uncommitted voters

i'm pretty sick of presidential politics. this is not a new condition for me. i am really, really sick of political theater mounted by rich bastards in the one dollar = one vote former republic and i do not know which thing outrages me more: the progressive erosion of constitutional rights and protections, the increasing rate of income equality, or the binding memorandum by the aforementioned rich bastards in the pockets of the corporations who agree among themselves that no voices beside theirs will be heard.

i am also outraged by the media coverage of the presidential debate and all this attention on undecided voters. this is perhaps the most polarized election of recent memory and there are still undecided voters?

who are these addlepated idiots? why is the media courting them? why do they have anything at all to say in the conversation?

long gone are the days when we might get intelligent questions from random voters about what candidates stand for, but instead what we have is one long parade of carefully cherrypicked nonquestions about nonissues while we all don't talk about things that might actually be important.

for instance, are you hearing a lot of crap about which candidate will get tough on china, because china owns too much US debt?

i heard an actual explanation about the real economics behind that and i'm all, like, what? why is this even a thing? this is just more camouflage and misdirection.

hellooooooo! poverty is on the rise. cost of living increases for medicare are tied to consumer prices on goods purchased by young people and do not include prescription drugs. corporations have huge bonuses written into tax code. police forces are being given increasing latitude to imprison citizens. the war is sending home veterans of whom 50% will have some kind of disability and their health care ALONE is going to cost 30 TRILLION dollars.

at this point in the race there should simply not be any undecided voters. everybody has had a lot of time to think about which candidate might possibly do the least damage to us while we're waiting for a real alternative or a revolution or armageddon or something.

if at this late date you have no opinion about all that you are an idiot and the media outlets need to stop talking to you.

ok.

i am now going to return to my previous position, which i like rather a lot.

sick day

you know, i used to have an immune system that was sufficiently ironclad that i could eat off the floor in a public school. i maybe got a decent cold every two or three years, and any cold bad enough to cause me to notice knocked me flat back for days on end.

what i'm saying is i was disease resistant organism.

but these days i don't have a lot of contact with people and what contact i do have is mostly outdoors and lightly social, so it is maybe not a surprise that i spent two intensive days indoors closely packed with two hundred and fifty people who are all singing and crying and kissing and hugging and two days later i am knocked back on my ass so hard i can't get up.

but i'm CAMPING, see? and i'm eight hours from home.

this is how my day went:


wake up in the national forest.
roll over and sleep more.
drive into the nearest town,  and check email.
rest.
drive ten more miles to the nearest shopping mall to replace an important piece of equipment.
take a half hour nap.
find a geocache in the parking lot.
buy the thing.
have another nap.
go to a grocery store and buy lunch.
drive ten miles.
stop to check email.
eat lunch.
drive another five miles.
three hour nap.
go back into town for cold medicine. stop to check email on the way.
return to camp and sleep. (this last one is not yet accomplished)

why, you may ask, am i still camping? why do i not just go home?

for starters, i am eight hours' drive and i'm not the perkiest, most attentive driver. on top of that, yesterday i took my laundry in to be done and it won't be done until late tomorrow, too late to go home, which would have been awesome if i was simply going to keep camping until early next week.

maybe if i sleep enough i will feel better and want to stay and have the choice on thursday.

this afternoon it was temperate and sunny and foliage is beautiful and i slept through the whole thing, which i resent just a little. i am not enjoying my stay in the finger lakes national forest.

from the dingle starry

maybe you know the poem fern hill. maybe you even know the piece by john corigliano.

i looked up last night in my campsite and saw this:

shindagin hollow

it was a fun-filled day.

i woke up in the morning and took my sweet time packing up all my gear to move from the great indoors back to the forest.

i took my laundry to be done because i do not have  enough of certain kinds of clothing to last another week, plus my laundry bag is so full there's nowhere to put laundry. i'll pick it up wednesday (two days from now down your leg of the pants of time).

then i went out to the slaterville spring to fill my water bottles, which was on the way almost to shindagin hollow state forest, which is really where i was heading today to do some mountain biking.

i have to check my notes to tell you exactly where i rode if you care, but i rode a lot of the yellow trails down to the office chair trail and then down to an unmarked trail that brought me out near the brearly road parking and i rode all the way down the number six blue where i was feeling cocky about going over some obstacles and then suddenly didn't go over one and got covered with mud.

did you notice my use of the word "down" with regard to the trails? let's just say it was very climb-y on the way out and i actually rode the little thing called the bitch ditch and then found my way back to the car where i had to use nearly a gallon of water to wash the mud off and while i was at it i shaved.

you know, because if you're out in the woods, the first thing you do is wash up really well and get a good, clean shave.

the great

so there we all were, two hundred some odd of us plus the almost fifty kids from the current crop and assorted members of the voice faculty and the great man himself.

i do not know what the official count was, but we were there from nearly every graduating class going back forty years; new and starting out, middle aged and greying, old and out of shape. some of us were not where we expected to have been. some of us were greater than our youthful expectations, some less. we were still married, or never married, or no longer married. we came alone or with wives and husbands and children. some of us were couples with children who belong to the choir in their own right. some of us had teachers in the choir, others students.

and larry,  kept telling us that we are the choir, all of us, present and not present.

all of us.

not any one year, not now and before, but all of us that ever stood to sing in that choir present and forever interwoven, inextricable, one foundation, all of us living in what larry is calling universal time.

it is an exclusive membership, limited in the entry of each of us, one by one, according to how the auditions came out and what voices were needed that year. we had to earn our place each year. some dropped in as freshmen, some had to wait and work and watch.

but once we had come in, we were of the choir and could call it home no matter how much time had passed or how far away we had moved. we never forgot how to sing deep river, and we never forgot why.

so there we all were, too many for the risers, too many for the curtain to close on the stage and we came from our separate, divergent lives and nervously crowded together but all of a sudden we were all that one choir and we were all nineteen again and golden and perfect but time had not simply reversed or stood still because while each of us was suddenly transported back to the time when we first stood in that choir, we were each of us in our own present and looking out along the crowd we caught our breath and we said to each other "they are so beautiful" and we reminded each other "they are us."

i say we did these things because i know i did them, and i saw and heard the same conversations repeated all around the room.

"do you think the new kids fully understand this?" we asked the other kids from about our time. we decided they probably understood that it was a significant thing, an important thing, but they could not possibly understand the full depth of it.

"how could they?" we said. "we didn't. we were too young." and i'm sure kids older than us overheard and nodded sagely, knowing what we can't yet know because we're too young.

i know you know.

do you remember when you were twenty years old and full of talent and promise and anything seemed possible?

do you ever sit back and wonder what you've done with your life that measures up to any of that?

in a few minutes i won't be able to put off any longer heading up to my college reunion. i am not here for the reunion. i am here to honor the retiring choir director and sing one last time in a massed alumni choir.

i have come in from the woods for this and while am enjoying staying in a room, i am nervous about people and mourning my losses very keenly.

but while i was finding the parking lot they want us to park in (the campus is much larger than it ever was in my day), i noticed there was a geocache RIGHT THERE so i went ahead and found it.

had to.

day at the museum

i woke up in my campsite at stillwater in filthy cold rain and getting rainier by the minute and thought maybe i didn't feel much like taking hikes or long bike rides and i'd had a lot of those and sort of needed a rest and if the weather had been nice, i maybe would'a' felt like doing a ton of roadside caches up in watertown, the flashtrashcache capital of the north country. that can be fun sometimes when you don't feel much like anything else.

but then i decided that it would be a good day to go to the adirondack museum. i have never been there before, since to do it, you really have to clear a couple days on your calendar and i've alwasy been doing something else.

if you;re following my story even a little bit, you know that i spend a fair amount of time in the adirondacks. what you maybe don;t know is that between the fabulous geological history and the social history of the lumber camps and the gilded age and the great camps, i'm a big fan.

so yesterday i went. and today when they open up, i'm going back. it;s a little exhausting, because i can;t just go and look at stuff; oh, no. i have to go and look at stuff and read ALL the accompanying material and take notes about things i want to look up later and i think museum going is more exhausting than a day of hiking an biking.

and the whole time i;m there i feel like i'm going to cry, because i have spent so many hours out here riding the back roads and looking at the places that used to be the old camps, that used to be full of life and are now moss covered ruins and i know them only by name, but here at the museum are the photos and relics of those days when they took those names that come down to me as echoes on my wilderness lansdscape.

fern hill

right now (last tuesday night by your count) i am sitting in my car practicing choir music. it is an hour after sunset and i have a recording of the piece and of course the sheet music.

you know, because you can't just show up at alumni weekend. they send you the music and ask you to come prepared. 

it's kind of awesome, but showing up prepared for rehearsal on friday is a much easier thing to do if you are living indoors. i received my music last wednesday as i was heading out of town.

living in your car + practicing choir music = awesome.

improbably polite

vinny's pizza in croghan does not open until six o'clock. SIX! i am HUNGRY. i hiked and rode today and it was COLD and i need to eat. now. or soon.

second they open up, i am THERE.

nope, they're not open tonight.

so i got a pizza and a few things at the corner gas station, one of a chain. but it was supremely weird. i've been in a lot of convenience stores. and sometimes at convenience stores people are surly and sometimes they're polite.

but THESE people were really, really polite. unusually helpful and friendly. weirdly, happily polite.

i used the restroom and i was initially unimpressed with filthy appearance of the sink, until i noticed the small sign asking people to please excuse the appearance of the sink; it was the original sink belonging to the miller house that stood on that corner for over a hundred years.

so i gave it a second look. no amount of cleaning will make that sink LOOK clean, but knowing what it was made it beautiful.

i love this sign

this sign is posted on one of the buildings out here at the stillwater lot. it informs us that this parking lot is intended ONLY for use by people boating on the reservoir OR legally using the surrounding state lands.

i find it hard to believe that anyone would just come up here and leave a car since it's about eighteen hard miles from anywhere. granted, some people have camps out here, but really. those people have their own driveways, roads, and sometimes parking lots.

maybe it;s just a piggyback thing. maybe if they catch you doing illegal things on the surrounding state lands the tack this one on to your charges. it's nothing like a commuter lot, that's for sure.

well. it's sunny and thirty-eight degrees which meas it's time to go out and legally use the surrounding state lands.

get lost.

here's a thing you maybe hadn't considered about travel: it isn't all that important to know where you are. neither is it that important to know where you're going.

the important thing is to have the skills to get yourself back to a place where you'll know where you are and in the meantime, you will have had an adventure.

i am not advocating heading off willy-nilly into the wilderness. you should start small. in an urban setting, go down a few streets that you don;t know where they go, just to see. don't stray too far. then get yourself back to either where you left known territory or some landmark you know.

practice.

in the woods, also start small. of off the trail a little way, and then get yourself back to the trail or some other destination with which you are familiar.

in both settings, make sure you have proper equipment for the setting in case it takes you a while to get back.  be aware of the position of the sun with relation to your direction of travel and time of day. notice landmarks. are you between the highway and the park? between the forest road and the lake? those will be handy bits of information to have later on.

now go on, scoot. out with you. go out and get lost.

breezy

out here the public toilet is an evaporating vault toilet, which is environmentally friendly. it's clean and smells better than most public restrooms and they keep it stocked with toilet paper, even though the rolls are locked to a steel bar so you can only use them in situ.

the thing that's hard to get used to, and especially when you first arrive in darkness, is the general quiet hum of the building and the breeze beneath you as you sit. i am not familiar with all of the particulars of the system,   but it does involve a very gentle breeze.

it is so gentle a breeze that at first you wonder that it's there at all. but yes, it's a little breezy. it takes a littel getting used to.

stillwater

today i left speculator.

i didn't so much mean to leave speculator, but it was raining filthy cold rain and i thought: i will just poke around a bit and next thing i knew i was on my way to indian lake and then the next thing i knew i was at a potential campsite at lake durant and then all of a sudden i was on the road over to big moose and then at stillwater.

i am lodged for the evening near there, although i think probably not at one basket factory road, just because there's a site that's big and grassy just a little bit farther on.

a long time ago i wrote this to a friend:

hello, my friend.

i have come for the night out to stillwater reservoir. it is a strange and generous landscape.

to get here you can come from big moose or from number four (yes, that's the name of an alleged town), but from either direction you drive a long way from civilization and then you turn off of the paved road and drive even longer on rough roads. it is so remote that in the winter you can't get near here except by snowmobile. this is the end of the line; mail does not go any farther than here.

after miles and miles of dirt road you come to the end of the road where all of a sudden there is pavement and streetlights. there's a general store/mechanic, hotel/bar/restaurant, a ranger station, and a public toilet. these four buildings are the whole of it out here, except for the picnic table and ferry dock. the ferry will take you and your car out to even more remote places where there are no roads. i hear tell of a very expensive resort somewhere out there, but i've seen no evidence.

one thing that makes this place very handy for me is that the amenities here include a high-speed wireless network.

my address for the time being is 1 basket factory road, a remote campsite off of an obscure singletrack road. 

i love it out here.

leaving trumansburg, my home of the last week, it was pleasing to know that i was coming here.

they were very kind to me in tburg; when i arrived this morning i was met at the curb with the request: will you sing for today's offertory?

well, i said, i haven't brought a guitar. i am not prepared.

a guitar was produced for me to play, and so i did it.

i was taken to brunch afterward (eggs benedict) and i was sent away with blessings and with gifts. yesterday i was feeling disjointed and disconnected but the reception i got this morning showed me firmly that i am not disconnected. they were grateful to have me visit with them, but the gratitude properly placed would be mine.

and i made my way up here. on the number four road (once again, not a fourth road, but the road that goes to number four)- on the number four road there's a library of sorts. it's a small shed, of the sort that might contain a utility panel. it's kind of a shallow closet with a roof. people leave books there and they take books from there; you may keep them if you wish and you need not sign them out.

further up the road there's a similar shed labeled "watering hole". it's a faucet that draws on a well. the landowner makes this water supply available to all comers, and for free. when i got there tonight i was third in line. the man filling jugs ahead of me stopped to talk for a while. he asked how i came to be here, and we talked of the weather, life on the road, and all the things (family, pets, livestock) that prevent him from being able to wander the way i do.

almost invariably when i tell people (they ask more often than i'd expect) how and why i am on the road, they have a lot of questions. 

to a lot of people the world is a dangerous and threatening place.

i wish to make my world one of surprise and delight. people are kind and generous if you give them the chance. to travel the way i do requires me to trust entirely that i will be brought to places that are interesting and worthwhile, and that i will meet the people i'm supposed to meet.

it matters to me little if i can be of service to them or they to me; it always seems to cut both ways. the web we all make as we connect with others is complex and beautiful; the strands woven around me are bright and taught.

it's time for me to make my way to my campsite.

happily because last night was saturday i had to wash up very thoroughly and today i didn't exert myself, a cursory washing-up will do just fine, which suits me because it's dark, windy, and about 37 degrees out. tonight will be the first hard freeze of the season. 

i've traveled 1300 miles since i left home, and i'm tired. i wonder if perhaps it's time to come home, but i feel that there's somewhere i'm supposed to be come sunday.

for now it will be sufficient just to crawl into bed.

good night, good friend; 
sleep soundly and well,
wake refreshed.


yours, as ever.

throwdown

this morning i woke up in brilliant sunlight in a campsite just outside speculator NY. on the news i heard about the NHL lockout.

really? you guys are having difficulty figuring out how to share 3.3 BILLION dollars? somehow i fail to feel any concern at all for you. you're idiots.

yesterday afternoon i was at a very fine geocache and i liked it especially because it's an old style cache, the kind where we go somewhere maybe a long way out of our way and don;t know what we'll see when we get there and we don't count on finding the thing, not even if the coordinates are good.

there's been a  trend in the sport in recent years to find as many caches as possible and as quickly, too, which means there's a rash of cheap caches in highway pullouts.

so i was on my way up this great trail yesterday to go look at some awesome ancient pine trees and i liked the location so much that i remember thinking maybe i wouldn't bother with the cache but then i couldn't find the cache so it was kind of sand in my craw.

and then i found the cheap throwdown.

another goofy practice that has developed is that often when people look for a few minutes and don;t find a cache, they either assume it's gone and toss down a cheap container and a few pages of post it notes and call it the cache and call it found.

alternately, they toss down the cheap container and then call it a new cache.

and i found just such a thing. it was clearly labeled as a geocache placed on october 4 2012 (you will remember that i am on a writing delay) and i thought: hey. that's today!

i redoubled my efforts to find the original container. i assumed it was hard to find and looked for it under that assumption. and i found it right where it should'a' been.

heh.

away games

i have done this thing again in which i pack up my bags and i leave my home and i begin blogging somewhere in the future.

at the time of writing i am in downtown speculator, NY. i am waiting for an excellent pizza from a place i've been to before, so i know it's going to be good pizza. my campsite is not pretty, but it is a commanding location on a hilltop and it has good cell reception and it's five miles from town and an internet connection and nearby there's a spring with sweet good water and the campsite itself is both legal and free.

by the time you read this, i will no longer me in speculator, but somewhere else out in the adirondacks, but i do not yet know where.

i'll let you know just after, ok?

a delicious thing

i know i've mentioned to you that i made this awesome baked egg thing.

here it is:

what you need:

an onion, diced
black beans. canned are awesome, or soak you own.
tomates. fresh is lovely. canned diced work just great.
garlic. either a lot or a little. fresh is lovely but jar garlic works great.
spices: cayenne, cumin, chili, paprika, whatever you like.
olive oil.

fritos

egg

cheese. you can use any kind you want; i like american.

directions:

preheat your oven to 350.

hot up the oil in a pot large enough to simmer the rest of the stuff. when it's hot, toss in the onion and cook it at least until they're a little transparent. you may wish to cook them until they're golden or even until they start to brown a little.

then toss the spices in there and stir it a few minutes until they smell nice and fragrant and then add the garlic and cook just a few more seconds, until you sell garlic in the mix.

then add the tomatoes and beans with juices and simmer that for about forty minutes, until it's a nice thick stew kinda thing.

meanwhile, put fritos in the bottom of an oven safe dish. i make a single serving, so mine's pretty small. you should use as much as you need.

when the bean thing is cooked, take it off the heat and pour some over the top of the fritos (according to serving size, see?) pat down a little nest in the center and try to make the bottom so it's not leaky. this will be important later when you go to wash the dish.

break an egg into the little nest and then put some ore bean stuff around the edges of the egg.

stick that puppy in the oven until the white of the egg sets (8 to 10 minutes) and then cover the top with a slice of cheese and bake until the cheese is soft and bubbly.


if you get it right (and it will depend on your oven and your egg and how runny you like your yolk, you get this incredible creamy baked egg frito pie and just about the only thing that makes it better than it is is to eat it with a wholemess of sriracha.

flood fill

here's a little flash game i've been playing and like:

it's the kind of thing you shouldn't try out if you need to be on time anywhere. *coughcough*

beware autoplay noises.

floodfill

and while i was looking up the link for this game, i found another.

i haven't tried it yet, but i will soon.

flood it

depthmap

i'm working on a stereogram poster for the niece of a friend as a confirmation gift.

on the off chance that you are not a maker of stereograms, you may not know that there are some very nice and cheap pieces of software that will do this for you, and even a pretty good online tool.

the process if fun, though. you have to make your image into a black and white depthmap on whch the darker regions are father back in the stereo image and the light regions appear closer-up.

this is the depthmap for the design i'm working on. later on i will maybe have the color version to show you, and you can sort out the image for yourself.

it's a work in progress.

seasonal change

if you read me in RSS, you won't even notice that this has happened, but since it is now autumn, i have switched to autumn colors.

it's a thing i like to do.

marconi and cheezles

at some point in my life i used to call it that among friends. i don't remember when or where or who.

but i mention it here because someone came to this blog last week looking for macaroni and cheese. the only reason i can think of is that i was in a public discussion forum talking about a macaroni and cheese that i was making and next thing i knew someone had gotten to this blog by way of the search terms "flask macaroni and cheese", so i am assuming that at least one person was interested.

so here's my recipe for macaroni and cheese. it is very good macaroni and cheese. the recipe is very nonspecific.

things you need:

a box of macaroni. i like shells or farfalle. use anything you like.

3 cups of milk, whole or skim.
3 tablespoons butter (you may use olive oil in a pinch)
a couple o' tablespoons o' flour
spices: at least a tablespoon of dry mustard. use cayenne, paprika, cumin, whatever.
garlic. fresh or from a jar is just fine. a little bit or a whole bunch. it's up to you.

cheese. somewhere between 8 and 14 ounces of whatever cheese you have in the house. cheddar, american, fontina, swiss, brie, kasseri, fontinella, peccorino romano, whatever. i usually like to use up to half american cheese. cut it into chucks that you'll be able to stir in the pot.

tomato, onion, whatever.

maybe some breadcrumbs.

directions:

at some point in the process you will have cooked and drained the macaroni. you can use the same pot for boiling the pasta as for making the sauce, but not at the same time.

preheat the oven to 350 degrees. fahrenheit, dude.

melt the butter or hot up your oil.

if you're using onions and you wish them to be mellower, toss them in now and cook until transparent or golden or even a little caramelized. you are under no obligation to use any onions at all.

when you onions are ready or when your butter or oil is hotted up, toss in the flour and the spices. stir it around until the flour has that cooked smell and the spice are fragrant. then toss in your garlic and cook it up until it smells garlicky, and then add some of the milk.

stir it until it's pasty and add more milk. you may want to use a whisk. you're making a roux here. alternately add milk and stir to uniform consistency. at some point it'll be more liquidy than pasty. just be sure to get out any lumps.

if you didn't cook down your onions first, add them now.

the the sauce simmer a little while, maybe eight minutes or so to give the flavorings some time to set in and let it thicken a little. if one of your spices was a bay leaf, take that out now.

turn the heat down under the pot if you haven't already and stir in the cheese until it's all melty. if you are using tomatoes or some other thing, toss that in now.

remove it from the heat and fold in the cooked pasta.

but the whole bunch of it in a 9x13 baking dish (or whatever), top with optional grated hard cheese and optional breadcrumbs and toss it in the oven for about 40 minutes.

when it's brown and bubbly take it out and let it stand a few minutes to catch its breath and then you're good to go.