open letter to staples

dear staples,

i realize that in order to have a savings card at your store (which actually comes in handy the few times a year i have to buy usuriously expensive printer ink), i have to allow you to send me twice daily emails about crappy deals for stuff i don't need or want and am not going to buy.

you do realize, don't you, that i delete them all without reading them and the constant reminder of what i have to do in order to get my printer ink cheaper only makes me try real hard to buy my other office supplies at some store that is not staples just because i don't like your intrusiveness?

yeah, i didn't think you thought of it that way, because the subject lines always sound like you think you're doing me a favor, getting in my face like i was dating a needy car salesman with attachment issues.

you're an object of ridicule in my house.

thanks for the reminders.

love, flask.

bad boys

so yesterday i was at a party, getting ready to have lunch and someone shouts "hey, flask! you got a flat tire!"

sure enough.

this, i don't need.

but i'm at a party with geocachers and geocachers are nothing if not resourceful.

and handy.

so chip, who is the husband of the party host, who i have only just met that morning, says he'll go get his air compressor right after lunch.

and after lunch there are some people who i want to go caching with and i figure getting my tire fixed is going to be an all day kind of thing, especially on a sunday afternoon, so i tell the people i'll talk to chip about how to go about getting the tire fixed and i go to look for him and i can't find him in the crowd which is mostly because he's not in the crowd.

he's in the parking lot, just finishing up inflating my tire.

and he's managed to find a local guy who will fix my tire NOW.

by "local guy", i mean "three mailboxes over on the left". and by "now", i mean that he's ready for me when i get there.

you want to guess how much that kind of service cost me?

on a sunday afternoon?

go on, guess. i'll wait.




*goes to check dinner in the oven*

the guy has a big sign in the shop that says he doesn't take credit cards, so i ask him if he'll take a check. he kind of wrinkles up his nose and says he does. "that'll be five dollars", he says.

oh.

in that case, i have cash.

in case you are ever in need of a mechanic and you happen to be on town hill in jacksonville, vt, you should call bad boys automotive.

five-thirty in the afternoon.

it's five-thirty in the afternoon and it's bedtime.

last night there was a disturbing amount of blattering slat-blasting barrel-busting rain and you really NOTICE a thing like that when you're sleeping in your car.

this morning a truckload of new geocaches was published over on the ashuelot rail trail.

did i get the firstfinds on them?

no, i did not.

you know why? i was out geocaching when they got published.

you want to know WHERE i was geocaching when i missed the online publication of the dozen new caches on the ashuelot rail trail?

ON THE ASHUELOT RAIL TRAIL.

mmm-hm.

the letter M

what i learned today is that my knees, hips, and feet really need more time to recover from my little adventure in maine.

but flask, i hear you say. aren't you home? weren't you going to show us pictures and tell us stories?

why, yes. i WAS home, but then i went out again and am now wandering happily (ok, maybe not exactly happily) around southern vermont, cranking back and forth on route nine. see, all you really need to know about travel in southern vermont is that there's only one road that goes across. this is on account of the mountains. if you're trying to imagine an elevation profile along route nine between brattleboro and bennington (two cities that are forever irritated when people from away can't remember which one is which, which is kind of like the towns of pittsford and pittsfield, which are on opposite sides of the mountains and although they're not far apart, you can't get from one to the other on account of no road over the mountains...)

...uh, anyway. if you're trying to imagine the topography of route nine, it is a lot like the letter M. you go up and up and up and then down a little and then up a little and then down and down and down. there are runaway truck ramps at disturbingly frequent intervals, and mashed guardrails at even more disturbingly frequent intervals.

in the flooding from tropical storm irene we lost huge parts of route nine and the best advice for how to get across southern vermont was to go down into massachusetts  and use their roads.

speakin' o' which, it's three years on and here in wilmington they're still doing reconstruction. i know, yeah, i keep telling you i'm going to post picctures and tell you about that time i came down here and did demo work the october after, but i keep getting behind in adventure telling.

so yeah, i'm in wilmington at the moment, which is pretty much the middle of the M.

which sort of explains why the flooding was so bad.

here in the middle of the M it has been raining filthy soaking steady rain all day. if i had known it was not raining for most of the day down at the feet of the M, i would have gone down there and enjoyed dryness earlier in the day.

it is so good...

...that your head might could explode.

buy a large pizza at the place on route nine in west brattleboro. it doesn't matter what kind. i like eggplant and some other thing because the eggplant they put on a pie is done just about perfect.

perfect, i tell you.

then drive it up to the hogback overlook and eat it there. by the time you get there the pizza is still hot but not hot enough to burn the roof of your mouth, plus you have a view.

holy honk.

*boom*

small potatoes

maybe you remember that earlier this year i had some potato vines come up in my living room.

well, yesterday i was kind of cleaning up some things as i was repacking the car to go off adventuring and i thought: maybe i will just pull up these dead potato vines.

and you know what? there were POTATOES! teeny, tiny little potatoes, cute as all get out and enough for maybe a half serving but they are MY potatoes, grown right in my own living room.

hit pause

come home
laundry
unpack/repack
pick up letters from tax department
more laundry
put feet up, rest knees
clean and waterproof shoes again
laundry
pack data
reload ipod
snooze

communal moose latrine

i was reading some articles recently about evidence that we are not the only species that uses a communal latrine.

certainly recently i have come across a communal moose latrine.

if you are traveling the cranberry peak trail between arnold's well and the summit, you pass through maybe a quarter mile of trail that is full up nearly ankle-high with what appears to be the accumulated shit of every moose in the district over a period of months.

i am kind of a fan of moose poop; when you look at the pellets the moose leave behind, you can tell how recently moose have been by, how often they come by, and a lot of other interesting things. because moose are kind of reclusive animals, often scats and tracks are your best indicators that moose are present with you in the woods.

in this case, however, all you really learn is that this section of trail is being used by a number of animals over a long period of time as a communal latrine. you learn that your idea of how much moose shit was possible to accumulate in one place before it disintegrates was wildly underestimated.

uninvited to the banquet

imagine that you can smell the food. you can see the table laid out, you can hear the crackle of the cooking, you can smell the delicious aromas wafting on the breeze, but you cannot get through the door.

the meal itself mocks you.

that's what it was like for the mosquitoes outside my car this morning.

i sleep in there with the windows down and the screens up.

yes, screens. you can buy a yard or two of nylon screen down at the hardware store an stick it to your car with some strong magnets and voila! you have screens.

sleeping is delightful like that.

and the mosquitoes congregate on the screens, looking for a way in.

muahahahaha.

neenerneenerneener.

university of eustis

so these days i am working on a trio of geocaching challenges:

http://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC1EE71_eustis-cache-challenge-i-ebgc-degree
http://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC1EPZH_eustis-cache-challenge-ii-emgc-degree
http://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC1ET0W_eustis-cache-challenge-iii-edgc-degree

you should look them up just so you have an idea what all crazy ass nonsense i have got myself into.

cranberry peak

today it is raining.

today i am going up cranberry peak.

the trail is 3.29 long. the average person takes four hours to make the trip up, and three to get down.

i move slowly.

i will be carrying all kinda emergency gear and a very good sammidge. it's going to be a long tiring day.

wish me luck.

see it on maps.

one man's trip

grey jay

so the other morning i stopped my car to repack my gear because even though it looks a mess in here, everything has to be in its place or i can't find ANYTHING, and all of a sudden there's a fluttering of wings, like when a bird is thinking of landing on your head.

we used to keep birds as pets when i was a kid, and i will tell you that there is a very distinctive look to how a bird moves when it is thinking of landing on your head. i never expect to see this behavior in wild birds.

so i'm minding my own business and this bird comes and almost lands on my head. i am apparently an object of some interest for this bird, since it circles up and lands on the handlebar of my bike. it then makes another try at landing on my head and instead perches on my car door window.

it watches me for a while from there and from the handlebar and then from a nearby tree branch and then it moves on. i learn later that

a lady in the neighborhood makes them little peanut butter sandwiches in the winter.

kind of a one way conversation

hello, people who read my blog.

many of you also have blogs that i regularly read, although i sometimes don't comment much if i don't feel i have much to add to the conversation.

if you notice me missing, it is because i'm not reading any of my RSS feeds while i'm up here in the maine woods.

i just don't have that kind of time to park at the library and use the internet in my car. i mean, i COULD sit here for hours and hours and if it was raining horribly i might do it, but the point of coming up here and living in my car is to go play in the outside, so i check my email, process a few photos, catch up on a little of the games i play, and then i scoot along and go do outdoorsy things.

bit by bit i will have pictures and stories for you but right now i'm out doing things.

so yeah, i do wonder how life is for you in the pacific northwest. i wonder how your gardener is doing. i wonder how things are at blackrock. i wonder how your dog is and what crazy people you had to talk to on the phone. i hope your cats are getting along.

i'm just not catching up on the reading for a while.

but i'll be back.

carry on.

crossing the border

awright. so some days ago i was on my way to eustis, maine (go look it up for yourself) and i took a little side trip on the way that had me heading north on route three.

now, here's a thing about travel in this area of the US: route 3 ends up in canada. route 27 (which is the next north-south road over) ends up in canada. route 201 ends up in canada.

you can't actually cross over from route 3 to route 27 or from route 27 to route 201, (well, you CAN, but only if you like going ten miles an hour on roads that may or may not be washed out or gated shut do for practical purposes you can't) but if you cross over into canada it's no longer trackless wilderness and there are paved roads and towns, because once you cross the border, people actually live there.

so. this side, moose and miles and miles of wilderness. that side, paved roads, farms, and charming villages.

the canadian border guard totally gets why you decided to detour into canada to save time.

the us border guard, not so much, even though he probably TOTALLY lives in stratton and knows why you went through canada, because border guards come in two flavors: regular people who just want t decent job, and hatwipes who like to wear a uniform and boss people around.

i was thinking why so many border guards are in that second category, and i think i have arrived at the conclusion that you have a lot of career choices if you just want a decent job, but if you want to put on a uniform and push people around, you tend to gravitate toward jobs like prison guard or border patrol where you get to do things to people who are at your mercy and you don't have to answer to anyone for it.

the canadian border guard asked me a LOT of questions, but i sort of got the feeling that it was a slow day and he was having a good time with me. he was nice enough, but he asked WAY more personal questions than i'm comfortable being asked, but it's their country and they have the right to turn me back if they don't want me to come in. it was friendly, though, and he made chitchat with me about his uncle and camping and such.

so then he runs my EDL to see what  databases i might appear in, and he came back out and told me that i score double zero. he pleasantly explains that this means i am not in either of the giant databases of undesirables of different degrees, and also that there are surprisingly few people with my last name in either of those databases.

i am not surprised by it; mine is a fairly uncommon last name except in some small clusters.

my double zero score makes me feel more confident coming back into the US.

the US border guard is entirely less pleasant. he wants to know what exactly i have in my car (it is full to the brim with camping gear and athletic equipment). he wants to know exactly where i plan to be camping. it is not ok with him that i'm going to camp in eustis on the PRL parcel somewhere. he wants to know WHERE.

you can't know that, because the sites are first-come-first served. since this man probably LIVES in eustis, there is no reason for him to press this issue except because he CAN.

the conversation goes on like that.

let's just say he's not happy that i don't actually know the names of the internet acquaintances i intend to visit. i know them as "kayaking loon", ok? as far as they're concerned, my name is flask.

used to be they asked you if you had anything to declare and asked a couple of questions to check who you are and check you out a little. but you had the right of free travel.

now everyone is a suspect, and if the DHS had their way they'd have checkpoints everywhere instead of just in the civil-rights-free zone near the borders. so now you are a criminal suspect if you want to go to quebec or new brunswick.

good job, gubmint.

eek! meese!

these two hang out on the long corner bridge most every morning.

campsite in eustis

flask, i hear you mutter, isn't it may? aren't you supposed to be off in some god-forsaken wilderness having adventures?

why yes. yes i am.

yes, i did leave my snug little home to go live in my car for a couple of weeks. later on i will have more things to tell you, but for now i will just post for you a video of the road to eustis and some photos at and near my campsite.

a word about the video: in it i say i was crossing back into the US from new brunswick, but really it was quebec. i didn't particularly plan to get to eustis by way of canada, but i took a little side trip and if you look at a map you will see that people actually live on the canadian side of the border and there are roads there, so if you go through canada it saves you about an hour and a half on the trip if you don't get held up at customs.


 

(blech. yahoo, in an attempt to be more with it, has changed flickr's function AGAIN. note to yahoo: everybody loves flickr. nobody likes yahoo. keep yahoo-ing up flicker and people will learn to hate flickr. also, google, give up on G+. it was interesting when you started it because it was a nice facebook alternative for those of us who hate facebook, but then you kept changing it to have more of the things we hate about facebook. plus! even more odious "features".)

 if you want to see the pictures full size, you can go here.

 

drug testing

i want to start by telling you my bias right off the bat: i do not use drugs or approve of drug use. i'm talking about recreational drugs. i also do not approve of mandatory drug testing.

i'm thinking about it because the supreme court recently refused to hear florida governor rick scott's appeal of a lower court ruling that he could not force all government employees into drug testing.

i'm against drug testing for employment, even for truck drivers and pilots and such.

but flask, i hear you saying, don't those people need to come to work unimpaired? how will we protect the public from drivers and pilots and heavy machinery operators who are on drugs?

yes, we do need those people to show up to work unimpaired an alert. i am going to suggest that if our primary interest is public safety, those people and people in similarly sensitive jobs should not be subjected to random drug testing, but alertness and dexterity testing every day they work, at the beginning of every shift.

there are a lot of reasons people might be unfit for work, including illness and fatigue.

can't pass your test today? you don't fly, don't drive. take a rest day. no penalty. too many failed tests and you might need to have drug testing or some medical testing, but overall, you get better safety without an invasion of privacy.

i do not care what competent adults do with their own bodies on their own time. i want people in sensitive jobs to be safe.

if it's about safety and not about trying to force other people into certain behaviors, we'd be testing for fitness and not randomly testing for certain substances.

crimes against nature

i saw an article (an article-let? a clickbait?) about states in which  consensual oral sex is illegal but necrophilia is, apparently, just fine.

in most states that do not define necrophilia as being strictly illegal, they have some kind of statute about "crimes against nature" which they somehow think is a clear legal concept and universally understood.

so i think what we OUGHT to do is prosecute people for "crimes against nature", like fouling a water supply, or mismanagement of herd population, or deforestation of sensitive land.

you know, ACTUAL crimes against nature.

if you pay attention to animal behavior at all, you learn more and more that homosexual sex, rape, torture, and necrophilia are not particularly unnatural or even uncommon out in nature, so it's going to be harder to use the term "crimes against nature" to define daintily sexual acts between people that your legislature does not like unless your legislature wants to get in thee and actually use words that mean something.

otherwise, i am going to suggest very strongly that we hold those words to their meanings, i.e., crimes against nature. which as far as i'm concerned, is stuff that careless or mailicious people do against the natural world.

at any rate, it ought to make for interesting hearings.

the wrong metrics

the government uses the wrong metrics to gauge the health of the economy.

for instance, new housing starts.

you can start all the new construction you want, but the only thing that shows the health of is the owners of construction firms. it does not take into account how many of the new construction starts will be occupied nor does it take into account renovation of existing buildings.

a better indicator of a healthy economy would be the percentage of residents who can afford decent or even basic housing.

similarly, how wall street is doing doesn't tell us much about how main street is doing.

wall street is doing fine.

so are food pantries.

mayhem

i was all excited about this year's Month of MAYhem Blogging Challenge™, but as i started to think about it, i realize i have spent a great deal of time shaking things up for causes that matter to me, and a couple years of actual protests against actual things has worn me down a little.

it's not that i've lost my sense of humor, but if you want people to take seriously your protest, it helps if you're not that crazy person who does weird things.

so here's a kind of truncated list of things you might do for your Month of MAYhem™:



1) choose a language invented by someone else. for just one day, write all your communications in that language. or just your blog post. the rest of us won't know the difference. it's funnier if you try to communicate with the government in a constructed language, like idiotish, which is their native tongue anyway.

2) write to your senators and congressmen every week. it's just a month. you can do it.

3) bake something nice for the guys on your town's road crew. all right, buy them donuts if you're not handy in the kitchen.

4) go onto public land at night with a flashlight and make a survey of amphibians. report your findings on your blog and to any handy wildlife preservation group. bonus points if you have to explain yourself to the police.

5) find out which mass surveillance techniques your town is using and make your findings public. paranoia about government surveillance is not just for the tinfoil hatters anymore.

6) get a half dozen five dollar bills and go door to door in a strange neighborhood and give them to people for no reason at all. if pressed to declare a reason, tell them to have a nice day.

7) pick a random person from the phone directory. call them to see if they're at home. if they are, order a pizza to be delivered to their house. this is only funny if you pay for the pizza. remember, paid-for pizza  = funny / unpaid-for pizza = harassment.

8) go to a public place and shout STOP LOOKING AT ME! write about your results.

9) along with several of your friends, drive up and down the street your local police station is on AT OR JUST BELOW THE SPEED LIMIT. do this for as many hours as you can spare.

10) you know those magnetic decals people put on their cars? switch 'em around a little. don't steal 'em or even change anybody's displayed political affiliations. just move 'em from one side of the car to a different side.  let those people scratch their heads.

11) you get tracked through your online search history. search for things you're not interested in, just to throw monkey wrenches. today i googled "online explosive sales", "knitting supplies", "tactical weapons", and "penis toothbrush" sadly, this last thing exists.

12) start a religion. develop and practice faith tenets and rituals and see if you can write or adopt something as holy scripture.  practice this thing until it is a "sincerely held religious belief", which will come in handy later on when you want license to do anything and the law doesn't go your way.

13) shave off a tiny sliver from the middle of one of your eyebrows. it will make you look slightly off-balance and most people will not be able to figure out why.

14) have coffee or lunch with someone you only just met.

15) correct people's grammar. all day long. bonus points if you correct the principal of your child's school.

16) stand at a busy intersection with a sign that says: WHERE SHOULD I GO NEXT? keep standing there until someone gives you a suggestion. then go there.