I’ll be making some long overdue changes to this site soon.  Gotta keep up with the times, right?

Unfortunately I had this idea late on Friday and proceeded to be rather busy on Saturday, so this first Friday Flickr is happening on a Sunday (I know, right? I guess I should probably get that New Year’s Eve recap post up soon too).

To start with, this photo that I took in the command center of my newly constructed secret underground headquarters.

Kidding!  Saturday was a free day at OMSI, and we went so that we could bathe ourselves in SCIENCE! for an afternoon.  They had this nifty “Science on a Sphere” display, which cycled through a number of cool presentations about the planets.  I also took this very cool one of Mars:

….and that’s what I got for today.  Please be sure to join me next week when I will probably miss my self-imposed Friday deadline again.

I finally got around to cleaning out some old filing cabinets (read: throwing away large volumes of crap I had been carrying around for years) when I discovered that for one reason or another the proofs from my senior photo shoot had been stuffed in a folder with some old tax documents and a random birthday card.  I tweeted about the discovery, and then a few people totally wanted evidence so I snapped a quick picture with my phone and uploaded it to the Flickr.  For those of you out there who aren’t stalking me on either of those other networks I might as well throw the photo up here along with a quick post about it.

Kerri asked why I was wearing a tux in one of them, and the answer is this: I don’t know how senior photos worked for all y’alls, but at my high school we were sent the name of a photo studio in the mail and a date and time on when we were expected to show up.  You were supposed to wear something sort of nice, and the photographer would snap a few pictures of you doing some unnatural silly things like sitting on a chair backwards and looking all serene or whatever, and then everyone had to get a few shots in with this silly half-tuxedo shirt with the tie already attached and a jacket thrown on over it.  These were the photos that ended up being used in the yearbook.  I really don’t know who decided these things.

It’s funny, looking back — I remember being the pudgy kid all through middle school and high school, but looking now at the sixteen year old version of me I don’t think I was fat at all.  If anything, fleshing out over the course of the years has meant that I’ve “grown into” my super-sized head, and finally coming to terms with having curly hair and letting it grow out longer than an inch has worked wonders for camouflaging my massive forehead.

I took a (very brief) road trip to Montana the other day, and discovered that just like in the Pacific Northwest they are still getting rain as late as July.  I spent about twelve hours total there, which is a whole different story, but for now really I just wanted to show you a few pictures I took while driving home during the day.

And also to tell you this: Montana rest stops have some of the friendliest rodents around.  We pulled over just prior to crossing back through Idaho to stretch our legs, and I noted what looked like thirty or more chipmunks or squirrels running riot all over the lawn near the restrooms.  I wondered aloud whether it was mating season, but soon realized that these rodents had just keyed into a crucial secret of survival: if you hang out near where humans are passing by and are cute and fuzzy, humans will go crazy over you and shower you with food for your time.

I got a little closer to try and get a picture of one, and as I bent down with my phone to get a closer shot, the little bugger turned and ran right at me.  I backed up a step or too, trying to keep my feet away from him while trying to keep my phone close enough for a decent shot.  Thinking that surely I must be holding out some form of foodstuff for him, the little guy sat straight up and looked at me to let me know he was ready to receive his due.

Almost made me wish I had a cracker for him.

You were the prettiest one out of the lot (as we told you any number of times), which is why we kept you, the rest of your litter given away for free over a few sunny afternoons in the summer of ‘95.  It was your white fur offset by a black spot above your tail, the bit of color around your eyes, the way your ears stood up.  We decided you looked like a Muggsy, and it stuck.

You barked a lot when you were young, and never were all that well behaved when we took you out.  Like that time we took you to the beach, and you tried to fight that other dog when you thought he was getting to close to us.  And then that wasn’t quite enough to establish your territory, so you ran over to some other people’s towels and peed on them.  But you loved the ocean, though, wanted to keep running into those waves as much as I did.

We brought you with us from our home in San Diego when the family moved to the Oregon countryside, and free of that little backyard in suburbia we discovered how much you loved to run.  You had a hard time remembering you were supposed to stay with the house though — more than once we’d get to the end of our long, long driveway only to discover that you’d chased the car all the way to the road, and we’d have to put you in it to take you back.

We always babied you, and when I’d come home for the weekends you’d come up to me and I’d pet you and ask you to tell me how things were, and you’d start to whine, and then I’d say, “Is it that bad, Muggsy?  Tell me a story!” and this would only encourage you to whine even more.

You had a really bad habit of sniffing everybody’s crotch.  And neutered or not you had a really bad habit of humping things.

You were always our puppy, and I always thought of you that way, until I counted off how many years you’d been with us.  Ten, then twelve, and maybe there’s something to this country living because you didn’t slow down too much till you were thirteen.  Finally you hit fifteen years and change, and that’s a good long run for any dog.  You couldn’t hear too well at all there near the end, and your legs started to give out, and you barely ate, and I wanted to you to just keep on hanging in there for another summer but that’s awful selfish of me if you couldn’t go out walking with us anymore.

If there are some Elysian Fields somewhere for dogs, endless fields of green bound only by blue skies above, I hope you’re running in them now as freely as you did when you were younger.

Stupid old dog.  Sure am going to miss you.

I did the whole dragon boat racing thing about two years ago, even competed once or twice, and so thought it would be nice if we could wander down to the waterfront this past weekend and catch a few of the races.  Apparently since my time they’ve added a new position to help judge those close finishes: a crew member whose job is to lay flat on top of the dragon’s head, arm outstretched, and pluck their flag from the finish line as the boat crosses it.

A few weekends back we got up extra early on Saturday and went down to the waterfront to check out the Portland Doggie Dash, an organized run for dogs and their owners.

A few of my photos turned out to be worth sharing.  Suspiciously they all seem to be of corgis.  Hmmm…

As you were.

“Do you like your Droid?” I asked, trying so hard to focus on the icons on the screen of my own iPhone.

“It’s pretty sweet,” Sibyl admitted, and she showed me some of the apps she’d downloaded recently. “I’ve never had a smart phone before, but I’m loving this Droid.”

“Do you have Bump?” I said, excited. “Check it: it’s an app that let’s you transfer contacts and photos from phone to phone, and it runs on the Android platform too so if you had it we could bump phones to send things directly to each other.”

“Okay, wait a minute,” she said, searching for the app in the Android marketplace. “Okay, I got it. Okay, now what?”

“Sweet!” I’ve had this app on my phone for months but hadn’t had anyone to bump with. “Okay, I’m going to send you a photo,” I said, randomly selecting one from my camera roll. “Oh my god, this is going to be awesome.”

“So what do we do?”

“Just have the app running on your phone and then we’ll bump fists with them and it’ll jump over to your phone,” and of course this is just the effect, really the motion triggers the accelerometer which has the app check with the Bump servers to see which other phone is nearby doing the same thing and swaps the data for you, but in my excitement and inebriation that seemed a bit much, so I just said the above and then, “okay, now go! YEAH!”

And I punched Sibyl’s fist and knocked the phone clean out of her hand and onto the floor.

“Oh!” I said, and “oh shit!”, and “wow! I really didn’t mean to do that.” I think Tyler chuckled; I’m fairly certain Sarah said, “Honey, what did you do now?” Sibyl, like the champ that she is, picked up her phone, and fortunately we’d had enough rum and wine that the whole thing seemed pretty funny so she laughed and said, “okay, let’s try this again.” I agreed, but when she saw me winding up for a second kung fu phone strike she said, “Let’s not actually bump fists this time; I think we can just make the motion in the air and it should work, right?”

Sensible. “Yeah, that makes sense.” So our hands shot out again, trying to trigger the app and get the photo transfer to work. Our arms shot by each other, and again, and a third time while we tried to get it to work, which I am sure looked like some of the weakest fake karate fighting of all time as we air-punched at each other with cell phones gripped in our hands. Finally: “My phone buzzed. I think it worked! Did you get it?”

“Yeah, did you send me a photo?”

“I did! AWESOME.” And I sat there, feeling a little giddy, but something else too, something I couldn’t quite name…

And then Tyler put his finger on it exactly when he said, “That may have been one of the dorkiest things I’ve seen in a while.”

Oh yeah! That was it. Dorky. EXTREMELY dorky. Hey, I am what I am, and I don’t have a problem with that. Happily, my friends don’t either, because they invited us back.

I took this one at a tourist shop on Government Avenue in Victoria, BC.  I believe the name of the store was literally “I Love Canada, Eh?”.  No, I’m serious.  Anyway, I liked the way this photo turned out.