Expect Delays — and Beer

It’s become the theme for the trip, and not just in that I’m three days behind on the blogging. But things seem to happen for a reason, so we’ve tolerated it all so far.

Day 2/4, also known as Monday, began fine. Up at some ungodly hour, in the cars and rolling by 6:00. And by 6:15, we’d taken a wrong turn.

No big deal; it put us right at an affordable gas station, and the adjoining McDonalds offered a two-hour wireless connection for $3. I know, I know, it’s strictly a worse value than the previous days $10 for 24 hours, but how much internet access do you need on the road? I took it, did some quick email correspondence, reconfirmed that the Sox completely suck and have thrown away the season, and wrapped it all up in under ten minutes. THAT’S why $3 is better than $10.

Things do indeed happen for a reason. By 6:45 we were neck deep in Chicago traffic. With the nearly two and a hlaf hours of stop-and-go traffic, we’d have never made it through the city without the wrong turn gas stop. And without gas to keep the cars running or the traffic, we’d have never discovered that over one week earlier, back in New Hampshire, Heather’s car had broken down.

Eh? Come again? How exactly does that work?

Around the two hour mark into the traffic, Heather and Liz buzzed Keith and I on the walkie-talkies. Heather’s car was overheating profusely. The temperature guage needle had buried itself in the red until they turned up the heat in the car full blast. Then the needle evened out for a few minutes before once again going the way of Samuel L. Jackson when he and Travolta were cleaning up the Marvin mess.

We pulled over at mile marker 84 and popped the hood. The radiator fluid cap came off and the reserved boiled out for a solid ten minutes. I caled Triple-A and spoke to a call center girl who had never heard of highway mile markers. When it became clear that she herself wouldn’t be much help, I got a list of local mechanics and made some calls. There was a Firestone just a few blocks away, and we made it there without much else going wrong.

Tony, the manager of the Firestone, explained to us that the Radiator Fan Assembly in Heather’s car had crapped out several days ago. The fact that all of our driving from that point had been predominantly high-speed and long distance meant that there was plenty of air already flowing through the radiator and keeping things cool. Once we hit traffic, the ambient air flow wasn’t enough, and the busted fan showed up on the proverbial radar.

The real serendipity here is that Chicago is a big enough city to have traffic in the first place. Which means Chicago is also big enough to have many, many mechanics and parts distributors. If we’d had this problem at any other point along the way, we might not have been able to have it fixed as easily.

So we killed the better part of our morning wandering around what I’m assuming was the Gladstone neighborhod. Keith bought a six-dollar sweatshirt, as he had no other suitable rain coverage. We found the American Science and Surplus Store, which was completely amazing; they had an endless supply of the sorts of things third graders use in science fair projects they don’t understand. I bought an action figure of Edgar Allen Poe. Heather found a camera apable of taking four photos on one frame of film. Seriously, that place was amazing.

We had lunch at the Blue Angels Diner. It turns out that Keith has been everyfrigginwhere in the U.S.; as we walked in he says, ”Oh, yeah, I’ve eaten here before”. We’re in a random Chicago neighborhood having somewhat random unexpected repairs made to Heather’s car, and Keith has been here before.

I give up.

By 1:30 we were fixed and back on the road.

And it rained.

And rained.

And we stopped four million times to pay tolls on the Illinois Tollway.

Then, at some point, Illinois ended and Wisconsin began.

And there was even more rain.

Somewhere down the road, the rain let up and we opted for a break. In the middle of nowhere we found a monstrous mall with an Old Navy, and Keith replaced the six-dollar sweatshirt with something more substantial. But that’s not what you want to hear about at all, so I’ll fast forward to LaCrosse, Wisconsin.

The city of LaCrosse has an old brewery with six very large distilling tanks. Along the left side of Route 53 South, these six tanks stand proudly, bearing the outer markings of LaCrosse beer cans gone wild in four-plus stories of yeasty glory. Now, I myself am not a beer connosiuer, but DAMN, that’s a lot of beer! The side of one can visibly lists the contents at over 14 MILLION fluid ounces. Here’s the coolest thing about the six pack though: whereas there are plenty of World’s Largest Things, not so many of them are actually functional. The World’s Largest Six Pack of Beer, being that it is a six-chamber distilling tank, is really full of (nearly) functional beer.



Sadly we’d gotten to LaCrosse too late for the brewery tour and gift shop, but felt at least a little vindicated that after the detour in Chicago, we still got to see the World’s Largest Six Pack of Beer. Instead, we found a park alongside the Mississippi river with a mildly stereotypical statue of Hiawatha. It would seem that “mildly sterotypical” is more palatable than “blatantly racist”, as the plaque indicated that the statue had gone up at some point in the sixties. Our tour guide book mentioned that the statue had gone up significantly earlier than that, and that it had borne the inscription “Me Welcome You to LaCrosse”. The photo in the book was also not the same as the statue we saw in person (the one in the book was actually more artistic and less offensive than the new one). At some point someone pulled a switch, maybe for the better, maybe for the worse. You’d have to go see it for youself to judge.





Keith tried to hug the beer. There may have been too much beer for such a gesture to be properly appreciated.

We left LaCrosse pretty sure we’d be falling short of our goal of ending the day in Souix Falls, South Dakota. Rochester, Minnesota certainly fit that bill, though the Holiday Inn was considered by all to be a step up from the Red Roof Inn we were originally going to stop at.

And that’s that. One new radiator fan and about two hundred fewer miles than we had wanted to complete, but we got to see beer. Lots of it.


And somehow made it through without tapping any of the tanks.

That Better Be The Best Sandwich Ever Made...

Day three – or day one depending on whether you consider the stops in Manchester and Hornell as part of the Grand Road Trip.

We left Hornell by 7:00 AM after a short adventure trying to figure out how to return the keys to Liz’s rental car. The highway out of New York State and through Pennsylvania was fairly clear, though the drizzly rain that would persist for the next thousand-plus miles had begun. We had a quick pit stop for coffee and food about halfway through the Pennsylvania stretch, thereby ensuring that at least Liz would have set foot in every state along the way. The rest of us had missed the chance to get out of the car in Massachusetts, but we figure that we’d all spent enough time there at other points that this was fairly irrelevant.

Incidentally, if you ever drive a long distance with freinds in another car, get walkie-talkies. We picked up a $20 pair in CT before starting off, and they’ve been indispensible. Coordinating pit stops and confirming directions is great, being able to point out unusual sights along the way to the other car is phenomenal.

We hit Ohio before noon, and eventually stopped at a rest stop south of Toledo for gas and lunch. Gas was $2.66 a gallon, so Ohio may get the award for best gas prices on I-90. Keith and I opted for Burger King, which went flawlessly except for the woman who didn’t understand that the twenty-or-so people asking her to move out of the way so they could reach the soda dispensers really did honestly want her to move, and her kid who so generously sneezed directly into Keith’s lunch bag while Keith reached around the woman for a lid for his drink.


Heather and Liz, on the other hand, decided to try out the new Einstein Bros. Bagel shop. It would seem that the management had no real interest in succeding, as it took over forty-five minutes for the poor girl behind the counter (at most times trying to run the whole place by herself) to make the two sandwiches. It really was a comedy of errors; she was, by no fault of her own, a good foot too short to reach anything kept above the countertop, including the microwaves and many of the bagels. Her front-counter co-worker wasn’t doing much to help the customers, and despite the growing crowd of people angrily waiting, he continued to take orders for the girl to fill. There were also two manager-types in the back of the shop, but they seemed mostly concerned with things like the reserve stock of napkins and bagels (which weren’t being bought or sold anyway).

The rest of the day went smoothly though, and we got to Michigan City, Indiana in one piece (four pieces?).

One last note, one that I foreshadowed yesterday: Red Roof Inns lies about the conditions of their free internet access. The TV ads, the listings on the AAA website, the banner on the front of the hotel management office, all of them promise free high-speed internet access. The truth? Red Roof Inns has a partnership deal with T-Mobile Wireless. Pre-existing T-Mobile customers get free access with their pre-existing accounts. Meaning that if you’re already paying to have access to the global T-Mobile wireless network, Red Roof Inns promises not to charge you again for it. The rest of us? Red Roof Inns will be happy to overcharge us for one night of Wi-Fi access if we promise to also sign up for a T-Mobile subscription of some sort. Ugggh.


Okay, more catch-up tomorrow...

Backlogs of Roadblogs

Yes, the blog updates are falling behind already. These things happen when you don’t have the internet connection you were expecting or counting on. I’m pointing at you, Red Roof Inns. Updates will now happen as connections and time allow.

Saturday was the second day of the "pre-trip" travel. We said our farewells to my folks and my brother (and their two cats). Mom presented us with a pair of Washington State grown apples. Our plan is to bring them back to their native home and perhaps find a nice orchard for them where they can be re-released into the wild. Run free, little leggless produce, run free...

Heather, Keith and I drove from Manchester, CT to Hornell, NY to spend a night with Heather’s parents. The route crossed Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York State and Pensylvania before cutting back into Hornell in the southwest part of New York. The drive itself was largely insignificant, to the extent that we never even got out of the car in Massachusetts. This, we’ve since realized, marks the only part of our trip in which we haven’t actually planted our feet on the soil of a state through which we passed (though we’d all been to Mass many times before). Even Pennsylvania got walked on, in the form of a gas station stop where all the locals looked like freaky X-files mutant people and they charged significantly more to pay with a credit card than cash.

Yes, I’ve defamed the good people of the fine State of Pennsylvania. Specifically the weird-ass inbred ones in some backwater woodshed community. I don’t feel particularly bad about it either. In fact, I will go further to say that dental hygiene is not actually "hokum quack hoodoo", and they really ought to be more open minded.

Somewhere along the way we stopped at an Arby’s for lunch. Middle of Nowhere, New York. Heather and I are ordering our sandwiches, Keith is waiting for his, and out of the blue the laws of statistical odds explode into a million little shards.

One of Keith’s old friends from college walks in the door with his wife. They’re just stopping in for luch while helping a friend move.

Keith did go to school in New York State, but it was in Pottsdam, roughly 300 miles from this particular Arby’s. Neither Keith nor his friend lives anywhere near this particular Arby’s. And the likelyhood of two uncoordinated carloads of people mid-move at that particular moment both breaking for food at this particular Arby’s? I can’t begin to guess. Freaky.

We got to Hornell around 5:00 PM. Heather communed with her parents, Keith and I crashed on the sofas watching Dirty Jobs and Mythbusters. Dinner was baked ziti from the restaraunt at which the rehearsal dinner from our wedding was held. For lack of a more eloquent way to put it, the evening was spent "chilling".


Liz – Heather’s co-pilot for the journey and her Maid of Honor – arrived at the house at 8:00, just in time for a game of Texas Hold ’Em. Heather’s parents are both poker enthusiasts, and her dad is damn near an expert on the game theories of poker, so that’s always fun. Honestly, as competitive as I am, I really don’t mind being the first one to bust. In the end, Keith hauled in the big money - a whole $4 - and my father in law took the two dollar consolation prize. Man, we’re wild.

And we all went to be before 10:00 PM. Like I said, wild.

The Road Trip Begins...

The primary purpose I had in mind when I started this blog several weeks ago was to have a place to chronicle the cross-country move Heather and I are in the middle of making.

Sure, other rants are all fine and good, but really, the number one reason most of you are reading right now is to see how our big-ass road trip is progressing. We started in Jaffrey, New Hampshire (old home) and are travelling to Kent, Washington (new home). The reasons for the move are far too numerous and ponderous to go into right now, and for most of you, I’ve already bored you to death with them twice. Regardless, we’re driving two cars cross-country with some interesting stops along the way. Photos will acompany most posts, and I’ll eventually even upload yesterday’s shots when I have more time.

This morning I’m typing from my parents’ living room in Manchester, CT, stop #1 on the road trip. Jaffrey to Connecticut was about a two-point-five hour leg, easily the shortest of the journey. We started the day doing the final cleaning of our old apartment, shut down the last of our accounts in New Hampsire, and hit the road, arriving in Manchester around 2:45 PM.

After a short visit with Mom and my brother Matt, Heather and I took off for lunch at Shady Glen (note to self – add links to Shady Glen related sites). The cheeseburgers there have been recognized by NPR food critics as the single greatest cheeseburgers on the planet, and I’ve been downing them since I was seven or eight. I introduced Heather to them about ten years ago, and ever since, we’ve made sure to stop for Shady Glen whenever we’re in Manchester.

Mmmmm, wavy crisp cheese.....

(Again, we have photos, I just haven’t uploaded them yet.)

We napped for a good hour after the beef-and-dairy-masterpiece goodness, then had dinner with Mom, Dad, Nan & Pop (the grand-peoples), and my sister Melissa and brother-in-law Brian. The sophistication of the dinner conversation was exquisite, and I’m proud to say we probably could have gotten ourselves removed from a McDonalds. Good stuff. Fun. Seriously.

Shortly thereafter, we welcomed a tin full of brownies from Keith’s mom. Keith is riding along with me in my car on the trip, and arrived with the snacks. You may or may not know Keith as the Best Man from my wedding; back in high school and college, he used to just about live at my parent’s place so long as food and I were here (food and me? me and food? grammar check...).

This morning (Saturday), we’re doing our last preparations for the trip: Mapquesting the individual legs, passing around the contact info, etc. In less than an hour, we’ll be heading out for Hornell, NY, where Heather’s folks live. There we pick up Liz (Heather’s best friend and Maid of Honor), crash for a night, and kick off the main stretch.

More as it happens....

Cleaning House with a Soapbox and a Broom

Carol Wyndham owns the building I rent an apartment in. That will be changing very soon, as Heather and I are moving to Seattle, but that’s beside the point.

Carol also knows I’m an Eagle Scout. What’s more, she seems to have a slightly skewed view of what this means. I don’t help myself any in this case; typically, once she invokes the Title, I respond as one would expect an Eagle to according to the situation on cue. This, I suppose, only reinforces her misconception. Let me explain.

She called me about three weeks ago and asked if I’d done a Good Turn (© BSA) yet that day.

“Huh?”

“Oh, I told my friend I knew an Eagle Scout who could help him!”, she sang cheerfully.

Turns out she knew a guy running a political campaign. He needed a logo for his supporters to rally around. He’s also a staunch supporter of a local character who calls herself “Granny D” who runs around the state (or at least walks, literally) with a broom. The broom apparently symbolizes “cleaning up government”. Don’t ask me to explain it much more than that. While I am in fact an Eagle Scout, I can’t honestly say I pay a whole lot of attention to local politics. I know the general story, and for me, that’s enough.

So this Alex fellow knows Carol, and Carol knows a graphic designer with a Boy Scout Responsibility Guilt Button.

Hey, at least she steered Alex towards a trained professional.

Then Carol mentioned that Alex had no budget to speak of. They needed to find a designer who could work pro-bono. Someone like a generous, intelligent, socially responsible do-gooder with a full compliment of design software and the skills to use them properly. Ahh, now I see why the Eagle Title was invoked...

I caved.

With Heather and I on the verge of spending scads of cash on moving (and conveniently, now that Carol was on the phone, it seemed a good time to tell her we’d be leaving the apartment), normally I’d have started talking fees and usage rights. Unfortunately, she’d appealed to the Scout. On the upside, it would give me an interesting portfolio piece, which I’d need to beef up the book for the inevitable interviews in Seattle.

She needs a favor from an Eagle Scout. She asks said Eagle Scout. Eagle Scout responds in heroic fashion. Somebody’s got to eventually explain to this woman that Eagle Scouts are not actually superheroes with hotlines. It just won’t be me.

Three weeks later, it’s today.

I get an email from Alex showing a reasonable quote from an online sticker vendor. He’s got prices, he seems to have a producer lined up for the items, he just needs a logo to go on them. I’ve yet to so much as sketch anything.

Bad Eagle.

So I sit down with pencil and paper. I’d thought here and there about how to approach the “assignment”, but this was the first physical evidence. Five minutes later I’ve decided that all but one of those ideas are absolute crap. Straight on to the computer, I fire up Illustrator and grab the Wacom tablet.

(For the uninitiated, a Wacom is like that awesome light pen they use with the computers on CSI, except that it’s real. It’s still awesome though.)

An hour later I’ve fleshed out something very close to a final logo concept. Then I take a job interview phone call, welcome my wife home from work, “assist” her with grocery shopping – mostly restraining urges to make up embarrassing jingles for various food items out loud in the store – and eat a bunch of chicken and mac-and-cheese. After all that, I find time to finish the logo and email it out. Three weeks to plan a mark that will represent a socio-political message that Alex has spent years refining...

And I wait until the last minute, call an audible, and windmill-slam a solid, useable image onto the screen in one evening.

I am an awful Eagle Scout.

Here’s the best part. As I’m about to click the “send” button, it occurs to me that I really like this mark. I also really like this website called Threadless.com. They take submissions from artists and designers and put the best ones on t-shirts. Then they sell the t-shirts to cool people. I have a Threadless shirt; therefore I am a cool person.

I actually considered keeping the mark for myself and sending it to Threadless. Who knows what I’d have sent to Alex?



In the end, I did the right thing. Alex got his mark, and he liked it a lot. Said it wasn’t anything like what he’d had brewing in his own head, and yet was very cool and on target with his goals.



So here it is, the broom for his soapbox.

My sister would be proud, though I’m relatively certain that she sees a slightly different meaning in what this mark is all about. That’s okay, I suppose; part of the purpose of this sort of logo is just to get people to latch on instantly, regardless of their reason for latching on. This mark has nothing at all to do with environmentally concious cleaning products, though I’d put money on it that Alex is far more for eco-safe-detergent than he is against it.

I could send you to his site at this point, but I won’t. See, I’m not in this to support one political agenda over another. I did it because it presented a new challenge, something to wrap my head and my design programs around. I did it because my portfolio needed something fresh, new and unlike its prior contents. And I did it because a woman who has been kind to Heather and myself asked me for a favor from an Eagle Scout.



But maybe I’ll still try to talk Alex into sending the logo in to Threadless...

Raw Shock Value

This is my first real blog entry. The fact is, until recently, I thought a lot about journaling, writing, or generally creating something worth publishing, but never just sat down and did it.

Call it a mid-year’s resolution.

Clearly, the most important aspect of the Blog — and I’m speaking here about the concept of Blogs in general, not mine specifically — is the catchy name. All the best blogs have them. In the last twenty four hours, every major news outlet in America has covered the grassroots blogging phenomena that seems to have helped Ned Lamont wrest the favor of the Democratic Party in Connecticut from Joe "I really did vote for him" Lieberman. What blog did every newscast include in their coverage? "My Left Nutmeg.Com". If that don’t prove it’s all about the name, I don’t know what does. Ha. A Democratic (aka "left") blog about Connecticut (aka "The Nutmeg State"). A smarmy dick joke. Ha, Ha. Seriously, that’s a good title. I wish I’d thought of it. Or had something important enough to say about left-end politics in Connecticut that I needed that title.

The Title. It must be topical yet clever, edgy but palatable, but most of all it must have one trait above all others.

A fourteen year old boy must find it amusing.

Wait, no, that’s not it. Very valid, but not it.

It must be available.

There are, scientifically speaking, several metric assloads of blogs out there. Everyone puts some kind of clever title on them, or at least tries to. Sadly, there’s only so many times an idea can be original. Specifically, that number of times is one. So odds are, somewhere around the third Blog ever created, names started repeating, and therefore sort of sucked.

So here I am with a new blog. Gotta have a title. Hmmmm. I’m a clever guy. Got me a website with a clever name (www.thinkblotstudios.com). Got a blog that I intend to create with some semblance of synergy with the website. What the hell do I call it? Second, how many other chucklesacks have already come up with the same clever name?

Side note- a couple of months ago I was thinking about an old roommate when a co-worker began quoting a recent cult-status movie. The two topics began interbreeding in my head like some filthy nature show about snow leopards and deisel mechanics, and the resulting thought was one of pure genius: A blaxploitation film featuring a nerd with serious social issues.

Napoleon Dolemite.

“Hot bitches like a guy with tetherball skills. The Man’s gonna get some numchucks in his face, and when we’re done, his lips’ll hurt.”

Then I went to the age-old deflator of egos: Google. Fourteen trillion people already had the same idea. I suck.

End of side note.

Rorschach Value.

How the hell does nobody else have this one locked in? It’s pronounced “Raw Shock Value"! (Honestly!) It even fits the inkblot theme on my website! And nobody else has used it yet. Either it’s such a craptacular name that nobody, not even a blogger on a 386 in West Virginia has used it, it’s so obscure that only a New Yorker editor would get it, or I’m a friggin’ genius.

Bitches like a guy with good Blog naming skills.


But don’t expect anything too radical here. It’s just about having a good name.