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Sumiki

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Blog Entries posted by Sumiki

  1. Sumiki

    Stuff

    By Sumiki,

    Past midnight and not tired. Happening to me a lot lately.
     
    Triple Insanity Pole Vault entry about 50% done. I want it to be around 700 words (about two Word pages in 14-point Palatino) while being funny. Right now it's just a little gross and kind of random, so I'll have to really fix it up to make it really good.
     
    Will be going to grandmothers for tomorrow and the day after. Maybe I'll be able to run by the LEGO store near there.
  2. Sumiki
    -----We've put around three thousand miles on the vehicle since its last oil change/tire rotation in Anchorage, and the intervening three thousand include the Tok Cut-Off, the Top of the World Highway, and the vicious hills and traffic in the state of Washington. We wouldn't be able to get back home without a last stop at a dealership, and luckily, one was about a mile from where we stayed in Bozeman. My dad returned about forty-five minutes after leaving and reported that somehow, the brakes were in exactly the same condition as they were in Anchorage, i.e. nearly completely intact. The tires, having been worn down through our travels, have reached their half-life, meaning that we'll be able to get home on them with no problem and tens of thousands of miles left after that.
     
    -----Interstate 90 was again our route, and it was again surprising how familiar we were with it. Rain was again our companion for the first half of the journey, east to Billings before dropping south into Wyoming, but it stopped prior to our lunch in Sheridan at the Jimmy John's at which we ate last time. The gravel breaks came back again, this time as road work diverted traffic up and over an exit. We saw some pronghorn, but little in the way of other wildlife. Transitioning from the Rockies to the plains isn't a sudden flattening-out, but rather the rolling and meandering hills which we saw much of today.
     
    -----Past Sheridan lay Buffalo, and past Buffalo lay over sixty miles of nothing. When you look on a map, there isn't a single settlement between Buffalo and Gillette. This was where 80 MPH on the roads actually made some sense—or it would have, if it weren't for the wind which gusted up to 40 MPH. The few exits were local ranch access routes where the posted speed limit was a rip-roaring 10. But it took less than an hour to make the trip and we made it to Gillette. The hotel, as we'd figured from our reservation snafu, is not well-run, but their rooms are new and clean ... even if we had to fix the clock so it'd be the right time.
     
    -----Two years ago, we stayed here in Gillette and ate at a Mexican restaurant called Los Compadres. We remembered great salsa, huge portions, and tasty food, and this time we only got the first two. The fajitas had gristly meat steeped in standing oil, watery refried beans, barely-cooked tortillas, and utterly tasteless everything else. It's still the #1-ranked place in all of Gillette, which means that they either had an off night or have gone way downhill. It just was, and for their quasi-effort at a flavorful meal, I shudder to think of the product of whatever's ranked second to them.
     
    -----(Side note: when we started on this journey, we fully expected our worst meals to be on the Alaska Highway for its captured audience, but as it turns out, our worst experiences by far have been our return journey, from the putridity of Haines to the "pizza" of Forks to whatever this was. There's a reason we're sticking to Jimmy John's a lot!)
     
    -----Tomorrow: a return to the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota.
  3. Sumiki

    Forever

    By Sumiki,

    I don't usually post three blog entries in a row, but those pesky Library minions are keeping me way too busy. As if I don't have enough to do already.
     

    Forever


     
    The subtle waves swept onto the shoreline, lapsing peacefully back upon the ocean from whence they came. The wind was brisk and light, with the most indistinguishable of salty tangs to the air. The sea, such as it was, was slowly and forthrightly climbing onto the shoreline, doing its best to slowly eat away at the footsteps that so marred the sand.
     
    "You think this is such a good idea?" came a whispered call. A gruff grunt and a brusque shrug was all the response that he got.
     
    "Just a little more up ..."
     
    The sheer, striated rock wall that had consistently been around a hundred yards from them took a bend, sharply descending into a mess of boulders as it met with the sea. Beyond it, the two adventurers saw, there was wood.
     
    In the dim light of the waxing moon, and the modicum of light that the stars around it provided, golden points of light twinkled on the sand.
     
    "This is it. That's the shipwreck."
     
    "Looks like it was yesterday ..."
     
    The more ambitious of the two slid down the sand that coated the greatest of the boulders, leaving his own heavy boot prints on the soft and easily scarred sand.
     
    They were gold-diggers, at heart. They couldn't help it; it was in their genes and in their blood. Gold intrigued them and enticed them as few vices could, as addictions that they could not break themselves of.
     
    "Gold!" the taller, more bearded, and slightly denser of the two yelled. As obvious as this was, this only served to excite them further. Fumbling with their crowbars for a few moments, they cracked open chest after chest, uncovering priceless amounts of riches in one after another.
     
    They were like two little boys in a candy store, heaping piles of gold about themselves, garnishing their garish and unrestricted piles with silver, crowns, jewels, and precious minerals. Easily tired, they collapsed onto beds of riches, thinking their goldbrick selves to be set for life, if they figured out how to cash in on this hunch. And how hard could it be? They were quite literally sleeping on gold ...
     
    ***
     
    The next morning, the sea had rushed up to the rock wall that it, so long ago, had hewn. Seagulls flew over, rushing down only occasionally to eat something.
     
    Far above, where the last bits of sand ran out and the lushness of trees began, bits of rotted wood floated away, small coins coming with it.
     
    Treasure, such as it was, was theirs forever, down where no one would ever reach again.
  6. Sumiki

    Music of the Storm

    By Sumiki,

    -----We left Mitchell at 10:00 and hit I-90 towards Sioux Falls. For the first time since the day we left Olympia, we spent time off of that particular road, as we merged onto I-29 southbound towards Sioux City. But before Sioux City, we got off on ND-50 towards Vermillion, home of the National Music Museum. Like many of the great museums, it's one that withstands repeated visits and elicits the same stupefied fascination each time, even if a great many of their exhibits stay identical. Their Javanese Gamelan—one of the most complete outside Indonesia—had been brought down to the main floor for a recent performance by the local ensemble, and their front desk area was altered, but other than that it remained exactly as expected (and previously described in GART4: VI – "Clarinet on the Cob").
     
    -----My one complaint about the NMM is that, while the girl at the front desk was very pleasant, their Web site—only recently refurbished from the completely inadequate husk of one that they'd had theretofore—is filled with some of the most execrable pretentiousness this side of a tattooed hipster who passes off pieces of gravel as deep artistic expression. NMM policies prohibit returning e-mails of any kind to anyone who doesn't give them at least $100 per annum. Their communications director was, I have reason to believe, the leader of a tour group of entirely out-of-control kids who, despite being of small number, more than made up for it in complete obnoxiousness and loudly voiced desires for two demonstrations of an equally loud nickelodeon-style harmonium, which they got.
     
    -----Road construction marred the South Dakota-Iowa border, and it was the very road construction that, in 2015, gave us the pesky windshield crack that eventually forced us home from southern Utah in the course of three days. They've not made a lick of progress in as far as I can tell, but we got through it unscathed all the same. (It continues to bother me, however, that North Sioux City is the southernmost point in South Dakota.)
     
    -----We came down the western side of Iowa and split off before the Omaha metropolitan area—which we could see in the distance—and then headed halfway across the state to Des Moines. It's stereotypically Iowan countryside, with farmlands of corn and occasional cattle going up and down rolling hills as far as the eye could see. Various two-story houses—not skimpy on size—were placed under the shade of small groves of trees. It's one of those drives where the most exciting thing about it are some of the signs for the minor attractions situated a county away, such as John Wayne's birthplace. (We found the occasional deer sightings much more interesting.)
     
    -----We navigated through the residential area of West Des Moines to our hotel. Upon checking in, my dad almost immediately asked the girl at the front desk how close the nearest Culver's was, and she seemed a little concerned for his Butterburger® craving until we told her of our recent whereabouts and the fact that we can't get them at home.
     
    -----It was Culver's indeed, though to get out we had the issue of construction, which necessitated ... yes, you probably guessed it—a gravel break. (And in true gravel break fashion, we had to pass someone on its 1.5 lanes.) It was pleasant to be in an establishment where there, for once, weren't any rowdy kids under the watch of ineffectual parents. Most patrons seemed to be at the drive-through, and there seemed to be quite a few of them—though we looked out beyond them into the unusual sunset colors against the storm clouds of the south. They seemed to be further south and moving due east, but we didn't want to take any chances where hail two inches in diameter may be involved—and, sure enough, they soon called for such hail in Des Moines. Fortunately for us, the rest of the patrons of this hotel had not had the bright idea of moving their respective cars to shelter under the overhang of the adjoining—and currently unoccupied—convention center.
     
    -----We flipped the TV on, and it took us a while to locate the local channels. When we did, we soon learned that hail of such diameter—baseball-sized now, they warned—was not really much of a concern to them. If anything, the anchors treated the subject with detached fascination as opposed to the programming-preempting red alerts that such weather would warrant in North Carolina. Not even a ticker on the bottomline kept us informed during the commercial breaks. We waited for the hail to come, and the worst-looking cell passed with much lightning and much wind, but not a stone of hail.
     
    -----My dad, when realigning the car underneath its protective awning, let another car park behind, who turned out to be one with an Alaskan plate. As it turns out, the man who drove it was from Fairbanks and was familiar with the barbecue at Big Daddy's. He was shocked to find out that we drove the Alaska and Top of the World Highways with no punctured tires, no dings in the paint, and no cracks in the windshield.
     
    -----Tomorrow: across the rest of Iowa to Champaign, Illinois—unless, of course, we catch up with the slowly moving storm.
  7. Sumiki
    We left the hotel a little before 11:00 and got on the road to Cortez, Colorado. We passed through more rock formations similar to Arches or Canyonlands, saw swirly grass patterns and passed by a tourist trap called "Hole in the Rock" (though there are a great many holes in rocks in that area of the country), and encountered a bit of road construction but not enough to slow us down considerably.
     
    A bit after noon we entered Colorado, a state I've never been to before until today; we hit all of Colorado's surrounding states last trip. The scenery featured a bit more trees than the consistent scrub-brush of Utah, but was not all that different altogether. Within the hour we were in Cortez and turned to backtrack slightly along a 38-mile route to our first destination of the day: the Four Corners monument, the only place in the United States where four state corners meet. It's officially on an Indian reservation, so we paid the nominal fee to get in.
     
    There were more people there than I had anticipated, but getting parked and walking to the monument (which is essentially a large circular plaque on the ground) was still easy. This means that this trip also features Arizona on the list of states/provinces - we got to 25 last year and we're aiming to get to at least that number this time. (So far, we're at an even 20, so I don't think getting to 25 will be a problem.)
     
    (Side note: roads through Indian reservations are generally not very good. They're bumpy - as if the asphalt was poured directly on top of the terrain sans grading - and feature an insane amount of potholes. It always seems to be like this and I don't know why. We did run into road repainting - something the road very much did not need!)
     
    While our route did not take us to the official borders of Monument Valley, we got near there enough to see rock formations similar to what is found there. After Arches, though, I'm not sure what much Monument Valley has that could be better.
     
    We went back to Cortez, as that was the only way in and out that did not involve even more desolate roads than the ones we traversed. We finally found the Colorado welcome center, which, I have to say, is the worst welcome center I've ever seen. It was clean and all, but they simply do not make it easy to find. The sign is practically camouflage and there are no road signs to point it out. However, they did not, for some reason, have an official Colorado road map. I don't understand why - they're a freaking welcome center. What welcome center doesn't have maps?
     
    We got gas on the outskirts of Cortez and went a few more miles up the road to Mesa Verde National Park, the famous site of ancestral Pueblo homes constructed inside large holes in the mesa cliffs. The park was a bit different, as most of the tours up into the famous archaeological areas were led by park rangers. We discussed getting tickets for these, but with our feet still very sore after the many hikes in Arches yesterday and with all of us (for some bizarre reason) not having gotten enough sleep after said hikes, we skipped the longer tours. I didn't feel too bad about doing so, as we were later informed by a park ranger that the free tour of a dwelling called Spruce Tree House was better than the ranger-led tours as it was in better condition than the other, larger dwellings. (The same ranger told us that some bear had been spotted in the park recently - just our luck. We didn't see any, though.)
     
    Soon we were on the road through the park, and climbed up a huge number of switchbacks up to the top of the mesa, where the views out over the flat fields below were insanely cool. We didn't do any trails aside from the paved walk down to Spruce Tree House, which was basically a very small town consisting of three or four extended families living in stone-and-mortar dwellings halfway up a sheer cliff underneath a massive overhang. Average ancestral Puebloan size was roughly five feet, life expectancy was around 30 years old, and the infant mortality rate is estimated to have been about fifty percent. The windows and doors on the now-crumbling structures were quite small, and even if folks were allowed inside them I don't think very many people could fit.
     
    Circular underground ceremonial rooms, known as kivas, were sacred places for the Puebloans, and a reconstructed kiva was provided. I squeezed through the small hole down the slightly slippery ladder into the cool circular chamber - quite a nice place to beat the heat when you're dealing with southwestern temperatures.
     
    The Puebloans used the area behind their dwellings, where the overhang joins with the cliff, as a refuse area, where trash and animal carcasses were incinerated. (Soot can still be seen to stain the overhang as it goes back.) These unsanitary practices likely led to the poor conditions described earlier.
     
    With the heat becoming stifling and the lower halves of our bodies complaining after the effort they collectively expended yesterday, we headed back up the trail, where we saw an incredibly cute chipmunk nibbling on tree leaves.
     
    Barely able - and totally unwilling - to get out of the car further, we went along a small loop trail until we could get to a good view of the Cliff Palace, the largest of the Puebloan dwellings. The fact that these things are constructed literally inside the cliffs - and that the Puebloans had to climb up and down tiny handholds and footholds in the rock face daily - made them very impressive.
     
    (We also saw a wild turkey in there, and he was a big one.)
     
    As we went out of the park and descended the steep curves and hills, we spotted a group of wild horses. The descent out of Mesa Verde never just stops, as the roughly thirty-mile drive was almost all downhill. I was tired enough to sleep through a good portion of it, but was awoken to taking some scary turns at some equally scary speeds. The brakes did their job, but they've taken such an incredible beating on this trip that we're going to have to give them a check-up before we go up to 10,000 feet and down again en route to Alamosa, Colorado.
     
    We arrived in Durango and checked into our hotel. We'd seen a place just about a block from the hotel called Serious Texas Barbecue, and it came with high recommendations from the hotel staff.
     
    This place is little more than a shack with a couple of additions to it. Its dive-like qualities are emphasized by its old wooden construction and highly rickety nature, as well as the many Texas-themed signs stuck to pretty much every available open spot - including many that referenced "Kinky for Governor." When we asked about who this "Kinky" fellow was, and why he felt the need to run for the Governorship, we got the response of "ah ... Texas."
     
    Their apparently famous pulled pork sandwiches - featured on Live with Regis and Kelly - were absolutely huge and rank right up there with some of the best barbecue I've ever eaten. It came with some sort of cherry chipotle sauce which tasted less like cherries and more like delicious. Their sweet tea had about a gallon less sugar than our variety, but it was still tea and we got refills. As it turns out, one of the three girls who ran the place (and cooked up the delicious barbecue) was from just outside of Asheville. The more we travel, the more North Carolinians we encounter.
     
    We got a number of pictures of the quirky interior and headed back to the hotel room, where we're anticipating a good, long night of sleep.
     
    Tomorrow: another resting day as we take a short drive over to Alamosa, Colorado, which will serve as our base camp for sledding in Great Sand Dunes National Park. We'll also probably get the car looked at to make sure everything is still in order before we go up to 10,000 feet above sea level - all electronic diagnostics have come back clean, but there's no substitute for having someone who knows what they're looking at check things out.
  8. Sumiki

    Saab Story

    By Sumiki,

    Early this morning, my dad went and got the car looked at. The steering was funny when he drove in, with some terrible sounds emanating from the steering vicinity. Sure enough, the power steering system had a few leaks in it, necessitating a full overhaul.
     
    As a courtesy vehicle, the dealership loaned us practically the only car they had available for the purpose - an ancient Saab which didn't have back lights, had trouble turning over, made funny noises, and sounded especially bad if you tried to go anything over 30 miles an hour.
     
    By the time we'd straightened all of these things out - including a futile attempt at canceling our Boston reservations - we were ready to get lunch, which is where my mom and I had our first experience in the infamous Saab.
     
    We ended up at the same place we had dinner at last night. I had the same thing - lobster ravioli - except this time I had a clam chowder all to myself. My dad copied my order and my mom opted for a salad and a bowl of lobster bisque.
     
    After lunch, we got back to our rooms, where my parents took naps. I could tell they were tired, as they kept finding the most mundane things inordinately funny - "Cape Scrod" was one of the things that kept my mom rolling. Eventually they fell asleep, and were out for about an hour and a half.
     
    Upon their return to normal consciousness, we all felt a little hungry, so we debated where to go. None of us really wanted to get into that dang Saab any more than was absolutely necessary, so we went to the small hotel restaurant. I'd heard good things about their clam chowder, and it didn't disappoint - it was more peppery than the award-winning chowder I'd sampled previously, but I'd have to rate them pretty much equals.
     
    After dinner, we went out for a bit of exploring. In hindsight, this was a particularly ill-advised decision, although we did not know it was at the time. We didn't have the right light or the right car to go any farther eastward down Cape Cod, where it's said that the beaches are the best in the country, so we just decided to go south to see what we could of the sea.
     
    En route to the sea, we saw a store called a Christmas Tree Shop. I'd seen a few of these elsewhere on the Cape, and I thought that it was sort of a strange thing to base a year-round chain on. As it turns out, Christmas Tree Shops don't have Christmas trees ... or anything Christmas-themed ... or any trees. It's essentially the Cape Cod equivalent of a Dollar Tree, as we found out when we looked around to see if we could find an ornament for my mom's Collection.
     
    With that out of the way, we found the sea. With the sun rapidly setting, the temperature at 55 degrees and dropping, and the wind billowing in at a steady 30 MPH, we bolted out to the beach, got a few pictures, and bolted back to the safety of the Saab. We wondered if the car would fall apart upon our return journey, but it made it back, despite many desperate squeals from the engine region.
     
    (Side note: it turns out that there is a strong Brazilian community here near Hyannis. Brazilian markets, churches, and pizzerias abound along one particular area of our route between hotel and beach. We asked the lady at the front desk about it, and she said that, though many nationalities visit, the Brazilians have made a permanent home in Cape Cod.)
     
    We're now winding down, enjoying what's left of this off day before we get back on the road tomorrow. We'll be going through Boston as opposed to staying in Boston, as there are literally zero available rooms anywhere in the greater Boston area. I don't know what's going on there, but our plan is just to see history and move on through to New Hampshire.
  9. Sumiki

    The Staff Inflection

    By Sumiki,

    -----There were no clouds when we left West Des Moines, and post-mediocre waffles, we set out for downtown. The fastest route was through the city, and along the route lay the stadium of the Iowa Cubs, Chicago's Triple-A affiliate. With no game on the docket, we waltzed past the silent front desk people and straight into the team store, where there was no one there. My dad's timid "hellos" would have echoed eerily had the store been larger.
     
    -----Most of what the Iowa Cubs sell is just regular Cubs merchandise with "Iowa" in script stuffed in somewhere nearby. It's a half-cooked aesthetic and prevents the team from having its own identity. Their pennant was in this vein—though cheaper than most are—and we were checked out by a college intern who looked half-asleep, which added to the dreariness of her already pancake-flat personality. I would usually diagnose an especially rowdy party on the prior night, but she seemed the type for whom a slightly different shade of mayonnaise would provoke a faint.
     
    -----Pennant in tow, we were back on the road, and it wasn't too much longer that we got out of Des Moines. The downtown area was cute—in as far as downtown areas are concerned, as I view most cities as basically the same sort of thing anyway—but we had the rest of Iowa and most of Illinois to go. Our next stop was the college town of Iowa City, whose signage heavily implies that it used to be the state capital. Being a college town, there was no Jimmy John's shortage. I don't want to abandon forever the idea of going to local places, but sticking to an eating schedule has really helped us make tracks back across the country.
     
    -----Not far from Iowa City is West Branch, best known for being the birthplace of Herbert Hoover. History tends to make his presidency out as ineffective at best and malicious at worst and his legacy is relegated to being amongst the five or ten worst to ever hold office. He was known as the Great Humanitarian for his civilian work in bringing large-scale food relief to Europeans during World War I, putting in long days to help them through the crisis. When the Great Depression hit on his watch, he turned back to the way his family would weather the periodic recession or depression, and assumed that wealth would be infused into the economy much as he had helped in Europe. By the time things got worse, he was too unpopular—and too much of a lame duck—to get anything done.
     
    -----Hoover rehabilitated himself in the public eye until his death in 1964, mostly by temporal distance from the Depression era. He had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and possessed an optimistic ideology about the elimination of poverty. Yet his work in the public eye went well beyond the public perception of his ineptitude, even in the Depression, when he sought to bolster the financial infrastructure in subtle ways and at arm's length.
     
    -----His birthplace, which is integrated into the cute and historic West Branch, is next to his Presidential Library and Museum. We hadn't the time to visit that part of things, but we spoke for a long while with a park ranger stationed outside Hoover's reconstructed two-room boyhood home, where we picked his brain about Hoover's reasons for being ineffective despite being the "Great Humanitarian." In West Branch, they're all fans of a usually disliked figure, so I get the sense that they enjoy getting to dig into the details of his life.
     
    -----About a half-hour's drive from West Branch is the Quad Cities area, and we were after a pennant from the Quad Cities River Bandits, whose historically located stadium—literally right across the train tracks, and with a view of the Mississippi River and Illinois beyond—was ranked the best in the Minor Leagues by USA Today. Its size and amenities made me guess at least Double-A, but they were in fact Single-A. The three people with whom we shared interaction had the kinds of monotone voices that could put inanimate objects to sleep, and I realized then that they weren't bored or upset with us ... it was—unfortunately—just the way they talked.
     
    -----The ticket office guy sent us inside, where the secretary gave a call to someone else, who came down the steps and shuttled us up the elevator to the team store on the main concourse. Their hats were quite cool and we got one for that collection as well as our requisite pennant. Their store even had an enormous bobblehead of their mascot, who cheers on a team that the man who checked us out called "somewhat competitive." They even had a lounge—well, an upscale bar—on the concourse behind home plate, where motion-filled quasi-abstract paintings of River Bandits players adorned the brick walls.
     
    -----Upon returning to our car, I'm sure those involved with the process of getting us in to get our pennant were stunned—for several completely silent hours, no doubt—about the fact that three people came in with actual inflections in their voices. (Perish the thought!)
     
    -----We went over a rather rickety-looking bridge—which we were told was erected before American involvement in World War II—and went into Illinois. We ended up going through three of the Quad Cities. Illinois, though it may be about to default on its debt, still has room for expansive road construction segments all over I-74, and there were seemingly more of those infernal things than actual road—which was itself in bad shape. I've seen better Yukon roads, and I shouldn't have to say that.
     
    -----After skirting around Peoria, we got gas in the town of Carlock, which is quite a funny name for a place to get gas. It wasn't long thereafter that we reached the Champaign-Urbana area, where we got the scenic tour of about two miles through the heart of downtown. I can't figure the place out, as derelict buildings and questionable characters are perhaps only a few hundred feet from extremely affluent sections of uppity restaurants and outdoor concerts. The whole place, as far as I've seen, is a patchwork city.
     
    -----We drove through the local Culver's. We had every intention of getting out and going inside, but several large families were already in there and we could see writhing masses of children cooped up inside. What really sealed the deal against going inside was a girl who let out a blood-curdling scream at us while being driven by, apparently just for kicks. Crazed Champaigners were not the kinds of Champaigners with which we wanted to interact.
     
    -----Tomorrow: we finally get that pesky Indianapolis pennant en route to Lexington, Kentucky.
  10. Sumiki
    Blogarithm Contest #1: Strange PMs!
    Objective: Come up with the a bizarre PM.
    Contest Period: October 8-10, 2009
    Entries: 11
    Winners: -Toa Lhikevikk-, HercuLesss, ChocolateFrogs, and Mesonak
    Prizes: PBZP MOCs.
     
    Blogarithm Contest #2: Subtitles!
    Objective: Come up with a subtitle for Blogarithm.
    Contest Period: October 22-25, 2009
    Entries: 18
    Winner: Jonah Falcon
    Prize: Subtitle used on Blogarithm for one month.
     
    Blogarithm Contest #3: Home Improvement!
    Objective: Come up with a concept for an improvement to BZP.
    Contest Period: August 27-September 4, 2010
    Entries: none (contest canceled)
     
    Blogarithm Contest #4: Fresh Salad!
    Objective: Build a MOC that integrates a fruit or vegetable.
    Contest Period: January 1-February 29, 2012
    Entries: 4
    Winner: Sparkytron's Dr. Bananabot
    Prize: none
     
    Blogarithm Contest #5: Biographical!
    Objective: Write Sumiki's staff biography.
    Contest Period: June 15-23, 2012
    Entries: 5
    Prize: Usage in Sumiki's official staff biography.
     
    Blogarithm Contest #6: Topic Closed!
    Objective: Create a hilarious topic-closing post.
    Contest Period: September 19-26, 2012
    Entries: 32
    Winner: Lego Obsessionist
    Prize: Have your topic-closing post used on the forums.
     
    Blogarithm Contest #7: The Wisdom of Sumiki!
    Objective: Guess the nature of Sumiki's surreal status updates.
    Contest Period: January 4-15, 2014
    Entries: 11
    Winner: Paleo
    Prizes: An autographed selfie and an engraved "Dreams About Farm Animals" brick
     
    Blogarithm Contest #8: The Great Vine Challenge!
    Objective: Provide the concept to a six-second Vine made by Sumiki, Zatth, Xaeraz, Takuma Nuva, and others at BrickFair VA 2014.
    Contest Period: July 28-30, 2014
    Entries: 9
    Winners: Octodad, Makuta Luroka, and Kitania
    Prizes: The completed Vines from BrickFair VA.
     
    Blogarithm Contest #9: Vakama Eats Spam‽
    Objective: Come up with a Sumiki's Dad-esque reason for why Vakama would eat Spam.
    Contest Period: December 7-14, 2014
    Entries: 13
    Winner: Portalfig
    Prizes: Appearance in The Adventures of Sumiki's Dad 2: Vakama Eats Spam and a signed copy of the complete Adventures of Sumiki's Dad saga.
     
    Blogarithm Contest #10: Express Building!
    Objective: Build a MOC using twenty pieces or fewer.
    Contest Period: August 7-15, 2015
    Entries: 15
    Winner: Paleo's Separator Monster
    Prize: An engraved brick
  12. Sumiki

    Water We Doing

    By Sumiki,

    -----Over the past several days, our hotel breakfasts have been slipping from the upward side of mediocrity down towards the barely edible. After a couple of pancakes that hardly deserved the name—and how on Earth do you mess up a pancake?—we headed out of Champaign towards the Indiana border. We picked up much traffic en route to Indianapolis, and instead of skirting around it, we went directly into its heart to Victory Field, home of the Triple-A Indianapolis Indians.
     
    -----But what was to become the enduring theme of our time in Indiana is that you can't drink the water. Something—I know not what—happened to the water supply in the entire region. A sign was posted on rest areas saying that water should be boiled for five minutes before using, and that same rest area featured a man mumbling to himself in one of the stalls.
     
    -----We entered Indianapolis on the bad side of town, and made it around heavily tilted buses to the downtown complex that includes Lucas Oil Stadium—home of the Indianapolis Colts—as well as Victory Field, which we were after. Being Saturday, they were using the stadium for the high school championship tournament, and it had a decent-sized crowd. We explained our inexplicable quest to the folks letting people in, and they allowed my dad to idle the car outside while my mom and I ran in to get a pennant.
     
    -----They had no pennant, but they were nice about it and we got a hat instead. They're between styles of pennant and as of yet have not received their new shipment, but since we've been there—finally, after three times in the immediate area—we'll allow ourselves the luxury of ordering one.
     
    -----If there is a more heinous and hideous stretch of Interstate in the country than the one between Indianapolis and Louisville, I've yet to witness it. Trucks would seemingly make a game of passing each other, nearly swiping oblivious and speeding cars off the road and nearly tipping over themselves. Not a single highway patrol car was so much as parked on the side of the road to enforce the rules and customs associated with a pleasant highway experience. On top of all this, the road surface itself was so pockmarked that I longed for the Klondike Highway for the second time in as many days.
     
    -----We exited the highway in Columbus in pursuit of our daily Jimmy John's lunch, but it was much too far off of the highway. The built-up area featured a menagerie of restaurants and gas stations, so we pulled into a Culver's only to realize that not only was it closed, but every other eating establishment was as well. In the door was pasted a sign saying that they were closed due to the water contamination. Gas was the only thing we could get before we got back on the infernal road south.
     
    -----There was a toll bridge across the Ohio River to Louisville, but the toll never materialized. Instead, the nastiness of the Indiana road was now the nastiness of the Kentucky road, and the worst offenders were those who were hauling things that they ought not to have been and/or had University of Kentucky paraphernalia on their bumpers or back windshields. There was something decidedly unpleasant about having to drive through it, but the sheer amount of traffic had cleared out significantly.
     
    -----We got off in the suburbs of Lexington for a Culver's dinner, as it is the last time we'll eat their cheese curds and burgers and pot roast sandwiches for a long while. It wasn't crammed with the screaming kids we'd come to expect, and it was not long before we were working our way through the pastoral Kentucky countryside, past horse farms and rolling pastures, to the suburb of Winchester, where our hotel's miserable exterior belies one of the most updated and fancy interiors we've been at. (They even have a small spread of hors d'oeuvres near the front desk.)
     
    -----Tomorrow: we get home.
  15. Sumiki
    my parents' 31st wedding anniversary



    We had a small breakfast at our Hyannis hotel, then checked out, loitering in the lobby at the business-center computers looking up routes to Boston until the dealership called. They called, and we left, the last time I'd ever be in that terrible excuse for a car, the loaner Saab. As always, it barely turned over, but it got us to the dealership amid rain, wind, and cold blowing in off of the Atlantic.
     
    Back in our car by 12:15, we rolled out of the dealership and made good time off of Cape Cod. We stopped for gas a little before 1:00, knowing that we'd likely get snarled up in traffic as we approached Boston. We'd looked at several different routes, but there was little difference in time between them - going up secondary roads or just sucking it up and going up the Interstate into Boston would get us there at the same time. As such, we just decided to go up the Interstate, which would be the most direct route.
     
    Our first stop, however, was the town of Plymouth, site of the famous Plymouth Rock. We found some parking and got out to see the rock, which is underneath a neo-Gothic façade which keeps people from touching it yet keeps it on the beach, near its original location. While it has shrunk in size to about a third of what it was - due to tourists grabbing their own chunks, as well as the natural forces of erosion - and has been moved from its original location for display elsewhere, it's still there to see.
     
    I wish I could say that it was impressive, but ... well, it's just a rock. There's really not a whole lot to it.
     
    Plymouth Rock itself is in a complex also housing a replica of the Mayflower, which we would have gone to - but the weather was very bad. It threatened to rip hats off and send us flying into the air aloft on our umbrellas à la Mary Poppins. The cold - about 50 degrees - turned into a biting chill with the help of the wind, and the rain, while not hard, sliced diagonally at anyone unfortunate or insane enough to be walking around.
     
    We made surprisingly good time out of Plymouth and onto the Interstate up to Boston. Traffic increased and there were some slower sections, but we never came to a complete stop. Along the way, the most interesting thing was a truck built to re-arrange the concrete barriers along the side of the highway. It'd roll through the lane, feed the barriers through its body, and deposit them on the other side, thus marking off the lane.
     
    At 1:49 we crossed over the river into the Boston city limits, and a little after 2:00 we'd parked in a parking deck in Cambridge, just across from the U.S.S. Constitution. The ship - "Old Ironsides" - was our first stop of the day, although we tried to keep our time spend outside to a minimum. The Constitution was never officially decommissioned, and thus could still officially be sent into active duty - although her weaponry is over 200 years out of date.
     
    We toured around above and below deck, saw some things, asked a few questions ... but all in all, there was nothing particularly special or mind-blowing about this ship as compared to other old ships I've been on. As far as history is concerned, the Constitution has a long and gloried one - many victories in the War of 1812, a trip around the world in the 1840s, and has sailed under her own power in 1997 and 2012.
     
    From the Constitution, we hoofed it over to Bunker Hill. Though the celebrated Battle of Bunker Hill was a victory for the British - a fact sometimes overlooked or downplayed by jingoistic historians - the casualties for the British were immense. The American loss was due to lacking another round of ammunition for their muskets - when the ammo was out and hand-to-hand fighting commenced, the British were the only ones with bayonets.
     
    One of the more interesting characters in the battle was Joseph Warren, a doctor who was commissioned as a Major General in the Massachusetts militia shortly before the battle began. He opted instead to enter the battle as a private, and was killed during the final British assault. His death served to spur on the movement for independence, as he was the first real martyr of the Revolutionary War.
     
    After the battle, his mangled body was identified by none other than Paul Revere, who organized a proper Masonic burial. Despite having relatively little impact while alive, he was immortalized in statues and in town and county names across the nascent nation.
     
    Ironically, most of the fighting at the Battle of Bunker Hill didn't actually take place on Bunker Hill, but rather on nearby Breed's Hill. While most of these hills are now taken up by quaint houses, the spot where Warren was killed now has an immense stone obelisk. We got our tickets inside the Bunker Hill museum and proceeded to walk up the hill.
     
    For the obelisk is not a solid structure - it's hollow, with 294 granite steps to the top.
     
    It was a long walk - one which I made much faster than my parents - but the views from the top were excellent, although the windows were rather small. After resting from the climb at the top (and looking down the grate right down the center of it), we went back all 294 steps, which was a considerably easier endeavor.
     
    With some light left, we headed back out into Boston itself - technically these first two stops were in Cambridge - along the Freedom Trail, a link between historical sites in and around Boston denoted by red bricks in the pavement. Getting to Boston meant walking over a bridge. The walking surface was a massive grate, which meant that one could look down all the way into the water below ...
     
    (At the beginning of the bridge, there's a spray-painted sign on the ground: "Acrophobia Friendly Zone." I don't think they're kidding.)
     
    Once across the bridge, we decided - a little on the spur of the moment - to eat in an Italian restaurant. It was exceptionally authentic - I'm pretty sure our server was the owner and a first-generation Italian-American. I got a dish of calamari (tentacles and all - yum!) served with a rich tomato sauce over linguine. My parents got the same thing, some sort of crab-farfalle concoction which was a little bit of a let-down. Despite this, we enjoyed the authenticity, appreciated a little time away from the bustle of Boston, and really came to appreciate the quick service.
     
    We got to the Old North Church five minutes before they closed up. It's still in use today, and you can tell that they've kept it up - the pews are boxed off and rented out to families, who could, historically, do what they wanted to do with regards to decorating them. The pulpit was accessible by spiral staircase, the week's hymns were put on a board for all to see, and the place, in general, looked simply divine - pun intended.
     
    Leaving the Old North Church, we continued along the trail to Paul Revere's house. We got there just a few minutes before it closed as well, and were able to have enough time to leisurely work our way through the four rooms of the house open on the tour and pick the brains of the two ladies who served there as tour guides.
     
    We learned interesting information on the production of accidental stained glass, the fate of Paul Revere's manufacturing company, his immense family, and architectural trends of different periods, as the downstairs was decorated like the 1690s, when the structure was built, and the upstairs like the 1790s, when the Reveres lived there.
     
    Working our way back, we noticed something - we were in Little Italy. We heard Italian spoken on street corners, saw dozens of Italian restaurants, and saw three shady-looking characters dressed in all black, loitering outside a building. I generally like to assume the best in people, but I'd honestly be surprised if those guys weren't involved in some kind of black-market dealings. They were simply too stereotypical.
     
    With the wind and rain having long since stopped, we worked our way back through the quaint and surprisingly quiet little neighborhoods, then back out over the bridge and finally to the car. We'd managed to do everything we'd come to do in a little less than four hours.
     
    At 6:00 we left the parking garage and began worming our way out of Boston. This was insane, mainly because we had to go through a traffic circle. Now, traffic circles are generally not that bad. In fact, for most low-traffic intersections, I'd like to see more traffic circles. But this one had about a million people in it, a million people trying to get off of it, a thousand people cutting a thousand other people off, and exactly zero demarcated lanes.
     
    You read that right - there were none of those handy dashed lines to mark off the lanes, which turned the traffic circle into a road-rage-fueled free-for-all. After getting through this mess, we were confronted with even more roads without lane markings, until we finally were back on the Interstate, with the same start-stop traffic as earlier.
     
    After a few interchanges, we made it to the hotel.
     
    Now, most hotels are generally built as a solid block, with the lobby, amenities, and maybe a few rooms on the first floor, with the upper floors devoted exclusively to rooms. This hotel is built nothing like that - it's sprawling, spreading its wings and floors out to fifteen different counties and three time zones. It took ten minutes of walking to get to a room only a floor above the lobby.
     
    After a long day of walking - not to mention up and down those 294 steps - we really weren't looking forward to walking anywhere, but we were still hungry and we knew we had to. With the traffic of the day, it was an easy decision to eat at the hotel. My parents split a lobster roll, and I got the second-largest sandwich that I've ever seen, which consisted of a massive hunk of fried cod, garnished with massive slices of vegetables - but, despite the immenseness of both tomato and lettuce, they just seemed puny when compared with the enormousness of the fish.
     
    I ate it all.
     
    We finished it off with a cheesecake garnished like a turtle - caramel and chocolate sauce over the top, with three chunks of walnut over that.
     
    Tomorrow: more history at Concord and Lexington before heading north to New Hampshire. The second leg of this trip is about to begin.
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