the whole world's going to hell, and I forgot my handbasket

Do you ever feel as if your dream life makes more sense than your real life? After reading the newspaper in the morning, do you just want to crawl back into bed and pull the covers over your head?
I present, for your amusement and/or horror, the following headlines. I dare you to click the links and read all about it:

1. FDA To Review Inhalable Caffeine Over Safety Concerns
2. Santorum Targets President's Christianity
3. Why Do Mammals Go to Coffee Farms?
4. Has Romney Lost His Way?
5. For Space Mess, Scientists Seek Celestial Broom

So, after my morning "news" consumption, (and several cups of coffee, none of it inhaled) here's my take on what's happening in the world:

  Lots of people would rather not take the time to enjoy a nice warm beverage to give them a little boost in the morning...they'd simply rather suck on a plastic tube and get an instant high, and hey! The Food and Drug Administration suddenly decides that it should investigate if this is a healthful thing. Did you know that the FDA doesn't have to evaluate a product if it's labeled a "supplement"? 

  

  In politics, Republican presidential contender Rick Santorum seems to have run out of issues, and has taken to questioning President Obama's religious beliefs. It appears that  Mr. Santorum,  a well known  ill-advised nut job  religious scholar has concluded after extensive research, that Mr. Obama's theology is phony, and not actually based on the Bible. (My nice warm bed is looking pretty good right about now.)

  And while we're on the subject of coffee, scientists come up with the most interesting questions, like: "Why do mammals go to coffee farms?" It seems a much more interesting subject to ponder than whether or not someone's religious beliefs are based on the Bible or not...And at the very least, answering that question (about the mammals, not religion) may very well help us to save the planet in the long run.

   Meanwhile, back on the Presidential campaign trail, it seems that Mitt Romney, another Republican running for President, has lost his confidence. He's been pandering to the masses, trying to get them to like him. Last week in Michigan, for instance, he mentioned that "The trees are the right height", and then told a business group, "I love you". I guess he feels it necessary, after ABC News uncovered a story about him making Seamus, the family dog, ride on top of the car during a family road trip in the 1980s. Good old Mitt  said at the time that the dog actually liked riding in his crate on top of the vehicle (hurtling down the road at 60 mph?). And the fact that Seamus pooped all over the top of the car during that trip? I'm sure it was simply something he ate, right? Dogs will be dogs. Unfortunately, Seamus is no longer available for an interview.
Do you smell a cover up?

  Then there's the problem of space junk. We humans have been very, very bad about cleaning up after ourselves for millennia, but now that we've moved into space, the problem has gotten much worse. So much crap is now zipping around the earth at something like 17,000 miles per hour and colliding, then smashing into millions of pieces, that live, working satellites are threatened with destruction at every orbit of the planet.The U.S. Air Force currently tracks over 20,000 pieces of space junk like old rocket parts and broken satellites.
  According to the article, the Swiss, who have only two satellites, both smaller than a breadbox (apparently a universal standard of measuring satellites) are concerned about what will happen to them when they stop working. Anton Ivanov, a scientist at a top Swiss university said, "We want to clean up after ourselves. That's very Swiss, isn't it?" They're currently designing a kind of giant vacuum cleaner (perhaps it's a Dyson) to help clean up the mess.
Other ideas involve lasers, high altitude balloons, and machines that shoot puffs of air in the path of the debris. Then there's the ElectroDynamic Debris Eliminator -- Edde for short, it is apparently powered by a 6 mile long extension cord (they call it a "space tether"). Edde will sidle up to a piece of space junk and whip out a disposable net, catch the object and coax it to re-enter the atmosphere. The president of the company that designed this one says it would only take a few years and a few hundred million dollars to clean up the "near-Earth neighborhood".
Personally, I think we ought to leave it all up there. It could eliminate the alien invasion scenario...I mean, what self-respecting space alien would want to live in such a junky neighborhood, right?

I think from now on, I'll just stick to reading the comics. They're so normal.

wordless wednesday no. 22

pdx to oc, day three

On the road again, after a stop in the Bay Area to visit my sisters and nephews...I stayed up too late and got up too early, but I was eager to get the trip down that desolate stretch of Interstate 5 over with. Not much to look at but gently rolling golden hills and cows. Lot of cows. Down around Coalinga, you can smell the feedlots from miles away. A truly awful way to raise food. I'm not a vegetarian, but why we feel as if it's our right to treat these animals as if they're just inanimate, non-feeling things is a mystery to me.

Further south the rolling hills give way to the enormous San Joaquin Valley, a formerly fertile, now incredibly arid place full of orchards and vineyards and orange groves fed by broad, manmade canals moving water from North to South. Farm is such a quaint word. This is Agribusiness.

It's easy to be critical, but not so easy to reconcile that criticism when I pull into an oasis to fill up my car with gas and have a breakfast of fast food at Burger King.

However, nature is not quite so critical...the wild things see opportunity in the very things I'm criticizing.

Hours later, I make the long, hot climb up and over the final pass

into LA smog and traffic.

It seemed fitting that I was listening to this song at the time:

Welcome to LA...

did I mention it was hot?

pdx to oc, day two

Back on the road after a one night stopover at my cousin's place. By 7:45 am I've already seen two dead deer and a small orange tabby on the side of the road. We humans sure have made this planet a dangerous place for our fellow creatures.

On the bright side, I narrowly avoid hitting a confused squirrel trying to cross the interstate, so I console myself with that for awhile.

By mid morning I've climbed up and over quite a few mountain passes:

The first three were hills, really...

but then they got a bit higher...

Still, nothing like going over the Rockies, but the highest point on I-5 nevertheless.

And then I got to see the last little bit of cool, green Northwest scenery for about a week:

pdx to oc, day one

Driving down I-5 near Roseburg, Oregon listening to Jumping Jack Flash loud on the stereo. I'm doing 75, trying to pass a log truck, when out of nowhere a big maroon Pontiac comes up on my tail. I slip the Honda in front of the truck, and watch the Pontiac blow past me. It's a car full of blue-haired, little old ladies bobbing their heads and laughing animatedly, doing at least 85. I wonder what they're listening to?

happy trails, bossy!

A famous blogger rode into town Thursday on her intrepid hybrid pony known as (Harrison) Ford.
Bossy is on another road trip, driving 10,000 miles from coast to coast to convene her council in cities and towns across the country. She's been on the road about three weeks or so at this point, and arrived in Portland after a grueling ten-hour drive from Reno looking a little bleary-eyed, but surprisingly fresh and cheery. (The girl's got some serious stamina. I would have been incoherent if I tried to keep up a schedule like hers!) In fact, I'm pretty sure I was fairly incoherent anyway, after spending the afternoon shoveling all the messes out of the house to make it look presentable to the general public.


We shared homemade pizzas, and salads and a fabulous gorgonzola spinach dip that made it all the way up from Eugene (thanks, Elizabeth - it was awesome!)

That's Amanda on the right, an amazing blogger and about-to-be-published author who's already working on her second novel.

There was some great conversation, which is a given, considering all the talent assembled that night. This is Eliza, a fiber artist and soon to be publisher with two blogs: this one and this one.

Bossy was looking stuff up on her iPhone...what did we ever do without the technology to instantly call up facts when we need them?

Here's Sara, who has a wonderful blog where she writes letters to her young daughter.

That's Ann (who's in a marimba band) on the left, and Elise on the right. I met Ann and Elise and Sara a couple of years ago at a mixed up meetup for Bossy's last road trip. We're all glad we finally got to meet her this time!

I wish I'd taken more pictures, but I was way too busy trying to keep the knuckleheads from stealing the pizza off the table, and generally creating chaos. Plus, it just wouldn't be the real Camp Cactus experience if at least one of the cats didn't draw blood or throw up on the rug. (sorry about that!)

Well, I sure hope Bossy has one or two fond memories of the few hours spent with her Portland Council. You can see her famous long-arm portraits of the whole group here.

And as for me, I'm spending the weekend recovering from Bossy's No Book Tour.

Thanks to whoever left the "lemonade" behind...(and trust me, it is not simply lemonade...that stuff has a kick!)

Happy Trails, Bossy!

(Cooper's already taken over your chair)

alien tunnels and mystical orbs: a woo-woo adventure

A few weeks ago I visited an old friend out in Hood River with my sister in law, Martha and niece, Lily. Kim and Martha and I worked together over 20 years ago in San Francisco, and they hadn't seen each other for many years, so Kim invited us to her place for a girl's night out.

Adventurous gals that we are, Kim led us on a trek to a place at the base of Mt. Adams to sky watch. We left Hood River at sunset, and arrived at this place in the pitch-blackness of a summer evening. After signing in by the light of a flashlight held by an acolyte of the UFO movement, we were asked if we had brought digital cameras. When we told him we had, he went on to tell us that there was plenty of "orb activity" happening that evening, and that digital cameras were especially good at capturing images of the orbs. This explained all the flashing lights and excited whispers in the meadow we were walking toward. A girl appeared out of the darkness on the path in front of us, holding out her digital camera to show us some orbs she had just photographed.

They looked a lot like this:

(photo borrowed from this site)

Here's a video taken with an infrared camera. The orbs seem much less like dust particles when seen in motion.



We lay down our blankets and looked up at the amazing night sky spread out above us like a glittering light show, the milky way stretched across from horizon to horizon. Our hosts sat on the edge of the clearing in patio chairs, using laser pointers to track the "ships" moving through the sky in trajectories that looked suspiciously like those of satellites.


At one point a guy came in from the other side of the meadow, claiming he'd been knocked to the ground by an invisible force several times as he made his way back to the group. You never know...maybe bigfoot has cosmic connections, too.

We heard stories of fairy sightings the night before (apparently we'd "just missed them"), as well as an incident involving a seemingly 200 foot tall alien being stepping out of a light-filled cave on the side of the mountain. "No shit?", we said. He told us that they couldn't have been that huge - the aliens were just projecting a giant holographic image to "mess with us." He did say they had a videotape of it, though. We were too busy wondering what the hell we'd gotten ourselves into to think about asking to see it.

After a couple of hours of tracking alien ships star gazing, we packed up the blankets, re-engaged our skepticism and headed back to civilization.

And the dancing alien lights lit our way back ; }

Nanu Nanu.

of tourist traps and strip mall sushi

I think we should officially declare 2009 The Year of the Visitor. Long-lost friends, in-laws, nieces and nephews, cousins and children have all trekked up the Oregon Trail to Camp Cactus recently, and we couldn't be happier. It's given us an opportunity to go places and see sights we wouldn't ordinarily take the time to visit.

Matt and I drove up to Seattle on a warm and sunny Saturday with my sister in law Martha and niece Lily. We got there just before lunchtime and drove around looking for a cheap place to park. Cheap is a relative term. Let's just say, if you're used to parking in a small to medium sized city like Portland, when parking in Seattle it is advisable to be accompanied by either a platinum credit card or a briefcase full of money.


Our first stop was the Public Market, where we waded into a raging torrent of tourists and were swept along past stalls selling dazzling flowers, luscious fruits and vegetables and tacky souvenirs of every description.

It's a throwback to another era, and it's packed because public markets like these are few and far between.




I'm not sure what the pigs were doing there, though.

After lunch we strolled past the original Starbucks location.

It was packed with Japanese tourists holding up their cell phones to take pictures, so we skipped our afternoon caffeine fix and walked up the hill to the museum.

It's a good thing, because the caffeine might have sent me over the edge like the drivers of these cars.

On the way home, we stopped for gas and food at an outlet mall in Centralia...were we found a kick ass little Japanese restaurant that served the freshest sushi I've had in ages, as well as a really great Korean dish called bulgogi.

It was so good, I ate it before I remembered to take a picture.

camp cactus excursions, inc.

You know how it is when friends come to visit. You take them out and show them the local geography and points of interest, both personal and touristy. They tag along on errands and walk around the neighborhood, and the best guests manage to merge seamlessly into the rhythm of your everyday life. When I go visit friends, I like to see where they hang out, and how people live in a place, not just the places a guidebook says are interesting.

My sister in law and niece have been in town for a few days, and we've gotten around more than we have in ages.

The other day we drove up to Mt. Saint Helens and checked out the crater and the movie at the visitor's center on Johnston Ridge, the area directly in the path of the gigantic eruption in 1980. The view of the crater was spectacular, but the movie suffered from a seemingly tiny budget and a little too much special effects envy.

It seems a little odd that the government would spend millions of dollars building a visitor's center so close to a still very active volcano, but hey- I'm glad they did. It saved us a very grueling hike.

All around the area the destruction is still quite apparent, even after nearly 30 years. Ridges miles away from the blast are still covered with the carcasses of giant fir trees that were toppled like matchsticks, and dried mud flows over a hundred feet deep in some places smothered the forest and changed the landscape in a matter of hours. The power of Mother Nature is very sobering, indeed.


On our way home we stopped at a local restaurant on the Washington side of the Columbia River that's known for its great river views and unique artwork, which is everywhere:

(And this is just the art in the women's restroom.)

Too bad we couldn't talk Dave into taking pictures in the men's room. Stay tuned for our trip to downtown Portland and the X-rated sandcastles.

not exactly disney world, part 2

Yesterday, following this prompt from San Diego Momma, (What is your craziest travel adventure?) I started telling this tale from my sordid past. Scroll down to read part one. Here's part two:

* * * * * * *

(photo borrowed from this guy)

After we'd regained our composure in the restroom of a gas station in nearby Pittsfield, my boyfriend (always looking ahead for an opportunity to mooch) suggested, that since we were in Massachusetts with no place to go, I should call up my aunt and see if she was up for a visit. My aunt (actually my great aunt, the matriarch of my father's Irish Catholic family) lived in New Bedford, an old whaling town on the coast near Cape Cod. I had not had any contact with her in a couple of years, but I was pretty sure that she had heard rumors of my fall from grace, ie: my leaving home and school to travel around like a vagrant with my hippie boyfriend whilst thumbing my nose at responsibility and polite society. The thought of calling her up out of the blue (and it would have to be a collect call) made me a nervous wreck.

My father's side of the family (particularly the older generation) seemed to me to have very high standards of moral conduct. Maybe it was the proximity of New Bedford to Plymouth Rock, the original landing site of those uptight pilgrims who founded our country.

Or maybe it was the vision of my aunt's (a retired schoolteacher) stern countenance and upstanding character and the fact that any moral misconduct would be most likely be reported to my father that turned my knees to jello. In any event, the LAST thing I wanted to do was to call my aunt and ask to use her place as a crash pad with my hippie boyfriend and gay sidekick. The boyfriend, in his infinite wisdom, cajoled me into calling her (collect) and telling her that we'd be no trouble...we had a tent, and we could simply pitch it in her backyard and she'd hardly even know we were there.

(photo borrowed from this site)

I made the call from a phone booth somewhere between Pittsfield and Springfield. It did not go over well. Perhaps I didn't have the powers of persuasion that my boyfriend so obviously possessed. Maybe I didn't really want to go there. In any case, my aunt's response was unfailingly polite, but firm. That of course, she'd love to see me, but my friends would have to find alternate arrangements. The tent in the backyard was a definite no. I was relieved, but now I had to face the boyfriend and tell him we had no place to stay. His response was not exactly repeatable.

At this point, my gay best friend suggested we check out Cape Cod. We were headed that direction anyway, and he'd heard it was a nice place to pick up guys hang out, a gathering place for artists and others with alternative lifestyles. Maybe we could camp out there on the Cape for a couple of days and check it out. Next stop: Provincetown.

We rolled into Provincetown that afternoon, our ride dropping us just outside of town on Hwy 6. The weather was warm, and before us spread sand dunes rolling gently out to sea. It looked like the perfect place to camp, and was illegal but free within walking distance of town. We climbed over the guardrail and hiked out a ways, up and down the dunes, and finally pitched the tent on the lee side of a small rise overlooking the ocean and invisible from the road. It was a lovely spot, and we left shortly to check out the scene in Ptown.

We checked out the galleries and gift shops, and as darkness fell, the bar scene picked up. Not being a drinker, and being underage kept me outside on a bench while my boyfriend and friend (who had fake id) checked out the nightlife. As jailbait an underage girl in a gay resort town, I was at least relatively safe alone on my little bench, and after a couple of hours we decided to head back to the tent, and walked back along the road, now brightly lit by a full moon. As we came to the bend in the road where we thought we had set off across the dunes, it was apparent that we had sorely misjudged our wilderness camping skills: the tide had come in while we were out partying, and the water now came almost up to the road, the tops of the dunes just peeking out above the water.

This did not deter my best friend and my boyfriend, who by this time were both three sheets to the wind. They took my hands, and dragged me, whining, into the current, wading waist and then shoulder deep through the tide and up and down across the dunes. We had no idea if our tent was even still where we'd left it. I was positive we were all going to die.

We didn't die, and miraculously found our tent, but I was not convinced that the tide was all the way in, and couldn't sleep most of the night. Someone had to stay awake and keep watch while the two drunken idiots slept like the dead. At one point, a small boat with a searchlight on it motored by (I was convinced it was probably a police patrol boat looking for illegal activity) but they apparently didn't see our bright orange and green tent.

I suppose I did fall asleep for awhile, because I woke up to warm sunlight on the tent, and two snoring guys next to me. I quietly crawled out of my sleeping bag, and felt around for my glasses. When I started to unzip the tent screen, I came face to face with the biggest tick I had ever seen. It was on the outside of the screen, and it was then that I slowly realized all the hazy spots covering the tent I'd noticed before I put my glasses on were actually many, many more giant blood sucking bugs. I lurched away from the tent door, falling over my friend, and started sobbing. I'm not a wuss when it comes to bugs, but this was just too much. I figured these things could probably drain the three of us in about 30 seconds and leave our empty shells for the next high tide to take out.

The boys woke up, probably stirred by my now uncontrollable shaking, and complained loudly. When they realized what was happening, they both sobered up immediately. My boyfriend tried to tell me that they were just flies, and I was being a sissy, until he put his glasses on and gasped. My best friend, on the other hand immediately grasped the situation, and joined me in sobbing hysterically. My boyfriend (ever the knight in shining armour) then took control of the situation and went outside to scrape the ticks off the tent, while we cowered inside. When the coast was clear, we packed up and hiked back to the road, where my best friend promptly stripped naked and begged me to inspect him for ticks. The three of us looked like a trio of monkeys going through each other's hair looking for parasites.

By that summer, I had taken the GED, got my high school diploma, moved to California and enrolled in college in San Francisco.

My boyfriend hooked up with my best girlfriend and mooched off her, crashing in her dorm in upstate NY.

My gay best friend found a sugar daddy in Greenwich Village and took to spending winters in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

c'est la vie.

not exactly a trip to disney world...

Over at San Diego Mama's place, it's Prompt Tuesday #52, and the theme is: Craziest Travel Adventure...here's one:

Now, being a starving artist most of my life, I haven't exactly been a world traveler, but I've had one or two adventures here and there.

(photo borrowed from this guy)

Back when I was a young and stupid 16 year old high school dropout with a 21 year old boyfriend, I did a bit of hitchhiking around the countryside. Unemployed and unencumbered, we'd take off on a whim (mostly his) and head out on the open road. Sometimes we'd go places on our own, and other times he'd sweet talk friends into coming so we could mooch off their relations on the trip. Generally there were drugs and alcohol involved, and the transportation of choice was always hitch hiking.

I know what you're thinking. He was a jerk. An asshole. A child molester. Yes, yes, and yes... to all of the above. I know that now. (Actually, I figured it out about 35 years ago) I'm pretty sure I had an inkling then. But I was 16. I was looking for love in all the wrong places (more on that another time).

So, one fine, late spring day we he decided we should take a trip up to Massachusetts to visit an old friend and neighbor of his, Mrs. Green. Our rent was due, and and since neither of us were employed (I had gotten fired from my job shoveling french fries at McDonald's, (and I'm pretty sure he had never held a real job in his life), and considering that we hadn't paid the rent for a couple of months previously, it seemed a good time to get out of town travel. Mrs. Green had bought a cabin in the Berkshires, in hopes of retiring there someday, and was a good prospect to hit up for money friend who might let us stay there for a bit. We were joined on this trip by our roommate, (my best friend) who was another unemployed 16 year old art school drop out, in the midst of discovering his homosexuality.

We hitch hiked up to the Berkshires from Queens, arriving at Mrs. Green's mountain hideaway just as night fell in the middle of a drenching downpour. Mrs. Green was not in residence. Or maybe she was smart enough not to answer the door. In any event, things were looking bleak. We had the forethought to have brought a tent, but for some reason (Who knows? I certainly was not the one making the decisions) we spent the night in an apparently abandoned car on the dirt road leading up to her cabin. The next morning dawned clear and cold, and we were rudely awakened by an irate Massachusetts hillbilly slamming his fist on the windshield, demanding to know just what the F**K we were doing in his car? We high-tailed it down the muddy road as fast as we could, making tracks for the state highway, and the closest town. Apparently, people don't feel the need to lock up their cars in the country.

* * * * * *

The trip didn't end there, but good Lord, it's 1:43 am, and I've got to get to bed. I promise I'll fill in the rest tomorrow.

(you can read the rest of the story here: http://buenosburritos.blogspot.com/2009/04/not-exactly-disney-world-part-2.html )