Cali-Bound

                            
ROAD TRIP:  No post last night - sorry. We were enduring Seattle rush hour traffic, and then it was a straight shot down I-5 to Vancouver, where we had a nice dinner and watched "The Wizard of Oz" with G&G R. Then at 6 this a.m. it was back to I-5 in the dark and a heavy fog, California bound.  We're heading to a weekend wine country wedding.

It was dark and pea soup thick fog for the first four hours or so of travel, but once we got to Southern Oregon, we could actually see a little landscape, which was nice, as three of the four of us haven't driven this stretch before. We saw lots of pretty fall colors, that's for sure.
We saw signs at places with intriguing names, like Indian Mark Park, and Jump Off Joe Creek. For quite awhile, we drove along the Applegate Trail. Blazed by the Applegate family of Missouri in the mid 1800s, the route was supposed to be a safer alternative to the Oregon Trail. We caught glimpses of the Rogue River, and we exited I-5 at Ashland for a lunch stop. That's where we found the cast of sign (pictured above) in the weeds, near a gas station. So funny!

We saw our first ever Bear Xing sign, and many, many signs for liquor stores with names like Liquor Expo and Liquor Cabinet and Liquor Barn. I was hoping for Liquo-Rama, but never saw one. Maybe I need to trademark that.

After a couple of miscues, we managed to stumble upon the most wonderful spot for lunch!! Local, sustainable, tasty food, great service and wonderful beer. Yay for Standing Stone Brewing Company!

Curious, we asked the waitress the genesis of the business' name. She told us it's named after a geological formation that looks like a finger sticking up, right by Mount Ashland. Standing Stone is its native name. These days more people call it Pilot Rock.

Along the Sacramento River, not too far south of the Oregon border, we ogled Caste Crags out the car window. Super cool! They really did look like castles (more so than in this Wikipedia photo).
            
We got a nice glimpse of of Mt. Shasta and its snowy top.

After about eight or nine hours total of driving, we stopped in the teeming metropolis of Corning, CA for the evening. We had our choice of hundreds of hotels along our route, but we chose to stay at the Best Western "Plus" in Corning for two reasons. First and foremost, it had an indoor pool for the kids.  Second, it was close to the freeway.

We weren't here for 10 minutes before the kids had their suits on, ready to swim. I walked down to the pool with them. It's lovely to look at, but they were super hesitant about getting in, despite how badly they wanted to swim.

They said it was cold. I have to admit, I initially thought they were just being wusses. After about 5 minutes, though, I dipped a toe in and felt it for myself. Brrrr! It WAS very cold. As in unheated cold.  I looked around the area for a pool thermometer. What I saw was THIS ...

Oh sure, there's a pool heater. It's just not heating the pool. :(  Apparently it's scheduled to go in next week. That will be super helpful to us. NOT. Lame, Best Western "Plus" in Corning for not telling us at check in (when the kids were talking about swimming) that the indoor pool was unheated today, and for not warning us as the teeth chattering kids are trying to get in the pool (the pool is wholly visible to the check in desk, just separated by a glass wall) and for not even apologizing - let alone offer some kind of comp - when we asked if the pool heater was broken. Super crappy customer 'service' IMHO. Perhaps I'll send corportate a link to this blog post. ...

Tall Tales

YEE HAW: This weekend's travels took us to the Georgetown neighborhood. There, along Corson Avenue, is a park with the gosh darn biggest cowboy boots and hat in these here parts!

Since I first saw these statues, I have wondered why Oxbow is home to these pieces, and today we finally found out. It was 1953, when Seattle artist Lewis Nasmyth was hired to create an attraction for a western-themed gas station in the Georgetown part of the city. 

Nasmyth made a 44-ft. wide hat and 22-ft. high cowboy boots, for the appropriately named Hat n' Boots station opened. According to the city of Seattle's Web site, it was the busiest station in the state for a spell, and supposedly Elvis even stopped by in 1962, when he was in town for the World's Fair. 

                                                   Source: City of Seattle Web site
However, when Interstate 5 came through, traffic around Hat n' Boots dwindled and in the late 1980s, it closed. But residents rallied to save the artwork, and it was moved to the park.

          
STORYTELLER:  Yesterday morning I found CJ sitting at his computer, writing. I asked him what he was working on, and he said it was a "creepy pasta."

Intrigued, I asked what that was, of course. He said it originated with the term 'copypasta,' which is a block of text that gets copied and pasted repeatedly on Internet discussion forums and social networking sites. A creepypasta, however, is a short horror story subgenre of copypasta. Most creepypasta stories are supposed to scare readers, but some are a bait-and-switch means of trolling someone. 

That explanation out of the way, here's CJ's copypasta ... 

This started when I moved to my current neighborhood. As soon as I moved over, I realized that I might as well check out the new neighborhood and see what was going on there. I went over to meet my next-door neighbor, who had a quite old-looking house. 

When I saw that he had a garage sale, I went over there to see what he was selling.Most of the things the old man was selling were old knick-knacks and creepy marionettes, but one thing that caught my attention was a DVD case with transparent plastic. The DVD inside it had no design on it, but "MY LITTLE PONY" was written in marker on the DVD. I asked the old man how much it was, and he told me I could have it for free if I wanted to.

So, I bought the DVD, and proceeded to bring it home. When I loaded the DVD into my DVD player, I immediately knew something was wrong. Instead of getting a nice, friendly startup screen that shows you which episode you want to select, there was an image of a Zalgo-style Pinkie Pie, accompanied by "S3L3CT Y0UЯ FдT3" in place of the massage that would tell you to choose the episode that you wanted to view.

I decided to choose the first episode on the DVD, Party of One, where Pinkie Pie starts thinking that her friends don't like her anymore. For about half of the episode, it acted normal, until it came to the point where Pinkie starts thinking that her friends don't like her anymore. As though she was breaking the fourth wall, every once in a while she would make cryptic and threatening comments, targeted at seemingly nobody.

Near the end of the episode where her friends threw a surprise party to show her that they still like her, instead of her cheering up like she would regularly in the episode, the camera zoomed out of the barn, where you could hear sounds of chopping, cries for help, and screaming, like you would if somebody was being fatally attacked.

It didn't show the inside of the barn again, but it did show a blood-covered Pinkie Pie running away from the from the barn, which had broken windows. The episode blacked out after that, and the only thing I could see on the television was an image of once again, a Zalgo-style Pinkie Pie, with blood drooling from her eyes. I was too afraid to watch any more of this DVD right now, thinking "Is this some sort of sick joke!?!?!?!? Is my DVD haunted!?!?!?!?!??!" I immediately put the DVD back in it's transparent case, and drove back to the old man's house.

I asked the old man "WHAT THE DEVIL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING SELLING THIS SORT OF DIGITAL NIGHTMARE!?!?" The old man looked confused, saying it's just a DVD containing ponies. I proceeded to ask him if he even knew what was actually on the disk, and he said he didn't. I gave him a summary of what happened while I viewed it, and he seemed confused.I figured the next best thing to do would be to call Hasbro, the people who own the rights to the series, and I told them everything that happened. The next day, a Hasbro employee came to my house, and once he had watched the version of A Party of One, even he seemed terrified. I asked him if he knew anything that I didn't, and he was confused, and had to leave.

The next day, it said there was a similar real-life accident at broNYcon, which had a similar incident to the one that happened in the barn in my haunted episode. I had had far enough of this haunted DVD now, and I destroyed it with my hammer in the attic.

There you have it, the story of my haunted MLP DVD.

PUNKIN PONY:  Bee has had pumpkins on the brain, too. She's been drawing up a storm. Today one of her creations was a Halloween inspired My Little Pony character, whom she named Jackie Lantern. :)

FLY BY: This evening we ran up top to watch an ISS flyover from our roofdeck. It was a nice, long, bright one. As it disappeared over Queen Anne hill, Christian noticed something was trailing the ISS. 

"That must be Cygnus!" I said.

Early this morning (4:31 our time), Orbital Science's Cygnus cargo craft was detached from the ISS.  (It's on the left in this photo.)
                           
                                                              Image Credit: NASA/Karen Nyberg
Per a NASA press release in my inbox today, it's headed for a "destructive re-entry in Earth's atmosphere Wednesday, Oct. 23."  Guess it's a good thing we saw it when we did. By tomorrow, it's toast!

Wonder why they didn't design a reusable, splashdown or landing model, like SpaceX's Dragon. ... 

PINK NIGHTMARE: The bad ball gown for the good witch costume continues. I spent another couple of hours on it today. You may never see a photo of it.

Fun 'n Horror

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems
HALLO, EARTHLING:  Last week, I posted about NASA's Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft doing a low fly-by. Launched on Aug. 5, 2011, by an Atlas 551, that rocket only had enough oomph to give Juno enough speed to reach the asteroid belt. Then, as anticipated, our Sun's gravity pulled the craft back toward the inner solar system. Juno used Earth's gravity to boost it on its way toward our solar system's gas giant.

During the process, JunoCam took the time to snap a photo of home. Hope you were waving!

Juno is expected to reach Jupiter on the Fourth of July, 2016.

HARVEST PARTY: Sunday afternoon the kids were thrilled to attend the annual harvest party of CJ's BFF from kindergarten. Such a nice family. Thank goodness we have one super awesome aspect of CJ's otherwise super awful kindergarten year at a local public school at the south end of Queen Anne hill. ...

The kids had a great time carving and decorating pumpkins.

Actually CJ wasn't so interested in the art aspect of his pumpkins. Rather, he viewed it as food and wanted to harvest every seed he could out of it. :) So while the other kids got their art on, CJ conducted an autopsy.

We brought the seeds home, roasted them up and enjoyed them, so I can't fault his pragmatic approach. :)

BAD WITCH: I have previously shared that CJ and Annabelle have decided to be Glinda the Good Witch and a flying monkey this year. Sounds simple enough ... OK, not so simple, but nothing I can't handle. ... Or at least that's what I thought.

I knew that Simplicity had the Wizard of Oz rights, and so we "scored" a pattern for the Glinda dress. Unfortunately, they only had tiny kid sizes or adult sizes, no 'big kid' sizes. So, I opted for the adult pattern, 4136. Looks, OK, right? ...
                                              
Four words for 4136: So much, so wrong.
                                   
Sweet Jeebus. I know my way around a pattern and a sewing machine. Really I do. But this pattern is beyond not good. From fabric cutting out advice to sewing directions, it's flat out freaking WRONG in so many places. And by wrong, I mean 'let's waste yards of fabric and having you look like the Wicked Witch of the East.' Not that I know exactly what the Wicked Witch of the East looks like, but now, in my mind's eye, I picture her in Simplicity 4136.

Case in point: There are numerous pattern pieces with multiple pattern pieces. Yes, I know, that's confusing. Welcome to my world. But let's say once you realize there are multiple piece 22s, you think, OK, there's a piece 22 for size 8 or 12, and one for size 10 or 6. But what if the piece is so confuzzuled it doesn't even know what it is?!

At some point, after my left eye developed an involuntary twitch and I said Many Bad Words that Glinda the Good Witch has never even THOUGHT let alone said, I was like, "Screw it, I'm sewing this ball gown MY WAY," as Frank Sinatra would say, if he were ever to sew a pink ball gown.

And so I'm OK now, and Annabelle will have a g.d. poufy pink dress, and she won't look like the Wicked Witch of the East and she might even look a little like Glinda when I'm done, despite Simplicity 4136.

LEFTOVERS: In happier news, here are photos of cake. Because cake makes everything better.

Dontcha love the glow-stick candles on Bee's cake? Makes me want to do a Star Wars cake just to use 'em for the light sabers.

And here was its ooey gooey inside of Annabelle's oversized birthday cupcake.

\