Blog

• Waiting for the motel to turn the water back on. #

• Hail, thunderstorms, bright sun. All at once. Just another day on the Mogollon Rim. #
• Scratching my head over the hiker who just passed through Bird Camp — with six goats, laden with saddle bags. #

• Enjoying not being in the woods for a change, but not minding the thought of going back tomorrow. #
• Standing on a corner near Winslow, Arizona. #
• The internet’s grip on my mind seems to be lessening after almost one month of tent living in the Coconino National Forest. #

• Finalizing the details of my Ponzi scheme. #
• Local weather forecast: hot, dry, on fire. #
• Found a robin’s egg in a nest box in the meadow today. Pretty, but it would take a lot of them to make an omelet. #

• The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. http://tinyurl.com/23ovg #
• In Flagstaff, the sun feels like it is out to get you. No tall buildings + the only mountains are north of the city = no escaping the rays. #
• Can someone tell me what a “go to market partner” is? #
• Flagstaff: the part built 100 years ago is great, the rest, not so much. And there’s a lot of the rest. #
• Land of the free: Montana bans red-light cameras statewide. http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2009/05/05/bnews/br46.txt #
• Flagstaff. Working in the Rendezvous coffee shop in the Monte Vista hotel. Just reserved the Bob Hope suite for later in the month. #
• Sipping tea in the meadow just now, I felt more strongly than ever that we might be able to civilize these savages yet. Arizonians, I mean. #
• Nonplussed by the flaccid national response to swine flu, Bird Camp is instituting a strict new order. Skulls on sticks, etc. #

• Taking the grill they found in the woods seemed to me an obvious way to anger some band of vicious redneck cannibals. #
• Using wireless internet in the empty dusty parking lot of the Happy Jack Lodge. About to pay $3 for the first shower since Saturday morning. #
• Basking in the glow of successfully recording a cell-phone interview on the Mogollon Rim. http://tinyurl.com/csyse8 #
• Basking in the glow of successfully recording a cell-phone interview on the Mogollon Rim. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mogollon_Rim #
• Swineflu health map: http://healthmap.org/swineflu #
• Don’t call it “collections.” It’s “receivables management.” Also, “search and destroy” will now be referred to as “sweep and clear.” Got it? #
• Guy with O2 tank at next table is watching an on-line video about “a fantastic moneymaking opportunity.” #
• Some of the news coverage of swine flu might want to include the symptoms. So we can all start imagining we have it. #
• Sleeping on the ground for a couple of days really makes you appreciate an old camper mattress. #
• What is this thing called Bird Camp? All is revealed: https://marginnotes.net/about-bird-camp/ #

• From high tech to no tech: shutting down the laptops and setting out for Bird Camp. #
• Taking it to the next level by using not one but two laptops in a coffee shop. #
• Enjoying Bookmans, a great used book store in Flagstaff. #
• Next, I want to go to Mysterious Ape Island. #
• Watching awesome recreation of prehistoric death match between “mega lion” and “mega bear” on the History Channel. #
• Flagstaff has been reached. Hot red dust blasting across the highway last 150 miles. Thai food is planned. Never use passive voice. #
• Crossing the Navajo Nation. #
• We can’t stop here. This is Mormon country. #
• “Kafka would have had a Twitter feed.” http://tinyurl.com/crwxtv #
• Sometimes it’s like Burger King isn’t even trying anymore. #
• A ghastly pall hangs over Utah, as if to show the universe’s displeasure with the mortals who live here. #
• Hearing the siren call of the open road. Also, the pre-open-road breakfast sandwich and coffee. #
• Doesn’t Facebook know we don’t want to vote, we just want to complain about the results? #
• Turning in for the last time in this house for about three months. #
• Copying music from my iPod to my MacBook using iGadget. Pretty straightforward so far. #
• Unfortunately, the shower has once again failed to clean itself. #
• Cleaning to get ready for the short-term tenants, ahead of departing for AZ for the summer tomorrow. #
• “”The job of the interrogator is to… help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he… [is] liberated to speak freely.” tinyurl.com/dzzvrz #
• Surprised and impressed to learn that, in aggregate, the Earth Day protests in 1970 were the largest in U.S. history: 10 percent of pop. #
• Waiting for the man. #
• I hate myself for hating MTPR’s “Morning Classics”, but there it is. #
• Maybe I meant cannibal rednecks. #
• Sometimes I get the impression that I’m the only one who is concerned about the threat of redneck cannibals. #
• Bikers, enough with the left-arm right turn signal already. #
• RT @itsthomas “Opt out of the (stealth) behavioral advertising network dropping cookies on your machine: http://ginx.com/-pV0tz Please RT!” #
• “It’s not… “I Twitter, therefore I am.” It’s “I Twitter because I’m afraid I ain’t.”” http://tinyurl.com/ddst6s #
• Excited to learn that Pete Dexter is a downright prolific novelist. #

• Has anyone ever looked into why so many mystery writers have Mac- or McDonald as a last or middle name? #
• Knives, headlamps, Snuggies. #
• Missoula District 1 voters, be advised: Nancy Pickhardt sided with the teacher in that video controversy. http://tinyurl.com/ck9vec #
• Small-town pleasures, Saturday errands edition: breakfast at B-way Bagels, 8 stores, no malls, 40 minutes total driving time, done by 12:30. #
• Just invented the word “apocaflicks.” #
• Why didn’t I think of promising $100,000 to fight malaria if 1,000,000 people started following me on Twitter? Oh, well, too late now. #
• Sean Kelly’s sometimes makes me want to be a bartender again. #
• So what is this Twitter thing everyone’s on about? Oh, wait. #
• I was like yeah but like he was all no way. #
• Apparently membrane roofs cannot heal themselves, despite what the name might lead you to think. On the plus side, no veins or throbbing. #
• The sonority of words, not their transforming power. #
• Might go with the membrane roof after all. #
• If only I knew which roofer to believe. #
• So when does the War on Pirates start? #
• Waiting for the roofer before heading off to campus for a day of writing-exam scoring. #
• Do you have to do EVERYTHING your pregnant wife asks you to do? Even buy Les Mis on iTunes? #
• What does it say about me that I’ll eat the heel eventually, just never on the first sandwich I make from a new bag of bread. #
• Just got an intriguing offer on life insurance — from AIG. #
• Not having twins. #
• I love the Mountain 102.5 American Idol contest commercial. #
• One of the hardest things to comprehend about the baby we’re expecting this fall is here is a person who will have no money of its own. #
• Looking for a good roofer in Missoula. #
• Resenting the guy whose stuff is taking up one of the good tables at the Break while he visits friends’ table. Half hour and counting. #
• Decided not to paint the porch creamy beige. #
• If eating hamburgers for breakfast is wrong, I don’t want to be right. #
• Happiness is remembering you already wrote a bang-up conclusion but have been forgetting to include it toward the minimum word count. #
• No sign of the private detective this morning. Case solved? #

• Installing a porch light turned out to be less fun than I had hoped. #
• The yoga mats we leave in the car are good for bracing growlers upright for the drive home. #
• The private detective parked in front of my house showed me his badge and told me not to worry. #
• The yoga teacher said he always loses balance points on tree pose when playing Wii Fit Yoga. #
• The startup boss at the next table talks as though he has watched a lot of movies about startups. #
• Thought for the day: I would register/leave comments on more web sites if registration didn’t always take me to a new page. #
• It’s nice to be a regular. #
• Getting ready for Amy’s second prenatal appointment. (Is this what they call “burying the lede”?) #
• The charms of the Whitefish Super 8 do not come entirely into focus until preceded by a 32-hour train ride, hardly a business plan. #
• Secured from train operations. Totals: 64 hours, 3240 miles, 4.2 books, 20 sandwiches. Super 8, here we come. #
• The conductor announced that the person smoking on the train would be escorted to a ‘county non-smoking facility.’ #
• There sure is a lot of rusty brown eastern Montana. Six hours until the bland comforts of the Whitefish Super 8. #
• Train I ride, not sure how many cars but the loudmouth boot squid finally detrained and we scored bulkhead seats. 24 hrs to go. #
• Why is the VOLUME of an overheard conversation on a public conveyance so often directly proportional to its inanity? #
• Why is the inanity of a conversation on a public conveyance so often directly proportional to its inanity? #
• Missed out on the snowman. #
• Preparing for the 32-hour train ride home. Two new books and a cooler full of sandwich fixings. Plus Good and Plentys, of course. #
• Lazy Sunday in Naperville, IL. No sign of the promised winter storm. Yet. #

• Pulling into Chicago on the Empire Builder. Will need additional books for the return trip, I think. #
• Groggy on the train platform in St. Paul. 8 hours until Chicago. #
• Train through Glacier: elk, coyotes, mountain goats. No avalanches. #
• Observation car, hot coffee, sunrise in Glacier National Park. #
• Got time for a fast train. #
• Leaving for Chicago. ETA: two days from now. #
• Draft turnaround coincides neatly with commencement of vacation. I can enjoy the train ride with a clear conscience. #
• Is it crazy to let some people we’ve never met stay in our house while we’re away? Ominously, the internet is involved. #
• Packing for Chi-town, hoping we’ve provisioned well enough for the 32-hour train ride (coach seats). #
• The Break is redolent with the smell of baking parm/garlic bagels, one of the most disgusting foods I have ever tasted. #
• Amazing how many little frustrations can be eliminated… by replacing your hard drive. (Assuming it was disintegrating before.) #
• Who’s the wintertime shorts-wearer with the old-fashioned carnival-barker’s mustache, waxed to curled points, who haunts the Break? #
• What is “the lower Clark Fork” anyway? (They always say this on the weather report, but I can’t figure out where they are talking about.) #
• The first person was good enough for Poe, so it’s good enough for me. #
• Many good men and women lost their lives aboard this ship because someone wanted a faster computer to make life easier. #
• Apparently, only a madman would try to get across Roger’s Pass right now. #
• Steve’s obit, a well-told recounting of a well-lived life: http://tinyurl.com/cq5qur #
• Congratulations to the snow, which got off to a weak start but persevered and is finally piling up respectably on grass, sidewalks, trees. #
• RIP Steve Krauzer. (I’d link to his obit, but the Missoulian’s web site is a little 1997 and doesn’t seem to have it up yet.) #