It certainly wasn’t bad, and the views were lovely, as always, but the 3-4 foot swells that were supposed to materialize around noon never really arrived, the sun didn’t do a very good job of bringing its A-game, and as Niels pointed out even the wind was non-existent.  Still, we’d come all this way, so we sat around with the driftwood to watch the waves come in, in case things started to shape up. There are worse ways to spend your day than sitting around watching the ocean and breathing in the sea air, so it wasn’t all a wash, but almost an hour later we didn’t see anything that warranted us suiting up and paddling out.

We thought things might shape up to at least go with our back-up plan, so we headed north towards Astoria, where the mighty Columbia River empties into the sea and the wind always seems to be blowing, and after lunch that turned out to be just the case, so we drove out to Fort Stevens and brought out Niels’ practice kite.

It honestly wasn’t my favorite, at first: after getting the kite into the air I sent it crashing straight down to the sand despite my best efforts to pull it up. Niels took the controls again, and we got it flying again, and after I ran around shooting a few photos he clued me in on the secret: “You really have to lead it. When it starts going to the right, you need to already be pulling left, and vice versa. Move it back and forth through the ‘power zone,’ here, and it will always have enough pull to stay up.”

I took the control handles back, and once I got the back-and-forth cycling down the whole process went from dispiriting fight to elegant dance. More than once I found myself laughing out loud at the sheer joy of flying a kite, kicking up sand as kite and I pulled one another around the beach. Awareness both expands and contracts, taking in the clouds and the wind and the whisper of the ocean as the thought of anything beyond drains away, and if there’s original sin at all it’s in the forgetting that you, child of Earth, are one with nature and its rhythms, the dance of the sea and the wind and the sun and the moon encoded in your being before you were born.

The wind picked up steadily, and I danced more and more, sweeping the kite faster and faster, my arms and back burning as I pulled one way and kite pulled another, leaning back at an acute angle, and it was so strong I wondered why I was holding back at all, when it seemed all I would have to do would be lean forward, leap up, surrender, and the winds would carry me up and away into the sky to live there evermore.

We had to call it a day eventually, and as much as we love surfing I think to back-up plan worked out just fine. After we rolled up the kite and put it back in the car, Niels saw me stretching out my arms. “You’re really going to feel that tomorrow,” he said.

“I feel it now.”

Real life Portlandia is far more entertaining than Portlandia the show.

— Vahid (@Iron_Fist) June 15, 2013

Okay, so, I haven’t actually watched very much of the show Portlandia. I realize it’s popular for some reason, but I honestly felt they ran out of material by the second or third episode. Maybe it’s gotten better since then? I don’t know. All I know is I don’t have to walk very far in the morning to see some truly bizarre, entertaining sights that I haven’t seen on any sketch TV show.

Here’s the deal: Sarah got an email from some list she was on with a link to some free passes for an early screening of the new Star Trek movie. We’ve done one of these before, when we saw Jack Reacher this past winter. It works on a “first come, first serve” basis, so if you want to get in to see a blockbuster new movie AT ABSOLUTELY NO COST TO YOU, it makes sense that you have to show up a little early and wait in line.

I get this. It’s a trade off. If I didn’t want to stand in line with a bunch of assholes, I could have just waited and shelled out the money for a ticket, even reserved tickets on Fandango so I could just show up, print them out and waltz in. I wanted to see it for free, though, so I walked in a little after six for the nine o’clock screening, knowing this would mean I would have to stand around for two and a half hours before they started letting people into the theater. A trade-off, right?

Well, I walked in and find unoccupied lawn chairs sitting around, jackets thrown on empty patches of floor. A whole lot of attitude about “I’m saving this spot for a friend!” The management came up at one point and asked couple about the large empty space around then. “Well, we have nine friends coming.” The nice lady from the theatre management pointed out the sign that said only one person could wait in line per free pass so there was no holding spots. “They were here, but they left to get food.” I should mention that those spots had been unoccupied for the half hour that I had been waiting by this point. Anyway, the lady from management then informed them this was just too bad, and let everyone else in line behind them know it was cool to go ahead and move forward now, and though this seemed PERFECTLY REASONABLE to me, the couple flashed one another that look. You know the one. The look when someone farts at a formal dinner, or loses their temper when they need to repeat to the person making their burrito at Chipotle that they want absolutely no spiciness on their food. The one that says, “boy, are we embarrassed for how you’re acting right now.”

I just don’t get it. You think you’d be stoked about the chance to see an awesome movie before the general release FOR FREE and not act like it was your God-given right instead of a really cool opportunity that might mean you need to stand around for a little bit first.

Anyway. It’s 7:45 now. I figure I have another forty five minutes until they start letting people in. There were probably twenty people ahead of me when we got here. There might be fifty now. People keep squeezing in, although they have to squeeze a lot tighter now since I steadfastly refuse to step back, and my scowl is working pretty well to discourage anyone from asking me to do so. Perhaps if I’m lucky they’ll start piling on top of one another and reach some sort of critical mass that prompts a savage switch to cannibalism and I won’t have to perform any homicides myself.

Keep an eye out for me on the news tonight, just in case.

Hallmark: make a card for when you unfollow someone on Twitter. "It's not you, it's your retweets. #andyourhashtags" That one's for free.

— Vahid (@Iron_Fist) December 31, 2012

Just so we’re clear on hashtags and whatnot: I don’t actually care all that much.

I know this will prompt a few people to say, “LOL Vahid you totally do care I see you go off on rants all the time.” That’s kinda true. I went off on a huge tirade about hashtags in general a few years back, which I remember largely because it upset one person so much that he unfollowed me, took me off his “Cool People” Twitter list, and the next day declared he was still going to keep using hashtags, just without the pound sign in front of them. I really wanted to send him a box of chocolates to congratulate him on his bold stance, but never got around to it.

But, it’s true. I don’t care. I went off on that old rant and, having said my peace, ceased to really give a damn about it. Not everyone is going to use social media the same way that I do, and I’m fine with it. I think the practice of putting a partial sentence into a hashtag, used for searching, is a little silly, mostly because when I read tweets in my head, I read the contents of the hashtag as well, which makes for some oddly distorted sentences. In my head it’s a lot like someone with Tourette’s Syndrome having an outburst during a conversation, or maybe like that old “Mr Subliminal” bit they used to do on Saturday Night Live.

To get an idea of how I end up reading these tweets, imagine having a conversation with a coworker at the end of the day, where you politely ask them if they have anything cool going on that night. They reply, “Can’t wait to get home and have some meat loaf SO HUNGRY! LOVE MEATLOAF! FAVORITE!”

It’s an unusual sort of outburst, but you don’t want to dampen their enthusiasm for a food they enjoy so much that it makes them lose the ability to make a proper sentence, so you let it pass. Anything cool going on over the weekend? you ask. “Pretty excited about going to a baseball game this weekend BASEBALL! DODGERS! GO TEAM! I LIKE HOT DOGS!”

You can see how this is a little distracting. Exposed to this often enough, you might learn to ignore it. Or in the case of Twitter, either set up some filters or just use that thumb to keep scrolling, keep scrolling.

Anyway, I’ll probably still make the occasional joke about #hashtags; I’m making jokes about the convention and not picking on any person in particular. I think most people I know on the Twitter these days get my sense of humor, or at least put up with it. But, if you still want to get upset about it even after all this explanation, I guess I can send you a box of chocolates.

I think I broke it down to my buddy Matterdays one time that the seasons in the Pacific Northwest are the wet season, the cold season, the cold and wet season, and OMG INFERNO season. West of the Cascade Range, at least, the winters are pretty mild, except for a week or three every year where it drops down below freezing and stays there, and everyone goes OH GOD WHEN WILL IT RAIN AGAIN AND END OUR TORMENT? After a while, it warms up enough to rain, and the people are briefly grateful before they go back to grumbling about the eight months of rain, and eventually summer gets here and it’s briefly just gorgeous all the time before we spend a week or two in the triple digits, and again everyone goes OH GOD WHEN WILL IT RAIN AGAIN AND END OUR TORMENT? and then sure enough it rains, etc, etc, rinse and repeat, you kids know the drill.

We didn’t get much in the way of snow, this year, at least not in our neighborhood. (Note: I’m fine with that. Snow is a huge pain in the ass if I have to drive anywhere.) We did, however, get a weird, strangely localized ice fall all over everything pretty consistently on the days it got below freezing at night. Like in the photo above: right on the other side of that building in the background, there was no ice at all. Turn in the other direction, and it covered everything as far as you could see.

In talking it over with some of my coworkers, we came up with what was probably the most logical explanation for why ice crystals only seemed to fall all over and cover the ground for only a mile or so along this stretch of the suburbs. A fair bit of this part of Hillsboro is taken up by high tech manufacturing, notably the large Intel fabs. Making semiconductors involves a lot of water, so the plants along these roads give off a lot of steam. On the colder days the steam cools and falls and blows away closer to the ground, and doesn’t get very far at all before it freezes and covers the ground as faux snow. The moisture in the air also makes for some really cool looking frozen spider webs.

Our days are a bit warmer now, and I’ll have some more photos of the spring up soon, but in keeping with my new theme of the least current events on the web I thought a few photos from January seemed appropriate for now.

The best jokes never quite make it in translation to the blog, we say, going from white bicycle to white horse to white ghost Hyundai cruising the streets, all in quick succession and in a way that wouldn’t make any sense in the retelling.

*****

Those two paragraphs have been sitting here in my blog drafts for what I thought was oh, surely not that long at all, just like I had thought, oh, surely it hasn’t been that long since I paid attention to my blog, and then one day  I realized that not only had it been eleven months since I had last written a post, but I was at the same bar, with the same friends, and I thought of this draft and how I had put these words down the summer of the previous year.

Maybe I should write something here, I thought, but what am I going to do with my blog after all this time? Should I take it in another direction? Do blogs have any place, these days? And then I thought, did they ever? Haven’t these always been something we sort of made up, carved our own place on the Internet for?

I thought about just deleting these old drafts, but events had come full circle in a weird sort of way, and I thought, why not dig it up? This blog has never really been a source of breaking news for anyone, and I have a few old tales I might tell here. No need to tell them in any particular order, or chronological relevance.

Anyway, I’m back. I think. FOR REAL THIS TIME PEOPLE. And I know I tempted you with a post a few weeks ago but I mean it this time. I miss this space, and I miss you imaginary people out there. So let’s give this another shot, shall we?

Speaking of old news, that same night, in an impromptu ceremony at the Limelight, my friend Kristi married Sarah and I, sealing our union with rings she’d fashioned out of a bar napkin, and we toasted our PBR Tallboys in celebration.

And then, a few weeks later, we got engaged, so you see what I mean about things being a little out of order.

It’s big news, even if it is old news at this point, what with the speed at which the world turns these days, but as my long-time blogging friend Claire pointed out to me, it’s not like I can’t say I don’t have anything to blog about now. And she’s right, there’s always something to write about. Just not in this post. Come back tomorrow, people, I MEAN IT THIS TIME.

Oh yeah, and if this is your holiday today, Merry Christmas! Hope you’re having a great one.

The day before New Year’s Eve I was at home making a fire to try and bring some warmth to our little apartment in the ‘burbs, a task which I take on even though I don’t really have any special qualifications for firemaking.  In fact, they only turn out as well as they do because I cheat and start them all off with a Duraflame log, piling extra wood on once most of it has caught and started to crumble.  Anyway, I was poking around in this fire with the sawed-off end of a two-by-four, wanting to move some of the logs around to improve airflow and burn rate and other things  I like to pretend I know about before adding said end of a two-by-four to the fire.  I decided abruptly that a certain burning log should be moved, so I jammed the wood I was holding into it and started to lever it up, which meant my hand went down and because I didn’t plan this one out too well ahead of time I put my fingers down directly into the flames.

Fun fact!  The pain signal doesn’t have to make it all the way back to your brain before you react — it makes it to the spinal cord, which has no problem cutting in and moving your hand for you, which begs the question why it allowed you to use your hand in the first place since you were just going to go around doing things like sticking it into open flames.  Perhaps someone more versed in the sciences than myself knows the answer to that one, but my guess is that your autonomic nervous system is taking the tough love route with you, reasoning that if it always keeps you from sticking your hands into things that hurt you are just never going to keep them out on your own.

Anyway!  In the event that you put your hand directly into a fire like some sort of idiot, local control kicks in before the sensation of burning makes it very far at all, and your hand yanks itself away from the fireplace and back.  In some cases, you may find that your hand has also reacted by releasing the sawed-off end of two-by-four that you were holding.  I don’t imagine these sort of situations are very common at all, but I am willing to bet that in only one case in a million do the commands from the spine come through that dictate that the hand should hurl the piece of wood directly into one’s big toe.

Stubbing your toe is pretty bad, sure, but I can tell you that throwing a piece of wood at it and hitting it dead on is a lot worse, though it’s less that pain that makes you yell than the indignation that hitting something so small should hurt so bad.  ”ARRRGGHH!” I shouted, dropping to all fours and kicking my wounded foot back and up because I don’t know why.  Moving it away from the pain?  Trying to elevate it?  I raised it up behind me into the air, pressed my head against the cool tile in front of the fireplace, and yelled, “I SMASHED MY BIG LADY TOE!”

Lady toe?

Something you should know about me is that I have two younger sisters, and what they can tell you is what any younger sister anywhere in the world can tell you about older brothers: they are really, really annoying.  A few days before I was over at my mother’s place for Christmas, and my baby sister was over, too, and I guess she’s going to be twenty-three here before long but some things never change, and anyway we were taking a break from the game we’d been playing all morning of trying to catch one another unawares with a swift kick to the butt, and sat down at the dinner table to have cookies.  She took advantage of the break as an opportunity to start painting her toenails, a task from which I tried to distract her by poking her in the ribs with my foot.  She’s old enough now that she can just ignore me when she’s tired of my nonsense, so when I saw that my foot-poking tactics weren’t working, I plopped my foot down in her lap and said, “Paint my toes!”  She called my bluff and did so without missing a beat, painting three toes on my left foot a bright pink while I munched on my cookies.

I forgot all about the decorated toes of my left foot as soon as I put my slippers back on, chuckling when I switched out of slippers and into socks and shoes for the drive home, laughing in surprise when I took my socks off later, giggling when I looked down in the shower the next morning and discovered I had pink toes.  If you can imagine sitting the dude from “Memento” down in front of a computer and having him laugh fifty times in a row as you hit repeat on that “Charlie bit me” video on YouTube, you pretty much have my cycle over the next few days of forgetting about my pink toe nails, seeing them, and finding them hysterical all over again.  After a while I took to calling them my lady toes.

Here we are back at the fireplace, and since no one was there but me you’ll have to picture it: a fat guy dressed only in boxers and a T-shirt, head and hands pressed against the tile, one foot on the ground and the other up in the air as if I were trying to kick up into a headstand, bellowing about the pretty pink princess toes I had pointed at the ceiling.

If I had a destiny, ladies and gentlemen, that image pretty much sums it up:  I am a completely ridiculous person, to whom any number of completely ridiculous things occur on a regular basis.  It’s almost constant.  The very next day I was out for Korean barbecue and opened the wrapper on my chopsticks to find I only had one.  I’ve never heard of someone getting only one chopstick in one of those things before.  I’m pretty certain it didn’t happen to anyone else at that restaurant, since from what I could see I was the only one sitting around with a pitiful look on his face, holding a single chopstick in the air to try and get the attention of the waitstaff.

It’s fate, right?  Might as well have a sense of humor about it.

Now, go enjoy your weekend.  Go!  It’s going to be nice out.