Ship in an aquarium.

My father-in-law keeps this ship in an aquarium. It looks perfect, except... well, it looks like it's sunken. So there's this ghostly ship on the bottom of an aquarium with no fish, but nicely lit. It's beautiful, but disconcerting.

This Is My Milwaukee

About two weeks ago, while traveling around the internet, I found this:



Which was really weird and interesting. People started talking about it over on SomethingAwful and Unfiction picked it up.

After a brief discussion on QuarterToThree, a lot of people said, "I wish I had the time/energy/inclination to follow up on this, but I don't. I'd really love it if someone would just keep track of it for me in one thread so I could read about it and kind of, almost participate in an ARG."

Behold! I started the TIMM thread at QuarterToThree which I'm keeping updated. Yes, there are two wiki's, a sub-forum on UnFiction, and a thread on SomethingAwful, as well as various other places to keep up, but that Qt3 thread is mine. So there.

Also, the format there is a little better than here for keeping it up to date and readable, with comments from other posters. So I thought I'd link to it here, but over there is where I'm posting updates.

Playwrighting

My two writing partners in mid-session, amidst Cocoa Puffs, coffee, pretzels, and various energy drinks.

On Friday night we started the "Show in 24 Hours" with nothing. We picked a cast (3 men and a woman, and what drama program has that ratio?), then went off to write. Generally, Mike and I riff on something-- the favorite this year was "ass" whether it was man-ass, elephant-ass, or baboon-ass, and AJ has control of the laptop.

She's not just taking notes, she's deciding what's funny enough or makes sense enough to be in the play. I program word with a macro for every character so she can go pretty quickly and it comes out pretty much formatted.

A lot of argument, silliness, and too many breaks later, and we have a script. This year it took us about an hour longer than last year, but Mike says it was because we took too long in the store getting munchies, and that I was telling a long story about beef jerky that took up all the extra hour.

It's possible.

Our director showed up around 2am to remind us that the set was a city street. By then we were halfway through writing a couch play. We ignored the set. Every other play did too.

We finished at 4am, then went to find other writing groups to gloat. We found Amanda Gray and Sarah Pavis in the Green Room-- they took it from us this year, damn them!!!!! -- but they looked so cold and miserable that it was no fun to gloat. I had to wish them well.

I drove home around 4:30am, and I think it was kind of a dangerous ride. Not good. Showed up at the theatre at 7pm and watched the show at 8pm.

In retrospect, we should have cut some of the ass talk at the end. It's not Return of the King with 11 endings, but the play ends and the guys keep talking about ass.

So grab our play, if you're interested.

Elizabeth at the ocean.

Married for two years and it's still pretty sweet.

I marvel that we have the means to vacation on one coast (Seattle, WA) in August, and three months later we can take a weekend in Maine. Life is good.

Maine in November

Not exactly beach weather, but clear and cold, and worth walking around. We had a gorgeous weekend in Ogunquit. I got in some good DS time while E shopped, and I tried out the new camera. This, however was taken with the cellphone because I can instantly post to the blog, thus I post to the blog.

I still haven't even gotten the camera pics off the SD card and onto the computer, let alone done anything with them. I did, however, stick the SD card in the Wii and watch the slideshow. Not bad for a point and shoot.

Silliness.

So a fat guy, a FABULOUS boy, and a pirate go to Disneyland...

The team.

I think Dan is method acting, and Julia is just barely tolerating the two of them.

Im wet

Im wet

Muppets go dark.

Muppets go dark.

Wake up to this.

Wake up to this.

Boston Gameloop '08

Yesterday was the first ever Boston Gameloop UnConference which took 45 local developers, threw them into the MIT-Singapore Gambit Lab and expected them to talk about interesting things.

We did.

This is the brainchild of Darius Kazemi and Scott MacMillan who have been turning the Boston Post Mortem into a real developer community over the last year or so (and I'm probably showing that I have my head up my ass by not mentioning the other people on the BPM committee, sorry, other people). Darius asked us to write, post, or even just email our scanned notes to him and he would transcribe them.

When he asked that I made this:



That's Ralph, a little guy I've been drawing since I was eight. Yesterday, for some reason, he had a mullet. I was just trying to bring a little visualization to the proceedings. Oh, and yes, we learned the earth-shattering fact that a free open bar gets people to come to your event. There was no free open bar (isn't that redundant?) at Gameloop.

We arrived at the ungodly hour of 9am on a Saturday, and we milled about, as geeks will do. We were told to put up a topic that we wanted to talk about, or if we weren't sure there would be enough interest in our topic, but it up as a trial topic on a sheet on the board. We would put a hash mark on anything we were interested in. If a trial topic got enough has marks (no definition of "enough") then we could move it over to a card and schedule it.

After a bit, the board started looking like a schedule, and eventually it looked like this:


So here was my day, and I apologize if I don't get the titles quite right:

• Interactive Actors that Express Emotion - was an actual talk prepared by Gerry Seidman from Actor Machine. He's working with Ken Perlin on a bunch of Maya plugins that will allow a model to be given a character, or a basic description which will allow the model to animate in line with the character. Basically you don't have to keyframe everything, behaviors are part of the model itself. Gerry showed a lot of demos from Ken Perlin's actors page. This would seem to enable very quick, procedurally generate crowds, as well as low-overhead projections for live performances. I'm going to ceep in contact with Gerry on this, as some of my projection work could benefit from this, as long as it would all work with importing models into Unreal.
• Boston Games Industry, What's Next? - Did you know our Post Mortem is the best attended and most frequent IGDA meeting in the world? Did you know Massachusetts has recently instituted tax benefits for the film industry, and at the last moment included the game industry in those benefits? Did you know the general perception in the games industry is that there are no developers in or around Boston? Yeah, that last one sucks. So what's next for the Boston games industry seemed to be two things:
  

1. We need better PR to tell people that we exist. It occured to me this morning while reading Edge, that every month they spotlight a different city or region, get a roundtable of all the developers there, then do individual articles about the major developers in that area, yet I hadn't read one about Boston. Hmm... So basically we need a Local Game Industry Evangelist, which was when everyone looked at Darius.
   
2. The other thing was to leverage our strengths, which seemed to be that we're a hotbed of academia with a number of very strong game development programs. The talk then turned to internships and entry-level hiring vs. experienced hiring. I outed myself as an academic (there were no academics allowed at this, though the MIT-Gambit lab seems perilously close to academia, and they were well represented) and talked about when to look for interns. It seems to me that game companies don't think summer starts until June, when all the WPI kids leave at the beginning of May. I asked them to start looking in March/April in order to actually get local kids into local companies.

• LUNCH! Pizza and soda. Not doing my waistline any favors.
• Board Games Workshop - in which we took familiar board games and discarded the rules and made new ones. We grabbed Scrabble and, after some farting around, Devin Griffiths (who said he wasn't a designer. "Feh," I say to you, "Feh.") came up with Scrabble Hold 'Em which put three common tiles in the middle of play and gives each player four tiles to make words with. The first player to finish gets 5 extra points, the player with the longest word gets 2 extra points. We were trying to make a very short game, and we were trying to eliminate the downtime in Scrabble where you're sitting there as the other person stares at their tiles. Even then, we wanted to solve another problem of Scrabble, that players don't interact, so we came up with Scrabble Stealing in which each player gets 7 tiles and starts to make words, but at any time another player can offer a tile and "steal" a random tile from you. Tiles already in complete words were "safe." When the first person uses up all their their tiles, the game is over, and you only get scored on tiles in words. This again kept it short, gave a "screw you" element to the game, and rewarded people for coming up with the first word they saw instead of staring at their tiles forever. This hour probably went by the fastest of the day.
• Low tech games (ARGs != Marketing) is the session I proposed. I wanted to talk about indie ARGs and bring game design sensibility into what seems to be a "webbie" industry. At ARG Fest O Con, it seemed odd to me that not one local game developer was present, in fact, even though it was announced at Post Mortem, most every game developer at GameLoop didn't know about it. I deal with the problems of getting players for our ARGs, because they're quick, they're free, and most people "like the idea but just don't have the time." I described the inverted pyramid -- hardcore at the tip doing most of the content, casuals in the middle watching the hardcore, cheering them on, but not really participating, and the lurkers who tune in, don't have time, and read about how it went when it's all over. This seems remarkably like a problem that MMO developers deal with. Do you make more content for the hardcore, or do you serve the casuals? One idea that came up for ARGs, was a very quick ARG (my class does 5 day ARGs) that you sell tickets to. That would monetize the ARG, localize the ARG, and everyone participating would know that the commitment was short. This really takes a page from LARPing and Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre. I'm going to think about this more. My one regret was that there were two other bitchin' sessions during mine, and I would've liked to go to both of them.
• Turning Licensed Properties into Games - This was a talk that Matt Weise and Geoff Long are prepping for Austin GDC, basically pointing out that licensed games only recreate a small subset of the activities portrayed in their source material, and that the barrier to using more is no longer technical, it's a lack of imagination. Unfortunately, when they asked me to name the last movie I had seen, I replied (truthfully!), "Shooter." It was not the best illustration of their point, but we moved on to Rudeboy, Almost Famous, and Death Note. They used conversions of James Bond properties to shooters as a good example, and then went one step further to point out a weird verb in the Bond lexicon -- "Use super senses." This is when Bond shoots exactly the right thing to cause a chain reaction that saves his bacon. In one of the Bond games, they translated this as "Bond sight" where bond can see targets that will cause unexpected things to happen and create "Bond moments." I'd like to see them extend this and not just handwave that verbs like seduce, investigate, and grow up are possible, but show us how they've already been done in other games. That would pretty much prove their thesis.
• Finally, OMG Jonathan Blow is teh Awesome! or Design and Narrative - This was Scott leading a roundtable that was interesting, but also somewhat maddening, because some of us were speaking different languages. There seemed a whole camp (led by Tynan and Scott) who saw emergent stories as the future, but admitted that the stories had to be interpreted (read, rewritten) by humans in order to become interesting. So AAR's of Starcraft become interesting because a human is interpreting what would be unintelligible if you just watched the game. Additionally, there are a whole host of games, all strategy titles, which have interesting events happen, that, when strung together become a narrative that was experienced by the player. Personally, I don't see AARs of strategy games as threatening the novel anytime soon. When the writer-types in the room (myself, and Devlin leading that charge) talk about game narrative, we still want a feeling of authorship on our part. Bioshock is pretty much the same story for everyone who plays it, and it has definite high points and lulls, which were designed by the writer and designers. Mostly I wanted to talk about Braid, but everyone in the room hadn't finished it, and that put a bit of a damper on that discussion. Again, Braid is being held up as what games are capable of as narrative, but everyone who plays it has more or less the same experience. Braid is authored, whereas King of Dragon Pass, and Dwarf Fortress are designed in such a way that interesting things might happen. And that's a big might. Most of the time, nothing interesting happens, but when something special does happen, that's the one instance the player remembers and recounts.

Afterwards, there was a brief announcements session and a promise that we would all do it again, but not for a year or so, and starting at 10am instead of 9am, maybe with healthier foods, and with t-shirts that weren't orange.


Then there was beer at CBC, with even more discussion. All in all it was a very tiring, very rewarding day.

Janet in the North End

While waiting for our cappuccino and tiramisu. She is thrilled with me taking her picture. She is even more thrilled with the idea of this picture being posted on the internet.

I am evil.

Higgins

Of the places we could have gone on Sunday, Dick wanted to see WPI. I wasn't exactly clamoring to head back to work during my vacation, but we thought that Higgins Armory would be a decent afternoon.

We got a late start, after Sunday brunch, so we didn't arrive at the armory until 3pm. It closed at 4pm. I've been there before, but Dick was in hog heaven. The armory is great but you really need about 2 hours to do it.

I snapped pictures:



You lookin' at me?


You shall not pass!


Makin' the armor, just makin' the armor.

Afterword we headed to WPI. I always bring visitors in the summer to Higgins House, and they were quite impressed with both the house and the gardens. It's sometimes hard to believe that we have such a beautiful area right on campus. Most of the students never go there. I know I didn't when I was a student. There's even a meditation area, which is quiet and such, with somewhat depressing plaques commemorating students who died while they were still students.

But here's the view from the meditation area:


Then it was driving Mr. City Planner around Worcester because it was raining and we had time to kill. Had an amazing meal at The Sole Proprietor, and our weekend of Tustians was over.

Next up, Janet arrives.

Tourists around Boston

The neverending vacation continues. Elizabeth's parents were up this weekend, so we did touristy things around town. After the whole John Adams miniseries on HBO this fall (and I read the McCullough book), we decided to head down to Quincy to the Adams National Historical Park. One tour gets you three houses, two of which are mostly empty, because the Adams family (click, click) moved to the third house and ended up there for generations, so all the stuff was in the third house.

The first house was where John Adams' parents lived and where he was born. The second was where he lived as a young man, or, more accurately, where Abigail lived while he was off in Philadelphia. This is the first house:

Those are totally God rays. Woot! The new camera gets pretty grainy in low-light conditions, but outside on a sunny day, you can get some pretty cool shots.

Unfortunately, you can't take any pictures in any of the houses. This is mostly because Peacefield (the big house) is full of the actual period stuff that is worth millions and they don't want you to case the joint to come back and rob it. The security doesn't seem very high on the house, and you could probably walk off with precious artifacts. Even the copies of famous paintings were made in the 1800's and are valuable. John Adams wasn't exactly a popular president at the time, and a lot of the stuff from his life is still in the house. John Quincy Adams also has a bunch of stuff there. Basically its full of priceless artifacts.

The other houses are full of replicas, but they're being consistent and just not allowing photos anywhere.

This is Peacefield:


So named because Adams sought to live out his post-presidential life in peace. Also possibly because he sacrificed his second term in order to keep the peace with France when all around him were calling for war (it's the French-American war that didn't happen, and it probably saved the country).

Abigail Adams had a stroke on that porch. It's still very nice to sit there and watch the traffic go by.


On the way back we stopped at Wollaston Beach and the clouds were amazing. The beach was nice too.

Tustians!

Tustians!

The Legend of Neil

Just had to post a link to this, because it's great. From the makers of The Guild comes The Legend of Neil, wherein a guy wakes up as Link in a Legend of Zelda game.

I found it over at Dubious Quality, but it was in his Friday Links extravaganza and I thought it deserved better.

The Last Day

So naturally after we return from Seattle I don't blog. I am a lazy bastard.

The last day was "My Geek Day" which meant that I could plan anything I wanted. I considered a movie at Paul Allen's Cinerama, but The Dark Knight was playing and we've already seen that. Alex said that it was the best movie theater in Seattle and I would've liked to see a movie there, but no joy was to be had.

So I opted for Seattle's Underground Tour, which Elizabeth had expressed an interest in. I didn't want to totally alienate her on the last day. It's an interesting story of a big fire that had city planners wanting to raise the level of the city by 10 feet or more vs. property owners who just wanted to rebuild and get back to business as quickly as possible. What you end up with is blocks of the city where the streets are 10 feet above the front doors of the businesses.

I didn't take any pictures, because it basically all looks like a dilapidated basement. I would give it a "Meh" on the excitement meter.

There is a cool toy store there with Bacon flavored dental floss. Yes, bacon flavored:


Then off to Pink Godzilla Games. This is a small store in the international district (because Seattle is too cosmopolitan just to have Chinatown, they have a large Japanese population too) that specializes in import games. I picked up Dragonquest Monsters: Joker for a lot more than Amazon is selling it, but hey, I like the idea of the store, and there are rumors that they're going to open a Boston store. Fingers crossed!

We picked up a late lunch a a little hole in the wall hot-pot place, then went over to Uwajimaya Market, where we should have eaten. This place was like an Asian version of Whole Foods, only cheap. As it was, I picked up some manga called iDeNTITY. If it's good I can pick up the rest online, and if it's bad, I've tried to expand my horizons a bit.

Then we had an argument about whether to go to the hotel during rush hour or just go to Safeco Field. Safeco Field won, since we were right there anyway. Y'know, once you get to a ballpark, everyone is great. You're there to watch baseball and have a good time, and even the parking attendants were nice.

Safeco Field is gorgeous, and they have a much bigger selection of foods than Fenway. On the other hand, Fenway has that moment, where you've been walking around underneath and it's cool and a little damp, with all the food smells. It really feels like you're in an alley or something, then you walk up the ramp and out into the stadium where it's green and bright and magical. Safeco didn't have that magical moment, but it did have some damn fine sushi. And kettle corn. And bratwurst. And ice cream.

The panorama:


We had tickets right at third base. You can't buy these tickets at Fenway. Also, they have booths around that you can take your DS to, and Nintendo will load up a suite of baseball applications. You can follow the game and get the jumbotron feed on your DS, you can order food (at hugely inflated prices) delivered right to your seats, or you can follow another game being played that night. I ended up following the Red Sox game in Kansas City while watching the Mariners get pasted by the Minnesota Twins.

Because everyone sitting around me told me that the Mariners suck this year. Who am I to argue? I said what I always say, "I root for the Mariners whenever they play the Yankees."


At least until the seventh inning, when, after being behind 6-zip, they scored 10 runs and took the game.

Here is Elizabeth getting excited during the amazing rally:

Oh, and they gave us hats too, but they were in Japanese because it was Japanese Baseball Appreciation Night. Notice the kid behind Elizabeth with the Twins jersey and the Mariners cap. He was a winner that night.

Though now that I've unpacked, I think I lost my hat. Oh well. Easy come, easy go.

Then it was off to the crappy airport hotel for our last night, and the day of flying.

We are now back in Watertown, and expecting Elizabeth's parents anytime. More touristy crap around Boston to come!!

Whidbey Island and surroundings

Today was a day of scenery, but at least it wasn't raining.

It started with yet another ferry ride to Whidbey Island.


Then a quaint artists' colony, where overpriced art in small galleries captured the adults' attention. Personally, I was happy there were lots of dogs. One of the galleries even had a cat.

Second quaint village of the day. Lots of dogs out on this pier. We had already eaten at a pizza place in the last town, but this town apparently produced the best mussels of anywhere, and we were standing right in front of the tavern where they serve a pound of the best mussels anywhere for $11, and it was killing Alex that we didn't have the wish or desire to partake. I am not a mussel man, but I'll eat them. Since lunch was a recent memory, everyone was already full. Alex couldn't eat a pound of them by himself, so we traveled on.

To Deception Pass. The first captain to explore the area thought it was a peninsula, when he found this inlet, he sent a team, including his navigation master to explore it, and found that it was an island. He named the island after the master, Whidbey, and the pass, Deception Pass, because he felt he had been deceived. Darn you, nature!

The currents get very strong in the pass, and we watched a couple of boats labor through it. It's also a very high bridge that afforded the fun of scaring Elizabeth. All you have to do is say, "It's a long way down, my god, can you feel it shaking?" She gets all freaked out.


We went to Eerie peak and saw other great vistas of the islands, but I grew bored of vistas. After that it was home to Alex and Beth's for fabulous steaks cooked on the grill, and the wine we bought the other day at the winery.

So ends this leg of our trip. Tomorrow is our final day in Seattle, and a Mariners game.

Drinking the Falls

I have given in to the considerable pressure and last night I didn't record the day. I hang my head in shame.

So we decided to to go Squolnamie Falls, where Twin Peaks was set. They lured me with the promise of damn fine pie.

We got about 8 miles from Alex and Beth's house and decided to stop into one of the many wineries for a wine tasting.


Had a great time tasting various wines and I went gaga over the Otis Vineyard 2003 Cabernet Sauvignon. Pictured is a dry rose' that was actually quite good.

Then it was time for lunch, and the Red Hook Brewery was just a short walk away. Had a decent lunch (bad service) and finished just as they were calling for a tour of the brewery to start. We jumped on it, and it turned out to be standing in a room drinking beer while a slightly inebriated blonde explained the history of the company. Between the wine, the beer with lunch, and now about two pints of "samples" the Falls now seemed a distant and silly idea.


We headed back to Alex and Beth's where I surfed the net, Elizabeth napped, and A&B went on a brisk walk.

Then off to a party for one of Alex's co-workers. It was Hawaiian themed, and mai-tai's were in evidence.

We also had an incredible view of the bay, and Elizabeth won the prize for knowing what happened in 1968.

Then back to the house for Euchre. Alex and I lost.

They're calling me to go shower in preparation for today's hike. Hopefully there will be more alcohol producing buildings on the way.

Wet Vampires and Lichens

Woke up to more rain in beautiful Forks, WA.

Apparently there are big things going on in Forks. Twilight is some young adult book about a high school girl in Forks who falls in love with a vampire. Since Forks has the most rainfall of anywhere in the continental U.S., it's a pretty good bet that vampires won't be caught in the sun. The final book in the series is due to be published tomorrow, and all the tweenage girls will finally know if Bella has chosen Edward the vampire or Jacob the werewolf.

I don't care. It's wet and rainy.

The series was written by a Mormon mother, for her daughter(s) (I don't even know if she has more than one) who wanted something to read now that Harry Potter is over. So vampires. The subtext is that you should wait until you're married to have sex, especially with vampires. Especially with sexy teenage vampire virgins (who knows what he's been waiting for). In the last book Bella is going to finally have sex with her vampire. Or her werewolf. Or both.

Then they can talk about abortion.

Yippee.

We went to the rainforest. It's called the Hoh. Yeah, I thought it was funny too.

There are gnomes there.

And giant trees.


And everything is covered with lichens.

I did not poop in the park, but apparently someone does. I guessed about a million chipmunks.


And that's it for today. We finally made it to Alex and Beth's (as evidenced below), and now everyone is in bed while I wrestle with this. I'm exhausted.

Oh yeah, the fabulous breakfast at the B&B-- Elizabeth got French Toast, and they made it by taking the inside of french bread and soaking it into an egg mixture. It was more a bready omelette than eggy bread. It wasn't good.

My waffles were fine. I shared them with her.

Off to bed.

Sunset in Mukilteo

Sunset in Mukilteo

The Olympic Peninsula

So it begins.

We are in nature.

It is raining.

Nature is wet. Wet and cold.

We are wet and cold.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The day started clear and sunny, a fine day to head into nature. We checked out of the hotel, and while we waited for our car to come out, the doorman told us all that Boston was really flat. It had no mountains. He had an uncle who lived in Boston and never left the city. This doorman didn't understand why someone would never want to leave the city and go hike on a mountain.

I wanted to tell him to stick his mountain up his butt. Instead I smiled and said, "I don't think of Boston as flat, and how about those Red Sox? They really plastered the Mariners last week, huh?"

Thankfully, the car arrived before it got ugly.

We drove up to Edmonds and took the Kingston ferry across to the Olympic peninsula. Those guys on the ferry are amazing. We were out on the water before Elizabeth and I were organized enough to leave the car.


It was cold and breezy up on deck, but they had some sheltered benches that were perfectly comfortable and out of the wind. Before we knew it we were on the Olympic Peninsula.

We start heading across the northern section where it's still sunny and temperate. We stop in Sequim, WA and head to Purple Haze Lavender Farm. Yes, a lavender farm where they grow pretty purple flowers to make soap that smells like your grandmother.

Elizabeth loved it.



She could've stayed there taking pictures for hours. /////

--I am now typing this in the bathroom of the Bed and Breakfast where we're staying. Every night Elizabeth has bitched that my typing this keeps her awake. It's a battle. There's no desk in this place (I would be nuts if there was no wifi) and I started out typing this on the bed, but apparently this was too much vibration, then I moved to the floor, but the sound of it was too much, so now I'm sitting on the toilet typing.

I love my wife.

Back to the story-- I have lots of pictures of this lavender farm because really the only thing to do there is take pictures. It's smelly. They sell lavender soap, lavender salad dressing, and lavender ice cream. We had a choice of lavender peppermint, lavender lemon, or lavender white chocolate ice cream. We went for the lavender white chocolate ice cream.

It tasted like vanilla with pieces of white chocolate in it.

I tried the lavender salad dressing. It tasted like Italian.

The shop has lavender drying all over the ceiling, and on the way back we're probably going to stop again and pick some of our own to take home.


I did drink the kool-aid a bit and got edible lavender (seeds? buds?) for cooking. There was another mix there with basil, oregano, fennel, and thyme, but I figure I can add those things myself later. I'm not sure lavender will taste like anything unless you steam whatever food you're cooking with it (since it's so aromatic). The place said it went well with citrus flavors. I'll experiment with it.

And onward to Forks, WA, which is currently famous because some author set her young-adult vampire novels there. These novels are currently being turned into a movie called Twilight, and this year's San Diego Comic Con was overwhelmed with teenage girls desperate to find out about it and its hunky, male, vampire stars. That's just wrong. Teenage girls don't go to Comic Con, it's for overweight geeks and other social misfits. But I digress.

Forks is pretty much a hole in the wall (actually some buildings in the middle of a forest), but that's were our rustic B&B is.

This is the view out our window:

We're told we'll see elk down there among the trees, but nothing so far.

As soon as we got on this side of the peninsula, the rain really started. When they say rain forest, that's not just about what kind of trees are there. It's pouring. It's raining in the picture above-- see how wet the banister is?

There's really nothing to do here unless you want to get wet. People apparently hike in the rain. I've done this, but usually when you start hiking it's not raining, and then it starts to rain so in order to get back to civilization you have to hike in the rain. I'm told that people start hiking in the rain around here, because if you don't, there are only about two days of the year that you'd go hiking.

We went to La Push, WA for dinner. This is a Native American community, and the restaurant is run by the tribe, apparently. Good fish, but the salad bar was a nightmare. The restaurant was called River's End, because, you guessed it, it's where the river meets the sea.

The beaches there are full of nasty wood, that comes down from Alaska. The sea just sweeps this stuff in.



It's a desolate place. If I ever meet a kid from La Push, I will congratulate him for being able to get out of there.

There's no nightlife to speak of around here. We came back to the B&B where there are amazing homemade desserts. The price of the desserts is sitting and listening to the innkeeper go on and on about her kids, how college athletes make the best workers (HA!), the trials of running a B&B, maverick ranchers she has known, zoning problems, reforestation, strange guests she's had in the past, and horrible diseases I might have. Again, Elizabeth loved it.

I just wanted to go back to the room and type this up. Elizabeth should have stayed out there, at least then I wouldn't have to sit in the bathroom while I type.

Tomorrow: more nature, and finally arriving at Alex and Beth's.

Olympic Sculpture Park

After the Museum of Flight we headed over to the Olympic Sculpture Park, which is right on the water. The day had cleared up and the sun was shining. We didn't have much time, just enough to take a leisurely walk on the waterfront.

And take some artsy-fartsy photos of the city. This is an actual view, not photoshopped at all.

I even got some time to sit and sketch the waterfront, which isn't as easily transferred online. Oh, and as a sketch, it pretty much sucks, but I'm trying.

There's currently an exhibit of giant orange cones in the park. No, that isn't a weird angle, it's actually about two stories tall. These will only be there until October.


Then we went off for dinner and drinks with Alex and Beth. It was a long day on our feet, and even more walking around the city at night. We had another really great meal.

Tomorrow we set off for the Olympic Peninsula.

The Museum of Flight

Elizabeth is very sneaky.

I've officially got one day to plan as my own on this trip. That's Monday, and we're going to see a Mariners game that night. These first two days were doing mutual touristy stuff in and around the city. Today she suggested we go to the Museum of flight.

I was in hog heaven.

They have a space exhibit currently. It starts with Goddard (who went to WPI) and ends with the international space station.

They have a Gemini capsule.



They have simulators where you can practice landing the the LEM on the moon, or landing the Space Shuttle, or even using an EVA suit to get yourself over to the Hubble telescope for repairs and adjustments (I got the quickest time today on that one. Just sayin'.) They have stuff you can actually do.

They give a pretty good history of spaceflight too. I learned some stuff about the Soviet space program that I never knew. They really showed that much of both of our programs was due to the fact that we hustled those German rocket scientists out of Nazi Germany at the end of WWII.

And you have to love this:


No, that's not a Star Trek uniform. That is Carl Sagan's turtleneck!!!!!! Yes, the great man's moth-eaten turtleneck (you can see the holes) is in a glass case at the Museum of Flight. Now an old turtleneck isn't such a big deal, but the thought that some museum curator thought that Carl Sagan was such a boon to the space program (and he was) that his turtleneck should be enshrined just brought a smile to my face. They also have his dictaphone, and the card read that he had dictated millions and millions of words into it.

That's a museum with a sense of humor.

We lunched on a patio where we could watch planes and jets take off and land at the Boeing field. That really gave us a sense that the history of aviation was ongoing. Really a great place.

Then onto the World War II exhibit.

They have a Spitfire.


And a bunch of other planes that were not built by Boeing, which is again, really cool. I expected it to be a Boeing propaganda film, but just about every major fighter plane of the war was represented. I only put the Spitfire here because that is the damn coolest looking plane ever. I never realized the guns protruded as far as they do.

By the way, I'm only posting and commenting on a few pictures that I take every day. If you want to see all the pictures I take, though without any labels or context, you can head on over to my photo albums.

Outside the building they have a Concorde, the discontinued supersonic jet, and the original Air Force One (that saw service from Kennedy to Nixon). It's not the first presidential plane, just the first one that was called AFO.

Did you know that Jackie O. originally designed the color scheme on the outside? It was later changed by Jimmy Carter, and that's the design that's on this one.


We went through it and as we were coming down the exit stairs Elizabeth took my picture (I meant to do my Gerald Ford imitation and trip, but it was actually pretty steep and I could've hurt myself). The curator guy saw her, and came running down the steps to take our picture together.

I'd post that picture, but it's on Elizabeth's camera and she hasn't bothered to upload any pictures or contribute to this thing in any way.

This guy didn't just take the picture, he started fiddling with the settings on Elizabeth's camera. I thought he was dead for sure, because if Elizabeth tells me to take a picture, I point it at the thing I'm supposed to take a picture of and press the button. If I screw up her settings I'm a dead man.

He was not a dead man. He pointed out that she had the wrong settings for the lighting conditions and she agreed. Then he asked her about shooting RAW, and she answered. Then he ran up and got the Photoshop book he was reading while on duty, and together they started speaking a language of their own.


So she made a friend.

Why is she sneaky? Because she front-loaded my fun. She let me go nuts in a place I wanted to see, so during the next two days when we're trapped in icky nature, I'll keep my trap shut.

Very sneaky.