Vienna (and work, and summer is somehow over)

I do not understand how this summer is over already.  What on earth happened?  Last thing I knew, the spring semester was drawing to a close and I was looking forward to having the summer to get some work done, and suddenly it's the start of the fall semester already.  Argh!

On the bright side, I did get some work done, though.  I resubmitted my Monster Paper (fingers crossed), and I also started a new paper with my former office mate (which is to be submitted in about two weeks), and I also got some really awesome results on a project I've been working on with J.  So things are rolling right along, just in time to start applying for jobs again.  I'm kind of looking forward to the jobs thing now that the Monster Paper is in.  It was really hanging over my head, and now I just feel like, "Okay. Let's DO this."

I also traveled!  How could I possibly go a few months without flying across the country a few times?  (I couldn't.)  Shortly after I got back from El Paso in April, I went to a conference in New Jersey for a week, then I drove back to State College and caught a flight to the west coast so I could spend some time with J (and friends who have now left Berkeley - for good!).  So I was in Berkeley for two weeks in late May/early June, and then I was in State College for a while, and then J was here for two weeks while I worked on Monster Paper (although we did get a chance to do some stuff while he was here, including spending a few days in IL), and then I went to Vienna for a week for another conference.  I just got back late on Sunday night, in fact, and it was a very cool experience.  I still feel kind of weird about going to Europe for a week, and my body doesn't deal with it very well (although I've found that a little bit of melatonin really eases the transition for me), but it was a great opportunity and I took quite a few pictures while I was there.

So without further ado: Vienna.

the Rathaus (City Hall)

Tee-hee!  We did not go there.

Google Translate tells me that this means, "Shit, the ka is hit."
Thanks, Google.

The pedestrian crossing signal is apparently two people holding hands with a heart between them?
That's lovely and everything, but what a weird thing to put on a crossing signal.

The hugest vat of sauerkraut I've ever seen, at the Naschmarkt (open air market).

The back of Schönbrunn Palace.  It's like Versailles, but Germanic.

The gardens at Schönbrunn.

Squinty-eyed selfie at the gardens at Schönbrunn.

Super close up cheetah at the Schönbrunn Zoo.
I have very mixed feelings about zoos in general, but this was a pretty nice zoo, at least.

Emperor penguins! Chillin'.

View of Vienna from the suspension bridge at Schönbrunn Zoo.

The front of Schönbrunn Palace, as I was leaving.

Inside of Café Central. Thanks for the recommendation, K!

My favorite museum was probably the Freud museum, which is in his family's former apartment. There was a HUGE statue of a naked body hanging from the ceiling in the middle of a rather small room (complete with huge and, shall we say, prominent genitalia) and it was pretty hilarious to watch people try to navigate the room and look at the exhibits without staring at the giant penis. Extremely Freudian.

Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to visit Mozart's house, but I did walk by Beethoven's apartment, and that was pretty cool. It was a really neat city, and I hope I'll be able to go back sometime.

I'm gonna go for a walk now before it gets too dark and chilly.  (What's with the chilly air today?  It can't be fall already!  Aack!)

some new results

There is a very good reason why I have not been updating my blog.  Well, sort of.  As you, my faithful readers, are likely aware, my life has been very much in the balance for the past few months.  So many things happened, or almost happened, and then everything very suddenly magically worked out.

Here's the scoop.  I applied for a postdoctoral research grant from the National Science Foundation back in early November.  It was extremely last minute.  Maddeningly so.  I learned about the grant something like a week before the proposal was due.  Thankfully two things had happened: I was already in the process of preparing a different grant proposal, so it wasn't too terribly hard to rewrite that one into a different version for NSF, and the government shutdown had backed things up at NSF so much that they ended up extending the deadline by a week or two, giving me a little extra time.

In any case, it was kind of miserable pulling everything together at the last minute, but I did it, and then I sat.  And waited.  For months.  At the end of January, I learned that my proposal had been sent out for review, which means they sent it to some experts in my field to read what I had written and make comments on it for the big committee meeting.  Then in early March, the committee met, and we heard nothing.  Radio silence.  And then - suddenly - in May, after months of no communication whatsoever from NSF, the status of my proposal magically changed from "pending" to "recommended".

What that means is this: the way NSF works is a big committee meets to discuss all the proposals that have been submitted.  The committee members read the proposals themselves, and also the reviews written by the expert reviewers, and the program manager (the head of the committee) has to write up a summary of all of the discussions, and ultimately make a recommendation for which grants should be funded.   Normally, when the program manager recommends that a grant be funded, it's funded.  So for my grant status to change from "pending" to "recommended" is huge.  The problem was, there has been discussion of a bill in congress called the FIRST act, which is the reauthorization for the NSF budget, and it's kind of a mess, from what I understand.  They're trying to slash science funding, and they're also trying to implement some really damaging changes to the scientific review process.  It's extremely disheartening, to say the least.

So in my case, there was the added issue of the timing of this legislation.  I was really worried that even though my grant was recommended, depending on what was happening with the FIRST act, the program manager's recommendation might get shot down.  And then I would be in the somewhat tragic position of being the only person anyone's ever heard of who had their grant get recommended and then not funded.

But.  But!  On June 1st, the status changed again: from "recommended" to "funded".  That's it - "funded".  And suddenly there's paperwork to fill out and plane tickets that I can buy on my very own grant and my salary is getting changed over to my very own grant as of July 1st.

So all of this time that I have been not blogging, I've been in kind of a precarious mind space, wondering where I would be next year.  Hoping against hope that things would work out with this grant, and wanting to write an update here, but holding my breath because what if, what if it doesn't work out.  In the meantime, I also had a job interview elsewhere (sort of... that's a subject for a different post), and also spent some time convincing myself that truly, the absolute worst case scenario would be for me to move back to Berkeley for a year, and come on, that's not exactly the end of the world.

But here I am, and it's summer in State College, and the weather has been truly lovely and I get to sit in my upstairs office in my apartment that I love, and work on things that I think are interesting, and go for long runs on Sunday mornings, and spend the day on Saturday brewing beer and pulling weeds in the garden plot I'm sharing with my neighbors.  Things have gotten so cozy here.  I'm really feeling at home, and at least part of that is because I now know I can stay here, so I can afford to get attached to it.  I have some really great friends who live in the same apartment complex as me, and some nights we sit out on the porch together, or in the grass behind our houses, munching on snacks and shooting the breeze.  It's a good life, and I'm glad I get to live it for a little while longer.

This summer is about to become a little bit crazy, though, so I'm trying to enjoy the lazy days of summer while I can.  J will be here starting Tuesday (yay!!), and we will have a month of hanging out and probably alternately working from home and going out and exploring the environs.  Then the craziness starts.  I'll be in Geneva for a week (yes, just one week) in July, for a conference.  Then I stop off in PA, do my laundry, and head back out to California almost immediately, where J and I are driving up north (basically on the border with Oregon) for his family reunion.  I'll be back here at the beginning of August, and then I guess it's time for the semester, and it'll be time to start keeping my eyes peeled for faculty jobs.

And that is the story of what I've been up to for the past few months.  Oh, also, I went to my Berkeley graduation and G & S's wedding in May, and it was really wonderful.  I hope they don't mind if I post a picture here.  (It's on the internet elsewhere, so I don't think it should matter.)

I think this is G's 1052nd picture of the day.  I assure you he was quite happy in person.

Tonight I think I'm going to Happy Valley Brewing Company to watch the World Cup, and tomorrow is long run day, and I also have some laundry to do and more weeds to pull.  (Gardening is hard work.  Especially when you only do it in extremely punctuated spurts.  :-P )  I will try to make my next update not take quite so long as this one did (although no promises that I will be able to top the NSF news).

Happy Summer!

fast forward button plz thx

You know the part where I'm done with this dissertation, and with teaching this class, and with packing my stuff, and with moving in to my new place that's 3,000 miles away?

And I don't have to worry about how all that stuff is going to get done in the next, oh, three weeks?

Yeah, can we just skip to that part now?

On the bright side, I have the greatest advisors ever.  I got comments back from both of them on my last chapter, and I finally got brave enough to read them (it's scary looking at comments, because what if they have no idea what you were trying to say, or there's some huge fundamental flaw that you completely missed because you were too busy getting the stupid statistical model to work, etc. etc.) and they're just the. greatest.  So encouraging and understanding and helpful.  Basically along the lines of, "This is a good idea, and I can tell it's not quite there yet, but it's good, so you should do the best you can with it for now, and then keep working on it."  And also they keep saying things like, "I'm looking forward to continuing this conversation with you once you're Dr. Fricke."  So basically, the best possible way to talk a tired and frustrated grad student down off the ledge!

Oof.  I need to get back to work.

Epic Road Trip Recap: Part 3

I'm in kind of a crap mood today, so I'm going to do a blog post, and maybe that will make me feel better.

First, I had one horrible day last week (I think it was Thursday), and it kind of ruined the next few days for me.  I won't go into details here, because I never know who reads this thing and I don't want to publicize any information that others would prefer me to keep private, but suffice it to say that Thursday pretty much sucked on multiple counts.  So I didn't sleep well on Thursday night at all, which set me up for a crap Friday as well.  Thankfully, I had a good time on Friday night with some friends, but then after I got home I kept waking up and running to the bathroom because I felt like I was going to throw up.  Sorry if that's more than you wanted to know... the long and short of it is that Saturday I came down with some horrible stomach bug that had me in and out of the bathroom in incredible pain all day Saturday and Sunday.  And no, I don't think it's the ulcer, back with a vengeance.  I really think it was just a stomach bug, for various reasons that I will not explain in detail.  It's mostly gone now, but I've just been in this lame-o queasy funk for the past few days, and I'm about ready for it to be done.

On the slightly brighter side, I sat down and did some soul-searching regarding my dissertation today (which is part of what's been putting me in a funk), and I do feel a little bit better about it.  I sort of have a plan, but I've been struggling to reorient my research trajectory to position myself for the job I'd like to apply for for next year, and trying to figure out how to do that, and how to package a small set of mish-mash projects into one sensible storyline has been bugging me for some time now.  There are several studies I'd like to do, but I haven't made myself sit down and work out a detailed plan for them, and they feel a little all over the place.  I know they must have some thread tying them together, since I'm the one who thought of them, so today I sat down and thought about why exactly I'm interested in pursuing those studies.  It helped organize my thinking a bit, and I do think I'm making progress.  I'm just feeling kind of... discouraged and scatterbrained and slightly incompetent.  I'm going to do the same thing tomorrow, and then meet with my advisors on Friday with A Definitive Plan in hand, and hopefully then I'll feel like I have a definite direction again.

Okay, now.  On the much brighter side, I'm going to put up some more pictures from our road trip.  First, I'm going to add a great picture of some weird neon orange dirt to the Yellowstone post from last time, so you should go back and check it out.  Now I'm going to pick the narrative back up: we just spent the night at a rest area just over the mountains into southwestern Montana, after having spent the day at Yellowstone.

We woke up early the next morning (or in my case, never really got to sleep the night before), and Jevon drove while I napped.  We drove and drove and drove and drove.  Montana was really beautiful, and really big, and it felt nice to be getting into some landscape that felt 'close to home'; it's amazing how comforting a prairie can be when you've spent the first twenty-some years of your life in a prairie state.  By early afternoon, we crossed the state line into North Dakota, and we decided to stop at Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

Part of me wishes we could have done the National Parks in the reverse order from how we did them.  T.R. National Park was really awesome and beautiful, but it was hard for me to appreciate it when it was immediately preceded by Yellowstone and Crater Lake.  I mean, those are pretty hard to top.  But T.R. was beautiful in its own, badlands-y way.

The badlands are a really cool area of the country.  I still don't entirely know what 'badlands' means, except that it's apparently some kind of geological terrain that's characterized by cool rock formations that have been carved out by wind and water erosion, over a period of thousands of years.  I know it doesn't seem that exciting in the picture, but we saw some super cool rocks with holes right through them that had been caused by the blustery wind that just constantly pounds the landscape.  So this rock is the very small scale version of how the entire landscape was formed:

I've never been to Africa, but when we took the winding road up to the highest point in the park and looked down over the river and the flood plains, it reminded me an awful lot of the Africa shots from Planet Earth, a documentary we recently watched about all the cool ecosystems on earth.  We saw part of a herd of buffalo fording the river, too, with their babies in tow.  It was pretty neat.

See the buffalo herd, in the water?

What was even neater, though (despite freaking me out a bit), was when we were headed out of the park, and we came across said buffalo herd completely blocking the road.  There was nothing to do except stop the car and sort of idle our way through, as the herd parted and let us pass.  They were right next to me, out the driver's side window, and they seemed like they couldn't care less that we were there, but it was kind of freaky, nonetheless.

We didn't spend too too long at T.R. National Park before we were on the road again, headed straight south out of North Dakota.  My atlas perusal revealed that we would be passing almost directly through the geographical center of the United States, so of course we had to go there.  When else am I going to be driving through western South Dakota with nothing but time?

So we took a 12 mile detour to go through the center of the country, and it was totally worth it.  Not that it was particularly cool, but it was pretty fun to be in the absolute middle of nowhere, following a country road in the most deserted place I've ever been to.  There is nothing in the western part of the Dakotas.  Nothing.  There were a few towns marked on the atlas, but when we would pass through them, they would consist of a single trailer and a convenience store, if you were lucky.  It's apparently the kind of place where you honestly have to worry about running out of gas and being stranded.  I had never been to such a sparsely populated area, and it was surprisingly creepy.

Anyway, in case you were wondering what the geographical center of the nation looks like and you don't think you're going to make the trip any time soon, I am happy to provide the following documentation.

We could have easily missed it.  Do you see the landscape in the background?  That's what that entire afternoon's worth of driving looked like.  Which might go some ways toward explaining the following two pictures; sometimes you have to add some artificial excitement to your life.

Look at me!  I'm out of the car!

We also jumped the fence and went and took our pictures by the flag in the middle of the field, since we figured it was probably marking the exact center of the nation.  And also because we had been in the car for several days straight.  And also because we're silly.

Here's what the view across from the center of the nation looks like.  This was the only structure we came across on this road, and that's our car, parked next to the pile of rocks and the sign.

So after that excitement was passed, we got back in the car, drove the 12 miles back to the main road, and headed on our way.  Our last major national park/sightseeing stop was in the southwestern part of South Dakota, where we went to Wind Cave National Park (sort of), the Crazy Horse monument, Mount Rushmore, and Badlands National Park.

But that will have to be for next time!

... I do feel a bit better, by the way.  I think I might bake some bread and curl up with a good statistics book.

Epic Road Trip Recap: Part 2

Where we last left off, Melinda and Jevon were sleeping in the middle of nowhere in Oregon, which, it turns out, is mostly a desert.

We got up with the sun on Sunday morning and were ready to hit the road.  On Sunday, we drove the rest of the way through Oregon, and most of the way through Idaho.  Oregon and western Idaho mostly looked like this:

Lost of dusty hills and green-brown brush.  By Sunday afternoon, we had made it to Boise, and we stopped for two hours or so to get lunch and walk around a bit.  I really liked Boise and would love to go back and spend some more time there sometime.  It was not unlike Urbana, in some ways; it felt like a college town in the middle of a pretty rural state, but it did feel a little bit bigger than Urbana, since the state capitol is there.  Bigger than Urbana, but way small for a state capitol, that's for sure.  Anyway, we checked out the Basque quarter a tiny bit (did you know that Boise has the biggest Basque population outside of the Pyrenees?), but I had forgotten that I wanted to eat at a Basque restaurant, and we had already stopped for lunch at a local brew pub by that point.  I was disappointed, but the beer was pretty good, so it was fine.  We walked around downtown a bit, found an Apple store and bought a car charger for the iPad, which was absolutely essential and totally worth the $35 or however much I paid for it, and then hit the road again.

On Sunday evening, around the time we were getting hungry and tired of being in the car, we came upon some signs for a state park in Idaho.  So we decided to call it a day and set up camp for the night.  The Idaho campground might have been my favorite one of the whole trip, actually.  First, because it was beautiful (although they all were, really):

But second because the facilities were really nice - there were some pretty decent showers, even - and third because there was a frisbee golf course!  So while we were checking in and paying our fees at the main office, we inquired about the frisbee golf course, and the people there were so nice that they lent us a whole set of discs to play with, as long as we promised to drop them off before we left the next day.  The guy at the front desk was obviously really in to frisbee golf, so he was simultaneously excited and a little bit sheepish to tell us what all the different types of discs were for, and I think he probably would've stayed late to play with us if we'd asked him to.

Anyway, we set up camp and struck out to find the first hole on the golf course, but it took us forever to find it.  The campsite was right along the Snake River, so we basically ended up doing a really nice little hike along the river before we finally found part of the course.  Then we had to back track a bit to find the first hole.  And then we weren't very good, so there was a lot of walking involved.  And then I managed to lose my disc in some brush on the third hole, which involved a lot more walking.  And then we finally found it after what felt like an hour of searching, by which time the sun was going down, and I was totally disheartened and ready to quit.  So... it could have been really fun.  ;)

But then there was a glorious, much needed shower awaiting me, and I got to get all clean and fresh and walk back to the tent in the beautiful, cooled-down summer twilight, completely exhausted and ready to crash.  So crash we did, and hit the road again early the next day.

(I think the name of the campground was Massacre Rocks State Park; another part of our evening (or the next morning, I can't remember) was checking out the info at the visitors' center about the site itself, which was where a massacre occurred along the Oregon Trail.  If I remember right, some white people were killed by Indians, but I don't remember why, or whether they retaliated, or what the rest of the story was.)

On Monday, we decided to shoot for Yellowstone.  We got a nice early start, drove the rest of the way across Idaho, and made it to Yellowstone by early afternoon.  Yellowstone is huge.  I mean huge.  There's a big main loop that goes around the park, and basically just driving 3/4 of the way around the loop took us something like 5 hours.  We entered on the western side and were immediately greeted by views like this:

After just a little bit of driving in the park, we hit on some of the geothermal activity; Yellowstone is chock full of geysers and cool mud pits and things like that.  I'd never seen anything like it before, and I really loved the weird colors, caused by various naturally occurring minerals and acids.

This is molten rock/mud caused by some sort of sulphuric acid bubbling up out of the ground.

Geysers!

We did stop and see Old Faithful, but honestly, the picture (and the geyser itself) were kind of lame.  I mean, no, they were awesome, in principal.  But if you can picture a huge jet of water spurting out of the ground, well, that's basically it.  The coolest part was that we learned that given any one eruption, they can predict the time of the next eruption based on the height and duration of the previous one, but other than that, they only know that it erupts every 30 - 120 minutes or something like that.

Another thing I really loved about Yellowstone was the wildlife.  It's just... there.  Hangin' out.  So we saw some awesome elk and buffalo!  This one was on our hike:

Look closely, next to the telephone pole in the background.

And we did stop and do a hike, which was really nice.  It was only a few miles, but it was great to get out of the car, and get to the top of a cool little hill/ravine thing and get a nice view of Yellowstone Lake.

Jevon's favorite part of Yellowstone was this absolutely breathtaking valley we hit upon.  We actually pulled over on the side of the road, got out of the car, and just gazed for a while.  The pictures definitely don't do it justice - it was incredibly peaceful, and verdant, and just... soul-soothing.

The weird thing about Yellowstone is that it was honestly kind of overwhelming.  The whole park is just so unbelievably gorgeous that it actually blows your mind, and after a few hours of constant, idyllic natural beauty, we were kind of ready to get out of there.  It was totally weird... you could stay for a week, easily, exploring trails and fishing and being in an outdoorsman's paradise, but we both had sensory overload and decided it would make more sense to just complete our 3/4 loop around the park and call it a day.

So we did our 3/4 loop, down around the southern and eastern parts of the park, and eventually exited out the north, into Montana.  Here we are making our way out of the park.

We finally made it out around 8:00 pm, I think, and we stopped at the first place we found for dinner, which ended up being a little lodge/log cabin deal just outside the park.  Once we got some food in us, we were ready to drive a little bit farther, so we decided to cross the mountains into Montana before we called it a night.  If I had known how long it would take us to the cross the mountains, I probably would not have decided to do that.  But ignorance is bliss, and we did indeed decide to cross the mountains.  On the bright side, it was fantastically gorgeous, even though the pictures don't properly convey it.

On the not-as-bright side, I'm a nervous wreck driving on mountain roads, and the sun was going down, so even though it was beautiful, it kept getting right in my eyes when we would round corners, and I would have nightmare visions of some car careening into us as we rounded the bend.  Whee!

But we made it eventually, and Jevon graciously took over the driving, and we stopped the first place we could, which ended up being a rest area in the middle of nowhere in southwestern Montana.  That was the only night we slept in the car instead of in the tent, and I did not get a good night's sleep, but Jevon did, so he started the next day off driving while I napped for a while.

That's got to be it for tonight, friends.  Blog entries take a long time!  Next up: Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

it's a pretty nice town

there is solace
in playing volleyball with strangers
staying past when my arms hurt
walking home in the late summer twilight
stopping for ice cream along the way

thumping up the stairs with tired legs
playing Van Morrison a little too loud
standing at the kitchen sink
and doing the dishes

photo by Joe Parks, Berkeleyside Flickr pool

I hope you had a nice summer evening too.

Epic Road Trip Recap: Part 1

Oh dear.  It's been over a month since I updated.  That was not at all on purpose.  Since my last post, I worked like a madwoman until July 31st, when I submitted an abstract to our big annual linguist conference.  I haven't heard back about it yet, but I should very soon (tomorrow, maybe?).  Around that time, I got the awful news that my grandpa passed away, and despite the fact that I had just been in Illinois, it seemed like the right thing to go back again, for another week.  I just wanted to be with my family some more, and especially since my dad and brother were out of town when I visited in July, I was happy to go back for a bit longer, even given the sad circumstances.

All those feelings can be for another post, though, since there's a lot I could say... and anyway, I'm not sure this is the right place to air them out.

This post is intended to be the first in my recap of our Epic Road Trip, from July.  We had such an excellent trip!  Oh my gosh, it was all so so cool.  I've been kind of putting off writing about it, though, because I just have so very many pictures, and there's so much to say, that it makes the prospect of writing it up seem daunting.  So I decided to break it up into multiple (smaller, more manageable) posts.  There will be one post per leg of the trip, or thereabouts.

The first leg of the trip was from Berkeley up to Jevon's mom's house, in Medford, Oregon.  It was about 6 hours, I think, so we left on Thursday morning, June 28th, and made it there in the afternoon.  Southwest Oregon was really beautiful, and Jevon's mom lives in a really rural, very cute little neighborhood outside of Medford, with his sister and a totally awesome dog named Toad.  I loved Toad.  But more importantly, his family was pretty great too!

Taking Toad for a walk around the neighborhood.

We stayed with his mom and sister on Thursday and Friday night, and decided to head out on Saturday afternoon.  When we originally planned this trip, we were already planning to check out Yellowstone National Park, and make a few other stops along the way, but I realized when we were headed up to Oregon that we were so close to Crater Lake National Park.  It was almost perfectly on our way to Yellowstone anyway, so we basically had to go there.

So here we are at Crater Lake National Park, in southwest Oregon!  Oh my gosh, I'm so glad we went. It was phenomenal, and such a great start to our sightseeing trip.

I am so cold in this picture.

Jevon is less cold, and not yet tired of me taking pictures of him.

We ascended all the way up into the mountains, and the whole top was covered in cold, cold fog.  We tried to stop and go for a hike at the top, but the trail we had wanted to do was snowed over (in late June!), so we decided to cut our losses and head out of the park.  Man, but that lake was amazing, though.  It's so crystal blue, and deep, and perfectly round, and rimmed with awesome mountains and trees.  Such a cool place!

So here we are headed out of the park.  We had to drive for quite a ways before we left the fog and snow, but eventually we got out of the mountains, it cleared up, and we were in a desert!

Now, I for one did not know that the eastern two thirds of Oregon is desert, and basically completely deserted.  There are very few towns once you leave the Oregon coast, and the landscape becomes very dry and somewhat desolate, but very beautiful.

We drove for a few more hours after we left the park, until it started to get dark and we started looking for a campsite.  And just in the nick of time, we found one!  A little county park next to a reservoir, right smack dab in the middle of the state.  These pictures are from where we set up camp on that first night.

Here's the car on Sunday morning, when we woke up and were ready to hit the road.  One thing I loved about this trip is we were incredibly lucky with respect to our campsites.  We pretty much always found a campsite right when we needed one, usually only had to pay $10 - $20 for some pretty excellent campgrounds, and we got to see some gorgeous landscapes, in some really cool parts of the country where neither of us had ever been before.

Another nice aspect was that sleeping in the wide open country, we went to bed shortly after it got dark, and we woke up when the sun rose every morning.  I really enjoy being on a totally natural schedule like that; it's the way my body prefers it, and it's what I default to when things like grad school and friends and wasting time on the internet don't get in the way.

Speaking of being on the internet when I should be asleep... this concludes Part 1 of the Recap.  Tune in next time to hear and see the next leg of the journey: from the middle of nowhere in Oregon, through Boise, and to the middle of nowhere in Idaho!