So…yeah. It’s been a long week (despite being shorter than usual thanks to some time off from work), and it ain’t over yet. Next week looks just as loaded. Hrm.

My commute this week has been relatively easy, thankfully – I’ve been working throught he audiobook of John Krakauer’s Into the Wild, which pieces together the story of Chris McCandless, who, after dropping more or less off the grid for a few years and tramping around the American West after graduating from university, hiked into the Alaska wilderness intending to live off the land. His journals indicate he survived quite well for several months, but eventually succumbed to what appears to be starvation (though the actual circumstances are in dispute).

McCandless was an interesting, if eccentric character. Stubborn and more than a little naive, but still, at least in my mind, kind of admirable. The guy jumped into life with both feet, and stuck to his principles (even if his principles were slightly strange). I saw more than little bit of me in him; or more accurately, I saw in him a bit of what parts of me aspire to be. I understand the need for solitude, and the recitence to develop strong connections with the world, if not to the extent McCandless felt it, and perhaps not for the same reasons, but I think I understand

That said, I think there’s a piece of many of us that would love to shuck off all of the responsibilities our lives have accumulated and just walk off into the bush and live a simple life in communion with nature. The idea itself is terribly liberating, however unrealistic. Most of us have to be content with weekend hikes along the AT or off-road cycling runs along the fringes of the megalopolis, but it’s still kind of nice to know that there are people out there who have actually tried.

Um. Tunes. A little heavy on the 80s metal this time, but that’s what I get for listening to hours of it on Pandora the other week. I’ve got the algorithms tuned to Aquanet and Spandex, it seems.

1. “Bad Medicine” – Bon Jovi
2. “Sweet Child o’ Mine – Guns & Roses
3. “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart) – Journey
4. “Don’t Know What You Got (live)” – Cinderella
5. “Take On Me (extended version) – A-Ha
6. “Little Lion Man” – Mumford & Sons
7. “I Fell In Love With A Girl” – White Stripes
8. “Women and Men” – They Might Be Giants
9. “Tainted Love” – Soft Cell
10. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” – Metallica

Being nice June Saturday, and given the fact that my wife and eldest are off doing the anime convention thing so I’m on the lookout for things to keep the younger two kids distracted from the fact that mom’s not here, we took a trip out to a local park to do a short hike through the woods and marshes along the James River, then decided to take a ride out to Hopewell VA, the next town over, and visited City Point, a park with some Civil War significance regarding the battle of Petersburg, and happens to overlook the confluence of the James and Appomatox rivers.

We walked along the water’s edge for a while, stopping along the way for the kids to pick up shells – the area is, if not brackish, only a few miles off from where the waterways become so – they ended up with a whole big pile of bivalve shells, a handful of crab bits, and a bunch of pretty smooth river rocks.

As we were going through the shells, we found that one of them we picked up belonged to a live clam. I did a little research, and learned that it was, in fact, an asian clam (Corbicula fluminea), an invasive species not native to North America, but is indeed a fresh water clam, and that some people have actually kept them in freshwater aquariums, though few have had much success.

The kids, being somewhat attached to the little guy, who sat in a small container sticking his filter out and trying to feed (it’s smaller than a penny), wanted to keep it. Of course, people who do keep these clams (you can buy them in the aquarium trade in some places) tend to have lots of horror stories about them slowly starving in community tanks (they eat plankton and stuff, and most home aquariums are, in fact, too clean), though they’re relatively harmless, if dull.

Having been pulled from the water within sight of a large Honeywell chemical plant along the river, and along a shoreline that, frankly, isn’t particularly clean, I am worried about what sort of ridealongs this little guy is carrying. Of course, he’s rather sprightly (for a clam, anyway), so I decided to try and set up a quarantine tank – I knocked together a simple sponge filter for a one gallon tank, mixed some of my tank water from the 30gal, some gravel, and a handful of java moss. It’s sitting on top of the larger tank’s light fixture, which is keeping the water somewhat warm.

Several hours later the clam (as well as a couple of little arthropod things that look a bit like scuds) are still alive and doing bivalve (and arthropod) sort of things. I still don’t hold out hope that they’ll make it for the long term, but I’ve done my fatherly best to provide a hospitable environment for the strange little creatures my children manage to bring home. However, I don’t know too many parents who’ve had to try to create a hospitable environment for a clam.

We’ll see how it goes.

It’s been a week. Not an awful week, aside from a couple of long work days and one bout of near crippling insomnia the night before I had an important meeting in DC (still nailed it, btw), but a week, largely dedicated to stacking the deck to make the next couple of weeks flow more smoothly in lots of different areas. Could’ve been worse, all told.

Friday’s a work from home day this week, which is nice, given the weather – I don’t expect this tropical storm to seriously derail us, but it’s raining an awful lot, and that makes the commute a pain. Already had a couple of rainy ones this week, and I wasn’t looking forward to another.

One thing that made the week’s driving go more smoothly though was my choice of soundtrack. I’d blown through my audiobooks, and the local library branch was totally picked over when I hit it this week, so I plugged my mp3 player into the dash (I can do that now, thanks to my new head unit…yay) and caught up with several hours of Mikey Mason’s Beer Powered Time Machine podcast. Mikey characterizes it as “a celebration of good beer, storytelling, and personal histories”, which it certainly is. On one of the social networks this week, I described my experience with it as follows:

so, I finally started really catching up with Mikey Mason’s “Beer Powered Time Machine” podcast this week, and I’m wondering what the hell took me so long. It’s a celebration of storytelling – with beer – and perfectly captures the comfortable feeling of sitting around a table or up against the brass rail with friends, old and new, sharing experiences – it’s the best lubrication for getting the wheels of nostalgia and memory turning short of actually being there – it filled yesterday’s time behind the wheel with lots of pleasant memories. Thanks, Mikey – keep ’em coming!

And I stand by that description. It had me laughing, thinking, reflecting, and creating a list of “beers I gotta try” all week, and I look forward to more. I highly recommend it.

Otherwise – nothing pressing this weekend. There’s talk of music tonight, maybe, and there’s potential music tomorrow if driving a little ways seems like I good idea, and music early on Sunday morning. Otherwise, I’ll probably do laundry, make kids clean up messes, take care of the shopping, and maybe finish Arrested Development. But for now, tunes:

1. “Classy Girls” – The Lumineers
2. “Hey Jude” – The Beatles
3. “Feeling The Pull” – The Swell Season
4. “Horse To Water” – REM
5. “Lay Your Hands On Me” – Bon Jovi
6. “A Different Kind of Fun” – Earth To Bob
7. “Cantina” – Voltaire
8. “That’s Just What You Are” – Aimee Mann
9. “Let’s go Crazy” – Prince + The Revolution
10. “White Highway” – Saraya

And in case none of those struck your fancy, here’s a bird singing the theme to My Neighbor Totoro:

Also, you should totally check out today’s xkcd…

Seventeen years ago, I was not yet here in Virginia to experience this particular natural event, but this year, it’s a cool experience.

I expect it’s probably grist for the nostalgic blog post mill in the future, but for now, I just wanted to share a photo of one of the plague I hung out with for a while this morning. He said “hi” by thrumming his abdomen.

For more of what I’m talking about, see here.

Stacked refers primarily to the fact that my weekend is terribly overloaded, to the point that I had to give up me free moe. tickets for this evening, because there was just too much going on (though stacked could also refer to the fact that the new jeans my spouse bought this week at the thrift store really highlight her hourglass pin-up figure – yowza!!!)…

…erm…Ahem.

Anyway…lots of stuff going on. Busy week at work, both in terms of actual activity (which was draining, but occasionally rewarding, oddly enough), and in terms of extra-organizational political fallout. Also, this weekend, I’ve got teenage houseguests, several amateur dramatic productions to watch and drag kids to, and an occasion to see two terribly good friends make their partnership official, at a wedding that’s sure to be the social event of the season.

So, anyway…the quietest I’m going to have it this weekend is Friday’s workday (thankfully at home), which is saying something.

A comment on the list number this week – I called it “10.1” because #3 is really only about 7 seconds long. I was just too lazy to do the HTML jiggering to get it to number that way. Nice list, though, really:

1. “I Live With It Every Day” – Barenaked Ladies
2. “Bad Medicine” – Bon Jovi
3. “Tick” – They Might Be Giants
4. “Run To The Hills” – Iron Maiden
5. “Lost (live)” – Katy Perry
6. “Straight to Rock City” – Rock Sugar
7. “Free You All (A Terrorist’s Lament) – Jonah Knight
8. “NaNoWriMo (Dance Remix) – John Anealio
9. “In All That Is Green” – SJ Tucker
10. “Below My Feet” – Mumford and Sons
11. “Let It Go” – Voltaire

Also – are you watching the new Arrested Development on Netflix yet? Surely you’re an AD fan, right? If not, you should be. I’m currently four episodes in, and it’s really pretty clever the way everything is fitting together asynchronously. I’m looking forward to the back nine…so don’t spoil it for me, okay!

Just wanted to say thanks to Dan at 21st Century Sandshark Studios for doing an admirable job capturing the mood in many an office this morning:

It’s the “Have A Nice Day!” at the bottom that really does it.

As I mentioned last week, I spent part of this weekend adventuring. Specifically, along with my friends Jason and Rebecca, I hiked a new (for me) section of the Appalachian Trail in Shenandoah National Park, as well as taking in the climb to to the top of Stony Man Mountain, the second highest peak in the park. Our hike picked up the AT at the Pinnacle parking area (where we were greeted by some well-lubricated revelers in the picnic area), and proceeded south to the branch trail leading to the Stony Man summit, and back again. Total round trip was a little over 8 miles, and while we only picked up six or eight hundred feet of elevation, we started at 3400 feet, so the height was not insignificant.

For a late May day, it was actually pretty chilly, barely brushing the low 50s, and quite windy. Still we were well-prepared, and stayed warm with a rather brisk pace, covering the outbound leg of our journey in around two hours, leading to a very windy lunch on the summit. Along the way, we saw some very nice scenery, including lots of just-blooming wildflowers, a baby grouse with it’s mother (who didn’t cooperate for photos), and some really rather beautiful scenery:

Here’s a shot of Stony Man (featuring the back of Jason’s head) from about the halfway mark from Pinnacle:

And another shot from the same place, zooming in on the mountain’s namesake rock formation:

A few shots from the summit at high noon:

And here’s a red-breasted grossbeak who called to us on our way back down:

It was a nice, brisk hike, with lots of pleasant conversation along the way, though we all came away noting how old we all feel, comparing the aches and pains we were nursing afterwards. Still, there are plenty of 38 year olds who couldn’t do what we did at all – I know many of them. That I did it with no ill effects other than a few muscle aches (largely due to using muscles in ways I don’t when biking when I have to carefully descend from mountain peaks on trails covered with loose rocks and plenty of switchbacks) and no complaints from my circulatory system, I feel pretty darned good about myself.

Also, on the way home we stopped off in Culpepper VA to check out the rejuvenated downtown (Jason grew up there, and there’s a bit of a renaissance of new independent businesses downtown), where we visited the Culpepper Cheese Company which has lots of cheese, of course, but also wine and beer, and where we partook in a wonderfully refreshing beer tasting as a reward for our physical efforts. I had samples of three really great beers from local brewers, though the highlight was generally agreed to be the Wood Aged Kilt Flasher Scottish Ale from Devil’s Backbone. Excellent stuff – if you have the means, I highly recommend finding yourself some.

So yeah, a pretty good Saturday.

working from home today, listening to the rain tap on the skylights while I take care of a bunch of system admin tasks before the holiday weekend. Should be a nice and quiet today, if all goes well.

A few things on for the weekend – tonight I’m supposed to help the kid finish up principal photography on her short film project for theater/drama class (I get to fill in as one of the villain’s hired muscle since one of them dropped out), and tomorrow I’m hiking a section of the AT in Shenandoah with some friends.

Otherwise, I’ve got some reading to catch up on, and since Amazon’s so good at delivering quick (the closest distribution center is only about five miles from the house), I’m going to make time to watch the low-budget Menahem Golan-produced 1990 Captain America film that never really got a theatrical release (like a lot of license-maintaining Marvel productions at that point in time), but got released to Blu-Ray recently, I’ve never seen it, though I remember when I went to that Star Trek convention in 1989, there was promo all over the place for it. I’m sure it’s pretty cheesy, but it fills a nice hole in my collection of Marvel Comics memorabilia, right next to the Hasselhoff Nick Fury and direct-to-video Man-Thing films.

Anyway, here’s the soundtrack of my morning from Pandora, though #8 eventually inspired me to just let the 80s Hair Metal channel spin, which is what’s been backing my keyboard tapping all morning since:

1. “Walkin’ In Memphis” – Marc Cohn
2. “Never Mind” – The Replacements
3. “Upside Down Frown” – They Might Be Giants
4. “My Only Swerving” – El Ten Eleven
5. “I’m On Fire” – Town Mountain
6. “Code Monkey”- Jonathan Coulton
7. “Seven Nation Army” – The White Stripes
8. “Seventeen” – Winger
9. “Heartlines” – Florence + The Machine
10. “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” – Simple Minds
11. “Aquaman’s Lament” – Mark Aaron James
12. “Ain’t No Use In Tryin'” – Trampled By Turtles

I’m off of work today. Just because. Might clean some things up, run some errands. Otherwise, nothing.

Once I finish a couple of necessary tasks, I’m off the computer the rest of the day. Don’t bother me.

Yeah, I’m broken and beaten. Not by anything sinister, but rather the simple act of getting from one piece of life to another, and finding things in my way, be they a 100 mile drive, or a pack of cackling teenagers filming a movie (which wasn’t as bad as I’d expected), or a pile of stuff all over the bed when all I want to do is go to sleep (which was much worse).

Have enough of that stuff happen, and stuff starts to crack. I’m starting to crack. However, I hope I’ll find a little bit of a break coming up – I’ve got two long weekends in the pipeline (and probably 11 more come summer, although I won’t be paid for those) here, and I hope I can find some rebuilding time.

Oh, and I watched Point Break for the first time last night…can’t believe I’ve never seen it before. It’s just about the perfect example of the late 20th century testosterone-fuelled action movie. Patrick Swayze thows a pitt bull at Keanu Reeves at one point – it’s just amazing and ridiculous, and I watched the whole thing with a stupid smile on my face.

Oh well – tunes.

1. “3am” – Matchbox 20
2. “Left of the Dial” – The Replacements
3. “Under Pressure” – Queen & David Bowie*
4. “Float On” – Modest Mouse
5. “Someone Is Crazy”- Jonathan Coulton
6. “Radioactive” – Kings of Leon
7. “What I Like About You” – The Romantics
8. “2082” – They Might Be Giants
9. “From a Window Seat” – Dawes
10. “Kids” – MGMT

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*- let’s completely ignore the fact that I double-taked it for a minute, wondering why Vanilla Ice came up in my Pandora shuffle…