This guitar belongs to Joe Crookston, who I was thrilled to get to meet last weekend at Kerrville. Joe’s album, Able Baker Charlie & Dog, was awarded "Album of the Year" by the International Folk Alliance last year. I could’ve listened to him play all night long.
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This is my buddy K.C. Clifford, who this weekend got to play the Main Stage at the Kerrville Folk Music Festival in Kerrville, Texas. Brian and I drove down to hang out with K.C., her husband David, her parents and a whole, whole bunch of really great folk musicians and folk music enthusiasts. We stayed up until 4 a.m. listening to said musicians play songs around campfires; it was great in every way something can be, and though I’m physically sleepy, I feel spiritually rested. More photos from the festival through the week. (Click the photo if you can’t wait that long).
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The Big Picture: Hubble’s Final Servicing Mission
Boston.com’s "The Big Picture" feature is one of my favorite things on the internet, and this week they look at the recent shuttle mission to update and repair the Hubble Space Telescope for the final time.
Vintage Sexist Ads
One of these straight-up says, "MEN ARE BETTER THAN WOMEN!" All at once a good laugh and a shocking look at the image of women in media over the last century.
J. Crew Math
via @whoorl, this blog helps you make sense of some of the more baffling choices available to you in your J. Crew catalog.
Onward Christian Soldiers!
Some truly creepy cover pages from Pentagon reports, seen by Then-Sec. Rumsfelt and President Bush, about progress in Iraq, featuring photos of war accompanied by scary-sounding, out-of-context Bible verses that seemed to cheer the war effort. So glad this administration is gone.
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In the last week my freelancing load has grown from 2 travel articles about the state of Oklahoma and all the neat stuff to do in it, due by the 15th of June and (in my optimistic mind), the end of June before we leave for D.C. and Ireland, to FIVE ARTICLES, one of which I just finished writing about very small cattle and how they might rid us of CAFOs forever. It’s a neat story; look for it, and my travel pieces, and then two more pieces for the gay pride issue at the end of the month. Why all the work? BECAUSE WE’RE LEAVING THE COUNTRY AND I’M TERRIFIED WE’RE GOING TO GET TO IRELAND AND NOT HAVE A CENT AND HAVE TO WORK IN A FISH-GUTTING FACTORY OR GO ON A HORRIFIC GAME SHOW TO EARN PLANE TICKETS BACK HOME. (Read: "Because I’m not a well man.")
Speaking of Ireland, here’s a photo of the place we are staying for the latter half of our journey, in Kenmare:
That’s pretty neat, right? Yeah, I’m stoked.
Before that, however, our summer looks pretty good, even if we’re spending the vast majority of it having fun for free, as most of our money is being poured into this trip. I don’t know why I’m getting so weird about money; the last time I lived in Ireland, FOR TWO MONTHS, I don’t think the entire trip cost as much as the amount of money I’m taking with me over there this time. I’m just going to do us all a favor and blame George W. Bush; I’ll figure out later how this is his fault.*
This has been an emotionally exhausting week. We lost someone we love very, very much last week, and it’s sort of colored the seven days since very darkly. I had one really good bawl about the whole thing Thursday morning before the funeral, and then that afternoon two very good friends of mine rolled through town on a cross-country road trip they’ve been doing, and though I had to go straight to the funeral from seeing them, it did my heart good.
Tonight we’re headed down to Texas to see our buddy K.C. perform as a mainstage artist at the Kerrville Folk Music Festival in Kerrville, Texas. It’s a whirlwind trip - we’ll be back Sunday evening - and when I get back I’ve got 3 stories to complete in just over a week, which will be SO GREAT**.
*For Republicans who were offended by that: come on. Have a freaking sense of humor.
**Well, no, but I’ll get paid for it, so.
| On The Road, This I Believe, Writer | Comments (1) | |
This is what the garden looked like just over a month ago:
This is what it looked like on Monday:
So it’s all going great. The most exciting thing I saw over the weekend was this guy:
See him? Here, let’s get closer:
IT’S A F***ING TOMATO! This guy is going to get really big and turn yellow - he’s a Golden Jubilee tomato! This is on one of the two plants that I picked up from Home Depot, which are the tallest plants in my garden right now. All the tomato plants have flowers, though a bunch of them got tossed around pretty badly in the thunderstorms we had over Memorial Day weekend, and I need to cage them tonight to get them pointed toward the sky once more. While this guy is already producing some fruit, my hot peppers, which grow much more slowly, are just starting to grow out of the seedling stage:
These guys are growing in a little bit of shade; they don’t usually hit full sun until about 11 AM, and though I always thought that hot peppers needed full sun, these part-sun peppers are growing much taller and more quickly than the ones that are getting sun starting at about 8:30 AM.
The birds - blue jays especially - love to come down and snip these guys down to their roots. They don’t eat them or use them to build nests; it’s just sort of a recreational activity for them. On top of that, I’m continuing to find presents left by the neighborhood cats, who use the loose soil in my garden as a litter box. They poop near my hot peppers, then cover the poop up with some of the soil. As much as I love that, as great as that is, what happens is that half the time they either bury or kick over one of these plants, which are still too small for the cats to notice, unlike the squash or tomatoes. And so that’s why I have my Reserve Pepper Brigade:
There are about 30 extra of each of my two kinds of peppers that have yet to go into the actual plot. The ones in this photo live indoors at night and come out to enjoy the sunshine in the daytime. They were living on my grow shelf but got too tall for it. The others in the reserve are in my container garden on the other side of the yard, where for some reason the birds never find it, and they get to enjoy the company of this guy:
This is the blackberry bush I planted in May 2008. It grew well but never produced a single flower or berry last year. This year, on the other hand, it’s gone completely insane, taken leave of its senses and is currently home to between 3 and 4 dozen blackberries. It’s expanding, too, threatening to take over the whole bed where it lives. This is fine with me, as I love fresh blackberries. The one in this photo is my star; he should be ripe any day now. I wonder if my first harvest should go into a healthy smoothie or a wonderful blackberry cobbler? Stay tuned.
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The hydrangeas just outside the garden room of my house have started to bloom. Other than the vegetables, the hydrangeas are my favorite thing that grows in my backyard.
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This is Gertie; she’s an orchid. She’s a very, very important orchid with whose care I have been entrusted while her real owner has to go out of town for awhile to do SOMETHING REALLY SUPER COOL. In totally related news, Brian and I will be spending part of next weekend in central Texas at the Kerrville Folk Festival. If anyone’s up for a bit of camping and some really amazing music, well, then they should join us. In the meantime Gertie is doing well and seems to be enjoying her new temporary digs.
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On our drive back from the Panhandle we ran across about a half-dozen of these guys crossing the road. I think they’re pheasants? I should know; when I was a kid growing up on the prairies of western Oklahoma my dad taught me how to recognize all the different species of birds that live out there, but this was a quarter-century ago, people, so if I’m wrong please correct me in the comments. It also bears mentioning here that on the way up to Black Mesa I almost got in an automobile accident because I had to swerve around a GIGANTIC ROADRUNNER THE SIZE OF AN OSTRICH I AM NOT KIDDING. That thing was like the sasquatch of the road runner world.
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This week we started our ten-hour-a-day, four-days-a-week schedule, and on Monday and Tuesday Brian and I experimented with moving our daily gym visits to the evening to accommodate my earlier hours. It didn’t go great, and today we switched back to early mornings again, but the last two days I’ve had the chance to walk to work, which is something I really like, as it allows me to catch neat sights like this one, in the shopping center between my house & my office.
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Traveling has been on my mind of late. I just finished the third in a series of travel articles I’m writing for the local alternative newsweekly, and in about six weeks I will fly to Washington, D.C. for a weekend of patriotism and mayhem before Brian, two of our great friends and I take off for a week in Ireland. To say I’m excited wouldn’t quite be fair; I’m having throes, people. Throes.
I’ve been to all of these places before, of course. But the gist of the travel series (which is based on last year’s Road Trip), is that even within my own state there is so much to see that often goes unseen, and so to that end I’ve been thinking about how much of America I have yet to see for myself. Brian and I were talking about this the other day. I was telling him about how when I was a kid we used to take these crazy-complicated road trips all over America - from Oklahoma to Los Angeles to Northern California to Colorado and back, or from Oklahoma to Cincinnati to New Orleans and back to Oklahoma. But if you drew a horizontal line through a map of the U.S., there is a great deal of stuff north of that line that I’ve never seen.
So, to that end I’ve been thinking about how to cover the 14 of the contiguous United States I’ve never visited; I figure Alaska and Hawai’i, while more than worthy of visits, are trips unto themselves. I used to dream that I’d take all 14 at once, in a Kerouac-esque hitchhike-a-thon across the northern half of our country. But now, encumbered and enhanced both by the wise caution that comes with growing older and a sense of perspective, I came up with three potential road trips to cover all 14 states and as much ground as possible.
Trip #1: Middle America
This trip begins and ends in Des Moines, IA, mostly because I have been fascinated by Iowa ever since I read On The Road, wherein Kerouac states that "the prettiest girls live in Iowa." I’d like to wind through northern Nebraska and the Black Hills of South Dakota (with a stop at Mt. Rushmore) before traveling north to visit North Dakota’s Audubon National Wildlife Refuge and Audubon Lake. From there it’s into Fargo, then to Minnesota, hopefully catching a live show of A Prairie Home Companion in St. Paul. This followed by a jaunt through Wisconsin - Eau Claire, Green Bay, Milwaukee and Madison, before winding back through Iowa. Middle America writ large.
Trip #2: Northern New England
I lived in New England for a time, squatting in a New Haven walkup and trying to be a Yale student. We all know that it didn’t go great. Since my time in the northeast was cut short, I missed out on exploring as much of that area of the country as I’d liked. So this trip starts in Boston (I’ve already been to Massachusetts, but) and winds up through New Hampshire and Vermont - the town of Rutland is of special interest to me because of Time Chasers - before rounding out the inner portion of Maine and then returning to Boston. I consider the part of the country that I’m originally from - Oklahoma - to be basically the exact opposite of New England, and so the idea for this trip really thrills me.
Trip #3: The Northwest
But this idea here is, to me, the most exciting. Starting in Seattle we’d drive up to Port Angeles, Washington, then down the Pacific Coast before turning inland to visit Portland and Bend, Oregon, then traipsing across Oregon, through the southern part of Idaho, to Casper, Wyoming. From there it’s north to Billings, Great Falls, and Kalispell, Montana, then across the panhandle of Idaho to Coeur d’Alene, up to the Grand Coulee Dam, then back to Seattle. Everything about the idea for this trip - except for the cost, really - excites me, and I hope to get to do it someday soon.
So, those are the three trips I’ve conceived to cover the 14 contiguous states I haven’t visited. Who’s in, and for what part? Also - if any struggling car companies want to reach out to me to, say, creatively market a new car, especially an SUV hybrid, by sponsoring me to take one or more of these trips and blog about it, well, THAT WOULD BE FINE. JUST FINE.
| Living In America, On The Road | Comments (2) | |
