Dispatch From A Roadtrip I'm Not On: Days 1 & 2

"There she is... Miss America." Honda ST1100. Don't remember the year.

Joosh is off. I am abandoned for a two-week venture with OMT* that will see them travel Easy Rider-style through several states, ending up in South Dakota (Wounded Knee, and no, he won't be burying any hearts, I already asked and he rolled his eyes mightily in my direction). About 200 - 250 miles a day. Sore bottoms will abound.

So that we may all enjoy the sights and sounds of this, our great nation, as they roll through, I offered something of a vicarious blogging situation wherein Joosh can send photos and some brief information, and I will in turn share it with you. I had hoped to speak with him at length in the evenings in order to fill out the narrative a bit, but since this is day two and that has not yet happened, I think that maybe I'll just go ahead and make up the stuff to fill in the gaps. Kidding. (Mostly).

Day 1 - Portland to Klamath Falls. 296 miles.
Joosh kept calling Klamath Falls "Clackamas" for some reason, which is only like 12 miles away. It was confusing. Also? I always thought there were two M's in "Klamath" but I guess I was terribly wrong. Huh.

He hit the road after a morning of dawdling and packing, around 1:30pm. Off to Clackamas Falls. I'd had a super hearty laugh when at one point he sat down and I noticed a seam looking a little precarious in the crotchal region of his jeans and said, "You want me to fix the hole in your dick... jeans?" He looked at me quizzically and said "Nooooooooo. Thanksssss." In my weakened state from all these days and days of being sick in bed, I have clearly lost my ability to communicate. But man I could not stop saying the word "dickjeans" (because oh yeah, that's a word now, people) and cracking up. Which was excellent for phlegm loosening, let me tell you.

There was some sort of big Washington/Oregon game in Eugene and rolling through was apparently quite trafficky and unfun. This photo was taken just south of there (if I'm not mistaken). I suppose we're to admire the bike and notice the long road ahead.










Salt Creek Falls.
You stay? You pay!
The Ranger would only let him stop for a minute to put on warmer gear (it was about 54 at this point). Otherwise he'd need to pony up the $5-a-day day use fee.





Odell Lake.
Just came over the pass.
It was cold.
Got down to 47.





This is my favorite dispatch from the road so far. Here, let me quote: "Sketchy rest stop 68 miles from klamath falls. Put on the rest of my warm gear. There was a really scuzzy looking old guy that kept asking me if I needed anything. He said he could make me a really good deal. He didn't say what he was selling and I wasn't gonna ask. Unfortunately he got really irritated when I tried to take his pic. He didn't seem to have a car so I don't know how he got there. He took off when some state troopers stopped to use the facilities."



Shall we wager whether this guy was selling drugs or a BJ? Hmmmm? If Joosh was wearing full leathers, I wouldn't even have to ask the question because Helloooooo, Papa Bear.

God, he's going to kill me if/when he reads this post.

Moving on.


Upper Klamath Lake.








About 7pm.








15 miles to the lovely hotel I had found on Hotels.com and booked for him. The Maverick Hotel. (Very timely, yes? What with the old coot choosing his unexpected running mate, proving he's just a jolly old independent spirit like always? Ugh.)






The hotel got some good reviews for being way cheap and shockingly clean and tidy for the degree of cheapness. I reserved a non-smoking room for the boy at $45 per night. Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me? I rock.





Then came the food finding:
What passes for Pra Ram in Klamath Falls (left).








And Mango with Sticky Rice. Hold the mango. So, um, sticky rice. With cream white goo sauce on it. And no mango. Even though he ordered mango. It happens. I guess. Right?







So listen. Vicarious blogging Day One while G-chatting with my brother about this ridiculous election and Tom & Jerry cartoons and other highly important matters (is Sarah Palin's Down Syndrome baby her daughter or her - gasp - GRANDDAUGHTER?!?!) has completely worn me out. We're gonna have to pick up this party again tomorrow.

Love you, babe. Be safe out there on the wide open road. Watch out for hookers in Nevada and Mormons in Utah. And vice versa (I know they can sometimes be hard to tell apart - Katherine Heigl, I'm looking at you).

Day Two. Klamath Falls, OR to Reno, NV. To be continued.

*OMT is "Old Man Todd" - not to be confused with the much younger BabyDaddy Todd or BDT, who also lives in Ventura. BDT is a good long story for another time.

Fun With Analytics.

Did I mention that I have been writing 1000 words a day for the last month or so? I have. With moderate success (if by moderate you understand that the middle ground between super great and unbelievably horrible is just that).

Actually, I have been tremendously successful at the actual writing of 1000 or more words every day. I've only missed one night since I committed to the daily activity. Ass in chair, blah blah blah. This does not mean that I have been writing 1000 GOOD words or strings of words each day. But whatever, it's a start.

The very first day of writing these grand or so words, I wrote something to read at my writing group, about the process of committing to the page and all the shit that floats up for writers sitting down to write. Well, all the stuff that floats up for ME sitting down to write, anyway. Not surprisingly (because apparently we writers are nothing if not unoriginal in all the shit that floats up around the process, the act, the desire, the actuating, the ass-sitting, etc etc), it was some pretty familiar stuff for my fellow wordsmitheons: I got plenty of positive feedback, and a lot of head-nodding and amens around the table.

Afterward, a gal that I particularly like (the instigator of the nerdy ladies board game fun) grabbed my paper and a red pen and bracketed six or seven sentences or segments that she felt particularly stood out. Right on. When I got home and did the casual math, I was running about 10% good, stand out stuff, to the remaining 90% comme ci comme ca stuff. Honestly, I'm fine with that. And if 10,000 monkeys pounding on 10,000 keyboards will come up with Hamlet in 10,000 years (um, isn't that how that goes?) then surely one girl, at one keyboard, in 10,000 nights can come up with something usable in 10% of all that scattertyped text, right?

So here's the problem: Procastination. It's insane to me how very much I resist the task at hand. I can sit in this fercockt (probably not the correct yiddish spelling of this, my favorite Grandpa word) chair all night long, and read all y'alls blogs like 18 times over, ignoring my real-life to-do-lists and the blank page in front of me, read read read and catch up on CNN and Buzzflash, and write a few words, and head over to Facebook for some Scramble and some spying on my friends and family, and then tap out a few more words, and then go scare the crap out of myself with stuff about the environment and warming and the war and the conspiracies (oy fucking vey, the conspiracies of those that are conspiring and not yet geting caught, holy hell) and the sea of plastic in the Pacific and the damage done and doing and gonna do, and then go write a few more bits (in a decidedly lower tone) and then back all y'alls blogs, and then internet-stalk people like Julia Kernochan from Junior High (she's a Yale-educated lawyer on Senator Schumer's team, if you must know) and back to Buzzflash and on and on and on. (I can imagine one or more of you sitting there with your wee one in your lap as you try to read my overly long post here, in the few spare moments you have to catchup on web bizness, thinking that clearly I need a child in order to stop having infinite time to not focus on the thing that I sat down to accomplish, right? Right. Sorry.)

My ultimate point here, however, is not about my fierce and ridiculous need and ability to procrastinate, but rather to talk about my latest good time in the avoidance realm. Bex treated me to a lovely procrasty show of her own (oh Veronica, oh Logan, how I miss you so) and then I thought about how much I feel that her blog is written just for me (by the way, writers are apparently giant narcissists, so look out) and then I started thinking about what others might think in stopping by her site and then I thought "hey I wish there was a way to find out who was visiting a site, that would be funny" and then I immediately recovered my brain and remembered the miracle thing known as Google Analytics.

I signed up with the old Analytics tool back when I created this little vanity project. And I couldn't figure out if I'd inserted the tracking code correctly (it did not seem as though I had), got super annoyed and then gave up on the effort (shocking, I know). I've not logged in since that day. But hey man, what a perfect procrastination tool!

And indeed it was a sweet little surprise treasure trove of goodness. So much information! More than you could ever need/want/take in/make use of in a million years. But lots of helpful bits and bytes and bites. Here, my friends, is the tastiest morsel:

The top ten (er, eleven) searched keywords/phrases that have led people to This (Amberican) Life this week-

11) anna beth chao.
10) Important stuff to know in life.
9) I'm going to ride my bicycles and roller skates.
8) 3 month old drool.
7) momby porn. (that is not a typo. momBy porn. someone should really spellcheck their blog, am I right?)
6) Sun chips flying pig. (nice)
5) scurvy more tests and diagnosis. (wow, sorry dude, that sucks)
4) Chastity-belt. (hahahahahahaha)
3) sucktastic. (um, ha).
2) 1950's aprons.
1) momboob. *

God I loves me some interwebs, I really do.

And guess what? 947 words, suckers, yeah!

But now I need to wrap it up and go watch last week's BSG cause apparently the 5th Cylon is revealed and it's bugging me that I've gone this long without seeing it but Josh grabbed a crap copy and then he grabbed a super nice, super huge copy that wouldn't play on the computer we've got hooked up to the projector (have you heard the expression "the cobbler's wife wears no shoes?") and then the final copy was just right, but Sunday I babysat* and Monday I procrastinated too long into the evening to allow for viewing and now tonight I'm coming dangerously close to same. So au revoir, mon amies. I hope you enjoyed this last segment of rambling smack wherein I tried to up my word count to make up for all the numericals above, which really shouldn't count toward the sum word total, don't you agree?

1097 give or take.

It counts.

*As it's related to the otherwise baffling search term "momboob" and the aforementioned babysitting, this might be a convenient time to tell you about a mortifying thing that happened while babysitting the wee Watsons on Sunday. Except I just wrote it and it's a million miles long, so I'll make it a separate post, backdated, and thus appearing below. Enjoy.

Are You Stronger Than A Three Year Old?

So about the asterisk, above. I was sitting for the wee Watsons, see. Having never been in charge of both of them at once (how do parents do it one at a time?) I was a little nervous. It worked out for the most part - My big secret to success is jelly belly's and reading stories in extra exciting and ridiculous voices. Both kids were enraptured. And apparently both slept pretty soundly through the night, so yay for Auntie Amby and her crazy Winnie the Pooh readings.

But first, first, in the early nervous moments, when Sarah was hungry and attention-requiring and Jakob was not hungry and attention-starved, I was snuggling Sarah and rocking her and making funny noises at her while Jakob was watching Sesame Street. Sarah was clearly getting hungry and started pawing at me and rooting around in the chestal region. At one point she snagged my top with her wee fingers and pulled with gusto. I laughed and dipped her again, trying to adjust my dress while tickling her tummy. She was positioned horizontally to me and I dipped her and blew a raspberry on her tum. When I came up from the dip, with the bundle of baby pressed in my arms, Jakob was looking at me, with wide horrified eyes. "Why are you doing that?" he asked. "What? Tickling her?" He shook his head and glared. "Why are you feeding her WITH YOUR BOOBS!?!" I looked down. It did indeed look as if I were feeding her, from where he stood especially. Hi. Never a redder shade of blush was I in all my life, I'm sure of it. I died. I stammered, as if caught doing something naughty, feeling horribly guilty, trying desperately to fix my dress and blubbered that I wasn't feeding her, that she was just laying sideways and we were playing, that I wouldn't breastfeed her, that's Mommy's job, etc etc etc. I was MORTIFIED. Jakob looked at me with narrow eyes, clearly not believing a word I was saying. Oh the horror, the shame. Called out by a three year old for something I was not actually guilty of doing. Changing the subject, I sing-songed that it was dinner time and how many Dino Nuggets did he want, tra la la? Later we walked to the store to look for Pez for his free-from-a-nice-but-unclear-on-the-concept-saleslady-in-an-antique-store Pez dispenser, but ended up with the Jellies, which did fit in the dispenser, but kept shooting out onto the sidewalk, and distressing the poor kid along the way. Luckily all that walking, talking, lamenting the lost Jellies (there were more, don't worry, I'm not that mean), and story reading eclipsed the earlier horror (for me, anyway).

Jess told me that the next morning she heard Jakob talking in his sleep: Something about "Amber, Amber" and Jelly Beans. I told her that I was relieved it was the jelly beans that crept into his tiny psyche, and not the misunderstanding about the inappropriate boob feeding. God, I would die.

They Might Not Have Been Whores Back Then, But...

Jesus H. Does this not seem a little whore-y to you?

I suppose it's slightly redeeming that they waited until after Hillary dropped out to start kissing and telling for a small bills on the internets?

Ladies, where is your self-respect? It's going to take a shitload of one-ninety-niners to buy that back, I gotta say.

Yucky.

Irony.

Amy Winehouse wins Grammy for "Rehab."

I'm sure you've heard the song, right? With the chorus that goes something along the lines of "They tried to make me go to Rehab, and I said no, no, no."

She's the UK's own Britney of the moment, except instead of an "inbred swamp thing," she's a nice Jewish girl from London with the voice of a soulful black lady, a WASPy eating disorder and a ghetto-worthy drug problem to boot. And the reason she couldn't attend the Grammy's in person was in part because she was denied the Visa she applied for FROM REHAB.

Art, life, life, art. Bravo, to both of you. No no, take a bow.

Unavoidable, Really.

It had to happen eventually, don't you think? After this and this, we've finally come to this:

Sutherland Sentenced to 48 Days in Private Jail

Kiefer Sutherland has been handed an early Christmas gift - a Los Angeles judge has agreed to let the actor serve jail time at a private prison. Sutherland feared he'd be spending Christmas behind bars at the notorious Twin Towers facility after he was sentenced to spend 48 days in jail for drink driving. But the 24 star learned he'll be required to serve his time at the Glendale City Jail on Wednesday. Sutherland, who wore a black suit and tie for his court appearance, must complete his sentence by March 30. The actor pleaded no contest to DUI on October 9. Judge Stuart M. Rice also sentenced Sutherland to five years probation, and insisted the star must complete an 18-month alcohol education program and attend weekly therapy sessions for six months. As WENN went to press, Sutherland was being "processed" and booked into the Glendale City Jail. (imdb.com)

I guess the only thing I can say is that Kiefer is damn lucky that his show is already in hiatus due to the writer's strike, because I expect that Fox would be in a position to demand a punitive shitload of his Gin money (or Scotch, from what I understand) if he were responsible for their millions-on-millions of dollars hit show (really? still a hit? huh) being held up, back or sideways while he sits, shaking from withdrawals, in the pokey.

On the plus side: private prison, maybe a private cell? Perhaps our hero won't have to worry about protecting his anus while hunched over in the fetal position, suffering the aforementioned shakes!

Shnow!

We had the first flurry of snow last night. It was beautiful (as it will probably always be to a Californian living in a place that only occasionally sees the white stuff). Joosh and I drove up into the hills by the zoo and took turns throwing fresh, clean little snoballs at each other.

Pardon the blurry photo. It was taken with Joosh's new Crackberry, which has a tiny bright white LED that it uses as a flash in the dark when taking pics. It's not high quality, but it does do the trick.

The snow smelled really good - super clean, and mildly herbal, like babies and sweetgrass. I was impressed with nature for creating such a lovely nosegay on frozen water. Very nice.

It is supposed to snow again tonight after 10pm and there's a 60% chance on Saturday as well. Pretty crazy that snow used to be an every few years event around here, and yet we've had significant snowstorms each year that we've been here. Thank you global warming and your interestingly shifting weather patterns.

In other news, I'm in a ridiculously foul mood today due to the idiotic project that will not die (if you say "Timeshare" to me, you are going down, Sucker). It's the goddamn Energizer Bunny, with the whole 'keeps going and going and going." Never was a person more over something than I am of this little venture.

Strength, Camille.