Travel Plans

Mr. Beale and I are making our summer travel plans. We welcome any suggestions folks may have for fun things to do in Seattle, great places to eat, any neat clubs, etc. We're not into super touristy stuff but obviously if there's something that's a must-see the city is known for we will want to hit it. Space Needle? I dunno. We hate touristy crowds but might hit it in the early morning for the views. We only have a few days in Seattle before moving on.

Leave your suggestions in comments -- we'd appreciate it! We both love museums, botanical gardens, aquariums, stuff like that. We're old farts, probably won't be booking any rappelling expeditions. Ow, my hip! We will hit the Pike Place Market for sure, though.

Thanks!

The Saddest Story I Ever Read

Lions Gate Bridge, Vancouver, B.C.

The saddest story I ever read is just 29 words long:

Tasha Lyn, Still want my daughter, miss you evrey [sic] day I’m alive

healing from the cancer ops not on dope crack or meth never was!

Prostrate [sic] cancer since 1996

Funny how we writers can fill a page with hundreds of words, and fill a book’s bindings with hundreds of pages, yet these 29 words tell us so much.

And there is so much left out. This graffiti was scrawled on a sign at Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver, B.C. A message that sad on the entrance to a bridge over the icy waters of English Bay and Burrard Inlet makes me wonder: how did the story end?

Traveling Again

We left this beautiful place ....

... and are now here.

We left San Juan Island today in six-seater prop plane piloted by a kid old enough to be my grandson. For reals. Oy.

Island Scenics

We leave this afternoon but I couldn't resist sharing a couple of images. One of my most favorite things to do when I'm in a new place is to take a brisk walk and get the lay of the land. You can do this when you're in a place where you don't sweat as soon as you walk out the door (dig dig!). The top picture is a view from our walk yesterday; there is a restaurant right next to where I took this picture, and we ate there for dinner last night, watching the ferries come and go as we sipped our wine.

Below is from my walk this morning. I hoofed it out of town into the countryside.

Hippie Heaven

I'm in Hippie Heaven, and yes, the weather is absolutely incredible. I realize this isn't the best photo, it was just a quickie I took before lunch. But trust me when I say I feel so sorry for you poor folks in that sweat lodge known as Tennessee right now. I already told Mr. Beale I hoped he packed a crowbar because he was going to need it to get me back to Nashville.

Actually, packing a crowbar wouldn't have done much good as American Airlines lost his bag. I keep saying American Airlines sucks and yet we still fly this airline, which is ridiculous. So really we have no one to blame but ourselves. Anyway, his bag finally showed up a day and a half late, just in time for us to leave Victoria, B.C. and move on to our next destination.

[ADDING .... Caught a "travel expert" on one of the morning news shows advising people to FedEx their luggage four days before departure. And I ask you: who is this solution practical for, save Federal Express? I'm sorry, I have two of some things but I don't have two of everything. I don't have two jackets and two pairs of running shoes and two sets of my favorite jeans and also if your travels involve more than one destination -- we are making three stops this week -- then really you haven't saved yourself much. On top of which, it's not like FedEx never lost a package. Just my luck our bags would end up on that island with Tom Hanks in "Cast Away." And he'd be the dufus who didn't open that package and find everything he needed for a 10 year exile in the Pacific. No, I have an idea: how about instead of making people pack and ship their bags a week ahead of time, how about you people in the airline business figure out how to not lose our fucking bags, mm'kay? How about that?]

Anyway, it's absolutely incredible where we are, and as usual I'm saying we need to move here. I'm even looking at real estate info. But no fear, I do this all the time. My threats are empty.

Four days before leaving on vacation we were adopted by an adorable little white and gray kitten. She'd been hanging around the bushes outside our house and I finally was able to lure her in with a plate of food. She was seriously malnourished and also very, very friendly: a trip to the vet confirmed that she was in heat. Ruh-roh. So four days before we left for our trip I had to schedule her to be neutered spayed so that we didn't have even more adorable white and gray kittens on our doorstep in a few months.

Anyway, pre-surgery we were keeping her separate from the other animals on our screened porch when Mr. Beale looks up and says, "Oh my god, there's another one." Sure enough, our little kitty whom we'd named Etta has a sister. Smaller, scrawnier, and way more active. So now we had twice the fun, and twice the vet bills. Here they are, and if they look a little woozy it's because this picture was taken after they'd both been neutered spayed :



We were prepared to adopt Etta but as many of you know, we have a lot of cats and dogs. Adding a second kitten is not in the cards. If anyone would like to adopt the kitty we are calling Little Sister, please give me a shout-out. She's had her shots, is negative for feline leukemia, and has been neutered spayed. She's also cute as the dickens.

In the meantime, we have two very wonderful and undertanding friends housesitting for us while we embark on our travels, taking care of the dogs and cats and making sure Etta and Little Sister assimilate into the family.

And that's the latest from .... where are we again?

How To Keep City Parks Clean

Here's one way: no to dogs, yes to needle drops:

En Route

The view from my window:

More Magic

Sunday Snowday in Central Park:

Magic!

What a difference a day makes. The before, during and after of the great snowstorm of Christmas O'Nine:

Montana Blogging

More pics from Montana. I think I have learned why they call it "Yellowstone"! And yes, a river runs through it ...

First two pics are from Yellowstone, third is from Quake Lake, a large body of water created, like our own Reelfoot Lake, by a massive earthquake.

And Amber Waves Of Grain

Okay, so it ain't grain. But it's close enough ....

Purple Mountain Majesties

Jungle Blogging

Greetings from Costa Rica!

After a hellish travel day (you know, it really shouldn't take 14 hours to get from Nashville to Quepos, not in this day and age, thank you American Airlines, you suck), we arrived in our lovely hotel.

Last night this giant bug flew in our room. He's about as long as my hand.

More blogging as time allows.

AccuWeather Could Ruin Your Vacation

AccuWeather sucks. Like, big time sucks. They’re always wrong, and I know this because they are the weather information widget on my Mac and I consult them a lot. I don’t know why I bother, since they have the worst weather information on the internets.

So when it came time for my Scandinavian vacation, I sent my friend AccuWeather’s forecast for the cities on our itinerary, with the codicil that “they are notoriously wrong.” Sure enough, Scandinavia is in the midst of a heat wave, which AccuWeather failed to predict. It was 85 degrees today; AccuWeather had forecast a high of 68. In fact, it’s been about 10 to 15 degrees warmer than what AccuWeather had forecast for our entire trip.

They were not only wrong, they could have ruined my vacation if I hadn’t ignored their advice and packed for much warmer weather. (Sadly, my friend did not, which is why we were shopping our first day in Oslo and she fell and tore a ligament in her ankle. But, that was a few threads a go ).

I only bring this up because I’m remembering AccuWeather once had a friend in the U.S. Senate who tried to subject us all to the sucky information coming from AccuWeather.

From the Memory Hole:

The bill, introduced last week by Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., would prohibit federal meteorologists from competing with companies such as AccuWeather and The Weather Channel, which offer their own forecasts through paid services and free ad-supported Web sites.

[...]

But Barry Myers, AccuWeather's executive vice president, said the bill would improve public safety by making the weather service devote its efforts to hurricanes, tsunamis and other dangers, rather than duplicating products already available from the private sector.

"The National Weather Service has not focused on what its core mission should be, which is protecting other people's lives and property," said Myers, whose company is based in State College, Pa. Instead, he said, "It spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year, every day, producing forecasts of 'warm and sunny.'"

Er, yeah. Like your company has done so much better? You nearly ruined my vacation.

This bill was such an appallingly bad idea that bloggers and columnists couldn’t understand why Santorum was dumb enough to think it would fly in the first place. Maybe, as Slate writer Timothy Noah observed:

...[T]he common denominator to contemporary conservative thought isn't ideology at all, but rather, the crude imperative for big government to shovel as many special privileges as possible to big corporations. Adam Smith would be appalled.

Well put.

Vacation ends tomorrow; regular blogging should resume not long after.

Get The Message?

Interesting display at the airport Duty Free in Bergen, Norway. And you thought those Surgeon General's warnings on U.S. cigarette packages were annoying!

(As always, click on the pic for a larger view.)

Interstingly, there are no such warnings on alcohol packaging. Hmmm...

Of course, Europeans love their cigarettes. Just about everyone here smokes. With the government offering such gold-standard healthcare over here, I had expected to find a little more aggressive anti-smoking legislation. No smoking in restaurants and other public places is a rather recent phenomenon here, but it does exist--unlike places like France, where I expect a smoking ban would spark another revolution.