Here we are hanging out at my grandma's house on Christmas Eve. Mom and Pete are being kinda ridiculous, which comes easily to them. Mom's on the big walking machine thing, Pete's pushing and pulling at the hand doohickey, which is propelling his chair back and forth. Mom's clearly cracking up while reading a bizarre article in the local indie rag about - I kid you not - tips on avoiding constipation during the holiday feeding frenzy. Grandma and I are both laughing at the scene, while all her cats run for cover. Yeah, cats... Notice the feline paraphenalia described by even this little snapshot: The wall hanging is clearly of cats in the snow. Right. The armchair back there is covered in cat toys and a fur-covered blanket. The entire back patio is fenced in and packed with kitty entertainment - a rumpus room, if you will. On the floor are a half dozen little trays in which wheatgrass grows, and the kitties are encouraged to come nibble in it when they want a snack. Basically, almost all her decorations either have to do with cats or Hinduism. Mostly cats.
Yeah. She's
After we left Grandma's house, gifted with another couple of bags stuffed with random food, we drove out to Jeff & Terri's place. They live on a comfortably-sized chunk of land just across the road from the house I first lived in. My grandpa designed and built that place, and it's pretty neat to have seen it. Jeff has a cool bunch of toys and a cool set of jobs/responsibilities/projects. He took me on a wonderful walking tour of the area that day. We walked about a half-perimeter of the land while he told me about the great flood of March '03, which put most of their land underwater. It messed up a lot of things - I guess there were about 15" of snow on the ground and a Chinook whatsis blew in, raising the temperature to 70° and causing a massive flood as the snow all melted in one day. It's an exciting story, with bridges and backhoes and all sorts of flotsam and jetsam and such, but I shouldn't try to retell it in too much detail since I wasn't actually there. Jeff has an outdoor ice-skating rink, among other curiosities, and one thing I recall with particular clarity is his description of how the water came in and lifted the entire ice sheet up and out, and how it broke up and scattered 10" thick icebergs over 100 yards away.
Anyway, after we walked around to all the buildings and I heard their various histories, I asked him about Packards, since I was trying to get straight another fragmented memory of mine involving me, as a young child, standing upright in on the backseat of a massive sea-foam green Packard. The beast was parked in front of my old house in 26th street, in Boise, but I haven't been able to remember for what length of time it was there - if we owned a Packard or just had one drop by. Well, Jeff is a huge fan of Packards. HUGE fan. He has three, but that doesn't tell you too much.
In true Montana fashion (me:"So he has a junkyard and all these parts cars..." clara:"How Montana!" — thanks for the stereotype) he keeps no less than 13 cars parked a short ways from the garage, which currently holds the prize Packard and the little old Volkswagen pickup he's doing some work on. A half dozen Ford trucks are parked in arcs between that yard and the garage, and there are a couple more rows of vehicles scattered around, not counting the long lines of farm equipment. It's all very impressively orderly. I got biographies of every single vehicle, from the Capri with almost 300,000 miles on it to the '56 Ford wagon held together with decals that's now used to smoke out gophers (he replaced the muffler when it rusted through with a flexible hose that now hangs casually over the driver's mirror. There's the truck that my grandpa moved their family across the country in, from Ohio to Montana at speeds up to but not in excess of 45 MPH. All the vehicles that don't or can't be driven around are used as storage depots, too. Neat piles of hubcaps in one, bike parts in another, intake manifolds strewn across the back seat of a third, and so on. Everything has a story. It's pretty magical.
A harsher critic than I, unsoftened by familial affection, might describe such a scene as pathetic - so many vehicles, just sitting around. It's a form of excess, sure, but I find it charming. Jeff doesn't have a lot of money, and the care with which he treats every piece of machinery he owns is really admirable. I think it's a far more pathetic thing to watch someone buy a single really expensive car and then treat it like shit. This is entirely different. And hey, y'know, it IS Montana we're talking about here - there IS space for a single guy to have three dozen cars and not get in anyone's way. That's a pretty strange thought for me, the city boy, to consider.
So, Packards. What beasts. Jeff's prize one is in the garage, like I said, serving as a shelf. The nose peeks out, chromed and glorious, from under a blue tarp. I didn't get a look at the inside, but I'm told it's all done up in kelly green leather. Wow. My mom tells me that that particular vehicle used to be the processional car for funerals... um, okay. Jeff and Diana and Mom & Barbie all took a road trip to get it from Ohio when they were teenagers, and apparently had a great deal of fun trying to not seem like runaways. Jeff gave me a great overview of what makes Packards so cool. In their day, they were premium flagships of technology and power. The Mercedes (almost the Maybach, I suppose) of the American fifties. First to feature air conditioning (in '49, I think - wow!). Had very advanced automatic transmissions for the time - only three gears, but some sort of mechanism (I forget the proper name) that basically, as I understand it, locks the engine into pretty much a direct 1:1 drive above a certain speed, so it doesn't get such bad mileage as you might expect and can go pretty fast. I mean, we're talking about 6000 lb cars with massive V8 engines. The wheelbase is probably twice as long as an Elise. So, yeah, not my ideal at all, but they're pretty interesting. Jeff told me about the unique suspension that they put in one model, about '57: The axles were connected by a bar running front-to-back that didn't actually connect to the body at all. So it was like driving on a cloud (he says convincingly). There was a laterally mounted bar at the rear, as well, which would stiffen the rear suspension if a sensor detected a load in the trunk, thereby preventing extreme forward dippage while braking. I explain it more awkwardly than Jeff did - suffice to say the cars were really surprisingly technologically advanced.
Here's a picture of the (get this!) push-button automatic shifter. And yes, I think those are skis being stored in it. Ah, anyway... it was fun.Christmas day came quickly and honestly, rather unexpectedly. It's easy to lose track of time for me when I'm following other people's schedules and living in a strange place.
Pete and I hatched a plan to entice my grandma to come to Christmas dinner with the rest of the family, at Barb's house. It seemed like it was working (miraculously) for a while, I mean, she actually said she'd consider it. We went out to Diana & Gary's place Monday morning and I cooked a special vegan dish that Grandma could eat under the pretense of it being for little ol' gluten-sensitive me. It was fun, and I felt good about how it turned out. Brown rice with finely cubed red bell pepper under a ginger peanut sauce, adorned with slivers of pepper radiating from the center of the dish. The peanut sauce turned out much better than the one I made for Thanksgiving, which unfortunately separated too much into oil and butter - I got it too hot for too long that time, but it was pretty perfect on this go. Thanks, dad, for teaching me how to make a good sauce. Ah, anyway, Grandma flaked out on us the day of, claiming that she was all worn out from receiving phone calls from friends who she only talks to once a year and wouldn't go out to Barb's at all. Sad, but expected. At least we tried, and we were congradulated on the effort by many. So I got to share the rice dish with a number of people at dinner and it was unanimously complimented, which I felt pretty darn good about. Here's the view from Diana's porch that morning and some impromptu poses struck for the camera.
Christmas dinner at Barb's was surprisingly relaxed and I had a pretty good time. It was a tricky decision for me which crowd to hang with; I'm totally fine being with adults, more than fine, I prefer joining their conversation, but my cousins started treating me like a person and invited me to join them in playing board games. I lingered amongst the older crowd for a while and helped make the noodles for lasagna, but joined the game of Monopoly and later played two rounds of Cranium. It wasn't just Sam and Colin but also their old friend (daughter of a friend of Barb & Don) named Coralee (I don't know if that's the right spelling). She's 17, a senior in high school, really beautiful, and just obviously far more comfortable in that environment than I was. She's working on college applications and such, so I could be all, 'hey I know college'. I enjoyed talking to her for the most part, but I only have so much to say about that stage of college stuff and it's not particularly interesting. She awkwardly told me in a friendly way that I look like some creepy stalker guy she knows. Yeah, so that just... I mean, everybody laughed about it, because they didn't seem to think I was creepy, but I felt that awkward pretty much the whole time.
Spending time with the younger crowd left me missing the sophistication, lewdness, and friendly antagonism of my usual crowd. Hanging with the older crowd left me missing the relaxed tone and inquisitive "hey check out this cool idea/question/concept" banter of, well, my usual crowd. I'm so ready to get back to Moscow, where drinking wine, having fun, and sharing provocative discussion all happen at the same table.
Tuesday morning we got up far earlier than health and good sense would recommend and made our way out to Jeff & Terri's place again. After a couple cups of coffee with them, we piled into 'Buster', the Suburban, drove to Diana's (just a few minutes away) and picked her up to join us for a grand tour of the valley. It really was a grand tour. Between Jeff and Diana, there's little I can imagine that they don't know about the area (that's worth knowing). I mean, we look at a field, and Jeff can tell us who owns and when they bought it from who and how deep they dug to hit water and Diana fills in how much it cost them, who's going to build what there, and so on. For every field, they pretty much know at least that much about it. I now refer to Photo #1, below.
This may look, to the uneducated observer, like a dirt road. Actually, it's two parallel dirt roads, poorly photographed. *cough* Additionally, guess what? There's a story behind it. Two doctors own neighboring property, see, and they can't agree on how to share the dirt road leading into it from the, uh, slightly larger dirt road. So they each pave their own road. And its been that way for decades, right? Wow. Who knew? Yeah, Jeff & Diana, that's who.
There's Jeff, just drivin' casual. And here's most of Diana, with a nice view of a mountain and an awkward view of a chunk of my head. She was sitting behind me and I took all these photos without saying I was taking photos, covertly, y'know, so as not to make anybody nervous. So I'm trying to excuse my poor photography but I really can't. So nevermind.
The conversation was consistently excellent, usually with everyone participating in the same topic and asking questions and stuff. The commentary was riveting. For example, "Livestock always looks pathetic in the winter." A couple times side-conversations broke out — Jeff and I talked about vacuum pressure in engines and mileage and, well, car stuff for a while. That too was excellent, so really, it was just a pretty awesome deal.
MISCELLANY TIME:
Facts have emerged which modify my story slightly, lessening the pleasantly dramatic spin I've enjoyed putting on this
I think I've made a mistake by trying to use the word 'meta' in conversation. The last couple sessions of Theory of Knowledge had me thinking in terms of stuff and meta-stuff, and it makes oodles of intuitive sense to me, and I was all happy trying to make conversation out of it. But I think that I'd be really annoyed if I were on the receiving end of the sort of comments I made. It's really hard (if not impossible) to talk about meta-levels without being a smug bastard about it. In class, that was also the case, but it was a roomful of smug bastards, so it was okay. Outside the academic circle-jerk, it's just annoying to have someone proclaiming dichotomies in terms of meta-levels. Too damn pretentious. So, my apologies to anyone who noticed me doing that.
I've been enjoying the Poorleno blog 'mixtapes' lately. I forget what random Googling brought up this guy's site, but of course anyone using the name of my all-time favorite Röyksopp song had better be doing something interesting with it. True enough, there's a good deal of good music on those collections. They're worth a listen. Personally, I can't stand not being able to see exactly what is playing, so the one-long-track format is annoying. I only know one to four songs already from each mix, so there's a lot I'm trying to learn. There are some really excellent choices and some really bizarre ones - 50 Cent and... I forget, Air Supply? What? Enjoy the french electronica, I say. Lots of Rinôçérôse, who I knew previously only from the Hôtel Costes compilations.
Direct Links for your Clicking Pleasure: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Okay, I'm done for the day. Please leave me comments! And questions, should you find yourself having them, are also welcome. Thanks for reading.
