my feet

Check it out, my feet went to the Grand Canyon and made friends with a raven:

crater lake: so pretty

There's not really, strictly speaking, all that much to *do* at Crater Lake, other than drive around and talk about how pretty it is. So that's what Kay Ray and I did. We stopped at almost every scenic overlook on the road that goes around the rim. That thing everyone says about Crater Lake, about how it's really pretty? That thing is true. Behold.

My first view of the lake:

Check it out, snow:

Freakishly pretty, see?

I think they were closing a bunch of roads the next day for the season. There weren't many people there, although this car kept following us:

Kay Ray figured out how we could take a picture of our feet with the lake. Note that I had changed into my hard-core hiking boots for this 1/2 mile walk, because dang it, I had carried them all the way to Oregon and they were going to get some use:

I was amused by these preparations for the winter. I'm familiar with the poles at the side of the road, I assume to guide the plow, but this was the first time I'd seen a bathroom with its own snow shed entrance thing.

feet by request

Ok, J.Bro, since you asked:


The only picture of Kay Ray's and my feet from the maze is this action shot. (That's me on the right.)

chicago: the lazy wrap-up blog post

Yeah, I never got around to telling the rest of my Chicago stories, then this weekend I went to Oregon and now I'm just totally behind. So here, I'm finishing off Chicago with one big post.


On Saturday we went to the Field Museum. They've got a real big dinosaur there.


A highlight of the visit: Chicago's Fluevog store isn't far from Grrrbear's house. It's in an old movie theater. I bought boots. They needed stretching (the guy almost pulled me off the chair getting the left boot off my foot) so I'm actually receiving them tomorrow - Grrrbear picked them up last week and shipped them to my office.


Clockwise from top left: Grrbear's girlfriend, Grrrbear, me.

Saturday night I went to former colleague S.Ball's wedding, the reason for my trip to Chicago. It was in a former billboard factory that now houses some guy's collection of sports cars. The guy also rents it out for events. The ceremony was on the top level, where they painted the billboards (so it had really high ceilings and natural light). Like how I cleverly made this photograph anonymous by shaking the camera? Totally on purpose. Nothing at all to do with the low light.


I wore my awesomest pair of shoes. In fact, I planned everything else I wore around the shoes. The other shoes in this picture belong to two very excellent people from my former employer.

I maxed out on wedding partying at about 11:30 and caught a cab back to Grrrbear's. I got in a little before midnight and was like, hey, sweet, I'm in time for Weekend Update! Stupid central time. Saturday Night Live was just ending.

And that is all. It was a quick trip but good fun.

today in feet

Grrrbear's in town! Woo! So it's time for blogcon '08 feet pictures! Today he and I met Spice at the train station and set off to see the sights. We were blessed? anointed? with the tail end of tropical storm Hanna, which was frankly pretty anemic. Well, I mean, I got wet, but I've been wetter.

Because there was a ton of rain, nobody was crazy enough to stand in line outside the Archives, so we pretty much marched right in and looked at the Constitution and whatnot. If you follow Spice's blog, you know she's got a foot injury and a boot. Here's how she protects it (she'd just re-wrapped it before venturing out of the Archives into a pretty major downpour):


That's Spice on the left, me at the bottom, and Grrrbear at right. He's wearing a pair of my flip-flops because of the rain. (And because I have huge feet.) I went for tevas and a skirt, which turned out to be a good combination. I don't think jeans would have dried out all day.

After the Archives we went to the Natural History Museum, the Jim Henson exhibit which is AWESOME but doesn't allow photographs - sad - and then the Air and Space Museum. Here's some kind of seal at the Air & Space:


While Grrrbear read the displays that go with the Wright Brothers' plane, Spice and I sat and compared feet (by now she was just leaving the plastic bag on the boot inside the museums, too):


And then we took perhaps the best foot picture of them all, in a metro station! Check out those snazzy red tiles!


It had stopped raining, so Spice didn't need her plastic bag anymore. Ah, what a fine day of sightseeing. With our feet!

my feet

I had the best pedicure of my LIFE today. Also the worst. And the most expensive. And the cheapest. Ok, if you get right down to it, I'd never had a pedicure before. It was pretty great. It was at a fancy little spa a few blocks away from here, and at the end, while the polish was drying, I totally conked out in the nice comfy chair with the pretty music playing and woke up, like, 45 minutes later. I could get used to that.

Falling asleep might had something to do with the fact that I watched the synchronized swimming team finals last night, or should I say this morning, from 3 to 4 a.m. It was excellent. And even though they played the finals again on TV today, I was happy I watched it online, not only because there were no commercial breaks, but, much better - there was no talking. You just watch the event and listen to the music while someone's comments occasionally appear below the screen, IM-style.

feet

Today I went to the podiatrist about my dumb feet. After the doctor saw me, an assistant guy came in to set me up with new insoles and heel lifts. While I was putting them in, he was like, "I have those same insoles." He said he has the same foot thing as me, and when he had it really bad he was working three jobs and was on his feet 16 hours a day. "At the end of the day, my feet hurt so bad I just wanted to take them off."

Yeah...I mostly sit down at work. It kind of put my complaints about my feet (poor me, I walked a lot when I was on vacation in Europe) into perspective.

hostels are for kids

I was pretty sure I was too old for hostels, but now I know for sure. I didn't have a place to stay in Warsaw, but a friend had told me about a hostel where he'd stayed before that had private rooms and a great location. I figured, hey, one night in a hostel, I can do it. So I walked there and it was full. (Who goes to Warsaw in February?) But the girl at the desk found me another place nearby. I had a private room and even a private bath, but this is what the bedroom floor looked like:


I was scared to touch the floor, or any other surfaces for that matter - those crocs stayed on all the time, including in the shower. The mattress was totally hard and had cigarette burns, the sheets had holes, the duvet had hairs (I put two covers on it, but still, ew). So if you ever go to Warsaw, I can't really strongly recommend the Tamka Hostel. (To be fair, the bathroom was clean, the common areas were pleasant and the people at the front desk were super nice.)

So, yeah, I guess my standards in accommodation have risen as I've aged. Also my standards in conversation - I met the most boring Australian girl in the common area. I was like, wow, talk about yourself a lot, don't you, early-20-somethings?

let the blogging commence

I'm back home, and I have pictures! I took nearly 1,200 (yikes) so you will be seeing a verrrrrry small selection.

A brief vacation overview: I was away for a little over two weeks. Most of that time I was in Berlin, but I spent last weekend, Thursday to Monday, in Poland. This trip had large quantities of history, music, good people, and reading. Also, sleep. And art. Also, a heck of a lot of drizzly rain.

It turns out Berlin is a pretty casual-dressing town, so I didn't feel conspicuous wandering the streets in my giant white sneakers. Unfortunately, wearing my giant white sneakers was not enough to keep my feet from hurting almost all of the time. Stupid feet.

public shoe store

Saturday afternoon I went to the coolest shoe store around. It's been in Clarendon, a neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia, since 1938. This is a picture of the guy; his store is mentioned at the end of this article. He's a podiatrist and he knows what shoes will make your feet not hurt. Also, he was able to tell me that the pain in the ball of my foot is probably not caused by a cracked bone, which it hadn't even occurred to me to worry about.

The store looks like it's been there since 1938 - there's hand-lettered signs in the window, shoe boxes lining all the walls, terrible overhead fluorescent lighting, and you sit in chairs with mustard-yellow velvet upholstery. You tell the guy what you want, he looks at your feet and comes back with the perfect shoe. Perfect in comfort, if not always in appearance.

I told him about my nasty plantar fasciitis and he brought me a new pair of Etonics that make my feet want to cry for joy but are entirely unsuitable for nice clothes. After offering me a few pairs of black orthopedic shoes, he dug up a pair of SoftWalks and grudgingly agreed to let me buy them for work. (He also put some arch supports in my Norwegian dance shoes but only after I promised to wear the Etonics whenever I walk. So I think I'm going to be a pretty obvious tourist as I march through the streets of Berlin. Sigh.)

Public Shoe Store, people. Go while you can. (He's in his 70s - this can't go on forever.)

cousins on facebook

One of the unexpected bonuses of Facebook: reconnecting with distant family members. My cousin (actually my dad's cousin's kid, so whatever that makes her to me) M.Dav lives in Kansas, which means I see her once every, oh, 5 to 20 years. But we're buddies on Facebook, so she let me know she was coming to town for a conference, and today we got together for brunch 'n' scrabble. (Actual, real-life scrabble, rather than the usual scrabulous.)

I had what I think was my best scrabble game of all time. Not only did I play all my tiles twice, I also played a wide range of other outstanding plays. End score was Towwas, 483; M.Dav, 225. If only I could've made 15 more points, it would have been truly awesome. (I had two points in my hand when I went out.) This is M.Dav pretending to look depressed over the final board:


We also went shoe shopping at a comfort shoe store in My Little Town (which is the kind of little town that has independently-run comfort shoe stores that also stock a lot of local-made jewelry and guatemalan handcrafts) and, because M.Dav has the same family foot issues I do, she was able to recommend some excellent shoes. My feet are very excited.

blogcon (with baby)

Clockwise from the red crocs: Me, Sophist, HT (only contributing one foot), Spice, Baby Miss, Miss Shirley, Alsho. Featuring my shiny bamboo floors. Everyone contributed delicious food and tales of academia, and a good time was had by all. Well, I had fun, anyway. I suppose everyone else could've been faking. It was superawesome to meet Sophist in person, and to convene all these cool people under one roof.

public service announcement

If you have a dog, you should not bring it to a party at the house of people who own two cats. Particularly if those cats do not like dogs. Here's why:

I got to a barbecue tonight just a few minutes after a couple with a new dog (a pound dog, so he was a year old, but very puppylike and very interested in the cats). One of the cats was downstairs, but, as I stood in the kitchen door, decided he'd rather not be downstairs anymore and used my foot to launch himself at the stairs. Awesome. The cuts were more dramatic four hours ago, when they were all bloody. Fortunately, the wife of the birthday honoree is a doctor. Ok, so, she's a pathologist - not necessarily the first doctor you look to in a trauma situation - but she set me up with some neosporin and some bandaids and all was good.

She felt really bad about it, but I don't blame the cat - I blame the idiots with the dog.