31: Scary Stories of the Internet

Somehow I got onto this genre kick late last night and I haven't been able to quit: web-based "scary" stories.

What I mean here is a particular kind of scary story that tends to be in an epistolary format, sometimes with multiple interconnecting narrator/characters, who may have their own blogs, websites, or at least are distinct users on a common platform.

The idea is to have these stories seem real. In fact, I discovered this whole part of Reddit, No Sleep, where as a rule readers interact with the storyteller and each other as if the story is true.

Anyway, here are the ones I've found the most fun so far:

The Dionaea House, by Eric Heisserer
This one was put together by the author back in 2004-2006 while he was trying to shop a movie script. He never meant it for public consumption, more as a calling card, but word got around. It's good fun, but obvious from the host website that it's fiction.

Correspondence, by "bloodstains"
If this one doesn't give you the willies, you aren't paying attention. It's structured as if there is some "thing" at play in the internet that is able to intercept and transmit anything that may be online, from emails to text messages to 911 calls to news articles, into this compilation of "correspondence" detailing a complex story of hauntings, possession, and murder. The devil is in the details here: photos, video, the incorporation of real events and reader feedback into the story, and the cultivation of blogs and ostensibly "real" Reddit users as characters over the course of years. It started being told four years ago and was updated as recently as October.

I found a videotape on the beach a few weeks ago. by "hauntedtape"
Just go to Stinson Beach tomorrow. There's something you need to see.

30: Pearson Air Museum

Saturday we found ourselves in Vancouver, WA. You never know in life, do you? Anyway, I decided to take the kids and my mom to the Pearson Air Museum.

#29: I Was A Dog

Today I spent a solid 1/2 hour only communicating by barking. This was Pete's idea and he enforced it ruthlessly: neither of us was allowed to talk. (He was Garfield; I was Odie. Never mind that they talk.)

We became pretty effective. We actually sorted out lunch while constrained in this way.

Then it was over: "We can use words now!" I wasn't sure I was ready to go back.

#28: Sprouts

Sprouts in the kitchen, showing leaves this morning.

#27: Wore A Tie

OK, not for the first time ever, but the first time this year.  It was picture day at work.  

I hope that the next time I gotta do this, it's for a job interview.

#26: Updates: Not New Things At All

There are some things to update on previous posts.

First of all, with regard to improving on bulletproof coffee, today I tried it with coconut oil and I can honestly report that this is the best thing to happen to coffee since hot water.

Second, I did it again:  I ran down a missed bus for four blocks and the bastard didn't get away.  At this point I feel like Superman.  I am on a roll with Tri-Met.  Watch, my luck'll crash and burn and I'll find myself strangled by a bum again next week.

#25: A Question

I want to know why our ice cubes grow dongs.  This happens a lot in our freezer.  Why?

#24: Adult Coloring

Coloring: okay for adults to do, now.

I keep hearing about this as a thing. It's supposed to be a good form of meditation or it's as good as meditation or even better.

Look, here's Fox News talking about it! I'm told they are even selling adult coloring books at Winco now, although on close inspection they turn out to be Jesus-y. I'll save that for another post - for now I'm workin' on a rabbit:

Something about those eyes...should I leave them blank?

#23: Oaks Bottom

Pete wanted to walk in some puddles - to go for a "puddle walk" as he calls it. 

"Puddles, eh?" said I. "I'll show you puddles, you little squirt!" And so I took him to a swamp.

#22: Frogs On the Brain

This is a thing I'm going to be doing over the next few weeks: volunteering to wade out into local ponds in search of frog and salamander egg masses.

#21: Skyr!

Skyr 1. verb : to frighten a member of Lynyrd Skynyrd, as by telling him the landing gear isn't working. 2.  noun : an Icelandic cultured dairy product.

I'd heard of and enjoyed Greek yogurt, but this stuff was news to me.  Fortunately, as noted before, I can count on my wife and my mother-in-law to keep me well supplied with foods and beverages I've never heard of before.  So along came some Siggi's skyr!

I am pleased to report that it tastes like chicken.

#20: Hippie Sauce

Got home tonight and my wife was like "I made some great Hippie Sauce for dinner."

Awesome!

No, it turned out it was.

Also, it was neither made out of hippies, nor made for dipping hippies in, although it couldn't hurt to try the latter if your hippies have gone a bit "off," and haven't they all?

#19: Lost and Found

My luck with Tri-Met keeps holding.  Last Friday I left my library book on the bus.  Reported it to lost and found online.  On Monday, they emailed me to say it was found.  

They warned me that I only had 14 days to go pick it up.  (Or what, I wonder?  They'll burn it?  Sell it?  I'd hope they'd return it to the library.  It's Multnomah County property, after all.  Imagine a bureaucratic turf war between Tri-Met and the Multnomah County Library over the disposal of lost and unclaimed library books.  Some Willamette Week intern should bite this juicy lead.)

Anyway, here in pictures is my thrill-packed* journey to reclaim it.

*Nope, not really.

#18: Motorhead Treadmill

At work we are doing a fitness challenge for the new year. You set a personal goal and try to meet it every day for a month. Prizes and all that. Last year I set a goal of 7,500 steps per day and was one of the winners. This year, I'm upping the ante to 10,000 steps a day. Today was day one.

Well, long about 10:15 p.m. after a full day of work, putting the kids to bed, a quiet dinner and an evening meeting, I found myself 2,500 steps short. Crap. Decided I'd hit the treadmill - which has never really been my thing; I'd usually prefer to be outside getting pissed on in almost all weather.

But hey. Bedtime and midnight were both fast approaching. This was no time to suit back up and go back out into the hungry night. No, tonight I needed an indoor speedball. Tonight, it was time for Motorhead Treadmill!

20 minutes and the following songs later, I was over the hump.  Thanks, Lemmy!  R.I.P.

#17: Three Pictures of a Sculpture

That is all.

On the Fifth Avenue bus mall.

#16: Garbage Disposal Changeroo

One thing that's awesome is discovering late on a Sunday night that the area under the kitchen sink has flooded because your garbage disposal sprung a leak.  This happened last Sunday.

We quickly declared that part of the sink "OUT OF ORDER" and on Monday, after some research, determined it needed replacing.  I did not have time to get around to taking the old one out and putting in the new one until this weekend.

Friday night I got started.

#15: Unitarian Church

A lot of what I know about the Unitarian Church comes from the Simpsons.  In particular, this exchange between Lisa Simpson and Reverend Lovejoy at a church ice cream social:

Lisa: “What flavors do you have?”
Rev. Lovejoy: “Well, chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, and our new Unitarian flavour ice cream.”
Lisa: “I’ll have that” (Rev hands her an empty bowl)
Lisa: “But there’s nothing in there.”
Rev: “Eeeexactly.”

It's a good joke, but a cheap shot from a reverend in a religious tradition where firmly established dogma is considered central to what it means to have a church.

The Unitarians certainly are not that.  But what are they?  Well, I decided to find out.  My wife and mother-in-law had plans to attend Sunday's 11:15 service.  I wanted to go too, but, having toddlers, we decided to divide and conquer: I'd go to the 9:15 service, then watch the boys later.

#14: Foo Foo Coffee Drink

My coffee desires are ... unconventional.

While I've been in a Starbucks, and other Starbucksian places, I've only ever ordered a cup of coffee.  Sometimes an iced coffee.

I know being all contrary and saying something like this is as old as the espresso trend itself.  But I'm not telling you this to boast, to rip open my internet shirt and let you see all my internet chest hair about how I only drink rill coffee with beef in it.

It's just a fact about me: I am a stubborn ass.  America, I have refused your pumpkin spice lattes and your frappacinos for decades without being able to say why.  Not coincidentally, when I was brainstorming ideas for this "try a new thing" blog, "Foo Foo Coffee Drink" was the first thing on the list.

So this Friday I stepped away from the office for a bit to give one a shot.

#13: My Bad Food Idea

My brother's never made it to Voodoo Donuts.  So we went.  Here is what we got, after I told my brother it existed.

Hey, it was tasty.  Cream-filled, because.

#12: Blazer Game

OK, sure, this isn't a "new thing."  I've been to Blazer games before.  But...uh... I haven't been to a 2015-2016 Blazer game, or really seen any of the current stars (Lillard, McCullom, that dreamy Meyers Leonard) live.  So that was new to me.

Plus, it's been a while.

#11: Mike's Bad Food Idea

Here is one of my chocolate birthday cupcakes.  

We have a plethora of that good German chocolate-style frosting to apply to it, made from scratch, but my brother said he was gonna try one with anchovy paste. Brothers being what we are, I had little choice but to do the same.

Do you think that this led to some kind of crazy umami-blast that brought a whole new angle to chocolate?  Then you are wrong, and maybe you read food media too much.

No, quite unlike the miracle of bacon or prime rib coffee, this was just terrible.  It tasted exactly like having one part of your mouth occupied by a perfectly good chocolate cupcake while a smaller but wilier force of anchovy paste occupied another.  Somewhere along your tongue is the DMZ and they're just staring at each other from entrenched positions and waiting to see who'll blink.

Swallow and move on.  Do not repeat.

#10: Trek To Tryon Creek

Near our house is this little gem of a state park in the middle of Portland/Lake Oswego.  

It's got dozens of miles of hiking and horse trails, but only two small loops of paved trail that you'd call wheelchair accessible in the conventional sense.  The rest varies from wide packed dirt-and-gravel lanes to narrow mud-and-root backcountry scrambles.

Sunday I was feeling adventurous, and my wife wanted some time alone, so I gathered up the boys and set out to see if I could break Henry out of the old paved-loop rut.

#9: Old is New: OMSI & The Spaghetti Factory

Monday is my birthday.  We decided to "observe" it Saturday, and I wanted to observe it by going to OMSI and the Spaghetti Factory, with the family plus my mom and brother.

Nothing new for me, except I haven't been to OMSI since I was a kid, and now we have kids ourselves!  They also have never been to the Spaghetti Factory, which was the very, very fancy restaurant my brother and I got to go to for special occasions as kids.

#8: Finished This Book, Started That One

A while back a couple of books on the CIA's adventures in Afghanistan caught my eye.  The first was Steve Coll's Ghost Wars, which is a thorough history of CIA operations in Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion right through to the rather arbitrary cut-off date of September 10, 2001.

The second is First In, by Gary Schroen, a longtime CIA operator in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a not insignificant character of Ghost Wars, and also the leader of the first CIA team to enter Afghanistan and link up with the Northern Alliance after 9/11.

 

#7: I Ran Four Blocks to Catch Up to a Bus

(Updated 1.28.16)

You know the thing where you exit your building just to see the bus you were on time for pull away? Well, I do.  And this time I was not going to take it.

I stood around demoralized for a couple minutes, looking at the transit tracker on my phone, which told me another one was coming in 20 damned minutes.  It was cold out.  I was tired.  I cussed and stomped.

Then I peered down the street.  There it was, four blocks away at its next stop.  Just sitting there all smug, full of smug passengers all smug about being on the bus they wanted to catch.

The hell with it.  I knew this was foolish - it was probably going to hit the road any second now - but I just started running.  And the crosswalks all agreed with me! Jesus had taken the wheel!

I ran like the dickens.  And that bus, against all odds, did not budge.

A block away, I saw its doors close up.  Crap.  But then some very slow-moving senior citizens hobbled towards it, waving their arms.  Thank you, Greatest Generation!  You've done it again!  The bus opened back up and hit the hydraulics to let them aboard.  I sprinted up right on their heels.

Victory.

True story.

------------------------
1.28.16 UPDATE: This all happened again.

#6: Personality Test (UPDATE)

I've actually never taken one of these Myers-Briggs Jungian things before.  At the wife's urging, I decided to grab a couple free ones online and see what they had to say.

#5: I Figured Out How to Make a Spiral Staircase With Lego Duplos

Spoiler Alert:  Stop reading if you want to figure out your own way.
Trigger Warning:  May make you want to play with Lego Duplos.

Base

#4: January Blooms

In my mom's garden, defying the frost.

#3: A Walk Among the Driftwood

Manzanita, along with the whole Oregon coast, had some huge storms a few weeks ago that included high surf on high tides.  There is a stunning amount of new driftwood tossed way up above the usual high tide line. I went out along the rocks at the base of Neahkahnie Mountain to check it out.

The day's surf was also up, with a stern east wind ripping the crests off the waves.  It was wild out there.

#2: Bulletprooooofer Coffee

(Updated 1.28.16)

So my wife told me about some new health hogwash taking the internet by storm, this notion of "bulletproof coffee" which is coffee but with butter in it instead of milk or cream.

OK, sounds good.  But there's one thing we've always known:

♩ ♪ ♫ ♬
Anything butter can do, bacon can do better
Bacon can do anything better than you
♬ ♫ ♪♩

The fat, that is.  So why put butter in coffee when you can put bacon fat in?  (All credit for this concept goes to my wife.)

Well, it should come as no surprise that there is "science" to this, to the extent that science has anything to do with this.  Part of the whole theory of "bulletproof coffee" is that butter is better because you're not drinking casein, i.e. milk proteins.  There's some tiny fraction of the population allergic to casein and some evidence of correlation with instances of cancer and autism.

For the sake of fun, let's stipulate that casein is bad for you.  If so, why put dairy in your coffee at all, when there are entirely casein-free fats that taste even better?

So today I decided to try this thing.

#1: New Year's Day Polar Plunge

I am kicking this blog off with a splash.

The point of this blog is to document trying one new thing every day - or almost every day.  I'm allowing myself a little wiggle room there.

The goal of this blog is to push me to establish new habits and routines, by way of checking in often and connecting with all the beauty that life can be.

The title of this blog?  It's a kind of stupid title with some personal significance for me, and I think that's how you're supposed to name blogs, right?

The "new things" that I will document here may be big, or small, or anything at all.  Sublime, ridiculous, profound and mundane.  Sometimes it may just be a new photograph.  But it'll be new.

So, without further ado: New Year's Day.  11 AM, Manzanita Beach.  Air temperature: 39F.  Water temperature:  -12F?  I don't know.