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Travel adventures thus far
This year—and this summer in particular—we’ve done quite a fair bit of traveling, possibly more than we have in the past. I’ve chronicled some of it as it applies to beer over on The Brew Site, but have been sorely lax in documenting the various trips here. Here’s a summary of the notable travels, with more detailed posts to follow for some of them: During spring break in March we visited Baker City for fabulous pizza and, well, seeing someplace new. In May, we spent a weekend in Portland doing some shopping and visiting friends. June was a big travel month: an anniversary trip spent in Lincoln City followed two days later by a longer visit to San Diego to see my brother. In July, we made a day trip up to Hood River, which I already chronicled here. Later in the same month, we made a quick day trip to Eugene. For beer. August saw our annual family reunion convene for a camping trip at the coast, just outside of Garibaldi. And, travels in August (and thus far this year) have more-or-less concluded with this past weekend, where my wife and I spent a night at Kah-Nee-Ta Resort (and Casino).

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1999 Contour – $800
4-door passenger, 4-cyl. No reverse. Asking $800.00 or BO.

It’s Fun For The Whole Family!
It’s Monopoly HP Supply Chain Edition: I was taking pictures of a new home for our rental pool here at the office, and found the above in a closet (if I had time I would’ve taken better pictures of the thing, including a gameboard shot — will try later this week). It appeared to be a custom game created by the folks at USAopoly, which lists HP as one of their clients. Anybody know the history of this and how folks ended up with it? Was it an employee or client/sales piece? All I know is that it sounds like a buzzword-filled good time for the whole family.

NaNoWriMo (manageably)
No, I’m not actually participating in National Novel Writing Month, but I toyed with the idea (again), and in doing so I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to see how manageable it would be. The results were interesting, so I thought I’d share. The idea, of course, is to write a 50,000 word (minimum) novel in the 30 days of November. Breaking that out by day, you have 1,667 (rounded up) words per day to complete. 1,667 words per day doesn’t seem all that daunting, but once you sit down and start writing some out you start to realize how many it actually is. So let’s borrow a page from algorithm design in computer science and break it down into smaller, more manageable chunks. In particular, would spending say, five minutes each hour of your day writing be manageable? Yes? Doesn’t matter which five minutes, just as long as you open your text file or Word document or Google Docs account and write however many words you need for five minutes. So if five minutes each hour works, let’s figure out how many words you’ll need to write for each brief session. In order to determine that, we need to figure out how many writeable hours you have each day. The number I fell upon was 15: assume you wake up and/or are functional by 7am, and can finish sometime in the 9pm hour. That sounds reasonable, right? So dividing 1,667 by 15 yields 112 (again, rounded up). That’s how many words you have to write each hour for the 15 workable hours you have each day of November to reach 50,000 words and thus a novel. Can you write 112 words in five minutes? I’m able to hit that in about two, but of course that isn’t necessarily stringing together meaningful prose, or at least something somewhat resembling a coherent narrative. But even if what you write is dreadful, at least you’re writing something. Spending five minutes each hour to write 112 words? Seems laughably easy! How couldn’t you find the time?

Parent Of The Year Nominee
This dad spoke only Klingon to his child for the first three years of his life. Link via here.

Link Dump
Get these links off my desktop, will ya?What does Google know about you?Share your e-mail address safely from spambots.Great Invoice design and practices.Perl has a “do” function, but apparently there’s also a don’t.A (and seems to be the final word) on what you can do with your Windows 7 upgrade media.Citizen Journalists Can’t Handle The Truth.Don’t understand xkcd? Then have it explained to you.TinEye reverse image search. I’m using this to find sources for some random images I’m finding on a file server here, making sure we’re authorized to use them.XP Quick Fix Plus is a simple little tool to just get some quick and dirty tweaks done in XP.How much should that car repair cost?Create your own Facebook quotes.What are the odds?

Notes on our San Diego trip
Last week, we went down to San Diego for a quick(ish) trip to visit my brother and his wife. We left Tuesday afternoon after I was off work, drove all day Wednesday, and then returned on Monday—doing the full San Diego to Bend drive in one day. I won’t recount the full blow-by-blow here (and I’m blogging my beer notes of the trip on The Brew Site, of course), but just a series of notes, observations, and tidbits. (A big reason for the visit was because my brother and sister-in-law are expecting their first child this August, and the baby shower was on Saturday. So we couldn’t pass up the opportunity.) At about three and a half hours from Bend, Weed is a town you can’t ignore: it’s the junction of Highway 97 and Interstate 5, and is the first "real" town you hit in California when traveling down 97. (I’d count Dorris, but that seems more like a truck stop/border crossing than a town.) I find the town fascinating: its population is exactly 3000, it sits in the shadow of Mt. Shasta, and in many ways it’s the gateway to Northern California. And it’s like Bend in several ways: it had its start as a lumber town, has a similar climate and the same elevation, and now derives a good portion of its economy from (mountain) tourism. What little I’ve seen of it—besides the fast food restaurants and gas stations marking it as an Interstate connector—seems charming and picturesque. Tuesday night we stayed in Anderson, California (just south of Redding) at the Gaia Anderson hotel. Even though it was just a waypoint on the trip, it was actually quite a nice place for a really good price. It’s new and built to "green" specs—energy efficient, with water conservation in mind, and organic and health-conscious. And it’s just off the freeway, which was convenient. The drive that first afternoon—Bend to Anderson/Redding—took us about 4 hours and 45 minutes. The next day, we drove about 11 hours through to San Diego, hitting rush hour Los Angeles traffic and losing about an hour and half to it. I completely hate Los Angeles traffic. And that pretty much mars the whole city for me. Driving through central California, south of Sacramento on that long, lonely stretch of I-5, is long, tedious, and a bit depressing. Desert and failed agriculture, with communities that only seem to have sprung up to service the Interstate. How people can live there is beyond me. And it’s crazy hot, from Redding on down; on our return trip, it was 105 degrees in Redding! At one point the kids wanted to open the windows so I let them briefly. It was like opening an oven door. After Wednesday, we were in San Diego four full days before returning on Monday. It was a great trip, and the weather—which had been forecasted to be 70 and overcast the entire time—actually turned out sunny, clear, and nicely hot (but not too hot). Which was a good thing, because Friday we hit the beach and had a great day—the water is cool but much warmer than the Oregon Coast, so we were able to actually, you know, go in it. My brother and I spent most of the time out in the surf, while I kept an eye on the kids and the women stayed on the beach. At one point I was far enough out so that when a wave crashed over me—intentionally—I couldn’t touch bottom. That was a bit spooky. Sunday we all went to the San Diego Zoo. Something like 16 of us total. It was a bit chaotic, but a good day. And it was hot—the hottest day in San Diego since we arrived. There were several sunburned people to show for it. Interesting fact I learned (but didn’t personally verify): apparently the Howard Johnson on Hotel Circle has a lifesize Hulk Hogan statue in the lobby. As much as I dislike Los Angeles, I like San Diego. The big negatives are (obviously) the traffic and the urban sprawl; everything is very spread out, along freeways, and tuned to the stripmall. Something might be "just across the freeway" but to cross it you might have to jump on, exit a mile down the road, loop around and cross another exchange just to get there. But for that, it’s appealing and likable. And of course, it’s a great beer town. Not much to say about the Monday drive home except that we went straight through (stopping only for gas, bathroom breaks, and fast food), and made it in 14.5 hours. We left at about 7:30 in the morning and were home by about 10 that night. The kids held up remarkably well, better than I hoped. So it’s doable—but I’m not sure I’d want to do it again. Although you do save money if you don’t stay overnight…

Plum wine
At my parents’ place in Alfalfa, they have a wild plum tree that produced fruit for (I believe) the first time ever this year. They were small, golden fruits that were terrifically sour as they grew, but ripened and turned a deep pink-purple and ended up being rather sweet. They picked a bunch of the plums, and then picked a bunch more for me (at my request): I ended up with almost four pounds of them, many very ripe! I debated for a bit on what to do with them and decided to make wine. I found a plum wine recipe online and went with it (the "basic" recipe at the top of the page); for a gallon of wine, it calls for three to four pounds of plums which worked out just right (four for sweet plums, three for wild—I compromised and used all four-ish pounds). The pitting of the plums was the biggest chore, as many were (over)ripe and almost falling apart, and many others were very small. The rest went fairly smoothly: making wine is easy. That was about a week ago, and I racked it from the bucket to a gallon-size glass jug tonight for secondary fermentation. I’ll rack it again in about three weeks, and then again about three months after that. Then, of course, I’ll bottle it and (according to this particular recipe) age it for another six to 12 months. (Making wine is easy—I didn’t say it was quick!) No idea how the final product will turn out, but I did taste the sample I drew for the hydrometer reading: still fizzy with fermentation and a bit yeasty (especially the smell), it was fairly sweet and—if not for the yeastiness—would make a tasty drink right now. Nothing to do now but shove it away in the the closet and be patient.

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