3Berwick

[3berwick]

Biology

Today talking about bean beetles.  Trying to determine if they use sight or smell primarily to find beans.

“Well, they’re all dead.” - Matt

“Yeah, maybe they couldn’t find any (beans) because they couldn’t smell anything but their own death.” - Brendan

------- And shortly thereafter, while discussing trade-offs of laying multiple eggs on the same bean. “But only one can hatch.  They’re like Highlander eggs...” - Brendan

[3berwick]

“Not only did we fail to slay the monster we came here to kill, but we seem to have also unleashed some sort of plant-based apocalypse.”

-Roland the Paladin

[3berwick]

If eugenics worked there would be no more lefties.

Eric

[3berwick]

Of course there's beetles in it.

[3berwick]

Wendigo ain't people.

Eric

[theorangecoco]

ATV, you blessed underdog.

[3berwick]

Well, this is the final (quite underwhelming) post for our 3800 mile road trip across the USA from Boston to Seattle.  Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like Hawk and I were too interested in pictures on the longest stretch of our trip (over 13 hours), which is really unfortunate because Oregon was a beautiful state.  (The two clear pics above are both in Oregon right when we changed time zones). The first stretch of the trip took us from Utah to Idaho and it was all right.  We left a bit late in the day and the sky was clear - it was quite hot.  As I recall there were multiple weird farms in northern Utah with smoke emanating from an undisclosed location and forming strange vortices up to a hundred or more feet tall.  I really don't know what that was about. A thing I learned about Idaho was that it's population is almost entirely distributed to the southern portion (which makes sense because most of the land area is in the south and it's also the most arable land).  I point this out because for being the most populous part of the state most of southern Idaho is farmland.  Big farm land, with a feel similar to but distinct from Kansas and other eastern farming states.  Honestly I don't have much more to say about Idaho... But I could talk about Oregon all day long.  The geography in eastern Oregon is plains.  In fact, I had never properly absorbed the distinction between plains and grasslands (which I knew existed but had not really seen in person) until we drove through eastern Oregon.  And all this time we were climbing, until we found ourselves a few thousand feet up and really just on top of the world.  On top of the world is a pretty place, and I found the site of my future home on top of a mountain in eastern Oregon (Hawk pointed out that the building there was likely a weather station but I wouldn't mind neighbors).  As we crested the hill we could see for miles and miles around and the way the road twisted and turned, obeying nature's contours was incredible.  The descent was fairly steep and narrow and at one point the two sides of the highway split to wind around opposite sites of a cliff and then pass by each other before merging. At this point the sun was beginning to set and we weren't even close to Seattle.  I found it really easy (and fun) to gun it down the following hilly stretches of the highway, trying always to catch the sunset over the next hill.  I probably averaged 90mph here, frequently hitting 100 (which isn't great for gas mileage), and I think I caught the sunset twice before the next set of hills was too far away and darkness fell.  And it was to remain so for a while.  We split north into Washington on I82 and didn't stop until Kennewick, where we got enormous helpings of Chinese food for dinner. The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful, except that it was long and we were both tired (which isn't always the best when one of us must drive).  When we arrived in Redmond we got the keys to our apartment, which turned out pretty awesome.  (I've included some photos here because there is a dearth of pictures of the trip - these were obviously taken at a later date). I'll do a closing post later, but it's dinner time now.

[3berwick]

Day 4 | Part 2

Here it is, folks!  It's been a busy couple of weeks since my last post.  Eric and Monica came to visit, Lindsay arrived, SO MUCH JOB SEARCH, and Quinn is currently here enjoying his 21st birthday at PAX!

But where did I leave the 'story' last?  It seems we were making our way over the glorious Rocky mountains.  As it turns out the Rockies end pretty abruptly, at least on the scale of our overall trip.  That being said, Colorado isn't any less beautiful on the Western side, just very different.  There are some rolling hills that transition into a very distinct geography.  Just as soon as you think the land will flatten out you come to a plateau that has been cut by a large river.  This is the Colorado river (of Grand Canyon fame), and route 70 follows it from the western foothills of the Rockies until just past Grand Junction (almost into Utah).  A couple pictures from the last set include shots from inside the canyon.  The top picture here is the 'end' (where route 70 splits from the River).  I think it gives an appropriate idea of scale (that plateau is HUGE) and context (Colorado went from a snow-capped mountain range to every conception I've ever had of the south west, geographically, in about 2 hours).  Suddenly everything was wide open as we left 'colorful Colorado' for empty Utah (pics 6 and 7 - look at how good the sign is!).

Honestly, much of Utah was boring in the sense that it's open and there's nobody there.  Seriously, there aren't even farms, there certainly aren't towns, just open near-desert for hundreds of miles.  That being said, it was beautiful.  I use that word a lot, because I'm no Thesaurus, but it's applies each and every time.  Another word I use is scale, and Utah really helped us appreciate how much bigger the world is than we've ever imagined.

It was here we hit the biggest storm we had seen or would see on the trip.  It started when Hawk pointed out a really cool phenomenon where dark tendrils stretched down and anchored the clouds to the ground (picture 8, here).  Then we noticed the same thing happening to our left.  We conjectured that it was rain, and this seems to have been confirmed when we noticed the incredible walls of cloud matter reaching down through the backdrop of a reddening sky (pictures 2 and 10).  At this point we noticed lightning began to strike up ahead and we were happily overwhelmed by just how grand the whole image was, and further by our recognition of our bearing - right between the two large masses of cloud... we were going to avoid the worst of the storm which seemed so large as to engulf the horizon before us!  And we drove.  Somehow we had not yet reached the storm, and it was here that I noticed that the road in the rear view was completely different looking from that in front of us.  It seems the storm clouds were keeping the sunset from reaching out behind us, and so the view behind was that of a clear day with no knowledge that it was 8:30 at night.  Picture 3 is one of my favorite pictures ever, showing the surreal contrast between the sunset in front (to the left, here) and the daylight behind.

It was 5 to 10 minutes later that we finally hit the storm, and it was all encompassing.  Lightning flickered all around, made all the more eerie by that lack of accompanying thunder (occasionally there was a feint clap, but it was mostly quiet - except for the prototype raptor we were blasting over the speakers).  The sky was no longer a battle between red and blue but rather a gray mess.  Of course there was rain.

As we drove out of the storm we caught a glimpse of the sunset again and were compelled to capture it (picture 4 above).  This was a very short sunset.  There was still heavy rain and lightning striking behind us as we pulled into a gas station / Subway to fill up (both the car and ourselves - also, the first sign of civilization in, and for, a while).  Here we had the must amusing Subway servers.  They were two teenage girls who were friends of the openly harassing each other for fun variety and also of the I'm more interested in having fun than being strictly professional variety.  As such they picked on each other the whole time while making conversation with those in line.  My favorite part was when one server told the man in front of us that the drinks at the gas station part of the store were cheaper.  Leaving their antics behind I took up the duty of driving and headed north on a now dark route 6.

Thankfully there isn't much left to report, as this is getting very long.  It was dark for a long stretch, which made sense because there were no cities, or towns, or hamlets, or anything to make light at all.  That is, until we came into 'the valley'.  ...  Salt Lake City is big.  Real big.  Bigger than any city I've ever seen big (except maybe St. Louis).  Enormous, really.  Now imagine the biggest city you've ever seen, stretching from eastern to western horizon, and picture it entirely lit up in the dark night after 5 or so continuous hours of no civilization.  You'd honestly have to be there.  The city is so large that it took me an hour just to get to Quinn's house (admittedly in the NW corner) after we entered the valley.  When Hawk and I finally arrived at our destination Quinn's mom was there to greet us and let us in.  We thanked her, found our beds, and promptly fell asleep from utter exhaustion (remember that we had gotten up before 7am).  Thus ended probably the most spectacular day of the 5 day road trip.

[3berwick]

Day 4 | Part 1

Ok.  So, Day 4 was super long and unbelievably awesometastic.  It was exhausting, frightening, peaceful, and awe inspiring, all wrapped up into a nearly 600 mile trip. To start we woke up at 6:30 for an excursion to a nearby white water rafting place sponsored by Julia (for which we're eternally grateful).  Unfortunately there are no pictures for this because, you know, water and electronics don't mix well.  Suffice it to say that it was a refreshing bit of activity after a cumulative 30 or so hours of sitting.  It was exhilarating, the scenery was beautiful, and our guide, Mac, was a really cool guy.  We finished around 11 and headed back to Julia's before our trip to Salt Lake City. At Julia's we had a filling lunch on a porch with a pretty spectacular view (the top picture of this post is more or less equivalent).  We relaxed and talked and I got to see some of Julia's awesome house (it's real big and the remodeling they did is incredible and I could go on about it but I won't).  At around 1:30 we (reluctantly) packed our things and headed out the driveway after plenty of farewells. Now the driving began.  Hawk navigated as I drove the car to route 70, for the final stretch of our favorite highway.  And what a stretch it was to be, but first traffic...  [It was about here that we got those cool dune like rock structures as can be seen in the 5th picture above, which Julia had told us earlier were called hawkbacks.] Next is the part where things got a bit scary.  You see, driving a stick up a steep incline in bumper to bumper traffic is not exactly something I want to do ever again.  I'm proud to say that I didn't stall the whole way up, but I also was on the clutch so often that near the top of the hill smoke began to pour out of the hood (and it smelled something awful).  Thankfully there were no more sections like that, because we were afraid the Subaru might break down.  The nice part about driving a standard in a traffic jam DOWNHILL is that neutral (which, to be fair, one can do in an automatic as well - also, don't shut the car off, as that disables the power steering and brakes, an eventuality that I learned the hard way but for which I was prepared). Eventually we got past the tunnel causing the jam and I put my foot to the floor - which was good, because we were able to do about 60 mph at full throttle (downhill - uphill I had to downshift in order to not lose speed).  You see, it turns out that at 9000 feet cars don't get enough oxygen to run like they do at sea level (a fact that I didn't know before and which I found AWESOME).  It was up here that we got to see all the tall, pointy peaks and steep declines.  The roads were so steep (and presumably susceptible to snow cover) that every couple miles there were runaway truck ramps - steep inclines covered in sand to slow 18 ton vehicles barreling out of control on 6 degree or steeper declinations. So, that was sufficiently awe inspiring and scary. I will continue this post in part 2, either tomorrow or later tonight.  But now, dinner!

[3berwick]

Day 3 of the road trip was the first super long stretch.  It was a whopping 800 miles (almost 400 across Kansas) and took 12 hours, despite our best efforts at speeding. The first stretch, which I took, was fairly uneventful.  The rolling hills of southern Missouri gave way to the flat fields of norther Missouri, and just before we got back onto our favorite of roads, Route 70, I gave control back to Hawk. At the beginning Kansas was a bore.  Hawk drove through Kansas City and Topeka and in between were large fields.  I mean, these were awesome in and of themselves, and the horizon seemed to stretch a bit further than the Eastern farming state (Hawk stated that it was the furthest he'd been able to see overland up until that point, and I had to agree). We stopped off in Salina and switched up for my half of the state.  On this stretch we did get one amazing sight, which was the enormous wind farm depicted above.  At first there were about a dozen or so and it was awesome.  Hawk grabbed my phone and patiently awaited a closeup, which took longer than expected because these were some big windmills and thus quite far away when we first spotted them.  After a few shots we crested a hill and saw the true extent of the farm.  It wasn't a dozen but a gross, windmills stretching to the horizon in rank and file.  We snapped a few more shots, Hawk switching over to his phone midway.  Then it was gone and things were uneventful until I stopped and switched with Hawk somewhere in western KS. Hawk took us through the most beautiful storm, with some incredibly fierce winds.  See the towering clouds above.  Somehow we managed to miss the worst of it, a phenomenon that would recur.  This is how Kansas said goodbye, as we entered 'Colorful Colorado' shortly thereafter (the picture where the sun is blinding and the focus is on the debris on the windshield?  That's the entering Colorado sign... I told you they only get worse!).  At this point things were really beautiful, and as Hawk continued westward I got a few more sunset shots.  When we stopped for gas I also got the shot of the sunset over the tiny pond (it was more of puddle, really, but more than enough to make a beautiful scene awesome).  Unfortunately we don't have any great pics of the transition to night, because it was even more spectacular (the camera couldn't handle that contrast).  It reminded me of those stop motion videos where someone plants a camera in front of some gorgeous vista and records for a whole day.  The scene was absolutely incredible and surprisingly calming.  We took a secondary road to swing south of Denver, stopping for dinner at Denny's before arriving at Julia's house at something like 11 pm.  Thankfully she and her mom were up to let us in and we, after ample thanks, hit the sack, eagerly awaiting the following day.

[chelonaut-deactivated20180729]

A woman tells her programmer husband to go to the store for some milk and while he’s there, get some eggs. He takes egg carton after egg carton, until there are none left. He reaches for empty space. The ground splits beneath his feet. The universe trembles and collapses.

This is how the world ends. Not with a bang but with a Null Pointer Exception.

[3berwick]

I told you that there would never be a road sign as good!  That picture of the inside of my car with the IL in Illinois is one of the better remaining ones (i.e. the sign is in the picture). This next stretch was from Bloomington, IN, to Forsyth, MO to stay with Hawk's grandparents.  This was by far the shortest stretch of the trip, and the only one which terminated at a reasonable time (6 or 7 pm, I think). I had control of the first stretch, through Indiana.  The road was a tiny secondary highway on which I likely averaged 45 (i.e. slow).  There was a memorable moment here, though.  As I drove I noticed a truck pulled over, so I passed him.  I was a little confused, but figured he had something wrong with his car.  Then I noticed more cars pulled over, so, perplexed, I followed suit and pulled over as well.  At this point there had to be a reason, and I quickly attributed it to a funeral procession I noticed was heading the other way.  That theory seems to have held up, since we started moving again as soon as the last car in the procession drove by.  So, stopping for funeral processions traveling the opposite way is apparently a thing, at least in southwestern Indiana. I let Hawk drive through Illinois, which is just a lot of fields in the southern part where we were.  I took some pictures with the intent of compiling a 'what is there in Illinois?' album, but quickly tired of that, opting to read And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini instead.  Hawk and I traded off just before Missouri in what I think was a town called Pocahontas - the first half of our trip had lots of weird town names like that - whereupon he promptly fell asleep. I woke his ass up for the arch, however, which was pretty cool (and features in half the pictures in this album - no, I wasn't just interested in billboards). Now we're at St. Louis, which was AWESOME.  It's just so fricken' big, and such a crazy shift from the hundreds of miles of nothing behind us.  That's one of the places we passed through that I figured I could live near if fortune ever swung me that way (though that opinion is solely based on a drive through, so, you know...). After St. Louis was a very hilly route 44, for a couple hundred miles.  Unfortunately I took no pictures since I was driving, and Hawk took no pictures, since he was asleep.  Some cool and unique features of this stretch were the secondary highways that ran alongside the main highway, but were clearly less important given how much more they follow the terrain (they're much more hilly).  Also, most of the highways in Missouri were labelled with letters, rather than numbers, which I found to be unique amongst all the states we drove through (this led to the not so philosophically interesting question "Is that highway 'oh' or highway 'zero'?"). Hawk and I traded for the last (windy) stretch through the Ozarks, to his grandparents house, or should I say farm.  We arrived just in time for a wonderful chicken dinner (fresh made - the chicken was raised by a neighbor and was a few week old, we were informed).  All in all his grandparents were incredibly gracious, offering to fill up the car tires and oil and giving us provisions (and a Styrofoam cooler) for the remainder of the trip.  Here we went to bed fairly early (9:30), though we were both up pretty late reading/coding (I'll leave you to figure out who was doing what).

[3berwick]

So here's a few pictures from day 1 of our road trip! This incorporated the stretch from DC to Bloomington, Indiana.  We left relatively late (near noon, I think) and almost immediately got lunch - burgers from 5 Guys at ANTIETAM CREEK!  I don't know how close we were to the actual site of the battle, and to be honest we stumbled across this place on accident, but I thought it was cool. [Edit: I looked it up and we were about 12 miles from the battle site - the river isn't short!] See that 'entering Pennsylvania' sign?  Relish it, as no other 'entering' or 'exiting' state sign will be quite so clear (I think we gave up after a few missed chances). So, how is the road from DC to Indiana?  Maryland was nice but things got really beautiful when we entered Appalachia (which I've recently learned is over 200Ma old - those young upstart Rockies don't have the experience that the Appalachians, formed by the collision of North America with Africa during the creation of Pangaea, have).  The hills and trees were gorgeous, and despite my criticisms that it was just 'glorified hills' I really did love it. I quickly missed it to, as it ended quite abruptly with a tunnel through a mountain in Pennsylvania. ... And then there were corn fields.  Ok, to be fair there were still lots of woods at this point (as is gathered from the pictures) but suddenly everything was flat.  And it stayed like this all the way to Indianapolis.  In fact, to describe the places in between I ask you to consult the following chart: Pennsylvania - Green and Brown Ohio - Grey Indiana - Gold/Yellow That's it folks, all flat but different colors.  Not to make Ohio look bad, but I was struck by how grey it was (particularly near Columbus).  Also by how every highway was going to either Cleveland or Cincinnati, without fail. Indiana was nice but bland, with just a stupid amount of agriculture.  It also was dark by this point, and as we came into Indianapolis we decided to stop off for dinner.  Hawk looked up places on his fancy phone app and when we saw the bar/diner 'Manley's Irish Mutt' we had to at least try.  This place looked like the diviest of dives on this outside, but was actually quite nice on the inside.  Unfortunately the kitchen closed at 10, and as it was 10:30, our last meal was at 2, and we still had at least an hour of driving (and thus no drinking) we promptly left in search of a new source of food.  Quite by accident we spotted Zelma's Diner, which Hawk noted on his phone app to be open 'from 12 to 12, so maybe 24 hours?'.  And indeed it was.  The place seemed a little sketchy, in large part due to the car driving the opposite way up the lot which stopped next to us and just parked (not in a spot).  We locked the (car) doors and chose a seat near the window of the restaurant.  Any misgivings were dispelled when we talked to the two kindly women running the diner.  They had southern accents and the nicest personalities, always making sure that we were comfortable and contented.  The food was also good, and not too expensive.  All in all it was a very pleasant experience for two hungry vagabonds. Our trip not quite yet over, we headed south toward Bloomington, Indiana.  On the way we learned that our expected housing was not to be had, as my friend Brian (Furtado) could not get access to wherever he was staying.  As such Hawk and I rented a cheap room at a Motel 6 (Brian and his friend got a room next door) and fell asleep fairly quickly.

[3berwick]

Road Trip 2013!

So, as many of you know, Hawk and I recently went on a cross country road trip to relocate from Boston, MA to Seattle, WA.  The following posts are the day by day retelling of the 3800 mile journey of driving, no internet, and more driving.  I hope you enjoy!

[3berwick]

A Typical Quinnism

[During a Skype call with Jacqueline, Quinn, and Hawk]

Hawk:  Have you managed to get in touch with Kieda yet? Quinn: No, but I think we should start calling him the 'elusive man'.

[3berwick]

Tonight was chicken ceasar salad & lemon cake.

[3berwick]

Well, it's been another while since our last post, sincesomepeople hold on to important pictures and don't post them.  Anyway, with almost everyone out of the house, and some of us trading food for repentance (note: today is Yom Kippur), we decided it was the perfect night to bake bread!  I didn't have a part in it, but I believe that it's cinnamon raisin bread, and it smells awesome.  Hopefully there'll be some left tomorrow night when I'm free again.  Until then, back to suffering from my research and playing Guild Wars.

-Jesse

Edit: Always remember to rotate photos before uploading.