even electric pianos are usually well beyond our budget, and I'd more or less accepted the fact that it would be another twenty years before I ever got anything acceptable. But suddenly this one showed up on the market, and it was a really good deal, and when Catherine came to meet me after drumming today, she filled out the paper work, wrote a check, and said, "Happy Birthday."

I like it because it's got 88 keys instead of just 76, and also it has "touch," which means it feels and reacts like a piano instead of a synthesizer when I play. Also, there's another dozen or so reasons why I like it, but I'm too tired to write about them at the moment. I'll come back and say more after I work my way through the 108-page instruction manual. I'm probably going to play it in grand piano mode 95% of the time, but it won't hurt to figure out what else the thing can do.

My boss is really quite good at making me feel incompetent.  He leaves me feeling as if he doesn't quite trust me to do things right, even though I haven't made any devastating mistakes in the past four months.  Yesterday I actually found something I do quite well--laying out VCT flooring.  I spent several hours working out the flooring designs for the children's museum, in the art area, the program room, the party room, and three bathrooms.  My boss looked at them and said, "I like this!" which would have been a compliment, had not his voiced dripped with incredulousness.

Yeah, I know I could be less surly and more social, but I'm trying to make some big decisions here, and I don't want to risk getting good advice from friends that might interfere with my god-given right to fuck up my life all by lonesome. And really, if you could see the things happening in my inbox right now, you wouldn't blame me for ignoring everyone around me. Just be glad you're not Catherine, she doesn't get ignored, she gets snarled at.

My best advice: don't go to a rock concert--even a relatively sedate one--on crutches. Drunk people are drunk people, and they'll run you over on the way to the parking lot after the concert w/out so much as a backward glance.

Man, I haven't seen so much alcohol since the last NHL game I attended, and I'm not sure that even hockey fans put away so much over-priced beer. Before I could even get out of the car, the people who had pulled up next to us were out of there car, had the trunk popped, the cooler open, and were already drinking. I know I'm moving slowly right now, but it was amazing how quickly they had the beer open and distributed. Our view was obstructed through a lot of the concert because people kept getting up to get more beer, and the woman behind Catherine during the concert was so drunk I was afraid she was going to fall over on top of us every time she leaned forward to gush something in Catherine's ear. And this lesbian a few rows in front of us was so drunk she was letting a total stranger--a middle-aged man--slobber all over her (after his wife walked away in disgust, of course).

Anyway, Deer Creek is too far to go for a concert. We've been exactly once in the seven years we've been here, and that should do it for us. Here's to a quiet rest-of-the-weekend.

The good thing about being on crutches is that you get to use the wheelchair when you go to the grocery store. And not the lame, electric wheelchair, either, but the cool one you push yourself. No one can stop you from skidding around corners because, hey, you're in a wheelchair.

Of course, if you're in a wheelchair, you're pretty much restricted to the bottom two shelves for shopping, so you really need to like all the storebrand foods, because that's what you're going to get. But the wheelies make it all worth it.

Go ahead, ask me how I spent my morning.

Long story cut short, I'm on crutches w/a torn calf muscle. And you know what? I'm not very happy about it.

So, I totally lost it at the mall this afternoon. 
 
You know, Hallmark is all about "a card for every occasion," but they don't have one that says "It is so FUCKING UNFAIR that you're not going to get well soon."  And you know, the woman at the checkout completely missed her chance to empty my checking account, because she was all "would be interested in contributing to the fund to send cards to our troops overseas," and I was all "you can do whatever the hell you want with my debit card, just hurry the fuck up and run it through because we're about to have a scene here, and neither you nor I want that, okay?"  Completely missed her chance.

I think I'm losing my mind.  I actually had to call the wife at work this morning to ask her what our home phone number was.  After thinking about it for five minutes, I managed to come up w/the last four digits, but for the life of me, I couldn't remember the exchange.  I'm not sure if I should be worried or amused.

"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do."

So says Eleanor Roosevelt.

http://aintitcoolnews.com/display.cgi?id=17944

Getting an e-mail from a famous person isn't necessarily cool--fame doesn't guarantee intelligence, quick-wittedness, or kindness. In fact, sometimes I've wondered if fame doesn't cultivate the exact opposite personality traits.

However, getting an e-mail from a famous person that you've admired for a long time, an e-mail that suggests the author is exactly as intelligent, insightful and warm as you'd hoped she'd be, *is* cool, and being able to follow it up with a phone call...well, then you get into something that is so far beyond cool that I can't even think of the appropriate words to describe it.

It's not entirely true that all I do is work, but it does seem like it by the end of the week.

Other things I'm doing besides working: a hell of a lot of training. My CV and strength-training schedule is plotted out through November (although I reserve the right to edit it between now and then). 5 training days, 2 days rest. That breaks out into 3 running days, two cross-training days, two days rest. 2 of the running days finish up w/lower-body strength training, the 2 cross-training days conclude w/upper-body strength training. 1 of the running days is reserved for the long run (distance increase starts in a week), so no strength-training.

Other things I'm doing besides training: I spend 45 minutes every Saturday w/Bobby, working out drum exercises I can use to strengthen my shoulder. So far I'm limited to about 10 minutes of drumming at a time. That's okay, because once I fully recover, I'll have to seriously thing about a new drum kit, and I can't afford it. I'm really at the point where I'm not going to be able to improve my playing much more w/out a more robust kit, so I've got to give this some serious thought.

Other things I'm doing besides drumming: I finally got to take the woodworking class I've been putting off for a year because of my shoulder. It's a class on dove-tailed joints, and although my first attempt truly and totally sucks, I've got the concept down, and it can only improve from such a dismal beginning.

Doesn't it seem like all I do is work?

I'm not sure what Catherine did when we got home this afternoon, but I read the paper then went to bed for the next three hours. We're both exhausted for some reason. I guess we did a lot of driving, and I do feel a little dehydrated, but I'm not sure why we feel so worn out.

Saturday we drove to Columbus, and arrived early enough to spend some time at the Franklin Park Conservatory. It was crowded and hot, and looking back, I would guess my dehydration started right there. Anyway, the butterflies were very nice, as was the garden train set. It was the last weekend of the Chihuly exhibit, thus explaining the dense crowds, ordinarily we don't have much competition when we go to look at plants. The Chihuly glass was nice, but I think this makes my 3rd Chihuly exhibit, so it didn't knock my socks off. Also, some of the pieces I'd definitely seen before--what I want is a "here's what Dale is doing RIGHT NOW" exhibit, not a collection of his older pieces.

Stopped off at the increasingly derelict Wexner Center on our way north through town. I don't think they're ever going to re-open that place. Went to see a movie in the evening--F9/11, like good internet liberals. It was either that or pay $20.00 to see Harry Potter on the IMAX screen.

Sunday we got up early and went for a run at Highbanks Metro Park. Excellent decision. After we showered, we drove up to Bucyrus to do some looking around for my dad. Spent a lot of time at the Oakwood Cemetery looking for family plots, and wandered around a lot downtown, photographing several late 19th/early 20th c. buildings contracted by one of his relatives. I was sick a lot, and it was quite hot out, and it was really a long day, but we got a lot done. On our way back to Columbus, we stopped at the Ohio Wesleyan University in Delware to photograph another building contracted by the same relative who worked in Bucyrus.

Stopped back at Highbanks Park on the way back to the hotel, watched some groundhogs for awhile. Thought about going to another movie, but decided we were too tired, so after dinner we went to a nearby park to sit and read read. Only we didn't read, we spent the evening watching skaters at the skate park in the Olentangy Parklands in Worthington. Almost all the skaters were adults, one guy was even skating in a pair of tailored dockers, he looked like a banker. Only one woman, maybe my age, and one little girl who had very groovy tiger-striped knee and elbow pads that matched her skate shoes.

A good but oh-so-unhealthy muffin at Tim's this morning (maybe *that's* why I feel so rotten), then we drove home. We made really good time considering I wasn't even speeding. And now I'm ready to go to bed and sleep for a week, but I suppose I really must get up and go into work tomorrow.