The Adirondack Park

You see things in upstate New York sometimes.

Things that you know your friends from other states would look at with curiosity:



Things that you're not sure if you should be offended by or not:



Things that make you scratch your head:



"Worms? Ice? Beer? You sure you don't want books? Because we also have books."

You see a lot of really pretty things, too, though.







The week before last I drove home to spend a week with my parents. I usually only go home at Thanksgiving, because summer is a busy time on campus, so I don't usually get to go to camp when I got home, since it's deep in the Adirondack Park, and that's not a place you want to drive to in heavy snow. Since I went home in summer, though, it was warm enough to go up to camp for a few days, something my parents do pretty much all the time since they are retired now.

Our camp is on Long Lake:



which I've always thought is the place where A Place in the Sun is set, but it turns out that's actually Loon Lake. Even more confusing, the actual murder that the story is based on took place on Big Moose Lake, but what it boils down to is that, while our camp is really pretty:



Montgomery Clift never drowned Shelly Winters on film there.

Still, it's peaceful and shockingly cold. I expected it to be a little cold, since we were in the mountains, but the second morning I was there it was 39 degrees Fahrenheit.

In summer.

I packed shorts and t-shirts, and a polo in case we went somewhere nice to eat.

It wasn't that bad, though. Mom turned on the fireplace and Dad let me borrow a pair of sweatpants to get my steps in. I got most of them walking the four mile round trip from camp to Buttermilk Falls:







and then in the three days when we were at camp we went all over the Adirondack Park: Tupper Lake, Lake Placid, Blue Mountain Lake, Long Lake, and some other lakes I can't remember. We went to antique stores, general stores, candy stores, popcorn shops, and out to eat a few times, and one morning I also hiked the grounds of The Wild Center, including the Wild Walk:







which rises to a height of three stories off the ground and includes a giant bird's nest that you can climb into:







The rest of the grounds were really pretty, too:



and I encountered this statue that I thought was of a cat pooping, because I didn't see the rabbit out in front at first:



It was a nice trip, and I may think about doing it again.

If I do, I'll have to take more time, since I spent almost half of the trip in the car.

Staycation Day 5: I Had All These Plans

I had all these plans for my Staycation. There was a bunch of stuff I wanted to do because I'm not really going to have another vacation until November, when I go home for Thanksgiving break. I was going to go on photo walks, I was planning to visit two different museums, I thought about hiking, I was going to go to the roller derby championship, and instead I went to lunch twice, went to a movie, and went to McKay's twice to turn in books and finally get rid of the VHS tapes taking up space in my apartment that I don't even have a player for.

So what happened?

Well, like I said on Day 1, it is swelteringly hot. It's too hot to walk around outside taking pictures, or to go hiking. I probably should have checked the weather before I scheduled time off, but I've been wanting time off since March or so, and I just went for it.

The other reason my plans fell apart after a day or two of a five day staycation goes back to what my friend Rod phrased as "the freedom of utter slothfullness". Once I got settled in, I didn't want to go anywhere, and I ended up not leaving my apartment from Friday night until Sunday night, when I ran out of milk. I tried to sleep in (unsuccessfully; my body apparently no longer believes in sleeping past nine), read a book, watched some movies, played video games, and basically did nothing.

And it was wonderful.

On the other hand, this bodes poorly for my later years when I am old and retired, as it now seems 99 percent likely that I will become a shut-in and start hoarding cats and dressing them in little outfits:



Should I just start sewing the outfits now, or give it a few more years?

Escape from New York

My vacation ended yesterday as I made the long drive from upstate New York back to Tennessee, made even longer by the horrible lake-effect blizzard that they started having on Friday night. Grimly determined to get home, I loaded up the car, got up at 3 AM, and got ready to go even though the driveway wasn't plowed and I hate driving in any kind of weather at night.

My parents helpfully soothed my fear and stress by offering advice.

"You should wear your sweatshirt over that t-shirt while you're driving."

"Why?"

"So you already have something warm on when you run off the road."

"I'm kind of hoping not to run off the road."

"Right, of course. Now take this blanket, too, and put it on the backseat."

"Why?"

"In case it takes them a really long time to find you."

The fact that I couldn't see the road because nothing was plowed yet made it even more likely that I would run off, but I spent the entire time going 20 miles per hour, loudly praying to God, asking for divine intercession from all the dead people that I know that I thought might be on better terms with God than I am (thanks Bryan, Nanny Eve, and Poppy Harry; I did not ask for intercession from Nanny Maggy because I rode in the car with her a number of times while she was alive and that convinced me that she's not the person to request automotive intervention from), and white-knuckling the wheel so hard that I couldn't even take a hand off to have a sip of Diet Mountain Dew or to snap even one photo through the windshield.

Since I couldn't take a picture, I've drawn one instead:



The size of the snowflakes is not accurate to the size of the car.

There was so much snow that by the time I got to Pennsylvania, hours later, it was still clinging to the bumper of my car:



My mom says that the plows went by the house right after I left.

favorite shots

Over Christmas vacation I spent five days in Florida, generously hosted by Sean, who also played host for summer vacation last year. We spent a day at Epcot Center in Disneyworld, spent a day flea marketing and comic shopping, rode a water taxi around Ft. Lauderdale, saw some movies, went to the mall, and basically just relaxed. I took over 200 pictures, and wanted to share a few of my favorites. Click on any of them to see a larger size.

1) Sean's Christmas mash-up:



Sean's apartment decor is a little eclectic:



if you're willing to take the opinion of someone like me, whose apartment has bookcases with action figures all over them in the living room. Rather than remove anything for Christmas, Sean just puts his Christmas stuff among the other decorations, so you end up with things like the mash-up picture, which apparently tells the story of how Malificent cursed the baby Jesus to fall into an enchanted slumber after pricking his finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel on his sixteenth birthday.

I love it because the same thing would happen if I put up a nativity in my apartment, except that the three wise men would be replaced by Bizarro, Supergirl, and Iron Fist.

2) The Distant Past:



This was taken on the "Spaceship Earth" ride, the ride inside the globe at Epcot:



Disney, probably deliberately, makes it kind of hard to take good pictures inside their rides. The flash washes out colors, the cars jerk and turn right at the moment when you click the shutter, the cars move too fast for a low light section and everything turns out blurry, but I think the blurriness works here. This is supposed to be a glimpse into the past of a caveman tribal shaman, and the blurriness gives it an impression of the powerful magician emerging for a moment from a blur of smoke and fog. It's kind of the way you imagine frightened tribesmen glimpsing him as they tremble in fear withing his shadowy cave.

3) Light and Paintings:



There's not a special story or anything that goes with this one. It's from the "Gran Fiesta Tour" ride, which is inside the pyramid in the Mexico pavillion:



It's a shot of the lights that lead up to the dock at the very end of the ride, but I really like the angles sharp angles of the light and the way they play against the curves of the painting on the wall.

4) Wooden Trees and People:



This was a window display in Downtown Disney, the shopping area that you don't have to pay to get into. I realize the whole thing probably came in a box and someone probably just followed instructions on how to put it together, but it looks cute. The little wooden people really look like they're decorating their wooden trees, and it made me smile when I sat down by it for a minute while Sean stopped by the restroom.

5) Drawbridge 1 and Drawbridge 2:





I saw the drawbridge go up while we were riding the water taxi:



around Ft. Lauderdale. I was fascinated with the machinery and the huge gears, especially when the water taxi went right under it and you could see everything up close. I was so busy studying the mechanics when we went under it that I forgot to take a picture, so those two are as close as I got. There's something inherently intriguing about large machinery to me, be it giant strip mining machines, drawbridges, rockets, or whatever else.

Some of it is that I have no real aptitude for machines (I finished 2 out of 4 projects in our mandatory 8th grade Technology class, because it took me the entire semester just to complete those two and to make them actually work; my tiny motor worked long enough for the teacher to evaluate it, and when I tried to turn it on again afterward it was dead. I destroyed it with a sledgehammer later that afternoon.), some of it is that I try to take them apart in my head to figure out how they work, and some of it is the inherent danger and possibility for disaster that large scale engineering represents.

6) Me:



I don't often like pictures of myself, but Sean did a good job on this one.

7) Ft. Lauderdale Sunset:



The colors are gorgeous. That's why people move to Florida: palm trees, water, sun, and beautiful scenery.

Five Days Off

Today is a holiday (Happy Labor Day! Sorry I didn't send any cards.) and I decided last week that a three day weekend just wasn't enough, so I put in for Thursday and Friday off, too. I didn't have any exciting plans or anything, but it suddenly seemed like I just needed a few days to read and watch TV ("Law and Order" and "Chopped!" are tied for most episodes seen in the five day stretch), so I asked for them. As the days off got closer, it looked like I wouldn't be taking Thursday after all because someone was sick and I was worried the office would be short staffed, but my boss called while I was driving in and told me to take it anyway.

He really had to twist my arm on that one, let me tell you. I considered my options for an entire two and a half seconds before I said, "OK" and sped off in the opposite direction.

Here's what I did with my five days off:

Thursday: I lied. I didn't actually speed off in the opposite direction because I was already almost to campus when my boss called. Since I was already up and dressed and out of the house, I decided to swing by the university gardens since they were right there, and I got to watch the sun come up over the plants:









Since no one else was there, I took my time walking around and enjoying the quiet of the morning. I stopped to examine some tiny flowers:



and then the bugs started waking up, too:





so I decided to head out before the bees really came out in force. On my way home, I stopped by the office to pick up my two boxes of picture frames, which were packed in an absurd amount of material:



Those twelve plastic frames came in a box half the size of my couch, and there were two boxes! I drive a Bug! My couch doesn't fit in my car! Not only do I have to feel bad about ordering frames from Wal-Mart, allowing them to continue squeezing out Mom and Pop stores and outsourcing jobs to foreign countries and not paying their employees health insurance by making them work 39.5 hours a week, but I feel like they also cut down a forest and a half just to get the frames to me. People with kids, I'm sorry that they will be both unemployed and shadeless in the barren future I have helped to create, but Wal-Mart was the only company that came in under my budget.

Friday: On Friday morning I slept in a little, and then got up to go downtown to the Museum of East Tennessee History. It was smaller than it looked from the outside (it turns out that there is a whole floor devoted to geneological archives), but filled with interesting things:



I saw one of Dolly Parton's dresses:



and flags celebrating Oak Ridge's revelation to the world:



and I got to leave my comments on the wall of Post-It's:



The highlight of the day, though, was my lunch downtown at The French Market. My coworker, Angie, has mentioned for months (mostly because she had a couple months of maternity leave between the first mention and the more recent one) that she ate there and it was wonderful and that I should try it, but it always managed to stay off of my radar until I walked out of the museum and it was directly across the street.

The French Market only serves one kind of food: crepes. My experience with crepes is mostly of this variety:



They're always filled with fruit and/or chocolate, and there's something sweet drizzled or, more often, gushed across the top. I've never had a crepe that's intended as a meal, rather than as a dessert or a replacement for a pastry, so I was a little dubious. I trust Angie, though, so I ordered the turkey and cheese crepe:



It was so good I want to go back and get another one right now. The inside was stuffed with shredded smoked turkey, Swiss cheese, and Gruyere cheese. That's it. No mustard, sauce, vegetables, or anything, and it was still so good that I practically inhaled it. I hope and pray they're open for the last Roller Derby home bout, because I'm pretty sure I don't want to eat anywhere else downtown again, ever.

God, it was so good.

Saturday: Football came to Tennessee again, and the carpool and I had to work at Gate 23. On our way across campus, since we have to park a bit of a hike away from the stadium, we stopped so that Anna could grab breakfast at Chik-Fil-A and found ourselves in a sea of orange:



If you're not dressed for football, it's best that you not leave the house on game days. Someone might cut you.

Sunday: I slept in, and when I woke up I suddenly felt like the idea of leaving the house to do anything was more than I could cope with, so I stayed in and read, watched more TV, and played games on the computer.

Monday: Today I framed my pictures and took them to work to hang on my walls. Using a yardstick and a level, I think I got them pretty even, and I'm happy now to have some color on all four walls instead of on just one:



I also swapped out the frames from the pictures I had up already, so everything matches. I know that my pictures aren't always good, but I like having them on my walls instead of random school art or posters. It makes the office feel more like it's mine, and the cleaning people probably won't steal my pictures like they did the Superman figure I used to have in there.