We paid a premium to move our trailer to a site with electricity. It’s been cold enough here to run our propane heater often during the night, which uses expensive propane and drains batteries, so we have to run a generator much of the day to keep up. With electricity, we can run a small electric heater and keep the lights on instead of using battery lanterns, which make it feel like a cave in our trailer.
More about caves later.
The site with electricity is $36 a night, compared with $23 a night for a no-hookups site. This puts camping here at the cost of a private RV park with full hookups, not that there’s any comparison. I’m assuming the parks are having to cover their actual costs because of budget cuts, but you don’t have to multiply $36 by very few days to figure out that it adds up fast. And no WIFI.
We’ve more or less settled into a happy routine. Up about 7:30 to walk the dogs and make coffee. A few hours of reading or studying Spanish for me during the day. Mary is busy on sewing projects she’s brought along and also reading a great deal. We spend a lot of time walking the dogs, a little time with maintaining camp and cooking and eating. Every couple of days, we go for a longer hike. And evenings we listen to an hour or two of Anna Karenina, which we have on audio book.
I don’t think I would have ever read this otherwise, but as a story it’s quite engaging, and at this rate we still have a few weeks of Anna to go. I think we’ll make this a regular part of the trip with more audio books to come. We could do an all-Russian vacation but probably won’t.
Today we took an exquisite hike of about four miles to the Boundary Cave, a talus cave that connects the west and east sides of the park. The hike up was on one of the most lovely trails I’ve ever enjoyed, heavily wooded with lots of rocks covered with moss and lichen and views of the pinnacles through the canopy. I’m not exactly sure what a “glade” is, but I’m pretty sure this would be a glade.
A talus cave, I learned, is formed when earthquakes dislodge huge rocks from the peaks and pile them up in ravines. Since they don’t fit together like a puzzle, the open spaces get partially filled in but leave passages. Bats, of course, love it. We made it to the cave entrance, which was set in a magnificent rock formation, but unfortunately forgot to bring a flashlight so we couldn’t explore further. We might go up again before we leave.
Weather is still cold at night, and we’ve had a little rain, but daytimes are still generally beautifully sunny and relatively warm in the mid-50s. On a trip into town, I got online at a Starbucks and among other things checked the weather back in Klamath Falls.
Ha!
Tomorrow we’re going into Hollister to provision up again, get online, have a Mexican lunch, and explore the site of the 1950s biker takeover that inspired the movie “The Wild One.” If you don’t know the story, it was actually a rather minor incident, with a motorcycle gang buying a lot of beer and getting drunk, fighting, and breaking a few windows over the weekend. Somehow, though, Life Magazine got a reporter and photographer in. There wasn’t a lot of excitement left when they got there, so they got a few of the bikers to stage fake fights and sit drunkenly on their bikes. (Not all Harleys, btw. Brando rode a Triumph in the movie.) The article made outlaw bikers familiar and somehow fascinating to enough people to keep the myth and legends going long after Hunter S. Thompson’s The Hell’s Angles: A Wild and Terrible Saga.
The movie followed the article, and the age of outlaw bikers was born. The dark and brooding Brando didn’t make a very convincing outlaw, but Lee Marvin is actually scary.
What we’ve seen of Hollister so far suggests it’s a nice little town with great strip malls. Tomorrow we go looking for the real downtown deal.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Still at Pinnacles
I love it here, and with several days left on our reservation, I’m hoping we might decide to stay longer.
Or not.
The whole idea of this excursion is to do exactly what we feel like, and we have very few actual plans and no real commitments. If the money holds out reasonably well, we’ll be traveling for something between two and four months
Our campground sits at 1,000 feet of elevation, and it’s cooler than I expected. Daytime temperatures of about sixty degrees are perfect, but nights it drops to freezing, and there has been ice on our things outside most mornings. It warms up slowly and cools down fast, so we’re dressing warm.
In fact, on a run into town today, we stopped at the Goodwill and bought sweatshirts. Mine’s a Nike, in honor of Tiger Woods. Cost me nine bucks.
Another aspect of the cooler temperatures is that we’re going through propane quickly. We had to take the trailer with us to town, and eleven gallons cost $45. We’ve started a more serious conservation effort. I mentioned the part of the money holding out.
We’re surrounded by the steep, oak covered hills of one of California’s central ranges, beautiful in themselves, and the actual pinnacles are a few miles up the road. We’ve only been up once so far for a short but challenging hike for us, a one-mile, 1,100-foot elevation gain to a great viewpoint.
I won’t say I could have knocked this out without effort when I was younger, only that it was a slow crawl for me now. One of my big objectives of this trip is physical conditioning, so I hope to combine a vigorous walk every day with more serious hikes a few times a week.
The wildlife here is abundant. A herd of deer numbering in the dozens makes its home in the campground, not that exciting for us since deer are also common in our yard at home. But Thursday we sighted our first condors flying over the ridge above our campground. Even from a distance, the size of these birds is apparent, and there was no confusing them with the more common turkey vultures. The campground has a viewing station with high-power telescopes, and if you can lock on to one in flight, it’s easy to follow it for long periods.
Very exciting. The condor’s survival is far from certain and it’s been a treat to be able to see them in part of their natural range.
We’ve seen lots of coyote scat and heard them at night. A few nights ago we built a campfire and were enjoying the evening with our JR terriers Bandit and Nick. Nick was very nervous and kept fixing on thingsthat go bump in the night. We thought he was just being paranoid, but when I scanned the perimeter with my flashlight, there were two Wileys circling in, and they weren’t quickly scared off when I threw a few rocks at them. We’ve seen several since then. Sometimes when we’re walking the dogs to go pee at night, Nick jumps sky high at something he smells and pulls hard on the leash to get away from it. We think it’s probably coyote piss marking the location of a new fast food franchise. They’re known to quickly grab and run with little dogs left unattended for any time, so we’re extra careful.
We also saw a bobcat in camp, and I got some pictures of it at about 100 meters. Later in the afternoon, it wandered much closer, obviously hunting mice or ground squirrels (of which we have seen none) and I slowly made my way over to it taking pictures and got to within about 30 feet. I would guess its weight at about thirty pounds.
(If you’ve never heard a bobcat cry, btw, it’s about the scariest sound in all of nature. You can hear samples with a Google search, but if it doesn’t send a primal chill up your spine, you haven’t got close to the real thing.)
Shortly after the bobcat, we also sighted three feral pigs, which for all purposes are pretty much wild boar. We had seen signs of their rooting, and Mary guessed what they were before we asked a ranger, and she (the ranger) confirmed they’re common around the campground. She said that within less than a year, a domestic pig will take on all the characteristics of a wild one: a lean frame and prominent shoulder hump, plus tusks. These pigs have been wild for generations.
They are an imposing presence, and we were glad they were a hundred meters or so away and moving the other direction. The ranger also said they are shot on sight as part of an effort to eradicate them from the park, which explains two shots we heard close in yesterday.
Still, good luck with that. Wild pigs breed like rats, and I don’t know of any successful efforts to remove them.
Because the oak trees have had an abundance of acorns this year, the bird population is very high. Common are jays and magpies, quail and, not surprisingly, the acorn woodpecker. Also lots of hawks, golden eagles, and the always comely turkey vultures.
I suppose you have to be here to appreciate all this, and I’m very glad we decided on a whim to make this our first stop. We’ve been the only campers here until two other RVs came in today, but they’ll be gone after the weekend and we’ll have the park to ourselves again, save for the hikers and climbers who drive up to the trailheads early in the morning and leave late.
The rest of the time, it’s just us and the chickens.
Or not.
The whole idea of this excursion is to do exactly what we feel like, and we have very few actual plans and no real commitments. If the money holds out reasonably well, we’ll be traveling for something between two and four months
Our campground sits at 1,000 feet of elevation, and it’s cooler than I expected. Daytime temperatures of about sixty degrees are perfect, but nights it drops to freezing, and there has been ice on our things outside most mornings. It warms up slowly and cools down fast, so we’re dressing warm.
In fact, on a run into town today, we stopped at the Goodwill and bought sweatshirts. Mine’s a Nike, in honor of Tiger Woods. Cost me nine bucks.
Another aspect of the cooler temperatures is that we’re going through propane quickly. We had to take the trailer with us to town, and eleven gallons cost $45. We’ve started a more serious conservation effort. I mentioned the part of the money holding out.
We’re surrounded by the steep, oak covered hills of one of California’s central ranges, beautiful in themselves, and the actual pinnacles are a few miles up the road. We’ve only been up once so far for a short but challenging hike for us, a one-mile, 1,100-foot elevation gain to a great viewpoint.
I won’t say I could have knocked this out without effort when I was younger, only that it was a slow crawl for me now. One of my big objectives of this trip is physical conditioning, so I hope to combine a vigorous walk every day with more serious hikes a few times a week.
The wildlife here is abundant. A herd of deer numbering in the dozens makes its home in the campground, not that exciting for us since deer are also common in our yard at home. But Thursday we sighted our first condors flying over the ridge above our campground. Even from a distance, the size of these birds is apparent, and there was no confusing them with the more common turkey vultures. The campground has a viewing station with high-power telescopes, and if you can lock on to one in flight, it’s easy to follow it for long periods.
Very exciting. The condor’s survival is far from certain and it’s been a treat to be able to see them in part of their natural range.
We’ve seen lots of coyote scat and heard them at night. A few nights ago we built a campfire and were enjoying the evening with our JR terriers Bandit and Nick. Nick was very nervous and kept fixing on thingsthat go bump in the night. We thought he was just being paranoid, but when I scanned the perimeter with my flashlight, there were two Wileys circling in, and they weren’t quickly scared off when I threw a few rocks at them. We’ve seen several since then. Sometimes when we’re walking the dogs to go pee at night, Nick jumps sky high at something he smells and pulls hard on the leash to get away from it. We think it’s probably coyote piss marking the location of a new fast food franchise. They’re known to quickly grab and run with little dogs left unattended for any time, so we’re extra careful.
We also saw a bobcat in camp, and I got some pictures of it at about 100 meters. Later in the afternoon, it wandered much closer, obviously hunting mice or ground squirrels (of which we have seen none) and I slowly made my way over to it taking pictures and got to within about 30 feet. I would guess its weight at about thirty pounds.
(If you’ve never heard a bobcat cry, btw, it’s about the scariest sound in all of nature. You can hear samples with a Google search, but if it doesn’t send a primal chill up your spine, you haven’t got close to the real thing.)
Shortly after the bobcat, we also sighted three feral pigs, which for all purposes are pretty much wild boar. We had seen signs of their rooting, and Mary guessed what they were before we asked a ranger, and she (the ranger) confirmed they’re common around the campground. She said that within less than a year, a domestic pig will take on all the characteristics of a wild one: a lean frame and prominent shoulder hump, plus tusks. These pigs have been wild for generations.
They are an imposing presence, and we were glad they were a hundred meters or so away and moving the other direction. The ranger also said they are shot on sight as part of an effort to eradicate them from the park, which explains two shots we heard close in yesterday.
Still, good luck with that. Wild pigs breed like rats, and I don’t know of any successful efforts to remove them.
Because the oak trees have had an abundance of acorns this year, the bird population is very high. Common are jays and magpies, quail and, not surprisingly, the acorn woodpecker. Also lots of hawks, golden eagles, and the always comely turkey vultures.
I suppose you have to be here to appreciate all this, and I’m very glad we decided on a whim to make this our first stop. We’ve been the only campers here until two other RVs came in today, but they’ll be gone after the weekend and we’ll have the park to ourselves again, save for the hikers and climbers who drive up to the trailheads early in the morning and leave late.
The rest of the time, it’s just us and the chickens.
Thursday, 12/17, Pinnacles
Our first full day here was very enjoyable. We went for a few walks around the camp area, finished setting up the trailer, and did a lot of reading and hanging around. We practiced yoga separately, which felt wonderful with our mats in the soft leaf bed from the oak trees and the warm sun on my back. I also did about an hour of Spanish. All in all, I was surprised how quickly the day filled up without either any sense of boredom or rushing. If anything, I would have enjoyed an extra hour or two for Spanish.
We haven’t explored the park beyond the campground yet. Plenty of time for that as we’ll be here another ten days or so. In camp, though, there is an abundance of wildlife to watch: a dozen or so deer which are quick at home with us campers, plus a large variety of very numerous and active birds: we’ve identified quail, turkeys, acorn woodpeckers, scrub jays, magpies, and our old friends from home the Oregon juncos. We haven’t seen any condors yet, though a very serious birder camped here yesterday uaesaid he could pick some out in the trees on the ridgeline above us with his very serious scope mounted on a tripod.
Other than him, we’re alone in the camper section. We’ve seen one tent in the tent section. There’s a lot of activity during the daytime, though, with workers busy building new rail fences and making other repairs and improvements. Stimulus money, I’m thinking, and glad to see them at work.
Last night we built a fire and were listening to Anna Karenina on audio disc, but were startled by an animal noise, a kind of combined grunt and growl. We both thought it was a deer, but we turned the disc off the listen more closely. Didn’t hear anything more. There aren’t any bears or cougars around, so we weren’t worried about getting eaten. It was getting cold, though, so we went in shortly after. It’s been warm and sunny during the day, about 60 degrees, but down to freezing at night.
This is a good test of boondocking since we don’t have any hookups. I ran the generator for a few hours yesterday and am not worried about the batteries, but water could be a few problem. The trailer carries sixty gallons, which seems like it should be a lot, but we’re down to 1/3 according to the indicator in the trailer, despite taking showers in the park shower/restroom. We’ve been out only three days now, and I was hoping we could get a week or more if we were careful. It doesn’t look like we’ll get anything like that now, though the indicator isn’t too accurate. For here, there’s a dump station and fresh water in camp, so we’d only have to hook up and drive over to them. Out in the desert, it would be a bigger undertaking.
Today we’re going into town for a few supplies.
Overall, we’re both enjoying the trip very much so far, but then it’s only been a few days. And we wouldn’t mind if it were a little warmer, but I think this is going to be typical of the weather. Actually, it’s very nice during most of the day, and we just layer up when it’s cooler.
We haven’t explored the park beyond the campground yet. Plenty of time for that as we’ll be here another ten days or so. In camp, though, there is an abundance of wildlife to watch: a dozen or so deer which are quick at home with us campers, plus a large variety of very numerous and active birds: we’ve identified quail, turkeys, acorn woodpeckers, scrub jays, magpies, and our old friends from home the Oregon juncos. We haven’t seen any condors yet, though a very serious birder camped here yesterday uaesaid he could pick some out in the trees on the ridgeline above us with his very serious scope mounted on a tripod.
Other than him, we’re alone in the camper section. We’ve seen one tent in the tent section. There’s a lot of activity during the daytime, though, with workers busy building new rail fences and making other repairs and improvements. Stimulus money, I’m thinking, and glad to see them at work.
Last night we built a fire and were listening to Anna Karenina on audio disc, but were startled by an animal noise, a kind of combined grunt and growl. We both thought it was a deer, but we turned the disc off the listen more closely. Didn’t hear anything more. There aren’t any bears or cougars around, so we weren’t worried about getting eaten. It was getting cold, though, so we went in shortly after. It’s been warm and sunny during the day, about 60 degrees, but down to freezing at night.
This is a good test of boondocking since we don’t have any hookups. I ran the generator for a few hours yesterday and am not worried about the batteries, but water could be a few problem. The trailer carries sixty gallons, which seems like it should be a lot, but we’re down to 1/3 according to the indicator in the trailer, despite taking showers in the park shower/restroom. We’ve been out only three days now, and I was hoping we could get a week or more if we were careful. It doesn’t look like we’ll get anything like that now, though the indicator isn’t too accurate. For here, there’s a dump station and fresh water in camp, so we’d only have to hook up and drive over to them. Out in the desert, it would be a bigger undertaking.
Today we’re going into town for a few supplies.
Overall, we’re both enjoying the trip very much so far, but then it’s only been a few days. And we wouldn’t mind if it were a little warmer, but I think this is going to be typical of the weather. Actually, it’s very nice during most of the day, and we just layer up when it’s cooler.
Ross and Mary’s Voyage of Discovery: Chapter One
Mary and I left Klamath Falls on Monday, December 14th. We had the trailer up at the house for a couple of days and were hoping to get out Monday, but weather reports kept changing. After a week of sub-zero temperatures, now we had a series of storms coming in, and it was looking like the better window would be later in the week. By Sunday afternoon we had a few inches of snow on the ground, and I chained up the truck and trailer, mostly so we could be sure of just getting down our steep hill. Once we got on the highway, I was optimistic we would have good pavement. I thought we could drop the chains and drive with the truck in 4-wheel once we got on the road.
By Monday morning, though, the weather report was calling for heavy snow that night, so we decided to make a run for it. It took us until 1pm to finish packing and loading, which was something of a bigger job than usual since we’re planning to be gone somewhere between two and four months, considerably longer than we’ve been gone before.
The escape from Klamath was only a little harrowing. We had bare pavement all the way, but at Weed, the junction with I-5, we hit heavy winds, which I expected. I would guess 20 mph, with gusts as high as 40. The trailer was definitely getting seriously pushed around. By this time, it was also raining hard and the temperature was only 36. We had just made it out in time.
We were thinking to stay in Redding and try something we’d heard about but never yet done ourselves, which was to camp free in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Not that I don’t hate Wal-Mart as much as the next enlightened liberal, but free overnight parking and a chance to stock-up on any last minute supplies is hard to pass up. With our Garmin GPS, I did a search and found one in Red Bluff, so we motored on down I-5 another thirty miles and Flo led us right to it.
(Flo is the voice on the GPS, and when in doubt about directions, we always go with the Flo.)
Staying at Wal-Mart was actually kind of fun and we especially appreciated the free camping. Our first real stop is Pinnacles National Monument, and we were surprised that dry camping (no hookups) is $23 a night. We’re used to paying $10 to $15 a night in Forest Service or BLM campgrounds, and some of the parks and monuments we plan to visit in the Southwest are also free, so it’s hard to understand the high prices here, especially in the off-season.
But we’re staying twelve days and are looking forward to it. Pinnacles lies in the oak foothills (some would say mountains) that separate the Salinas and Central Valleys of California. What makes the park interesting is that it’s composed of the remains of an ancient volcano, mostly eroded away now but with peaks rising to above 3,000 feet. The landscape is dramatic and beautiful. Mary and I camped here with a friend almost forty years ago, probably our first camping trip together. We’re looking forward to some hiking and caving, and if we’re lucky, we’ll also see some condors, which were successfully reintroduced here some years ago.
We’re also looking forward to being warm. Part of the reason for our trip, which we hope to repeat in coming years, is to camp and explore the desert Southwest, but we’re also here as snowbirds, fleeing the snow and freezing temperatures of the Oregon high desert. It’s not that I hate winter, it’s just that after all these years, I mostly hate winter.
So, although I was surprised that the temperature was only 28 this morning, it’s sunny today and should get up to about 60.
Yes!
We’ll have to go into Hollister once or twice for supplies while we’re here, and we already saw a Starbucks, so we’ll stop by to surf the web and check our mail and I can post this rambling first entry of our trip. There’s no WIFI here and not even any cell phone reception.
What’s the latest news on Tiger Woods? Talk about roughing it!
By Monday morning, though, the weather report was calling for heavy snow that night, so we decided to make a run for it. It took us until 1pm to finish packing and loading, which was something of a bigger job than usual since we’re planning to be gone somewhere between two and four months, considerably longer than we’ve been gone before.
The escape from Klamath was only a little harrowing. We had bare pavement all the way, but at Weed, the junction with I-5, we hit heavy winds, which I expected. I would guess 20 mph, with gusts as high as 40. The trailer was definitely getting seriously pushed around. By this time, it was also raining hard and the temperature was only 36. We had just made it out in time.
We were thinking to stay in Redding and try something we’d heard about but never yet done ourselves, which was to camp free in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Not that I don’t hate Wal-Mart as much as the next enlightened liberal, but free overnight parking and a chance to stock-up on any last minute supplies is hard to pass up. With our Garmin GPS, I did a search and found one in Red Bluff, so we motored on down I-5 another thirty miles and Flo led us right to it.
(Flo is the voice on the GPS, and when in doubt about directions, we always go with the Flo.)
Staying at Wal-Mart was actually kind of fun and we especially appreciated the free camping. Our first real stop is Pinnacles National Monument, and we were surprised that dry camping (no hookups) is $23 a night. We’re used to paying $10 to $15 a night in Forest Service or BLM campgrounds, and some of the parks and monuments we plan to visit in the Southwest are also free, so it’s hard to understand the high prices here, especially in the off-season.
But we’re staying twelve days and are looking forward to it. Pinnacles lies in the oak foothills (some would say mountains) that separate the Salinas and Central Valleys of California. What makes the park interesting is that it’s composed of the remains of an ancient volcano, mostly eroded away now but with peaks rising to above 3,000 feet. The landscape is dramatic and beautiful. Mary and I camped here with a friend almost forty years ago, probably our first camping trip together. We’re looking forward to some hiking and caving, and if we’re lucky, we’ll also see some condors, which were successfully reintroduced here some years ago.
We’re also looking forward to being warm. Part of the reason for our trip, which we hope to repeat in coming years, is to camp and explore the desert Southwest, but we’re also here as snowbirds, fleeing the snow and freezing temperatures of the Oregon high desert. It’s not that I hate winter, it’s just that after all these years, I mostly hate winter.
So, although I was surprised that the temperature was only 28 this morning, it’s sunny today and should get up to about 60.
Yes!
We’ll have to go into Hollister once or twice for supplies while we’re here, and we already saw a Starbucks, so we’ll stop by to surf the web and check our mail and I can post this rambling first entry of our trip. There’s no WIFI here and not even any cell phone reception.
What’s the latest news on Tiger Woods? Talk about roughing it!
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Stephen and Eve
I thought Colbert went easy on tonight’s guest, Andy Schlafly, son of Phyllis The Wicked Witch of the Right, and founder of Conservapedia, an online alternative to the liberal bias of Wikipedia.
Here’s the Conservapedia definition of liberal:
“A liberal (also leftist) is someone who rejects logical and biblical standards, often for self-centered reasons. There are no coherent liberal standards; often a liberal is merely someone who craves attention, and who uses many words to say nothing. Liberalism began as a movement for individual liberties, but today is increasingly statist, and in Europe even socialistic.”
I just love a concise, unbiased definition. Stephan could have just read that and asked, “WTF?”
Still, Colbert did take his shots at Conserva earlier when “On October 7, 2009, [he] called for his viewers to incorporate him into the Conservapedia Bible as a Biblical figure and viewers responded by editing the Conservapedia Bible to include his name.” This resulted in articles on topics such as “Stephan and the Ark.”
For more on Conservapedia and other “alternative conservative sites” here’s a link to the evil Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia
[You still gotta cut and paste the links. Blogger is messing with me.]
Here’s the Conservapedia definition of liberal:
“A liberal (also leftist) is someone who rejects logical and biblical standards, often for self-centered reasons. There are no coherent liberal standards; often a liberal is merely someone who craves attention, and who uses many words to say nothing. Liberalism began as a movement for individual liberties, but today is increasingly statist, and in Europe even socialistic.”
I just love a concise, unbiased definition. Stephan could have just read that and asked, “WTF?”
Still, Colbert did take his shots at Conserva earlier when “On October 7, 2009, [he] called for his viewers to incorporate him into the Conservapedia Bible as a Biblical figure and viewers responded by editing the Conservapedia Bible to include his name.” This resulted in articles on topics such as “Stephan and the Ark.”
For more on Conservapedia and other “alternative conservative sites” here’s a link to the evil Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia
[You still gotta cut and paste the links. Blogger is messing with me.]
Thursday, December 03, 2009
Small world
Mary and I exchanged Christmas presents yesterday. Actually, we both kept the one we had bought for the other. We gifted each other (why not make another new verb? It’s all the thing to do) a pair of Kindles, and when we opened them, we found we had to register them if they came as a gift, but they were already registered to the gifter, not the giftee, so we said, well hell, let’s just keep our own.
Not very Christmasy (also written “Christmas-y”),but each year I try to move a little further away from any recognition of Christmas as a special day. Part of this has to do with not being a Christian and resenting this imposed holiday, part is a rejection of the commercialization of Christmas. Part is protecting myself from the melancholy of not being eight-years-old anymore.
But hell, I still want some presents.
I’m very enthused about the Kindle and have wanted one since I read a little about the new features, which include a dictionary that allows instant access to definitions as you read. “Bumptious” is now in my active vocabulary, and pretty soon I’ll be sounding like George Will or the recently departed William F. Buckley even. Also, by searching for a name in the current document, you can almost instantly generate an in-order list of all the references to a single character, which should come in handy when I’m reading mysteries because usually when the bad guy comes back on the stage in the last pages and has our hero at gunpoint in an isolated warehouse, I can’t remember who this bad guy is. Of course, it’s almost always a minor character from page forty-three whom I’ve completely forgotten. So now, I can search and go back to page forty-three and remind myself that he was the doorman that the crime boss whispered to as he was entering the banquet surrounded by bodyguards.
Ah ha!
I’ve already downloaded a couple of books, plus the New Yorker, which is not available here in my little town, and today’s Washington Post just to see what the Kindle version looks like.
This is a very practical tool for us as we prepare to head out on our winter travels to the Southwest:
Pioneers! O Pioneers!
COME my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Damn straight we do, and our Arctic Fox travel trailer and Dodge ¾ ton pickup with the Cummins diesel, and now two Kindles so we’ll have very expanded access to books, newspapers,and magazines as we travel mostly in the backcountry of parks and national monuments. We’ll have cell phone reception much of the time, which allows Kindle shopping and downloads, but few bookstores or WI-FI, where we can get the news online.
So I’m feeling pretty good about my new gadget and our trip coming up when I’m watching Colbert last night, and his guest is author Sherman Alexie. I’ve heard of him. Turns out he’s a Native American from the Spokane area, growing up there about the time Mary and I lived there in the late 70s. Also, the film Smoke Signals, which I’ve admired here in earlier posts, is based on one of his short stories, and he wrote the screen play. Small world, I’m thinking.
I’m pretty interested in the guy by now and ready to cue him up on my Kindle, but it turns out the whole interview is about how much he hates Kindle and how it’s destroying the relationship between authors and their readers, not to mention the independent bookstores (I’ve got some bad news here for Sherman, Kindle or not), and in fact finally destroying the printed word itself. Pretty soon, there won’t be anything left but downloads, which will offer a hugely reduced number of titles mostly falling within the bestseller category.
Again, have I got news, but still.
So Sherman won’t allow his books to be digitized, doesn’t want them getting all digit-y, and I had to go to Amazon and order the hardcopies, and I’m not sure I see such a big difference between which Amazon department I order from.
Actually, I share all these concerns but I don’t think there’s anything we can do to change much. Better maybe to try to find a way to ride the wave. Technology is now a force of nature as powerful as climate change and about as immediate as a massive meteor strike. Goodbye to the daily newspaper, the network news team, and now the local bookstore. I will miss them all if I live long enough, but actually, I think I’m about the perfect age to have enjoyed the best of everything life and human progress have had to offer, and I mostly won’t be around when the bills come due.
Meanwhile, I downloaded Anna Karenina for free to my Kindle. (It’s public domain now, so I might finally get around to reading it. Sorry, Leo.) And I have four more new books on there, plus a couple of magazines.
I’m really killing the publishing industry.
Not very Christmasy (also written “Christmas-y”),but each year I try to move a little further away from any recognition of Christmas as a special day. Part of this has to do with not being a Christian and resenting this imposed holiday, part is a rejection of the commercialization of Christmas. Part is protecting myself from the melancholy of not being eight-years-old anymore.
But hell, I still want some presents.
I’m very enthused about the Kindle and have wanted one since I read a little about the new features, which include a dictionary that allows instant access to definitions as you read. “Bumptious” is now in my active vocabulary, and pretty soon I’ll be sounding like George Will or the recently departed William F. Buckley even. Also, by searching for a name in the current document, you can almost instantly generate an in-order list of all the references to a single character, which should come in handy when I’m reading mysteries because usually when the bad guy comes back on the stage in the last pages and has our hero at gunpoint in an isolated warehouse, I can’t remember who this bad guy is. Of course, it’s almost always a minor character from page forty-three whom I’ve completely forgotten. So now, I can search and go back to page forty-three and remind myself that he was the doorman that the crime boss whispered to as he was entering the banquet surrounded by bodyguards.
Ah ha!
I’ve already downloaded a couple of books, plus the New Yorker, which is not available here in my little town, and today’s Washington Post just to see what the Kindle version looks like.
This is a very practical tool for us as we prepare to head out on our winter travels to the Southwest:
Pioneers! O Pioneers!
COME my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Damn straight we do, and our Arctic Fox travel trailer and Dodge ¾ ton pickup with the Cummins diesel, and now two Kindles so we’ll have very expanded access to books, newspapers,and magazines as we travel mostly in the backcountry of parks and national monuments. We’ll have cell phone reception much of the time, which allows Kindle shopping and downloads, but few bookstores or WI-FI, where we can get the news online.
So I’m feeling pretty good about my new gadget and our trip coming up when I’m watching Colbert last night, and his guest is author Sherman Alexie. I’ve heard of him. Turns out he’s a Native American from the Spokane area, growing up there about the time Mary and I lived there in the late 70s. Also, the film Smoke Signals, which I’ve admired here in earlier posts, is based on one of his short stories, and he wrote the screen play. Small world, I’m thinking.
I’m pretty interested in the guy by now and ready to cue him up on my Kindle, but it turns out the whole interview is about how much he hates Kindle and how it’s destroying the relationship between authors and their readers, not to mention the independent bookstores (I’ve got some bad news here for Sherman, Kindle or not), and in fact finally destroying the printed word itself. Pretty soon, there won’t be anything left but downloads, which will offer a hugely reduced number of titles mostly falling within the bestseller category.
Again, have I got news, but still.
So Sherman won’t allow his books to be digitized, doesn’t want them getting all digit-y, and I had to go to Amazon and order the hardcopies, and I’m not sure I see such a big difference between which Amazon department I order from.
Actually, I share all these concerns but I don’t think there’s anything we can do to change much. Better maybe to try to find a way to ride the wave. Technology is now a force of nature as powerful as climate change and about as immediate as a massive meteor strike. Goodbye to the daily newspaper, the network news team, and now the local bookstore. I will miss them all if I live long enough, but actually, I think I’m about the perfect age to have enjoyed the best of everything life and human progress have had to offer, and I mostly won’t be around when the bills come due.
Meanwhile, I downloaded Anna Karenina for free to my Kindle. (It’s public domain now, so I might finally get around to reading it. Sorry, Leo.) And I have four more new books on there, plus a couple of magazines.
I’m really killing the publishing industry.
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