The Maze Of Death!

Life -  

 I've been pretty offline lately. My work has been... complicated and has taken up a lot more of my life than usual and by the time I get home, I scarcely have the energy to make dinner and read a book for a bit.

But today was a day off with my wife and we made a go at it. We got up early and ate breakfast. We relaxed for a bit (Played with the dog, read, fell asleep in the chair...) before deciding to head down the road a bit and explore a local attraction. We'd stopped in at The Treworgy Farm before, mostly to get some ice cream, but they had other attractions, including you-pick pumpkins and apples, a petting zoo, apple cider and a corn maze!

This was the tenth year the farm had done a corn maze, each year a different design, with little stations within for you to find. This year, the maze is shaped like a horse and all of the questions were horse themed. Not that you get the feeling of horse-i-ness when you're in the maze. All form kind of vanishes and you're surrounded by thick, gently rustling stalks of corn.

I loved it. It was gloomy and threatening rain, on a Thursday afternoon after school started, so though we heard a few other visitors, we never saw a single soul in the maze. We wandered for around an hour, using the map every once in a while, but mostly getting lost in the rows. It also made me want to read the Pine Deep Trilogy of books by Jonathan Maberry, which I think I'll have to do this Autumn at some point.

Afterwards, we looked over the large selection of pumpkins, picked a half peck of apples for a few dollars (Macintosh and Cortlands mostly, though we got a couple of Delicious apples too, to see if fresh grown ones are as horrible as store bought ones - they are.) You also got a free soft serve cone with the maze tickets, so we got them in the gift shoppe, where we also picked up a jar of homemade and utterly delicious dill pickles.

I cooked up some Enchiladas Verde for a late lunch and spent the rest of the evening out in my Fortress Of Smallitude, writing a bit, sculpting a smidge and generally wishing I never had to work for someone else again.

All in all, a decent day off.

The ROUS FAMILY -   

 

 

 

 

Reflections On A Northeastern Autumn

Now Playing -  
Ain't No Reason  by Brett Dennen

Life - 

This has been our first Autumn in a state that actually has something close to the actual definition of that season, and it's been intriguing.

Growing up in Idaho, Autumn was a very different season. Things would typically stay hot until late August, with temperatures ranging between 80 and 100 degrees during the day, and dropping to much cooler temperatures, often as low as 50 degrees at night. Then, like magic, sometime in late August, early September, things would cool off. It wasn't as dramatic as overnight, but pretty quick. You'd go from sleeping with your windows open to covering the tomatoes against freezing within the course of a few days. 

This is the closest thing I have to a photo of Pocatello, ID in Autumn. It is not a prime photo taking time.

Then everything froze. One night, instead of hitting around 40, we'd get a night of 25 degrees, the ground would be covered in frost whorls and all of the tree leaves, that had just started thinking about changing colors would be dead, hanging onto the branches with the sparest of grips. Eventually, the winds would pick up and blast those dead, brown leaves to the ground. Then, by Halloween, we'd be planning our costumes around whether or not our winter coats could fit under them.

In Maine, as expected, the foliage was outstanding. This was supposedly a bad year for "Leaf Peeping" as they call it out here, and it was gorgeous. We saw colors in every range, and on every growing plant around. Some were bright orange overnight, while others changed a branch at a time, transforming in leaps and hops. Temperatures stayed temperate and we got a lot more rain than I would have expected.

This was a photo taken from the window of the car, randomly in Maine.

They have a nice mix of things too. In addition to vivid pinks and reds, almost fluorescent yellows and rich, deep browns and oranges, the peeks of pine green added texture and depth. We loved it. We took day trips, just driving along the roads, not headed to the prime Peeping sites, where tourists flock to look at dying trees. We just headed anywhere we felt, and really enjoyed it.

Now, in the middle of November, when Pocatello is seeing snow, it's still Autumn here. It's been raining for a day or two, and the grass is still green in spots. I've worn my coat a few days and my hat a few too, but I've only seen frost a few mornings. For most of my life, I really wondered at the Thanksgiving decorations that I put up on the walls. Corn stalks, pumpkins, gourds... And while I do think it's interesting that nationwide, that's become more of an early fall decor thing, with Christmas being all there is after Nov. 1st, it makes more sense out here, where the leaves aren't already into their deep decomposing stages, the pumpkins outside haven't frozen and split and there isn't a foot of snow on the ground.

So overall, I'd have to give Maine's Autumns pretty high marks. Good on ye, Maine.

ROUS Family Updates!

Check out Neal Kristopher's blog in the next few days for a post about agents and the importance of respecting and cherishing them.



I've also posted a few new reviews,


And coming soon on Deeply Dapper - Chompy, the final photos!

And next time here, the long delayed continuation of my In-Laws vacation to Maine!

Weighty Matters - 
My Current Weight - 297
Progress Thus Far -   
Bah. I think the holidays could be a bad time for this, but I'll keep posting it. If only to force myself to think about it.




  Writing - 


This is my month of NaNoWriMo. Green means a good word day, dark red means a bad one. It's kind of funny how similar the weeks have been. Doing okay though...  I like my story a lot.


 

The Last Sentence - 

Its front hoof kicks feebly once, then nothing.
 

From - "Mr. Pale Steps Out" (WIP)

Draculas!

Now Playing -
The Big Fish by Danny Elfman

LIFE - 

We went "Leaf Peeping" to the North of Augusta yesterday. There's not much better than wandering around a cemetery in perfect autumn weather with your loved one. Not in my book, anyway. Beautiful! I will also have a new sculpture available on Deeply Dapper tonight, the first in my line of "Trapped Tikis" Check it out!

Tomorrow, I'm heading to Belfast for a week to help open a new store. I plan to have some downtime to update the blog and do some writing, but we'll see. Sometimes these trips get more involved than others.

Reviews Of Unusual Size  

Books



DRACULAS
by J.A. Konrath (as Jack Kilborn), Blake Crouch, F. Paul Wilson & Jeff Strand 
Release Date - October 19th, 2010, 389 pages, e-book Advance Copy
 

Re: This is an interesting book. Brainstormed by J.A. Konrath (writing under his Horror alter-ego, Jack Kilborn) and written tag team style by four generally well-respected horror and thriller authors, Draculas is a down and dirty re-imagining of the vampire legend. Ditching fancy cloaks and sparkling skin, these guys are nasty. They reproduce and hunger for flesh like fast moving zombies and if they escape the hospital where the initial outbreak occurs, God help the world. And all that stands between them and the world at large is a down on her luck hospice nurse, a lumberjack with a chainsaw sharper than he is and a gun-crazy deputy. 

Outstanding: Draculas is a ridiculously fun book to read. The writers styles mesh well, to the point that I had a hard time breaking down who did what, and the story is pure Video Nasty. In my book, that's a Very Good Thing. The "Draculas" as they are dubbed, are vicious, ugly creepy and cool as hell. I dig their take on the creatures, which is both original and old-school. The main characters are pretty stereotypical, but in this type of story, that's a strength. I don't want my big lumbering brute of a man to read Kierkegaard and moan about his feelings. I want him to break out a monster's teeth with the blade of a chainsaw while his ass flaps around in a hospital gown. (The ass part is purely optional, mind you.)

Unacceptable: There wasn't much I didn't like about this book. It's not for everyone - there's a lot of gore and violence, almost constant peril in fact, and some of it is ridiculously over the top. It's also a little short,  only taking up about 2/3 of the file's 389 pages, but the remainder is filled with some great DVD-style extras. I also had a problem with the advance copy of it on my nook. It had unusually slow page turns, sometimes as much as 5-7 seconds between each. 

Summary: Go back and read the first couple of lines about what was "Unacceptable" in this book. If that sounds more like a recommendation than a problem, then you should immediately GO HERE and order Draculas. It's crazy and filled with death in the best possible way. It is a little short, but the extras at the end, around 100 pages of interviews, previews of other books and short stories push the $2.99 price tag from being a good deal to being a steal. 

5/5     

 

Weighty Matters - 

My Current Weight - 296
 
Progress Thus Far -   

I've lost a couple of pounds, but that doesn't seem too significant... since I can do that taking off my shoes..We went out and bought some healthy snacks too, which should help. If I can avoid Halloween candy for a month and Christmas candy for the two after that....

Writing - 

Not too bad. I've passed the 72,000 word mark, and have started to discuss e-publishing options with my wife. She has a few books earmarked for that market as well. I'd like to get this completed, edited and available for sale by Christmas. 

 

The Last Sentence - 
My grip tightens on the sledge and a smile seeps unbidden to my face. 

From - "Graves" (WIP)

Autumn In The NorthWest Trip - Day Three

Day three, the day in which we had a home base and in theory had planned for a pretty simple day, yet I still managed to spend most of driving...

Started out the day getting harassed by the breakfast lady, bright and early. She made my waffles and dispensed abuse. In a good, friendly way, but still. It was pretty early in the morning, thanks to Lindsay. The breakfast at the Motel was pretty generic. All of the usual suspects for a continental breakfast at a chain. Bagels, Muffins, Hard Boiled Eggs, Bad Coffee, Keyser Soze.

After that, we headed North to check out a few of the towns that way. There's a little town called Vader that we thought looked intriguing and even further up is another Walgreens, in the small town of Chehalis, so we thought it'd be a good idea to see how far that would be to commute and whether the town was too close to the craziness of Seattle.

We fell instantly in love with Vader. It's a little village off to the side of the road, really more of a couple roads than any real cohesive unit. And the roads are fabulous. Lined with thick, gold and red trees, thick ferns, quaint buildings - many rotting away to moss and spongy wood. It had a lot of the details that we liked about Rainier so much. Isolated and quiet, pretty reasonably priced, yet within driving distance of both Longview and Chehalis.

Beyond Vader, down the same tree-lined path was a surprise. Ryderwood. What appears to be a really quiet place at the end of a long, winding road turned out to be a really quiet place at the end of the road filled exclusively with old people! Ryderwood is a 55+ retirement community, nestled away in the forest. While I kind of question socking away our elderly down a twisting road a good distance for them to travel for food and for medical assistance to reach them, the place was really charming. Mostly single level places, not many larger than a one bedroom, and all along the streets, healthy, happy looking retirees were out walking their little doggies and chatting.

Chehalis was tiny, much smaller than I'd expected of a place with a Walgreens, but had a lot of appeal. Nice, older houses and a cute downtown. Wasn't much to see, really but we did decide that we could live there happily. We stopped at a fruit stand selling some ridiculously colorful fall produce and asked the girl there where we could find some good pizza for lunch. In between adjusting something in the crotch reigion of her pants and selling us some huge apples, she sent us up the road a bit to Centralia.

The slightly butch fruitstand girl gave good directions and it didn't take us long to reach the place, a pizza joint in what appeared to have been a bar or something earlier, maybe a mexican restaurant. They served pretty passable 'za, though they used too much corn meal or whatever that grainy stuff is they put on the bottom of pizza to keep it from sticking. They also served gelato, made onsite, which was pretty great.



Sadly, I'm gonna have to split this post, I'd planned to make it all in one go, but our washer broke and we had to spend half of the morning running around to get some laundry done. Also, lazy!

Autumn In The Northwest Trip - Day Two

Now Playing -
Bang, Bang  by  Nancy Sinatra

Life - 

This was a pretty great day. Friday dawned Grey and cool, with a faint haze on the horizon. I slept well in the car, though I must have drank more water than I'd thought, or the devious coffee at Shari's was punishing me for mocking it, and I had to get up a few times in the night and stagger into the house, which was a little awkward to me. Better than staggering to a darkened corner or a port-a-potty like we usually have when we camp out in the car.

We're early risers, so we had gotten up, showered, resituated the car and read in the house for a while before Jen roused herself and we followed her on a merry chase into Portland. The roads she took were windy and pretty, lined with thick trees and undergrowth, eventually evolving into groomed shrubberies, planters, then city streets. A note to anyone that finds themselves following someone like Jen - Stay close and keep your foot on the gas! We're used to following folks like my father-in-law, who, when followed, drives 10 miles an hour, signals blocks before turning and often supplements those signals with hand gestures and sky writing. Jen however, had the uncanny talent to hit a light just as it turned yellow, forcing us to quickly floor it to keep up with her. This happened something like 3 times in the drive, and teased us a couple of other times.

She led us to the best breakfast restaurant in the world, The Original Hotcake House. Just a little, dive-styled place, this joint has some of the best food and biggest portions I've ever had in a restaurant. Absolutely heavenly! You stand in line and order first, weaving around a circular dining area, then find your table. Luckily, we arrived between rushes and managed to get a table with little effort, judging by their signage, on weekends and at other times, some folks have to wait for a table after ordering and paying. They're also open 24 hours a day. My friend Rob and I have driven 40 miles out of our way for food at 3am before. If we had grown up here, I would imagine that we'd know the cooks by name.

I ordered the biscuits and gravy with a side of hotcakes, Linz ordered the Gyro omelet with hashbrowns (That's right, a GYRO OMELET!) and Jen got the chicken fried steak. All of our meals were amazing tasting, complimented by some excellent coffee and big enough to stretch the stomach of a grizzly bear after hibernation.

Sated, bloated, gravy spattered and ready for a nap, we once again braved the streets of Portland following the red blaze of Jen as she led us to our exit, and we left, heading Northwest towards St. Helens.

Our main goal here was to look at areas that had Walgreens that I might be able to transfer to and see if there was an area nearby that we liked and could afford to live in. St. Helens and area certainly fit that bill. Picturesque and fairly quaint, it was almost hard to believe that those towns were theoretically close enough to commute into Portland for. Other towns in the area, like Ridgefield and BattleGround have slowly been taken over by the tract housing and cookie cutter housing complexes, but St. Helens and Rainier have managed to keep the ramshackle homes and crusty shoppes that make them feel original and special. We especially loved Rainier, cruising along their hilly roads, admiring the varied Autumn colors.

Then we hopped over the bridge to Longview. Since the first day we started looking into moving out this way, we'd considered Longview/Kelso pretty high on our list of potentials. There was something about it that seemed like it had the best aspects of Pocatello without a lot of the negatives, the housing was still pretty doable and it is in such a great location, an hour to Portland, an hour to Astoria... A long, but doable drive to the parents back in Idaho... Plusses all around!

We'd been here a few times before, but never spent more than an hour or two, just stopped into a Target, bought some beads, got gas, that kind of thing, so our plan for this trip was to really spend some time getting to know the place. Walk the streets, drive around looking at houses, get lost, talk to some locals, see if we could spend the next 2-15 years in this area.

Longview and Kelso are a couple of towns straddling three rivers, so close together that they may as well be one town. It's not overly picturesque, there's a pretty good amount of industrial area and according to the internet, there's a problem with Meth, though not to the extreme of Pocatello. It (By 'it' I mean Kelso and Longview) does have a certain charm though. There are a lot of parks, the trees are plentiful and especially colorful and gorgeous in the Autumn, and so far, the residents have either been slightly goofy and helpful or crazy and friendly.

We spent the afternoon and evening wandering and driving around the towns. A couple of our favorite things -

The lake. There's a long, narrow lake in the middle of town, ringed by a gorgeous, similarly narrow park. Though it's lined on both sides by fairly busy streets, it never really felt loud or surrounded. We walked around it a bit and drove the length.

Especially charming is a tiny island in the middle, carefully groomed and planted as a Japanese garden. We spent quite a bit of time here, wandering the paths, playing with the Gray sqirrels, looking at perfect spiderwebs and relaxing.

Though I'm sure it's far busier in "nicer" weather (It was drizzling and around 60 degrees, perfect weather as far as I'm concerned) it was impressive how tranquil it seemed and how clean it was.

The library. Man, what an amazing building. Built in 1926, it's the original building with a few additions. High ceilings, a pretty good selection of books and a quiet, slightly ominous feeling made it one of my favorite libraries that I've wandered around. Only the banks of computer tables marred the feeling.

Longview's downtown is really nice too, full of amazing older buildings,most of them in use. We wandered up and down most of the streets, sipping a coffee and eating a ridiculously rich almond chocolate bar we bought from a chocolatier. There was an old, abandoned theater there however that made me wish I could baby it back to life.

We're staying in the Super 8, which we got for a great price and while it's a basic room, generic as all get out, the desk/waffle maker at breakfast is manned by a truly batty older lady that wont stop giving me a hard time. I dig her.

We also wandered around the mall for a while and I can't decide if it was truly that lame or if I just don't like malls any more. Either way, there was very little to recommend.

For dinner that night, Lindsay decided she wanted pizza, so we stopped into the Rite Aid near our hotel to ask about a pizza place. (The one in the same strip mall was closed down, which was just as well, it looked crappy.) The clerk looked at me like a deer in the headlights and finally paged his manager to help. She was a little Hispanic lady and recommended us to a place that she'd never eaten at, but some of the girls that worked there liked. This made me a bit leery, but I figured it would be a start, if we didn't like it, it was on a busier street and we could just find a place.

The restaurant she sent us to, Nikki's, was a revelation. It won't be for everyone, but it should be. It's in a little bit of a shady building, the name painted on the front window a little sloppily, and the parking lot is poorly lit. Inside, there's a hodge podge of things that shouldn't work at all, and maybe some nights they don't but last night, they were great. They have a family dining section, just a few tables, a group of four pool tables, a small lounge section, a tiny second dining area and a stage with dance floor attached, beyond that, they had a room filled with gaming tables, where people were playing poker and blackjack. And in this place, they served very nice quality Italian food.

Our server, dressed in a white shirt and black vest was polite and friendly, with just the right amount of sarcastic humor. He let us chose a romantic little table by the stage and offered us a daily special that they have exclusively for couples. An entree, salad and dessert for twenty bucks. That night it was Roasted Garlic Pork Chops and red potatoes. We jumped on that.

It was freaking great. The cook there knows how to use a small amount of seasoning to let the natural flavors show through and everything was cooked just right. The Blue Cheese dressing was made there and perfect, the garlic on the pork chops were roasted like a coffee bean, hard and crunchy, adding an amazing flavor to the meat and the potatoes had just enough seasoning that all they needed was a little pepper. We also had a Chocolate Truffle Ice Cream Cake with Rum/Caramel drizzles for dessert. Twenty bucks, man. What a deal!

We left incredibly satisfied. Bravo, Nikki's!

After dinner, Linz crashed hard, asleep before 9:30pm, only waking up when her sister called from a Karaoke bar asking about a singer's name.


On to Day Three!

Writing - 

Yeah... nothing again. Maybe tonight!