Booyor’s BLOGgh!

It has been a quick adjustment to the small town style. I love the fact that my daughter could play out front with her cousins and she was safe - that’s cool.

Saturday night I was talking on the phone with my dad after dark. (The way I knew it was late was because the fire station did its nightly 9pm emergency klaxon test. You know, like an air raid?) While talking on my cell walking down the street, I heard three house doors open, pause, slam, click lock. That I could get used to. I just walked in the middle of the street and talked quieter.

The more disturbing part were the backlit silhouettes in the windows. Staring. As my dad says, I was Saturday night cable. I hope the town warms up to the 6′9″, Scion xB-driving (should I mention the MacBook?) city boy before the July 3 boot scoot. Yeah. Wasn’t that the plotline to Footloose?

I have some very funny stories (especially for those following my Twitter feed in the “From the Field” sidebar), but I also have some crazy stories. Everyone knows everyone’s business.

Literally, business.

Everyone knows who’s making what and where it goes. I mean, the car dealership has everyone come out and shake your hand when you buy a car. “I’ll be working on your brakes.” “I do mufflers.”

But there’s some downsides to knowing more info than in a big city.

Gas Prices

Town Pump
7985 Highway 200 E
Missoula, MT 59801
$4.05/ gallon regular unleaded

Town Pump
Highway 93 S
Polson, MT 59860
$3.98/ gallon regular unleaded

as of June 30, 2008

Here’s the complaint: people know the truckers. They know that the fuel trucks go to Missoula first and then Polson. Polson has more shipping tax/trucking expenditures and yet is cheaper. The Missoula people traditionally charge more than Polson, sometimes from 10 to 15 cents more.

This doesn’t sit well with Small Town, U.S.A. We also have a major oil refinery and coker here (cokers turn left-overs from the refinery process into usable stuff like asphalt. Yep. Makes you want to reach for that Diet Coke, right?). Townspeople know that the price of oil for Montana and all of its exporting areas was bid and locked in months, sometimes years, ago. Gas prices are a very sore subject here because they know the people trying to rip them off at the gas pump.

But the most fun I’ve had so far with small town dynamics is the “Don Quixote Project”.

Being a refinery/coker town, Laurel is also a train town. (Laurel High Locomotives. Get it?) Trains go non-stop, 24/7. Each time they pass a crossing, they must sound their horn. Makes sense. But the funny/annoying thing is that you can hear the signal from the next town, your town, and the town coming up. Horns blow all the time, especially at night “when no one notices”. (Unless you have an infant.)

But the issue is that the townspeople of Laurel are being trained to ignore the trains. (My youngest daughter adjusted by the second night and slept right through them.) In a town that has had only 3 train-related accidents in the past 30 years (2 involving people getting hit by the 5th/6th cars of a train by trying to go around the crossing arms (don’t ask) and 1 where the guy was drunk), people are starting to get a little too cozy with the crossings.

The town has adopted the Don Quixote Project (called that at city hall) and they are trying to take on Big Rail. (The guy at Hardee’s had a “S. Whiplash” nametag, but now that you mention it, his moustache did look familiar.)

The funnier/scarier part is early in the morning the trains will stop on the tracks so the engineers can get out to get breakfast.

The town is surrounded by tracks. The morning trains trap the town. In order to get from the south side of town to the north, you have to go to the neighboring town, loop around, and come back to Laurel on a different route. The volunteer fire/EMT department beats the state average in response time by 6 minutes.

Unless they have to go to the other town first.

Surprisingly, more than a few babies have been delivered in parking lots.

You gotta love small towns

with all its quirks.

I have killed lots of things on this trip.

I should correct that statement.

My Scion xB has killed many things on this trip. Awesome handling, powerful air conditioner, lots of technology, and a style that has had many people stop and stare in the windows/check my tires without realizing that I was sitting there watching them.

But the cool box shape?
Death. Lots of death.

I have hit every single bug from Arizona to Montana. I have washed my windshield five times. There’s different manner of wings, antennae, and whatever is inside bugs all over my grill.
It is an Exoskeletal Holocaust.

The bugs are like, “Scion? Who makes tha…?” [slam]

After playing one of the most fun video games known to man with one of my good friends, I returned home, turned on the TV, and the most vile thing I’ve ever seen came up on the screen immediately…..Meryl Streep in a “Helga” type outfit lip-syncing the words to the famously annoying melody of “Mamma Mia”. This theme has got to rank as one of the top most annoyingly disturbing melodies right up there with the “five hundred twenty five billion six hundred mili-SE-CONDS!!” theme from another creatively horrific flick known as “Rent!” Any film that has a plot where the bride-to-be tries to find out who her father is out of 3 of her mother’s past man-friends, and instead of going to each one individually and analyzing the evidence, you just invite them all to the wedding and throw caution to the wind with it, spells trouble for the viewer. Not only does it say to the viewer, “Man, this doesn’t look good…” but it also says, “Man, what was I thinking wasting my 4 bucks a gallon gas on coming to see this film?” Out of any of the actors in this film, the only one that I can honestly say that I trust to put on a good show is Stellan Skarsgård(Exorcist fame). His co-clowns of fathers in this movie include Pierce Brosnon(REMINGTON STEELE FAME OMG), and Colin Firth(also seen in..wouldn’t you know…THE MISTAKEN HUSBAND wow you can’t make this stuff up).

Predictably though, film critics will adore this film and deem it worthy of several Hollywood Film awards and proclaim it as the best thing that’s come out since…well…RENT!

What I find funny about Hollywood, and this isn’t just from my perspective, but I was talking with my pastor about Hollywood when he pointed out something very strange to me, “Only in Hollywood would you find the biggest egocentric people who set up all these award shows in which the actors vote for whoever amongst them as to who is/will be the most awesome of all.” This is certainly the case, because also Hollywood is the only place you would find a guy named Tom Cruise talk about how he’s operating on a certain level of whatever, and he’s working on getting to a certain level of awesome to heal people with his hands and do other unnaturally superstitious things like that.

Geez Mary Louise…..what would actors like John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn and even James Cagney have said about what Hollywood has turned into. Back in those times you saw actors acting out of a self-obligation to serve in the armed forces, not to look like heroes or to look good for the camera, but to help ensure the freedoms of a nation. What in the CRAP would Pierce Brosnon do if asked to serve in the armed forces…maybe he would wink his eye and raise his eyebrows at the same time like he did in trying to pass off as being James Bond. (Btw as far as Bonds go, Sean Connery all the way).

Save the money folks, go see Kung-Fu Panda(SCA-DOOSH), Mummy 3, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and most important of all….Dark Knight(RIP Heath Ledger).

To those of you who after reading this post are still considering even glancing at a commercial for “Mamma Mia!”, I’ve only got one thing to say to you….

Picard knows his stuff, there ya go, don’t let him down.

This one’s for the grandparents. Yep. Bison. We weren’t as crazy as the people yesterday who actually tried to pet one, but the wildlife are right there next to the side of the road. We saw bald eagles, deer, marmoset, elk, antelope-type things, and a whole bunch of ravens. That’s just the fauna.

Be lookin’ for a lot more pictures. Let’s hear it for random open wi-fi networks.

The Haiku
In one year I’ve found
My writing habits increased
Madness comes normal

At exactly this time last year I was in the computer lab at summer school hungry.

If I can beat the robot, you should have seen a cool treat. If not, you still had one year of haikus.

The Final (Official) Haiku
I would like to thank
All the encouraging friends
and a patient wife

Fanfares and all that.

As we are on the last leg of the trip to Montana (aside from the actual being in Montana and then getting home), we come to the last haiku. I have definitely kept my writing sharpened since college. The daily writings and postings were helpful when it came time to do a technical guidebook for my district and I was basically tech blogging.

I think I will miss the daily challenge. I have a couple of other concepts bouncing around. But first we have today’s adventure:

1. Yellowstone - I hear there’s bears. Or was that Jellystone?
2. Another full day in the Scion. I busted the entire 6 hour drive yesterday and was ready to keep going. I am a new convert to cruise control.
3. A potential foray into…dial-up…where we’ll be staying for a week. You may find me huddling in the parking lot of a local hotel. If the locals have “WHS” (hotel-speak, I guess, for wi-fi. Much shorter/clearer abbreviation than what the rest of the world uses).

There will be an automated post coming up. I will be on the road by then, but I still found the haiku fun. As The Robot promises, there’s a fun treat in post I’m writing (blogging on the road leads to some space-time thingys).

an-open-letter

Enjoy this most recent to the ultimate album, Ultimate Karate.

Thanks for the adventure!

If you haven’t seen, Tom is a dad. Here’s the story. Caution, images of of labor.

So, Devin, are you saying that there’s a longer version in the works? Because NPH is actually pretty funny in that trailer.

“Muahaha…so, yeah, that’s coming along.”

It’s great to see that Joss Whedon does stuff like “Motion Picture Association of my house“. Reminds us that he’s a nerd like the rest of us. (Okay, so like the rest of me. All of you socially adapted people who follow the blog…thanks for visiting my little domain (domain a double entendre for site or delusional masterpiece)).

Slade, when you mentioned RL DBZ, I thought you meant this or this. (Or, for Devin’s sake, a mention of a con and a link.)

But no. Now I have an image that makes me so nauseous, I won’t be able to sleep. (Great. Although my youngest screamed until 11pm, she did calm down after all the lights were out and was like, “What the…? Well, I’m bored…[snore]“)

Since I don’t know what tonight’s wi-fi situation will look like, here’s a haiku earlier than normal(-ish):
The Haiku
Two days remaining
For this year’s haiku project
Will I need robots?

I thought about automating my June 27 post (1 year!) since we will be on the road between Idaho and Montana, but I will try to find a connection…any way I can.

For those of you Dragon Ball Z fans, you know just how ripped and unnaturally muscular those characters are. I found an actual person who looks just like those characters from Dragon Ball, and he also makes just as many grunting sounds as they do.

Exhibit 1: Real Life Man Jay Cutler.

Exhibit 2: The Character “Brolly” from Dragon Ball Z.

A reminder to people wanting to follow along (like you, Mom). We can do cellphone updates here.

The Haiku
I’m a knight errant
Questing for some good wi-fi
and soft-baked pretzels

I found some decent wi-fi, but thankfully I had a soft-baked pretzel last night. Previous time to that had been a couple of years.

Quick trip updates: We did go through Zion National Park. Pictures later (Mac and Scion say 10:46pm, Hotel says 11:49pm). We were the only ones going our way in the dark on winding roads. I also went through the longest tunnel ever. I felt elvish - not meant to be underground for so long. Actually, switched to nightvision on my camera and had a rabid lobster flashback from Cloverfield.

Hopefully the next stop we can get to earlier and have better wi-fi. Lots of fun so far.

Funny stuff, Devin.

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.