Sucking Noise Getting Louder!

(Scott here is giving me the last kiss!)

Thanks for comments and email, everyone! Today is beautiful and cold. Chuck E. came by with a fiddler who is playing tonight in Portland and headed on down. I'm heading out tomorrow, when the roads are clearer.

I wish I could go the beautiful way down the back way and along the Sound, but a patch of ice there can be pretty serious. So I'll go the boring icky Tacoma way.

I got caught up with my mythology class; it's their first week, so everyone is freaking out as usual trying to figure out all the deadlines and stuff. Lots of folks have trouble sorting out online classes at first. In the first week, they just think about the word "myth," which is tough, look up urban legends, and talk about myth vs. science. (That last one always gets things cooking.)

Once done with myth for the day, I got on my hiking boots and we took T-Lou for a really freezing but achingly beautiful walk on North Beach. A red Coast Guard helicopter roared by, and the horizon over the water was all "choppy" from temperature differences in layers of air (we think--anyone know for sure?) Then Scott took me out for ice cream at Elevated, which, you can imagine, was pretty dead. He has a bunch of Elevated bucks (thank you, Carol and Roger!), and we can both recommend the new flavor down there, apricot glace. With chocolate jimmies. Yeah.

A Brief Digression on Van Camping
Some of you may be interested in planning something like this. Here's some helpful stuff I've found so far:

• 
  Some OR and WA parks have electricity, so you can plug in. Lots of the OR beach campsites do, and they're only $17 a night in the winter. CA, OTOH, has WiFi but no hookups, at least not often. Bummer!


• You can get little fenders over your windows, I found out today. So I'm gonna get some for the window that the cord goes out of and the back windows, which I keep open so that I can breathe. Don't want it to get wet and moldy!


• Boxes and stuff for storage are great, but those plastic zip things quilts come in are really awesome for clothes. If you have a cot in there, you get a lot more storage by shoving stuff underneath the cot.


• Marla (The Van Queen) gave me the big hint of buying that insulation that comes in rolls at hardware stores with silver foil on both sides and waffle construction in the middle. You make a form of your window (Scott helped me do this--it actually was something very new for me) and then cut the insulation a bit bigger than the window and just push it in. This works for all the windows except the really long middle ones, but we found some adhesive velcro strips and I'll be trying them. I thought suction cups with hooks would work, but they didn't stick to the glass too well.

I'll post more useful stuff as I go. Probably more useless stuff.

It turns out a friend of mine from NYC will be in San Francisco just before I was going to get there, so I might try to get down early. How cool would that be, to have dinner in SF with your buddy from NYC?!!!

Music Notes
I'm working in a desultory way on a new Tony Ellis tune. I really enjoy his stuff and am finally getting around to learning it. I admit that I'm cheating and using tab from the book, thanks to my dear buddy Stephen for sending it to me.I'm also bringing along a bunch of Dennis McGee tunes to learn with la Slowdowner!

It's so weird to be home with all your stuff waiting for you in a van. I gotta go!