Off to Guate

A view of Guatemala City from one city block

2011-11-01T11:21:00.000-07:00

GUATEMALA CITY - 15a Calle, Zona 10, is probably an atypical street by Guatemala City standards. It´s dominated by the Litegua bus depot, and by their nature, places devoted to coming and going are always a bit different.

Nonetheless, it will have to serve as my most in-depth view of the nation´s capital. Like their namesake, the fellows at the Junior Nixon Travel Service in San Pedro apparently have no qualms about putting on a nice smile and lying to you - they sold me a ticket for a 230 bus that does not exist, giving me two hours to kill until I can get on to Rio Dulce.

Thirty-odd pounds of expensive gadgets and valuable documents is a bit much luggage to be carting around a strange city with a reputation for random thuggery. And what I´ve seen on the minibus ride in doesn´t look to offer much in the way of fulfilling exploring. Zona 1, the prosperous part of the city dedicated to international visitors, looks like a palm-fringed downtown Seattle. Zonas 2 though - well, what is it, 21? - look like your typical third-world horrorshow, bristling with young men whose lizard eyes shine with desperation and trouble.

And so it is for both safety and convenience, it´s 15a Calle for another hour and change.

Change was kind of the whole theme that got me going today, so best get on with it. In the course of my tenative explorations outside the station gate, I bought myself a Coca Cola. Asked how much for the can, the boy and his mother running the place let forth with a stream of syllables I could barely recognize. At first I´d thought they´d asked for 15Q - about three times the going rate for Los Gaseosas - which seemed an awfully steep premium for the station-side convenience.

As it turns out, they were asking for 4 1/4 Q, something that hardly anyone does given an entire Quetzal is worth only about 13 or 14 cents. They had a good laugh at my expense, and I walked away with a cold drink and a pocketfull of odd and insubstantial little coins.

Small change. That seems to be about all anyone is hoping for in the upcoming election, just six days from today. Despite the grand promises made on the signs the two candidates have put up on any surface that can take them, nobody I´ve encountered seems to be harboring any great expectations for the future.

The favorite, Otto Perez-Molina, pledges to deliver ¨the change we need¨on the orange-hued billboards adorned with his image. A retired general who may or may not have played a role in the Army massacres during the civil war, Perez-Molina also promises to be ¨a strong hand,¨a position best illustrated by the image of an upraised fist that serves as the symbol of the Partido Patriota.

Ordinarily a harmless little piece fo campaign doggerel, it´s the kind of promise that has to be downright terrifying for the indidgenous people who suffered the worst at the hands of the army during the 30-year war.

It´s for this reason, I´m told, that the general´s challenger is much more popular upcountry. A doctor and a lawyer, Manuel Baldizon casts a striking figure on the red billboards of his Lider party, all greased-back hair, Clark Kent glasses and gleaming teeth. If you didn´t know there was an election going on, you might well be excused for thinking Lider is a popular brand of toothpaste in these parts.

Which, in many ways, is probably about as accurate as anything.

Despite my limited Spanish chops, I´ve been able to suss out a few things about the election from locals and from El Diario and Prensa Libre, the two most popular daily publications in Guatemala.

The coverage is brief and largely insubstantial. The two candidates appear to spend almost no time criticizing each other, and reports go little deeper than detailing where the two men were on any given day and providing non-critical accounts of what they had to say.

One of the splashiest headlines to grace the Prensa Libre in recent weeks promised an examination of the candidate´s writings, only to provide an analysis by a self proclaimed handwriting experts. If it matters, Perez-Molina´s penmanship suggests he´s a more reserved and deliberate thinker, while Baldizon´s points to a nurturing and outgoing nature.

It´s little wonder press coverage is shallow in a country where 15 years after the official end of the war, political violence is still rife and a critical reporters will sometimeswind up dead. Unconfirmed and possibly unconfirmable reports from ostensibly credible expats claim that 35 mayoral candidates have been assasinated this year along. This in a country where being a mayor is hardly a heavy-hitting position. While close to 5 million teem in the capital and its immediate suburbs, the second largest city is about the size of Salem, Oregon, and most are far smaller still.

One somewhat enlightening piece of news was published nearly two weeks back, an accounting of the campaign spending by the various parties. Perez-Molina´s PP led the way with 91.5 million Q, followed by Lider at 62 million Q and ¨other¨ - at least a dozen parties are still fielding candidates for lesser offices although they have been eliminated from condtending for the presidency - with 52 million Q.

Upcountry, much of this money seems to have been spent on paint. Orange and red buildings litter the countryside, urging a vote for one man or the other and presumably providing a valuable service to the occupants, who might well do without a layer of paint if not for the election.

A handful of green buildings still make the case for Sandra Torres and the UNE party, but she was eliminated in the first round in September, and the paint is already beginning to fade.

Along the road between Antigua and the capital, a single black and white sign leaps out of the blaze of color. Erected by something called the “Movimiento de Integración,¨the sign argues that each of the last seven presidents have been terrible.

Back outside the Litegua station in Guatemala City, a similarly grim message adorns a crumbling wall.

¨Farsa Electoral,¨it reads, in jangly letters of blue spray paint. ¨No Vota.

This is not to say that all is lost in Guatemala, in Guatemala City, or on 15a Calle, Zona 10.

A pair of smiling garbage men in tattered vests reading ¨Limpio y Verde¨(clean and green) make twice hourly stops to pick up the rinds from streetside fruit vendors and keep the place relatively tidy. The small comedors do a brisk business in grilled meats, rice and tortillas, and a small shop across the way from the station seems to attract a lot of young men in to look at its collection of second-hand clothing and cell phone accessories.

Still, the big red city busses belch giant clouds of black smoke, dark enough you could well lose your way and stumble into the open sewer. The walls are tacky with grime, and there´s no activity from inside either of the two hotels on 15a Calle, aside from a faded floral print curtain flapping through the broken window upstairs in the Hotel Manatial.

Most remarkably, this block includes a grand total of eight payphones, all of them functional. Few streets in the US could make such a claim, and on none of them could you drop down the equivelent of 75 cents and walk away with a cold drink and the change to make three phone calls.

But then again, this is most likely an atypical street.

Cross country, in relative style

2011-11-01T11:08:00.000-07:00

RIO DULCE - Between leaving the Villa del Lago at Lake Atitlan and arriving here in a chair outside my room at the Hotel Rio Dulce (80Q a night) has required a grand total of 16 hours. Curse you , Junior Nixon Travel Service, your non-existant 230 bus, and your overly ambitious estimates of travel time.

Aside from the enormous amount of time involved, it has not been a bad trip. Seating was comfortable the entire way, and had the 230 bus actually existed, I´d have missed my excellent 15Q lunch outside the Guatemala City bus station. As to the 15Q dinner of an ice cream bar that appeared to have been repeatedly sat on as well as repeatedly frozen and thawed, the less said the better.

I´d have also missed about six hours of sucking sounds and giggling from the teenaged Guatemalan couple seated in front of me on the Guatemala City to Rio Dulce bus. I do have to hand it to the guy, however - I don´t think there´s any way I could have survived a six-hour makeout session at his age without blowing most of my circuits and suffering some grevious and permenent injury.

Under the big Rio Dulce bridge, geckos are chirping and Black Sabbath is churning out ¨Paranoid¨from a little beer bar down toward the water. Up in town, there´s some fantastic vegetable market action. Men up to their knees in greens, hacking away at stems and stray roots with long knives and rinsing everything until it shines.

But this is not a night for nighttime exploring - far too beat up and gassed for any of that. Instead, a single tallboy of Gallo, a spot of water, and finding out what´s so dulce about Rio Dulce in the morning.

On board diversions from Skymall

2011-11-01T10:57:00.000-07:00

¨It´s a laugh a minute with this spiked hair hat.

Cream that will remove up to 30 warts, moles, or skin tags. Includes healing balm.

Miniature toilet-shaped water bowl for cats and dogs, ¨a hilarious conversation starter.¨

Trays that make ice cubes shaped like dauctsuns, branding iron to burn your initials into a steak. Or whole thoughs, if you want to splurge.

Laser hair therapy, $599. Resembles a partially-disassembled bike helmet.

Kite to pull you along on roller skates. $79, and awesome.

Plastic egg shaped gizmo. You crack your eggs and put them in these, allowing hard-boiled eggs without the inconvenience of shelling them.

¨The Brobdingnagian Sports Chair.¨With armrests at shoulder height and the seat too high for the feet of an ordinary-sized person to reach the ground, said ordinary-sized people can experience...something or rather.

¨The Seal Team 6 Money Clip.¨ A not entirely subtle way of bullshitting the most drunk and gullible women at closing time. Also, possibly a teriffic way to get one´s ass kicked by drunk and less gullible members of the armed forces.

Chicken Bus Follies

2011-10-28T09:11:00.000-07:00

NEBAJ, GUATEMALA - I have arrived in Nebaj, a town of 30,000 or so in a big green bowl among the mountains in the north of the country. This was apparently one of the hardest hit regions during the 80s civil war, as well as being home to Rigoberta Menchu, the Mayan woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize for documenting the era.

Or so I am told. As it turns out, the various guides who will take you around to some of the sights speak Spanish only a bit better than I do, and English not at all. Rather than drop even a modest amount of money on a tour where I will be unlikely to learn anything, I think I will be turning back and heading south.

Which means getting back on the chickenbus.

The chickenbus is the name tourists and locals both have adopted for the garishly decorated American school busses that provide much of the public transportation in the country. Presumably this is on account of people using them to transport chickens, though I have not seen that. There seems to be little to distinguish them from busses in any other part of the developing world, which is to say they are crowded and slow, noisy, dangerous, and fantastically cheap.

Yesterday morning, Jay the Englishman and I hit the Chichicastenago market, which according to all the guidebooks was supposed to be this legendary thing. It was disappointing.All the same fabrics and geegaws and fruits and such seen at every other market, only fractionally larger.

And so after about an hour of exploring, it was time to hit the road. We found the minibus station on the edge of the market and headed north to Quiche, riding in relative comfort for 45 minutes or so. At the station, the touts pointed us to our relative chicken busses - Coban for Jay, Nabaj for me - and we bid each other adios.

As it turns out, my bus was not scheduled to leave for another half hour, so I was treated to a parade of bus station sights, sounds and smells.

First up were the fruit and snack vendors, toting sacks of oranges and carrying trays of candy and cookies. I bought a small packet of strawberry wafers and munched away happily as they were followed by ice cream bars, and then what an American department store might call Gifts for Dad - wallets, watches and cologne.

Next up were the newspaper vendors. While most of them did little but listlessly chant the name of the publication- Prensa Libre, Prensa Libre ' waving it under the equally bored noses of the waiting passengers, one enterprising guy pulled the paper open and launched into a speech, detailing what one might find in a copy of the Journal de Centro America. Presidente Proximo! he said repeatedly, presumably a plug for bus riders to take this time to get up to speed before casting their vote in the upcoming presidential election.

As the paper vendors departed, a man carrying a tiny silver jar of balm climbed aboard. The balm - I assume it was balm, from the way he pantomimed applying it to various parts of his body - was truly magical. Headaches and stomach troubles could be cured, he said, as well as something to do with senorita en la cama - whether this is a male anti-impotency treatment, a female aphrodesiac or something else entirely, I will never know.

Balm man was carrying on when their was a commotion outside. Three women were chasing a turkey across the parking lot, trying to return it to the basket from which it had escaped. His audience otherwise occupied, the balm hawker shrugged and left.

The driver appeared to start the bus and we were surrounded in a thick cloud of diesel smoke. My seatmate came aboard, followed by what I assume was his wife and their six children, none of whom looked to be older than eight. The youngest was smearing a layer of grease across her already filthy face with a piece of fried chicken. He pulled her on to his lap, and we were off, backing the wrong way down a one way street for 50 yards or so until the driver was ready to proceed forward.

We spent the first 20 minutes or so, we circled around Quiche and the outlying towns, picking up additional passengers. Somewhere during this time, we picked up a 50 ish man in a dark red shirt and a Panama hat. His arrival was largely uneventful, as he plopped himself down next to the two men in the seat in front of me.

Shortly after we hit the highway, the driver cranked up the music and my seatmates oldest daughter began vomiting, wretching copiously into a blanket. Around this time, the man in the Panama hat began talking, seemingly to nobody in particular.

The two other men in the seat in front of me were not engaging him - one stared off into space, while another read about Presidente Proxima - but the man in the Panama hat grew increasingly agitated. Thirty minutes into his diatribe, he was waving his finger in their faces, still getting no response.

An hour in, he turned his ire on a new audience, turning to address the elderly woman across the aisle. This was apparently too much for bus management. A luggage handler pushed forward from the back of the bus and put a heavy hand on the mans shoulder. Exactly what all he said I do not know, but No Molesto came up repeatedly.

The luggage handler returned to his post, leaning up against the rear exit door with his arms crossed across a filthy yellow tank top. The man in the Panama hat turned a few times to argue over who was molesto-ing who, but soon gave up. He held up his palm in the universal Its Cool Man gesture, and fell silent. Moments later he moved a few seats up and continued to sit quietly.

Watching this spectacle, I had failed to notice that my seatmate had fallen asleep on my shoulder, his mouth agog.

The view outside was getting more interesting, allowing me to ignore his snoring. Crossing a wide, gravelly river, we began climbing into the hills. Fresh rockfalls and mudlides hid around every hairpin turn, and the bus lurched violently as the driver navigated around the obstacles.

Looking across the valley to the other road, the Coban road Jay was traveling against the advice of the Lonely Planet, slides hundreds of yards long foretold what would happen should the bus lose its footing.

Climbing higher, cold air whipped through nearly vertical cornfields as we passed one false summit after another. Finally at the top - nearly 10,000 feet - we began an equally windy decent into Nebaj.

The road was better on this side, allowing the driver to pick up a little speed. While still abiding by the Frenar Con Motor signs - downshift, basically - he pushed faster and faster into the valley beneath.

Approaching the bottom, a man a few rows up stood up and wandered back toward me. Gesturing to the flowers on the rack above me, he announced "flores," giving me no indication of whether he wanted assistance or was simply stating a fact.

As the man wrestled with the flowers, the driver muscled into a curve. Petals and leaves flying, the man caromed against several seats, smashing his ass into the face of the woman who had a short time earlier been the victim of the Panama hatted man's tirade.

Then we were in Nabaj. As noted earlier, it sucked, and I began making plans to head back to San Pedro.

The trip started smoothly enough. Along with a good two dozen locals, I packed into a small minibus. I was given the center seat in the front row, which gave me about half an inch of headroom and a view of the top of the rearview mirror. Thirty minutes in, I switched vans, and took the more comfortable passenger seat. So far, so good.

In Quiche, I dined on some kind of greasy soup with a large lump of pork fat floating in it. A chickenbus headed for the main junction near Lake Atitlan was waiting, and we were off and running in minutes.

A talented, hard charging driver was at the wheel. He stopped only when a group of at least four passengers were waiting by the side of the road, and barked out orders to his luggage boys, ordering them out the back door and up on to the roof as he gunned it through the curves. In no time, we were at the junction.

Up until now, I'd beeen telling the drivers I was headed for Panahachel, the largest city on the lake. The ride around the lake from San Pedro had been punishing, and it seemed it would be easiest to hit Panahachel and take one of the ferries across.

Two or three short rides later, I was ejected from the bus in Solola, a few miles up the road from Panahachel. A local woman seemed to sense my bewilderment and jumped in to help, explaining that the road between Solola and Panahachel had been blocked.

On to yet another bus. This one was headed for San Jorge, a town so small it appears on few of the tourist maps of the lake. The San Jorgeans seemed realize the road closure was an opportunity, and had set up a bustle of stands to peddle fruit and other snacks to the crowds descending on their town.

The ferry ride was straightforeward, spent chatting with a local fellow who spoke better English than any Guatemalan I've met yet. Total time six hours door to door from Nabaj to San Pedro, covering a distance of maybe 100 miles at most.

Tomorrow, all the way across the country to Tikal. This time, on a massive bus in air conditioned comfort.

On the ground in San Pedro

2011-10-25T16:38:00.000-07:00

After a week, figured it was time to provide some updates. First things first, the nothing but Guatemalan food streak is alive after 7 or 8 days now. More avocado than I have eaten in my life, saw a pile of them on a day trip yesterday that must have been the size of two school busses.

Upon touching down, I worked my way through customs and found the exit terminal quite different than any airport I've seen previously. Just a lot of vehicles parked around doing next to nothing. I had hoped for shuttle bus drivers shouting at me so I could sort of pick and choose, but after standing around for 5 minutes, only one guy approached me. With little to speak of in terms of knowing proper pricing structures, I proceeded to get raked over the coals, agreeing to pay $30 for a 45 minute cab ride to Antigua. I'm sure his sick mother needs the money.

As a non-Spanish speaker it took me a few days to learn that Antigua doesn't mean anything but old, in reference to the city's status as the old capital of the country. After around 200 years as the center of Spanish controlled Central America, the place was largely abandoned after a massive earthquake in the 1770s, so it's still filled with the architecure of the day, albeit no small part of it smashed into bits.

Food. After passing by a McDonalds and a Burger King both tastefully inserted into the kinds of pastel stucco buildings that predominate in Antigua, I found a tiny dark place with stains on the walls, maybe six little plastic stools and several pots of who knows what simmering on a small stove. Perfect.

This was where the vow to eat strictly Guatemalan began, and it may still be the best meal I've had. A couple pieces of chicken, a bunch of rice, a boiled potato, tortillas, a big bowl of some kind of chili chocolate soup and a boiled chayote, this odd little thing covered with prickly hairs that kind of tastes like a sugarless pear.

Lovely as it may be, Antigua doesn't have a lot going on beyond walking around gawking at the buildings. After three days, I was ready to leave and hopped on a tourist minibus to San Pedro.

San Pedro is one of about a half dozen smallish towns surrounding Lake Atitlan, a giant collapsed volcano that should be familiar to anyone who's been to Crater Lake. At close to 12 miles end to end, it is much larger, however, and the comparatively shallow slopes allowed the Mayans to move in and till the soil.

And till they do. There are few surfaces that don't have some kind of food growing on them. Even small properties will have a few coffee plants and a fruit tree or two, usually oranges or bananas. Properties that would be considered small lots in most American cities will have a few rows of corn, and much of it is towering stuff, 12 feet high or taller.

One phenomenon that I've not seen before but may be familiar to those from corn country is the practice of cracking the stalks so that the top half of the plant hangs down toward the ground. I suspect this may be a way of letting the kernels dry out in the sun, but my Spanish is not yet good enough to acertain an answer.

The Spanish is coming back, or at least as much as you might hope for after nearly 20 years of hardly using it at all. Oddly enough, when I'm struggling, it's stuff like 'Yo Quiero Taco Bell" that comes back. Probably not what my Spanish teachers would like to hear, but it has allowed me to explain what I want to the locals.

San Pedro is a hotspot for Spanish schools and burned out westerners, so it has been a good place to chat up a few people in my native tongue to figure out what's actually going on out there. The pub run by an English expat has been particularly useful in this regard, but with a cost. When the best beer deal in town involves buying it by the liter, "one more" is a dangerous proposition.

It was under such circumstances a couple days back that I ran into a couple of guys looking to make an illegal after hours beer run.

Closing time is at 11 pm in Guatemala, and widely observed it seems. However, if you know who to ask, you can get around this.

And so it was that myself, an English guy and a Dutch guy headed out into the narrow alleys late one night to track down the after hours shop.

After walking for what seemed like hours, we came across a tall metal gate, and Jeff the English guy began pounding on it insistently. The upper third of a gringo face appeared above the gate after a short time, and after some negotiations, we were on our way with a few bottles.

On a less destructive note, I met up with a different friendly English guy over lunch today, and we've made plans to head for Chichicastenango tomorrow on the Chicken Bus. It's going to be my first ride on one of these garishly painted former school busses, and I'm keen to see what all the hubub is about.

Luggage

2011-10-15T23:56:00.000-07:00

We now have approximately 44 1/2 hours until I hop on the plane for Guatemala, and my brain is on bags and packing them.

Curiously, no matter how many things I think I might be able to use, and the bloated size of my camera bag, the backpack is not filling up nearly as quickly as I expected. Why this is the case is a mystery to me.

There are a number of things I'm not taking that once upon a time took up a good deal of space in the pack. The one that jumps out most is the Walkman and a half dozen or so tapes, replaced by an iPod small enough I'm likely to lose it. There's also the water filter, a big thing about the size of one of those Hickory Farms summer sausages, that I've used so little on past trips that it's most likely still under warranty.

Looking at my old packing lists, it seems I've made a habit of carrying far more water bottles and carabiners than needed. Also a full roll of duct tape, which I'll probably take this time around despite slim odds I'll have any need to tape anything, let alone 50 yards of anything.

I figure I'll have a much better idea if I'm getting smarter or my pack is getting bigger by tomorrow, when I'll start stuffing it all in there. It's quite possible I'm just imagining things.

Can Hammers shoot?

2011-10-15T03:05:00.001-07:00

Ah, yes.

Last day of work for an entire month is coming up in approximately nine hours, just enough time to get some sleep before grinding out one more shift. Not that it's a grind. Could hardly be happier, really.

But, as has happened any number of times in the recent past, I get back to the office with an objectionable situation laid out in front of me, long after anyone I could object to has left. The next day's plan is scribbled on a scrap of paper for one of my photgrapher pals to pick up.

"Live event: Can Hammers shoot?"

The real photographer is racing to three sporting events and a portrait for the health pages, or something, so I understand. He's a busy guy.

I suppose this is something of an advisory to those who want to pursue a career in the exciting world of journalism, circa 2011. Being able to shoot is a good thing. Probably makes you a touch more marketable. It also means you WILL be shooting, like it or not, most likely in the least desirable circumstances.

Know this. And know a shit photo can't be papered over with a heap of purple prose or a correction the next day. It stands on its own. One sixtieth of a second, or less, with your name on it for all eternity.

Enjoy.

14 years, 15 photos

2011-10-02T18:56:00.001-07:00

With two weeks to go until I scoot off to Guatemala and thousands in newly-acquired camera gear ready to either make some fantastic photos or get stolen at knifepoint, I figured it'd be a good time to dig out the old photo albums and see if I've learned anything useful since my first trip to Indonesia in 1997.

What follows is a series of five photos from each of the three big trips - Indonesia 1997, Southeast Asia 1999 and Southeast Asia/India 2004, and my own personal critique of my work.

The first two trips were in the waning days of the film era, shot with an old manual Minolta SRT-101 and a fully-auto Pentax something or other. The India trip was shot with a digital faux-SLR Fuji - can't recall the model, as the relevant info that was once painted on the body has long since rubbed off.

One consequence of this transition is that in some cases, I've only been able to reproduce the film era shots by shooting the prints with the current camera. As a result, there are a few odd flares resulting from the slick photo paper. Clicking on any image should lead to a larger photo from my Picasa galleries.

Let's begin, PART I, INDONESIA 1997:

From Photo Critique

Somewhere in rural central Sumatera. I like a lot about this photo, particularly the resemblance to the cover art on Led Zeppelin IV, her off-kilter glance, and the path that kind of wraps around the left side and fades into the distance. I'm less pleased with her placement in the center of the frame; I'd most likely compose this picture differently today.

From Photo Critique

Yogyakarta. Like a lot of my shots from this trip, the excessive sky in the framing has fooled the camera into making an exposure different than what my eye saw. Framed a little more tightly, I think I could have picked up more detail from the parked cyclos and picked up the driver pulling out of the line.

From Photo Critique

Bali. A lot of my pictures from this trip have no people in them, making them much less interesting than they might be otherwise. I like some of the lines in this photo, but there's no real obvious point of interest.

From Photo Critique

Somewhere in Sumatera. I'm still not sure what I could have done with this one. I like how he's framed by the foliage, but the darkness of the forest vs. the relative brightness on the plants at the edge of the road creates a bit of a distraction. I could frame in closer, but I'd lose some of the context.

From Photo Critique

Borobudur, Java. I like the arc the tips of the spires create with the Buddha, and the highlighting a small piece of this giant temple. But it was crooked when I shot it, and remains crooked in the re-cropping of the original print.

PART II, SE ASIA 1999:

From Photo Critique

Bangkok. This is still one of my favorite photos, though it in part by accident. The camera - think it was the Pentax - made all of the aperture decisions, and I'm still unsure if the flash fired. He looks very brightly lit, but the shadows on his shirt are pretty soft. That said, I made a point of waiting for this very animated guide to do something showy, and gave him some space composition-wise away from the big gold statue.

From Photo Critique

Bangkok. Possibly the beginning of my ongoing infatuation with super wide angles. I like how it makes the spires seem that much taller, and I also like the sort of bored look of the Thai woman we toured around with that day. Mixed on the inadvertent vignetting created by an oversized lens hood, and would wish away the man in the blue shirt i I could.

From Photo Critique

Kunming, China. I don't remember enough about the state of the building beneath the man with the sledgehammer to know what my framing options were, but I think I'd like to be a little lower. I love the lower left to upper right lines, and the angle of the sledgehammer relative to those lines, but think it would be stronger if I'd aimed downward by a few degrees.

From Photo Critique

Laos, possibly Luang Prabang. Trying to get an idea and not just an image in a photo, and I'm less than satisfied with how it worked out. Getting back a bit further to compress the bomb casing and the temple might have helped, as well as coming back at an hour when the lighting was a bit more favorable.

From Photo Critique

Lopburi, Thailand. The oversize lens hood and the thing for wide framing strikes again. At the time, I don't think I realized how fast a shutter speed I'd need to freeze the action, and the inability to review my shots and their relative expense - film, remember? - created a poor representation of what was an awesome game of takraw.

PART III, INDIA/SE ASIA 2004:

From Photo Critique

Orissa, India. I might have framed down just a touch, and maybe a little wider, but I like the gesture and the level of temple detail presented along with our tour guide guy.

From Photo Critique

Jaipur, India. Although its a bit disorganized and the main subject is dead center, the number of different things going on at once really represents an Indian market well. I don't really like the arms coming in from the right, but this is the best in a series of frames. Perhaps moving back a bit would have allowed for a bit more produce and less of the disembodied arms effect.

From Photo Critique

Agra, India: The Taj Majal is one of those monuments that may be over-photographed. Right place right time here, all of the shots at dawn from across the river that lack the boat in the foreground are a bit lifeless.

From Photo Critique

Yongzhou, China. Other than the somewhat washed out tones - it was pretty foggy in Youngzhou - I have few complaints about this picture. One of the only shots I've ever created that lacks a single subject but works just the same.

From Photo Critique

Possibly Jaipur, definitely India. A bit of a throwaway shot I didn't really appreciate until I got home and could see it full size. The original framing is lost to history, but I find the huge expanse of textured emptiness on the left and the way the man sort of falls out of the right side of the frame makes it work. I do wonder what if anything he was looking at.

SUMMARY, WHAT I'VE LEARNED

Too much to list, really. A lot of my pictures early on fall short due to a failure to consider things like the rule of thirds, keeping horizons out of the middle of the frame, scanning the edges of the frame for intruding objects, and a total ignorance of bokeh and depth of field management.

The instant feedback of digital allowed me to put some of these lessons into practice in the 2004 series, but even then, a lot of it was luck. I shot nearly every frame on auto, and was able to machine gun my way in to better shots than I deserved on a few occasions.

In keeping with the spirit of today's project, five lessons.

#1: With a few exceptions, people make pictures work. On the first couple trips, I had a real reluctance to stick my lens in people's faces, and more importantly, I didn't know enough to wait for somebody to enter a frame and let them unknowingly turn a scenic snapshot into something more interesting.

#2: Your eyes are better than the camera's eye. Some things have entirely too much contrast to work, no matter how nice they may look through human eyes. Bright skies destroy all detail in the shadows, and can be defeated through a tighter shot or a little judiciously applied fill flash.

#3: You can only get so much in one picture, so make it count. Generally speaking, a foreground subject should be the top priority. If you can get an interesting secondary background subject, great. But trying to do much beyond that will almost always fail. The camera can only focus on one point. No matter what kind of excitement is going on in the background, a still photo will fail to capture it more often than not.

#4: Don't be afraid to push the ISO. A crisp yet slightly grainy photo is better than a blurry photo, and most likely better than one that's been blasted all to hell with on-camera flash. And the resolution of a high ISO photo with a modern digital camera is seriously impressive.

#5: Wide angle lenses and zoom lenses are both beautiful things. Don't become overly dependent on either. Move. A good subject will benefit from both.

Blackberry and Jim

2010-04-01T22:24:00.000-07:00

Thursday was a day of distinction at the paper, for reasons both amusing and somewhat disheartening.

The day before, one of the co-workers passed a message along to me, tucking something along the lines of "Here's another reason to hate me" in to the email. Minutes later, I was on the phone with a high school girl, hearing the story of Blackberry the cat and the nine days she'd spent stuck in a tree.

Now, nine days is an impressive amount of time for a cat to be in a tree. And the girl did have some pretty damning things to say about the fire chief's refusal to come to her aid. So a photographer went down to shoot some photos, I wrote up a little story, and rolled my eyes when I found out a cat in a tree was going to be taking up about three-quarters of the real estate on the front page.

Thursday. As I woke up, the phone rang. A cat rescue was getting underway, 30 miles south of my bed. Some hours later, I was headed back to the office, pondering what I could do with a story about an unemployed countertop installer who had chased a frightened cat around the top of a tree, only to have it escape when he got it to the ground.

When I got to the office, I had 17 voicemails and 6 emails, all from people who viewed the cat situation as no less upsetting and urgent than a full-fledged invasion of Commie-Nazis from outer space. Anything they could do, they were ready to do it.

By late afternoon, I'd taken to answering the phone, "Cat in a tree hotline, this is Scott." But the calls kept coming in. Eventually, I got another story out. This one, to take up about 90 percent of the front page.

When I got into this business, I had no aspirations of "changing the world," or more modestly, "making a difference," whatever that really means. I was in it for a lark, for the pure joy of asking people questions and sitting back to see what they had to say.

In six interviews for positions at various papers, I've answered the "why did you get into/want to get into journalism?" question exactly the same way - with a story about my first trip to Indonesia. Cornering people on the street and forcing them to engage in the critical questions of the day - such as, where did they move the goddamned Indian embassy, who sells a decent soup around here, and is this the bus to Bukkitingi - is tremendous fun. And it translates well to the day-to-day of being a reporter.

To the extent I've ever considered "serious issues" an important subject to explore, it was primarily as a vehicle for meeting people who were so wrapped up in whatever it was they happened to be into that they'd act in the most ridiculous, self-important way.

But it's still kind of troubling that a tale about a cat in a tree - a cute yet foolish animal with a brain the size of a grape - will roust more readers into action than a dozen stories about homeless people freezing to death in the forest or failing schools or moronic elected officials overseeing million-dollar budgets.

In more recent interviews, when I've been asked about the story I've most enjoyed writing, I've usually talked about Jim Wilson. It too was a rescue story.

Jim was a year or two shy of 70 when I met him, and still living in the house where he grew up in Lake Grove. The farmland that had surrounded his home when he was a boy had long since been gobbled up, his parents had died decades ago, but Jim had continued on, by himself, in a tiny shack of a house fenced in by blackberry brambles higher than his roof.

A code inspector had wandered down Jim's dead end street and found his home a week or so before we met. The place was, to be charitable, a fucking disaster area, littered with scrap wood, broken appliances, and any number of items that Jim had stashed away thinking they might be useful at some point in the future.

Using the deliberately non-threatening language of the bureaucracy, the code inspector had threatened Jim - clean up your act within two weeks, or we're going to lock you out of your house.

My story had the intended effect. The city backed off. A church group marshaled an army of at least 100 to clean up Jim's place, and the local garbage company donated a couple of giant dumpsters to haul away the detritus it'd taken him more than 50 years to assemble.

Jim was grateful, but more than a little embarrassed by all the attention. And he fought the whole way, chasing people down and ripping broken tools from their hands, and arguing vociferously in favor of saving unopened 20-year-old mail, or a stained and dented globe where East Pakistan and Upper Volta still existed.

The volunteers got Jim's house back into a semi-livable condition, but he couldn't keep up once they'd left. Condemnation went through a year or so later, Jim was moved into a nursing home, and died shortly thereafter.

You can get drama in a critter story, and you can get drama in serious news. But a story about Blackberry the cat is never going to make people feel nearly as unsettled as a story about a man like Jim.

While his story may have technically began with the visit from the code inspector, it had really begun decades earlier. And all that time, he'd been living right there among his neighbors, up to his ears in filth and humiliation and largely ignored.

It's too close. Jim is too much like the uncle no one ever bothers to visit, too much like the slightly strange man who always lingers a bit too long to chat with the cashiers at the grocery store up the street. Too much like anyone who's ever worried about isolation, or dying alone - too much like everyone, really.

Cats being cats, they come home, purr, have a scratch on the belly, and the whole story is over. It's a happy ending every time. Men like Jim don't disappear once their stories have been told. One goes off to the nursing home to die, and another three pop up to take his place.

Jim had cats too. If only more people had known about the cats sooner, maybe everything would have worked out differently.

American Bomb

2010-02-08T01:55:00.000-08:00

In Laos, just about everything happens out in the street.

Sometime around December 1999, Arlo and myself were wandering aimless-like along one of those streets in a riverside town in north Laos when we came across a handful of boys playing badminton. Their birdie was brown and worn, and they had two badminton racket to go along with two wooden paddles they'd fashioned into something resembling a proper racket.

As the foreigners, we were issued the real rackets with no hesitation on the part of the boys.

It was a hard fought match. We put up a good fight against our preternaturally spry opponents, diving and leaping and doing everything we could to keep the game somewhat close. I do not recall what the score was when I darted after the birdie and landed hard on the racket.

Crunch.

Chinese made consumer goods have a bad enough reputation here in the states, but be assured, what they turn out for the local market is comically poor. My racket had been bent near to 90 degrees, revealing a shameful fissure of disposable craftsmanship.

We, me and Arlo, we are statesmen. So we devoted the better part of the next 36 hours to looking for a replacement racket.

Whatever this town was, the sporting goods supply at the market was minimal. We found all kinds of rat traps and fishing gear, savory spices and off-brand batteries, but no badminton rackets. So we resorted to splinting the broken racket with bamboo chopsticks and duct tape.

The next day, we went looking for our badminton adversaries. They were not to be found, but the older brother of one of them came out to meet us. Come in, he said, let's have a drink.

Lao people that have any amount of money are packrats of the worst kind. This particular home was stuffed to the eaves with rice cookers, bags of t-shirts, clocks, all kinds of things that were readily available at the market that did not have badminton rackets, but all kinds of other things that might have some resale value somewhere down the line.

It's an understandable practice in a country where even the smallest purchase requires thousands of Kip, and you can leave your hotel in the morning with your pockets bursting with bills and find yourself unable to buy a plate of noodles at lunchtime.

Our friend in the street ushered us inside to watch Thai soap operas on the television and drink, which in Laos means lao-lao. Rice liquor, adulterated with whatever is at hand.

Poorly-repaired racket in hand, we went in. The lao-lao flowed. We sat on one couch with our new friend who was eager to talk about Premier League Football and his David Beckham jersey, while the opposite couch was occupied by older men with runny eyes.

The older men had obviously known each other for some time. Backs were slapped, eyebrows were raised, and stale punchlines to worn-out stories were exchanged.

The oldest man downed his lao lao, and smacked his glass on the table with authority. He made eye contact. He rolled up his pants and knocked his knuckles against a plastic tube.

"American bomb."

He paused, to be sure we were paying attention.

"American bomb."

More lao lao followed. The old man and his friends conversed, in Lao, while we did what we could to keep up the increasingly meaningless discussion of professional soccer with our friend in the Beckham jersey. Something neither of us knew the first thing about.

Painting

2010-02-07T22:53:00.000-08:00

Round about June, I got it into my head to paint my house. This is a not entirely normal impulse for a renter, but then again, this is not an entirely normal rental arrangement.

My humble little home, the crapshack, was built around 1920, and if the paint chips are any guide, it's been outfitted in a whole range of colors since then - grays, browns, greens, blues and red. As of last June, it was pretty well in the gray range.

The impulse to paint the house came as the neighboring house was getting all kinds of special treatment in anticipation of being rented out once again. My landlord owns both houses, but the one next door had been vacant for a year or so on account of a busted water main and any number of other deficiencies. And so he had hired a couple of guys to work on fixing the place up.

One of the repair guys had a second job as a Dominos delivery driver, something I figured out one night while walking back from the 7-11. We'd been nodding politely to each other for a couple of weeks, but on this particular night, he was able to boost the relationship by offering me free pizza. Which you just don't turn down. Even if it is Dominos.

In time, we started hanging out semi-regularly. He'd work late, and wander over with a box of cold pizza to have a beer on the front porch with me when he'd get burned out on fucking around with the wiring or trying to set tiles on a crooked floor. Eventually, the talk turned to painting, one of the few aspects of home repair I know well on account of my brief stint as part of "College Pro Painters," which is one of the most half-assed operations in the history of civilization.

Two quick asides: A sit-down strike to protest the lack of safety equipment is tremendously effective against a College Pro Painters crew chief, and turpentine should not be used to wash paint off your skin. You trip your balls off, it's like huffing a whole case of paint at once.

My new friend let it be known that they were planning on painting the house next door reasonably soon, and between the two of us, we hatched a plan to get my house painted as well. Easy for him, and a few more bucks in his pocket.

The plan, naturally, was contingent on not telling the landlord anything. He's a good guy, but he's up to his ears in debt as a result of jumping into the real estate market at the worst possible time. So any expense is a major headache for him.

Me and the repair guy figured that the best course of action would be for me to do all of the prep work for free, and then have him come over and spray the house. Then we'd tell the landlord what we'd done.

The front side of the house, east to southeast facing, was a nightmare. I was peeling off strips of paint as long as my arm, and probably could have scraped off every bit of paint had I been more diligent. Once the scraping was finished, I entertained the idea of renting a powerwasher, but eventually thought better of it. A mop and a bucket of Pine-Sol was surprisingly effective at washing down the remaining paint, and also revealed the house to be more of a pale blue than the gray I had become accustomed to.

Being in the newspaper business, I had no shortage of papers to mask off the windows. I managed to knock out most of this in a day or two, but with the actual painting postponed repeatedly, I began to feel cocooned. My houseplants drooped, and I lost track of day and night.

My sister came through for a visit during this period, and as we were sitting on the couch one night with the door cracked open, the homeless guy who had previously slept in my backyard came by.

"Hey brotherman, hey Scott, are they ever going to paint your house?"

"It looks like shit."

The landlord caught wind of our plan eventually, and came up with a thoroughly ridiculous idea that I ought to pay an extra $50 a month if the house was going to be painted. His plan would have had me paying off the paint and the labor within three to six months. This notion was dismantled quickly and severely -- when you rent an un-rentable house, you have the defensible position against landlord tomfoolery.

And so the house was painted. After three or four weeks of newspapered-over windows, I came home one night and let myself in, only to do a double-take and go back outside to find that my shady blue-gray had become a deep chocolate brown. And on the back steps was a big can of trim paint, my responsibility under the not-too-official deal we'd made.

Six months later, the trim is still not finished. This place is a fucking dump, seriously, and you can only do so much prepwork on a window frame that has taken on a cork-like consistency. On the plus side, it was fun to go up on the roof. Whatever it is that has been shitting near the hot water heater exhaust, I'm going to leave it alone.

There's no real lesson to sum up this post. Thanks to C and C for prompting me to get back on task documenting the Crap Shack Experience, and there is more to come.

Spring cleaning

2009-03-21T18:32:00.000-07:00

Today seemed like a good day to try to get rid of some stuff.

This is a project that has been at least slightly complicated by the work crew filling up my recycling bin with pine needles and branches and other scrap that's not going to make the boys at the garbage company too happy, so I decided to start with the bike.

I've dubbed this one, "The Lead Banana." It's the only bike I've ever actually named, but then, it's the only bike I've ever had that weighed a good 50 pounds and was bright yellow. For the last many months, The Lead Banana has lay on my porch in a state of disassemblage. I'm not sure what I planned to do with it when I started taking it apart, but nonetheless, apart it has remained for quite some time.

So this afternoon, I dug up what tools I could find, wandered over to the bike consignment shop and bought an inner tube, and picked up a couple bottles of beer and set to work.

I got this bike in maybe 2003, when a friend of mine from the Lake Oswego pub took mercy on me upon learning my beloved Bontrager had been stolen. The promise of a free bike got my hopes up more than they probably should have been, because when this was what he delivered, I was pretty disappointed. At the time it had no brake pads and no seat, but I managed to take care of that and it served me well for a few short trips around town.

Today was the right day to pass the generosity along. I got the bike put back together, and spent a few hours pedalling in circles in front of the house, trying to figure out if there was any way to make these rusty cables shift smoothly and brake crisply. Concluding there was not, I put together a sign. Since it's probably not visible in the picture, I'll repeat it here:

Free Inner Tube
a $4 value, bike included
- It mostly shifts
- It brakes enough
- The rear tire may have a slow leak
- That's why you get a free tube
- High visibility yellow
- Faster than walking
- The ultimate fashion statement
- Free

I hooked the sign to the bike and leaned it up against a tree on the main street. Not 30 seconds later, a couple folks wandered up to check it out. Kevin, a chunky blond kid with a can of High Life in his hand who turns out to be a nearby neighbor, wanted extra clarification to be sure it was indeed free, but he was happy to roll it away.

Kinda bummed I didn't get to hang out on the porch longer watching to see who came by to check it out, but The Lead Banana is now someone else's problem. It's about time.

Doing it the Max Power way

2009-03-11T20:46:00.000-07:00

I've heard there are small children out there who have a deathly fear of being sucked down the drain in the bathtub. I wasn't one of those kids, but lately, I've sorta understood where they're coming from.

One of the many pleasures of living in my little shack has been the bathroom. When I first viewed this house a little over three years ago, the tub was filthy and cracked, and the ceiling above the tub was a mass of dark colored sludge, held in place by a visquine and duct tape assembly of sorts. The landlords replaced the ceiling with something more appropriate and patched the cracks in the tub with a generous application of caulk.

The caulk began failing some time ago, and recently, I've noticed new cracks. A small stream of water was slipping through the cracks while I showered, leading me to speculate that the under-the-tub water was the source of the water that seems to trickle out onto the bathroom floor to soak my bathmat.

So with a day off today, I figured it was a good time for another home repair project: put a layer of fiberglass on the bottom of the tub, ideally waterproofing it and giving it some degree of structural stability.

This project has its origins close to 10 years ago, when I was living on Puget Sound up in Washington. One fine summer day I was sitting out on the back deck when I heard one of the neighbors scream "Boat!" Looking up, I saw a small rowboat floating by unoccupied, headed out for the Pacific on the ebb tide. Jumping into action, roommate Ian and I hopped in our own rowboat and paddled out to snag it.

After we got it to shore, we realized its potential. All of about six feet long, this boat was small enough to get up to speed if we could ever get one of our outboards running again. Ian set up a sawhorse and got to tinkering with the outboards, and I hiked up the hill to buy a fiberglass repair kit.

Before the story gets too far off track, I'll just skip ahead and say I learned a fair bit about working with fiberglass, Ian learned a bit about motors, and we eventually got the boat fitted out to cruise across the shipping lanes and go drink beer at the Tides Tavern in Gig Harbor.

So today, I headed into the Home Depot pretty well sure of what I was looking for. Finding the fiberglass matting and the resin and the hardener, I went home ready to get to work.

The result, as seen above, looks as though I let an incontinent pig loose in my tub. The brown is obviously the fiberglass, and the purplish stuff is where the sanding block I bought rubbed off on the high spots, leaving its colorful residue behind. The nasty stuff everywhere else is just evidence that I either need to scrub my tub harder and more often, or refrain from taking flash photos of it.

Tomorrow during the shower hour, we find out how well this worked.

Sledge McBeef

2009-02-19T01:31:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks after my break-in episode and my brief stint as a private eye working only on my own behalf, I have found my latest alter-ego.

Det. Sledge McBeef.

This began, as most primetime crime serials do, with a nasty eye infection of some sort. All seemed to be going well wearing the contacts, and then I stepped on my glasses, and then the contacts went south on me and suddenly I was Amsterdam coffee shop bloodshot pretty much all the time. So the easiest thing to do was to wear my sunglasses to work.

I picked these glasses up in Vietnam, after a similar episode involving a lens falling out of my regular glasses and contacts difficulties. It's an advanced country in many ways, but the typical small town optician has the State Trooper model and the Buddy Holly model and not much else in between. As the sun had been burning the bejeezus out of my unshielded eyes while I was in regular-glasses mode, I decided to go for the State Trooper, with a light enough tint that I could still navigate my way through the dark alleyways and distinguish between potted plants, prostitutes, motorcycles and those looking to do me harm.

Fun fact: Up close, the temples have the word "Police" in tiny raised letters.

In any event, wearing retro dark glasses to work was a source of much amusement for some of the co-workers. The editor decided I was "Starsky," and one of the other reporters simply giggled without end. Being a good sport, I brought in the leather coat on Monday to better live up to the part.

But then, Tuesday was a day off. Slept in, washed a few dishes. Took a nice bike ride. Unsure of what to do late in the afternoon, I broke out the lights and the tripod. Only took about 15 or 20 shots to get one I liked, though it is a tad out of focus on the front end. Then it was poster making time.

Getting into work today, giggling reporter was disappointed I didn't have the glasses. She had a present for me, so I figured I'd toss in a poster of myself in full-flower in trade.

I got a fake mustache in our little gift exchange. It itches like hell, but makes me want to do a few more shots. Photo editor has suggested I wear it for the official press ID, which at least on the surface sounds like a fantastic idea.

Scott Hammers, Private Detective

2009-02-07T01:10:00.000-08:00

The upside of Wednesday's burglary episode is that it has given me a chance to play detective. Anyone who tells you they never wanted to be a detective is most likely lying to you -- I know this, because of my keenly-honed detective senses.

In any event, the day began early, because I was too jacked up to sleep. It had been a sleepless night, spent with my dirty chef's knife sitting on the nightstand, because when you've been burgled, you kinda take leave of your senses. Every time the furnace or water heater popped or grunted or groaned, I snapped upright, which made for a pretty unsatisfying night's rest. That, and the better part of a bottle of wine I finished off after the cops left around 12:30.

The sleuthing began around 8. I went for a coffee, then walked the alley behind my house for two or three blocks, looking for clues. Mostly my watch, which had been in the coin jar, and with a broken band, I figured it wasn't of much use to the asshole who broke into my house.

Step two was the hair salon that backs up against the crapshack. Just for fun, we're gonna lapse into character here, to try to get a better feel for what unfolded. Trust me, it'll be fun.

"Hey sweetie, investigating a little situation here, hopin' you can help me out. Seems some no-good punk broke into my place last night. You know anything about that?"

You could see her heart jump underneath the Mylar stylists apron, not unlike some kind of jumping thing, maybe a kangaroo, maybe a kangaroo trapped under a sheet of Mylar. She was troubled by this. She cared. This was a dame with a lotta soul.

"Oh, that's awful, just awful," she said, her scissors still snipping away at nothing in paticular. "What did they take."

"Change baby, just change. You know, they say it's the only thing that's constant."

She swallowed hard. This was a dame I could get along with, she noticed things. She'd noticed I'd walked around the building twice before coming in. People who don't notice things don't notice those kinds of things, I've noticed.

"What about, those people, you know, up the alley?"

"I know. Oh, do I ever know. But here's the real question darlin': What do you know?"

Those people up the alley, whatta bunch. Seems like there's barely a week goes by, it's not something. Sometimes it's one boozehound shouting at another, sometimes it's all about who knifed who, and why. Sometimes, it's a 24-foot motorhome engulfed in flames, but even then, it's either that crazy broad lighting the whole thing on fire for no good reason at all, or maybe it's that skinny fellow with the three day beard, just dropping his cigarette in his bed and pushing off to the store for another case of Busch. You never know with those people, you never, never know.

The dame, she knew more than she was letting on at first. She'd seen the kid, those people's kid, the kid with the long greasy hair and the hooded sweatshirt. Just that morning, even. He'd been a couple blocks over, kinda holdling his right hand up like it was hurt. She thought maybe it was a stomach problem, maybe a burst appendix even. But now. Now, she thought maybe it was one of those hurts you can only get from putting your fist through a single pane window a couple feet from a doorknob. Maybe my doorknob. We were getting somewhere.

Part 2 of this excercise in True Crime writing coming tomorrow. Who loves ya, baby?

Post-Scripts

2009-02-07T00:57:00.000-08:00

In reviewing some of the back blog entries, I've realized my much-anticipated photo opportunity was never properly explained here. Suffice it to say, it came through -- damn, probably five months ago now -- and it was a good experience.

I got a call one day from the weekly editor asking if I wanted to shoot some photos of a Redmond woman for a British tabloid. As I learned, she was half-famous as the former host of one of the largest tumors ever recorded, which was extracted from her abdomen in a series of surgeries earlier in the spring.

After a few phone calls back and forth with an exceedingly friendly woman with an English accent, we struck a deal. I shoot photos, I get $250. Given the paygrade in the world of print journalism these days, I jumped right on it.

Linda, the tumorwoman, her daughter Katie (I think) and the dog were all quite fun to work with, and never once did I feel as exploitive as I expected I would. At its root, a story about a woman with a tumor the size of a toilet bowl is an exercise in exploitation, an opportunity for all of us to point and stare and grimace uncomfortably.

I suppose it doesn't have to be, but I've never seen anything all that heroic in facing one's health problems, much less so when it's something like this. Maybe I should walk back my musings on this subject a few paces -- if nothing else, Linda's case does serve as an extreme-case reminder of why people should make a point of visiting the doctor on a somewhat regular basis. Yes, a lot of people are overweight, but when you've got a solid lump jutting out from beneath your ribcage that you rest your dinner plate on -- true story -- you probably ought to have that checked out.

Either way, I did the shoot. It wasn't as successful as I'd hoped, but I eventually got a handful of shots I couldr, be mostly happy with. And a few weeks later, I got my check. I'd really like to get a copy of the magazine the story was supposed to have run in, or at least find an online version of the story. But no luck yet.

Too many Mutha Uckers

2009-02-04T23:54:00.000-08:00

Since I apparently can't embed a youtube video, I'll open the day with a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqxnm6t3QMw

You'd think a house that all but screams poverty would fly under the radar of the criminally-minded. From the peeling paint to the trash in the yard to the unkempt weeds, there's nothing to suggest a rich or even modestly-average person lives here.

But that would be wrong. Tonight, I celebrate being burglarized for the first time.

It was an average enough night. I got home around 9:45 as ususal, sat down at the computer and had a couple glasses of wine, when out of nowhere I had the urge to empty my pockets. I had about five quarters in the front pocket of my jeans, but oddly, my change jar was nowhere to be found. After a brief wander through the house, I found that the back door was unlocked.

Further wandering revealed a nightstand drawer ajar, a drawer that is not opened unless I have, eh, "visitors." And I really don't have visitors. Finally, I found that one of the little glass panels in my rearmost room had been busted clean out, providing a clear path for someone with slightly longer arms than me to unlock the very door that was found unlocked.

Too many mutha uckers, uckin' with my sheee...

The strangest and yet most satisfying aspect of all of this is that nothing of any real value seems to have been taken. Just the change, which is of course the part most easily put to use. I'm happy about that, but less happy about the idea that I will feel compelled to pack up my valuable items and sock them away in a safer location whenever I leave.

Mutha Ucker, you ain't outta the woods yet. Tomorrow, we begin the task of tracking your worthless ass down. And I've got a few ideas on just how to do that.

Vaya con Dios, dickface.

I've tried this before

2009-01-29T23:59:00.000-08:00

Modern technology is a wonderous thing. Not only does it allow me to choke out my beer-tinged thoughts at midnight on a Thursday evening for all the world to see, it allows me to peek in and see who bothers to drop in and enjoy my mostly-pointless observations.

One of these treasured guests used to come from Jamaica, NY. I don't feel like I've seen them so much these days. I put out the all-points bulletin for whoever it was to contact me, and nothing came of it. Oh well...

The one that's coasted across my radar more recently is from Oakland, Calif., and I'd really love to know who you are. There's no shame in checking out someone's blog, even if it is primarily about plumbing issues and the like. We're all voyeurs online.

As they say here on the tubes, email in profile. Give me a holler, whoever you are. I'm sure I'll be happy to hear from you.

The game that has no end

2009-01-27T23:18:00.000-08:00

One of my former co-workers used to preface nearly every tale of real or imagined hardship with something that may or may not have come straight from Moby Dick:

"Day 206: I was chained to the deck as the waves began crashing around us"

Something along those lines. The relevence, today, is a return to matters concerning my house. Without doing the math, we can start it out something along the lines of, "Day 1,152: I was sitting quietly sipping a beer when the flood began."

Yes, it has been cold in the High Desert, as is the norm in wintertime. And as in each of the four winters I have spent in this near-house that I call home, the pipes have frozen multiple times, often with entertaining results.

Today's episode is centered on the kitchen, which due to its proximity to the outside wall of the house, is always the first to freeze. More serious cold will cause the bathroom sink to freeze, slightly more serious than that will cause the feed to the toilet to freeze, and only in the most extreme of extreme conditions will the line to the shower freeze.

Oddly, I don't believe the line to the hot water heater has ever frozen.

But today, we're in the kitchen. Two days ago I discovered that both the hot and the cold spigots had frozen solid. I initiated my usual ritual, cracking open the taps a touch and positioning a spaceheater inside the enclosure beneath the sink. It didn't do shit.

Yesterday I decided to take a closer look. I crawled under the sink with a flashlight and examined the pipes, periodically nodding and grimacing as someone who has no idea what they're doing will. At the bottom, where the pipes descend into the bare dirt that makes up the floor of this area, I noticed a few icicles. Curious as to how far up these went, I set to squeezing the pipe for signs of exterior ice. A foot up, my hand brushed against the little football-shaped dial that lets you shut off the flow of water to the tap. It fell off into the dirt, leaving me to peer into a pencil lead sized hole that presumably lead into the center of the pipe.

I have a lot of experience with this, but I have no experience with electrocution. Assuming the water would eventually start spurting out this hole, I unplugged the space heater and positioned a large jar in front of the cabinet door to keep it from flying open.

Wouldn't you know, it worked. Half an hour ago, the freeze thawed, and the cabinet door began banging violently on the jar as a large puddle collected on my kitchen floor. Finding my wrench and my flashlight, I headed out to the street to shut off the valve, but not before locating a large bucket that nearly filled in the tub as I fumbled around outside in the dark. As I say, I've done this before.

The plumber has been summoned. What do you expect for $425 a month, really?

The Skinny

2008-11-25T20:42:00.000-08:00

When I was small, the BMX bike was the ultimate way to get around the neighborhood. Squat, stable, and easy to jump, it was the only bike any self-respecting kids would want to be seen on.

At that time, I'd only seen two road bikes, or "ten speeds" as we called them back then. One belonged to my dad. He didn't ride it much, it was pretty bland looking, and besides, it was my dad, it couldn't be cool. The other belonged to a dad from down the street. It was flashier, but the guy who rode it always struck me as a bit of a weirdo, doing things like heading out jogging in sub-zero weather with some kind of scuba-style breathing device strapped to his back.

Now, after nearly 30 years of riding a bike, I've joined the ranks of the weirdos. A little over a week ago I bought the above pictured bike, a Jamis Quest. Steel frame, carbon fork, 20 gears, drop bars, the whole business. To up the ante, I've taken to wearing spandex.

And damn, if I haven't been missing out all these years.

Since I was six or so, I've owned a number of different bikes.

There was the green Schwinn, a throwback transvestite of a bike with a bolt-on top bar to make it a girls bike or a boys bike.

The silver Schwinn BMX, complete with pads for the top bar and the handlebars.

The gray Nishiki, a 24-inch, 24-speed mountain bike, a fine ride that I managed to destroy in a head-on crash with two other bikers that left me with a mishapen left kneecap.

A silver Raleigh mountain bike with ridiculous Fruit Stripe accents.

A blue Bridgestone that was a few years old when I bought it right as Rock Shox were coming into common usage, making me feel stylish and retro.

My black Bontrager, the finest mountain bike I have ever owned. I still dig GripShift, even if it is out of style.

A rusting, banana-yellow bike of German manufacture that weighed about 60 pounds and failed in just about every aspect of bike function beyond rolling straight ahead.

The Novara, a red bike I got at a deep discount and have mostly enjoyed. But with disc brakes and a low-end front shock, it's heavy. And more and more, I've found I do most of my riding on paved roads.

It's this bike that got me started thinking about those goofy looking road bikes with their skinny tires and weird curved handlebars. With the riding season mostly over, I started hitting the largely-deserted bike shops to hunt out the deals.

There were several. All over the place, bikes of all kinds were marked down 20 to 30 percent or more. I rode bikes made of aluminum, carbon, and steel, bikes made in Japan, Europe, and the United States, crossbikes, flatbars, and touring bikes. There was something to like about nearly every one.

But then, there was the Jamis.

Bent over, but not too bent over. Classy looking, not flashy looking. The hoods didn't hurt my hands. Really, it was like there was no bike there at all, just me pedaling off in space.

So far, we've been out on six rides. Today, I rolled up Shevlin Park Road with the cyclometer reading 95 miles, so I took an extra spin through downtown, spandex and all, just to get to that 100 mile milestone.

Still loving it, and rooting for a mild winter.

Brand New Funky President

2008-11-06T00:27:00.000-08:00

Well, that's it. After a good year of obsessing over the day to day minutia, checking polls several times a day, and boring friends and family with my commentary, it's over.

Hey country...didn't say what you meant...just changed...Brand new funky president

Going back to 2004, I was anything but an Obama booster. The speech he gave to the Democratic convention that year underwhelmed me as much as just about any bit of political rhetoric ever has. It was, and it remains even now, a collection of platitudes, a pitch-perfect version of what almost everyone wants to hear. At the time, it struck me as grotesque.

What's changed?

I think he really believes this stuff. And if he does, he's the right man to head the government over the next four years.

This is not to say that the entirety of the Obama campaign has been on mark. Some of the jabs he took at Senator McCain, especially the "fundamentals of our economy are strong" applause line, were distortions. He's set out goals that may not fully reflect the reality of the country's finances, but if promising things that can't be paid for without deficit spending is a disqualifier, then we haven't had an honest man run for president for maybe a hundred years.

McCain was a different story. I don't believe for a second he believes that a three percent tax hike on the highest tax bracket is a harbinger of socialism, or that Obama's associations with a handful of unsavory characters are any different than those of other mover/shaker sorts. One can despise the methods of 1968-era Bill Ayers, but the leftover bombs dropped by McCain and his fellow U.S. pilots killed more innocents this year -- more than 30 years after hostilities ended -- than the Weathermen killed during their brief reign.

On the whole, Obama has run an honest, diciplined campaign. When the Jeremiah Wright racial flare-up hit early this summer, he offered up one of the best speeches I've ever seen from any candidate, openly confessing that at times he felt lost and angry as a young black man in a predominantly white community. He didn't lash out at his opponents, but he also didn't pretend it was a non-issue. Whether you like what he said or not, he answered the questions in front of him.

In the final stretch, he didn't get rattled. There were few snarky swipes at the easy target that was Sarah Palin, and in the debates, he shook off every attack with a smile.

Aside from the pivot after the primary where he switched from Iraq issues to primarily economic ones, it has been remarkably consistent. To maintain such a level of focus over nearly two years is impressive.

I did an experiment tonight with one of the election simulator sites. If you give John McCain every state where he came within a ten point spread, he wins by a 295 - 243 margin -- Florida flips, he loses. Give Obama every state where he came within ten, it's a 400 - 138 blowout.

If President Obama can maintain the level of focus he's shown in the campaign over the next four years, he'll get another four years. And the electoral map that surprised so many last night could be much, much more blue.

Looking forward to Jan. 20, and raising my glass to the Brand New Funky President.

Beer Snobbery

2008-10-19T20:04:00.000-07:00

I am a beer snob, and unapologetic about it. A few cases of homebrew are sitting just feet away from me right now, alongside a gurgling carboy with a batch of midnight black stout. Until a recent cleaning blitz, the back room was full of empty bottles from just about every brewery in the Northwest.

I will drink the cheap stuff from time to time, but it's fairly rare. And so it was with great interest I read of Budweiser's attempt to jump into the microbrew fray with what they call "Budweiser American Ale."

Today, it arrived at my local 7-11.

Impression 1: Very surprised to find this was not a twist-top. Had to go find my bottle opener, but I was impressed they'd made this admittedly superficial attempt at microbrew-style packaging. On closer inspection, I discovered the little Budweiser eagle was embossed on the transitional zone between the body and neck of the bottle.

Impression 2: Not a lot of smell to this beer. There's a faint yeastyness, but hardly any hop odor to speak of.

Impression 3: Fizzy. Really fizzy. Curiously, this has passed quite quickly, perhaps because I'm taking time between sips to type, but we will see.

Impression 4: Taste is a fairly generic golden/bronze ale. You can taste a small amount of what I believe is the Munich barley, probably best recognized from nearly every product produced by the Fat Tire brewery. Not nearly as much, but it's there.

Impression 5: The AB website claims a 5.3 ABV level. Though it's already carbonated and a bit on the cold side, the test with the hydrometer puts it at about 1.015 (don't really know what those units are), which is right about on par where most of my ales finish up.

Conclusion: Not sure I'd buy it again. It's not bad by any means, but at the same price point as a Deschutes or a Widmer or a Fat Tire or fill-in-the-blank, it's just not quite as good. As many others have suggested in my reading on this beer, this beer's biggest impact could be in turning on Budweiser drinkers to the larger beer universe. I'm a bit skeptical on this point, as most stores seem to segregate their beers by bottle/can packaging and by price. Anyone who heads into the store looking for a case of Bud in cans may not come across it.

There would seem to be a risk that Budweiser cuts their own throats by releasing this beer. Their customers try it, get used to the idea of a $6 to $8 six pack, and then move on to all the more colorfully-packaged, exotic-sounding, and, well, better beers sitting alongside Budweiser American Ale.

But the fact remains, Anheuser-Busch knows its marketing, and they know their large-scale brewing. I'd be surprised if they haven't appraised these risks and determined them to be unfounded. And with their brewing skill, they're quite possibly producing American Ale at a lower cost per ounce than any other brewer they're competing with. Time will tell.

Home Improvements

2008-10-16T00:53:00.000-07:00

This is a depressing post to write, but here we go. There are new neighbors across the street, in the little house that's even sadder looking than mine, and they are going great guns to put their little shack in order.

The fence is upright. The garbage is gone. They've got goddamned Christmas lights of all things, and the saggy roof looks less saggy now that they've swept the pine needles out of the low spots.

Perhaps tomorrow I drag the unused satellite dish out of the front yard, and put the disassembled bike away. The weeds growing everywhere are more than I want to contend with at this point. Sorta hoping on an early snow to put us all in the same gritty half-melted gray.

Smurf tail

2008-10-08T00:40:00.000-07:00

That's what I'm calling this little blue chunk of hose, my smurf tail.

As those who have followed my prior adventures in home repair know, I live in an out-and-out shithole of a house. The lights don't work in two out of the five rooms, the insulation is primarily old newspapers, the doors are all but falling off the hinges and multiple windows are technically broken.

But, it's cheap.

The biggest of these shortcomings with my house has been the kitchen sink. The drain worked for nearly a week when I moved in almost three years ago, and since then, not at all. I've worked around this by washing by dishes in a plastic tub and pitching the wastewater on the front yard or flushing it down the toilet. It has been surprisingly easy to adapt to.

On Saturday, I was there at the sink, doing some dishes, when I heard a rushing water kind of a noise. I popped open the cabinet under the sink to find that the pipes linking the drain to the irreparably clogged main pipe had become disconnected, and my sludgy dishwater was making its way down to the exposed dirt beneath the sink, pausing from time to time to moisten the lumps of fiberglass insulation and the kitchen rug on which I was standing.

To this day, I'm not entirely clear why this happened. I puzzled with the threaded pieces of plastic pipe under the sink for a while and sniffed at the slimy gray stuff clinging to their insides. Then I took off to the hardware store to do what I've been planning for quite some time:

Build a half-assed drain system that dumps my dishwater into the alley.

I would be better served if we had a Home Depot or a Lowe's in this town rather than a Home Depot and a Lowe's. They're more or less right next to each other, and largely the same inside, so I'm all but useless when it comes to remembering what is where in which store. After multiple attempts to explain the difference between stiff plastic pipes and flexible plastic hoses to the aproned help, I eventually found an aisle with the flexible stuff well over my head. My leaping at the dangling end of a spool of blue "discharge hose" eventually attracted the attention of a big bearded guy, and he wheeled this giant ladder-type thing over the chop off a piece for me.

Back home, I dug up my two most versatile tools -- a framing hammer and a shovel. Both were useful at whacking away at the siding beneath my sink. Unsurprisingly enough, the only thing separating the inside of the house from the outside of the house was a series of half-inch thick pieces of siding. They did not appear to be attached to any frame or foundation, nor to each other. Several layers of dried paint, it would appear, is what keeps my house standing. But they can be busted away with a few well-placed shovel strikes.

The rest was pretty easy. I took an old mop handle around to the alley and stuffed it into the crack between the bits of siding. Squatting under the sink, the end of the mop handle and the daylight it was letting in were plainly visible. The discharge hose, which is something like a cheap rubber fire hose in the way it flattens out when empty, threaded through quite easily. I dragged out a couple feet and went inside to rig the rest of it to the sink with a hose clamp.

Since then, I've had drain fever. I'll do a few dishes, then leave the water on and run outside to watch the soapy water and little chunks of garlic skin burp out of the end of my hose. Most of it soaks into the ground, but if you let it go long enough it spills out into the alley.

Critics have suggested this system will fail when it drops below freezing. They're right. But I figure I can go outside and stomp on the discharge hose until it crunches a bit, and run a sink full of hot water if that doesn't do the trick. Either way, I'm a step ahead of where I was a week ago, and the rent is as cheap as ever.

First Contact

2008-09-20T00:18:00.000-07:00

Thursday was a big day. I got the call about the intriguing photo assignment first thing in the morning, and by evening, I had sealed a deal to do the thing. Feeling proud of myself, I headed down to the local tavern to suck down some celebratory cocktails and brag to anyone willing to listen.

Several gin and tonics later, the bartender disclosed that she'd been skimping on tonic and making up the difference with more gin. Apparently they were nearly out of tonic, but with heaps of limes in each glass, I'd not really noticed. So I was feeling pretty jolly on the way home, and decided this was the night to meet the neighbors.

Flashlight in hand, I made my way through the weeds and spotted the familiar red sleeping bag under a tree in the backyard of the abandoned house next door. Inside the bag was a youngish looking bearded guy. I poked him in the shoulder with the flashlight.

"Hey! Hey! Dude, it's time to wake up. Hey dude, it's time to wake up."

I am a diplomat to my very core.

He mumbled incoherently and thrashed around a bit, but eventually came to and sat up.

"So, ah, I've noticed you've been sleeping in my backyard for the last few weeks. What's the story?"

With that, we were off. My assurances that I wasn't here to run him off were accepted at face value, and he began to speak at length. Though the gin has somewhat fogged my memory, apparently, he lived in Bend a year or so back, moved off to Idaho or someplace with his girlfriend, then came back here all but destitute when they split. Curiously, he referred to the girlfriend as "my old lady," which struck me as a charming bit of hobo patois. Made him more authentic somehow.

He dug around in a backpack and produced a pouch of Bugler, and we sat in the dark smoking and chatting. Much as I'd seen him in the backyard, he'd seen me coming and going from the car, but didn't really know how you handle the neighborly pleasantries when one of you is a squatter sleeping under a tree among a litter of malt liquor bottles.

Asa is his name, I learned, a Hebrew name as he explained it.

His brother was blamed for the streams of liquid shit painting the side wall of the empty house, a practice Asa found fairly distasteful as well. He prefers the men's room at the Texaco down the street.

Work has been hard to find in Bend, Asa told me, adding that he wasn't sure how long he'd be in the area. With questionable prospects, he was concerned about the approach of winter.

In observing my movements in recent weeks, Asa had determined I wasn't all that likely to run him off. He said I appeared to be the sort who avoids conflict, which is largely true, but he'd conceded I seemed like "a pretty cool guy" on account of the kayak chained to my carport and the battered red Subaru inside. These are small clues, yes, but then, all I had to measure him was the fact he slept in a red sleeping bag.

After a while, he fished out a bottle of Old English, downed a few mouthfuls, then grabbed a guitar case I hadn't noticed up until then. He was surprised I hadn't heard him playing the guitar back there before.

Somehow our conversation had drifted towards alternative modes of societal organization, or whatever you'd call it when you're full of gin squatting in the weeds at 3 a.m. In any event, we'd talked about the Rainbow Family a bit, prompting him to dig up the guitar and play a self-penned song that said something or another about "going to Waco" and "start(ing) my own commune." I've heard much worse.

Asa was intrigued by my current employment, asked a lot of good questions about how it all works, and said he'd keep an eye open for stories about the homeless experience in Bend. He openly mocked my opening up the fence to build some kind of a wooden tunnel to the empty house for use a workshop, which, really, is the only reasonable way to view such a scheme.

The air was growing cold and sleep was unavoidable. I gave Asa my word that he's welcome to camp in the backyard so long as he keep the late-night noise down, piles his trash in a neat fashion, and makes some effort to deter his guests from shitting on the house.

When I got to bed, it was 4:07 a.m. No wonder I've felt like hell all day.

Cameras at the ready

2008-09-18T22:50:00.000-07:00

Very intriguing news on the photography front, much of which I will hold back until all is official and done. Needless to say, it is a paid assignment for an international publisher, and I have every intention of shooting some of the best portrait shots I ever shoot-ed.

Lenses are being cleaned, cards are being reformatted, and batteries are being charged at this very moment. Stay tuned, more details will be available by the end of the weekend.

Return of the Brewhouse

2008-09-17T00:57:00.000-07:00

Summer is a bad time for homebrewing, though I'm not sure I can point to that as my sole reason for leaving it all untouched since February or so. Yes, there's the matter of ambient temps and so forth, but mostly, I've just been lazy. With the weather cooling down, I again have a good reason to heat up the crap-shack with a couple hours of boiling stuff on the stove.

We're still a few weeks out from tasting any of my works, but it's a comforting feeling to have two gurgling carboys in the backroom. The smells coming out of the airlocks seem a tad too cidery for my tastes, but I'm going to let it fly for now. Much as I hate St. Charlie's "relax, have a homebrew" incantations, he may be right.

This time.

Why it's OK to hate photographers

2008-09-06T01:47:00.000-07:00

And now, before I go off to bed, I'm going to post what I sent off to my old pal from weeklies past. He's working on a book about small town journalists, and while I don't know where it's going, it's a project worth tackling. By getting this up here now, I figure I've got a claim on some of the royalties when they start rolling in.

So, in response to the question "Why it's OK to hate photographers"

Until it's possible for a reporter to crank out the oft-mentioned "1,000 words" in 1/250th of a second, photographers are going to be getting a disproportionate amount of credit while doing little that resembles actual work. Sure, it's possible to take a less-than-ideal picture, but it's pretty well impossible to get anything "wrong" in a photo and have to deal with the ensuing fallout.

Reporters go out on assignments and meet people who will call them up at inopportune times with useless story ideas. Photographers go out on assignments and meet people who will pay them thousands of dollars to shoot their daughter's wedding.

People relate to photographers. Most people have a camera, even if it's just used for snapshots. Nobody in their right mind goes to utility commission meetings for kicks.

Ninety percent of the time, a story starts with the reporter or an editor, imagining it primarily as a text-based product. Depending on the picture the photographer chooses to take, the end result that winds up on the page may convey a totally different idea. This, incidentally, is why it's also OK to hate headline writers.

All that said, it's good to get along with photographers. Having been around newsrooms for a while -- keep in mind, you see a lot more aging photographers sticking around the industry than you do writers -- many of them are excellent questioners. They'd be fine reporters if they could write their way out of a wet paper sack. So it's not uncommon for a photographer to chime in with some great questions when you're with the subject of your story, often when conversation has hit an uncomfortable lag.

If this happens, DO NOT LET THEM KNOW. As covered above, they already get too much credit. And the only thing worse than a photographer is a photographer with a swollen ego -- but I repeat myself.

Welcome, weirdos

2008-09-06T01:25:00.000-07:00

Over the last few weeks, I've been in communication with one of my associates from one of the papers I worked with some time ago. A good guy in nearly every way, but somewhat challenged when it comes to computers and online type stuff. Not that I ought to be overly critical, but you know, he's only 40 or so while I'm 33, and I certainly didn't grow up bathing in bytes and bits.

Which is a stupid phrase, but I'm gonna run with it.

In any event, my associate is curious about blogging, but has no idea where to begin. Really, no idea at all. So, I answered a few questions for him, including a few about whether it was possible to track your visitors. I shared the story about Sitemeter, and how it's shown me that hardly anyone ever wanders in this way, and those that do are usually looking for something a little obscure.

Things like grilling fetuses, the health benefits of travel, trolley schedules, dead animal disposal, and the woktenna. I guess I cover a fairly wide bit of ground in my tiny little corner of the web.

The one that's always made me uneasy is "teenagers penises," for reasons I need not go into. It is on this site, by way of an old AP article I pasted in here before my last trip to Asia. Some resident of a Bangkok slum snagged a couple of teenagers stealing from him and did pretty much what you'd expect, assuming your expectations run towards sharp blades and overreaction.

When I last checked in on this subject, I ranked #3 on Google for those seeking teenagers penises. I am now number one, no doubt because this dubious honor rankled me so that I felt the need to write about it. Now that I can't go any further up, I guess I'm just going to get comfortable with it.

So, to all you twisted fuckers who stopped by to scope out the boys: really now, what the hell is wrong with you? Can't you go join the Y or something, maybe go browse the medical literature shelves at your local university library? Anything. Anything to keep me from lying awake at night wondering what you're thinking when you come in here all hot-n-bothered, but find nothing but accounts of how small town journalism will drive you mad and the difficulties of buying beer on Hindu religious holidays.

You people are even weirder than I thought.

on and on and on and on

2008-09-05T00:20:00.000-07:00

There has been no word as to when I get sent back to the weekly. Hoping it doesn't happen.

My three or two, or maybe its been four weeks at the daily, it's been great. I've locked down and just cranked it out more than I have in the longest time, and for the first time in a long time, I've had that nagging and uncertain feeling that there are people here who are better at what I do than me.

Arrogance has a bad way of cracking open the door to laziness. And I will not even attempt to deflect charges of laziness. Too lazy, I guess.

But! But! The best thing going over the last several weeks is that there are people here to call me on my shit. Even the smallest error, it gets kicked back to me with a serious dose of stink-eye.

"Scott, come on, don't you have your fucking spell check on? Jesus Christ."

This is perfect.

Stray Cat Strut

2008-08-22T23:54:00.001-07:00

This is what they call "liveblogging," or so I'm lead to believe from the folks at DailyKos and other such sites that try to write down what goes on in real time.

In any event, two of the neighborhood cats have recently come in through my window.

The first was the one I call leopard cat, because he's the rare domestic cat with leopard spots. Never seen one like that, and he's sleek and muscular, and all around, I just like his style.

The second one doesn't really have a name. She -- and I assume this cat is a she and the other a he for no real reason -- is excessively long-haired and large-pawed. Very much in the same vein as Shaknoza, the long-haired, large-pawed and pink-nosed cat my sister left me that croaked in the front yard a couple years ago.

Update: While I was hoping for a live-action catfight here in my living room, it appears leopard cat has hopped out the window, while other cat has taken to crawling around on the back of my couch and sticking her wet nose on my exposed flesh.

Going to have to boot her out soon now that nothing exciting is happening.

In the meantime, I urge all of those in my audience to support Hillary. She's off on a diabetes ride tomorrow, and is just $50 short of winning herself a jersey. She really wants this jersey. So dig into your pockets, you low-life, long-haired, pink-nosed and big-pawed miscreants: http://main.diabetes.org/goto/hillbill

Hilly needs your support. If by odd chance you've come across this posting looking to support Hillary Clinton, be assured she would want you to donate to the fight against diabetes. Trust me, she's just like that.

One week

2008-08-20T00:55:00.000-07:00

Today ends one full week on the temporary reassignment from the weekly to the daily, and damned if I'm not tired as all hell.

I like the pace, yes. My tendency has always been to adopt to the flow of the flow around me, so getting into something where people are pushing the speed aspects of the craft is a good thing. But, wow...it takes some getting used to.

Let's see: in one week I've done two stories on the bicyclist hit by a car, one on air quality, one on the fire protection payments plan, one on a firefighter killed in action, a feature on motorcyclists, and dozens upon dozens of briefs. I've had my work challenged more times in five days at the daily than I have in two plus years at the weekly, and while it's irritating at first, it's for all the right reasons.

I like the folks at the weekly, but the pacing and the enthusiasm level can be borderline catatonic. I don't much like the fact they've kind of been hung out to dry while I do the reassignment thing, but the unfortunate reality is, the low-energy level up there probably has everything to do with the way they're viewed as secondary if not expendable by the powers that be. It's a quandary, but it's a bigger problem than I can tackle on my own.

Figure if I just keep my head down and do what I'm asked, good things will come of this. The other reporters have already taken to writing my name in to the focus feature budget and work calendar well into October, so this may last longer than originally imagined.

Fashion central

2008-08-18T23:14:00.000-07:00

Got to take my first crack at real portrait photography this week, working with a friend's daughter on some senior pictures. The reviews are in -- she doesn't know how to pose, you don't know how to pose her, and knock off that shit with the wide-angle lenses.

That said, I'm fairly happy with the results. I like wide angle lenses, even if they do make people look strange. My feeling is, if the distortion is obvious enough, the mind corrects for it. You can use a lens to make someone look thinner or wider, but at the extremes (and best I know there's no thin extreme on this front) it's just kind of assumed that the subject really doesn't have a head like a watermelon.

Next time out, I will be trying to do things by the book, with the longer lenses and more "classic" style of portrait shooting. Not because I'm admitting to wrongdoing, but because it's one of those things I just kind of need to learn. Puts the ringlight right out, but I can make better use of the new 30-foot flash cord and mini softbox I put together for this project. Gotta make a trip to the old office to pick up the f/1.8 portrait lens as well - being a non-zoom, it will force me to do things differently.

It's all fun, and I get a few bucks out of it, so there's no reason not to experiment.

Back Yard Bunkhouse

2008-08-15T02:17:00.000-07:00

So, there's a couple of homeless guys sleeping in the back yard tonight. I went out to my car around midnight and heard one of them snoring away. Five minutes or so ago, I went out back and spotted at least two with the flashlight. They're out cold; the closer one has a partially-finished 40 of OE close to his body.

I don't really have much of a problem with this, but it would be nice if me and the homeless dudes had some kind of an understanding. I suspect they will be gone by the time I wake tomorrow, what with them sleeping on the ground in the open air and me in a comfortable bed inside, but I'd still like to know who they are and how long they plan to stay.

Nancy the Westside bartender advises a note, perhaps stuck to their foreheads. I like the note idea, but I don't think it has to be quite so personal. The bigger question is, what do you say in this kind of note?

I have absolutely no idea. If nothing else, they've stopped snoring.

Westside fire

2008-07-24T23:35:00.000-07:00

Unfortunate day in the neighborhood. The motorhome up the alley caught fire around 9 tonight, and by all appearances, it was a total loss. The fellow who lived in the motorhome (far right foreground) was not inside at the time, but the fate of his dog is unknown as of this time. The cat, seen near the middle of the picture, is almost certainly dead. He jumped out the window of the motorhome a good five minutes after the fire began, with what was left of his hair in flames. Along with the rest of the crowd gathered behind Longboard Louie's, I watched him limp under a nearby car, where he presumably met a painful end.

Truly remarkable how big a crowd assembled to rubberneck. I wasn't up there for more than 15 minutes from the start to when the fire crews flattened the last of the flames, but there were at least 100 people camped out at various vantage points around the block when I headed home. Nothing draws a crowd quite like fire.

The whole thing makes me a touch worried about the questionable wiring in my own house, but thus far, everything is holding up. The shouting panic at the start leads me to believe this started with an unattended ash tray, something I do not have to consider when assessing my risk. So I got that going for me, which is nice.

Dish-aster

2008-06-26T22:49:00.000-07:00

It's the end of a short-lived era. The dish era. In the end, the little internet dish I was so high on a week or so back wasn't nearly enough to salvage my dwindling internet connection. It goes back to the store tomorrow.

So, for the first time in recent memory and perhaps ever, I post from a linkup that I'm actually paying for.

After much disinterested research and several rambling conversations with half-wits at our local electronics stores, I decide to go with Clearwire. Not only was it the cheapest thing I could find, its wireless. I feel much more Buck Rogers/George Jetson getting my connection through tiny invisible electromagnetic waves than a boring old copper wire. If it gives me brain cancer, well, lets hope it was worth it.

Jamaica, New York, you're on the air

2008-06-16T22:38:00.001-07:00

Those of you who read these scribblings most likely do not know just how exclusive a club you're part of. My page views are extremely limited, though how limited I'd just prefer not to say.

However, ever since I started monitoring IP addresses and the like, I've noticed a recurring visitor. Someone in Jamaica, NY, who looks me up multiple times a week and always enters the site from the front page. They're not searching for one of the sensitive subjects like "tacoma rendering plant" or "teenagers penises" or "health benefits of travel" that tend to drive a lot of my traffic.

But, so far as I know, I don't know anyone in Jamaica. Not even entirely sure where it is. And so, this small request to whoever it is -- shoot me an email. Contact info is in the profile. I'd love to know if you're someone I knew years ago, or even more strangely, someone who came across my meandering writings by chance and decided they just had to come back for more.

Stranger things have happened. Hope to hear from you.

Cheapskates do it with tinfoil

2008-06-10T21:03:00.000-07:00

There have been a number of internet connectivity problems here at the crapshack in recent weeks. More than anything, this has to do with the fact I'm disinclined to pay for it.

Why, really, would I want to? Sure, the free connections that magically float through my walls aren't perfect, but up until recently, they were pretty close. Close enough for me anyway. I've got no great need to stream full movies, so a clunky connection that let me use the email, update the blog, and read the stray story about marauding owls or funny mugshots or even legitimate news, well, that was good enough for me.

The first iffy moments came a couple months back when the abandoned truck parked in front of the house mysteriously disappeared. As it was between me and my primary wi-fi spot (hi guys!), I developed a theory it had somehow focused or reflected or otherwise altered the signals to my benefit. But eventually things got better, and I stopped thinking about it.

Within the last two weeks, however, things got much worse. It got to the point where I couldn't even pick up a signal without carrying the laptop down the street to connect. I'd be down there by the water meter with my laptop on my knees like some kind of freelance public works type, picking up funny looks from the passing drivers as I slowly rotated the laptop until the signal came.

But in time, even that wasn't working. I could get a signal, I could even keep a signal, but things were slow. Google Chat suffered significantly, with service drops and missed messages, both coming and going. Regular pages were slow to open, often taking multiple tries, and stuff like Youtube videos just weren't happening.

So, last week, I set out to do what anyone in my situation would do: find a way, any way, to preserve the free internet connection.

No, I'm not going to pay for it....no, seriously. Haven't you been paying attention?

Some brief research while at work (the internet works just fine there) exposed me to a variety of cheapskate alternatives. Better yet, they were made out of stray junk, and had fun names. There's the Cantenna, made out of a can, and there's the Woktenna, made out of a wok or some other similarly parabolic piece of Asian cookware. At home that night, I experimented with my own variations on this theme. There was the Broiltenna, made by propping up a broiler pan against the back of my laptop, and the Suntenna, made by doing the same with a big sheet of metallic mylar intended to shield the inside of a car on hot days. These didn't work at all. And the less thats said about the tree of foil, the better.

What I needed was a little gizmo called a dongle. It turns out this is the somewhat-accepted name for the remote wi-fi cards that plug into the USB port. The fact it came with a fun name only heightened my enthusiasm for the project. The good folks at the Redmond Radio Shack were all too happy to answer my questions and sell me my very own dongle.

Given that I'm partial to all things Asian, I decided the Woktenna was for me. My coworkers snorted and guffawed as I dug through the office collection of stray cookware, but that's just what they do. Saturday morning, I set out to find a suitable wok or strainer or dish for my purposes.

This proved more difficult than first imagined. Our local thrift stores had all kinds of junky cookware around, but none of it seemed quite right. Driving around town, I spied a few of those dishes used to pick up satellite tv and figured they might have some promise. Most of the thrift stores, it turns out, won't accept these things as the obsolete ones are of little use to anyone. And while the folks at the dump are real nice, they won't let you fish around in the recycling dumpsters, even if there's a perfectly good DirectTV dish sitting right on top.

Dad came through for me. He found a dish at a thrift shop down in Sunriver, so I headed out for an afternoon of half-assed scientific endeavor.

The dongle-dish combo seemed to show a fair bit of potential early on. I could get on and stay on Dad's home network from close to 300 feet away -- more than enough to suck in the coffee shop's signal, assuming they were of relatively equal strength.

It was not to be. In a couple hours monkeying with the dish and dongle back home, I was unable to pick up a signal. What's worse, the internal wi-fi card seemed to outperform the dongle at every turn. I tried talking through my problems with one of the doubters, but the signal wasn't there. So I headed down the street to close down the pub.

Sunday, I was off to the worst store in the world. Best Buy. I've never been anywhere else where the staff is so desperately uninformed about the products they're selling but so well versed in the hard sell and the upsell and the warranty you really, really should buy. Luckily enough, they had a new gizmo for me, a dongle of sorts that came with its own dish and promised to increase my range by 300 percent.

The dish showed a lot of promise right out of the box. Not only was I picking up a signal with no difficulty, it seemed a strong signal. Video streamed, pages loaded fast, everything I'd hoped for. Eager to gloat, I rang up doubter #1 later that evening. Just as I was getting into it, the signal dropped. Back up 20 minutes later, I was ready to concede a few problems, but an overall increase in performance...and then it dropped again. And again. And again and again and again, until I was pretty well too embarrassed to defend the stupid thing.

But then!! Then today came around, and I had the lightning-flash of inspiration to read the user's manual. I figured out how to adjust the thing, and spent a few hours wandering around the house, checking out different signal strengths and how and where they came in.

Then I broke out the tinfoil.

A little tinfoil hat on the dish seemed to boost the performance considerably, another 5 to 7 "points" on the zero to 100 percent signal scale. Moving the whole rig to my junk room -- this is the room that's come to house my crap ever since the overhead light died -- boosted things a touch more. And so now, with a big tinfoil apparatus on top of the perfectly aligned dish, we're looking at speeds not seen in some time.

But I'm going to hold off on the gloating until there's a better track record. And make myself a smart tinfoil hat if it works.

Primary Day

2008-05-20T22:39:00.000-07:00

Not a whole lot of big surprises in the Oregon primary today. Obama easily dropped Clinton, as expected. Steve Novick appears to have lost in the Dems Senate primary, which counts as my only disappointment. This is a superficial concern, however - I still think Smith will roll to easy victory in November, but I wanted to see a dwarf with a hook for a hand in the race. Instead we get Bradbury part two, without the MS.

The real story is the out-and-out push I saw from the Obama campaign over the last two weeks. Upon coming back from Colorado on May 4, I had two direct mail pieces in my mailbox and one door hanger hanging from my doorknob. Over the next week or so, I got another piece in the mail and another door hanger.

Then, yesterday, I finally met a canvasser in person. He came up, verified who I was, scribbled down a bit of info about how I planned to drop off my ballot today and how I had voted for Obama. He left, and I left for a trip up to the river. When I got back, there was another door hanger stuck in the door, most likely from the other Obama canvasser I spotted on the way out of town.

From Hillary? Nothing. No mail, no door hangers, no visitors, and no in-person visit.

No wonder she got smoked 60-38 around here.

Fire and Water

2008-05-16T20:42:00.000-07:00

Today was a day for breaking shit, apparently.

Slow day at the office for the most part. Making calls, and waiting for calls to come in. I had two photo assignments, both of that miserable variety that involve people working on things well below the waistline - getting a face in frame is tough enough, and worse, it indulges my tendency to shoot too many things from Smurf height. I gotta break that habit one of these days.

The first, a bunch of folks planting flower baskets for a downtown beautification effort, went well enough despite being staged at noon. Rotten shadows everywhere, and the flash didn't seem to be firing as it ought, but I kept at it. Nothing I'm real proud of in this batch, but that's OK.

Up until recently, I'd assumed my non-firing flash problems had something to do with the batteries in the little V2 flash triggers. Great little toys, available by googling Gadget Infinity, but inexplicably sold with the promise that the batteries should be expected to kick it after a while. This in mind, I've been keeping replacements in the bag waiting for that day to come.

Assignment number 2 pitched that theory clean out the window, or at the very least made it certain I won't be able to test it for some time.

There were a bunch of folks with shovels and wheelbarrows and rakes and the like, doing a bunch of good deeds as part of a United Way "Day of Caring" event. The shadows were still vicious, and so, as is my habit, I whipped out the flash and did what I could to fill them in. Flash still wasn't firing right, or recharging as fast as it ought.

About five minutes in, I smelled a familiar smell. Couldn't quite place it, just one of those things that triggers the scent-memory part of the brain - a part I'm lead to believe is quite impressive in what it catalogs.

The wisp of smoke rising out of my flash connected the dots. Even on a 90 degree day, the casing was much hotter than it should have been. The next several steps are irrelevant, except to say, the flash was dead. I only wish the fire had left behind some melty plastic or charred bits to give the husk some kind of trophy value, but this was not to be the case.

My trip to the camera store after work was ostensibly to research new flash units, but mostly it was to force myself on people I could expect to be sympathetic to my situation.

Getting home, I heard a gushing noise as soon as I got inside. My three-month old attempt at home plumbing repair had failed, and the little brewery hose I'd hooked into the toilet's water supply had sprung a leak. By odd chance, the leak was positioned such that the bulk of the waterstream was launched into the tub, and much of the rest had been soaked up by the bathmats.

The whole day makes me hesitant to do anything more today but curl up under my bed and wait for the worst. But I'm going to suck it up and head out anyway - keeping an eye open for the swarms of locusts or rains of frogs that are sure to be just around the corner.

A bad week for my people

2008-05-13T21:29:00.000-07:00

It's sappy, yes. But I really do think of them as my people, though our blood linkage is awfully limited. They've gotten under my skin.

I refer, of course, to the miserable, rotten, no-good week that befell Asia. The cyclone in Burma, the earthquake in China, and now, I learn today, the car bombings in India.

I've been within a hundred miles or so of the epicenter in China, in the delta region in Burma for a short skip that included nothing but a passport stamp. But I've been right to the center of it in India, in the old city of Jaipur, and though the death toll is nowhere close to that of China and Burma, it gets to me a bit more - to say nothing of the fact that this is the only one in the triumverate of unfortunate happenings that could have been prevented had cooler heads prevailed. Recent reports suggest about 60 were killed, and a couple hundred injured.

The shot of the girl with the cat was taken in Jaipur, in the old walled city part where I'm told the bombings took place. She was with an older woman, her grandmother I assume, buying tomatos at a small produce stand. This was in December 2004, so I'm going to guess that the girl is a very pretty 16 to 18 year old by now. The cat is probably dead, because that's what happens to street animals in India.

Unpacking the sectarian differences in India is something to be left to people with much more knowledge of the region than myself. There's a fine book out there, "No Full Stops in India," by ex BBC journo Mark Tully that explains it in exquisite detail, though even that probably just scratches the surface.

It's a beautiful county, as is China, as is Burma. I've never seen anyone work so hard as I have in India, unless you count China, which brings up the point: The moment for you to realize the economic miracle you've been pushing for is right now. If all the chips fall right, it's possible that in 20 years, rural families won't be throwing their infant daughters into wells or gobbling pesticides in a poverty-desperation suicide pact.

To a large extent, getting there means putting these religious and political divisions behind you. Us shaggy white kids get off on checking in on squalor, but that doesn't do much for you or your children.

Don't fuck it up.

Eight Hundred

2008-04-12T19:09:00.000-07:00

There are three things you can control when shooting - shutter, aperture, and film speed or ISO setting. Ever since I got my first camera maybe twenty years ago, it's always been that last one I've been reluctant to play with.

It probably goes back to the film days, when changing the ISO meant changing the film. For people like me with only a single camera body to work with, that meant a time-consuming unwinding of the film, basically killing any chance of using however many inches remained. Nevermind the cost of film or development - it just seemed wasteful and unnecessary.

With the digital, that's not a problem. I don't pretend to totally understand how the same sensor can run at 100 or 3200, but that is apparently exactly what they do. And by all indications, at the higher settings - say 400 and above - digital achieves this with less noise than with film.

Still, I rarely fiddle with the ISO settings. Today, for an hour or so, this hesitation cost me dearly.

I was out shooting a cultural festival, lots of dancing, costumes, musicians, cute ambiguously-ethnic kids. In short, all the stuff you'd want to work with.

Even though there seemed to be plenty of light streaming in through the windows, the camera said otherwise. Frame after frame came in dark. I pulled out the flash, but that either flattened everyone's faces out to nothing, or cast big raccoon style shadows in their eysockets.

The daily shooter showed up and I expressed my frustrations to him. He didn't seem to understand. We compared equipment, and it turned out we were shooting more-or-less the same kind of lenses. His were more expensive, of course, but f/2.8 is f/2.8, all the world round.

Wandering off to sulk, I realized my error, and knew I'd have to do what I never do. I'd have to shoot at 800.

Everything changed in an instant. No more fighting with the flash meant no more wicked shadows, and no more waiting to take that next shot. No more flash means no weird contrast between a blue flash-lit face and a green tube-lit background. And at least so far as newsprint goes, the quality was just fine.

Lesson: Every shot doesn't have to be a magazine cover image. Those aren't real images in any number of ways as it is. The models are pounded with incredibly powerful lights. It's no more normal to be able to count a cover model's nosehairs than it is to count the nosehairs of the guy sitting in the next seat on the bus. Sometimes, reality is dimly lit and a little bit blurry around the edges. Probably more often than not.

They've taken my truck

2008-04-02T19:35:00.000-07:00

I never thought I'd see this day. Coming home from the store yesterday evening, I was taking the usual route, left around the corner and quickly left again up the alley. But something seemed different. Once I'd parked and made my way around to the front door, it clicked:

The truck was gone.

This truck first showed up on my block in roughly August '06. One day it wasn't there, and the next day it was, and after a while, I realized it hadn't moved in weeks. At first, this was an object of great interest to me and the boys across the street. We'd wander around in the street sipping beers, debating the different theories we'd heard about claiming abandoned vehicles. None of us had any real expertise in the matter - it was always more of an "I heard from this one guy once" kind of discussion, but we all talked about getting around to calling the local PD to file a claim.

Not that this was any real prize of a truck. It was a Toyota, gray, and pretty well dented all over. It had a canopy and sturdy utility rack, and pretty good looking tires. Sorta like this one here, but in much worse shape. But it was just sitting there, apparently free to the first person who took the time to claim it.

Over the year and a half it sat there, somebody knocked off one of the side mirrors and it got smeared with some kind of substance resembling cake batter or paint. The back window from the canopy was gone, and I used it a few times to get rid of the shit that wound up dropped in my front yard, and once offered it as a receptacle for some neighbors who decided to pitch their PBR cans in my front yard while watching the fireworks. For the most part it fared pretty well.

Maybe two weeks ago, I came home to find a business card tucked in my doorjamb. Some guy who deals with used cars, saying he'd be interested in buying the truck if I was selling, and also interested if it wasn't mine. Well, since it wasn't mine, I didn't give it any thought.

And now it's gone. I can't say I miss it, but I'm in the process of developing a theory that it played an important part in keeping my internet connection going. Something about being a big antenna to focus the beams between me and the WiFi connection a block away in a perfect line that cut through the truck. Connections have been strangely spotty since it disappeared.

rollerderby days

2008-03-21T21:28:00.000-07:00

Thanks to both Leah and Jessica for agreeing to meet a stranger in a deserted industrial area for a "photo shoot." It sounds sleazier when I put it in quotes, so that's what I'll do. But everyone seemed to be perfectly happy and cooperative with the whole mess, and I got some decent shots out of it.

I had plenty of trouble getting the both of them neatly focused and lighted in the same frame, but I'm happy with both of these 8X10s, both cropped out of larger shots. Will probably end up running a compromise shot -- wishing I'd modeled them closer together -- but all in all, I'm pleased.

Tomorrow, I'm off to the big derby event to see if I can get some kind of action shot to accompany the portrait, which will be easier and more challenging at the same time. One of these days I'm going to figure out how to kick down the ambient light to allow a top-notch field photo, but today is not that day. Good enough for a first whack at it.

Frustration looms

2008-03-06T22:43:00.000-08:00

Today was a frustrating day at the office.

In keeping with my recently-adopted policy of avoiding names and precise place identifiers, I'll keep it as general as possible. In any event, sometime around the middle of the afternoon, I learned that daily paper guy had managed to get his claws into a story of mine. One I've been working on for over a week with limited success, but one I was making some headway on. He publishes tomorrow. I publish next Wednesday, and so, the problem ought to be obvious.

This kind of thing has been a sore spot for me over the last decade of working at the weeklies, but it's even more pronounced when we're both with the same company. Let alone working under the same roof, and to say nothing of the fact that I like and respect daily paper guy. The good stuff often happens fast, and after a week, it's old news.

It's the total lack of coordination that gets under my skin more than anything. We are technically all on the same team here, but no one has figured out a way to divvy up the spoils without triggering some kind of massive shit-storm. With our limited resources here at the weekly, we've got to grab on to whatever scraps we can get to get a paper together. It's not enough to count on a new report from the Federal Reserve governors or the assassination of the King of Tonga to fill it up. We've got to do it all on our own. Having the rug yanked out from under you fucking stings.

Sadly enough, I don't think there's any winning here. The boss caste at the daily doesn't seem to have much of an interest in a meaningful discussion of who should do what. Instead, what we get are a bunch of generalities about "tabs" and "features" and "magazine style' and "look at this clipping from some publication from Chicago." It's a fine first step, but as the weekly elders tell me, we've seen this movie before. In the end, it never goes anywhere.

So what we're left with is the axe hanging over our heads, with little to no idea of whether it will fall. It's the boy who cried redesign. And while it's the right thing to do, the sclerotic tendencies of the boss caste have trickled down to the newsroom. There's no point in trying to change anything, because the boss caste will resist, and offer the old chestnut about how "we'll change it for you. Soon. It'll be great."

Nothing changes.

The story in question at the beginning of this post will run. I've punted some of the info collection to tomorrow, so that I can duplicate as little as possible from daily guy's story, and hopefully find an angle of my own. We'll see how that goes.

On a more positive note, I spent the better part of the late afternoon in a community "listening session" with our local peacemaker, the Santa look-alike (who, of course, I'm not naming here to preserve my relative anonymity). I've been snarky and critical about his processes, which from my view, take way too damned long to get past the introductory phase. But today, playing participant for the first time, I came awfully close to cracking.

Not entirely. Nice words only go so far, and the whole thing still seems awfully touchy-feely to me. But he's got an undeniable touch for getting people who aren't generally speechmakers to speechify. The local questions currently under consideration have yet to open up any real fault lines, so I'm not totally sold. But, if he wanted to come in and mediate the whole daily-weekly controversy, I'd be more than happy to let him take a crack at it.

It gets worse and worse

2008-02-22T22:31:00.000-08:00

A week or so back, I put a little gizmo from something called Sitemeter on my blog. The essential idea is, it gives you an idea of how many folks are visiting your site, and how it is they got there.

Since doing so, I've been pleasantly surprised to find that a handful of people from around the world come across my little ol' blog by happenstance. Something in what I've written ranks high in the super-secret Google formula, and what do you know, I'm right up at the top of the search list on certain topics.

If I knew how to do this on purpose, I'd be a genius.

In the last couple days, I learned I'd been getting a lot of hits for people doing a Google search for "health benefits of travel." A picture of me, all beer-bellied in my boxers, is something like the number five site for this search. So tonight, I went back and edited that post from 2004, adding a picture of me taken months later and looking much more svelte.

So then I go back to the Sitemeter site. Looks like I've had a recent visitor. Who is it, and how did they get here?

They're from Australia, it turns out. The search was for "teenagers penises."

And there, I'm the number three site.

This appears to be because I pasted in an AP story for my own future reference about a man in Bangkok (har) who chopped off a couple of...uh, well at the risk of this happening again, "teenagers penises" when he caught them stealing from them.

So -- for any federal agents who might be reading tonight, the nakedest pictures you're going to find on this site are of me, I'm 33 years old, and you can't see nothing through those boxer shorts.

If you don't belive me, just search for "health benefits of travel."

Fun with lights

2008-02-22T21:32:00.000-08:00

Strobist is featured over in my little list of links listed over on the right, and as far as I can tell, it's the finest photo site online. I've done what I can to read a lot of lighting books in recent months, but few of them can hold a candle to the tutorials and contests seen on strobist. That said, I've been spending a lot of time screwing around with my expanding collection of flashes and related do-dads. Some of the latest results can be seen below.

One of these days I gotta figure out how to better fold the text around the pictures, but that day is not today. Something to do with trying to post more than one photo at once, I think.

Dumb is smart

2008-02-19T20:30:00.000-08:00

I like reading the political blogs. Of all stripes, really, but it's a peculiar pleasure of mine to read the hard-right stuff -- especially on an election night like tonight -- to marinate myself for a while in the near-incomprehensible rationalizations that get tossed around to explain why the consensus prognostication from the day before has been proven dead wrong.

And if you love near-incomprehensible rationalization, you love FreeRepublic.

So far as I can tell, FreeRepublic was the only place anywhere where Duncan Hunter was considered a viable candidate for president right to the end, and one of only a few where it was regarded as more sane than not to think that the somnambulant Fred Thompson would suddenly catch fire in S.C. and Florida after snoozing his way through Iowa and New Hampshire.

And it's for this reason that I was so surprised to come across this image while cruising there this evening.

It was posted in the midst of a discussion of a recent vote by the Florida state school board to approve the teaching of evolution, but only when prefaced by the word "theory," as in "theory of evolution," but unmistakably placed there so as to cast doubt on the whole ugly matter of whether or not there's a good reason we look an awful lot like the apes.

Any which way, the poster tossed this up as part of a valiant effort to engage the creation-first crowd, in response to another poster's description of evolution as a "provisional theory.

The graphic, as was explained, was intended to demonstrate the "provisional" status of Euclidian geometry. You know, the stuff that makes sure our houses stand up and don't leak and all that.

Damned if it doesn't. Much as I'd love to think I could figure it out, I'm guessing many much better mathamaticians than I have tried before. One more puzzle to keep me up at night.

Same Same, no Different

2008-02-13T11:54:00.000-08:00

I have no doubt the glassblower spotted by Arlo at the Pai reggae festival just days ago is the same one I shot in Chiang Mai back in 2005.

There's a lot of weird stuff to be seen in southeast Asia, but I still gotta think the number of glassblowers with purple shades and skeezy mustaches in northeast Thailand is in the low single digits.

Arlo's photo to the left, mine down below.

Winterfest

2008-02-10T11:06:00.000-08:00

Took the new lens out on the town Saturday for a little exercise and a little practice. By luck, it was Winterfest, which just like it sounds, is a festival held in winter. A good opportunity to walk around sticking my camera in people's faces without attracting undue attention. And so that's exactly what I did.

Uncle Dick says cheese

2008-02-07T22:10:00.000-08:00

In the interest of housekeeping, I'm killing off the old blog and rescuing the old photo of Jim Zupancic and Dick "Smiles" Cheney from the archives. Was never a great photo, but when you grain it up like I did, it takes on a more menacing, campaign hit-piece quality.

And, as I know as of today, Darlene Hooley is calling it quits, so who knows if Jimmy Z. will make another run at it?

Interesting to note -- when I went to the Cheney/Zupancic fundraiser back in '04, I was pleasantly surprised at how warm and human the Vice President came off. Really, it totally blew me away...something about being in the same room as opposed to seeing him on the teevee, or maybe he was just on that day.

But -- the funny part is, of the hundred or so frames I shot during his speech, there was nary a one where he didn't have that trademark Cheney sneer, or worse. Several times he looked out and out angry, and this would be in the middle of a fairly tame "I'd like to thank my beautiful wife Lynne..." part of the speech.

I've shot thousands of people over the years, and I well recognize that it can be tough to get a good shot off of someone while they're speaking. But usually, at least one in ten or one in twenty is respectable.

Not so with Uncle Dick.

SUPER-MACRO

2008-02-07T21:57:00.000-08:00

The new lens arrived today, and thus far, it's everything I hoped for. Better sharpnes, better low-light focus, and -- despite the advertised specs -- the apparent ability to focus in as close as two inches or so.

As expected, you can't see anything in at two inches without some kind of creative light solution, so the home ring flash fits the bill splendidly. Although, on a beer bottle close-up, it does leave a bit of a crazy flare...but that's for another day.

In related news, a whole bundle of colorgels were waiting for me on the doorstep when I got home. A bolt-nut combo left over from last week's toilet endeavors fits perfectly to hold the thing together, and they fit the flash with minimal use of masking tape. Exciting times beckon...

Crap Shack III: The present catches up with the past

2008-02-02T18:39:00.000-08:00

What started out as a recollection of past house difficulties will now briefly detour to the present day. As in, today. As in, the day I spent hunting for this miserable little piece of roughage seen on the left side of the page.

In my outstretched hand I am holding the butt end of a head of romaine lettuce, the hard and bitter tasting part nobody but goats will eat. In the background, laying on the floor, is what's left of my toilet.

Ever since the realization that my kitchen sink was beyond repair, the toilet has served me well as a receptacle for my dishwater on days when I'd rather not open the front door. Oftentimes I'll use the dishwater pan for peeling carrots or potatoes or whatever's on the dinner menu, and just dump the whole mess down the toilet. That's sort of what a toilet's for, yes?

Yesterday I got greedy. Along with my regular vegetable peelings, I tossed this tennis-ball sized chunk of lettuce in. And so my problems began.

It was pretty clear the toilet wasn't flushing by around 9 p.m., and I was fairly certain the lettuce was to blame. So being the responsible sort that I am, I went to the bar. I stagged home several hours later, took one look at the puddle of water collected on the floor and went to bed, my bowels constricting like angry python.

The next morning it was off to Home Depot. After wandering aimlessly for what seemed like miles, an older fellow in an orange apron escorted me over to the plumbing tools display. I tried explaining my situation, but he just sort of shook his head at me like he didn't understand.

Another orange-aproned sort was there at the display, along with a customer who seemed to have a similar predicament. The two were discussing "toilet augers," which is basically a pipe snake with a stiff bent bit to help you work it into the drainpipe. I tried hitting the customer up for helpful tips, but he wouldn't stop going on about his wife.

"I don't know how many times I've told her, it's only the TIP of the brush that's flushable, not the whole frikken thing!"

"Have you tried a coat hanger? I tried a coat hanger this morning, and..."

"You've seen those brushes with the flushable tip? Easiest damned thing in the world, if you just pay attention to the directions. But no, she had to..."

The basic auger was only about eight bucks, so I grabbed it and headed for the exits.

About an hour later I was back at the Home Depot, having sliced open my thumb on the toilet auger and utterly failing to dislodge the drain. I was studying a bottle of high-test Drano, when another employee wandered by to help. He seemed genuinely intrigued by the idea of a chunk of lettuce blocking a toilet. However, he didn't think chemicals would do the trick. Suggesting the clog might be in the pipe as opposed to the toilet, he reccomended I unbolt the toilet and start fishing around deeper.

"But isn't the pipe like this big around?" I protested, making a shape roughly the size of a toilet pipe.

"Sure is," he said. "But you know, once you get a few things down there, maybe it only takes something like your lettuce to stop it up completely."

I didn't have the heart to tell him about the half-dozen or so forks and spoons I'd washed down along with the dishwater, so I just grabbed a wax ring and left.

The wax ring, for those who've never taken a toilet apart, is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. About the size of a salad plate, the ring fills the gap between the toilet and the hole in the floor leading to the sewer. I'm still undecided as to whether it's a brilliantly simple creation or absurdly outdated. Either way, it's a hell of a mess.

Back home, I got the old toilet emptied and unbolted, lifted it up and balanced it on the edge of the bathtub. Right there at the bottom was my chunk of lettuce. I moved in to grab it, but in doing so, I undid the perilous balancing act on the tub's edge.

CRASH!!

The tank busted into about a dozen pieces as it went crashing into the tub. I briefly contemplated putting the whole rig back together sans tank, going for the Asian style manual flush mode. Instead, I was off on a hunt for a new toilet.

There was a free toilet up on Craigslist, but when I got to the house, no one seemed to be home. I feel like I see junked toilets sitting in alleys all the time, but there's snow everywhere now,and it didn't seem like the right time to go driving all over looking for one.

So I was off to the ReStore.

The ReStore is one of Bend's great hidden treasures, a whole hardware store full of drastically discounted second hand goods. Run by Habitat for Humanity, it's a worthy cause as well. And they have toilets for $25.

Driving back home, the toilet was bouncing hither and yon as my car rattled over the little ice ripples that seem to be all over the streets these days. There was a vicious crack and I thought I'd smashed the thing before even getting it home, but it turns out it was just the seat falling.

Long story short, the new toilet is installed. The old one is in pieces in the spare room. Connecting the water is on tomorrow's to-do list, and it's still wobbly as can be, but we're ahead of where we were 24 hours ago.

Crap Shack part II

2008-01-25T21:44:00.000-08:00

When we left off, I promised to get back to it a day later, but you know,I don't owe you anything. So here goes:

The trouble started with a mighty KER-LUNK! kind of a noise, which jolted me out of bed but otherwise meant nothing. When I woke up, I discerned that my pipes had frozen, and that the KER-LUNK most likely had something to do with it. I called the landlords, went off to work minus a hot shower and a cup of coffee,and came home later that night to meet Jeff the handyman.

I liked Jeff, because he talked about my house in the darkest possible terms.

When I first met him, he was already in my house, and a touch sheepish. He'd been removing the whole cabinet apparatus surrounding my bathroom sink -- the vanity, is it? -- and had found a Penthouse magazine from Thailand I'd stashed in the top drawer. Nothing unseemly was going on, but, you know.

As it turned out, Jeff had already chopped a big hole in my floor next to the water heater, and had spent the better part of the afternoon crawling around under the house in the mud and the ice. But he was cheerful.

"Dude, fuck, these fuckers are prolly gonna freeze all fuckin' winter long, man. Yer fucked."

And maybe I was. But I had the best rent deal in Bend.

SUBCHAPTER II - THE HOLE

The hole Jeff had sliced in my floor let an incredible amount of cold air into the bathroom, such that I was tempted to shower fully clothed. Instead, I carved up a chunk of that cheap pressboard shit with a steak knife, and screwed it into the floor along with a handful of fiberglass insulation. It didn't help much.

More importantly, it was Christmas or thereabouts, and my sister was back from the east coast. She'd left Bend only three or four months earlier, and was most concerned with the fate of Shaknoza, the feral cat she'd adopted, given a Uzbek name, and handed off to a couple of friends who best I learned were incapable of looking after a largely wild animal.

And so, Shaknoza was delivered to my house. Toys and litterbox and everything. I'd let her out in the morning, and let her back in at nighttime when she started scratching at the door. All was well. I'd go off to work, come home, and the cat and I would get togetherto share out trout almondine or whatever and a bottle of wine. Just kidding. I drank all of the wine.

Eventually, as I was washing off another plate of trout almondine, I noticed the sink wasn't draining so well. Eventually, it wasn't draining at all. I called Jeff.

SUBCHAPTER III -- SINK

The next time I saw Jeff, he was armed to the teeth. He had wrenches a foot long, he had bottles of chemicals, he had plungers, he had a blowtorch, and he had pipesnakes. He had my whole kitchen torn up in front of the sink, and a big puddle of brown water around his feet.

"Dude," he said.

"Dude"

He poured some kind of nasty, caustic gloop down the drain. It bubbled and smoked, and there were knocking noises somewhere down below.

"Dude."

He produced a power drill and a snake-device of some kind, threaded the snake down the drain 30 or 40 feet, and hit the trigger. There was a rumbling. The sink did not drain.

I started throwing my dishwater in the front yard.

SUBCHAPTER IV -- CAT HOLE

It was getting cold. Mid January 2006 was unseasonably cold, down in the single digits many nights. I trickled my faucets, and for the most part avoided pipe-freeze incidents.

There was a neighborhood cat who was cold as well. I was laying in bed one night, and suddenly there's this rubbing noise from behind my head. Then it meowed. I turned back, and there's this absurdly skinny cat sitting on my window sill. Shaknoza looked up from the foot of the bed, and went back to sleep. So did I.

This continued for a few days. Eventually, I came home to find Shaknoza in the front room, freaked out beyond all measure. In my bedroom, on my bed, was the window sill cat. He was looking pretty chill. The busted-up pressboard in the bathroom explained how he got in. I grabbed him, he clawed me in the face, then shit on the floor as I pitched him out the front door.

A few more days passed, and I found Shaknoza frozen solid in the front yard. Dead as they come. I called my sister to share the news, headed off to work, then came home to find window sill cat sitting on my bed. I decided to keep him. He was missing all but about an inch of his tail, so I named him Stumpy.

SUBCHAPTER V - SPRINGTIME

Suddenly, the story goes cold for a bit....I'm gonna hold off and take it up later, though there's a bunch of electrical/plumbing/other stuff to come. Just doesn't come in such a rapid succession, so I gotta figure out where to take it without lying my ass off.

More gawl-damned winter, and the legend of the crap shack

2008-01-20T19:21:00.000-08:00

I suppose I ought not complain about winter, living in Bend by choice and all, but it's still getting to me. It's only a matter of time until I fall down and crack my skull wide open on the trip from the carport to the front door. My skiing days are long, long passed, and when you take that out of the mix, it's just one long cold pain in the ass.

More importantly is the matter of my house, pictured here in the midst of our latest flurry. The temperature is supposed to drop into the single digits tonight and tomorrow, which means better than even odds I'll wake up Monday or Tuesday with frozen pipes and no prospects of taking a shower or making coffee. These things will make me grouchy.

It's a good time to talk about the house as it is, because I've never really addressed it here. As I've told any number of people -- bag boys at the grocery store, barflies, the mailman, second graders -- I've got the best rent deal in all of Bend. And it might just be true. But the harsh reality of the situation is, the only reason I've got such a smokin' deal is that the place is such a hell-hole that hardly anyone in their right mind would want to live here.

So -- starting from the beginning:

I found my charming little crap shack back in November 2005, on a cruise of the neighborhood for the express purpose of finding a place to live. Being located so near the corner of the main drag, I wasn't able to stop when I spotted the for rent sign, but something in my subconcious had picked up on the fine print as I rolled past.

"There's no way you can get a whole house for that price, no way," I said to myself as I circled the block.

But when I got back around, there it was, just as I'd seen it before.

$425.

The idea of a house renting for $425 a month absolutely floored me. This was considerably less than most apartments I'd seen, and in a prime location to boot. My heart started racing as I, and scribbled down the number, and I pulled over to the side of the road half a block later to call the landlord.

Over the next week, the skies opened up and close to two feet of snow fell on the city. It was still coming down when I went to tour the house, flakes the size of tennis balls and we had to dig our way to the front door.

The prior resident had either been a cat owner or a man of unusual diet and limited bladder control. The place stunk. Spider webs filled the corners where the walls met the ceiling, and dust bunnies and a surprising number of thumbtacks (no idea) filled the corners on the floor end of things. There was an ancient gas furnace wheezing in the corner, and in the bathroom, a musty black goo was defying gravity, hanging over the tub where the ceiling ought to have been.

I was thrilled as could be.

The landlord, a pleasant enough fellow named Jason, admitted he'd had difficulty renting the place. A couple of girls from the local college had toured the place a week or so earlier, but they barely made it through the front door before changing their minds. He didn't want to put much money into the place, as his ultimate plan was to bulldoze it to build some kind of commercial building, but he was agreeable to replacing the goo with a proper ceiling.

Three days later I picked up the keys and moved in with a toothbrush, an inflatable mattress, and a laundry basket full of clean clothes.

The next several days were a frenzy of furniture purchase and intensive cleaning. I soon discovered that much of the distinctive odor came from the utility room in the back, where urine of uncertain origins had gathered in the corners to form an impressive collection of crystals. I'd work all day, hit the thrift stores for an hour or two, then spend four or five hours a night cleaning before collapsing into dreamless, Pine-Sol scented sleep. I'd painted the walls; the place was starting to look pretty good.

Trouble was just around the corner, and I'll get to that with a new post tomorrow -- no, really, I will.

Photo Time

2007-11-05T14:25:00.000-08:00

Got one of my all-time favorite shots just last week during the downtown Redmond trick-or-treating event. Very happy with this one. Thanks to Mia and her mother for cooperating with me as I futzed around with my camera settings.

An accounting for my blogging sins

2007-08-27T20:55:00.000-07:00

Yes, I recognize nobody read the blog, but I still feel like I ought to explain why there's nothing but crusty old newspaper stores on here in recent months. So, yeah, this was my ill-fated attempt to get hired on by the Portland Tribune, which expected an online application but gave no details as to how one is supposed to do such a thing.

Given that nearly everything I've done nowadays exists only in print form in musty little back closets, this is what I came up with. So instead of a bunch of old travel stories about hookers and hash and falling in the sewer, I've got a damned resume full of the cute and the maudlin sitting here.

And wouldn't you know, they never even had the courtesy to shoot me a line saying they hired someone else. Gah! No wonder I'm keen on getting out of here.

New Camera

2007-08-22T23:05:00.000-07:00

I may be wrong, but I believe I now have a camera worth more than my car. It's a fine camera, to be sure, but this probably has a good bit more to do with the sorry state of my aged Subaru than the camera itself.

Anyhow, this:

little black beauty is the new toy. It's a Canon 30D, which probably means something to those who are big into cameras, and nothing to those who are not.

It's a welcome change of pace after four years or so of shooting with something effectively fully automated. Getting to monkey around with all the controls makes for a few shitty pictures, but on balance, it's worth it. Best of all, it's like having a great big swinging dick hanging on a strap around your neck -- instant respect/awe/jealously, etc. The hardcore photographers, the guys with even more spendy equipment don't pay it any mind, but for the rabble, it says I'M GOING TO SHOOT WHATEVER I DAMN WELL PLEASE!

Then again, maybe it doesn't. But it does let me shoot a lot of stuff I couldn't before and it means I'll have to get a little more serious about making regular updates to the photoblog as I figure out how to use the fool thing.

The photos are all here on picasa, which is a mighty useful site for anyone who hasn't used it. Nearly everything up there was shot on the old camera or the office camera, but that should change in the coming weeks

Transiton Center gives purpose to all: Redmond Spokesman, Dec. 20, 2006

2007-07-17T17:46:00.001-07:00

It’s Thursday morning at the Redmond Transition Center on NE Fifth Street, and the whole place is humming with activity. A nurse and a physical therapist are down on the floor with wrenches, giving a battered-looking wheelchair a tune up. Two more staffers are easing a student out of a wheelchair and in to a contraption that allows her to stand upright.

Parents wander in and out, lingering by the coffee and cookies table near the front door to chat. One student is hunched over the cash register drawer counting money, another is looking over the merchandise in the student-run store, and others wander from room to room, gathering books and notebooks for classes, or the uniforms they’ll wear to work later in the day.

Everybody has something to do. And that, says center director Kate Barker, is the whole point.

“Everyone needs something in their life that fulfills them vocationally, even these guys. And even if they need some support,” she said.

Barker oversees 20 students between 18 and 21 years old, all of whom have some kind of physical or cognitive handicap. Under federal law, the school district is required to provide services to handicapped students until the year they turn 21 or they earn a standard diploma, whichever comes first.

But for many of these students, a standard diploma is unattainable. And so the transitional program serves a different function, teaching students how to get a job or rent an apartment, how to manage money and cook for themselves – the kinds of things the parents of many college graduates are miffed to discover their own children are unable to do.

“You know, I hear that a lot,” Barker said. “They say, ‘my son didn’t learn that, my daughter didn’t learn that – they should have been in your program!’”

Teaching a person with significant disabilities how to function in the adult world is, of course, many orders of magnitude more complex than doing the same with a college graduate. The students at the Transition Center vary quite a bit, from those who look like any other young adult to those who will likely require professional caregivers for the rest of their lives. Most of them will live in subsidized housing, and those who find steady work will likely do so at jobs that many people would find unfulfilling.

But spend some time around the Center, and the excitement is infectious. After years of being led along by their parents, their teachers, their doctors and others, they’re taking charge of their own lives for the first time.

In the kitchen of the Transition Center, about half a dozen students have gathered to study for the food handlers permit test. Restaurants have been big supporters of the Center over the years, providing many of the students with their first paid work experience, but the food handler’s card is a necessity if they are to move beyond dishwashing or similar low-level positions. Passing the test is a challenge for many of these students, however, so the lesson moves along slowly. Today, the instructor asks if it’s O.K. to re-use an unopened packet of crackers, the type usually served alongside a bowl of soup.

“Can I tell you something? I wouldn’t do it. No,” offers Jason Johns.

Johns has spina bifida, a condition that begins in the womb and results in a child with a malformed spine. Johns is in a wheelchair and quite short for someone his age, but he’s got a quick wit that keeps the other students amused. When it comes to the crackers, he’s wrong, but he defends his answer – better to play it safe, he says.

When the discussion turns to the re-use of more perishable items – sour cream, in this instance – Johns is right back in the mix.

“That’s disgusting,” he said, flat and deadpan. The rest of the class busts up laughing.

Out in the main lobby, Nicole Hinds is standing upright encased in an assemblage of metal tubes and pads and straps that resembles a piece of home exercise equipment or a torture device. In a wheelchair since a car accident in 2002, Hinds needs to spend some time upright in order to keep up the production of bone marrow in her legs. While her attendants tighten the straps, Nicole grips a control stick attached to a laptop computer navigates through a series of spreadsheets containing her business records.

Unlike most of the students at the Transition Center, Hinds was born “normal,” a word that Barker and the rest of the staff try to avoid yet use frequently. She suffered a significant brain injury in the car accident, which left her with some memory problems and slow, drawn out speech patterns, but otherwise, her mental functioning is solid. In order to make the most of her abilities, the Center staff set her up with her own business, selling gift baskets under the name “Nic’s Snacks and Knick Knacks.”

Hinds buys the supplies and assembles the baskets herself, selling them through “Heart and Hands,” the store run by the students. They’re all a little different, she said, describing movie baskets stuffed with popcorn and candy, coffee baskets filled with specialty coffees and cookies, and gardener’s baskets full of seed packets. Hinds is grateful to the staff for helping her get started in a business that suits her.

“I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this,” Hinds said, taking a deep breath to continue. “But…this…program…kicks…ass.”

John Seibert got his job with a little help from the center as well. The husband of one of the staff members set Seibert up with Miller Custom Drywall, and he’s learned enough to demonstrate his trowel technique and dismiss the texturing on the walls of the center as “spray on – cheap.” He said he’s had a few rough patches, getting so into his work that he backed into things and knocked his head a few times, and once taking a big bite out of his left hand with the edge of his trowel, but he’s having a good time. The next step, he said, is to get his learners permit and then his driver’s license. If he can do that, Seibert will be able to live as independently as just about anyone else.

Parents say the program is exceptional in that the staff really make a point of trying to nudge their students into the larger world. Georgina Carter, whose daughter Ambie is a spina bifida patient and in a wheelchair, said she moved to Redmond from Bend in order to get Ambie into the Transitional Center – the program in Bend, she said, seemed to be primarily interested in minimizing their legal liability. Two weeks after she arrived this fall, Ambie was working as a volunteer at a local nursing home, a job her mother says she loves.

Carrol Hinds, Nicole’s mother, said she’s impressed at everything the staff has done to help her daughter create her gift basket business. Everyone at the Center is committed to doing everything possible for the students, she said, and the attitude starts from the top.

“All of this, this is Kate’s dream, and her staff is awesome,” she said.

Every year in early summer, the entire Transition Center packs up and heads for the coast. The week-long vacation is paid for through donations and the money earned at the student run store, and it seems to have a miraculous effect on the students – according to Carrol, their medical problems seem to disappear. Several of the students are prone to seizures, she said, but there’s never been a single seizure on any of the coast trips.

“It is just the strangest thing,” she said. “It’s like magic.”

Carter and Hinds sit on the couch in the Center’s lobby, trading stories about the obstacles they’ve encountered trying to guide their daughters through a world that’s still quite difficult to navigate from a wheelchair. They know the stores where the aisles are to narrow to steer a chair, and have similar tales to tell about what happens when your van breaks down – tow trucks, police cars, and taxis still have no way of taking passengers in a wheelchair, it seems.

It’s expensive – Nicole’s wheelchair cost $18,000, Carrol said. And it’s frustrating – the dentist’s office they recently visited promised handicapped access, but had used the wheelchair ramp to pile the snow they’d shoveled from the steps. But getting frustrated doesn’t solve anything, and Carrol said she’s learned to laugh in the face of adversity.

Carter said she’s also learned to laugh at the challenges, following her daughter’s example. If Ambie can withstand the stares and the hushed whispering she encounters out in public, I can too, she said.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my daughter, it’s this: she told me, ‘I don’t have a problem, they do mom. They have to deal with it,’” Carter said. “You can’t not get on with life, you just do what you have to do.”

Maid in Redmond: Redmond Spokesman, Aug. 25, 2006

2007-07-12T17:08:00.000-07:00

There’s a few things you learn spending an afternoon as a movie extra. One, if you think your cell phone is off, check again. Two, the breakaway bottles used for cracking over a stuntman’s head or other forms of bottle-related melee, are not, no matter what you’ve heard, made of candy. And three, it’s really, really boring. Deathly boring. Fall asleep standing up, wake up in a puddle of drool and feeling good you nodded off for a bit boring,

Along with Spokesman page designer John Barry, I spent last Thursday afternoon at the Timbers Tavern on Redmond’s south end, working as an extra for “Man Maid,” an independent production being filmed in and around Redmond. “Working” is something of a relative term – most of the time we just sat there, staring dumbly at the walls and trying not to make any noise. “Extra” is entirely apt – we were extra. As in unnecessary.

Written and directed by Chris Lusvardi, Man Maid is the story of a male housekeeper named Vincent who works at the Historic New Redmond Hotel. A big company tries to buy the hotel, Vincent the man maid leads a charge to save the hotel, Vincent falls for a beautiful accordion player who’s pretending to be an Indian, and eventually, a famous country swinger swoops in on a helicopter for some kind of concert that somehow saves the day. Did I mention Vincent lives in a tent in the woods and rides a Vespa scooter?

The point is, from what’s available, it’s really hard to know exactly what Man Maid is about. Hopefully, that’s clearer once the movie is released next spring.

Friday, it was all about booing and confrontations. With Timbers doing a respectable job as a stand in for a rough-and-tumble country music bar, John and I arrived midway through the filming of a scene where one of the local roughnecks is laying into Vincent, something about how “there’s no queer bars in this town” and something else about men “rubbing each other with exotic oils.” Eventually, the roughneck punches Vincent, one of those stage punches that looks phony as can be in person yet somehow manages to be fairly convincing on film.

After several more takes of Vincent versus the roughneck, the crew starts moving the lights and repositioning the cameras, and John and I are able to grab a couple of seats up closer to the action. The new scene involved Chloe, the aforementioned accordion player pretending to be an Indian, dressed up like the girl on the Land o’ Lakes butter package and pumping away at her instrument. It’s hard to know if Chloe knows how to play the accordion or if the wheezy and tuneless number is all for show. She does have a passable singing voice, though. The roughneck is in this scene as well, and he’s been given the job of interrupting Chloe, screaming out “Freebird!” and “Come on bitch, cantcha play somethin’ that rocks?”

As the accordion droned on, John and I kept ourselves silently amused by checking out the modifications made to the various neon signs hung throughout Timbers. For some reason or another, many brands seem to frown on the idea of getting free publicity in movies or on television. They can pay producers for product placement, or they can sell you and me t-shirts or what-have-you with their logos emblazoned across the chest, but the notion of advertising minus any exchange of cash is apparently unthinkable. Not that anyone’s going to be fooled by the little strips of black electrical tape used to create new brands like “Mrror Pond,” “Copenhage,” or “Black Butt Porter,” but that’s the idea.

John is getting fidgety.

“There’s something fundamentally wrong about being in a bar without a beer in front of me,” he said once the silence order was lifted.

“God, I know. I feel like one of those guys who quit drinking but still hangs out at the bar drinking O’Doul’s or iced tea or something.’

“Those guys! I couldn’t do that. It doesn’t even feel like a bar like this. This feels like, like…it feels like jury duty.”

Between shots, I run into another extra pacing around the parking lot. Jeff, a recent arrival from Texas, borrows my pen and uses it to scrawl “Leave cell phones in car!” on a paper sign tacked to the front door. A few minutes earlier, Jeff’s phone had gone off, cutting the shot short and sparking off a flurry of shouting and disapproving scowls from the film crew.

“I was in the bathroom,” Jeff explained.” I could hear though the door they were still shooting, so I waited. And then, there’s my phone, sitting there on the bar where I guess I left it. I swear it was off. Man…”

Back inside, they’re setting up a third shot requiring no extras whatsoever. The crew is busy, dragging fat bundles of cable behind them like tails, arranging blindingly bright lights and big white reflector panels. One guy appears to be in charge of tape, carrying about 15 rolls of the stuff on a strap hung around his neck. Every few moments he rips off a piece and sticks it on the floor, marking the location of a light or an actor or something else. Another is on measuring tape duty, measuring the distance between the actors’ noses and the camera.

This latest scene involves a muscular young fellow in an aqua-blue cowboy getup, prancing around the stage and singing. Later on he climbs atop some piece of recycled exercise equipment with a stuffed-animal horse's head attached to it, pumping his hips to the music and waving his aluminum foil covered cowboy hat. The performance doesn’t sit well with some of the patrons, and yet another roughneck sort drags him from the stage and punches him out.

“Gee, I hope this doesn’t reflect badly on Redmond,” a woman sitting behind us whispers.

The first time around, it’s pretty funny. The second time, a little less so. By the eighth or tenth time, I don’t really know anymore, but the tune has burrowed its way into my brain and I’m singing under my breath, “Hey! Ho! Do-si-do! Something something at the rodeo!”

Looking across the table I see John is singing and tapping his foot as well. He says he’s grown used to watching the same scene over and over again.

“I’ve done this before. It’s like when my two-year old son gets a hold of the DVD remote control.”

Finally, our moment has come. They’re going to turn the cameras around and shoot some crowd scenes.

A crew member wanders over and sizes us up. He leads John away to a small table in the middle of the floor, then comes back and points me to a barstool on the far side of the room. “You sit there.”

Jeff from Texas is sent over to the stool next to mine. We chat for a bit, and before long, a pretty blond girl is placed next to John. He raises a glass of some reddish-colored faux cocktail at me and grins. I snarl at him and turn to Jeff.

“Will you look at that. John gets a pretend cocktail, a pretend girlfriend and a can to throw at the stage. And we get to be the drunk losers by ourselves over at the bar.”

“Yeah,” Jeff says, drawing shapes in the air with a plastic straw, “hits a little too close to the truth, doesn’t it?”

There’s a broken piece of a breakaway bottle sitting on the bar in front of me. The label is a near-perfect replica of the Budweiser label, but it reads “Beermeister.” Having been told years ago that bottles and windows and other stunt glass used in the movies were made of crystallized sugar, I snap off a piece and pop it into my mouth.

This is a bad idea. It starts foaming as soon as I bite down, breaking apart into angry, bitter tasting sand. Probably little different than chewing glass. Down the bar I find a shot glass full of fruity smelling warm liquid to wash down whatever it was I just ate. Jeff looks over and shakes his head sadly. John points and laughs.

The scene we’re shooting is the crowd reaction shot from the foil-hatted cowboy’s song and dance routine. On cue, we boo loudly and throw breakaway bottles and empty beer cans at the stage. It’s an unusual scene in the way that the entire crowd seems to turn against the cowboy at the same time. We shoot the scene several times, sometimes booing, sometimes booing without booing, a silent room full of mouths flapping like guppies. We record a couple of audio takes, one talking normally among ourselves, another without saying anything at all, just a recording of a whirring fan somewhere off in the distance.

And then, it’s over. The actors and the crew circulate through the crowd shaking out hands and thanking us for our time. We wander out squinting into the still-blazing sun, a little disoriented after spending five hours in a bar with heavy black sheets hanging over the windows. Fifteen minutes later, everything is finally normal again. We’re in a bar. With beers. With nobody telling us when to talk or where to sit. The clientele is a little rougher on the eyes. But this, this is a convincing audience of toughs, the kind of people who probably would come unglued at having to sit through one lame musical performer after another. Maybe they’d even throw a few bottles.

It’s too early to know what becomes of Man Maid. Maybe it will premier at a small film festival. Maybe it will go straight to video, maybe it will be the surprise hit of next summer, or maybe it will never see the light of day. No matter what happens, it’s a local product, and it’s going to be worth seeing for that reason alone. I’m the one in the short-sleeved green shirt with the military haircut. John’s the one in the brown long-sleeved shirt next to the blond girl. One of your neighbors or one of your friends is probably in it too. Redmond is of course, everywhere, from the hotel to Timbers to the Tum-a-Lum lumberyard. Check it out – watching Man Maid can’t be any slower than making it.

Hartman plan needs fix: Redmond Spokesman, Oct. 10 2006

2007-07-11T17:49:00.001-07:00

The Redmond School Board will meet tonight to learn more about emerging problems with the Hartman building at Redmond High School. District administrators say the two-building experiment is running up greater transportation costs than originally imagined, and that Hartman building is underutilized, diminishing its impact on crowding at the main high school.

A former middle school, the Hartman building was picked to absorb some of the overflow from Redmond High School when the last school construction bond was presented to voters in early 2004. That bond funded the construction of Elton Gregory Middle School, which opened this fall with the students and staff were at Hartman last year. With an official capacity of 600 students – it held roughly 680 during its last year as a middle school with the help of portable classrooms – Hartman was held out as a cost-effective temporary solution to crowding at the main high school.

The Hartman building, located a few hundred yards north of the main high school campus, opened this year as home to three distinct programs – the SUCCESS Academy, a 9^th and 10^th grade program intended to help struggling students get back on track, the Global Academy, an internationally-focused 9-12 program, and the International School of the Cascades (ISC), also 9-12 and also internationally-focused, but managed as a charter school within the district. The SUCCESS Academy and the Global Academy are both new this year, while the International School of the Cascades moved over from the main high school campus for its second year.

Getting to the current arrangement was a long and drawn out process.

Following the passage of the bond, the school district initiated a dialogue with members of the community, trying to find out what the public would prefer at Hartman. Two possibilities were floated, a ninth-grade only campus or an internationally-oriented 9-12 program similar to what was eventually adapted. In April 2005, teachers and other district employees at a workshop convened by the district noted that it could be difficult to offer a wide enough range of classes for students at a “theme school,” but expressed enthusiasm at the idea of creating an all-new curriculum.

In May 2005, the school board voted to move forward with a 9-12 plan that would include the ISC, but would not necessarily be a “theme school.” At the time, it was projected 175 ISC students would attend Hartman alongside 300-350 others, but no mechanism was identified for selecting those other students. It was not determined if the school would be fully autonomous or part of the larger high school.

In mid-September, Redmond High School principal Jon Bullock told the Spokesman there was still no mechanism for selecting the other Hartman students, and that he and other high school administrators were waiting for the school board to vote on a theme for the building before moving forward.

The following month, the board re-visited the 9^th grade campus concept, with Bullock supporting such and approach and ISC principal Donna Howard backing a plan packaging a fully-autonomous small high school with the ISC. At the board’s October 12 meeting, Howard reiterated how important it was they meet the district’s goal of housing 4-500 students at the Hartman building, because at the time, the district expected 2,074 students to enroll at Redmond High School in the 2006-07 school year.

In late October, the board deadlocked 2-2 on a vote to return to the 9^th grade campus plan. The May decision remained in effect, and it was left to Bullock and Howard to develop a concept. By late winter, the two had developed the concept for the SUCCESS Academy and Global Academy and begun trying to drum up interest among high school students and incoming freshman.

When Bullock and Howard met with the board on May 3, 2006, they reported commitments from 253 students interested in one of the three programs at Hartman. Board members expressed concerns that the figure was too low. Bullock told the board that along with Howard and district curriculum director Keith Hanson, two contingency plans had been developed in the event they were unable to improve the numbers. One would be the 9^th grade campus plan, Bullock said, which would give the school a total enrollment of 510 to 430, while the other would involve breaking off two of the four “small learning communities” of ninth and tenth graders at the high school, for a total of 420 to 500 students at Hartman. The board announced that they would look into the contingency plans unless enrollment could be brought up by at least 100 students within a week.

Following the May 3 meeting, Howard told the Spokesman that many students had expressed an interest in the ISC or the Global Academy, but were reluctant to commit. Many of them were band students, Howard said, who were reluctant to participate because band would not be offered at the Hartman building. However, because the school’s budget picture had recently improved, Howard said it was now possible to fund a bus that would run back and forth between Hartman and the main high school twice a day. The bus would make the Hartman option more attractive to those students who wanted to take electives only available at the main campus, she said, and predicted they would meet their enrollment targets.

When Howard and Bullock appeared before the board a week later, they had reached the 350 student threshold. Board member Cathy Miller said she still didn’t think that was sufficient, but other board members said it was getting to be late in the process to reverse course. Board member Dan Murphy said he felt it would be unfair to abandon the plan if it missed its enrollment target by just a few students, and suggested the district could utilize the unused space by housing elective courses at Hartman. Howard predicted enrollment would be up to around 400 by the time school started.

That did not happen. According to the district’s Sept. 11 attendance report, there are 132 students enrolled in the ISC, 84 in the SUCCESS Academy, and 105 in the Global Academy for a total of 321 students enrolled in Hartman programs.

Meanwhile, bussing is up sharply. According to Howard, two busses are staged at both Hartman and the main high school building throughout the day, and they make the trip from one to the other between every class period as well as at the beginning and end of lunch for a total of 24 trips per day rather than the four in the earlier budget. Students who spend the majority of their day at the main high school travel to Hartman for language classes, physics and astronomy, and students in the Hartman programs, unencumbered by a lack of transportation options, are free to take whatever electives their schedules will allow.

“Originally, we were looking at only transporting students for tech classes and band, but as we plugged students into the system, schedules don’t always flow as smoothly as you would like,” Howard said.

Passing periods at both buildings are nine minutes long, up from six last year in order to accommodate bussing. Bullock said the change has not cut in to class time due to the elimination of time set aside last year for morning announcements and the new single-lunch schedule, and declined comment when asked if the amount of bussing was a concern for him.

“I think my greatest concern is trying to develop a high school program in which we can see students meet and exceed state standards and have opportunities for success beyond high school,” he said, adding that the two campus arrangement is one of many factors that complicate his efforts.

“We have a number of initiatives going on to try to meet that goal, and sometimes, yeah, it can be difficult to keep them all going.”

Howard said she’s been studying the master schedule to try to find a way to limit the number of busses going back and forth each day.

“We are in an arrangement that we haven’t had before. There are many things that we had considered and planned and structured before we moved into this, but there’s always things that you learn that you didn’t know,” she said. “And that’s what we’re working on right now; here are some things we have learned, now how do we address those to improve the situation and address the problems. That’s what you do in a good system.”

School board chairman Tim Carpenter said the board hopes to get a clear picture of how many students are going back and forth between the two buildings and how much it’s costing the district at tonight’s meeting.

“I don’t want to say (we are) evaluating the Hartman plan, but looking at where we are right now, what are the plusses and minuses, and as we approach the end of first trimester five weeks from now, what do we need to do different as we head into second and third trimester,” he said. “Or do we need to do anything? Is everything going OK, do we need to adjust schedules, what do we want to do?”

Carpenter said any significant changes to the current plan would be likely to go into place during the breaks between trimesters.

This evening’s school board meeting begins at 5 p.m. at the district headquarters, 145 SE Salmon Ave. in Redmond.

Ninth grade campus not a new idea: Redmond Spokesman, Nov. 15, 2006

2007-07-11T17:47:00.001-07:00

Tonight, the Redmond School Board will take citizen testimony on the future of the Hartman building at Redmond High School. According to district officials, the administrative council – a group consisting of building principals and department heads – recently voted unanimously to support turning Hartman into a ninth grade campus next year.

The meeting will be held at the high school and begins at 5:30 p.m.

Superintendent Vickie Fleming said the support for the ninth grade campus arrangement came about as a result of her question to the council: which approach will put the district in the best position to pass a new schools bond within the next five years? Fleming has since communicated the council’s position to the board, which has thus far been reluctant to accept the ninth grade campus arrangement without further public input.

If the board accepts the administrative council’s recommendation and votes to approve the switch following a second board meeting scheduled for Nov. 29, the three specialty programs currently housed at Hartman would move to the main Redmond High School building next year. Fleming said she understands that being located at Hartman is part of the allure of the programs – the SUCCESS Academy, the Global Academy, and the International School of the Cascades – but with under 300 students in the programs, it’s the wrong fit for a building built with a capacity of 600.

When the school district put its most recent bond before voters in 2004, Hartman was to be used to alleviate overcrowding at the high school, not as a laboratory for innovative programs, Fleming said – no matter how worthy those innovative programs might be.

“I’ve pretty clearly stated in a memo to the board – in order to get the credibility rebuilt with the community and get on the right side of this decision is to do the thing that is fiscally responsible and fully utilize the building,” Fleming said. “…it doesn’t mean we have to throw out the programs that we have innovated and created. We don’t. Those programs are not dependent on a building.”

Other Oregon school districts have experimented with special campuses for ninth grade students in the recent past. Last week, the Spokesman contacted two of those districts to find out more about what a ninth grade campus might look like in Redmond.

DALLES- WAHTONKA

In 2004, The Dalles School District and the Chenoweth School District merged to become the North Wasco County School District, a move that left the newly-formed district with two high schools about one and a half miles apart.

Superintendent Candy Armstrong said there was a degree of tension in the air leading up to the merger. Teachers, administrators, parents and students from the smaller Chenoweth district saw the move as more of a takeover, she said, and it was clear the district would have to take steps to bring the two sides together.

Administrators thought a single high school would help to do that, but both Dalles High School and Wahtonka High School were too small to house all of their students. They considered setting up a magnet school program at the smaller Wahtonka campus, but that approach, Armstrong said, “smacked of separateness.”

The district wasn’t growing nearly fast enough to justify construction of a new high school. The ninth grade campus approach was identified as the best of a number of imperfect solutions.

Trying to ensure that the freshman had access to all of the classes available on the main campus, the district instituted a shuttle system to move students and teachers between the two buildings. The result was a strained transportation budget, Armstrong said, and worse, a sense that the freshman didn’t really “belong” at either building.

“We tried too hard to try to make all that back and forth so there wouldn’t be any missed opportunities, and we drove ourselves crazy,” Armstrong said. “You don’t have to do that.”

In the three years since the ninth grade campus opened, the district has steadily cut back transportation between the two buildings. Required classes already consume a large part the schedule for freshman, Armstrong said, so cutting back further wasn’t too hard to do. While limiting the class choices available to ninth graders, the district set up a number of easy to provide extracurricular activities. The ninth grade campus has its own newspaper, its own athletic programs, and a once a week “open mic” event where students can show off their performing talents.

“While it isn’t woods (shop) or some of your traditional kinds of things that are on the main campus, there’s enough variety there to hook kids in and keep them moving towards developing their talents,” Armstrong said.

One worry early on was that adding another transitional step between middle school and high school could hurt academic performance. Most research, Armstrong said, tends to show that switching from one school to another disorients students and can cause their grades to slip. While the students’ academic performance hasn’t measurably improved under the ninth grade campus arrangement, it hasn’t slipped either, leading Armstrong to wonder why teachers and administrators spent so much time worrying.

“Change is so hard. It’s so much harder on staff and community members than it is, often times, on the students themselves,” she said. “Sometimes we think something’s going to be very, very difficult for the students. They adjust, but the staff and the community has a hard time getting used to it.”

The only significant downside Armstrong points to is the feeling that freshman aren’t really a part of the larger high school community. The entire freshman class is transported to the main campus for homecoming activities and other major social events, but Armstrong said it’s still a “huge challenge” to instill in the freshman a sense of belonging. That’s somewhat balanced out by the tremendous sense of belonging at the freshman campus, she said, and the fact that juniors and seniors seem more eager than ever to embrace sophomores once they make it to the main campus.

“I think we’ve done a good job of taking something that could have been seen as a negative, and it’s actually working really well,” Armstrong said. “It’s going back to that relational piece, that cultural piece. You can pull it off, but there are some things that have to be in place.”

OREGON CITY

Four years ago, just before Dalles-Wahtonka moved to a ninth grade campus arrangement, the Oregon City School District opened its new high school, bringing a decade-long ninth grade campus experiment to a close. Mike Hyder, now an administrator in the district’s central office, spent four years as principal of the ninth grade Moss Campus.

Hyder’s observations are markedly similar to those of Candy Armstrong in The Dalles. The socialization aspect was good for unifying the freshman class, but not so good in terms of making them feel like part of the larger high school.

“I think there were pros and cons. Certainly a pro was we had two middle schools, so for at least a year during those years there was sort of a protective mixing of the middle school students, sort of a special year when they were ninth graders,” Hyder said. “That was good, socially and developmentally. It was sort of a protection from going from a middle school to a large high school.”

As in The Dalles, Oregon City made a conscious effort to limit the elective classes available to students at the Moss Campus. During Hyder’s tenure – the final four years of the arrangement – the district loosened those restrictions and expanded bussing between the two campuses. The shift was in response to parental pressure, he said, but it had an added benefit of easing the transition back to a single high school.

“One, because we knew the combined high school was coming, we wanted to start attending to that cohesiveness, building that, but also by doing it allowed our kids to access more electives,” he said. “We couldn’t bring all the electives out to the Moss Campus because of space and specialization. We couldn’t stock an art room, for example, with as much supplies and stuff if it was only going to be used for two periods a day.”

Hyder said he has only anecdotal evidence of improved academic performance during the ninth grade campus years, although “staff and kids have very fond memories of their freshman year, and I think that’s definitely worth something.”

“The trend now is to go to smaller learning communities, and certainly that does lend itself – depending on the size of your ninth grade class and if that’s the only one in the school district – it does lend itself to a smaller learning community,” he said. “You can target things more directly to that age level of kid, as far as assemblies and programs and social things that are more targeted to that grade level.”

Over time, the staff at the Moss Campus came to strongly believe in the effectiveness of the ninth grade campus arrangement. Teachers who felt their skills worked best with younger high school students gravitated there, Hyder said, and the semi-autonomous administration of the campus allowed them to develop their own methods of teaching. Many teachers, he said, “went though withdrawal” when the arrangement came to an end with the opening of the new high school.

“It was quite a cultural adjustment for them, an organizational-cultural adjustment for them,” he said. “And some that have retired thereafter would probably believe that it’s too bad the night grade campus went away.”

Asked if he would bring back the ninth grade campus arrangement if the Oregon City School had unlimited resources, Hyder said no – he’d build a second high school.

“If I had all the resources in the world, I would rather we just had two smaller high schools,” he said. “We have 2,400 kids. We make an effort to create smaller learning communities and stuff, but it’s a big, big high school.”

Redmond tallow firm, last in state, will close: Bend Bulletin, Sept. 29, 2003

2007-07-11T17:45:00.001-07:00

The Redmond Tallow Co. will close its doors at the end of October, a move that may place a substantial burden on a variety of local companies.

Martha Cacho, who along with her son and other members of her family has owned the meat rendering plant since 1970, said keeping the plant running is now more trouble than it’s worth. Neighbors have complained about the smell, and a number of longtime customers quit doing business with them when the company began charging a fee to pick up animal carcasses.

“When I was here, I wish they would have cooperated with me. Maybe I would still be here. But I guess they figured as long as I was here, they had nothing to worry about. Now that I’m no longer here, everybody’s worried about it,” she said. “I’m sorry it had to go that way. The same people that complain about my odor here, when they lost a horse or a cow, who did they call?”

“The same people they didn’t want as a neighbor.”

The plant is located on O’Neil Highway northeast of Redmond. It cooks down meat scraps, restaurant grease and livestock carcasses in giant pressure cookers to produce a substance used to make chicken, hog, and pet food. Ranchers, hunters, butchers and restaurant owners turned their leftovers over to the plant, recycling materials that would otherwise end up in landfills or dumped on public land.

According to Cacho, the 75-year-old company is the only full-fledged rendering plant still doing business in Oregon.

Redmond Tallow was investigated by the state Department of Environmental Quality in 2001, on the suspicion that nitrates from animal carcasses were leaching into the water table. Well tests done that year showed that two wells at the plant and one well on an adjacent property south of the plant had nitrate levels above the legal limit of 10 milligrams per liter.

The plant owners eventually lined a wastewater pond that was suspected of being the main source of contamination, and replaced the neighbor’s contaminated well.

Cacho said the company’s run-in with the DEQ marked a turning point in the plant’s fortunes, but it was not the primary reason they decided to shut down.

In preparation for the closure, the company has sent a letter to its customers telling them about other companies that can provide the same services. Customers have been advised to contact a Tacoma, Wash., company to dispose of meat scraps and animal parts, and a Harrisburg company near Eugene that will take restaurant grease.

Carl Cacho, Martha Cacho’s son, will continue to pick up dead livestock for a fee that will likely include the Tacoma company’s disposal costs.

For people like Ben Moore, the owner of Redmond Lockers and Custom Meats, the tallow plant’s pending closure is going to sting.

Moore said Darling International, the Tacoma company the Cachos recommended he use to dispose of fat and bones leftover from his business’ butchering operations, will charge him between $550 and $600 a week in disposal fees. Darling International does have a transfer station in Portland, but its rendering plant is in Tacoma.

With Redmond Tallow, he pays just $60 a month. Moore said he doesn’t feel like he has any other choices.

“I’ve tried all the other avenues,” he said. “The dump doesn’t want it there, DEQ doesn’t want me to take it there. I can’t waste the labor on hauling it to those places, and anyway it’s material that should be made into other byproducts.”

Currently, Redmond Lockers charges customers a $4 waste disposal fee for every cow they butcher. Moore hasn’t set a new waste disposal fee, but he expects it to go up sharply.

Restaurants may have an easier road ahead. Leftover grease has become a hot commodity in recent years as more and more people have taken to running their cars on biodiesel produced from discarded cooking oil.

Larry Pankey, manager of Erickson’s Thriftway in Redmond, a longtime customer of Redmond Tallow, said he doesn’t expect he’ll have any difficulty getting rid of the grease the store uses to make fried chicken and other food.

“Heck, we could probably sell it now,” Pankey said. “We have people coming in here all the time that say they want to take it to make biodiesel.”

Pankey said Erickson’s will probably let the grease hunters take whatever they want once Redmond Tallow shuts down.

Casey Ellil, a hobby farmer who recently butchered two of his steers and sent the unusable portions to Redmond Tallow, said he’s concerned the loss of the tallow plant will lead to more people dumping dead animals on public land.

“It would be an ugly situation,” Ellil said. “If one of your farm animals die or you put them down, legally you can’t bury their entrails and everything on your property. Without the tallow company to haul that stuff away, where is all this stuff going to end up? I’m not saying I would do this, but there’s an awful lot of people who would haul it out and dump it on BLM, national forest, or on the side of the road.”

Cacho said she’s disappointed to see her family plant go out of business under the circumstances.

She said it’s unfortunate she was unable to convince her customers that the disposal fees the company instituted in recent years were a necessary cost of doing business, and predicts many of them will be “shocked” when they learn the cost of transporting their waste products out of the region.

“Everything doesn’t stay the same forever. Gas goes up, you run a truck, you’ve got more expenses. You’ve got insurance, it goes up. Everything keeps going up, and a lot of time people don’t want to pay for the service, and if you charge a little bit they still complain,” Cacho said. “What the other companies do is going to be between them — I have no control over it.”

Local officials have been watching the issue closely, and are currently in the process of trying to come up with both short-term and long-term solutions to the carcass disposal problem.

Crook County Judge Scott Cooper, head of the county commission, said his county’s landfill may have to stop accepting animal carcasses if another disposal option is not identified. The county landfill currently accepts carcasses, Cooper said, but it’s an expensive and labor intensive process to bury them in accordance with environmental regulations.

If the number of animals coming to the landfill were to surge — as Cooper expects will be the case when the tallow plant closes — they would be unable to keep up and would be forced to turn them away.

“Rendering plants are a nasty, smelly, unpleasant and absolutely essential part of any economy that includes animals,” Cooper said. “The idea that we’ll just get by without one in Oregon is pretty naive.”

Cooper will be meeting with officials from state agencies today to discuss what can be done.

In search of a near-term solution, he plans to ask for relief from the regulations that drive up the price of burying carcasses in landfills. Longer term, he said he’d like to find an out-of-the-way location and enough money to persuade a new tallow company to set up in Central Oregon.

“The regulatory environment in the last 10 years has become increasingly difficult because of DEQ, and the cities haven’t been very good — Redmond in particular — about disallowing encroachment by residential development around the plants, and neighbors have complained,” Cooper said. “And cities have largely heeded the majority, which was the neighbors, without really recognizing what that would do to their infrastructure in the long term if they didn’t have these plants. Our own NIMBY-ism is catching up with us.”

Plan for Block 138 caps a 15-year effort: Lake Oswego Review, March 29, 2001

2007-07-11T17:43:00.001-07:00

Lake Oswego is closer to realizing its dream of a revitalized downtown today than it has been in decades.

Last week, more than 100 citizens packed the city council chambers to get a first glimpse at the latest plans fro Block 138, at an open house hosted by the city, Gramor Development, and architectural firm Sienna. If everything goes according to schedule, the city and Gramor will sign a development agreement next month, initiate a public review process, then break ground in July 2002.

It’s really not that far away, and there are still a lot of questions that haven’t been answered. What’s planned for Block 138? Who’s paying for it and how? Will it change downtown, and if so, will it change for the better?

The Background

Though talk of renovating downtown has been bandied about for nearly 30 years, the modern era of redevelopment began in earnest in 1986 with the creation of the Lake Oswego Redevelopment Agency, or LORA.

Lora is what city planners call an urban renewal district. The formation of such a district is regulated by state government, but cities are generally free to create them in any area considered blighted, underutilized, or in need of improvement.

Lake Oswego’s urban renewal district covers most of the downtown area. Both sides of State Street from Terwilliger to Foothills Drive are included; on the east side of State, the district runs nearly all the way to George Rogers Park. The Oswego Pointe area is included, as is everything along A Avenue up to 7^th Street and everything south of C Avenue.

The A Avenue improvements, Millennium Plaza Park, the watersports center, and the Oswego Pointe Apartments are among the projects the urban renewal district has helped fund so far.

Urban renewal districts are funded through a complicated process known as tax increment financing, best explained through a hypothetical illustration:

Assume an urban renewal district is created in an area where $1 million worth of property is taxed at $4 per $1,000, generating $4,000 for basic city services. After five years, the property is assessed at $1.5 million. The property owner would pay $6,000 in taxes – $4,000 towards basic services, and $2,000 to the urban renewal district.

The urban renewal district uses that money to pay off bonds it has issued to fund improvements within its boundaries; when the bonds are retired, all tax revenue raised within the urban renewal district will once again be dedicated to basic services.

Two things limit the money-generating potential of Lake Oswego’s urban renewal district: the 1997 approval of Ballot Measure 50 and the 1998 failure of Measure 3-18.

Following the passage of Measure 50, a statewide initiative that restricts property tax assessments from growing more than 3 percent annually, local governments wishing to continue using tax increment financing were required to determine the total cost of their redevelopment projects, then pass an ordinance removing properties in the urban renewal district from the limitations of Measure 50. The urban renewal district would be allowed to collect tax revenue until it reached the predetermined figure.

The Lake Oswego City Council passed such an ordinance, adding up the cost of all the projected redevelopment to come up with a figure just shy of $43.5 million. But opponents of downtown redevelopment countered, putting Measure 3-18 on a citywide ballot. Had 3-18 passed, there would be no limit on how fast the assessment could grow on properties within the urban renewal district. When it failed – by just 22 votes – LORA was forced to step back and rethink its ambitious plans.

The Plan

The latest sketches, shown last week at the open house, depict six two- and three-story buildings ringing the perimeter of the Block 138 property. In the middle of the property stands a four-story parking garage capable of holding 336 cars. By putting one level of the parking garage below ground and building tall, pitched roofs on the surrounding buildings, the garage is effectively invisible from the surrounding area.

The four largest buildings, two fronting A Avenue, one of First Street and one on State Street, are intended for a combination of retail and office space. Street-level spaces would be devoted to retailing, while offices would occupy the upper floors.

Two smaller buildings, designed as restaurants, are planned for the southern end of the property. These buildings would overlook the plaza just east of the Fortuna fountain, providing opportunities for sidewalk dining with views of Lakewood Bay.

The parking garage would be accessed from First Street, directly across from Wizer’s southeast parking lot.

LORA and Gramor are currently negotiating the finer details of the agreement. While it is agreed that the city should own the parking garage and Gramor should own the commercial space, the two parties have not determine dhow to divide the costs of construction – most recently estimated at $22.5 million. Gramor will be picking up most of the tab, but the exact amount is uncertain.

Complicating the negotiations is the question of which businesses will occupy the completed commercial spaces. LORA hopes to be able to exert some degree of control in this area, and is looking to do so by imposing codes and covenants specific to Block 138.

Because LORA and Gramor are still in negotiation, and because so many things are still up in the air, there has been no public discussion of possible tenants or rental rates. At the recent open house, Gramor President Barry Cain promised “market based” rents, and said the project had attracted interest from national, regional and local retailers and restaurateurs.

The Word on the Street

Explaining the why and how of downtown renovations at last week’s open house, consultant David Leland noted three things no successful redevelopment project can do without: adequate parking, a well-balanced blend of retail uses, and something to attract shoppers after work and on weekends. Leland’s issues are echoed by the merchants surrounding Block 138.

A lack of parking is the primary concern raised by downtown business people. Hilmi Eladem of the Sultan restaurant said his parking lot is too well hidden – nobody knows how to find it. Vicki Overbay of Tillamook Creamery said hers is too visible – everyone doing business downtown ends up parking there. Jim Ierulli of the Navigator Pub said there’s simply not enough parking – he’s seen parking on A Avenue dwindle over the years as the street has been expanded and improved.

“There’s only two parking spots in front of my place, and there’s one-two-three-four businesses here,” Ierulli said. “If you don’t have places for customers to park, you don’t have customers. Especially during lunch – people generally have on hour to eat, they don’t want to waste time looking for a place to park.”

Danny Piscitelli of the Westside Rider skateboard shop said he’s got parking problems too, but because much of his clientele arrives on skateboards or BMX bikes, it’s not his primary concern. He’s hoping Block 138 includes something to draw younger people into the area.

“I’m not against it – I think it’ll bring a lot of people walking around downtown,” Piscitelli said. “But I don’t know if it’ll have an effect on us – it depends on the stores they put in.”

Eladem shares Piscitelli’s concern about a lack of youth-oriented attractions downtown. He’d like to see Block 138 include arcades and music stores, as well as additional restaurants to boost evening activity.

“If you put a couple of restaurants in, that’s good for me, because competition is always good,” said Eladem. “If it’s all restaurants, that’s too many.”

No matter what happens on Block 138, the construction will snarl the downtown for months. Ierulli and Overbay say that’s fine with them – last summer’s A Avenue improvements were good for their businesses, and they expect the same of Block 138.

“A lot of the stores around here had the opposite view, the opposite experience,” said Overbay. “But for us personally, it’s always been a benefit.”

Redmond's Childcare Woes - Redmond Spokesman, Nov. 8, 2006

2007-07-11T17:41:00.001-07:00

At Redmond Community Child Care, these are nervous days.

Late last month, the Redmond School District renewed the child care center’s lease for another year, guaranteeing they will stay in their home behind Redmond High School through at least July 2008. But beyond that, the future is uncertain. As the population growth continues and the demand for child care climbs ever higher, the fate of one of Redmond’s largest providers is joined at the hip to that other over-arching growth issue, the question of where the city’s swelling high school population will be housed.

When Redmond Community Child Care came before the school board earlier this year, they came looking for a ten-year lease extension. The board turned them down, not out of any hostility towards the center’s mission, but due to the district’s own uncertainty about the future.

Superintendent Vickie Fleming explained that the district feels like it needs to keep its options open. Should voters approve a bond to build a second high school, it’s quite possible Redmond Community Child Care could stay in its current home, albeit on a year-to-year basis. But if a bond can not be passed and the district has to get creative, the ground occupied by the child care center could be targeted in an expansion of the existing high school.

“We don’t want the people at the child care center to worry that the axe is about to drop,” Fleming said. “We just wanted to be on a year to year basis generally speaking.”

Brianna Robertson, the center’s director since August, said she’s happy the lease was renewed, even if only for a year. The year-to-year arrangement is less than idea for the center – Robertson said she’d like to upgrade the building where the center is housed, but it’s hard to justify the investment if the whole operation has to pack up and move just a few years down the road.

Child care experts in the region say operations like the Redmond Community Child Care center are an important asset to the community. According to Lisa Vasquez, the director of childcare resources for Neighbor Impact (formerly COCAAN), the Redmond Childcare Center is the only certified facility in the city that takes children under the age of two. There are other options for the parents of very young children – Vasquez counts a total of 460 childcare providers in the tri-county area, everything from established centers like Redmond Child Care to informal, in-home operations – but slots for babies and infants are hard to come by.

It’s not uncommon, she said, for parents to start shopping for child care or even secure a spot on a center’s waiting list before their child is born.

Robertson said a center like hers can provide a higher quality of care, both in terms of safety and the individual attention paid to each child, than is possible at the typical in-home child care provider.

“They’re not as watched as at a center, per se. You have eight or nine people here watching what everybody is doing,” she said. “The quality of care, when you have one infant in an in-home and all the preschoolers around, it is going to be a lot different than when you have all the infants in one home with two steady teachers all watching them.”

The problem, according to Debbie Coehlo of the OSU Cascades Human Development and Family Sciences department, is money. She’s found that price trumps all other considerations when parents are looking for childcare, which puts providers like Redmond Community Childcare at a disadvantage. Those that make an extra effort to provide quality care price themselves out of the market, Coehlo said.

“It’s really a troubled system…national guidelines are childcare should be less than ten percent of your gross income, and many parents are paying, in this area, as high as thirty percent. More than their rent or mortgage for childcare. Because if each child is $500 a month, and then if you have two or three kids, that adds up quickly,” she said.

Slots for infants and babies, as well as children with disabilities, are often harder to provide, in large part due to state regulations mandating a minimum ratio of adults to children.

In Oregon, daycare centers must maintain a 1:15 ratio of adults to school age children, a 1:10 ratio of adults to preschoolers (3-5 years), a 1:5 ratio of adults to toddlers (2-3 years), and a 1:4 ratio of adults to children under two. In-home daycare providers are subject to somewhat less stringent standards, but established centers face the choice of either jacking up their prices for babies and toddlers, or developing a large pool of older children to partially subsidize the younger children.

Coehlo and Vasquez both said childcare is often overlooked when community leaders and government agencies look at ways to improve the region’s economy. Vasquez said she has a friend in the childcare world who has been going to Chamber of Commerce meetings and similar events. She’s made a nuisance of herself by continually beating the childcare drum while others wanted to talk about transportation issues, but lately, they’re starting to pay attention.

Coehlo said childcare has been a serious issue for companies like T-Mobile, places that pay low to medium wages and tend to employ a lot of women. Single mothers are some of the most reliable employees out there – they won’t quit, because they know they have to support their children, Coehlo said – but they’re also the group most seriously impacted by a lack of affordable childcare.

“One thing employers have to understand is if their employees aren’t happy, if their parents are not comfortable at work because they’re worried ‘is my child in the right facility, is my child safe?’ then they’re not getting the most production out of their workers,” Vasquez said.

Businesses have been slow to adopt policies to help their employees with childcare, Coehlo said, but they are starting to come around. Bank of the Cascades now provides employees with children in daycare with a stipend covering 20 percent of their costs, a benefit Coehlo said more employers would likely provide if they were aware of the various tax incentives available to such businesses. OSU Cascades currently employs an “employer coordinator,” whose full-time job is explaining the ins and outs of the childcare provisions of the state and federal tax code to employers and parents.

One idea that could improve the picture for Redmond families is a “model center” currently in development by OSU Cascades. A similar center exists in Corvallis, staffed by students from the Human Development and Family Science department at OSU’s main campus. Students get to hone their skills in a real-world work environment, while the community gets the benefit of high-quality, affordable childcare. Coehlo said OSU Cascades got “real close” to setting up such a center in Redmond earlier this year, but has since put the project on hold due to budget shortfalls. Should the budgetary picture improve during the next legislative session, Coehlo said she expects the idea will return to the forefront.

“The good news is, in our needs assessment, our survey of providers, 95 percent say they love their job,” Coehlo said. “If they left, it would be for low wages and lack of respect. I think we have a great group of providers, if we just supported them a little bit more and respected them just a little bit more, then we’d attract more. But it’s a hard job.”

The Train Man - Lake Oswego Review, 2003

2007-07-11T17:28:00.001-07:00

As a small boy, Rod Cox would set up rows of orange crates in the basement of his Southern California home. Lost in his own dream, he’d scramble back and for the across the boxes, imagining the wooden crates were boxcars and he was a brakeman, cranking down the airbrakes to slow his speeding locomotive.

The orange crates were gone within a few years, replaced with a Lionel model train set, a common enough diversion for boys growing up in the early 1940’s. But Cox took it one step further. By his mid-teens, he’d taught himself Morse code, the language of the rails. In the backyard, he’d build a network of telegraphy lines, and a fully operational minecar running on narrow-gauge tracks. From his earliest days, Cox was preparing himself for a life on rails.

His life on the rails never panned out, but the passion never waned. Now 62, Cox is the general manager of the Willamette Shore Railroad, the seven-mile trolley line running from Lake Oswego to Portland. It’s the realization of a dream he has been chasing his entire life.

“I can remember when I was less than two years old – still in diapers, and I wasn’t in them long – and I loved trains even then,” he says.

To fully understand his love affair with the rails, you have to go back even further, back to the construction of the Pan-American Railroad, decades before Cox was born.

In the mid 1800s, Cox’s grandfather Bengamin Cox was a just-off-the-boat immigrant, fresh from England and thirsting for adventure. He headed west and continued down to Mexico, where he signed on as a contractor with the Pan-American, an ambitious venture that sought to lay tracks across two continents. Before long he’d met a woman, Maria, a native girl and the daughter of the family that ran the railroad hotel.

Bengamin Cox loved Maria, but her family refused to allow her to marry an Englishman. Even though the family was not Catholic, the parents decided that Maria should be sent away to a nunnery. Her belongings were packed into an oxcart, and she was sent on her way.

Through a lucky twist of fate, it was a friend of Cox’s who was recruited to drive the oxcart. The two men got together and conspired to intercept Maria on the way to the nunnery. A short distance out of town, where the oxcart path crossed the rail line, there was Cox, waiting for his girl with a steam locomotive.

Their friend helped them onto the train and Maria and Bengamin headed back to the railway station. Riding a handcar across the railyards, the young couple made their way to a waiting passenger train, fled to the next town, and were married.

It’s no wonder railroading is in Cox’s blood.

In August 1984, the Southern Pacific Railroad decided the time had come to abandon the Jefferson Street Branch, a spur line running from Portland to Lake Oswego. Freight traffic on the line was fading, and passenger service was a distant memory. If the trains stopped running, the 100-year-old line would be lost for good – the land underneath the tracks would revert to the property owners on either side.

Rod Cox had been watching the goings-on surrounding the Jefferson Street Branch with a keen interest and a hopeful heart. For the last several decades, Cox had fed his hunger for railroading through his involvement with the Oregon Electrical Railway Historical Society. Between trips to the society’s museum in Brooks, and the trolley park the society operated at Western Antique Powerland in Glenwood, he’d passed his love of the rails along to his family.

Joined by his wife, Connie, and their five children, Cox spent countless days at the trolley park, hiking and picnicking in the woods, restoring the society’s collection of vintage streetcars and trains, and riding the two short trolley lines.

“We always had a wonderful time, it was like our vacation,” he said. “All of my children really enjoyed it, they grew up out there.”

But the two lines in Glenwood were closer to carnival rides than they were to railroads. Cox and his children longed for the chance to immerse themselves in the real thing.

Cox recalls on night when his Samuel, was five or six years old. Samuel was getting ready for bed, and as he did, he regaled his father with stories of the railroad he wanted to build. Not just standard schoolboy fantasies of playing engineer, but sophisticated plans, down to the last detail. Young Samuel had already decided what kinds of crossbucks and ties he’d use, how the trellises would be constructed, and where the tracks would run. To Maine, because, as his father remembers him saying, “it’s a long way.”

At the same time, local governments were a long way from figuring out what to do with the Jefferson Street Branch. All agreed that the tracks should be preserved for future use as a public transit line, but they didn’t have the resources or experience to operate a railroad. In the fall of 1987, Cox finally got his big break – the historical society was given permission to run its electric trolleys down on the old tracks for a few months.

The local governments were impressed, and quickly assembled a consortium to purchase the line. A year later, a deal was struck – the consortium would buy the tracks for $2 million, and the historical society would operate a railroad. The Cox family was ecstatic.

“When we heard the consortium was going to acquire this line, we were jumping for joy. For me, it was an answer to prayer,” Cox said. “We would enjoy it, and our children would enjoy it…by the grace of God, this line was preserved.”

The Cox family started with the new Willamette Shore Railroad right from the beginning. At least one day a week, the whole family would make the drive from their home in Salem, eager for a chance to roll up their sleeves and work. It was all unpaid, but it was a real railroad, a far cry from the Glenwood trolley park.

For over a decade, the family worked their hearts out, logging thousands upon thousands of volunteer hours. Four years ago, Cox was named general manager. He finally had his railroad.

Cox was six years old when his father left home, leaving behind Rod, his mother, and his sister. They were, as he remembers, “the only broken home in the neighborhood.”

When Cox’s father left, he took the family car with him. To get anywhere, his family had to depend on Southern California’s premier public transit system, the Pacific Electric Railroad.

The Southern California where Cox grew up was a very different place than the sprawling megacity that’s taken root in the last 60 years. From his home in Pasadena, the streetcar lines ran down the hill and spread out across the Los Angeles Basin, a vast, interconnected web of twin steel rails and overhead wires. At its peak, the Pacific Electric was running hundreds of streetcars on more than 1,600 miles of track. On nearly every downtown street, clusters of red and yellow streetcars ran in long, palm-shaded processions. Skilled operators kept the line tight, each streetcar running just inches ahead of the next.

Every week or so, Cox, his mother and his sister would board the streetcar for an all-day trip. They’d ride all the way across Los Angeles to visit Cox’s cousins, with a stop at the A & W worked in along the way.

“Those were the best childhood memories I had,” he said.

A shy and quiet boy, Cox kept to himself, playing with his train sets, reading railroading books and magazines, and dreaming of the day that he could sit in the motorman’s seat on a Pacific Electric streetcar. While other little boy moved on from trains to firetrucks to cowboys and Indians, Cox stuck with what he loved.

“If you enjoyed what I was doing, you were welcome in my little world,” Cox said. “If you just wanted to come in and play war and destroy things, you weren’t welcome, but if you wanted to build, if you enjoyed railroading, you were my friend.”

By the time Cox reached high school, things were starting to change. American cities, including Los Angeles, were beginning to abandon their rail systems. In some cases, companies with an interest in replacing the trains with busses played an active part, buying up the rail lines only to shut them down. For Cox, a man who abhors profanity, words like Firestone, Standard Oil, and General Motors are his strongest slurs.

“When they got rid of my red and yellow streetcars, I wasn’t very happy,” Cox said. “When I was a boy, downtown Los Angeles was absolutely beautiful…until this thing called progress came around. We were told busses are better, but for whom? Certainly not the riding public. So this boy has never forgiven those bums for what they did.”

But Cox wasn’t ready to give up the dream. Along with his friend Mike, they decided they’d build their own streetcar line. The two boys knew they couldn’t afford to hire anybody, so they taught themselves everything they thought they’d need to know. Cox learned the art of hand-painting signs, mechanical skills, telegraphy, and how to string high-voltage cables.

After high school, Cox entered the Navy. Stationed at a base outside St. Louis, he spent his off hours hanging around the Illinois Central railroad yard, taking pictures, meeting the men who worked the rails, and continuing his self-education.

By the time he got out of the service, it was too late. Cox returned to Los Angeles to find that the last few miles of the Pacific Electric’s track were being ripped up. Construction o the new Interstate Highway system was in full swing, and the age of rail was on its deathbed.

Seeing his future slipping away, Cox took his railman’s skills elsewhere. He landed a job stringing telephone wires, and later, painting signs. It would be years before he could honestly call himself a professional railman.

Making his way from the State Street depot to the storage barn, Rod Cox walks straight-backed and tall, his eyes scanning every inch of the 500 yards of track rolling out before him. Every few step, one polished black shoe sweeps a graceful arc to boot a small stone off the tracks, but Cox never breaks stride, never takes his eyes of the rails and he never stops talking about his trains.

On any given day, Cox might be found in grubby work clothes, shoveling rocks, hacking away at blackberries, or greasing the big steel wheels on the railroad’s two trolleys. Or he could be dressed in his neatly pressed motorman’s uniform, running the trolleys back and forth from Portland and sharing the history of the line with his passengers. He might be in his office at the depot scratching out a budget, testifying at a TriMet board meeting, or fielding calls from people upset by the clackety-clack-clack sound the trolley makes while rolling by their homes.[ There’s nothing he doesn’t do.

“You know the Levi’s emblem, on the back of ht jeans with the two horses pulling the pants apart?” he says. “Well I’m sorta like that pair of Levi’s.”

Despite being pulled in all directions, Cox loves the work. As general manager, his responsibilities are actually fairly limited. He oversees 20 to 30 volunteers, plots out the train schedule, makes sure maintenance gets done, and handles the marketing. But that’s not enough for Cox. By his own estimate, he puts in about 1,400 unpaid volunteer hours every year. Connie, who is purely a volunteer, logs nearly as many.

Cox says it’s worth working the extra hours, just to make sure things are done right.

“It gives me an opportunity to do things the way I think they should be done,” he said. “I like to do things in a railway fashion, and I just wanted to run a railroad like this. It’s been my dream all my life.”

The volunteers that work with Cox share his passion for authenticity and doing things the railroad way. Most of the volunteers come from the historical society, and they know how to play the part of an early 20^th century streetcar operator, dressing up in period uniforms and peppering their speech with railman’s slang. A ride on the trolley is a chance to step back in time and everyone who works there knows it.

“I always try to hire those that have a heart for it,” Cox said. “I have a lot of people who want to work for the sake of working, but if they have a love for the trolley, it doesn’t matter if they aren’t the most qualified, it doesn’t matter if they’re not Superman. They just need to talk to me and I’ll find a place for them.”

On this particular day in early February, Rod and Connie are in the office in the depot, handling a backlog of paperwork. The office is a cramped but cozy little place, the air musty with the scent of old paper and industrial grease. Cardboard boxes stuffed with file folders and rolled-up maps are everywhere, and on the massive desk Cox built himself, there’s a conspicuous open space. No computer. Cox doesn’t see any sense in using a computer, not when pencils and paper have served him just fine for all these years.

“I live in the past, with almost everything I do,” he said. “I never change.”

Down the tracks, Cox’s youngest son, 18-year-old John, is spending the day on maintenance duty with two friends. The boys spent the night in the storage barn, sleeping on the bench seats in the vintage double-decker trolley, and have been up since dawn, shouldering massive wooden ties and shoveling close to a ton of rock.

It’s sweaty, backbreaking work, but when the boys roll up to the depot and hop out of the maintenance car at sunset, they announce they’re only pausing for a dinner break. In an hour or so, they’ll be back out on the tracks, toiling in the dusky yellow glow of the maintenance car’s headlight.

There’s no mistaking where John gets his work ethic, or the father’s pride in his son.

“As far as I’m concerned, if the Lord gives me the strength, I hope to railroad for the rest of my life,” says Rod. “I may get tired of the long hours and the long drives. But I never tire of the work.”

It’s not clear how much longer Cox will be able to keep railroading, at lest with the Willamette Shore Railroad. From the very beginning, the trolley was intended as a stopgap measure, a way of preserving the consortium’s right to the tracks until a passenger train could be brought on line. And now, after 15 years of trolley service, commuter rail is starting to look like a real possibility.

Metro and TriMet are actively studying a proposal to extend the Portland Streetcar out to Lake Oswego along the trolley line. All of the consortium members support the idea, and once the financing issues are sorted out, construction is likely to begin. Cox thinks the trolley will be around for no more than 10 years, though he’s guessing it’ll be closer to eight.

Cox doesn’t know what he’ll do when that happens. He’d love to be a motorman for MAX or the Portland Streetcar, but he knows he’s too old and too impatient for that to happen.

“I don’t worry about that,” he says. “I look to the Lord for opportunities, and He’s never let me down.”

Once again, progress is on the move, nudging Cox to get out of the way. And once again, Cox is resisting. When the time finally comes to hang up his motorman’s hat, he’ll miss the many friends he’s made, and, of course, he’ll miss working with the trains he loves.

But more than anything, he’ll miss the chance to share his enthusiasm with the people who ride the trolley. Some days he’ll find himself deep in conversation with a train buff every bit as passionate as he, and on other days, he’ll serve as a bridge to the past for a passenger taking his or her first train ride.

“It’s a real railroad, but it’s like a mobile park, too,” he says. “It’s a treasure that we have here in the Portland-Lake Oswego area that needs to be preserved for future generations.”

Cox won’t fight the coming of the Portland Streetcar. It’s still a train, even if it’s not his train. But he’s got a few lessons for those who will build the next generation of streetcars.

Lose the boxy European designs, Cox says. America invented the streetcar, and American streetcar lines should use American-style cars.

Automated doors and panels littered with buttons and lights are just one more thing to break. His streetcars have a throttle, a brake and a bell. Nothing more. You have to open the door by hand. Simpler, Cox says, is often better.

“Look at this,” he says, grabbing the back of one of the seats in car 813, a 1932 unit build for the Portland Traction Company. With a single move, he pulls the back of the seat forward, up and over the seat cushion. The hinge settles into place and the back comes to rest, the seat now facing the opposite direction.

“All built without computers,” he says. “Amazing! It works, and it works well. I say, why be modern just for the sake of modern?”

testing the picasa web album

2006-09-27T13:00:00.000-07:00

Click on the picture to visit album

Pictures again?

2005-05-17T22:33:00.000-07:00

Seems I may have been wrong about my picture host booting us freeloaders, so here goes:

www.ImageShack.us" />

Back at the keyboard again

2005-05-16T01:02:00.000-07:00

Well now, it's been a long time now, hasn't it. It seems the last blog entry detailed my departure from Thomas, so today's may seem a touch repetitive. Yesterday, Tom boarded the bus to Bangkok, where he will catch a plane home tomorrow. Myself, I'm here in Siem Reap, home of Angkor Wat, trying to plot my next move.

More than likely, that's going to include a trip to Lake Toba, one of my favorite places in the world. It's a massive lake formed in the crater of an extinct/dormant volcano on the island of Sumatera, probably four to five times the size of Crater Lake in southern Oregon. The lake's formation is said to be identical to that of Crater Lake, but on a whole different scale - this is the kind of eruption that truly deserves to be called "cataclysmic" or whatever disaster-related appellation you prefer. This is blot out the sun and cool the earth for years kind of destruction, thousands killed, species wiped out, life-as-we-know-it kind of stuff. Perhaps the biggest volcano ever to blow, though there's some dispute as to if the volcano underlying Yellowstone National Park was larger.

Appropriately enough, today is the 24th anniversary of the Mt. St. Helens eruption, an event many of you are at least partially familiar with. The geologists say Toba was roughly 3,000 times larger than the St. Helens eruption. It's journalism convention to describe such things in terms of atom bomb equivelents, but I can't be bothered to find out exactly where the truth lies in this regard - a quick web search says 30,000 bombs equal one St. Helens, though the sources all seem to be from dead-serious Christian sources looking to shoehorn a touch of scientific reality into their creation theories. And meanwhile, the BBC report this morning said five bombs, so who knows? And really, who cares? It's huge, and that's all that matters.

Vietnam and Cambodia have both been terrific - caves and jungle, beaches and motorbikes, lots of French bread (viva Colonialism!) and more prostitutes than you could ever imagine. Not for me, mind you, not in THAT way, you understand. It's just that they're absolutely everywhere.

The first clue should have come on my last night in China. Tom and myself were coming back from dinner. He stopped off at the barber for a shave, I went back to the room.

I hadn't been inside for more than five minutes when the phone rang. This was unusual for two reasons, one, that it was the only room with a phone I'd stayed in since leaving Oregon, and two, that it was ringing at all.

Picking it up, I heard the voice of a Chinese girl:

(garble-garble) 150? OK?

Is this the front desk?

(garble-garble)...(giggling)...150? OK? In room?

I don't understand? We said 100. No 150 - 100.

I had somehow led myself to believe it was the front desk calling, announcing our new room price. We had negotiated our price down from the 150 posted in the lobby, settling at 100 Yuan (about 13 dollars), and had assumed everything was settled. But then the phone rang again, and a similar conversation unfolded. And then it happened again.

About that time, Tom walked in. He was bleeding from the neck, and looked quite upset. The barber apparently had little idea as to how to shave a man with a straight razor, and the proof was right their in the tiny crimson slashes decorating his left cheek and neck. The right cheek was unshaven, as was his chin, as Tom had decided to cut his losses and escape from the barber's chair before things went from bad to worse.

You know, this story would run better if I started over - and I will, eventually. This is not the place for it. Let's just say nothing transpired between Tom, myself, and the prostitutes - who I'm sure you've gleaned were our mystery callers - and leave it at that until further notice. It's a fine story, I swear.

Any which way, It's looking like I'll probably be back in the states around July 1. So stay in touch (assuming the lack of updates hasn't driven everyone away), and I'll see you all real soon.

Freewheeling in South China

2005-03-17T21:43:00.000-08:00

Well, here we are again...it's a drizzly day in Lijiang, an "old city" that has been preserved for the benefit of the flocks of Chinese tourists who descend on this corner of Yunnan province for a taste of the China that used to be. This is accomplished, mostly, by posing for countless photographs in front of cute, red painted shopfronts and rustic looking stone bridges, as well as by consuming copious amounts of food and beer at the overpriced restaurants that line the canals and cobblestone streets. There's a lot of singing, too, most of it in the screechy and off-key style familiar to anyone who has ever heard any Chinese folk music.

According to legend and countless guidebooks, old town Lijiang is the only part of Lijiang to survive a 7-magnitude earthquake in the mid 1990s. The locals tell a different story. In fact, it was the new town, with its rebar-reinforced concrete buildings, that escaped largely unscathed, while the piss-and-mud construction of old town took it on the nose. But a good tourist trap is built on legend, and so it holds that the shoddily-built old town -- which is in fact, only about 200 years old -- survived the best that Mother Nature could dish out. Any which way, the old town was rebuilt for the benefit of the throngs of tourists, and if there's anything the Chinese excel at, it's slapping together buildings that start deteriorating before the paint is even dry. And so, old town Lijiang looks, well, old.

Our travel plans have taken an interesting turn in the last few days. Two days ago, travelling partner Thomas announced his intentions to head north to Tiger Leaping Gorge with his brother and his brother's girlfriend, leaving me to linger in Lijiang. We'll be meeting up again in about two weeks, but for the time being, I'm enjoying the solitude and the complete control over my destiny. Not to hold anything against the two new arrivals -- lovely people, really -- but the indecisiveness that seems unavoidable any time a group of more than two people is assembled was too much for me. And so here I am, typing away with no sightseeing plans or dinner engagements to impede me. It is lovely.

On another front, the plan to buy a boat and cruise the Mekong has been put on the back burner. I was reluctant to suggest such a thing, as it was my idea to begin with, but it seems like a good plan. The longtail boats, available for about $250 with engine, are noisy, tempremental craft, and neither Thomas nor I have any real experience in engine repair or river navigation. Thomas' brother helped tip the scales against the boat plan with an imaginary captain's log entry: "Day 184: A Vietnamese woman tries to sell us rice." It cut to the drudgery that such a venture would likely entail, and so both of us are pretty content to drop it.

The alternative plan that has begun to develop involves crossing into Vietnam around the first of the month, then moving south and on to Cambodia. Australia and New Zealand have already been pitched into the trash, so after Cambodia, our plans get awfully fuzzy. Thomas is inclined to return to the States around June 1, and I imagine I'll be ready by then as well.

It appears unlikely I'll be able to post any photos here anytime soon, as the folks at imageshack.us seem to have gone to a registration format that makes picture hosting that much more difficult. I'm still shooting at a brisk pace, probably the equivilent of 2 to 3 rolls of film a day, but the pictures will remain on my portable hard drive until further notice.

China is a far more facinating country than I recall from my previous trip, and credit this to the absence of one Arlo Pelegrin, the master linguist and traveller and all around fine fellow who accompanied me the last time around. Any of you who have met Arlo will understand - he's one of those people inclined to leap at any impediment or inconvenience and beat it into submission. Given his Chinese language skills, the previous trip often consisted of me standing there with my mouth agape while Arlo jabbered away in Chinese to some hapless ticket seller or restaurant operator. Only after the fact would I learn what had been going on, and then, only partially.

This part of China is referred to as "Girls Kingdom" in some of the literature, a reference to the Naxi people. The Naxi's are supposedly one of the few matriarchal societies still running. Men and women to not marry; instead, they break off for sexual couplings as they see fit. The men support any offspring, but only until the relationship comes to an end. Names and property are passed down through the female lineage, but beyond that, I'm hard pressed to see how this arrangement is of any greater benefit to women than the western model.

The language barrier makes it difficult to delve into this subject much deeper. One travel guide I came across, published by the state tourism board, encouraged myself and any other traveller sort to visit the Girl's Kingdom and "...experience the hot love of the Naxi girls." Huh. Maybe something was lost in the translation, but maybe not. In any event, I'm headed in the other direction, so I'll have to seek out "hot love" with the Miao and Lisu, the dominant minority groups to the southeast of here.

Given my photo problems, anyone interested in seeing pictures of the latest adventures is encouraged to visit http://www.humantail.com This is Thomas' website, and as he is a bona-fide computer geek, he's had better luck getting a gallery up and running.

Best wishes to all, and we'll see about getting more blog entries up shortly.

And now, a few words about India

2005-02-15T00:42:00.000-08:00

It’s one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and Indian Airlines flight 731 has just touched down at Bangkok’s Don Muan International Airport. As the plane hurtles across the tarmac at well over 100 miles per hour, dozens of Indian passengers leap from their seats and begin furiously digging through the overhead compartments. Briefcases, luggage carts, and diaper bags crash to the floor as the big jet waggles from side to side across the runway, the passengers swaying drunkenly in the aisles. Baggage in hand, the throng pushes forward in a single motion. Old women in saris climb over the seats. Mustachioed businessmen stab each other in the spine with sharp-cornered attaches. Children use their small size to advantage, deftly slaloming their way through the lower reaches of the cabin, the only place not consumed by the tangle of asses, elbows, and weaponized luggage.

The “fasten seat belts/please remain seated” light burns brightly above every seat, but no one pays it any mind. A few stewardesses rise to peek through the curtain at the unruly travelers, then shrug and return to their seats. The indifference says it all – this is nothing new.

We arrive at the gate, and the warning lights go dark with a chirpy “bleep.” You can see the passengers gearing up for the push to the front; like boxers, they roll their shoulders up and down and up and down, they stretch their necks as far as they will go to either side, they pop their knuckles. When the door opens, a hot, wet blast of tropical Bangkok air slams through the cabin, and for the briefest of moments, it seems to drain the passengers of all their energy. But the moment doesn’t last. It’s almost like a bullwhip cracking; the passengers at the rear of the plane let out a collective grunt and surge forward, and their momentum all but shoves those further forward out the door.

I’m still sitting, soaking up the spectacle, when it strikes me that this is the last Indian crowd I’ll have to face on this trip. No more sweaty fingers working their way in between my ribs. No more curry belches in my ear, no more mustaches tickling the back of my neck. No more being bent over backwards when I find myself caught between two competing crowds of Indians with decidedly different ideas on whether the body of the bewildered white man ought to be used as a northbound or southbound passing lane.

I’m not sitting this one out, I think to myself, curling my fingers around the grip of my carryon bag.

And they’re not going to beat me this time.

The details of what followed are too shameful to be recounted here. Many innocent people were hip-checked, others were elbowed, while still more experienced the disconcerting feeling of a paperback book spine thrust far further between their buttocks than such things were ever intended to be thrust. But I’ll say this: never, never before in the history of flight has one man covered such a distance so quickly.

We’ve been out of India about three weeks now, and already it feels like the whole thing was nothing more than a disturbing dream, a lurid, seven-week hallucination brought on by eating too much curry and breathing too many exhaust fumes. Could those people really have been as exasperating as I remember them? Could the traffic really have been as loud, relentless, and pollution-clogged as I recall?

Did I really see children eating garbage?

Was that really a dead man lying on the shoulder of the road?

Are there really that many different ways one can be deformed or disfigured,

But then again, three weeks is not that long. All of my pictures seem to confirm my worst suspicions. And that, I think, is what makes it all the more disturbing.

The contrast with Thailand is illuminating and somewhat reassuring. Had I jetted straight to the United States following my departure from India, I have no doubt the enormity of the difference would have left me gasping for breath and unable to cope. Thailand is something of a half-step. It’s a little bit noisy. It’s a little bit dirty. And while the people seem to take an interest in what we white folks are doing, it’s a friendly interest, a genuine curiosity and not a scam in the works. In three weeks, I’ve yet to have a conversation with a Thai during which I kept my fingers tightly gripped around my wallet.

The soul-sucking persistence of the Indian people is evidenced by my near total failure to produce a written record of my time in the country. Most nights, it was all I could do to down a few bottles of Kingfisher in rapid succession, eat a huge greasy meal, then collapse into deep, dreamless sleep. But I don’t think it’s too late – I’ve had my nose in my notebooks a fair bit lately, and hope to be able to knock off a complete set of India diaries within three to four weeks.
However, it could take a while to get them all online. We’re off to Laos in a few days, where internet connections are few and slow. So it’s all going down on paper, on computer disks, and in other portable formats (really, just those two). And when it goes up, it will be organized – not the jumble you see below you that bears little resemblance to the pace or content of my trip.
So stay tuned, and don’t let my lack of productivity as of late drive you away. There is, I can assure you, much more to come

Yippie-kai-yay motherfucker - it's picture time!!

2005-01-26T02:32:00.000-08:00

Well, it looks like we've finally got it figured out. After days and days of jerking around at internet cafes, we can post pictures. Sort of. Good enough for now, I says.

So anyhow, here's a few to check out before I go blind from looking at the computer.

The Taj Mahal (of course) located in Agra:

A janitor at Delhi's Red Fort:

A resident of one of Delhi's numerous shantytowns:

A fisherwoman in the Sunderbands delta:

No Problem, See You Tomorrow!!

2005-01-11T01:52:00.000-08:00

We are in Varanasi, the city of Shiva, the oldest living city in the world, the hash-addled hippie capital of India, and the place where every righteous Hindoo hopes to one day be barbequed before a crowd of gawkers and family members along the banks of the Ganga River. After they die, that is. It's to the point now, that after three days here, I've seen enough cremations that they don't even phase me.

Did you know, for instance, that with three hours and around 300 kilos of wood, you can consume nearly all of a human body? Everything, that is, except the chest area on a man and the hips on a woman. These stubborn bits are lifted from the coals and dumped into the river post-cremation. From there, they either float downriver, or sink to the bottom to join the remains of children, pregnant women, holy men, and people killed by leprocy, smallpox, or snakebite -- members of these six groups are considered to be sufficiently pure that no cremation is required, so they are simply bundled with rocks and unceremoniously tipped overboard mid river.

As an inarguably weird place, Varanasi has more than its fair share backpackers who are "with it" or "grooving on the scene" or "just trying to figure out where I'm at, man," and so there is a healthy population of touts, on hand 24 hours a day to provide the spiritual seeker with silk scarves, cheap plastic toys, postcards, hashish, money changing services and sundry other accoutrouments of enlightenment. One such tout came across me just the other day outside this very internet cafe. Let's set the scene: I'm outside finishing a cigarette while Thomas is typing away inside, it's night, the dimly lit street is full of vegetable hawkers, rickshaw drivers, scabby dogs, indifferent cows, garishly painted half-naked holy men, dreadlocked backpackers, and, lest we forget, touts.

Tout: Hey mon, howeryou, whatsyer country?

Me: Uh? Me? From United States.

Tout: Eh?

Me: America.

Tout: Oh, America. You know, I know this American once, you know how bad he fucked me? You know how bad he fucked me?

Me: Uh, no?

Tout: He fuck me for two lakh (lakh is an Indian term for 100,000; two lach is equivilent to around $5,000).

Me: Well, that seems like a fair price (being cheeky).

Tout: Yeah, I do business with him three times, two times is OK, third time he fuck me, he give me fake money, fake US money.

Me (supressing laughter): Well, that's too bad.

Tout (producing business card): Maybe you know him? You know Alaska.

Me: I was born in Alaska.

Tout: Oh yeah? (shows me card) He's a big fat guy who talks (putting on accent) like this.

Me: Well, it's a big country. I don't think I know him. But I'll keep an eye out.

Tout: How long you stay in Varanasi?

Me: Two days now (Thomas appears through the door, and the two exchange introductions).

Tout: You like hash? Marrywanna? How about coke, you know coke, I have?

Me: I don't think we need anything like that now.

Tout: Why not? I have best quality. You come to my house, you try, if you no like, no buy, no problem.

Me: No, that's OK (we start walking down the street, tout follows)

Tout: No problem! You just try, if no satisfy, no pay. I have best quality, top quality.

Me: No thank you (shove past the tout gently)

There's a crunching, splashing sound behind us. I look over my shoulder to see the tout up to his waist in an open sewer.

Tout: You make me fall! No problem! See you tomorrow!

And while we did see him the next day, and I believe the day after that, and we'll probably see him before we blow town today, he never did get his sale. But no problem! There's always tomorrow.

It's a picture!!

2005-01-11T01:15:00.000-08:00

Well, sort of. Really, it's just a link to a picture. But it's a picture of a noisy, lunatic festival here in Varanasi, and that ought to count for something.

http://humantail.com/gallery/album02/IMG_0688?full=1

But I'm not dead yet!

2004-12-27T07:42:00.000-08:00

Just got a message from Kurt Fredrick, inquiring to see if we made it through the earthquake. As to the rest of you ingrates, well, maybe you just didn't have time.

We are in Jaipur, about 100 miles or so southwest of Delhi, so thankfully we're long out of earthquake/tsunami range. Thomas (my travelling partner) and I have been running through the lists of folks we know who were heading to south Thailand or South India for the holidays, but so far, we haven't come up with too many people who's names we recall. So whoever they are, I hope they're OK. The Hindustani Times put the multicountry death toll at 9,300 and climbing, so needless to say, a lot of people didn't come through so well.

Otherwise, things are in good shape. We spent Christmas in Mathura, the birthplace of Lord Krishna, the blue faced boy warrior who saved the day thousands of years ago and won himself a prominent place in the Hindi panthenon of gods. I'm sure he was a great fellow, but three days in Mathura was more than enough. Our hotel overlooked the Krishna temple that is the towns main tourist attraction, so for at least 18 hours a day, we heard one of several "hare, hare, hare rama, hare krishna" cassette tapes blaring, as well as the constant chatter of street salesman - "hello sir? temple postcard? krisna book? temple CD? Come, please, have a look?"

Our train out was delayed by about 2 hours, but we made it in to town at a reasonable hour and were able to find a rooftop bar and have a couple of Kingfishers. Despite anything you may have heard about "India Pale Ale" or any other similar fantasies, Indian beer sucks in a big way. It's cheap -- about 70 rupees for a 22 oz bottle (approx. $1.20) -- but the locals have a thing for "strong beer," which is essentially malt liquor without the tasty. Many of the beers have threatening sounding names like "Sikkim 5000" and "Hit 2000." I've resolved to stop drinking beers with numbers in the name, which should cover other nasty shit like Colt 45 and Old English 800 just fine.

Since I've got a message going to you, I'm going to go ahead and run on at the mouth, then post it to the blog. Can't imagine you'll mind, as you'll be getting the first look at things.

As of last, I was bloviating heavily about my "near death in the mountains" experience. After a week or more of recuperation, I'm happy to say I have all but recovered. The blisters on my heels (disgusting picture coming soon, maybe) have healed over, my legs are working normally, and I'm even contemplating walking more than a few blocks at a time again.

When we last left off, English Dave, Thomas and myself had just checked in to the Aliment Hotel in Darjeeling. Uncle, our host, was showing us the ropes. Uncle had explained to us that he'd served a career in the British military, and as such, he had a real thing for what he called "order." This was expressed through the cleanliness of his hotel (most impressive), the policy he maintained with his 3,000 book library (no trades, don't bother asking), and his seething hatred for Israeli tourists.

I've never much cared for Israeli tourists myself. As a group, fair as such a generalization may or may not be, they are a loud and boorish lot, constantly bellowing at hapless hotel maids in heavily accented English and nattering among themselves in Hebrew. Some people theorize such behavior is a result of the mandatory military service that many are just wrapping up when they head out on their round the world holidays, but I'm not sure that's the whole story.

But getting back to Uncle (who calls Israeli tourists the "Why tourists" because they're always asking him "why?"), one thing that was decidedly disorderly was his mouth. Uncle is a connisure (SP) of pan, a mixture of tobacco, betle nut, lime paste and a few other mystery ingredients wrapped up in a leaf. The whole bundle is shoved into the mouth much like a wad of chew, and like chew, it stimulates the salivary glands, causing the chewer to spit incessently. Uncle apparently had too much to do to get to the spitting part, and so his chin was constantly glistening with bright red slobber, giving him the appearance of a man who had just barely survived a fistfight. Possibly with an Israeli guest...

Uncle knew his stuff so far as trekking in the Darjeeling region was concerned, and one evening, he ushered us all over to a map and, in great detail, explained how we should catch a bus to this place, hike up that road, stay at such-and-such guest house and so on. The whole idea seemed ludicrous to me, as Darjeeling was plenty cold as it was, it promised to be even colder at higher elevations, and, hey, the view of Kantchatcana (or something), the world's second-highest peak, was pretty damned good from the hotel balcony.

Thomas apparently had other ideas. By the time we'd finished off our evening meal, he'd all but committed us to hopping the bus the next morning at some ungodly hour, and I, not wanting to piss on his parade, reluctantly agreed to come along.

Heading out of Darjeeling, we rolled down a bombed-out looking road in a Jeep stuffed with at least a dozen passengers. And I do mean rolled -- Indian drivers have apparently got it into their heads that it's better to kill the engine and glide down hills than it is to burn whatever scant amount of fuel might be lost by doing otherwise, power brakes and power steering be damned. And it may not be such a foolish idea. Gas is about 40 rupees a liter, and while I don't intend to do the math here, be assured that's no cheaper than in the States. And at 35 rupees a head for the two hour journey, it could be that our pilot was on to something.

In Manhebanghang (again, or something), our driver parked the Jeep before a billboard sized sign welcoming us to Nepal. This was, at first, a source of great amusement, and we hopped back and forth beneath the sign, giggling to ourselves about being in two countries at once.

And then the hiking began, straight up the hill, straight into Nepal with no passport stamping or other formalities, just straight, straight, straight up into the clouds. Not even 200 yards in, I was wheezing and panting, glistening with sweat and looking over my shoulder to see if the Jeep driver had headed back to Darjeeling. Not wanting to be an obvious pussy, I kept these thoughts to myself, at least until my physical exertion became apparent to everyone around me.

"Jeezusfuckinchrist," I coughed, spitting out what I was sure were chunks of my shredded lungs. "Whenzthishitgonnaend?"

Dave, being all of 23 and fit like a man who's been on the road for nearly two years should be, just kept bounding ahead. Thomas was more understanding, periodically glancing over his shoulder to see if I'd collapsed in the dust.

"Everyone says the first two kilometers are the toughest," he told me, just as the one kilometer marker came into sight.

And, once again, I've fallen far enough behind in the blogging department that the adventures of the last two weeks or so will have to wait for another day. Best to all, and stay in touch.

Photo update

2004-12-17T01:52:00.000-08:00

Some of you may have noticed there are no travel photos on the site. Help is on the way! The computers here at the Aliment Hotel are too old to accomodate my "Wolverine," a slick device about the size of a walkman that includes a 20 Gig hard drive and contains a good number of photos at the present time. However, the lady of the computer room says one machine might work -- unfortunately, it is currently being used by some local who has decided that putting together a flyer to advertise his guide services is more important than my own immediate gratification. Imagine!!

So, sometime within the next 24 hours, it's likely we'll get some pictures up and running. Stay tuned.

On an unrelated note, it's now just over a week before Christmas, so I'll be heading out on the town to scratch together some gifts, which should probably arrive stateside sometime around the first of the year. So keep an eye out for those, and remember, bad little boys and girls get tiny sachets of Darjeeling tea or Dali Lama keychains in their stockings.

Near death in the mountains

2004-12-17T01:29:00.000-08:00

Well, maybe it wasn't near death. But it was goddamned cold, and I couldn't be happier to be back in Darjeeling, back to where an an altitude of more than 7,000 feet and nighttime lows of just over freezing seem downright sensible.

So, where to begin? If I had the maps in front of me, I'd be able to provide all of you with the proper names of the towns we've been visiting over the last few days, but since these "towns," as I choose to call them, consist of little more than a handful of tin shacks and a small population of goats, chickens, and oddly comfortable locals, it's unlikely they appear on any maps but the one sitting on my bed upstairs. So I'll fake it. You'll never know the difference.

About one week ago, Thomas and I were on the train from Calcutta to New Jaipur (there's an "old" Jaipur about 20 minutes away, which seems to be a perfectly serviceable place) on our way to Darjeeling when we met an Englishman named David Bauer. Dave is what those on the island call a "gap year student," which refers to the year off most students take between high school and university or between their second and third year of university - the English have a three-year higher education programme, where they learn to do things such as add extreneous letters to words like program. Anyhow, Dave is a gap year kid, but his gap had just recently hit 22 months, during which time he'd visited the United States, parts of South America, nearly everything in Southeast Asia and even worked ten months or so in Australia. He carried an obscene amount of luggage with him, including a giant set of yellow swim fins strapped to one of his two backpacks and a full set of golf clubs. He had it in his head to play a round at the highest golf course in the world, located more than 8,000 feet above sea level and somewhere in the Darjeeling area.

On the train, Dave had met a local girl whose name I forget. She was exceptionally worldly for a Darjeelingite, having recently worked in one of the Gulf States as a bartender, and was eager to help us find a place to stay.

We ended up in a dank, heatless lump of concrete called the Regent Hotel, located at the top of a urine splashed stairwell just off the noisy main street. On balance, this wasn't so bad. The whole town shuts down around 8, so there was very little traffic noise to contend with as we shivered in our beds, and the aromatic accessway provided ample cover for the three of us, all of whom felt the need to relive ourselves al fresco while waiting 20 minutes for the night clerk to answer the locked front door.

The next day, we resolved to move. Taking a tip from Dutch Bart, we hunted out the Aliment Hotel. Like the Regent and nearly every other place in this frigid part of the world, it lacks heat, but it is a friendly place with a good sized population of backpackers and a passable restaurant. The owner is a gruff but amiable Nepalese, who upon meeting us for the first time, explained that so long as we were staying here, we would be his children and he would be our uncle. Incestuous implications aside, we didn't feel the need to ask any questions. It was clear what he meant.