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The 10 most recent entries are displayed here. See Archives for previous entries. Best viewed on 1024x768 and with Internet Explorer as Netscape is a piece of shit.
12.03.2001 16:08
Car Shopping
Ben and I are toying with the idea of buying a new car, so we spent Saturday test-driving cars. First, to the Ford dealership (with the allure of 0% financing), to test drive the Escape. Felt like a tin can, and even with 0% financing, it was only on 36 months, which would have still put payments at $600+ a month. Next to the Toyota dealership – the Rav4 felt like a sardine can -- equally as tinny, but even smaller.
Finally, to the Jeep dealership, where we test-drove the new Jeep Liberty. Now that is a nice car. It feels sturdy, is very comfortable, and generally is pretty sweet. Only drawback: the damn white dials on the dash (all of them had it). Now, to figure out the whole finances part….
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11.26.2001 12:50
Rainer's Editorial from the Bangor Daily News
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11.25.2001 21:43
Vacation
For the Thanksgiving holiday, instead of battling airport crowds, Ben and I decided to head to the great white north of the Canadian Rockies. While the drive was long (10 hours to, 13 hours back), it was perhaps one of the greatest destinations ever. Banff and Lake Louise are cute ski towns; the drive through Kooteney, Banff, Jasper and Yoho National Parks truly phenomenal.
We left Wednesday mid-day, driving in our monster truck (see last posting) and hauled-ass to Sandpoint, Idaho (very depressing place in November). It was raining most of the way, which wouldn’t bode well for the visibility in the next days, but much of the drive was at night so at this point it didn’t matter much. Idaho is a very strange place: there were a lot of roadside bars on the deserted road up to the border, and I kept on thinking of the Dukes of Hazzard for some reason. One brightly lit “store” of sorts was called “Wolf People” which was bizarre too, as there wasn’t anything around for miles. We stayed at the Worst Western in Sandpoint.
The next morning we continued on, nearly running over a gaggle of wild turkeys. How funny on Thanksgiving and all. This would be the first of our wildlife encounters, as the rest of the trip would have us waiting on the roadside for elk and big horn sheep to move (we also saw moose and wolves; no bears, they are hibernating). By mid-day we had driven all the way through Kooteney National Park to Banff, where we stayed for the next two nights at the Brewster Mountain Lodge. Now, a note: if you ever go to Banff – and I strongly recommend that you do – go in November, when rates are less than 1/3 of the high season and go when the us dollar is strong (the BML costs $250 US in high season – we paid $59 US).
Banff is beautiful, but nothing compared to the drive up the Icefields Parkway to Jasper. While we didn’t drive the whole way up, we drove to the largest glacier in the world which you can drive right up to, went x-country skiing at 7000 feet, and saw an amazing amount of animals. We will definitely have to go again in the summer, although I fear that the Winnebagos will be almost intolerable.
The drive back turned out to be a long one. We drove through a snowstorm through the Yoho National Park (on the trans-Canada highway, which, for the record is only one lane -- not much of a highway!), buzzed through fog banks in Glacier National Park (the one in Canada, not the one in Montana), and, while we had initially thought of stopping half way home like on the way up, hauled all the way back to Kirkland in one 13 hour stretch.
Some random notes: crossing the border into Canada and back is much easier east of the Cascades. On the way into Canada it took less than a minute of waiting (we were stuck behind a truck full of cows) and on the way back in, we didn’t even have a wait. It took less than a minute, all told. Secondly, Canadians fly their flag a lot. Guess they don’t want to be considered part of the US. Finally, when they have wildlife warnings in Canada they mean it. I think that we saw 100+ elk and 20+ big horn sheep.
We took pictures. I broke them into 3 sets: Getting there, Banff and Lake Louise, and the Icefields Parkway Drive. Oh, and Da Maus came too.
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11.21.2001 10:24
S U V
For our Canadian Rockies Trip, we rented a SUV, a Dodge Durango. This is going to be a ridiculous trip. I will need a ladder to get into the monster truck!! But it should be fun if I can get over the fact that the car is gold colored. Sigh. Midas.
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11.20.2001 14:51
Terrible Burritos
While I love to listen to NPR, there are moments that it is so anally eloquent that it makes you want to throw up (kinda like this sentence). This morning on KUOW, there was part two of the “in-depth reporting” on Terror Curridos, Mexican ballads with tragic lyrics and polka-and-waltz-like beats, by my favorite correspondent, Mandalit Del Barrrrrrrrrco. She went on and on about the terrible, meaningful, heartfelt quandary people fall into when they hear this music. Meanwhile, a man with a 99-cent Casio keyboard with dying batteries was playing in the background. Puke! If you like, you can listen to the whole thing here (scroll down about half way).
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11.12.2001 13:23
Odd Todd
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11.12.2001 13:21
Plane Crash
Another tragedy hits New York City. This morning, an American Airlines plane crashed into Rockaway, Queens, reportedly narrowly missing a school, but slamming into a residential neighborhood. I heard it on NPR first, and called Rainer from the car. The plane was bound for Santo Domingo in the Dom Rep, and seeing that was formerly his route to the island, I thought it would be big news for him. While everything can have things “read into” them these days, it does seem odd enough not to be a coincidence in this terror-filled age, but I am guessing that it was a mechanical failure, not terrorism.
I am going to use the cnn-ping factor as a gauge of the amount of tragedy in a given day though. If cnn.com loads like a bullet, then it’s a boring news day. If it builds like quicksand, then there is news to report and something is going on in the world.
They are estimating no survivors. 255 aboard.
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11.12.2001 11:49
Hiking
Ben and I went to Mt. Rainier again for the day on Sunday. This time no skiing, just a 5-mile hike along Rampart Ridge. It was a nice hike; exhausting enough on the switchbacks up, steep enough on the knees down, to be worthwhile. It is one of the few loop hikes in the park, so you don’t have to repeat the trail up and down. If you go, start heading left out of Longmire Lodge, otherwise the upswing will kill you. The weather wasn’t great, one of those days where the sky was rather indistinguishable from the snow of the mountain, and it threatened to rain pretty much the whole time we were walking, but it held off until the ride home. But then, it poured all the way home, through the bumper-to-bumper strip-mall-hell of Puyallup. What is up with Puyallup anyway? What a horrible town, and a pretty horrible name, and a perfectly disgusting website too.
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11.06.2001 12:33
Wordplay
So, on NPR this morning these was a story about a German truck driver being stopped at the border to Italy at a truck scale, his truck full of wine barrels, and detained on suspicion of carrying bombs because the word “laden” was on his manifest. Evidently, the Italian police officer hadn’t seen many German manifests before. No, …Worde ge-Laden… is not Osama’s brother, worde geladen means “was loaded”. Laden means loaded in German.
Simple mistake or are we all just a little too paranoid these days ? !
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10.31.2001 09:59
One Word:
pathetic
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