Washington state

I just had the most wonderful week visiting the state of Washington.
We made a point of finding a few caches on the way. This one was a virtual, at a historic gas station made to look like a teapot:



But the most fun was in Seattle, where I spent a lot of time at the Seattle Center, site of the World's Fair in 1962. Here is the Peace Garden:


This is situated almost directly under the Space Needle, and I suppose if it weren't for the glass windows preventing it, people could have spit on me down below. They might have hit me, or they might have hit the numerous homeless people. These homeless people are, as the name of the park implies, very peaceful. They peacefully ask for money because they just got their duffel bag stolen, or they need money for their father's spleen operation, or for a bus ticket home so they can escape their life of drugs/prostitution/whatnot.

Something you have to do in Seattle is go to the Pike street market, where they throw fish around and yell at each other. It was a little crowded the day we went - not because of the homeless people, which are actually entertaining at the market, but because we managed to coincide our visit with that of a cruise ship, but we still enjoyed the time we spent. We ate at a nice little Greek restaurant several levels below and off the obvious trails to avoid the crowds - very good lamb, plus some things I can't pronounce much less spell. Here are the fish being thrown:




Then, back to the Science center to pay admission to the Experimental Music Project and Science Fiction Museum, which is also under the shadow of the Space Needle. Paying admission is a good thing because it gets you clear of the homeless people plying their trade. Here's the Space Needle, in all its glory:



...and once inside, you can see things like the original costumes worn in Blade Runner, and the original Captain's station in the Starship Enterprise - not the Captain Picard one, but the one that William Shatner parked his butt in. I saw a First Edition of Have Space Suit Will Travel, which is the first Science Fiction novel I ever read. Use the provided link to see a picture of the cover of that first edition.

One fun thing to do is the Seattle Underground Tour. It takes about 90 minutes and 15 bucks, and the first half hour is a very cheesy history lesson given by (in our case) a relatively attractive young lady, before they turn you over to a somewhat less skilled and personable tour guide. It's worthwhile mostly because you finally understand why Seattle is built so funny. Apparently, it has to do with the fact that the sewage system was unworkable with the way the hills dumped the crap on the low lying areas next to the ocean, where the brothels and opium dens were.

But probably the biggest thrill was seeing the very guitar that Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock - the white Fender Stratocaster used to produce the gentle, melodious sounds of the Star Spangled Banner on Yasger's farm, where only 30,000 or so of the former half million concert goers were left to see it, the rest having gone home to their jobs after taxing "the system" with their emergency disaster needs (while reveling in the idea that their lifestyle was sustainable in the real world because they had done it for three days). Here is that guitar, a bit blurry because the lights were reverently dim and I was using my cell phone:


By the way, they don't ask for "spare change" anymore. Now it's 14 bucks for something they need. Inflation has taken its toll.

Highway 287

Lately, highways have begun to fascinate me. I think it started with the realization that highway 6, just outside my HOA, is the same highway that goes through Copper Breaks State Park and Quanah, TX, and just past one of the first caves I ever entered without paying an admission fee and following a paid tour guide. Here, it has six lanes of slow, busy traffic, but in Quanah, it's a two-lane that doesn't pose much of a threat to the occasional armadillo.

I often make a trip to or from Houston and Wichita Falls. About half the trip is on Interstate 45, which some consider to be one of the worst in the nation, but which I find easy compared to certain stretches of I-35 south of Dallas. The other half is done on hwy 287, which goes right through Wichita Falls, and to the northwest, intersects with hwy 6... in Quanah.

Hwy 287 goes south from Wichita Falls through Fort Worth, Grapeville, Palestine, and Port Arthur. It goes north to Memphis (TX), through the Oklahoma panhandle, on to Denver, and then on into Wyoming, Montana... and eventually on to the Canadian border, though it keeps getting less and less important on the way, so that Google maps doesn't even bother with the number after it leaves Choteau, MT.

It never got the respect that Route 66 got - songs, TV shows, T shirts - but the original R66 was a two lane with no shoulders crossing that romantic desert west, while 287 was a mighty four lane divided highway almost every inch between the gulf coast and Denver.

The lesson is that if you're near the writers in LA or New York, you get attention out the wazoo. Everybody else gets nada, regardless of merit. That's why they call us "fly-over country." Yet, for some reason, we let those overpaid stuffed shirts tell us what we're supposed to think, and how to vote.

It's worth remembering.

Putting the Punk in Punctuality

There are many things I like about living in the Houston area. There are also things I don't like, such as the common practice of leaving shopping carts where you empty them, even when the cart rack is only ten feet away. One thing I don't like at all around here is the complete lack of punctuality. Whether you're dealing with the cable company, the refrigerator repairman, the plumber, or the pest control company, they never keep their appointments. If they make the appointment for "in the morning," you can expect them at 5:15 pm. If they say 9:30, the earliest they offer, you won't see them before noon.

Is my time worth nothing? ARS called me yesterday and offered me a discount if they could come out and service my air conditioning system. I don't need them, mind you, I just thought it would be a good idea to get it done, so I took them up on their offer and let them give me a time they could come out. They're over an hour late (so far), and they haven't even bothered to call. So I have to put my own errands on hold because I don't know when they're going to show up.

This is the way it's done down here in the Houston area. When my POS Whirlpool refrigerator required repeated servicing (a dozen times or so), they never once showed up on time - or even in the same half-day window.

I'm beginning to wonder if I should bother staying past the first hour. Just let them show up and wonder where I went.

Dialysis R Us

I'm used to finding all manner of paper and cardboard hanging from my doorknob. It's usually somebody trying to scrounge up business, for a lawn care company, or maybe a maid service.

Today, on my way out of the house to toss one more plastic bottle into the recycle tub out at the curb before the waste management people arrived to make my world a cleaner place, I saw a new one: a slick brown cardboard advertisement hanging from the knob. This one was for home dialysis.

Is this the best way to get new customers for dialysis? Are they trying to be the first to get to me when I suffer from renal failure? Is this kind of like ambulance chasing for your kidneys?

I can just see the dad in the household, coming home from work and pulling the card from the door, reading the ad, and calling up to everyone upstairs in the TV room: "Hey! Anybody up there need any dialysis? They got a special on this week."

"Not today, dear... but put it in the coupon drawer, in case something comes up."

"OK. My pee does smell a little strong lately."

"Want me to call a doctor?"

"Naw. Doctors don't know nothin'. If my eyes turn yeller, we'll know who to call."

I love this place.

Sea World and the greedy dolphin slavemasters

So we went to San Antonio this Saturday to meet the grandkids for a day of romping in the wet attractions, and to see Shamu.



Going on a Saturday in August is NOT a good idea. While I did enjoy seeing the kiddos, Sea World made me feel less like a customer or visitor than a cash cow.

Even on the best of days, you would have to say that this is a very expensive theme park to visit, but at least you'd have a good time. But they apparently make no effort to avoid over-selling the park. We were first greeted by the kid selling the parking permits: $15 a car, which is ridiculous. But it's their park, so we had to pay it.

We had already bought our tickets online, costing over a hundred bucks for the two of us. Once in the gate, though, we found it so crowded that we could barely turn around. For my part, I was able to ride two roller coasters once each, and I saw the 4D pirate film, and I saw Shamu Rocks Texas. To accomplish the Shamu admission, we had to stand in line in the sun for an hour before they even started letting people in - otherwise we couldn't even get standing room in the back. Georganne didn't even do the roller coasters or the pirate film.

Getting lunch required a wait in line for 45 minutes! And then we had to fight to get a place to sit down and eat.

To add insult to injury, Sea World has taken a hint from Disney and started selling Fast Passes, where you pay extra and you can jump the line ahead of the other people who have already been waiting for their hour, thus making their wait even longer, and Sea World's pockets even fuller. For the record, I find the whole concept of Fast Passes unfair and obscene. After waiting all that time, and finally getting to the ride, when I'm NEXT - oh, sorry sir, these people have a Fast Pass so you'll have to wait for them.

Again, it's their park, so they can run it as they please, but it seems to me that there should be a limit on admissions to prevent overcrowding. There were at least twice as many people in that park than there should have been.

On the plus side, and I always like to be an optimist, the Killer Whales (all of which are named Shamu) are magnificent, smart animals. And the Steel Eel is one screamer of a roller coaster.

And after the day ended, and the sun went down, we had a very pleasant stay at the Holiday Inn Express nearby, which had a Shamu mural on the elevator door.

Galveston

I guess I never realized how much fun Galveston could be.

The grandkids were here for a week - with their parents, of course, which makes it even more fun - but we saw this ad for Moody Gardens, which has recently reopened after getting drowned by Hurricane Ike.

I mostly wanted to go because of the dinosaur-related stuff. See, they have these pyramids - three of them - and one is an aquarium complex, where you can go down several floors and see replicas of several coral reefs in the world. They've figured out how to reproduce the corals so we can visit living specimens in their natural environment. Well, sort of natural. It's a fake natural, but it's real coral.

Another is kind of a general scientific interest pyramid, which has what I came to see, the dinosaur stuff. They have an Imax movie I've been wanting to see for years: Dinosaurs Alive, in 3D. You better believe I enjoyed that, even if the narrator did say stupid things like "Less than 2% of dinosaur species have been discovered," which is mathematical nonsense, since we're expressing a percentage of an unknown quantity by definition. I don't care - I just love seeing realistic 3D dinosaurs trying to bite me right in front of my face.



My favorite was the third pyramid (in no particular order), the rain forest. Here, you can follow a comfortable path and see specimens of plants from rain forests of the world, including coffee trees, cocoa bean trees, and vanilla orchids. Did you know that vanilla comes from orchids? I sure didn't.


Weird flowers in the rain forest pyramid. Photo by wm

There were colorful birds, turtles and fishies in the pools of the pyramid, and I want to go again so I can wander more slowly.


Birds in Moody Gardens rain-forest pyramid. Photo by wm

After spending the day at Moody Gardens, GA thought it would be a great idea to take the Bolivar ferry off the island. It was a good idea, since the grandkids had never been on one, and as far as I know had never been on the ocean except for the beach. So we went across to Bolivar, then turned right back around and came back to Galveston. It happened to be sunset as we made the crossing, which was perfect timing.


Sunset on the Bolivar ferry. Photo by wm

setting the clock in Midland

While staying in the Holiday Inn Express in Midland TX recently, we were unable to set the clock. It had a convenient label glued to the top of the clock, explaining in exciting detail how to set the alarm - good thing, too, because it was like finding the Easter Egg on a Sony DVD. You have to hold this button down while pressing the Alarm button, and you have to hold your tongue just right.

But it doesn't do much good to set the alarm if the clock is six and a half hours off. I suppose you could offset the alarm time by that same six and a half hours, but I didn't think of that, because we had already had too many margaritas at Summer Mummers. Besides, we were still shedding popcorn all over their carpet.

Turns out the trick is to find the power button and press it. I'm not sure it was turning it on or off, but it doesn't matter - you press it and the hidden clock button starts responding (it's under the clock). As far as I could tell, nothing was really being turned on or off by pressing the power button, but it somehow affected the clock button. So, to set that button:

1. Turn the clock over.
2. Press the power button.
3. Hold down the clock button and press the hour button. If nothing happens, press the power button again.
4. Still holding the clock button down, press the minutes button until the time is correct.
5. Now you can set the alarm, by following the instructions glued to the top of the clock - if they are still there.

As for setting the radio stations, that one is beyond me.