2001-01-30 - Next morning

Who's Who Cheat Sheet
Who I Read

On the internal soundtrack: "For What It's Worth", Buffalo Springfield.

Well, I got all caught up yammering about men and women and forgot to discuss my weekend. Wonder of wonders, we actually DID stuff, instead of just lying around like lazy slugs as we usually do.

Saturday morning I dragged Poindexter out on a drive. First item on the itinerary, which triggered the whole trip, was to find the "unofficial" dirt-bike-riding place we'd heard about.

It turned out to be a well-established trail (fresh tire tracks on it, even) that follows the power lines. It was utterly perfect. There's a wide swath of land expressly for power lines that goes on for miles, occasionally intersecting roads. The swath is wide enough so that the noise of the bikes is most likely inaudible (in heater or AC weather, anyway) to the people living on either side of it.

Frankly, I can't think of a better use for power-line land. It's not parkland or pristine forest, it's just sitting there, and I mean, who'd want to picnic there? It's all overgrown. People who ride dirt bikes are already crazy so they're less likely to worry about getting brain cancer from the power lines or anything like that.

After this, I decided to drag him to Clifton, because it's so cute and because Michelle reminded me of its existence last week. It's a small town, exactly one square mile, I believe (if that). It's been preserved so it still looks and feels like a small country town. It's surrounded by large estates owned by people with horses who have kept it from being built up at all.

All the homes in the town have little historical markers on them telling you about the history of the house. The person who wrote "Sleepless in Seattle" lived for a while in a house across the street from another house that was once owned by someone who went down on the Titanic.

From there, up to Centreville to the used-book store where I browsed until he ran out of CDs to look at and got fidgety. Then we ate at the Chinese buffet next door until I was so stuffed I was falling asleep. We got home and took a delicious one-hour nap, since, at the end of the day, we are still lazy slugs.

I love buffets because there's such a variety. I hate having to pick just one thing in a restaurant. Sometimes I don't pick just one thing, actually -- I've ordered two entrees before and taken home what I couldn't eat. Poindexter thinks I'm crazy. He says, "You can always come back." But that's not entirely true, because every time I suggest we go to Kinkead's again, he says, "We've already eaten there, I want to try something new." Kinkead's has a different menu every week, at least, so this is a poor argument.

What I need is a dining pal who will go to Kinkead's with me every other month or so.

But I digress. On Sunday we had Aaron and Melissa (Alicia's brother and his girlfriend) over for dinner and the Super Bowl. Aaron is a lifelong Giants fan, so he was not so happy. Melissa made fun of him the whole time -- "Well, I guess we don't need to watch anymore" after the 3rd touchdown for the Ravens.

I hadn't spent much time with Melissa before, but she's fun. Asks a lot of questions (she doesn't seem the least bit embarrassed to admit if she doesn't know stuff), and doesn't seem fazed by weird topics of conversation, like, "How does a tornado drive a piece of straw into solid wood?" Gotta like a girl like that. Poindexter likes her because she's "feisty". He can sympathize with Aaron's plight, being involved with a feisty broad.

So, one of my little pet peeves is seeing the word "fazed" spelled as "phased". According to the 1971 unabridged dictionary, either spelling is okay, but "phased" just doesn't seem right to me.

I am such a word geek. I wonder how hopelessly boring this must seem to readers. Or maybe not. I broached the "fazed" topic with two coworkers and they both had strong feelings about it. One of them mentioned that it was like using British spellings for things (analyse, sympathise, colours, etc.)

I'm also fascinated by the fact that this discussion is best carried out in writing. Fussing over same-sound-different-spelling only happens because of writing.

Poindexter is sending me snippets from the website of the riding area in West Virginia that he wants to go to.

He's all excited. I told him to start planning our trip. It's going to be a seven-hour drive, at a minimum, so we have to figure two full days of driving. Yuck.

I'm probably going to have to find a way to rent a quad, unless he thinks I can learn to ride a dirt bike. I can't go all the way out there and not at least try it. I bet I'd enjoy the scenery. The rest of the time I'll probably be happily ensconced in some small town somewhere reading books or walking around.

Er, that is, if I can actually find a town. I'm typing some of the town names into Yahoo and they are turning out to be merely "areas", or crossroads, at the most. Doesn't seem to be anything resembling an actual "town" at all. It's really going to be the boonies. Wow. And here I whine because the grocery store is too far to walk to on a regular basis.

So Poindexter has this funny habit of pausing, when he's relating a story, to try to pin down the exact timing of the story. Like this:

"I think I was sixteen. No, seventeen. Wait. I was working at Round Table and ... no, sixteen. Or maybe seventeen..."

It's completely irrelevant to the story, of course. His mother does this too. It's pretty cute. Unless I'm very impatient to hear the rest of the story, in which case I have to interrupt and say, "Will you get on with it?!?!?"

I'm mystified by the notes people put on their online journals. "If you know me in real life, don't read this!" Are they serious? I'm not talking about the ones that ASK people not to read, but the ones that just say, "Don't read this." I mean, do they really believe that little note will keep people from reading? The internet is PUBLIC. I can take precautions to hide my identity, but if somebody who knows me finds me, oh well. I can ask them not to read, but I sure wouldn't bet on it.

Would I read, if someone I knew had a journal with this request? I don't know. I'd try not to. If I did, I'd feel guilty about it. Hard to say.

You know how people are always talking about how electric cars are so clean and don't pollute, so we should all drive them, etc. etc.?

Now, I don't know much about electric cars, but I have two questions:

1. If everybody drove an electric car, wouldn't we need a LOT MORE power plants to generate the electricity? And wouldn't those power plants pollute as much as gasoline-powered cars would? Nuclear power plants wouldn't pollute the air, but everybody worries about nuclear waste or accidents.

2. If the electric cars run on batteries, where are we going to put the batteries when they die out? Aren't they going to take up a lot of space, dripping battery acid into the ground and the water?

It sounds like electric cars aren't much better. What the environmentalists really ought to be doing is insisting everyone walk or ride bicycles.

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