Housesitting is done for now. I lived a rather different life than I usually do for one whole month. (Cars, animals, giant TVs with nice sound systems. Out of walking distance of the ocean.) I appreciate such opportunities. And as a reward, I was given cheap Mexican albuterol, and an unspeakably awesome necklace by my Mexico-visiting friends, not to mention a chance to sample the four different tequilas they brought back.

I'm at the parents' place right now, and so far, I'm having a lot of fun. I made dinner, and Dad and I went through boxes of old, potentially meaningful stuff. Lots of letters and records and maps from my dad's travelling days. I also helped him go through his old technical books. Do you know anyone who'd like a book on a forty-year-old programming language? Most of them aren't exactly books, just comb-bound, typewritten manuals from when my dad worked for the Navy in California back in the early 70s.
Dad was talking to me about the work he used to do, and I was trying to listen, but it's all "blah blah blah" to me. Suddenly I hear, "I mean, I didn't come up with it, I worked off of what this other guy before me did. I don't want to say I invented the internet." So there you go. Now, when people ask me what my dad used to do, I can say he helped invent the internet.

Have a picture of a bug.

Oh yeah, did I mention that I'm housesitting. Dude! I have access to a car! And a huge tv with surround sound! Also, dog. This means that I get to bring kehrli out to North Seattle and we watch ridiculous Nick Cage movies while playing with the dog. (First, Face/Off, last night, Con Air. Up next, The Rock)

Last night, after driving a friend home, I had my first ever driver/passenger-in-car-beside-me at a stoplight interaction. It was the U-District, he was presumably a drunk college student. I think he was trying to get me to follow them to a party. If I'd realized how damned long the light was going to be, I would have rolled down the windows and tried to say witty things. After I left the light, and they moved on, the next song my cd played was Fight For Your Right To Party (RIP Adam Yauch). I pondered my missed opportunities.

Spiders are one of the hardest and most frustrating things for me to get pictures of with my dumb little autofocus camera. First it seems easy, since spiders tend to hold still for a bit, hoping you'll go away. But then the camera refuses to focus, and the spider skitters away. The contrast has to be just right for the autofocus to pick it up. Today, however, I got some good ones. The jumping spider photo is one of my best.

Arachnophobes, don't click through!

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Way back when, I started reading Changes, one of the Harry Dresden books. The first chapter reminded me of all the things that bug me about Dresden that overwhelm the good that I shoved it back on the shelf in a fit of fury. Now I've finally read it, and am over my initial fury. My point still stands about the things that bug me about Harry, but I'm not giving up on the series. I'm also reading Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books, which are also about a snarky badass magic-doing Mary Sue, and I'm really seeing the contrast in how the two series are written.
One, Brust throws a whole lot of kitchen utensils into each of his books, but not the whole damned sink. In Changes, at one point, I thought Butcher was actually trying to give everyone who'd been in every single one of the last eleven book a cameo, and I started checking off who we hadn't seen yet. But maybe two or three out of a billion characters were left out, leaving me seriously disappointed.

Two, Vlad actually changes. He'll build up a life, watch as life changes through things both in and out of his control, screws up, makes hard choices and has to leave entire relationships behind. His character arc is smooth and realistic, even as he is an entertaining wish-fulfillment device. As I said in my initial rant, Harry just gets characterization in the form of roles and powers lumpily stuck onto him. He's like that crazy hoarding lady in Labyrinth. However, in Changes, it seems like Butcher may be trying to reboot the character and start over from a clean slate. I am interested to see what happens next.

My ongoing project of exploring Seattle continues. Here's some shots from Seward Park.



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She's in hospice care. Not gone yet, but that doesn't mean I can't grieve. Look! I have put my obsession with the geology of the Bitterroot Valley into practical use!

Sapphire Mountains

When the hills slid from the mountains,
aching with the pain of separation.
When ancient fell from the grasp
of the young, even as youth
reaches high,
coated in the mica of your passing;
I fall from you
as you fall from me;
falling away across ever-winding rivers;
beyond trees that never die, and
roads that never straighten.
I will see you there glowing in the sunset
with sapphires in your heart.

So I've had the theory that one of the vital motifs of the Western (and related samurai movie) mythos is the division of townspeople and gunfighters, of innocent and jaded, of being inside civilization and the law, or outside. You can't really be both at once. The townspeople need the gunfighters to do the things they can't do (kill people) without losing their innocence and protected status. Right now, I'm rewatching The Magnificent Seven. The brutality at the end, of the villagers rising up and basically massacring the bandits, is making me question my theory. These guys are doing plenty of killing themselves. (and they're going in with shovels and chairs and their bare hands. They don't have the distancing luxury of guns.) You know those videos of army ant swarms tearing apart spiders way bigger than themselves? This reminded me of that.

Many Westerns, of course, tend to gloss over the effects that killing people has on the killer. One of the reasons The Magnificent Seven is so great is that it instead highlights this and questions the glamour.

So are we supposed to assume that the villagers aren't going to be afflicted with some serious PTSD? That that girl who goes and buries an ax in some bandit's back isn't going to have nightmares about it for the rest of her life? At the end, the movie redraws the line between inside and outside. "The farmers are like the earth, and you (the gunfighters) are like the wind driving away the locusts, coming, and then going." The gunfighter who stays with the villagers, the first thing he does is take off his gun. You can't live on both sides of the line.

But is this actually an example of the two sides I spoke of merging? Now the villagers have lost just enough innocence to be able to defend themselves, but still have the benefits of community and order. Or is the point I should take home that the dividing line isn't being able to kill, but being able to live in a community?
Discuss.

In the fuss over Washington State Liquor Stores having to close in a couple of months, I realized my own alcohol supply is pathetic. (One inch of Finlandia vodka, and a bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream.) So I'm stocking up before the state-run stores close, and big business takes over. I discovered a cute little liquor store downtown on my way home, and picked up a bottle of buttershots (it was lightweight. That particular store doesn't have many moderate-sized bottles). Upon my return home, I decided to make the one drink I could: a Slippery Nipple. Alas, I have no shot glasses. I ended up using a plastic champagne flute, which worked very nicely. However, today when I went to Value Village, I checked out their selection. 99% of Value Village shot glasses are souveniers. What did I pick? A big heavy square thing from Wallace, Idaho. Oh, Wallace! In the great blur of travel from home to grandparents in Montana, Wallace stood out, because it was the last place on I-90 where you had to divert through town and go through a stoplight. (Take note of that, I once saw that trivia come up on Jeopardy.)

And good news to all my friends who hated my warm yet hideous hobo coat: the main reason I went to Value Village was for a new winter coat. I can now look a little classier.