Monthly Archives: August 2017

Seattle

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We discovered on the way that we had a place to stay with a music/computer industry friend of long standing. Mark is currently making Media Folio, a product which is basically a database, except with some bells and whistles and keywords that make it useful for large companies doing worldwide private things. I can imagine using it to manage our web pictures, to the exent to which I can imagine it. We walked out to the coast of the Magnolia District at sunset with Ralphie, his dachshund/schnauzer mix, and then to a nice Indian restaurant called “Roti”. The Magnolia district has a bit of everything you need, which is good, because if you are going anywhere in Seattle besides straight downtown, you will die of dysentery on the way.

Back at Mark’s house he demoed his perfect audio system, with uncompressed 96K 24-bit audio files (a Steely Dan album from 2000 which we hadn’t heard) playing through a tube amplifier which he built himself from scratch, through some old speakers which had ribbon tweeters and conventional woofers. I suppose changing either the speakers or the amp or using MP3 files would have made it sound worse.

Friday, August 25: Today I Learned, if you are using Google Maps in Seattle, double all the time estimates. Google Maps has never been particularly strong on estimating left turns, and they certainly do not know about driving across town in an urban area which only affords north-south traffic. Dave and Mark stayed at Mark’s house and worked a little at their respective companies, and then decided to walk in Discovery Park, which was previously owned by the army and hence saved from becoming condominiums during the condominium plague of the late twentieth century. Now it has giant big leaf maples and firs and trails. It takes a while to walk in it, though, and my estimate that I could, after our walk in Discovery Park, drive to see my friend Flake on 110th Street near the lake in 20 minutes (while Dave and Mark continued working at their respective jobs), visit for an hour, and drive back in 20 minutes, actually became drive 40 minutes, visit 40 minutes, and return 40 minutes. Longtime students of Babylonian arithmetic will notice that the sum of these two scenarios is not the same. The additional 20 minutes was taken out of the time we spent visiting Dave’s college friend Jeff and his companion Dana. Except the deduction had become an hour by then, even though I decided it would be far too time-consuming to drive back to the Magnolia neighborhood about the time the drawbridge came down and told Dave to take an Uber. But he got my text that I was at the Arco on Dravus two blocks before he passed that very spot, and he bailed on the Uber which still charged him $10 for four minutes (I thought they were supposed to be price competitive.)

Jeff took us to an institution called College Club. Apparently it used to be a club with cigars and overstuffed chairs and men, and then they ran out of money and men didn’t want to be stuffed around only each other so they became — I don’t know what they became. It’s a barn on the shores of Lake Union with a ton of sculls and a variety of people on the floating dock looking at their smart phones and eating and drinking. The most interesting iPhone gesture was by a young guy who was sunbathing with his friend. He set up a plastic stool, placed his friend’s shoe on top of it, and very carefully propped up his iPhone inside the shoe — then returned to his sunbathing station fifteen feet in front, facing away from the telephone, and did nothing in particular. It stayed that way for a long time. I took a picture, especially since the persons were about 16 and not wearing shirts, but it won’t tell you anything I haven’t written here.

After that it was time to go to a Maceo Parker concert at Jazz Alley with 6 others. This idea had developed suddenly in the morning when I heard that Steve, the main Sunriver perp, was taking his son Chris to the concert, and I decided to tag along, and invite others, and we were 8 people at two tables. Dinner there is OK. Maceo Parker is OK but he wasn’t playing any notes he hadn’t played before — he’s nearly 80 years old which does not show at all on stage, that datum is from Wikipedia, and there aren’t that many new notes coming out of the walls of an upscale dinner theater space when you are 80. He put on sunglasses to cue the audience he was referencing Ray Charles. I was hoping for Stevie Wonder. The trombonist honored the venue of the tour by playing some measures from Nirvana. I was thinking just then, where are the blind white musicians? The neo-Nazis need to get on this.

It was fun introducing Mark to Ray’s college friends Steve and Dean; they knew all the same people. We also met Doug and Matt, musician friends they’d brought along.

Saturday we packed up, and headed to the Seattle Art Museum where we had 11am tickets to Yasoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors exhibition, and where we met up with Steve’s son James and his companion Victoria. Allow fifteen minutes to find your way out of the parking lot next door and into the museum. It’s not obvious. Once in the show at our appointed time, we would stand in a line for 15 minutes or so, and then enter a room, the two of us, for 20 or 30 seconds. Very Disneyland. There were about six different rooms. In each, some interesting decoration would be reflected in mirrors, for infinity. You were forbidden to take photos in only one room, the Pumpkin Room, and a guard who was the exact opposite of the Boise prison museum fellow stood in the room with you, to make sure you didn’t. You could not engage her. On exiting the Pumpkin Room, I asked one of the friendly guards how come she was so dour. He said that when he was the guard in the pumpkin room, he was that way, too. Company orders. It’s all performance.

About two thirds of the way through, I became aware that a much smaller percentage of people in the museum had tattoos, than in the general population. I told James and Victoria, and they started watching, and observed the same. We came up with various hypotheses, and rejected them. First of all, the crowd was young enough. Their art, had there been any, was not shaded by Pendletons. When was the last time you were standing in line in Seattle, any place other than an old folks’ home, and you could see exactly one sleeve on maybe 40 people, mostly under 35?

Was it the early hour, noon on Saturday? Was it the persistence required to buy the tickets on line, camping out all morning on redial? The cost? All of these explanations posit a theory of who-gets-tattoos, which was maybe valid during the Carter Administration.

So, I don’t know. But it was happening, sure as shadow bands.

We had a delightful little lunch at Le Pichet. Charcuterie. Corn Soup. On the way back to the car, two men jumped out at us and said, “You dropped something!” and I thought, oh great, we are about to be robbed in front of Pike Place Market in broad daylight. But they were only flyering some hip hop show. Why they thought we were their audience, I don’t know. “Do you really get a lot of customers by pretending to be pickpockets or initiating a pigeon drop?” I asked them. “We just want to show white people there’s nothing to be afraid of,” said one, disregarding that I was in full fight-or-flight adrenal dudgeon and if we had been policemen they would by now have both been prone on the sidewalk in a sticky pool of spreading controversy.

A trip to Google suggests that acting like a Gypsy con artist on the streets of Bucharest is in fact an accepted way of publicizing your concert. Go figure.

After another puzzling entry sequence to the parking lot, we drove to Tacoma, where our Opcode coworker friend Kord’s son Christian was playing in his rock band for a sports fundraiser for a prep school. It was nice to see Kord and Pam and express our condolences for the recent tragic loss of their 19-year-old daughter Caitlin, as a passenger in a DUI crash.

Obvioiusly we didn’t know anybody at the fundraiser, nor were we likely to meet any. It was clear to the parents and old alums that we were NOKD, and the preppie athletes have learned very early in life, to avoid eye contact with anyone who can’t get them founder’s stock. But our names were on the band’s guest list, so noblesse fuckin’ oblige. I took photos of Christan and his pals on the stage, and chatted with some of the caterers. Scallop and bacon tamales. bottomless guacamole.

Grieving is where you find it.

Then it was a four-hour drive back to Eugene where we will leave the car for Kent to drive back to our house, as we fly Monday morning to Iceland.

Portland

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We met our friend Jesse at the eminently popular Por Que No on the eminently popular N Mississippi Ave.  Then we stayed with our Opcode coworker Lenore and her husband Geoff.  They had just remodeled the kitchen, and had a very colorful countertop with shards of beer bottles embedded in cement, with a clear top.

The Liberal Media speak as though Donald Trump were some incomprehensible monster, with his wall-building and Muslim hate and White Supremacy. This is a lie.  Liberals understand Donald Trump perfectly, and feel the same way that he does, just about different things.

Islam doesn’t bother me much.  But if I were president, I would detain all the manufacturers of faucets in the United States and put them in one of the conference rooms at Guantanamo (They probably have names like “The Palm Room” and “Rio Grande 3” and of course “Guantanamera”) and there they would watch live video feeds of their own children being tortured and killed until they settled upon two EXISTING designs of faucets, which would then become the ONLY faucets permitted in the United States: one with one handle that remembers the temperature, and one with two handles in the old style.  And I guess you could grandfather in the ones with two handles and two faucets.  And one standard way of switching from tub to shower and shower to hand-held nozzle.

The first amendment would indicate you could make other creative designs, but they would be classified as Art and it would be illegal to sell them for less than $100,000, which would prevent their being installed in Motel 6 and airports.  And the American flag would do a Google Doodle of that way sexy old post card of the guy washing his feet in a sink.  I can’t find it right now on Google Images.

I will not say anything like “I thought I’d seen it all,” with respect to useless technological elaboration, but I thought I had a grasp on the eigenvectors of faucet design.  Ha.  Ha.  Lenore has an encrypted faucet in her kitchen that requires you touch it just-so on the side, in order to unlock the water function.  This is not some janky plumbing mishap of the era of rabbit ear antennas on the top of TV sets, this is an intentional design.  It’s touch-controlled.  You can’t grasp it.  You have to brush it gently.  I’ve gone on long enough on this tangent and I will stipulate all the sex jokes about touching faucets gently on the side.

Lenore seems to be doing well.  Her house is neat.  Her daughter Zoe is fabulous.  She likes to sort things, for fun.  I told her I needed to be her friend on that basis — she can join the conversations I have with Kent about algorithms for that.  Zoe used to do gymnastics but now is very interested in the circus; gymnastics was horrendously competitive, but in a circus everyone depends on everyone else.

On Thursday morning, August 24, we met Dave’s cousin Larissa at Jam on Hawthorne, for brunch.  There were not two square centimeters of flesh colored skin in the whole place.  I used to think that the tattoo fad would come and go, but I now think it will only fade when it is replaced by full motion subcutaneous video.

Larissa’s house makes me wonder how many hours other people have in the day.  I feel like I have really done it all, if I have razored off a couple of feet of blue masking tape scraps from the edge of a window.  Larissa has painted her whole damn house.  And she has a full time job.  How is this possible?  She also has a golden retriever which insists on taking up 105% of your attention the whole time you are on the property.
 
We realized that we needed to leave for Seattle “stat!” to avoid the horrible traffic.  Of course, there is always horrible traffic from Olympia through Tacoma, and that was indeed the case.

The Columbia River Gorge

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On Tuesday, August 22, we peeked at some Boise sights before leaving.  We went to the Micron Semiconductor headquarters, and snapped a photo from the road of the world’s largest nitrous oxide tank.  As a result of bad Google Maps guessing, we ended up at the Old Idaho Penitentiary, and why not have a look?  The museum has the world’s most cheerful ticket taker, and an impressive prison tattoo and prison weapon exhibit.  The ticket man said we should go to the Roosevelt Grocery and have quiche.  It’s a pleasant change to take marching orders from happy people.  We had lunch in a neighborhood featuring many fine old houses from the late 19th century.  The lunch place is called Roosevelt Grocery and is notable for being across from an elementary school and they don’t forbid students from entering more than six at a time.  Lack of prejudice is worth seeking out.  The green chili quiche is good too.

Then we headed up I-84 towards the Columbia River.

We stopped at the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center outside of Baker City for a little stretch.  They tell you not to walk on the ruts.  This is not to the point.  Tens of thousands of people walked on those ruts already, and it doesn’t give the right impression to show faint tracks under grown sagebrush.  Here is a proposal for another Oregon Trail interpretive center:  Take few dozen acres of the trail and build a few dozen prairie schooners and all summer long, run them (bearing tourists of course) many times a day over a one or two hundred meter wide stripe of land, rain or shine, leaving ruts and wagon parts and footprints and hoof marks and the ground would then look like the Oregon Trail actually did.

Of course you all have noticed that the eclipse followed the Oregon Trail quite accurately.  The staff had all viewed.  One very young looking clerk said it was her last eclipse.  She has had breast cancer and her future is uncertain.  She did not tolerate chemotherapy well.  Currently she is in the “they think they got it all,” phase of life, and all of you reading this, wish her well according to your various contradictory faiths, and pray that her husband keeps his insurance-bearing job because she doesn’t get enough hours in the gift shop to qualify for insurance for her surgeries and drugs.

I sent our friend Sam a post card that said “You have died of dysentery,” referring to the Oregon Trail game craze he was swept up in as a teenager.  We had previously sent him a t-shirt with that slogan, after seeing one some years back, in Portland.

That day ended in Hermiston, where we visited briefly with a very old friend who has had a career with Oregon Fish and Wildlife, assisting with the reintroduction of salmon into  previously dammed-off tributaries of the Columbia.  Now he can have Atlantic salmon, too!  In between administrative hostility at the highest level and Jurassic Park irresponsibility on the economic front — you knew we were doomed, I don’t have to keep dwelling on it.

Wednesday we drove down the Columbia River Gorge.  First we saw the Maryhill Museum’s Stonehenge replica, and then the museum itself.  The first room you enter was all about Marie, Queen of Roumania and friend of Sam Hill the founder (no, not What The Sam Hill).  A Rodin room had an interesting exhibit showing the stages of the lost-wax method of making bronze sculptures, and a Native American room had many cute artifacts.  We briefly watched windsurfers and kitesurfers at Hood River, and then saw waterfalls.  We went on a short walk to Elowah Falls, then took pictures of a woman’s water polo team getting their pictures taken at Horsetail Falls, and glanced at Multnomah Falls.  We drove up to Vista House, but it was closed so we didn’t go inside.  The view up there is pretty great.  We drove on to Portland for dinner.

Totality!

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For several days starting even before we got to Eugene, eclipse plans were part of every conversation.  Our friends Anna and Jose who had moved to Eugene from Long Beach told us they had a camper.  We told them they should take it up into the path of totality, and stay in it the night before (they did).  Colin and Natacia planned a week camping in various wilderness areas, and witnessing totality there.  The other Eugene residents had various plans to drive on back roads up to a town just west of Corvallis.  Most of the Sunriver crew saw the eclipse in Madras or Culver; a dozen flew up there on a little plane which had gotten one of 500 landing spots, spaced 50 seconds apart, for which an air traffic controller had been brought in specially.  The inmates near John Day, already being almost on the centerline, were hopeful they’d get a chance to see the eclipse; we gave them some glasses to help.  Our friend Mark from Seattle met some of his friends on a forest road near John Day.  And a couple of the guys at Clear Lake went to Oregon, one to a big festival with 40,000 people, and the other to a hayfield in Culver.

I had long viewed the eclipse as a good excuse to see Jill, my sister, who I hadn’t seen for a few years.  My cousin Carole suggested a family reunion in Kansas City, but I talked her into doing it in Boise where the weather prospects were better (clouds kill eclipses; fortunately there were no clouds anywhere in the West, not even at the coast.)  Her brother Hugh and his wife Rita live in Boise, and their house became a base of operations.  Carole and her husband Larry flew up from Garden City, Kansas; cousin Scott from Phoenix flew up; and cousin Ryan from Santa Clara flew up with his family (though their flight was overbooked, and his wife Beth didn’t make it until Sunday morning, after being incorrectly rerouted, fixing it herself, and spending the night in Portland with Ryan’s sister Larissa.)  And Jill drove down from Bozeman with her daughter Annika, who had rather dramatically changed from being 9 when I’d last seen her, to being 14.  Hugh and Rita fixed dinner for all of us for three nights, assuming that restaurants would all be too crowded.

On Sunday we did a reconnaissance trip with Ray’s college friends Bob and Joyce and their son John.  We went north out of Boise up highway 55, which was a narrow river canyon.  I wanted to check out Garden Valley, which Ryan had told me was a “wide valley” after looking at Google Earth.  So we turned up highway 17, another narrow river canyon, turned left at Crouch, and went up the road through the valley.  Most of it was pretty unfriendly (lots of “private road” signs, and even one that said “Get Bent”) but there was a county road across the valley, and as it started up the hill we saw a place called “Dino’s Taxidermy”.  Our curiosity was piqued, because it was in such a perfect spot.  We stopped; Dino came out and said “Are you OK?”  Bob said “we’re looking for a place to watch the eclipse”, Dino said “I don’t care where you watch it”.  He was incredibly friendly and funny and had tons of stories, and we agreed we’d be there in the morning.  Our recon was complete, and we drove back to Hugh and Rita’s for dinner.

Sunday afternoon it clouded up, but they were afternoon clouds.  I worry about that, anyhow.

At 6am Monday morning, five cars including the 13 family members and the 3 college friends headed up to Dino’s.  There were many cars on the road, but we were able to drive the speed limit all the way there.  We ended up with a little time to kill, and headed back to Crouch to shop for more eclipse shirts.  We returned to Dino’s and set up chairs out in the middle of his horse pasture, and waited for the eclipse to begin.  Dino joined us when it did.  At one point Ray told him that an eclipse phenomenon was that birds go roost a little while before totality as it starts getting dark and cooling off.  And a few minutes later, Dino pointed out “there go the magpies roosting in their tree.  And there go the ravens to their tree.  And there go the doves.”  We passed around Verizon phones to talk to a few family members who were elsewhere (AT&T doesn’t really do rural much.)

And then totality happened.  There were easily visible shadow bands that many of us saw (I forgot to look, I was concentrating on the sun.)  The corona looked to me like a devil’s head, with pointy ears and a very long pointy beard, probably the longest corona I remembered.  Prominences at 12 and 3 bracketed a solid stripe of chromosphere.  Regulus was visible near the sun with binoculars, and Venus is always visible, but I didn’t see Mercury or Mars.  Of the 17 of us there, it was the first total eclipse for all but three, and I was happy to have helped get them to that place to see it.

After the sun came back, we took a little tour of Dino’s house and taxidermy studio.  He has an elk and three antelopes mounted in his living room, which he shot and stuffed decades ago.  Modern taxidermy consists of ordering a foam form from one of the companies that make them, and stretching the hide and antlers over it, with perhaps a plastic jaw and tongue, and glass eyes.

As heavenly as the eclipse was, the ride back was hell.  It took four hours to drive back to the hotel.  The narrow river canyon roads had become parking lots.  Ryan and I walked 20 car lengths to each other’s car, and he gave me back a radio so we could at least talk to each other on the way back.  When Ryan got back his cell coverage, he learned that his flight the next morning had been canceled, and he ended up having to rent a larger car and drive 11 hours all the way back to the Bay Area.

Across Oregon

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In Ashland, we stayed with Dave S, another Opcode coworker, and his family.  After dinner we went out to hear some music at the Wild Goose, a dive bar where Dave has played. 

On Tuesday, August 15, I worked at Connor’s house (one of my Avid coworkers), and then introduced Dave S and Connor to each other at dinner.

I went into town and paid to have people at the Ashland 76 station replace the headlight on the Outback.  Dave’s daughter Sabrina happened to walk into the gas station just then, so I drove her back to the juice bar where she works and had coconut and orange juice.  She is leaving for junior year abroad in Alicante this week.  Afterwards I rode around with Dave S in the woods on a jeep.  He had just gotten a pair of logging boots with spikes.


Wednesday we drove to Ray’s cousin Meg’s goat farm in Eugene.  Ray slept, and Meg and I walked around her neighborhood.  One of her neighbors had just harvested large amounts of wood on their property in order to raise money so that one of them could buy out another’s share of their parents’ estate.  It all smelled like sap.

Thursday was another productive work day for me.  Thursday night we ate with Ray’s other cousins. The food was better than in Ashland, but still not definitively out of the Olive Garden class.  After dinner we visited Colin and Natacia.  Natacia has a setup for playing video games with friends around the world.  She was watching her twitch friends play some game — she is looking forward to meeting them in person at a convention in Long Beach this October, for twitchers.  She assumes they think she’s a gay guy, and will be surprised at the convention.  She also said that YouTube had told its users that any monetized video had to be accessible to five year olds, and a bunch of them had moved to twitch.  (Their community guidelines don’t mention five-year-olds — I figured she was interjecting editorial interpretations.)

Friday, August 18, we drove to Bend.  We had hoped to go on highway 242 on the side of Mt. Washington, but it was closed due to a fire that was casting smoke over the whole area.  We went to the Sunriver resort, south of Bend, where Ray’s college friend Steve has a house, and where several of their friends had rented additional houses for 40 or so people who would go see the eclipse somewhere (Sunriver wasn’t quite in the path).  Our Bend friend Rick was working as a bartender in Sunriver, and he was extremely generous, probably overly so.  We were joined by one of Steve’s kids.  We stayed at Steve’s house that night, seeing another scion in the evening, and yet another in the morning.  (We saw the fourth and fifth in Seattle a few days later.)

Saturday, August 19, after getting over my mild hangover, we pressed on eastward.  We stopped near the tiny town of John Day, where we visited Rick’s friend who is in county jail for six months.  He said that one of the guys in with him he knew from K-12, another was a Swede doing four months for assault at a Rainbow Gathering (circumstances unclear) and that he knew ALL of the guards before.  The whole strip of highway 26 around John Day was awash in eclipse merchandise, though not particularly crowded.  We drove up highway 7, a very pretty stretch of road, to Baker City, so we could check out where the path crossed Interstate 84.  Interstate 84 was quite an ugly area, especially Cement Plant Road, and I hope somebody got some punk eclipse pictures from the ruins of the industrial facilities there.  There were rolling treeless hills, with no apparent way to get to the top of any of them. We crossed it off the list of possibilities, and as it was starting to get late, proceeded to Boise to join the family reunion underway.

[not so] Clear Lake

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The trip began Friday, August 11, with dropping Justin off at the airport, for a cruise from Bergen to Murmansk and back.  We proceeded to the annual two-week party at Indian Beach Resort at Clear Lake, getting up there around 3pm.  There were probably a dozen or so people up there, including Juliette, who is almost four months old.  We went out on the motorboat “Brown Squall”, from which her dad Skot wavesurfed:  he got up on his surfboard, threw the rope back to the boat, and followed it closely by surfing on its wake.

I’m tired just from watching Skot wake surf.  What is it about these guys?  They don’t mind that they are wet.  They don’t mind that it hurts.  They don’t mind that it’s exertion.  They seek out all those feelings.  What in the world is that like?

The boat conked out in mid surf while Alex was trying to duplicate Skot’s feat.  Adam took some time getting it started again.  Sounded like the carburetor was flooded but that wouldn’t explain the original problem.

Saturday and Sunday were more of the same.  The lake had so much algae this year that there was no oxygen left for the fish, and several of them floated dead on the water:  Jenny directed us on a Dead Fish Cruise down near the town of Clearlake, where the largest and most bloated specimens could be appreciated.  Afterwards, we went someplace far away and swam a bit.  There were many rides on boats each day.

The drug of choice for most of the party people is Coors Lite or Bud Lite, since it’s so darned hot there, like 100 degrees during the day.  Our friend Tollef brought a bunch of beer from his brewery (Temescal, in Oakland), which had actual flavor.  And there was wine, and our friend Alex made punch, which he says is from the Bengali word for five, as in Panch Phoron.  Wikipedia backs him up on this.  And, for the very first time, I saw just a bit of cocaine served on an iPhone, which I suppose makes sense.

Sadie [Adam and Jenny’s dog] seems even older.  She had to be separated from a larger black even friendlier and fluffier dog, in the water, because she is just not up to play any more, and she doesn’t know it.

For some reason the dinner conversation got to the subject of female stand up urination, and Alex said that when he was eleven years old and coming from a family backpacking expedition on the Wyoming Montana border, he was in a bar in their unisex bathroom with a row of tall urinals and a person came in and unzipped and he realized she was a woman, and she pissed anyway, as a man does.  I said, you should testify to the Texas Legislature how this traumatized you, and he said, that’s why I got so into wearing women’s dresses.  These extended jokes, building Bulwer-Lytton-wise on each other, are responsible for a lot of creation myths among dull psychologists.

Saturday night had a game of Pictionary, featuring totally made-up words, like “Clampari” (there was a Campari umbrella nearby).  I couldn’t figure anything out.

Everyone left on Sunday, except us and Adam. 

Monday, August 14, we packed up, stopped at the Redbud Trailhead on highway 20 nearby, and walked 2.5 miles to Cache Creek and back.  It was a very pretty walk, starting out in a bunch of trees which were burned in the Rocky fire two years earlier.  From there, we had lunch with an Opcode coworker Kim in Redding, and stopped at the AAA where we got some paper maps, and asked if they could help with my drivers license which expires just before we get back in November.  They couldn’t, but they did point out that the DMV in Mt. Shasta never has a line.  We got there a minute late so it didn’t matter.  We drove on to Ashland and met our friends for creekside dining at a Japanese restaurant.

Welcome, welcome, welcome!

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We are getting ready to leave the Bay Area for 14 weeks. We’ll tour the Northwest US and hope to see the eclipse, get another glimpse of Iceland, see art and film in Venice and Kassel, have dinner at Hisa Franko, attend a wedding in Berlin, see a church near Prague. Then I will get somewhat serious and work for six weeks, at offices in Szczecin and Kiev, in Berlin, and in Paris and Rome. Finally we’ll hop down to Ethiopia and check out its geography.

We’ll try to keep you up to date with our adventures as they continue.