5 Nights, 6 Days, 17 Portages

Dad finally dropped off the pictures from the BWCA, and I've uploaded them to shutterfly. We look remarkably clean and rested in the photos.

I like the portage view from under the canoe. Dad took this picture after I had portaged a short distance - there was no way I was going to stand there with a canoe on my head after carrying it half a mile. And I did both 180 rod portages on this trip.

Here's how happy I am to be portaging a measly 30-rodder:

And, despite seeing two bears . . .

We had no unfortunate encounters. Perhaps it's our excellent bear bag hanging skills!

I have to say we're such old hands that we made pretty good time. While boyscouts kept passing us on portages, we managed to pass them on the open water. And we also, somewhat miraculously, never flipped the canoe.

Maybe next time . . .

Back in Civilization

I made it back from my BWCA trip, and will shortly have pictures to prove it. I'm reliant on Dad sending me photos from his camera, the only one we had on the trip.

It was a pretty good trip all around, even though I managed to get some major bruises in the course of one of the portages.

Meanwhile, back in civilization, I received photos from my trip to Dallas. Here is my favorite picture of one of the librarians (not me) being carried back to the hotel by a writing faculty member. She couldn't walk the mile back in her shoes. You'd think we were students by the look of this!

This is why most librarians choose sensible shoes - to avoid embarrassing photos on the web!

Goodbye, Dallas!

I'm sitting in the Continental President's Club at the Dallas airport, enjoying the refreshments and the wireless internet. It's good to be leaving Dallas, finally, but it is a bit unfortunate that we're heading out just as the temperature has dropped enough to make walking around town bearable.

Despite the heat, a bunch of us went to the Y.O. Ranch Steakhouse in the West End on Monday night. It was by far the best meal I've ever had at a colloquium, and probably the best restaurant meal I've had so far in 2008.

I started with the house salad, which was an astonishingly delicious combination of greens, candied pecans, goat cheese, and apple. Sommer and I split the mixed grill, with a buffalo filet mignon, elk chops, and quail. I also ordered the Gouda mac and cheese and a piece of chocolate cake with raspberry coulis.

Luckily everyone was willing to share, so I got to try a taste of the pheasant ravioli and what was very likely the best pork chop on the planet. This was the first expensive meal I've had all year that was actually worth the price.

It was so good, in fact, that I might actually want to come back to Dallas, just to eat there a second time. It certainly is preferable to Orlando, which was a dining wasteland. Ditto with Lansdowne and Anaheim. At least the next trip to Atlanta will be near The Varsity. Not fine dining, but hopefully good.

I shall not succumb to blog fade

After talking to the much more consistent blogger of Wordlustitude this morning, I'm making a concerted effort not to let my blog just fade away.

It still feels like I do so much blogging on my work blog, that blogging here is redundant, but in reality, the two blogs are completely different. At least I haven't bored anyone here with my opinions on Wikipedia and Cuil - I just bore people with fat dogs and African violets.

I'm in Dallas right now, which really doesn't have much to recommend it. Welcome to Dallas, where we shot a President! Or, Dallas, where the sun can set your clothes on fire.

Seriously, it's been over 100 every day that we've been here, and it'll probably stay that way until we leave. I'd never go outside, but the hotel is so freaking over air-conditioned that I have to stand outside between sessions just to get full circulation in my toes.

We're staying at the Hyatt, which is connected to the most architecturally interesting building in Dallas: a giant, concrete dandelion. You can eat dinner in it. Yep, that's what Dallas has to offer.

At least I'm able to crawl out of bed early enough to get a spot in the hotel gym (and Hyatt does have those refrigerated towels). Plus, I can watch hulu in my room, and thereby avoid all of the cable news channels, which seem to make up all the television channels available in hotels.

I can't wait for my vacation next week!

We're overrun by pets!

The fat dogs are back - and will be here on and off for much of the summer. At least the 'rents have their house on the market. There is an end in sight.


Today we got our newest member of the household - the fish. He seems happy enough, despite the cats.



And so far we're all surviving the heat. Although I was a bit worried about Tasha puffing away in Monday night. I guess 85 degrees inside is a bit much for a fat dog.

I think I've been blogging for work too much; I just can't get into blogging here. That, and there really isn't that much going on these days. I dragged Nick to a Swing class on Thursday - I think he's nearly got the basic Lindy down. The rest was a good refresher. Now I just have to goad him into Contra on Saturday. I mentioned English Country dancing and he looked a bit sick. I guess I'll leave that one for now.

Other than that, I'm devouring The Ghost Map, which is fabulous. And tomorrow is my first book club meeting at work. So far I only have three people (myself included) who have actually read the book. We'll see if there are any surprises tomorrow. I guess three's better than nothing . . .

It's Finally Summer!

I can tell it's summer again, because it's 83 degrees inside my house. It never seems to be the perfect temperature - always too hot or too cold. I probably need to move to a more temperate locale.

Fat dog is here again, since she's been banished from the new carpet house due to he own poor behavior. She's been good so far, and the kitties have tolerated her. Except for one incident at 3 am on Monday.

I recently enjoyed "Is Google Making us Stupid?" in the Atlantic Monthly. Nicholas Carr apparently forgot that we've always been stupid. It's just more interactive now. Of course, that led me to the more interesting article American Murder Mystery, which makes the shocking point that inner city crime is not actually caused by density. It reminds me of all the epidemiologists who talk about crime as if it were an infectious disease . . .

And then there was this: "Fuel Prices Shift Math for Life in Far Suburbs" in the New York Times. It's full of comments about how suburban schools are always better than urban ones - another myth that I'm sure will be disproved soon. C'mon, it's all about the parents, anyway.

That said, I'm hoping that those exurbanites don't move into my neighborhood. Exurbanites live in the exurbs for a reason, and the last thing I want is for them to turn my urban neighborhood (which is the only place you can live an urban lifestyle) into a recreation of the suburbs. They could tear up the sidewalks to increase the size of front lawns, push out buses because the stops encourage loitering and take away on-street parking space, or zone out corner businesses because they interfere with the "residential feel" and lack parking lots.

Hopefully the houses are too small around here to be appealing. Plus, I'm walking down the street a lot, and perhaps I look hoodlum enough to scare them off. At any rate, for the moment I hear mostly birds chirping outside my open windows. I don't want it to become the noise of leafblowers and SUV engines filling my house.

It's so inconvenient when losers keep winning!

I haven't bothered to write much about the current election in a while, but the last few weeks have had me shaking my head. I'm just astonished by the treatment of Hillary Clinton's campaign by many in the party and the press. For so long there has been the constant drumbeat of calls for her to quit. The insults took nearly every form: she's a sore loser, she's wrecking the Democrats' chances, she doesn't have support, she's the candidate of the old (read: racist/losing) Democratic party.

Now I'm not a big Hillary fan. I actually think she's only marginally less bad than Obama. My favorite candidate dropped out long ago because nobody liked him but me. Oh well. But let's stop for a minute and think about what we've done in the process of vilifying Hillary.

The party made a gigantic, colossal, ridiculous, horrifying mistake by nullifying the Michigan and Florida primaries. I don't believe that they should have taken results from the primaries as they were done (that would certainly not be fair to Obama in Michigan), but they absolutely should have called "do over." The cost of new primaries and the precedent of special treatment is far less of a concern to me than the near disenfranchisement of so many primary voters. This isn't Zimbabwe or Kenya - we can redo a primary in a fair manner that would get to the actual preferences of Michigan and Florida voters. Their voices are not being properly heard, and in a primary where even Montana managed to be pivotal, it should have been done.

The attitude of the media and the party has done a great disservice to women. I remember the day I realized as a child that my grandmothers were born into an America where they couldn't vote. I now wonder what we will say to our collective granddaughters when they learn about the first really viable female presidential candidacy. How could a woman have won so many primaries and still be so consistently be called a loser (and she won them right up to the end)? The labels used in this campaign were not the language you hear in any other close race - no nail biting or neck-and-neck. The moment Obama won Iowa the new press meme ran rampant: She's lost! Now she must crawl into a hole and disappear! Wait! Why is she still here? She must be ruining everything!

It's quite disingenuous for people to keep going on and on about Obama's campaign as being a shocking, surprise victory as well. I remember the 2004 convention. Anyone who saw that production was well aware of the collective gush that followed his speech. And the gush kept happening long after that. It would have been surprising if he hadn't managed a very successful run for the candidacy.

And now there has been so much focus on the question of racism, it's nearly tarred every Hillary supporter out there. The claim that Hillary represents the "old" Democratic party, which started long before the talk of door-to-door campaigners hearing racial slurs, is particularly damaging to the party. Treating Hispanics, women, and blue collar workers as if they are all part of Strom Thurmond's Democratic party only pushes people away. And it sorely misrepresents the true base of the party. Are we now to think that women aren't the backbone of the party? That Hispanics aren't a growing electoral force? That working class people, who have been hit incredibly hard by the economic changes of the last decade, shouldn't be a major focus? Get real.

And just how are we going to explain this one to the next generation? "Well, you see honey, she may have won a lot of votes, and she may have kept winning primaries, but not all of her votes could really count, and some might have been from racists. And by continuing to win, she just got in the way of the real winner. So, what you should learn from this is that if you are very close to winning, but it's not 100% sure you will win, you should just give up so that people will still like you."

So here we are; Obama now gets to preside over a party that has spent several months devouring itself. It wasn't the long campaign that did the damage, or even the candidates, really. Candidates are always going to try to spin things in ridiculous ways. You just have to ignore that and move on.

I blame the press and the party regulars. They turned this from a constructive fight about minor policy differences into a destructive battle over who really counts as a Democrat.