Hey, look! It’s the Granola Goths! They’ve even got merit badges.

I’m thinking about doing this hike, but in reverse, to end up at Goldmeyer. And you have to love pix like this.

Via eschaton, this overview of the conservative reaction to the new ‘anti-Bush’ Star Wars movie.

It’s pretty amusing, in that we-live-in-creepy-times kind of way.

One thing I have to give up is the sense that I’ll accomplish much of anything before sleeping.

I mean, if it’s time to go to bed, there’s no single thing that I can accomplish that I won’t be able to accomplish tomorrow. The desire to do Just One More Thing before bed is like chasing a dog which has escaped the yard and is running down the block. One simply can’t keep up.

I think that what my mind is trying to avoid is the thinking that cycles through my mind as I’m drifting off to sleep. The nagging things that pull me back to wakefulness. Another whole set of aspirations and self-flagellations to give up on, or at least to view as less important than the benefit of sleep itself. A more wakeful set of distractions to keep me from falling prey to the less wakeful ones.

Some times I want to move to a place where you wear a canvas sack and eat a bowl of rice every day and that’s it. A vow of silence. Sleep on a hard cot.

Yesterday I realized that my Amazon marketplace account was still set to the ‘vacation’ setting from when I went to Texas over Xmas. So I set it back to non-vacation, thinking all the inventory I had entered was gone (they have a policy about inventory listings over a certain age).

Well, today I made a sale. $2.13 profit for me. W00t.

Now I have to dig the book out of storage!

Update: Why does it cost more to mail a 12oz. package second-day than it does to send it first class?

I was doing Google for some other stuff, and ended up at American Buddha. Suddenly, it’s 1995 again, and I’m in a coffeehouse in Houston talking with pseudo-revolutionaries about poetry and meaning. The First Church of Buddha, Materialist in particular.

Other linkage: John Cletheroe’s web site, which features a bunch of very browsable US and Canada travel hints. I hope he didn’t build this site by hand, but even if he didn’t, it’s still pretty impressive.

More super-link-o-matic action: Motorcycle Roads US. Links to other sites where people talk about cool back roads. The emphasis is on going really fast and endangering the lives of others, but the info is up-to-date, and it’s useful.

I was looking at a road map and found a highway 821 between Ellensburg and Yakima, a route I’ve driven more than a few times on the interstate, and found mind-numbingly boring. A google search later, I’m at the motorcycle roads site, and from there, another one specializing in Pacific NW roads, including highway 821. Looks more fun than an interstate that borders a weapons training range.

A photographic exhibit that makes me want to go to New York City just to see it: Ashes and Snow. If anyone wants to ease my pain through the time-honored means of rampant consumerism, they could start here.

Apparently, the exhibit is housed in re-purposed shipping containers, which reminded me of this photographer’s work: Chris Jordan.

Some days just go right on by.

Wake up, ponder all the things that need to be done, and then, before you know it, it’s time to go to bed. In fact, it’s past time to go to bed. Having really accomplished nothing.

Well, I did accomplish a few things, but they seem so insignificant. They matter, but the execution was so trivial that they don’t really seem like accomplishments. I tend not to notice accomplishments anyway, just failures, which take on the quality of being on-going.

I’m a bit neurotic about failures, which is a common Aspie trait, apparently, if that means anything. Sort of like esprit d’escalier, which is the ‘spirit of the stairway,’ which is to say that after you’re already done talking to someone and you’re walking up the stairs, and you think, “I should have said *that* instead!” Imagine that on an endless loop, about everything that’s happened since I was, say, 10 years old, and you see how it’s a wonder I get to sleep at all.

I’m at a point where I can’t be bothered to react to it, to even really think about it, so it churns away at a barely-conscious level. I mean, who freakin’ cares if I had a bully in junior high school? The universe certainly doesn’t. But making that realization doesn’t unplug the endless loop, and only shapes the way I deal with those memories.

So some of it gets forgotten, but mostly I remember what I didn’t accomplish today, even though I did a lot.

Some days are like that. Today was cloudy and rainy and cool, and I wanted to go hiking, and I wanted to go take pictures, and I couldn’t do either, so I spent it all in this chair, doing internet things.

Which reminds me of something funny. I told a chat buddy that I was going to Colorado, and she said, “Hey, you should visit the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya. It’s supposed to give liberation just by looking at it.”

So I found the web site and looked, and told her: “Hey, pop star Sting visited during the construction. If I watch the quicktime video of his visit, will I be liberated?”

“No, watching the Sting video is a partial liberation. Like for a traffic ticket or something.”

I need a list of the oldest things in North America.

So far I’ve got: Bristlecone pines, Anasazi culture, relics of the various mound-making cultures of the southeast, and of course all that Eric the Red stuff in the northeast.

Geology aside, what else is old on this continent?

I know some of you folks out there are using iBooks and PowerBooks, so here’s a link to info about Apple’s battery recall.

File under ‘fun experimentation.’

Yesterday, after we got home from the hike, I set up my tripod to get this picture:

Later that evening, I thought… I really should take that thing down. But I was too exhausted and went to bed and slept like a log.

A little while ago, a tiny storm moved over the ridge where I live, and since the tripod was set up, here it is, in time lapse. The link is a Quicktime movie that’s 700k big. And here it is: Out My Window.

I kept the aperture and shutter speed constant, and stopped taking pictures when it was too overexposed.

By this time, the storm is dropping rain on Lake Dorothy, where we were yesterday.

Update: From first pic to last is about 20 minutes.