We do well to remember

Obviously I am back to updating this blog as the spirit moves me. Not for the first time, the spirit is moving me on September 11.

Exactly a month ago I happened to be vacationing in central Pennsylvania, and I realized I was in the vicinity of the Flight 93 Memorial. (Thank God for the racks of tourist pamphlets in every hotel and rest stop--they are not, as it turns out, obsolete.)

Flight 93 was the hijacked flight whose passengers realized what was happening, and chose to fight the hijackers. They died, but they stopped the attack before it reached Washington D.C., where it presumably would have crashed into the White House or the Capitol Building. In the year or so after the 9/11 attacks, I found the story of Flight 93 hugely compelling. So, though it wasn't part of the plan (to the extent that we had any at all), I made a point of visiting the memorial. Now I want to talk about it, because I realized a good memorial is worth praising.

I am, above all, glad that the memorial is thoughtful. I remember reading, while we still argued about how to memorialize the 9/11 attacks, about the World War II memorial finished in D.C. in 2004--the sense being that it was too triumphalist, to sterile, and so long overdue as to be perfunctory, drained of meaning. It gave me something to be afraid of in the development of the "Ground Zero" memorial in the footprint of the World Trade Center.

There is an art to memorializing events, which I am beginning to appreciate. The Flight 93 Memorial's design wasn't without pitfalls and controversy, but it came together effectively to, in essence, turn an idea into a place.

It's a big place, too, if you count the whole national park space surrounding the actual built memorial. The effect is that the whole landscape is empty as far as you can see from the memorial itself. It was the wall of names that I actually want to talk about, though.

The names of passengers and crew are carved in a marble wall, but there is a second, shorter wall parallel to it, that turns the memorial into a corridor, like the interior of an airplane, oriented toward the crash site. It ends like this:

A wooden gate (solid but conspicuously impermanent, breakable) separating the corridor from the stone marking the crash site. One remembers that the passengers of the plane used a drink cart as a ram to break down the door to the cockpit--an act that hastened their deaths by a few minutes but fixed it in this spot, where no one further would be hurt. The whole memorial points this way, and the ghosts almost call you to do as they did.

This is all to say that the memorial succeeded in reminding me of more than the fact that people died here. It mattered how they died, and it still matters.

Advent, Christmas, Fimbulwinter, Epiphany

Where to begin? Not with another apology for letting my blog languish so long, I hope.

Immediately before I left for a long Christmas vacation, my trusty laptop went kaput. I ordered a new laptop, which I had shipped to where I would be on Christmas Eve, and alternated between packing and file recovery the next day. Everything important was saved, I'm pleased to say. What wasn't important wasn't lost--I just haven't bothered moving everything off the old computer because the process is a pain. But all my writing and work files are here, and I didn't have to worry for very long that they were irretrievable.

Since I had just wrapped up a big project that had to be out before Christmas, and I hadn't lined up any work for the week I would be on vacation, being without a computer was almost relaxing. It gave me more time to relax and really focus on the things that are important in life, like food, naps, movies, and presents.

I came home with a supply of good literature (Stephen King's special extra-long edition of The Stand), good games (the first season of Telltale Games' The Walking Dead, as well as the lost trove of my Super Nintendo titles finally uncovered by my dutiful sister in exchange for custody of the N64 and its games*), good music (Florence + the Machine's album "Lungs," which provided the soundtrack for the drives between New York and Philadelphia), a great movie (Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai), good chocolate, and two bottles of Sky River mead, one of a handful of Pacific Northwest beverages that I miss almost as much as my friends who still live there.**

If you've read the news about as much as I have, you've probably noticed that it's cold all over the place. That includes here in Maryland, and although I don't claim to be nearly as hard off as folks in the Midwest, or the folks who recently had to get rescued off an Antarctic research boat, or the people who just had to be rescued off the boat that rescued those people. But it's pretty cold here, and by "here" I mean "inside."

As it happens, my contentious downstairs housemates moved out on New Year's Eve. And it turned out that they called the gas company as they moved out and had the gas shut off. Do I know why? No. Am I going to speculate about their motives or possible negligence in a public forum? Heck no. Can I see my own breath in the dining room? Yes.

If Pepco is as good as its word, this will be sorted out on Monday, which will be very nice. In the meantime, Girlfriend and I have been keeping very close to our favorite space heater.

Not that I want to complain, or, more correctly, not that I want to complain any more. I am not nearly as miserable about the situation as you might think I have right to be. But a maxim I'm coming to believe--and one I beg everyone not to abuse--is that if a situation must be bad it behooves it to also be interesting. It also helps to spend the time in good company, and I suspect I would be a great deal grouchier about this if the school year had resumed on the second.

* If playing Dungeons & Dragons has taught me anything, it's that people will delve for your lost treasure and fight the necessary monsters for you if you let them in exchange for a share of the loot.

** Hey, I said "almost."

Abominations both eldritch and insectoid

I did a good bit of vacationing this summer vacation, which is why there haven't been posts here. I'll make this round of blog apology brief and get to the more interesting stuff.

First of all, while canoeing with Girlfriend in Cape Cod I ended up taking my cell phone out for a swim. I also learned something from the experience about how deep you can sink into mud, and how hard it can be to pull your feet back up out of the bottom of a lake.

It was certainly time for my phone to go. I was still using the phone I got in 2006, which made it about 140 in phone years. So although it did not prove absolutely necessary, my unpremeditated swim provided a good excuse to get a new, "actual" phone, which is to say a small computer that is also capable, with some coaxing, of making phone calls.

What's more fun, the experience in the muck informed the Heroes' Tears adventure I was working on. It's a very swampy adventure, and/but I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. I'm hoping I will have the chance to share it with the world, and not just with the people who will be paying me directly for it.

What else? I wish the saga of my house and its vermin was complete, but it is not. The mice, I think, heard about the bedbugs downstairs and decided to leave. But bedbugs there are, and the Great Inconvenience has been scheduled for next week. And the week after that. And the week after that. Our landlord probably could have arranged for a less onerous treatment, but, of course, no inconvenience is too great when it's someone else's problem. If I'm overly bitter about this (and I'm sure I am), it's likely because there is still no sign of bedbugs in my house; this is all because of what's going on downstairs.

Enough of that, though. I'm writing an adventure.

Things going well, for the most part

I'm excited lately. I'm not sure if I have a reason. It could just be that I've changed (re: dropped some of) my medication, and a little bit of my ADHD is coming back. It could be that I'm replacing the missing stimulant with caffeine, though I'm actually hardly drinking any more than I did before. It could be, and I hope it is, that some things are going right.

I successfully extracted my health insurance from the bureaucratic barathrum that held it out of my reach for 72 days, at final count. There's a story there, but it may be the sort that diminishes in the telling. I am not Franz Kafka; this tale is outside my expertise. Suffice it to say, in brief, that I called and I called and I called, and the whole process felt like fixing a broken VCR by swatting it with a rolled-up newspaper. Eventually something went "clunk" and the mechanism moved.

The immediate upshot was that I could go to judo last night without being afraid that I could bankrupt myself by dislocating my pinky toe. I had a good time, skinned my knuckle, tore the knee of (one of) my uniform pants, and got sore. And it is wonderful to have a body capable of picking other bodies up and throwing them down again; it is wonderful to have a body capable of self-repair when the same is done to it.

I was up late the night before that working on 12 when I had a breakthrough, or an inspiration, or just a couple good ideas. I should keep this in mind in the future as evidence that you really can find a solution for a story that's stuck by sitting down and writing at it for a while. I wish I could explain exactly what I thought of, but I should just put it in the story. Anyway, sometimes, occasionally, writing actually is exhilarating, and it has been once or twice this week.

I've been talked into playing Guild Wars 2, which is also exciting. That would entail playing with friends, and it was also explained to me that the game allowed you to combine skills with other players' on the fly in a manner reminiscent of Chrono Trigger, which made my heart sing. Actually sing. I need to see someone about it.

I also finally remembered to throw some money at the Kickstarter for The Gamers 3: Hands of Fate. You should too, if you haven't (and soon--the deadline is September 7), because it's going to be good, and Bryan will be in it. They even shot some of the movie already at this year's GenCon. Here, watch this:

Now I suppose it's possible that that makes no sense to you, in which case I apologize. A little.

The last thing, I guess, is that I'm leaving tonight for New York to visit my parents. My plan for the weekend consists of visiting, taking advantage of the pool, and little else.

Back to something

Sometimes, as good as it is to be gone, it's better to be back. Sometimes I suppose the opposite is also true. At any rate I am back, and happy to be so. The summer, defined here as vacation season, is over.

Hanging out with my grandmothers the past week entailed a decent amount of time spent watching the Olympics, an alternately intriguing and appalling affair.

Intriguing, because some people have gotten shockingly good at some odd things. Teenage girls busting out acrobatics that I dismiss as fanciful when I see them in video games. People moving at impossible speeds. And it does warm some hidden patriotic organ of mine somehow to know that an American swam the fastest, even if I never attached any importance to the activity before and probably won't again, except maybe four years from now.

Appalling, because I find myself watching network television again, and all of my mechanisms for surviving that environment have atrophied beyond recovery. Was I really able to sit through six commercials at a stretch when I was a younger man? I am not what I used to be.

Now that things are boring again, maybe there will be time to do things worth writing about.

Summertime, and the livin' is crazy

Summer is a crazy time. On Wednesday night I got back to Maryland from Cape Cod, by way of a layover in Philadelphia. On Sunday I'm leaving again to go on a tour of my grandmothers in the Carolinas. In all this I'm trying to find time to work--to work work, mind you--and also to write.

I didn't finish my 12 Dancing Princesses story, which I'll just call "12" for now until I come up with something better. That sort of diligence didn't really seem in the spirit of the vacation I was taking, but I'll keep at it. I actually think this story will be cool when I finish it. I like it.

Over the last six weeks I've been having a Kafkaesque experience with Maryland's state health insurance plan. It's not such a great story in the telling. The upshot is that the enrollment department's game plan is apparently to tell me my paperwork is out of date and make me fill it out again, and repeat, until (I guess) I give up or die. So I am currently, technically, uninsured.

So between being out of town and knowing that I'll have to sell my kidneys if I break my arm, I haven't done much judo lately. I can console myself by watching it on the Olympics, although that itself is a strange experience--NBC, assuming nobody in America cares about judo (I guess), has left most of the feeds raw. But I can be excited, at least, by the news that an American has finally won a judo gold medal. I can also look forward to picking through NBC's three-hour feed to watch that happen.

I have now watched The Dark Knight Rises twice since I last posted about it. It was a very good movie but did not flirt with greatness like its immediate forebear did. I am satisfied. Now I can start devoting my anticipation to The Hobbit, which I hear has now been racked out to three movies. No doubt there will be more to say on that.

A walk through the ghost trees

Some people wanted to know if I ever got my dwarfpire situation sorted out. (See the end of my last post for the beginning of this story.) Copper ballista arrowheads were slightly more effective than bare wooden arrows. One was enough to knock the vampire down, after that the other arrows just shot over him without hitting him. I gave up on the ballista, and sent miners into the space above the vampire's cell. They mined through their floor/his ceiling until they caused a cave-in. Dropping the ceiling on him did the trick; the vampire mayor was really and sincerely dead.

Now, on to stuff that matters. Last week was a wonderful reunion with college and Seattle friends on the Washington coast. Fun was had; games were played; drink was drunk, and so were we. A Burning Wheel campaign was begun that I hope will find a way to continue; I'm getting better at creating characters that intrigue me. I hope the other players at least find him tolerable.

The house we stayed at was nice, if slightly architecturally surreal. It had no front door. It hovered on columns over a wall-less garage space, from which a spiral staircase took you up into a laundry room. The other door was a glass sliding door opening on a balcony facing the beach. Either of these would have been the back door of a regular house. It was a beach house, so I suppose the side facing the beach was the front.

And how was the weather?

Typical for the Pacific Northwest, I guess. That's the house we stayed at, in the middle.

Not that it stayed that cloudy the whole time, but as I said, we passed more time with games than with frolicking. I did, however, get a chance to walk a little way along the beach and had a pleasant scenic surprise.

You see, the whole beach that you could see from the house pretty much looked like this:

Just out of sight, though, there was a stream that ran into the ocean. Girlfriend and I followed it into what was, for me, the nonsocial highlight of the week.

Here is the stream itself. You can see some of the coloration from the silt, or clay, or whatever the water was full of. In person it was quite vivid and striking: the water was yellow at the edges, then red into carmine, and finally a deep, deep indigo where the blue from the sky took over. The stream cut into hilly forest on the far bank:

You could just see that yellow rock face in the distance from the house; that's what we had set out walking to get a better look at in the first place. But the stream, naturally, kept going, and it had been eating away at the shore for a while.

The trees that the water had undercut were all a ghostly white, essentially driftwood that hadn't drifted anywhere. One fallen tree branched into the bank like it was trying its hand at being a tributary.

The stream had driven people away too. The abandoned posts of several docks marched into the forest, where one supposes houses had stood until the ground fell out from under them.

At least, I assume these supported something because they all come up to the same height. As you can see from some of the lower stumps, someone had cut everything down along the bank, perhaps to get this wood. (A little more searching suggests to me that this used to be a bridge. To where, I wonder.)

Opposite these cliffs the trees came right up to the bank, so that's as far as we went inland. A little farther on, a couple of boys were setting off firecrackers, taking advantage of the natural amphitheater. I wondered if they had climbed through the trees or come from the opposite direction.

It turns out that this area is where the Moclips River empties into the ocean. It's odd, and somehow refreshing, to come to a place and explore it without knowing its name. The whole place felt unspoiled, even though it obviously wasn't. I wish I found places like this by accident more often.

Adventures in Baltimore

Presidents' Day weekend was a nice one. Girlfriend and I went to Baltimore, about as spontaneously as we do anything. That is, we wanted to do it. On Friday I did some research on what you can actually do in Baltimore. (The case for the city up to that point had rested mainly on proximity.) On Saturday we started actually planning it, looking at train tickets for Sunday morning and Monday evening, and reasonable hotels for in between. So as it had turned out, there are several good museums in Baltimore as well as an aquarium, but their hours, combined with the hours Girlfriend needed to be back in DC to get work done, were generating headaches. We'd be rushing to get there when there wouldn't be much to do, then rushing back to get back to work. I was beginning to wonder if we actually had time for a vacation, and was getting ready to call the whole thing off, when Girlfriend asked me, "What if we go tonight?"

It was 3 p.m. at this point and I had already made a hotel reservation for Sunday night. The deadline for cancelling that reservation was 4 p.m. the day before, or one hour from then. But over the next hour she convinced me she had the right idea. We canceled the reservation with five minutes to spare. We booked a different room at a different hotel and bought train tickets for 7 o'clock. Then we ran around the house throwing things into bags, swung by the pharmacy to pick up a prescription I had to have refilled that day, ate dinner at the mall food court, and were off.

I forgot to account for the track work on the Metro. We had a long wait for the red line to get us to Union Station. But, there we got, timed so perfectly that you would have thought I knew what I was doing.

So, there's a Quality Inn in Baltimore that's surprisingly nice. Actually, possibly the nicest hotel I have any memory of staying in. (I think the place in Westport was, on the whole, a better experience, but that was a family operation. Also, we got trapped in the parking lot by an elk.) Booking the room at the last minute apparently brought it back into our price range, so hooray for that!

Girlfriend particularly liked the window hangings.

She made a nest there and hibernated until Monday.

As you can see, Girlfriend remembered to bring her camera, which means I get to put pictures in this post.

We walked out that night to get drinks and some food. We had a frustrating time at the bar we finally settled on. It's partially, but not entirely, their fault. For example, it was unfortunate that they were out of Blue Moon. It was my fault that, when browsing their remaining beer selection more or less at random, I forgot what's special about O'Doul's. Similarly, it was not their fault that my girlfriend is passionately averse to the substance known as "nacho cheese," but it is their fault that their menu specified mozzarella. (It was special. Or supposed to be.) And ultimately it is on me that I didn't send either of these things back.

Downtown Baltimore looks pretty nice. On the walk back we saw the back of the Baltimore Basilica.

We intended to circle around to the front at some point, but didn't get around to it. We also saw the Washington Monument (not that one) and got a shot of that in daylight.

Commemorating George Washington's imprisonment atop the tower of Orthanc.

We found The Walter's Art Museum, and that's a pretty cool (free) place. We got to the bulk of it in our two hours or so there, but could have spent two, or six, more. I'll share one bronze thingy that caught my eye:

It was maybe one or two feet tall. That's the Fall of Adam and Eve, there, but what got my attention was the monkey munching away in the background. Conjures up some fun thoughts. Of course Darwin wouldn't come along for another two centuries or so, and inasmuch as this prefigures him it's a coincidence. The monkey, according to the museum card, symbolizes lust and foolishness or some such. But I like to imagine him a step behind Adam and Eve, waiting for his turn.

The chunk of the museum I found most interesting was an eclectic collection organized as the sort of things an Enlightenment-era nobleman might accumulate. An 11-inch Egyptian "mummy" filled with corn sat on a shelf under a Mesoamerican stone "idol," with cards explaining not only what they were, but what the people collecting them in the 1600s thought they were. A narwhal horn hung, contextless, on the wall. At least, I couldn't find an explanation. It looked about 10 feet long--much too big to have been passed off as something that grew out of a horse's forehead, as I understand they had been.

We went down from there to the Inner Harbor to check out the National Aquarium with some of Girlfriend's relatives. The aquarium's exhibits were interesting, but the layout made for a tightly-controlled experience. I felt like I was on an assembly line. It was dark, and hard to get good pictures.

Guess.*

But there were some successes.

There's a rainforest exhibit too. I found out what a Screaming Piha sounds like. That's something that stops being fun right away.

All in all, a good trip, a good break. I discover, over and over, how nice it is to just up and go somewhere with Girlfriend. We might go back to Baltimore some time. Then again, we might pick a completely different destination at random.

* It's the whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling.