Iron Fist

I decided to put my insomnia to good use the other night by staying up to watch the lunar eclipse on the morning of 28 August. Apparently we here on the west coast were particularly well suited for viewing this eclipse. I made do by standing on a corner down the street from my house and setting up my tripod in the middle of the road. After about an hour I managed to get a few keepers.

On a whim I sent one of the pictures to our local alternative weekly and it got published in their “Blogtown” online-only segment of the paper. You can see it here.

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I really do!  Yes, I’m talking to you.  It’s simply spectacular up here, and I wish you could see it all with me.  I mean, just look at this view!

On Saturday my friend Jerod talked me into driving out with him to Smith Rock State Park in central Oregon to get some pictures.  I hopped along for the ride, and was not disappointed.

We started climbing up the trail to go right over the top of Smith Rock around five or so, and crossed to the other side to catch the sun setting over the farmlands to the west of us.  The view on a clear day up there is spectacular.  We also saw the famous Monkey Face Rock, which is immensely popular with rock climbers the world over.

I wish you could have been there, I really do. But since you weren’t, I took a bunch of pictures for you, and put them up on my new photo album page.  It’s an out-of-the-box usage of the TanTanNoodles Flickr PhotoAlbum Plug-in for WordPress. I haven’t gotten around to fully integrating it with the rest of my site so it’s still a little buggy, but in the meantime please enjoy.

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I’m in a meeting room with one of my coworkers and my boss, waiting for the rest of the attendees to arrive before we start.

Me: Everyone have a good weekend?

Boss: Yeah, it was good.

Coworker: The get together at [the Departmental Director]‘s house on Friday night was cool.

Me: Oh, sweet. Did a lot of our department go to that?

Coworker: Yeah, a lot did!

Boss: You didn’t make it, though.

Me: No, I know. I ended up going go-kart racing with my friends.

All: [laughter] Awesome!

[The Director walks in to the meeting room and takes his seat.]

Coworker: Hey, [Director], I was just talking about how nice your house was.

Director: Yes. [Looks directly at me.] How come you weren’t there?

Me: Sir! I do regret not being able to be in attenda-

Boss: He was go-kart racing! Haw! Haw!

Me: [complete mortification]

Director: …

***

I do not think I am happy with my boss today.

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I’ve lived in downtown Portland since 2001, mostly at one of the many on-campus apartments at PSU. For the past, oh, almost two years now, I’ve lived in subsidized low-income housing not too far from campus, which I qualified for by being dirt-poor right after finishing school.

This is not an experience I would recommend. These apartments were sketchy from the day I moved in. I am pretty sure that some of the other recommended prerequisites for living there included “smells like alcohol” and “carries parasites”. Living there was never dangerous so much as it was continuously frustrating and dispiriting, especially the times when we’d have to evacuate the building because some idiot set his dinner on fire and then opened up their hallway door to vent the smoke right into the detectors.

I’ve moved now, to a nice little townhouse/duplex on the other side of the river. It’s a lot quieter here, since I’m not seven stories directly above a major freeway anymore. It’s kind of nice to live in just a regular neighborhood again, and the city is just a few minutes away if I should find myself missing it.

I won’t miss my old apartment, though. The only thing I might possibly miss were early morning sunrises coming through my window.

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For some reason no other page beyond the front page will resolve tonight. Somewhere between Fantastico Deluxe automatic WordPress upgrades and FastCGI acceleration and I-don’t-even-know-what-else my site is broken tonight. And I’m too tired to fix it.

ARRRGGH! All I gotta say is those other pages had better be working in the morning.

Update: Now everything works. Go figure. Stupid webserver.

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