themorgue.org

I know that nobody thinks there is any reason to go to Oklahoma, and for the most part, you’d be right. Yeah, there is a wicked cool museum of banjos in Guthrie and there is even a canal area of Oklahoma City a lot like the one in San Antonio, but nothing I knew about prepared me for what I came across this weekend. I didn’t even know it, but there are more miles of Route 66 in Oklahoma than any other state. We decided to do a bit of touring around and see what there was to see. For the most part, Route 66 is just a highway like any other, but there are some interesting sites along the way. We went to the Rock Cafe and the round barn, but those were nothing (as far as I’m concerned) compared to a newer attraction: Pops.

The construction of Pops started in 2006. It is a store like nothing I’ve ever seen before. We actually drove by it a couple of times not even realizing what it was, but decided to go back and take a closer look. Boy am I glad we did. Pops is a Route 66 attraction that is basically a gas station and restaurant, but the real feature is pop (that’s coke for the Southerners). They have nearly 500 kinds pops and bottled waters. They don’t stock everything all the time, so you have to come back more than one time to see them all. The entire front of the building is covered in glass and has glass shelves lined with thousands of bottles of pop, just for decoration. Every bottle in the store is glass. If you aren’t a pop connoisseur, this is the only way that pop should be enjoyed. For me, this was a dream come true. They had pops there that I have wanted to try for years, and lots that I had never even heard of. They even had more than one kind of strawberry rhubarb pop! If you are looking for a reason to come to Oklahoma, this is it. But you’ll probably want to stop by and see the banjos too…

Day two of our trip got off to an early start. We can thank our cats for that. Our cats don’t like to be out of the house and decided at about 5am that they were ready to get out. Since they made sure to it that we couldn’t sleep, we decided to just get up and go. Not getting much sleep, and driving through Kansas is not exactly a good combination. This is made quite evident by the occasional road sign advertising free coffee at all Kansas rest stops. Unfortunately, neither I nor my wife likes coffee.

We drove for about an hour before stopping the first time. I was feeling pretty much awake by that time, but my wife was still having trouble concentrating on driving. Luckily, one of our cats decided that today was the day to create all kinds of noise during the entire trip to keep here awake. With Prairie Dog Town behind us, there didn’t appear to be any more sites to see in Kansas. The good news is that we soon hit I-135 and started heading south to Oklahoma.

I was excited to see the border of Kansas and Oklahoma. Every truck and rest stop that we visited had all kinds of Wizard of Oz stuff and I was just dying to see a big sign on the border that said “You’re not in Kansas anymore!”. I was, however, greatly disappointed. There was no such sign.

Northern Oklahoma was much like Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas, more nothing than I have ever seen before. However, after getting further south, the landscape got greener, and there were more towns. We stopped in Guthrie on the way through, which is the site of the Oklahoma International Bluegrass Festival in October. Being a banjo player, I’m definitely looking forward to that.

Less than an hour after Guthrie, we were in Norman, our new home. After picking up the keys to our rental unit, we were pleasantly surprised by our new home. It looked a lot better than either of us remembered it when we visited a couple of months earlier. We still plan on making quite a few changes to the place, but there’s no place like home even if we aren’t in Kansas anymore.

It was time for my wife and I to head out of Colorado and make way for Oklahoma where we’ll spend at least one year living. Rather than hiring a moving company like we did for our last move, we decided to rent a truck and move ourselves. This decision was made based mainly on the thought of having to live without our possessions for at least two weeks while the moving truck made it’s way to all of its destinations before coming to our place. Since the trip from Colorado to Oklahoma was mostly freeway the entire way, it would be an easy drive as well. Easy for someone who is experienced at driving a truck that is.

Out with a Bang… Literally

This would be my first experience driving a rental truck. I have driven tractors and wagons, cars with trailers, large vans and large pickups, but nothing quite like a large U-Haul truck. The main difference is that in a U-Haul truck, you can’t see a thing behind you, which I learned the hard way. After picking up the truck and getting back to our townhouse to load the truck, I thought I would back the truck up to the sidewalk to make it easier to load. The driveway to the townhouses in our neighborhood are pretty tight, but it looked like there would be room to do it. Apparently, there was a medium sized high-voltage box right next to the parking spots that I was trying back into. As I wheeled around to bring to truck into the spot, I backed right into it. When I looked back to see what it was that I hit, I finally saw it. At first I thought that I just put a small dent in it, but when I took a second look I realized that I had knocked the metal box off of its mounts so that it was sitting at an angle with the cables inside exposed. This was not a good start to the move…

I got out of the truck to take a closer look. It didn’t look like any major damage had been done. Yes, the box wasn’t mounted to the ground correctly, but it appeared as though all of the electrical equipment was intact. I certainly wasn’t about to touch anything, so we ended up calling the electric company to come take a look. Meanwhile, our hired hands had showed up to load the truck.

After a couple of hours, the electric company showed up and verified my evaluation of the damage. They took down my name and address so they knew where to send the bill and proceeded to put the box back onto its base. The procedure was basically the reverse of my procedure for pushing it off: hook a cable to the box and yank it with the truck. Five minutes later, they were gone. I’m curious to see what they’ll charge for something like that; I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

On the Road

It took about three hours to load the truck. Not too bad, although it wasn’t the best packing job as we would find out later. Now with my nerves all frazzled about running into things with the truck, we headed out. The plan was pretty simple: take I-25 to E-470 to I-70 into Kansas. I’m happy to say that this went without a hitch.

It took a few uneventful hours to get to Kansas through eastern Colorado. This is desolate ground, and I could tell that it was going to be a long drive. Western Kansas was more of the same. I lived in Michigan for most of my life and I’m used to seeing a lot of farmland, but nothing like Kansas. The whole state is farmland. The odd thing is that I didn’t see that many farms. My history of watching horror movies started getting the best of me out there. The sky was cloudy and gray, there was nothing but farmland for hundreds of miles in every direction, and there were only two radio stations, both Christian. If those stations had been preaching fire and brimstone, I think that might have been too much for me. I have seen way too many horror movies that start out this way. Even when towns did pass by, I was creeped out by it. Take Goodland, KS for instance, with the town motto “We’re waiting for you.” No, I am not making this up.

One of the finer landmarks on the way through Kansas was Prairie Dog Town which was advertised about 100 miles on either side. Prairie Dog Town featured such sights as a Russian wild boar, a 5-legged steer, and best of all, the largest prairie dog in the world! Unfortunately, it was late enough in the day that we figured Prairie Dog Town was closed for the night; or maybe my wife just wanted me to think that it was closed.

After driving about six hours, we decided to stop in Hays, KS, the largest town in Northwest Kansas: population 20,000. If you haven’t been to Kansas before, this should give you an idea of what it’s like. The largest town in the entire Northwest quadrant of the state only has 20,000 people in it! After getting there, I think that 20,000 was an optimistic count.

Overall, after hitting the high-voltage box and missing out on Prairie Dog Town, the day was uneventful. And if you know my luck at all, you’re well aware that my life runs in two modes: uneventful and freak-accident. I’ll take uneventful any day.

This was our first Independence Day in Colorado, and it was a memorable one. We went to the free Longmont Symphony concert in Thompson Park. There were a few opening acts featuring local talent, and a best picnic competition. Altogether, very nice. They ended the concert with the traditional 1812 Overture complete with canon fire. I have to say that I was very impressed with the whole event. It was simple and non-commercial.

While at the Longmont celebration, we heard about a great spot to watch fireworks in Boulder. You can drive up to the NCAR Mesa Lab and sit on the side of the mountain to watch the fireworks. Not only does this give you a nice view of the Boulder fireworks, but you can also see the fireworks from the surrounding towns (Longmont, Louisville, Lyons, Broomfield, Loveland, and probably more) off in the distance. It was quite a site to see so many towns setting off fireworks at the same time. If you’re ever in the Bolder, CO area on Independence Day, I highly recommend trying this.

I’m in Wisconsin now for a user group meeting where I am giving a couple of talks about ODS. Anyone that knows me at all knows that bad things always happen to me when I travel: delayed flights, cancelled flights, guaranteed hotel rooms not being available when I get there, etc. If it doesn’t happen to me on the way to my destination, it gets me on the way back. I didn’t figure that this trip to Wisconsin would be any different.

The line at the airline I was at was so long that it actually went through the door to the outside. I made it through the line in about 45 minutes, which was better than I expected. Fortunately, I got through security rather quickly so I made my flight pretty easily. Once I got to Milwaukee, I had a rental car waiting for me. I decided to splurge for the Garmin GPS navigation system since I heard rumors about heavy construction in the area. Boy, am I glad I did. The directions that Google Maps printed ended up being useless because the main exit that I needed was closed. However, the Garmin navigation system easily navigated me around the construction. Absolutely, brilliant!

I got to my hotel for another bit of drama. As I approached the front door to the hotel, I noticed an ambulance right outside the door. Apparently, an elderly woman had fallen on the front steps and she was still laying there. She was conscious, but they had her strapped to a backboard.

While it wasn’t uneventful, my trip here went fairly well. I guess that means I’m in for trouble on the way home.

It was a beautiful morning this morning so my wife and I decided to do some hiking in Boulder. We went to the Anemone Hill trail. This is a fairly easy hike and is very scenic this time of year. After we had gone down to the end of the trail and started heading back, we had the sight of a lifetime. We stopped on a small bridge in the shade for a break and to watch the creek and noticed some movement about 50 feet down the creek bed; it was a deer munching on some branches. Now, being from Michigan, I’ve seen plenty of deer but this one was fairly close. Then about a minute later we noticed a baby deer off to our right in the tall grass. This fawn couldn’t have been more than a couple of days old and wasn’t any more than about 20 feet away from us. The mother deer came back to corral the fawn in, but didn’t seem threatened by us at all. She licked the baby for a minute or two then they calmly walked away. I was really regretting leaving my camera at home.

Today was an absolutely perfect day to do some mountain biking. I’ve been in Colorado for over four months now and the weather has been less than optimal to say the least (it always seems to rain on the weekends here). This weekend was an exception. It was 77 degrees, mostly cloudy, and breezy. It’s been dry all week, so the trails are excellent condition. Nothing was going to hold me back from taking out my new K2 Lithium 3.0 mountain bike this weekend.

I headed out to Rabbit Mountain in Lyons. I’ve gone to this trail a few times before. This is the trail that is closest to my home. It is also a fairly beginner course. While I did do quite a bit of trail riding in the hills of North Carolina, I’ve only biked in the mountains a handful of times. I am definitely a beginner here.

This was by far my best showing on this trail. For the first time, I didn’t feel like I was going to die on the way up because my lungs were going to explode, and I didn’t feel like I was going to die on the way down because I was going to go flying off a cliff. I’m starting to get the hang of this Colorado mountain biking. I took a few pictures with my new digital camera as well. Unfortunately, they don’t really capture the true essence of these trails. When you look at the pictures it looks as though the trail is basically flat as it goes off into the distance. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The portions of trail in these pictures are fairly steep and very rocky. To make matters worse, a lot of the rocks are loose. And this is a beginner trail.

To top the whole day off, my final treat of the day was on the way down. I was coming down at a pretty good clip (just under 10mph) and there was a snake laying across the entire trail. It was too late to do anything about it, so I had to run over it. I didn’t bother to look back and see if it was alright (looking back while coming down a mountain on a bike is not a good idea). The other reason I didn’t stop is that this mountain used to be called Rattlesnake Mountain, but they changed the name to Rabbit Mountain for PR reasons. That didn’t, however, change the reason that it was called Rattlesnake Mountain in the first place. I’m not exactly sure how big it was since I didn’t see its head or tail, but it must have been at least 3 feet long. I’m just glad I caught it on the fast downhill rather than running into it on the slow uphill climb.

Well, Heather and I survived our first week in Colorado. Things were looking pretty good when we first rolled into town. It was about 5pm on New Year’s Day and we arrived in town just as the sun was setting behind the Rocky Mountains. That was beautiful. What wasn’t beautiful was the side roads that we had to travel to get to our yet unseen apartment. They had about 6 inches of hard packed snow and ice on them, and were very rough. After 10 years of not driving in snow very often, I had forgotten how unpleasant it is…

Our moving truck is scheduled to arrive on the 9th, but that depends on the weather. We’ve had an additional 7 inches of snow since we got here. The moving truck is a full-size semi and has to be able to maneuver the roads in order to drop our things off. If it can’t make it in, they’ll have to load our things into a smaller truck and bring that in (at significant cost to us, of course). Because we don’t have our belongings, we’ve been making do with a futon mattress, a couple of suitcases of clothes, and our computers (with no internet for the first 5 days). To entertain ourselves, we’ve been doing a lot of shopping to replenish the items that we had to sell or throw away when we left Raleigh. This has been fun, exhausting, and expensive. While I do enjoy shopping, I’m getting a bit shell shocked by the amount of money we are having to spend to get back to normal. Luckily, we made about $4,000 on things that we sold before we left (including my 53″ Pioneer Elite TV, Apple Dual G5 computer, and vintage ’60s credenza…sigh). That should help defray the costs.

Except for the side roads and not having any furniture, things have been quite nice. We’ve been running a whole house humidifier to keep from drying out. It’s been pumping over 2 gallons of water into the air each day to keep it at the recommended level! The mountains are gorgeous, especially with all of the snow on them. We can’t see them from our home, but as soon as you get out on the main road (less than a mile away), the vista is amazing. I’ll end with a summary of pros and cons comparing living in Longmont, CO to living in Raleigh, NC:

Pros

• Shopping is as good as Raleigh
• Gorgeous scenery
• Faster service and friendlier people everywhere in Longmont (Boulder is not as good)
• Roads are in a grid, and traffic lights don’t take forever to cycle
• Daylight Donuts in Boulder!!!

Cons

• Side roads don’t get plowed
• It’s cold and dry
• The mall is farther away (maybe this is good; it will be harder to spend as much money now)
• Hippies (in Boulder mainly)
• There are still a lot of medians in the road, although not as many as in Raleigh

Last week was PyCon 2005 at Washington DC. I was fortunate enough to have my workplace foot the bill for my trip. This was the first conference of this type that I’ve been to, so I probably didn’t get as much out of it as I would have liked to. I did however meet Guido van Rossum, Python’s creator. He seems like a decent enough guy.

I would have to say that my favorite parts of the conference were the lightning talks and volunteering at the registration desk. The lightning talks were like “open mike night.” People went did a five minute presentation on little projects that they were working on. For the most part, these things were fairly useless, but very cool. Like a multiple concurrent user Python editor/interpreter. Volunteering at the registration desk was nice because you got to meet more people than you would just going to the talks. I really think that giving a talk would probably be the best way to enjoy PyCon. Hopefully, next year, if my manager is feeling generous again, I’ll get my chance.