Where have I been?

I've been out of touch for a few days. Not long after I posted that last video, I found out that my great aunt had passed away. I spent a couple days moping around a bit. It wasn't a sudden thing, but it was still unpleasant. I'm going down to Colorado in a couple days for the funeral. :(

I have been doing a few things in the meantime though...

Franny and I watched Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. I didn't have too high an expectation for this film, but I was still disappointed. What a bore. There were a couple of funny moments (the "interview" with Alan Keyes comes to mind), but for the most part we just sat there waiting for something funny to happen. This movie was billed as using a boorish character to bring out the worst traits in people. What could have been a clever way to expose prejudices and hypocrisy mostly just degenerated into poop jokes. I imagined more. He did have a good time poking fun at antisemitism though. The actor is Jewish (In fact, his "Khazak" dialogue is actually Hebrew.), and had a field day bringing out the most outrageous stereotypes. "One of them had taken the form of an old woman. You could barely see her horns." Mainly though, the movie just wasn't worth the effort.

Since I worked two straight weeks in Idaho, I took a couple days off this week. I accompanied Franny to the rhododendron garden on what turned out to be a meeting of her moms' group. It was exactly what I always expected. It took almost five minutes to get down to discussing the latest birth story and nipple pain. Apparently I can't be disturbed anymore. Joys of parenting. Actually, Mizz and I had a good time wandering around chasing geese and ducks and identifying every tree, rock, and pine cone. I also got the job of steering him through the goose-poop minefield. The rhoddies were nice too.

Franny showed me an interesting article. It claims that Jews as a group are demonstrably smarter than average, and attempts to explain why. Um.....nuh uh. (Mizz will be at least half smart anyway.)

Alma had this great video on her blog. I liked it mainly because I see too many of these shows when I'm travelling. There's Pimp My Ride (the MTV original), Overhaulin' (a similar show with a joke's-on-you twist), and something on CMT where they do the same thing to semi rigs. Anyway, this video does a pretty good parody of the characters that seem to be represented in all of them.



(I just realized; I should really expand my blog reading beyond my wife, her friend, and occasionally her friend's husband. From what I hear, there's a lot of stuff out there on the internets.)

Working at home isn't as interesting as travelling, since I see this stuff a lot. I did get to take a new route through the Columbia Gorge yesterday though, since they have closed an exit I really need for a few months. Something about the bridge cracking and starting to slide down the hillside. Anyway, the detour took me along the old road that FDR christened the Columbia Highway long before the interstate bypassed most of it. I had no idea how many falls there were right near the road; more remnants of the Missoula floods, I suppose. Now I have to go back sometime when I have the time to take the family and stop and see things.

For Jana

Jana, I'll see your politically incorrect joke and raise you a video...

Back Home from Potatoland

Well, I made it back home. I got about halfway last night and finished this morning. I've put on about 1000 miles in the last three days, plus 2 full days of work in there too. I'm done. Luckily, with the exception of the last 45 minutes, the weather held out for me even through promises of rain all day today. Now if only I could find my family. I'm sure I left them around here somewhere...

Payback's a b...

...aby. For all the time's I've felt bad about the Mizz crying and potentially keeping people up, now I get a taste. I'm in the crying baby section of my new hotel in Burley, ID. Across the hall is a baby who is apparently not happy with the accommodations. Even better, I can hear Mom over there trying every trick she knows to calm him/her/it down, but no luck. Actually it's not that bad. I hear the baby occasionally, but like most very young ones, it doesn't last long. There's also a kid that once in a while decides to run down the hall yelling back at his sister. I have nightmares of Mizz doing this. It's cute right now while he's doing it at home and he can't run very fast anyway, but that won't last long I'm afraid.

In other news, one of the cool things about my job is getting inside industries and seeing where things come from. However, one of the occasional bad things is seeing where things come from. I worked at a place that processes potato starch, which shows up as an ingredient in all sorts of things. It helps keep McD's fries warm longer than what you can do at home. It sticks the corn to the dog. It keeps paper-thin fast food burgers from falling apart when cooked. Anyway, it's a staple of lots of mass-produced processed foods. However, now that I've seen where it comes from, I'm not as happy. No details today, just ewwwww. Logically, I've seen the precautions that go into the food industry, and everyone has seen the mass hysteria that happens when something bad slips through. Emotionally though, I just have to shiver sometimes and give a big "YUCK". As my boss put it one time, "It's the kind of place that makes you want to grow your own food."

Jewish Ganja

"No hash matzos?" from Yahoo! News

I never thought I'd see the words Passover and marijuana in the same news article. This just struck me as odd.

Where's my freakin' snow?

Once again, the weather forecasters have failed me. Instead of the 4-8 inches of snow promised, we got just a hair under 0 inches. Not just less snow, but not a single flake hit the ground. We did have a few flurries out here, but I'm very disappointed.

It is crazy cold though. And windy as hell.

I took a walk out today, trudging through the bone dry and climbing huge drifts of nothing to check out the feature for which Idaho Falls is named. They looked pretty cool, and again, due to forgetting the camera cable, you don't get to see them. The original falls have been augmented with a concrete wall that stretches about a quarter mile along the length of the river to divert some of the water through a power plant. There's also the remains of an old fish hatchery under one of the bridges that is now a graffiti gallery. And in an odd twist, I found the only non-redneck thing I've seen here in the park along the river. Right next to the falls, in a very picturesque location, was a pagoda-style pillar with some Chinese writing on it. It might have been Japanese, but I don't think so. Anyway, there was no other plaque or anything to tell me what it said or why it was there. Odd.

I'm outta here in the morning. After I finish working in town, I'll head out to Burley, Idaho. Friday, I'll be working there and Heyburn and then hitting the road as far as I can stand and then home Saturday. Finally.

What's new in Idaho?

Saturday, I moved from Pocatello up the road an hour to Idaho Falls. On the way, I stopped at a rest stop that had a sign for a point of geological interest. Turns out it was Hell's Half Acre. Unlike Eastern Oregon's entire canyon, Hell couldn't afford as much in Eastern Idaho. It was actually an area of fairly recent lava flow (4000 years old) that was only lightly covered in soil and vegetation. It was fun to see lava in the middle of Idaho and an interesting stop on a day when I wasn't in a hurry. It was also fun to know that even here, they use the term pahoehoe. What did white people call ropy lava before they found Hawaii?

Had I known how close I was to Craters of the Moon, I would have gone there instead, but I didn't know it was so close until Sunday, and by then I was working. Maybe next time out here.

When I was working on Sunday in Rexburg, I had some time to kill at lunch so I took a ride around town. It took about 9 minutes total. Anyway, I found that they had a BYU campus, and everyone was on the way to the temple. I've seen Mormons before, nothing special there. It just amused me to realize that the entire campus was going to church at the same time. At every other college I've ever been to, the Sunday exodus usually involved a bunch of people with their shirts inside out stumbling home squinting and holding their heads. Not quite the same thing.

I'm in potato land up here. Further down the Snake River Valley, there are also sugar beets, cattle and corn, but up here, it's pretty much just spuds. The place I was working on Monday was in Dubois. (Doo-boys, not Doo-bwah, what are you, foreign? Seriously, that's how they say it.) Dubois had exactly two places to eat. On one side of the road was the Exxon food mart, but on the other side was the Phillips 66 food mart. 66 was much bigger, but not as good as you'd expect. Potato processing plants are interesting. Most food processors work very seasonally, but potatoes can be stored almost a year, so they can be done anytime. Fresh french fries and hash browns all year round. That might mean more if most everything wasn't either dried or frozen before it left the plants.

Today I was working for the nukes at the Idaho National Lab. During the cold war, that place was making bomb parts, but I don't know what they are doing these days. Mainly cleaning up and closing building it looks like, but I'm sure there's something else that I wasn't invited to. Driving out there, you can see the Three Buttes. They're three huge cinder cones that grew up out of an otherwise flat landscape. It was pretty cloudy today though, so I'm guessing it would have been cooler on the weekend when it was sunny and 70 degrees.

It's supposed to snow tonight. 4-8 inches. It snowed a little this afternoon, but then went back to rain. But it's been getting colder all day and should be down below freezing tonight, so we'll see what happens. I'll still probably be able to get around, but the guy working with me was supposed to get over the mountains into Wyoming tonight, and I'm wondering how far he got or whether he'll make it back tomorrow if he did get there.

It's late. I was tired when I got back to the room this evening and took a nap. For 3 hours. So now I'm awake at the wrong time. But morning will still come, so I should at least try to sleep. We'll see how that works out.

Here's one for Marketing Mommy

I just thought of Alma when I saw this cool ad-related video.



There should definitely be more skateboarders on walls.

Hey, wait! I resemble that remark...

The local NPR station out here in Pocatello is doing its fund drive right now. Normally I can't stand listening to these fund drives, but it was on when I turned on the van. Anyway, they were interviewing a couple of kids who are forced to listen to NPR with their parents in the car. Although the younger kid could name some of the station's personalities, the only other thing he could say he knew about it was that he didn't like it. His older sister was a little more nuanced. She admitted that she sometimes liked it, but sometimes not. A lot of times it was a little boring. When asked whether she understood much of what she heard, she said that no, she didn't, and that's probably why it was boring. When asked why she thought her parents liked it, she answered, "because they're kind of boring too."

One more thing...

I'm sure everyone reading this (all 3 of you) have seen the cattle guards where roads cross fences, you know, the bars across the road that cows can't get past. Well, apparently Idaho has the dumbest cows in the country. Here, you get on a highway off ramp and you go through the fence like anywhere else, but instead of bars across the road, they've just painted a few white lines. So, either Idahoan cattle are dumber than average, or Idahoan people are so nostalgic for good-ole' open range cattle herds that they paint lines on the road to pretend it's still true. Which is weirder?