Due to temporary staffing circumstances that are neither interesting enough nor appropriate for discussion here, Kristen has semi-volunteered/been assigned to work for four weeks in the pediatric clinic at Misawa Air Base, a joint U.S./Japan military installation in northern Japan. The current dynamic of our Mother/Nursing Baby/Stay-at-Home Dad routine sort of makes this clan a package-deal at the moment, and Megan and I are quite portable, considering that all of my other notable responsibilities can be accommodated with a decent internet connection and she is a baby. So we are in Japan - a month in Misawa, followed by a week of vacation, traveling the parts of the country that the Lonely Planet guide book has convinced us to be the most interesting.
Friday, 14 June 2013
We depart Alaska at 11:05 AM, on a version of the now-standard Alaska Airlines flight to Seattle that kicks-off nearly all of our travel. ANC is a respectable commercial outfit with 25+ gates in two terminals, but as a measure of our current remoteness from places we tend to visit, I now view this leg as little more than the shuttle that gets us to The Real Airport, this despite a 3.5-hour flight time that would rank it among the longer flights of my life on such a list if compiled two years ago.
At time of take-off, the only items so far identified to be forgotten at home are the International Driving Permits, a document that the U.S. Embassy's official website recommends that one acquire from one's local AAA office if one wishes to drive a car while abroad. AAA's involvement in this struck me as odd and a little grift-y, in that I know the American Automobile Association not as an official document-issuing government agency but as more of just a club that offers hotel discounts and will fetch you a tow truck. The actual experience of acquiring the things did little to make me feel any better about it - I paid a lady $30 so that I could sit at her desk for half an hour while she told me about her second home in eastern Tennessee and made slightly racist baby-talk with Megan ("You're going to learn that squinty-eye language while you are over there, yes you are!"), all while inking a few dozen "AAA" stamps onto the pages of a barely official-looking paper booklet which, after all of this stamping and tactless chatter, looked to be little more than a receipt documenting that I gave $30 to AAA. More recently, I have learned that the IDPs should not be required for us (nor sufficient - I am told we must instead use a military-issued permit while driving on and around the base), and we are not even sure that we intend to drive there anyway, so the fact that they are sitting in a file cabinet in Anchorage is not catastrophic, but it does retroactively shift all hours spent acquiring them from "Possibly Unnecessary but Well-Intentioned" to "Stupid Waste of Time and Money."
We arrive at Sea-Tac, where we will spend 5 hours awaiting our flight to Tokyo. I enjoy this airport. While acknowledging the obvious element of Stockholm Syndrome in saying this about a public transit terminal in which we have had little choice but to spend 20+ cumulative hours over the past two years but in which I would never voluntarily hang out, the experience is always as pleasant as can be hoped: good local food (largely the sort that is not gastrointestinally regrettable 30,000 feet later), a few quirky shops capable of keeping one occupied for the better part of an hour, lots of natural light, comfortable-enough lounge seats with ample power outlets, dedicated water bottle filling stations, and Caffè Vita, a local roaster whose Concourse C outpost delivers my current favorite coffee/pastry combo experience, competition not limited to those that take place inside of an airport. (On at least one occasion, we have arranged travel plans with a slightly-longer-than-necessary Seattle layover to ensure time for a latte and flaky apple croissant thing.)
DL 581 departs at 8:10 PM with a 10.5-hour scheduled flight time. This is my first legitimate international flight, I am told. We went to Nassau for our honeymoon, but many, many people have smugly assured me that this does not count. This is confusing because the Bahamas is indeed a country separate from the one where I keep all of my stuff, and I definitely had to get a passport and declare a banana (which was confiscated). It is not clear what unspoken criterion this trip did not meet; perhaps the destination was not foreign enough, or far enough away, or perhaps the trip is disqualified because it did not involve a connection in JFK or Heathrow or de Gaulle or some other sufficiently huge airport with a name that is something other than just the city where it is. To clarify: I make no attempt to equate your five-week summer-after-sophomore-year Hostels 'n' Cafés tour of Western Europe with my 70-minute flight to a tropical island for six days in a pool ordering all-included Mai Tais from English-speaking bartenders, but let's please all agree that I have a stamp on my passport.
The flight over the Pacific is long but uneventful. Megan has a few antsy stretches, and she does not sleep on our laps as well as she did when we last flew several months ago, but complaining about a few fussy moments during 18+ hours of travel would unfairly suggest that she is not embarrassingly easy to travel with (she is). I use the tiny personal entertainment unit to watch Side Effects, multiple reviews of which describe it as a "pharmaceutical thriller," as if this is an acknowledged genre. This is 40 is also available, which I feel no urgency to watch because I have also paid for and downloaded the same film to my laptop as a 48-hour rental, which I now feel no urgency to watch because it is also available right here on the airplane entertainment unit. The result of this logical short-circuit is me spending a full 10 hours not watching it anywhere, qualifying the now-expired rental download as Stupid Waste of Time and Money #2, a designation that I shall henceforth abbreviate in this correspondence with a more convenient acronym (SWT&M), for which I desperately hope to encounter no further use.
An overwhelming majority of passengers on the flight are Japanese, which probably makes more sense than the plane full of American tourists I had somehow envisioned. In an early firsthand comparison between our cultures, I observe that most of the Japanese seem to find the bagel breakfast sandwich served 90 minutes before landing to be just as horrifying as I do. We are not so different!
Saturday, 15 June 2013
Saturday largely does not exist, a casualty of a 17-hour time difference between Alaska and Japan (we arrive in Tokyo at ~10:30 PM Saturday, some 26+ clock-hours after we left Seattle). I am welcomed by a very sophisticated and confusing toilet.
Flights to Misawa are not offered at this late hour, so we have arranged to stay one night at "Hotel JAL City Haneda Tokyo", as approximately translated. We navigate customs and manage to find the complimentary shuttle bus, which takes us on an eight-minute ride to what appears to be 1995, if assessing by the multiple Zima advertisements posted at the entrance to our hotel's restaurant. We haul five weeks' worth of luggage into a hotel room that has been precisely sized to fit one bed, five weeks' worth of luggage, and zero people. It is 11:45 PM, or perhaps 6:45 AM, or whatever.
Sunday, 16 June 2013
We have scheduled the Misawa flight for 1:15 PM in hopes of sleeping through the night and into mid-morning, perhaps making a dent in the jet lag. Megan has declared that she does not care for this plan, staying awake for large swaths of the next five hours and aggressively requesting company. Kristen and I groggily coordinate a plan to alternate shifts, one of us staying up with her while the other sleeps, but this does little beyond clarify which one of us should feel bad for having fallen asleep whenever we are both simultaneously awoken by Megan's impressive twisting double rib-kicks w/ occasional accompanying face-rake. (We made no front-desk inquiries about the availability of whatever extremely tiny crib might fit in the 11" of available space between the desk and the bed, so she joins us on the queen-size.) This fiasco abruptly ends at approximately 5:15 AM when we fear that we have somehow run out of diapers; we do ultimately find a few more, but not before we are awake and I am locating my shoes to make a run to the 24-hour mart across the street, during which there is an incident involving the bed and one temporarily-diaperless individual. So we are up.
It might be Father's Day, depending on one's interpretation of time zones and international recognition of such things. In celebration, we make our way downstairs to Brasserie Zima (name not confirmed) for the breakfast buffet, which appears to be a standard daily offering that is in no way associated with any American celebrations of parenthood (obviously). Browsing the selections, it is clear that my attempts to brace myself for the strangeness of the food in this country will turn out to be both mostly accurate and still wildly insufficient. Beyond the "Western" section - a table of sweet pastries, plus a series of bowls, labeled as "SCRAMBLED EGG" and "CRISPY POTATOES", which are filled with something that you might in fact guess to be those things if given at least three tries - lies a spread that is jarring to encounter at 7:30 AM: A salad bar with unidentifiable raw vegetables that may or may not exist in my home hemisphere, way too much fish, various curries and soups, a giant bowl of extremely tiny shrimp, and "TODAY'S SELECTION OF PICKLES". All of this, of course, seems strange only because of my own narrow perspective - free of bias, no logic dictates the correctness of eggs in the morning and seafood later. But I am biased, and I only got like 3 nonconsecutive hours of sleep, and this is a brunch-y kind of holiday in my home country, all of which leaves me grumpily craving an omelet with cured chunks of land mammal instead of this rice with viscous pale goo and okra-like mystery nuggets that I am made to eat with wooden sticks. (I take it back, bagel-despising airplane contingent: We are quite different.) I make the best of it with six mini Danishes and a mental pledge to be more open-minded (later), and after a brief walk through the surrounding neighborhood on an unsuccessful hunt for diapers, we check out of the hotel and catch the 10:00 AM shuttle back to Haneda Airport.
We are ticketed for Japan Airlines flight 1241 to Misawa. We check-in and drop off our luggage in a routine that is mostly familiar, notable only for the zero additional dollars required to check three suitcases, a car seat, and, at the representative's polite but stern insistence, our stroller, which we had intended to gate check until we noticed the neat stroller/cart combos that everyone was pushing around, provided for free by the airport and generally a much nicer ride than the cheap umbrella-style number with which we are traveling.
Although we flew into this airport last night, my understanding is that Haneda now serves as the "local" Tokyo airport, primarily handling the city's domestic flights, while the newer Narita sees most of the international traffic. (To ensure confusion, Haneda's official name is "Tokyo International Airport".) But "local" does not mean "small" - it is the 4th busiest airport in the world, with three large terminals and an extensive built-in shopping mall, the bottom two levels of which we browse before departure. Selections are overwhelmingly edible, primarily the sort of excessively-packaged treats meant for sharing with the office - cookies, chocolates, fruit, doughnuts decorated to look like animals, cheesecakes, and, of course, packages of tiny fish - most individually-wrapped and offered in boxes of 6+ pieces per.
We have successfully located an ATM capable of processing our U.S. debit cards, so I am now in possession of some real-life Yen and attempting to develop an on-the-fly competence for slickly using it in cash transactions. This turns out to be generally straightforward. ¥100 is currently ~$1 USD, making all conversions a convenient zero-dropping sort, and any taxes appear to be included in the labeled prices. The smallest Japanese bill is ¥1000 (roughly $10), with coins up to
¥500, which is fine except for my tendency to forget that some of the coins are worth $5 and I end up accidentally accumulating $15-$20
in change. When paying for things, the amount owed is always presented visually, via either LCD monitor or cash register display or even handheld solar calculator; this is done with such consistency and diligence as to suggest that doing so may be a legal obligation. All bills and most coins are labeled with standard Arabic numerals (note that this is not true for American coins, which forgo "5"/"10"/"25" in lieu of inconsistently-phrased identifiers like "FIVE CENTS," "ONE DIME," and "QUARTER DOLLAR" that seem to go out of their way to insist that one be capable of intricately parsing the written English language just to understand the denominations), although there is one coin bearing only Japanese writing, which, despite my growing collection of them received as change, I avoid using until I am certain what it is. (It's ¥5.)
There is a sort of ceremony to the cash exchange, it seems, in which I am likely not participating appropriately. After gesturing to the display with an open-palm The Price is Right-style "Here is what you owe" sort of move, the cashier usually brings her hands together and down, awaiting my move, which is to put the coins and bills into the ~4"x6" plastic tray on the counter between us (there is always a plastic tray). The cashier responds to this with a brief pause, accompanied by a sort of anticipatory head motion that eventually morphs into a slight nod but never without me feeling like I was supposed to do something else, some motion to indicate: "There is the money." All I can ever think to do is the same open-palm presentation thing, which might just look like I am mocking her, or maybe a double thumbs-up, which can't possibly be right. The cashier makes change (usually rounded down to the fives, interestingly - there is a ¥1 coin, but it seems that they are rarely given out) and places it directly into your hand (instead of into the tray) before smiling broadly and speaking an extensive series of words that might just add up to "Thank you, have a nice day" but seems much longer than that. I awkwardly nod and back away, which is probably what she expects of me at this point.
We take our snacks to the gate for boarding, a process conducted entirely in Japanese but with a familiar format and featuring enough context clues for us to get the idea. ([ANNOUNCEMENT], two families with multiple small children board, [ANNOUNCEMENT], men in business suits board, [ANNOUNCEMENT], most of the people who can understand the announcements board, [FINAL ANNOUNCEMENT], the last few Japanese plus us and all of the other confused Americans board.) The flight lasts less than an hour, winding down with an approach over a very green and very rural landscape of paddy fields before landing at a facility bearing all of the unmistakeable beige monotony of a U.S. military base, an odd turn of events considering that this is a commercial flight. We taxi to the gate (which turns out to be The Gate - there is one) and deplane to meet an unexpected welcoming committee, an extremely nice group of people with whom Kristen will be working for the next month. They help us with our luggage while explaining that we did in fact land on the base before taxiing off of it - for lack of an alternative, the six commercial flights that land here every day do so via a special arrangement allowing use of one of the military's runways.
The next few hours are pre-sleep blur - checking into the hotel, setting up the Pack 'n Play, grocery shopping, and an extremely generous sanity-saving trip to the home of the nurse that Kristen will be working with, who has three young children and a house full of the sort of too-big-for-a-suitcase toys that look capable of keeping an 11-month-old occupied, some of which she is willing to lend. We make over-easy eggs with toast for dinner, for reasons best described as a combination of laziness and some vague patriotic defiance of whatever that was we had for breakfast. It is 7:20 PM, and we are going to bed.
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Review: Trash Can
$36.99, Target
I went from high school to college to full-time employment with no appreciable gaps. I met my wife in 2003 and we have been together since. I began working for my current company in the same year, with only a single year-long Alaska-based hiatus interrupting an otherwise continuous stint. I once lived with the same roommate for four consecutive years, only to immediately transition to living with a different roommate for four more consecutive years. I have never been evicted or faced any sort of credit crisis or changed my identity or been on the lam.
And despite all of this seeming stability - or lack of a crippling instability, at least - I have somehow now lived at 13 different semi-permanent addresses in the last 14 years.
I have moved due to absurd lease-renewal terms, mandates from the United States military, evolving personal finances, and erratic about-faces in preference re: the ideal percentage of floor area covered by carpet. I have coerced my parents to pick me up in April from a nondescript 8'x10' room in Ann Arbor, make the 1,100 mile return trip to their house, and then chauffeur me back four months later to a negligibly more-descript 8'x10' room three-quarters of a mile from the previous one. In the past decade, I have changed addresses more times than I have gone to the dentist. I own things that are still tagged with enough moving company inventory ID stickers that they have begun to resemble that wardrobe trunk that Lucy got stuck in. When we begin our 25th month here in August of this year, our current residence will be my longest-tenured one since 1999.
So I am familiar with moving. I know it to inevitably leave casualties: the movers will not pack the 7/8-full bottle of rubbing alcohol that I bought after they wouldn't pack the last one, the fancy new kitchen's built-in microwave renders the stand-alone redundant, there is no way I am drying and folding that shower curtain liner, etc., plus I inevitably just amass a whole carload of stuff to voluntarily dump. I actually find this to be a perk of the process - one is less prone to absentminded hoarding when faced with a mandatory annual evacuation of every closet and drawer.
The kitchen trashcan succumbs to the purge maybe every other move, having acquired two years-worth of faint odors and tomato sauce stains that are wholly tolerable right up until the moment that I am presented the choice of loading this dirty, boring, cheap, and eminently upgradeable item into a moving van - right next to all of my clean non-garbagey stuff - vs. the poetic (and usually spectacularly noisy) Ouroboros of aggressively hurling the thing into a dumpster.
We ditched our last one two years ago. It was an unremarkable but perfectly suitable 5.2 gallon Sterilite Touch Top™ whose only fault was being owned by a spendthrift pseudo-gypsy who grew tired of its whole white plastic vibe. I regret it now (the ditching). Great can, that one. Stout. It wasn't even that dirty. But I know by now that this happens at least once per move - when, after all of that excessive clutter-cutting self-congratulation, I must eventually acknowledge that I have thrown out some perfectly good and quintessentially utilitarian possession because I was bored with its vibe, of all things - and I feel completely ridiculous.
So we needlessly bought a new trash can. And I do not care for it.
Procurement and Setup
I follow only one criterion when selecting a new thing to electively replace an old thing that did not need to be replaced: that the new thing be as different as possible from the old thing. This does nothing to ensure that the new one will be any better, and may in fact increase the likelihood of it being considerably worse, but in the moment, it is far more defensible than buying anything that resembles the perfectly good one that I just threw away, creeping regret be damned. So our must-haves for a new can described the opposite of the old one: Black. Metal would be nice. Something slick-looking. A little bigger (completely unnecessary). Maybe one of those pedal-operated lids I've been reading so much about.
Target has an entire aisle full of trash cans. The first half of it is stocked with familiar Sterilites, which I ignore; the second half is the "designer" section, where the ones with fancy styling and complex lid mechanics are available at a 100-200% cost premium. This is clearly where I want to be, as I have temporarily lost my mind.
The high-end models come packaged in individual boxes, made from the shiny kind of cardboard and decorated with well-composed photography and hip fonts. (To reiterate, in case you lost track and thought I was instead talking about a brochure for a condominium building, I am still referring to a container for a container for garbage.) One mid-range option looks to fit our bill - its box is printed with phrases like CIRCULAR DESIGN and MATTE FINISH and STYLISH ADDITION TO ANY KITCHEN and has a small window exposing the actual can, through which I tap one square centimeter of metal with an index finger and conclude that it "seems good". I quickly deem this level of research sufficient to justify spending nearly $40 on a barely-glorified bucket, doubling-down with a matching recyclables bin in silver (not matte, FYI).
It turns out that one handy benefit of selling your horrible overpriced trash can in a box is that the box hides all of the obvious shortcomings long enough for some idiot to buy one (or two). Overall build quality is dubious: the metal is thin, the base is a little wobbly, the lid is slightly askew from the body and makes a weird noise as it aligns itself while closing. Overall, I would assess it to be almost as sturdy as that giant can of hot chocolate mix we bought from Costco one time. There is a confusing metal hoop hanging off of the back of it, through which one might drape a hand towel or something, I guess.
Fitting it with a standard 13-gallon trash bag is a maddening test of patience and fine motor skills. I gather that the process is meant to utilize this dream-haunting plastic ring:
It fits snugly between the top of the can and the lid. Beyond this, I can confirm nothing about its intended use. Is the bag supposed to be fitted directly into the can with the ring pushed down on top of it like an embroidery hoop? Practical, but this leaves several inches of the top of the bag sloppily skirting out over the rim and negates the whole reason for shopping in the designer section (the slickness). Am I supposed to use the hinged metal parts to secure the bag? Possible, but the hinge-points interfere with the bag. My current method involves clumsily fishing the bag through the top and then wrapping the edges of the bag down and around the full circumference of the ring so that I end up with something like a handleless butterfly net, at which point I attempt to guide the entire bag/ring assembly into the can while maintaining enough tension on the bag to keep the whole thing from unraveling. I can typically do this in less than four minutes.
[At this point - after identifying their numerous intolerable faults but prior to soiling them with any actual garbage - you might ask why I did not repack the cans into their suspiciously stylish boxes and exchange them for a more practical choice, such as the larger (12.4 gallon) version of the proven Sterilite Touch Top™. The reason, of course, is that this would be a shameful act of weakness and an admission of failure, not to mention that the cumulative exasperation necessary to inspire a tightly-edited 2,300-word treatise about something dumb I did two years ago never really takes hold if I sabotage it with a regrettable spell of lame up-front humility. Where's the prolonged embarrassment and bitterness in that?]
Lid Operation
The can's weight is approximately equivalent to that of a medium-sized bag of pistachios. This is great if you want to take it backpacking but not if you are interested in it staying in one place while attempting to foot-open it. My preferred pedal-mashing motion is a rotate-about-the-heel sort. The resulting force has a horizontal component, resistance to which relies on the thing being heavy enough to create adequate friction with the floor:
A tiny W means a tiny N which leaves Fx > Rx; the result is the pedal squirting out from under my foot each time I try to depress it and me stomping around the kitchen with a Styrofoam tray full of chicken fat, chasing the can as it scoots away from me in four-inch increments. It is not unlike watching my daughter attempt to pick up a slice of avocado from the tray on her high chair.
To avoid the sliding, I could convert to a pure vertical stepping motion:
But this requires an awkward locked-ankle/vertical-shin arrangement that is practical only if I am attempting to incorporate some sort of mid-disposal lunge routine into the process (I am not). The other option is to keep extra weight in the can, and in lieu of maintaining a permanent base layer of rotting garbage, we have opted to line the bottoms of each 40-liter can with approximately five liters of rocks. This seemed like a convenient solution since several hundred square feet of our yard happen to be covered with largish gravel, although "convenient" is perhaps not the appropriate adjective to describe me carrying 30 pounds of rocks up a flight of stairs (a task which, despite all of this effort towards lunge-avoidance, must surely qualify as exercise) just so that we can properly open our stupid luxury garbage cans.
I suppose I also could have just put a rubber mat or something under the can, which I did not think of until just now.
Bag Removal
The curriculum of my sixth grade English class included Where the Red Fern Grows, a book about which I remember only three things: 1) Some dogs died in it, thereby meeting an apparent macabre requirement that all middle school literature feature at least one horrific animal death, 2) It made specific reference to a dog's disembodied intestines being dragged along the ground, a detail which I recall handling with precisely the level of maturity one might expect of a twelve-year-old boy, and 3) It described a way to trap raccoons wherein something shiny is placed inside of a sort of reamed-out Erlenmeyer-shaped hole in a log, with an opening small enough for the raccoon to get its open paw through but not big enough for it to get its clenched paw out, which works because the raccoon will grab the thing and then be stuck forever because it is too stubborn and dumb to just open its paw and let go of the washer or Werther's wrapper or whatever.
I am reminded of both #2 and #3 whenever attempting to extract even a moderately-full bag from this can, which has evidently been outfitted by a world-class team of frustration engineers with a subtle but suitably catastrophic opening constriction (plus a few random screw heads and metal edges for extra bag-grip). The raccoon trap analogy would be more accurate only if the hole in the log was lined with spikes like a sarlacc pit and if the paw was instead an impossibly thin plastic sack stuffed with two-week-old leftover spaghetti. But the guts-dragging-on-the-floor thing ultimately turns out to be a pretty spot-on visual.
I acknowledge that this specific shortcoming could have been anticipated by browsing the unanimously horrible reviews for the product on Target's own website, which reviews I did not seek until I started writing this. Highlights include: "It takes eight arms, ten minutes, and an engineering degree to remove an even semi-full bag without tearing holes in it", "Just now I watched as my wife struggled to get a bag out. She needed both hands and one foot, and still had to flail around to get it out", "I have yet to empty our trashcan without tearing the bag", "Not worth your trash", "The stupidest thing I've ever bought", and "A few times I have had to remove the bag and insert it into another bag due to all the tears", the final word of which could be interpreted in at least two valid ways. I would typically be inclined to dismiss this sort of bad press via the Nobody-Gives-a-Trash-Can-Five-Stars Corollary of Online Customer Reviews, but it is validated here by embarrassing consistency - 14 of 17 reviews make specific reference to Bag Removal Rage, and the only one awarding even 3/5 stars does so with the caveat that he just forgoes a bag and hoses the can down every time he empties it - plus the existence of alternatives with stellar reviews, not to mention my own daily fantasies of smashing this thing like drunk Eli Thompson in a garage crazily pummeling that poor guy with a wrench during Season 2 of Boardwalk Empire.
But I resist that sort of violence for now, instead just making occasional visits to the Sterilite section at Target for a bit of wistful old-can nostalgia. We will move again soon enough. And when we do, there will be a party with hockey sticks and snow shovels and a spectacular piñata de basura.
Summary
Pros:
Overall Score: 700
All reviews utilize their own unique scoring scale, each with no reference datum and extending infinitely in both directions.
I went from high school to college to full-time employment with no appreciable gaps. I met my wife in 2003 and we have been together since. I began working for my current company in the same year, with only a single year-long Alaska-based hiatus interrupting an otherwise continuous stint. I once lived with the same roommate for four consecutive years, only to immediately transition to living with a different roommate for four more consecutive years. I have never been evicted or faced any sort of credit crisis or changed my identity or been on the lam.
And despite all of this seeming stability - or lack of a crippling instability, at least - I have somehow now lived at 13 different semi-permanent addresses in the last 14 years.
I have moved due to absurd lease-renewal terms, mandates from the United States military, evolving personal finances, and erratic about-faces in preference re: the ideal percentage of floor area covered by carpet. I have coerced my parents to pick me up in April from a nondescript 8'x10' room in Ann Arbor, make the 1,100 mile return trip to their house, and then chauffeur me back four months later to a negligibly more-descript 8'x10' room three-quarters of a mile from the previous one. In the past decade, I have changed addresses more times than I have gone to the dentist. I own things that are still tagged with enough moving company inventory ID stickers that they have begun to resemble that wardrobe trunk that Lucy got stuck in. When we begin our 25th month here in August of this year, our current residence will be my longest-tenured one since 1999.
So I am familiar with moving. I know it to inevitably leave casualties: the movers will not pack the 7/8-full bottle of rubbing alcohol that I bought after they wouldn't pack the last one, the fancy new kitchen's built-in microwave renders the stand-alone redundant, there is no way I am drying and folding that shower curtain liner, etc., plus I inevitably just amass a whole carload of stuff to voluntarily dump. I actually find this to be a perk of the process - one is less prone to absentminded hoarding when faced with a mandatory annual evacuation of every closet and drawer.
The kitchen trashcan succumbs to the purge maybe every other move, having acquired two years-worth of faint odors and tomato sauce stains that are wholly tolerable right up until the moment that I am presented the choice of loading this dirty, boring, cheap, and eminently upgradeable item into a moving van - right next to all of my clean non-garbagey stuff - vs. the poetic (and usually spectacularly noisy) Ouroboros of aggressively hurling the thing into a dumpster.
We ditched our last one two years ago. It was an unremarkable but perfectly suitable 5.2 gallon Sterilite Touch Top™ whose only fault was being owned by a spendthrift pseudo-gypsy who grew tired of its whole white plastic vibe. I regret it now (the ditching). Great can, that one. Stout. It wasn't even that dirty. But I know by now that this happens at least once per move - when, after all of that excessive clutter-cutting self-congratulation, I must eventually acknowledge that I have thrown out some perfectly good and quintessentially utilitarian possession because I was bored with its vibe, of all things - and I feel completely ridiculous.
So we needlessly bought a new trash can. And I do not care for it.
Procurement and Setup
I follow only one criterion when selecting a new thing to electively replace an old thing that did not need to be replaced: that the new thing be as different as possible from the old thing. This does nothing to ensure that the new one will be any better, and may in fact increase the likelihood of it being considerably worse, but in the moment, it is far more defensible than buying anything that resembles the perfectly good one that I just threw away, creeping regret be damned. So our must-haves for a new can described the opposite of the old one: Black. Metal would be nice. Something slick-looking. A little bigger (completely unnecessary). Maybe one of those pedal-operated lids I've been reading so much about.
Target has an entire aisle full of trash cans. The first half of it is stocked with familiar Sterilites, which I ignore; the second half is the "designer" section, where the ones with fancy styling and complex lid mechanics are available at a 100-200% cost premium. This is clearly where I want to be, as I have temporarily lost my mind.
The high-end models come packaged in individual boxes, made from the shiny kind of cardboard and decorated with well-composed photography and hip fonts. (To reiterate, in case you lost track and thought I was instead talking about a brochure for a condominium building, I am still referring to a container for a container for garbage.) One mid-range option looks to fit our bill - its box is printed with phrases like CIRCULAR DESIGN and MATTE FINISH and STYLISH ADDITION TO ANY KITCHEN and has a small window exposing the actual can, through which I tap one square centimeter of metal with an index finger and conclude that it "seems good". I quickly deem this level of research sufficient to justify spending nearly $40 on a barely-glorified bucket, doubling-down with a matching recyclables bin in silver (not matte, FYI).
It turns out that one handy benefit of selling your horrible overpriced trash can in a box is that the box hides all of the obvious shortcomings long enough for some idiot to buy one (or two). Overall build quality is dubious: the metal is thin, the base is a little wobbly, the lid is slightly askew from the body and makes a weird noise as it aligns itself while closing. Overall, I would assess it to be almost as sturdy as that giant can of hot chocolate mix we bought from Costco one time. There is a confusing metal hoop hanging off of the back of it, through which one might drape a hand towel or something, I guess.
Fitting it with a standard 13-gallon trash bag is a maddening test of patience and fine motor skills. I gather that the process is meant to utilize this dream-haunting plastic ring:
It fits snugly between the top of the can and the lid. Beyond this, I can confirm nothing about its intended use. Is the bag supposed to be fitted directly into the can with the ring pushed down on top of it like an embroidery hoop? Practical, but this leaves several inches of the top of the bag sloppily skirting out over the rim and negates the whole reason for shopping in the designer section (the slickness). Am I supposed to use the hinged metal parts to secure the bag? Possible, but the hinge-points interfere with the bag. My current method involves clumsily fishing the bag through the top and then wrapping the edges of the bag down and around the full circumference of the ring so that I end up with something like a handleless butterfly net, at which point I attempt to guide the entire bag/ring assembly into the can while maintaining enough tension on the bag to keep the whole thing from unraveling. I can typically do this in less than four minutes.
[At this point - after identifying their numerous intolerable faults but prior to soiling them with any actual garbage - you might ask why I did not repack the cans into their suspiciously stylish boxes and exchange them for a more practical choice, such as the larger (12.4 gallon) version of the proven Sterilite Touch Top™. The reason, of course, is that this would be a shameful act of weakness and an admission of failure, not to mention that the cumulative exasperation necessary to inspire a tightly-edited 2,300-word treatise about something dumb I did two years ago never really takes hold if I sabotage it with a regrettable spell of lame up-front humility. Where's the prolonged embarrassment and bitterness in that?]
Lid Operation
The can's weight is approximately equivalent to that of a medium-sized bag of pistachios. This is great if you want to take it backpacking but not if you are interested in it staying in one place while attempting to foot-open it. My preferred pedal-mashing motion is a rotate-about-the-heel sort. The resulting force has a horizontal component, resistance to which relies on the thing being heavy enough to create adequate friction with the floor:
To avoid the sliding, I could convert to a pure vertical stepping motion:
I suppose I also could have just put a rubber mat or something under the can, which I did not think of until just now.
Bag Removal
The curriculum of my sixth grade English class included Where the Red Fern Grows, a book about which I remember only three things: 1) Some dogs died in it, thereby meeting an apparent macabre requirement that all middle school literature feature at least one horrific animal death, 2) It made specific reference to a dog's disembodied intestines being dragged along the ground, a detail which I recall handling with precisely the level of maturity one might expect of a twelve-year-old boy, and 3) It described a way to trap raccoons wherein something shiny is placed inside of a sort of reamed-out Erlenmeyer-shaped hole in a log, with an opening small enough for the raccoon to get its open paw through but not big enough for it to get its clenched paw out, which works because the raccoon will grab the thing and then be stuck forever because it is too stubborn and dumb to just open its paw and let go of the washer or Werther's wrapper or whatever.
I am reminded of both #2 and #3 whenever attempting to extract even a moderately-full bag from this can, which has evidently been outfitted by a world-class team of frustration engineers with a subtle but suitably catastrophic opening constriction (plus a few random screw heads and metal edges for extra bag-grip). The raccoon trap analogy would be more accurate only if the hole in the log was lined with spikes like a sarlacc pit and if the paw was instead an impossibly thin plastic sack stuffed with two-week-old leftover spaghetti. But the guts-dragging-on-the-floor thing ultimately turns out to be a pretty spot-on visual.
I acknowledge that this specific shortcoming could have been anticipated by browsing the unanimously horrible reviews for the product on Target's own website, which reviews I did not seek until I started writing this. Highlights include: "It takes eight arms, ten minutes, and an engineering degree to remove an even semi-full bag without tearing holes in it", "Just now I watched as my wife struggled to get a bag out. She needed both hands and one foot, and still had to flail around to get it out", "I have yet to empty our trashcan without tearing the bag", "Not worth your trash", "The stupidest thing I've ever bought", and "A few times I have had to remove the bag and insert it into another bag due to all the tears", the final word of which could be interpreted in at least two valid ways. I would typically be inclined to dismiss this sort of bad press via the Nobody-Gives-a-Trash-Can-Five-Stars Corollary of Online Customer Reviews, but it is validated here by embarrassing consistency - 14 of 17 reviews make specific reference to Bag Removal Rage, and the only one awarding even 3/5 stars does so with the caveat that he just forgoes a bag and hoses the can down every time he empties it - plus the existence of alternatives with stellar reviews, not to mention my own daily fantasies of smashing this thing like drunk Eli Thompson in a garage crazily pummeling that poor guy with a wrench during Season 2 of Boardwalk Empire.
But I resist that sort of violence for now, instead just making occasional visits to the Sterilite section at Target for a bit of wistful old-can nostalgia. We will move again soon enough. And when we do, there will be a party with hockey sticks and snow shovels and a spectacular piñata de basura.
Summary
Pros:
- Slick vibe
- Opaque construction visually conceals the grisly slurry of coffee grounds and fish parts that is going to be all over the floor in a few minutes
- Bonus rock storage
- Good starting point for homemade toddler-sized costume (cigarette or AA battery)
- While adequate for holding trash, does not allow for any reasonable means of putting trash into it nor taking trash out of it
- Is no Sterilite, that's for sure :(
- Is terrible
Overall Score: 700
All reviews utilize their own unique scoring scale, each with no reference datum and extending infinitely in both directions.
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Names I Have Called My Infant Daughter To Her Face (So Far)
MeganMegan Julia
Stinker
Stink-o
Stinky
Dude
Buddy
Buster
Missy
Peanut
Goofball
Jub Jub
Booger
Snots
Snotty McRosencheeks
Goo Face
Slobbery
Drooly
Megan Droolia
Spitty McGee
Two-Tooth McGee
No-Nap McGee
Jerk
Weirdo
This Baby
That Baby
The Baby
Baby
HEEEEEEEYYY STINKY BABY
Chubbyfeet
Meatball
Sweetie
Cutie
Dear
MJ Pee Pants
MJ Poopy Pants
Bitey
Baldy
Ol' Fuzzy Top
Ol' Broccoli Legs
Ol' Halibut Belly
Ol' Cucumber Breath
Wigglebutt
Antsy Nancy
Dancing Nancy
Fuss Bucket
Monday, April 22, 2013
Alaska (Travel)blog(ue): 2013 Fur Rondy & Iditarod Start
You are likely familiar with the Iditarod dog sled race, which begins here each year in March. It was on my short list of responses during a panicked word-association exercise that I stumbled through when I heard that we were moving here. (Alaska? Wow. OK. Cold...far...time zone? No sun...then lots of sun! Mountains...Iditarod...whales...Chipotle? Palin...Eskimos...Are we supposed to call them "Eskimos"? Oil spill...Simpsons movie...bears...gotta get a real coat. ("We're gonna need a bigger coat." (Ha!))) A search turns up at least one wire service story about the race in most prominent U.S. newspapers, suggesting there is at least a modest national awareness of the thing.
I gather that the interest in Fur Rendezvous, which happens around the same time but which I had never heard of before we moved here, is decidedly local. Last year, I wrote a bit about it, regurgitating what I read in the newspaper before briefly mentioning that we made no attempt to actually go see any of it:
The two events' association with one another seems reluctant but logistically wise. The last few days of Fur Rondy and the ceremonial start of the Iditarod now occupy the same weekend in the same downtown location, with schedules coordinated to encourage attendance of both. But beyond this, the events seem to do almost nothing to officially acknowledge one another, each maintaining its own promotional materials and sponsors and commemorative merchandise. (Fur Rondy even hosts its own race earlier in the week - the World Championship Sled Dog Races, a three-day sprint-style race that is entirely separate from the Iditarod.) A few weeks used to separate the two until the they were overlapped 20 years ago to draw each others' attendees; this is indeed convenient, but it also reduces the number of discrete winter events warranting a trip downtown by maybe 25%.
Last year, we skipped going downtown to see anything from either event, instead only stopping by the park near our house to see the last few mushers reach the endpoint of the Iditarod's first leg. We had decided that this was a savvy way to avoid the crowds, a feat that I now acknowledge to be unremarkable, inasmuch as we live in a state with a population about 1/10th as dense as South Dakota's and a neighborhood that is immediately adjacent to several million uninhabited acres of mountains and forest. This year, we decided that we could either sit around the house for ten days and let everything pass us by again, or we could sit around the house for nine-and-a-half days and then go down to 4th Avenue just long enough to see how crowded it was and to take a few pictures for a lazy blog post. #yolo
This happened almost two months ago, proving that this online format capable of real-time documentation still affords the option of being operated with no more urgency than if I were to just mail each of you a handwritten letter with a stack of 4x6 prints.
The original Fur Rendezvous was a legitimate rendezvous of furriers: people meeting in town to buy and sell animal pelts. It started in the 1930s, and since the REI here didn't open until 1997, I suppose that kind of thing was probably useful. As a festival-defining element, the marketplace concept seems to have been largely supplanted by the aforementioned collection of silly distractions, predominantly the sort that might feature on a Travel Channel countdown of the Top X Craziest Something-Or-Other; in addition to the items noted above, there are outhouse races, a parade of vintage snowmobiles, the "Frostbite Footrace and Costume Fun Run", and a fur bikini contest. [We did not attend any of these, a decision based fully on a lack of interest in doing so and one that I do not regret despite its implications that I might sort of have a bad attitude about the whole thing.]
But tucked into a corner of a parking lot on the edge of all of this foolishness is the modern incarnation of some actual fur trading: The Alaska State Hide, Horn & Antler Auction, presented by the Alaska Trappers Association and affording opportunity for bidders to take home a fuzzy and/or pointy part of an animal that "(was) illegally poached, killed in self-defense/accidentally, or became a threat." We observed bidding on the chunk of bear pictured above, the sale price for which eventually escalated to $2,400. This was apparently a good one, because we watched others go for under $100. (Those appeared to have been killed both accidentally and, one might speculate, ungracefully.) As I do not understand the intricacies of live-auction etiquette, I nervously limited all photography-related motions to the slow, deliberate, below-the-shoulders sort, a precaution that was probably unnecessary and almost certainly looked a bit silly but did keep me out of any unfortunate accidental-bid pickles.
I was especially drawn to the gentleman on stage watching for bids, on the left side of the picture:
I think he might have just hollowed out a lion.
Most of the folks actively looking to procure something were already wearing some variety of extravagant-looking fur-based garment or accessory, leading me to hypothesize that there are probably very few people in the world that own one such item. As with cowboy hats and Phish albums and Toyotas: you might have zero, and you might have four, but you probably don't have one.
This currently stands as the picture we would show Megan if she ever questions whether she was actually born in Alaska. I think a picture of your six-month-old self wearing that hat while attending a live auction for dead bears basically counts as a birth certificate.
And this is what the rest of Fur Rondy looked like while we were there. All of the notable events are spread throughout the week, leaving gaps to be filled with this big outdoor carnival, which appears to be the exact same one they have at the state fair in August except that this time it was like 24 degrees outside. This picture captures the approximate moment where my aforementioned too-cool-for-schoolness about the whole thing overlapped with my working professional knowledge of steel's proclivity for brittle failure when exposed to low temperatures and I decided it best to not even cross the street.
Thus concludes this year's installment of "Indifferent Dispatches from Fur Rondy". Please join us next year, for which I will probably provide a cursory overview of another 1-3% of this largely beloved celebration that I do not understand because I am too stubborn to give it a fair chance.
Six days later we were back in the same place for the Iditarod festivities:
"Festivities" because a) this isn't really the start of it - the "restart" happens the next day in Willow, an hour-and-a-half drive north of Anchorage, at which point the stopwatches are actually clicked for the 987 mile trek to Nome, and b) the atmosphere is indeed quite festive. This first in-town leg is essentially the equivalent of an Olympic opening ceremonies, but about five hours shorter and with no creepy giant baby heads or whatever.
If I had been asked two years ago how old this race is, my likely answer would have been incorrect by about half a century. The first Iditarod was in 1973. My assumption that they have been doing it for like 100 years was probably skewed by fun old-timey photos and a well-branded Official Race Tagline, plus a general perception that dog sledding is a historically notable thing in this part of the world. It is; it just happens that the competitive version's preeminent race is a relatively modern one that features many competitors that are older than the race itself, including at least one guy that participated in the second one 40 years ago.
This probably makes it not so much the Rose Bowl or the World Series of its sport, as I had originally surmised, but more like the Super Bowl (b. 1967): a signature, ostentatious, bucket-listable event for which the rich history of the sport that it embodies obscures the fact that there are James Bond movies older than the event itself.
With little competition, this was the biggest and most unified gathering of people that I have witnessed here. Thousands of spectators line the path for an afternoon of well-wishing and picture-taking and WOOOOing. There are homemade signs to show support for one's favorite musher, which one might choose with the help of the extensive musher biographies provided on the official race website. There is live radio coverage of race progress, interspersed with advertisements for race-inspired sale events at furniture stores and car dealerships, many featuring past race winners as pitchmen. It is a big deal.
And wading through a crowd this huge, here, was remarkably strange. I found it to be the most notable thing about the afternoon. I am not an accomplished estimator of large numbers of things, but surely we are talking about tens of thousands of people wandering around within a few blocks of one another. While this is probably the same number of people with which I spent three years making daily inadvertent physical contact during rush hour in the Farragut North Metro station, I could probably name only three or four places where I have seen more than a few thousand Alaskans in one place during the last two years - Alyeska, the state fair, and maybe an Aces game, with acknowledgments that we have not attended a Great Alaska Sportsman Show nor a Mayor's Marathon. (Note that there are many summer events that draw more than a few thousand people, but I am attempting to filter out the tourist-heavy ones.) People here seem to value their separation from other humans, and find it easily.
I suppose this is a chicken-or-the-egg sort of deal wherein one could question whether Alaska draws a disproportionate share of people content to usher a dogsled 1000 miles by themselves or to float down a river for a week with two other guys and a bucket of ammunition, or whether the (relative) dearth of neighbors in a crazy-huge neighborhood encourages these sorts of things.
Regardless, I did not expect "Stand uncomfortably close to strangers for an opportunity to look at a thing" to be the incentive that would draw the single largest crowd I have seen in two years (I would have guessed "Somebody found gold over there" or "Free boat"). Most here would not seem to regard this kind of thing as the makings of a fun Saturday. 30,000 locals do not gather here for arts fairs or baseball games or any sort of jazz in-a-sculpture-garden nonsense. This is an outlier.
As for the actual dog sledding, the pace is a barely-controlled jog, covering eleven miles over paved streets and an airstrip and at least one pedestrian bridge. Each team tows an extra sled with at least two extra people, added cargo that affords some donor-types ("Iditariders", they call them) a fun way to spend an afternoon but which primarily serves as a handy way to slow the dogs down while they are around so many people.
A young fan with an objectively adorable homemade sign, the top left corner of which appears to have been autographed. Context clues and semi-informed Googling suggest that it is the signature of 1984 race winner Dean Osmar, although it could also be celebrity physician Dean Ornish, or maybe Milwaukee sports talk radio personality Drew Olson. Regardless: probably a good idea to get home and double check the valuable papers insurance policy.
The downtown start requires a partial closure of 4th Avenue, an often-used but expendable-for-an-afternoon road lined with a lot of especially touristy places (mostly the sorts of gift shops where one can find "I Can See Russia From My House" refrigerator magnets and candy that is meant to resemble animal droppings). The traffic reroute is accompanied by the ironic task of trucking in thousands of cubic feet of snow - necessary for proper use of a sled, it turns out - and dumping it onto the street from which the same trucks have spent months removing it.
The course covers several blocks on 4th before turning south onto a secondary street and proceeding to cross 5th and 6th, two heavily-trafficked one-way roads comprising the primary east/west artery of the area. These stay open to traffic, but are blocked briefly to let each team cross. This means that a similar snow path is laid across them as well, but every time a group of cars and buses cross the path, the snow gets mashed and dispersed in ways that I gather to be non-optimal for sled runners. The chosen solution is that every time a musher is about to cross - every two minutes, for over two hours - a team of volunteers runs out to stop traffic and frantically shovel and rake a pile of dirty snow into something sled-passable. It is quite silly.
The Anchorage-to-Nome route of the race is not arbitrary. It is inspired by the 1925 emergency run between the same two towns, undertaken to deliver a diphtheria antitoxin serum and diffuse the threat of an outbreak. Railroads were available from Anchorage to Nenana (the first 300 miles or so), but the only options for the Nenana to Nome leg, in -50°F temperatures, were apparently a) a vintage (in 1925!), dismantled-for-winter, open-cockpit biplane, known to be unreliable in cold temperatures and manned by Just Some Guy because the two capable pilots happened to be back in the Lower 48 because their plane was dismantled for the winter, or b) dog sled relay, so they picked the sled. This was probably covered in all necessary animated detail in the 1995 movie Balto (never saw it), named for the dog that led the team that ran the last 53 miles of the route and made the delivery to Nome.
As a nod to all of that, children's vaccination has become a cause for which the race aims to raise awareness, primarily via bibs on some of the actual dogs and this Izzy The Immunization Dog mascot, which I assume to be a unlicensed offshoot of and/or apprentice to Izzy The Immunization Bear, which appears to be a California-based entity that posts on his blog even less frequently than I do.
The point is: this guy was there, dressed in a dog costume, which - and this is more notable than it should be - did not appear to be made of actual dog fur.
Megan does not understand what all of the fuss is about.
As is the case for most things that draw a horde of observers, a significant chunk of the entertainment comes from just observing the observers. Things I learned:
And let's go ahead and wrap this up with at least one picture of Megan where her expression reads as something other than "Please take me back inside, you maniacs."
I gather that the interest in Fur Rendezvous, which happens around the same time but which I had never heard of before we moved here, is decidedly local. Last year, I wrote a bit about it, regurgitating what I read in the newspaper before briefly mentioning that we made no attempt to actually go see any of it:
At the end of February there is a big event in Anchorage called Fur Rendezvous, or “Fur Rondy”, as everyone calls it, or “Frondee”, as I thought everyone was calling it for a while. It’s a ten-day outdoor festival thing that is quite obviously the culmination of a few hundred thousand people being trapped in their houses for three months and looking for some excuse to go out and do something ridiculous. We actually didn’t get out to see much of it; it’s a bunch of crazy stuff like the Running of the Reindeer, a costume party featuring a world-class beard competition, and a softball tournament played wearing snowshoes.So eloquent. A real local perspective. I think my favorite part is all of the details.
The two events' association with one another seems reluctant but logistically wise. The last few days of Fur Rondy and the ceremonial start of the Iditarod now occupy the same weekend in the same downtown location, with schedules coordinated to encourage attendance of both. But beyond this, the events seem to do almost nothing to officially acknowledge one another, each maintaining its own promotional materials and sponsors and commemorative merchandise. (Fur Rondy even hosts its own race earlier in the week - the World Championship Sled Dog Races, a three-day sprint-style race that is entirely separate from the Iditarod.) A few weeks used to separate the two until the they were overlapped 20 years ago to draw each others' attendees; this is indeed convenient, but it also reduces the number of discrete winter events warranting a trip downtown by maybe 25%.
Last year, we skipped going downtown to see anything from either event, instead only stopping by the park near our house to see the last few mushers reach the endpoint of the Iditarod's first leg. We had decided that this was a savvy way to avoid the crowds, a feat that I now acknowledge to be unremarkable, inasmuch as we live in a state with a population about 1/10th as dense as South Dakota's and a neighborhood that is immediately adjacent to several million uninhabited acres of mountains and forest. This year, we decided that we could either sit around the house for ten days and let everything pass us by again, or we could sit around the house for nine-and-a-half days and then go down to 4th Avenue just long enough to see how crowded it was and to take a few pictures for a lazy blog post. #yolo
This happened almost two months ago, proving that this online format capable of real-time documentation still affords the option of being operated with no more urgency than if I were to just mail each of you a handwritten letter with a stack of 4x6 prints.
The original Fur Rendezvous was a legitimate rendezvous of furriers: people meeting in town to buy and sell animal pelts. It started in the 1930s, and since the REI here didn't open until 1997, I suppose that kind of thing was probably useful. As a festival-defining element, the marketplace concept seems to have been largely supplanted by the aforementioned collection of silly distractions, predominantly the sort that might feature on a Travel Channel countdown of the Top X Craziest Something-Or-Other; in addition to the items noted above, there are outhouse races, a parade of vintage snowmobiles, the "Frostbite Footrace and Costume Fun Run", and a fur bikini contest. [We did not attend any of these, a decision based fully on a lack of interest in doing so and one that I do not regret despite its implications that I might sort of have a bad attitude about the whole thing.]
But tucked into a corner of a parking lot on the edge of all of this foolishness is the modern incarnation of some actual fur trading: The Alaska State Hide, Horn & Antler Auction, presented by the Alaska Trappers Association and affording opportunity for bidders to take home a fuzzy and/or pointy part of an animal that "(was) illegally poached, killed in self-defense/accidentally, or became a threat." We observed bidding on the chunk of bear pictured above, the sale price for which eventually escalated to $2,400. This was apparently a good one, because we watched others go for under $100. (Those appeared to have been killed both accidentally and, one might speculate, ungracefully.) As I do not understand the intricacies of live-auction etiquette, I nervously limited all photography-related motions to the slow, deliberate, below-the-shoulders sort, a precaution that was probably unnecessary and almost certainly looked a bit silly but did keep me out of any unfortunate accidental-bid pickles.
I was especially drawn to the gentleman on stage watching for bids, on the left side of the picture:
I think he might have just hollowed out a lion.
Most of the folks actively looking to procure something were already wearing some variety of extravagant-looking fur-based garment or accessory, leading me to hypothesize that there are probably very few people in the world that own one such item. As with cowboy hats and Phish albums and Toyotas: you might have zero, and you might have four, but you probably don't have one.
This currently stands as the picture we would show Megan if she ever questions whether she was actually born in Alaska. I think a picture of your six-month-old self wearing that hat while attending a live auction for dead bears basically counts as a birth certificate.
And this is what the rest of Fur Rondy looked like while we were there. All of the notable events are spread throughout the week, leaving gaps to be filled with this big outdoor carnival, which appears to be the exact same one they have at the state fair in August except that this time it was like 24 degrees outside. This picture captures the approximate moment where my aforementioned too-cool-for-schoolness about the whole thing overlapped with my working professional knowledge of steel's proclivity for brittle failure when exposed to low temperatures and I decided it best to not even cross the street.
Thus concludes this year's installment of "Indifferent Dispatches from Fur Rondy". Please join us next year, for which I will probably provide a cursory overview of another 1-3% of this largely beloved celebration that I do not understand because I am too stubborn to give it a fair chance.
***
Six days later we were back in the same place for the Iditarod festivities:
"Festivities" because a) this isn't really the start of it - the "restart" happens the next day in Willow, an hour-and-a-half drive north of Anchorage, at which point the stopwatches are actually clicked for the 987 mile trek to Nome, and b) the atmosphere is indeed quite festive. This first in-town leg is essentially the equivalent of an Olympic opening ceremonies, but about five hours shorter and with no creepy giant baby heads or whatever.
If I had been asked two years ago how old this race is, my likely answer would have been incorrect by about half a century. The first Iditarod was in 1973. My assumption that they have been doing it for like 100 years was probably skewed by fun old-timey photos and a well-branded Official Race Tagline, plus a general perception that dog sledding is a historically notable thing in this part of the world. It is; it just happens that the competitive version's preeminent race is a relatively modern one that features many competitors that are older than the race itself, including at least one guy that participated in the second one 40 years ago.
This probably makes it not so much the Rose Bowl or the World Series of its sport, as I had originally surmised, but more like the Super Bowl (b. 1967): a signature, ostentatious, bucket-listable event for which the rich history of the sport that it embodies obscures the fact that there are James Bond movies older than the event itself.
With little competition, this was the biggest and most unified gathering of people that I have witnessed here. Thousands of spectators line the path for an afternoon of well-wishing and picture-taking and WOOOOing. There are homemade signs to show support for one's favorite musher, which one might choose with the help of the extensive musher biographies provided on the official race website. There is live radio coverage of race progress, interspersed with advertisements for race-inspired sale events at furniture stores and car dealerships, many featuring past race winners as pitchmen. It is a big deal.
And wading through a crowd this huge, here, was remarkably strange. I found it to be the most notable thing about the afternoon. I am not an accomplished estimator of large numbers of things, but surely we are talking about tens of thousands of people wandering around within a few blocks of one another. While this is probably the same number of people with which I spent three years making daily inadvertent physical contact during rush hour in the Farragut North Metro station, I could probably name only three or four places where I have seen more than a few thousand Alaskans in one place during the last two years - Alyeska, the state fair, and maybe an Aces game, with acknowledgments that we have not attended a Great Alaska Sportsman Show nor a Mayor's Marathon. (Note that there are many summer events that draw more than a few thousand people, but I am attempting to filter out the tourist-heavy ones.) People here seem to value their separation from other humans, and find it easily.
I suppose this is a chicken-or-the-egg sort of deal wherein one could question whether Alaska draws a disproportionate share of people content to usher a dogsled 1000 miles by themselves or to float down a river for a week with two other guys and a bucket of ammunition, or whether the (relative) dearth of neighbors in a crazy-huge neighborhood encourages these sorts of things.
Regardless, I did not expect "Stand uncomfortably close to strangers for an opportunity to look at a thing" to be the incentive that would draw the single largest crowd I have seen in two years (I would have guessed "Somebody found gold over there" or "Free boat"). Most here would not seem to regard this kind of thing as the makings of a fun Saturday. 30,000 locals do not gather here for arts fairs or baseball games or any sort of jazz in-a-sculpture-garden nonsense. This is an outlier.
As for the actual dog sledding, the pace is a barely-controlled jog, covering eleven miles over paved streets and an airstrip and at least one pedestrian bridge. Each team tows an extra sled with at least two extra people, added cargo that affords some donor-types ("Iditariders", they call them) a fun way to spend an afternoon but which primarily serves as a handy way to slow the dogs down while they are around so many people.
A young fan with an objectively adorable homemade sign, the top left corner of which appears to have been autographed. Context clues and semi-informed Googling suggest that it is the signature of 1984 race winner Dean Osmar, although it could also be celebrity physician Dean Ornish, or maybe Milwaukee sports talk radio personality Drew Olson. Regardless: probably a good idea to get home and double check the valuable papers insurance policy.
The downtown start requires a partial closure of 4th Avenue, an often-used but expendable-for-an-afternoon road lined with a lot of especially touristy places (mostly the sorts of gift shops where one can find "I Can See Russia From My House" refrigerator magnets and candy that is meant to resemble animal droppings). The traffic reroute is accompanied by the ironic task of trucking in thousands of cubic feet of snow - necessary for proper use of a sled, it turns out - and dumping it onto the street from which the same trucks have spent months removing it.
The course covers several blocks on 4th before turning south onto a secondary street and proceeding to cross 5th and 6th, two heavily-trafficked one-way roads comprising the primary east/west artery of the area. These stay open to traffic, but are blocked briefly to let each team cross. This means that a similar snow path is laid across them as well, but every time a group of cars and buses cross the path, the snow gets mashed and dispersed in ways that I gather to be non-optimal for sled runners. The chosen solution is that every time a musher is about to cross - every two minutes, for over two hours - a team of volunteers runs out to stop traffic and frantically shovel and rake a pile of dirty snow into something sled-passable. It is quite silly.
The Anchorage-to-Nome route of the race is not arbitrary. It is inspired by the 1925 emergency run between the same two towns, undertaken to deliver a diphtheria antitoxin serum and diffuse the threat of an outbreak. Railroads were available from Anchorage to Nenana (the first 300 miles or so), but the only options for the Nenana to Nome leg, in -50°F temperatures, were apparently a) a vintage (in 1925!), dismantled-for-winter, open-cockpit biplane, known to be unreliable in cold temperatures and manned by Just Some Guy because the two capable pilots happened to be back in the Lower 48 because their plane was dismantled for the winter, or b) dog sled relay, so they picked the sled. This was probably covered in all necessary animated detail in the 1995 movie Balto (never saw it), named for the dog that led the team that ran the last 53 miles of the route and made the delivery to Nome.
As a nod to all of that, children's vaccination has become a cause for which the race aims to raise awareness, primarily via bibs on some of the actual dogs and this Izzy The Immunization Dog mascot, which I assume to be a unlicensed offshoot of and/or apprentice to Izzy The Immunization Bear, which appears to be a California-based entity that posts on his blog even less frequently than I do.
The point is: this guy was there, dressed in a dog costume, which - and this is more notable than it should be - did not appear to be made of actual dog fur.
Megan does not understand what all of the fuss is about.
As is the case for most things that draw a horde of observers, a significant chunk of the entertainment comes from just observing the observers. Things I learned:
- People with zany hair/beard combos love a good ceremonial dog sled race start
- In certain specific surroundings, examples of which I have difficulty imagining beyond those covered in this post, it is considered acceptable behavior to place a dead animal on your head and call it a hat despite no discernible evidence of haberdashery beyond, like, taking the bones out
- They make fur boots in a women's size 28
And let's go ahead and wrap this up with at least one picture of Megan where her expression reads as something other than "Please take me back inside, you maniacs."
Friday, February 22, 2013
These Ecuadorian Banana Packers* Are Really Underrated
I am incapable of transporting a banana from the - what do you call the place where they keep the bananas at the grocery store? It's not an aisle. Usually a freestanding thing. The banana section? Banana stand? Banana shelf? Display? Kiosk? Island? Let's go with island. I am incapable of transporting a banana from the banana island at the grocery store to my house without some degree of careless smashing.**
Despite the lackluster state of most of the local fruit & vegetable supply, bananas here are usually adequate, even in the winter - not because bananas are locally grown in Alaska (they are so, so not) but because bananas are also not locally grown in California or Texas or Florida or any of the other similar places I have saved on my phone's weather app for regular winter morning perusal and fist-shaking, i.e. we get the same imported bananas that all of those places get, just after maybe ten days in transit to get here instead of seven days to California. So while some elitist Costa Rican might laugh at what we consider to be plátanos frescos, they are comparable to what I have always seen in the rest of the country and seem just fine. This is decidedly different from, say, oranges, which are grown in many pleasantly-climated U.S. places, whose short-pantsed citrus-hoarding residents take all the good ones directly off of the trees (presumably) and then send us the misshapen yellowish dregs, probably in a big box with a note that says "Sorry, we each took a few extra so we could make juice for breakfast by the pool tomorrow before we all go play golf, in February. But yeah, that Iditarod thing sounds pretty neat for you guys, we'd definitely like to get up there to see that some time." I guess that's fine because Alaska does the same thing with oil, where we take it out of the ground and then ship it to an out-of-state refinery so we can pay inflated gas prices because of the transportation costs to get it back here and awwwwwww dammit I think we're doing it wrong.
Anyway, the bananas are decent. And even though I always take the time to pick out a near-perfect one with no blemishes, by the time I get it into our kitchen, one end is mashed in and it's speckled with brown spots and it generally looks like I carried it home using a pair of spaghetti tongs that I was clenching between my chin and my shoulder, which is to say: not gently.
That banana has a sticker on it that says it came from Ecuador. It traveled 5,700 miles from some giant South American plantation to the produce section at the Fred Meyer on Muldoon Road in Anchorage, under care of what is evidently a super-cautious team of harvesters, labelers, packagers, drivers, loaders, barge captains, unloaders, more drivers, more unloaders, unpackers, and stockers, arriving in a store three miles from my house without a single discernible surface imperfection, and then the dream team of me and Janet The Cashier manages to beat the crap out of it during its twenty-five minutes in our collective custody, from the time I pick it up from the shelf until I get it home to put it on a different shelf.
The credit must primarily go to whoever packs them up in their shipping containers, which I originally assumed to be some sort sophisticated active-response tri-axially shock-absorbent temperature- and humidity-controlled self-stabilizing pods (which I suppose could be unrealistic for something that costs like $0.40) but may in fact just be cardboard boxes lined with a sheet of plastic, at least according to a clip on YouTube called "Banana video: How they get into the box?", posted by a guy named "Banana" Chris Müller who has finally addressed the Internet's shortage of barely-decipherable heavily German-accented narration over steel drum music. Somehow, these people are consistently packaging boxes that arrive in Alaska full of pristine unbruised bananas while using only the exact same materials I once used to make a house for a pet turtle.
So: Well done, Ecuadorian banana packers. Please forward any advice you might have for finishing the last 0.05% of the journey without screwing it up once it is out of your hands.
*Possible fantasy football team name?
**Oh yeah? Whatever. YOU don't seem like the kind of thing worthy of inspiring an entire blog post.
Despite the lackluster state of most of the local fruit & vegetable supply, bananas here are usually adequate, even in the winter - not because bananas are locally grown in Alaska (they are so, so not) but because bananas are also not locally grown in California or Texas or Florida or any of the other similar places I have saved on my phone's weather app for regular winter morning perusal and fist-shaking, i.e. we get the same imported bananas that all of those places get, just after maybe ten days in transit to get here instead of seven days to California. So while some elitist Costa Rican might laugh at what we consider to be plátanos frescos, they are comparable to what I have always seen in the rest of the country and seem just fine. This is decidedly different from, say, oranges, which are grown in many pleasantly-climated U.S. places, whose short-pantsed citrus-hoarding residents take all the good ones directly off of the trees (presumably) and then send us the misshapen yellowish dregs, probably in a big box with a note that says "Sorry, we each took a few extra so we could make juice for breakfast by the pool tomorrow before we all go play golf, in February. But yeah, that Iditarod thing sounds pretty neat for you guys, we'd definitely like to get up there to see that some time." I guess that's fine because Alaska does the same thing with oil, where we take it out of the ground and then ship it to an out-of-state refinery so we can pay inflated gas prices because of the transportation costs to get it back here and awwwwwww dammit I think we're doing it wrong.
Anyway, the bananas are decent. And even though I always take the time to pick out a near-perfect one with no blemishes, by the time I get it into our kitchen, one end is mashed in and it's speckled with brown spots and it generally looks like I carried it home using a pair of spaghetti tongs that I was clenching between my chin and my shoulder, which is to say: not gently.
That banana has a sticker on it that says it came from Ecuador. It traveled 5,700 miles from some giant South American plantation to the produce section at the Fred Meyer on Muldoon Road in Anchorage, under care of what is evidently a super-cautious team of harvesters, labelers, packagers, drivers, loaders, barge captains, unloaders, more drivers, more unloaders, unpackers, and stockers, arriving in a store three miles from my house without a single discernible surface imperfection, and then the dream team of me and Janet The Cashier manages to beat the crap out of it during its twenty-five minutes in our collective custody, from the time I pick it up from the shelf until I get it home to put it on a different shelf.
The credit must primarily go to whoever packs them up in their shipping containers, which I originally assumed to be some sort sophisticated active-response tri-axially shock-absorbent temperature- and humidity-controlled self-stabilizing pods (which I suppose could be unrealistic for something that costs like $0.40) but may in fact just be cardboard boxes lined with a sheet of plastic, at least according to a clip on YouTube called "Banana video: How they get into the box?", posted by a guy named "Banana" Chris Müller who has finally addressed the Internet's shortage of barely-decipherable heavily German-accented narration over steel drum music. Somehow, these people are consistently packaging boxes that arrive in Alaska full of pristine unbruised bananas while using only the exact same materials I once used to make a house for a pet turtle.
So: Well done, Ecuadorian banana packers. Please forward any advice you might have for finishing the last 0.05% of the journey without screwing it up once it is out of your hands.
*Possible fantasy football team name?
**Oh yeah? Whatever. YOU don't seem like the kind of thing worthy of inspiring an entire blog post.
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Poorly Researched Local History: Star On The Mountain
It is well-known that Alaska was discovered during the American Civil War by Confederate Naval Captain Jasper Fairbanks, who in April of 1863 led a grand but ultimately fatal attempt to attack the Union stronghold of Milwaukee by sea. Sailing an aging sloop-of-war ship confiscated from the Mexican navy, Fairbanks and his squad of 78 rebel sailors set off into the Pacific Ocean, departing Fort Alcatraz with hopes of circumventing the northern and western extents of Canada - an ambitious path that would have covered nearly 9,000 miles. They planned to ultimately approach Milwaukee via Lake Michigan, storming the city's shores with intent to cripple its waterfront Grinding District, where all Union bayonets were sent for their regular sharpenings.
At its onset, success of the mission was believed to hinge on one of the South's greatest gambles of the war: the far-fetched hope of entering the Great Lakes through an unconfirmed Canadian waterway, thought to extend inland through Ontario from Hudson Bay, which Fairbanks and General Robert E. Lee (close friends from their years as roommates at the University of South Florida Military Academy) both falsely believed to exist. Instead, the ill-fated expedition ended far more prematurely, when the fragile vessel sustained irreparable damage after running aground on an unmapped (and then-unknown) peninsula extending from the western edge of the Canadian Yukon territories. The incident occurred near the present-day location of Anchorage, miring Fairbanks and his crew on the shores of the land that would eventually become the 49th U.S. state.
 |
| Captain Fairbanks's North American map, recovered from the Alaskan crash site that doomed the ill-fated Milwaukee siege, overlaid with his intended and actual (as approximated from his log) routes. |
It is lesser known, however, that Captain Fairbanks was also the first to observe and document the original incarnation of the famous star that overlooks Anchorage from the Chugach Mountains. Now composed of electric bulbs that illuminate the city's northeast sky each winter, the star formation was originally a naturally occurring meadow amongst surrounding mountainside trees.
During the five weeks between the wreck and his eventual death, Fairbanks wrote of the land where he and all but six of his men would eventually perish:
This wild newfound coast land has now dis-abled our sea craft, taken the lives of eleven of our crew, and cursed another two dozen with a most ruinous bout of moose poisoning. Yet it constitutes, truly, sights of God's glory to behold! Daylight at all hours and mountains on all sides. ... An easterly peak sports a most unusual clearing of vegetation, approximating shape of a five-pointed star, as though the forest's midsection were blasted by a 12-pounder's shell - much as has befallen my dear brother Cyrus at Antietam, I construe from his letters.Sadly, the original natural feature was a casualty of the extensive mountainside tree clearings of several Chugach peaks in the mid-1930s, when all vegetation was razed to make space for the U.S. Army Air Corps's experimentations with steeply inclined aircraft landing strips. These proved largely unsuccessful, and the project was discontinued in 1938 after three years of test-flights, nearly all of which ended in fatal crashes. After brief use as a Near-Vertical Arctic Farming (NVAF) site during the early 1940s, the land was abandoned to return to natural growth after the war; for reasons never conclusively determined, the star-shaped meadow did not reappear.
In 1968, Anchorage municipal assembly member Rick Nesson, a military history enthusiast, spearheaded an effort to reintroduce the star to the city's skyline, both as homage to the original shape observed by Captain Fairbanks and as tribute to the hundreds of the test pilots killed on the site (a fitting symbol, reminiscent of the Army Air Corps's roundel insignia). The project was completed and officially introduced to Anchorage residents with a modest dedication ceremony in October of 1969.
Each year, the star's 20,000+ bulbs are illuminated sequentially, one per minute, beginning at midnight on December 7 and concluding two weeks later with an extravagant fireworks show and outdoor music festival on the winter solstice, headlined in past years by popular rock acts including U2 (1995) and Dishwalla (2001). The star goes dark for the summer each year on the fifth Tuesday of May, except for years when May has only four Tuesdays, in which case the star is left illuminated and that year's winter lighting ceremony is forgone.
For a brief time during the borough's financial challenges of the early 1980s, the star and its operation were leased to various local commercial enterprises for the purposes of advertising, producing dozens of variations to the star's iconic white glow. Memorable versions included the two-year run of a blue and green bulb scheme promoting the Anchorage Admirals (an ABA basketball franchise which later relocated to California, eventually becoming the Sacramento Kings) and a collection of distasteful modifications made during its short-lived but regrettable sponsorship by a local gentlemen's club/shooting range.
Use of the landmark for advertising was discontinued when the borough permanently reclaimed operation of the star in 1988 and granted its inclusion on the state registry of historic places. Funding from this designation has enabled the construction of many of the star's modern amenities, including a unique inclined elevator, used to access the site for tours, and the observation deck, which offers one of the area's best views of the recently renovated state capitol building in downtown Anchorage.
Poorly Researched Local History is a recurring feature in which an Anchorage landmark is examined through a lens of outright lies and fake anecdotes that I totally just made up right now.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
There Are No Cats In Texas
For Christmas, we attempted our first trip out of Alaska with Megan, and the first for Kristen and me since June. We flew to Dallas to spend a week with my family after managing to reserve the least painful commercially-available itinerary, which still involved a 1:45 AM departure from Anchorage and two 3+ hour flights separated by a too-short-for-breakfast layover in Seattle. Before leaving, I had mentally sketched the framework of a potential post about whatever embarrassing/exhausting/infuriating/hilarious things might come of spending more than 13 (nonconsecutive) hours flying with a lap-bound infant, one who admittedly is calm relative to what she could be but is nonetheless the most volatile thing I have ever carried onto an airplane. Four incident-free flights later, the four-and-a-half-month-old version of her appears to be an excellent and very sleepy traveler, which is great except that now I need to find something else to write about.
But there are no cats in America
And the streets are paved with cheese
Oh there are no cats in America
So set your mind at ease
I do not have distinct personal memories of An American Tail as a notable part of my youth, despite its ostensible entrenchment in the sweet spot for being one: an animated film with anthropomorphic singing animals, released when I was five years old and featuring voice work by Dom Deluise, who in 1986 was a mere seven years from establishing himself as a favorite amongst my brothers and me for his virtuoso work in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, appearing as Don Giovanni in a single Godfather-spoofing scene which we could not possibly have fully appreciated at the time (having not seen the original) but still thought was hilarious because he is holding a plastic lizard. I probably did see An American Tail at some point - I think I vaguely remember watching part of it in school - but ours was a family of loyal Disney animation elitists, with Ferngully and The Land Before Time and All Dogs Go To Heaven all missing the cut for an otherwise extensive VHS collection.
But Kristen grew up watching and loving it, so much so that she can recall the slightly deeper tracks from the soundtrack (non-"Somewhere Out There" division) even after years since last seeing it. So the fact that "There Are No Cats In America" came to her mind leading up to and during the trip is perhaps not as random as I originally found it to be. It is sung in the movie by the European mice as they embark for the United States, having so exaggerated to themselves the virtues of America that they expect to arrive in a utopian wonderland, absent everything they hate about where they come from but overflowing with the good stuff.
This was an entirely appropriate parallel to us in the weeks leading up to our trip. A couple of Papa Mousekewitzes, counting down the days until we could escape this morose winter isolation and flee to the place universally recognized as Earth's most magnificent paradise: the north suburbs of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. We'll spend time with all of those people we miss! No snow! It will be warm enough for Megan to wear a sundress and lay on the grass outside! We can eat Chick-Fil-A and great Mexican food and fresh, moderately-priced fruit! [Prominent national retailer] has [more than zero] locations within fifty miles of your location! We can check out that park they built over the highway downtown! It was going to be amazing.
Of course, it turns out that there are cats in America, a fact alluded to in the latter half of the original movie and later capitalized upon as a surprisingly bleak plot turn in the sequel, Fievel Goes West, the second act of which concludes with the protagonist being gruesomely devoured by a cougar in Arizona. [This may not be true. I never saw it because it came out in 1993, same as both the aforementioned RH:MIT and the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, so my twelve-year-old self was fully occupied that year with one of those bizarre adolescent confluences of interests, alternately quoting lines from a Dave Chappelle character in a Mel Brooks movie and fine-tuning a French accent for an impression of a cartoon candelabra.]
But I'm pretty there were some cats, just like we didn't quite get to see everybody we wanted to see for as long as we hoped to see them, and the Mexican food was not quite as many notches above its non-Texan competition as I had remembered, and we never made it down to that park but it looked smaller than I expected when we drove past it, and it definitely wasn't warm:
I do not mean to suggest that the trip was not fulfilling - it was fantastic. You could say it was everything that we should have hoped it would be. But it turns out that voraciously anticipating a thing for weeks on end is a pretty good way to ensure that the thing can't possibly meet every ridiculous expectation you have made for it, which inevitably tempers your fun a bit and is totally unfair to the thing. It's not Dallas's fault that we had been romanticizing it for the last two months, so I suppose we should cut it some slack if people there drive a little worse than we had chosen to remember or if one of its many superior shopping malls closes earlier on Sundays than we had hoped. I even caught myself thinking about Alaska a few times, once wishing for a coffee from our local shop and later missing the mountains. And while we were gone, as snow was falling in Dallas, a rare December warm front even blew through Anchorage, melting enough of the accumulated snow here that we could actually see some green grass in our yard when we got back.
If given the option, would we live somewhere other than Alaska? Definitely. Will we be just as excited the next time we leave here during the winter? Almost certainly, yes. Will that again bring on unrealistic expectations for our destination? I assume so. Have I derailed my first metaphor about the song from the immigrant mouse movie by introducing a second and more tenuous one about the grass being greener elsewhere? It appears that I have. Am I a serious- and skilled-enough writer, then, to eloquently divert this conclusion back into the context of the original theme? Probably not.
But there are no cats in America
And the streets are paved with cheese
Oh there are no cats in America
So set your mind at ease
I do not have distinct personal memories of An American Tail as a notable part of my youth, despite its ostensible entrenchment in the sweet spot for being one: an animated film with anthropomorphic singing animals, released when I was five years old and featuring voice work by Dom Deluise, who in 1986 was a mere seven years from establishing himself as a favorite amongst my brothers and me for his virtuoso work in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, appearing as Don Giovanni in a single Godfather-spoofing scene which we could not possibly have fully appreciated at the time (having not seen the original) but still thought was hilarious because he is holding a plastic lizard. I probably did see An American Tail at some point - I think I vaguely remember watching part of it in school - but ours was a family of loyal Disney animation elitists, with Ferngully and The Land Before Time and All Dogs Go To Heaven all missing the cut for an otherwise extensive VHS collection.
But Kristen grew up watching and loving it, so much so that she can recall the slightly deeper tracks from the soundtrack (non-"Somewhere Out There" division) even after years since last seeing it. So the fact that "There Are No Cats In America" came to her mind leading up to and during the trip is perhaps not as random as I originally found it to be. It is sung in the movie by the European mice as they embark for the United States, having so exaggerated to themselves the virtues of America that they expect to arrive in a utopian wonderland, absent everything they hate about where they come from but overflowing with the good stuff.
This was an entirely appropriate parallel to us in the weeks leading up to our trip. A couple of Papa Mousekewitzes, counting down the days until we could escape this morose winter isolation and flee to the place universally recognized as Earth's most magnificent paradise: the north suburbs of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. We'll spend time with all of those people we miss! No snow! It will be warm enough for Megan to wear a sundress and lay on the grass outside! We can eat Chick-Fil-A and great Mexican food and fresh, moderately-priced fruit! [Prominent national retailer] has [more than zero] locations within fifty miles of your location! We can check out that park they built over the highway downtown! It was going to be amazing.
Of course, it turns out that there are cats in America, a fact alluded to in the latter half of the original movie and later capitalized upon as a surprisingly bleak plot turn in the sequel, Fievel Goes West, the second act of which concludes with the protagonist being gruesomely devoured by a cougar in Arizona. [This may not be true. I never saw it because it came out in 1993, same as both the aforementioned RH:MIT and the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, so my twelve-year-old self was fully occupied that year with one of those bizarre adolescent confluences of interests, alternately quoting lines from a Dave Chappelle character in a Mel Brooks movie and fine-tuning a French accent for an impression of a cartoon candelabra.]
But I'm pretty there were some cats, just like we didn't quite get to see everybody we wanted to see for as long as we hoped to see them, and the Mexican food was not quite as many notches above its non-Texan competition as I had remembered, and we never made it down to that park but it looked smaller than I expected when we drove past it, and it definitely wasn't warm:
 |
| Snow in the front yard of my parents' house on Christmas day. In Texas. It was 80 degrees there on December 18. COME ON. |
If given the option, would we live somewhere other than Alaska? Definitely. Will we be just as excited the next time we leave here during the winter? Almost certainly, yes. Will that again bring on unrealistic expectations for our destination? I assume so. Have I derailed my first metaphor about the song from the immigrant mouse movie by introducing a second and more tenuous one about the grass being greener elsewhere? It appears that I have. Am I a serious- and skilled-enough writer, then, to eloquently divert this conclusion back into the context of the original theme? Probably not.
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