Oregon Trails

OK, as threatened yesterday, here's some random rambling about my trip to Oregon to visit my sister. I have to say, the visit went by awfully fast. I was there from Sunday afternoon of last week through midafternoon yesterday, so it was actually five full days, but it sure felt like a lot less than that.

Among other things, we took a mini-road trip up to Mount St. Helens. I'm pretty much having to take it on faith that the mountain actually exists, because it was completely obscured by clouds, but the national park area was really cool, anyway, and you could see a lot of evidence of the eruption on the local landscape.

I also had my first experience with ice skating, which I had to be cajoled into trying. I'm horribly uncoordinated, and I had fairly bad experiences attempting to learn to roller skate as a kid (back in the days before rollerblades!), so I figured it was going to be a major debacle of the "everybody point and laugh!" variety. Much to my surprise, though, I found that the skates were really pretty easy to balance on, and it wasn't terribly difficult to figure out how to move around on them. Hey, physics doesn't get much simpler than moving bodies on a frictionless surface! I imagine with a little practice I could have become a reasonably adequate skater. Unfortunately, that is most definitely not going to happen, because even though the skates I rented were pretty close to the correct size for me, shoving my extra-wide, bunioned, generally malformed feet into them and then asking said feet to move in unfamiliar ways turned out to be exceedingly painful. I had to stop after every circuit of the rink, take off the skates, and rub my feet until the agony subsided. So I fear that one experience marks both the beginning and the end of my career as an ice skater, alas.

We did also watch a bunch of Farscape DVDs that I brought along, having long since made Scaper converts of both my sister and my brother-in-law. And I was given direct first-hand evidence of my two-year-old nephew's budding fannishness. The kid definitely knows who D'Argo is. I was wearing my Farscape t-shirt one day, and he came running up to me, pointed at the picture of D'Argo on my chest and shouted "D'Argo!", quite unprompted. He then proceeded to point at all the other characters and get their names, too. I don't think he learned all of them, but he was at least able to identify Rygel after that, and I think I heard him say "Crais" once when the guy was on the screen. And when we pointed at Scorpius he said something I couldn't quite catch, but which his mother translated as "he's scary." We all solemnly agreed that, yes, Scorpius is scary. (Though I should note that his parents are pretty careful about not letting him watch the scary parts of the show if it looks like they're beginning to bother him.) Oh, and when asked "who's your favorite character?" a bit later, he cheerfully replied "D'Argo," so apparently my earlier theory was wrong.

I could go on quite a bit about the experience of living with a toddler for a week, something I find simultaneously fascinating and exhausting. But maybe I'll go into that later...