Wednesday, August 06, 2003

Roll river roll

Anne-Marie and I went on a rafting trip down the Deschutes river Monday with some friends of hers from work and my friends Devin and Joel, old war buddies from the war against marketing stupidity at Tektronix. We try to make this trip once a year, but my health sometimes makes me miss it. If I am up to it, it is surely not to be avoided... the land out there is beautiful, and there is something... majestic... about just drifting down a river. Of course, there is also something frightening as hell about rowing the boat into bone-crunching rapids, but it usually turns out alright. Hanging out with the guys was great; we bitched about work all day, just like the Good Old Days.

My buddy Richard is being competitive again: here I am with a pain in my lower right abdomen for a couple of years, and now all of a sudden he goes and gets emergency operative appendicitis just to try and show me up. Ooh, like your little 'operation' even counts, whinerboy... I'm in this for the *long* haul. Tourist. :)

I'm down in Eugene, working... finishing up the computer work I've been doing, and painting a house. I rolled in on the train late last night, walked a couple of miles from the train station to my friends' house, and passed out, only to be awoken by what I at first thought must be an alien abduction: bright lights, the ground was shaking, there was a rumbling and crackling sound and the windows were slamming down in their sashes and there was a whole bunch of shit flying off of the bookshelves and nightstands and I'm pretty sure there was some of that doom-dee-dwee-doom-dwoop music but that part might have been a dream. My medication and general weariness prevented me from investigating further, so after I woke up in the morning and had found no indications of anal-probing or whatever other atrocities the extraterrestrials are supposedly flying all the way across the frickin galaxy to inflict upon us, I asked around and found that we had been in the middle of a rather spectacular thunderstorm, which was strangely (suspiciously?) without rain. (Even on a normal alien-free day in Oregon the lack of rain is suspicious). This thing was BIG... the closest thing I can compare it to is that scene in Attack of the Clones where Boba Fett drops some explosive mines to shake ObiWan off of his trail, and the mines just float in the silence of space until they explode with a WHOMP of light and a vibration that travels more the through soles of your feet than through the air. This is a mildly amusing thing to experience at 3 am.

I guess I should give a shout out to our new peeps in Liberia: welcome to The Empire, suckas.