Shoes and Ships and Ceiling Wax

I've been putting off an update for about a week. I wanted to write about my birthday, which was two weeks ago, but in retrospect I don't think there's a whole lot there to tell after all.

I went home to visit my family, and let me tell you, the drive down the Columbia Gorge is gorgeous. No pun intended. It beats the old drive from Seattle across Washington hands down. Of course every single time I drive that way (which I have many times since I was a child, but not recently enough to appreciate it) I am reminded that I have still never been to the Maryhill Museum. My mother is a huge Pacific Northwest history buff and consequently so am I, but we've never been. The museum was founded by Sam Hill, as in "what in the!" He had this crazy idea that the Queen was going to come sailing up the Columbia and he put together this elaborate museum in, what was then and is still, the middle of nowhere. That's the abridged version of the story of this guy. There's also a (non working) full scale replica of Stonehenge for some reason.

So on the plus side, my drive is exactly the same length (about six hours) and much more pleasant. On the down side...Oregon is much much stricter about enforcing traffic laws that Washington. It may be that the drive across Washington sucks, so people are more easily forgivin their agregious speeding. The point is that I go pulled over on the way down. There wasn't much I could say, I had been agregiously speeding, so I just handed over my liscense and registration and all that and was polite because cops get too much shit for doing their jobs already. But since I was nice, have a clean record, and it was the day before my birthday I got off with a warning! Hurrah! It surprised me when he wished me Happy Birthday too. I mean, I knew he was looking up all my records back there but it hadn't occured to me that he'd figure that out for some reason. Go figure.

In my hometown it was Giant Yard Sale Weekend and I bought a blender that turned out not to work, and a waffle iron that turned out to be pretty awesome except the waffles always stick to the top no matter how much butter I brush on and I think I'll try Pam next time. Sorry for the run-on. But I paid $4 for both of them so it wasn't too disappointing that the blender had to be thrown away. Especially since the day was miserable and everything got rained out and I was roped into helping my mom at her church's yard sale and by the end they were giving stuff away. I got a really cool (hideous/retro) slow cooker and assorted crockery and a rug, and a TV. The TV wasn't part of the yard sale, it belonged to some friends of my mother's who are working on starting a B&B and they had purchased TVs for the rooms but that was before everything was flat screen, so now they need to rebuy TVs. But this one is pretty new and in good shape, and while it's small, it's a free TV so I'm not complaining.

Speaking of TV. I saw the coolest thing ever. Ever. In the history of Everything. My roommate was watching Nova on Hulu and this episode was on the rotation.

Have you clicked on it yet? No?! The episode title, just to give you a taste, is Astrospies. It's about Spies. In. Space. (Can you hear the "Piiiiiigs iiiiiiin Spaaaaaace" commentary?) Apparently during the height of the cold war, while the Space Program we all know and love was going on, staring all those big names from The Right Stuff, there was this whole other thing going on.

Both Russia and the U.S. were in a race to spies into manned space stations orbiting the planet armed with high tech cameras with computers! in them, if you can imagine such a thing, that would have a high enough resolution to make out the models of cars being driven around on say...top secret military bases. Also, they wanted to shoot enemy satellites out of the sky.

Now of course we all just go to Google Earth and it seems not that impressive. I mean, if you have no appreciation whatsoever for history. But this was such an amazing story I was vibrating in my seat watching it. Also, one thing that was awesome and sad was that one of the Astro Spies in training was/would have been the first African American Astronaut (which has a ring to it) but he was killed in a practice flight which just sucks beyond the telling of it. All of this stuff has just recently become declassified, and it would make a hell of a movie for Tom Hanks to Co-Star in.

And to end on a completely unrelated note, I have opened a store on Etsy! I'm on there as seespotbitejane which is an old name that only makes sense to a friend of mine (well, her and the owner of the racehorse...) because SoupyTwist was taken. I was late to the party I guess. But I've already put some stuff up and have ideas for more, because I like making crafty things but don't know what to do with them after they're made. I'll put up art as well, as I deem it saleable. And of course Astrospies has turned my desire to do one piece about the Atomic Bomb into a series about the Space Race and the Cold War. Because Sputnik was an adorable little satellite.

Awesome. My dog just puked on my bed. And on a treasured stuffed animal from Disneyland that she was using as a pillow at the time. So. I'm done. Have a good night.