Statisticians Are On Crack

Yeah, really. They are so mean to me. Why? What have I done to deserve multiple linear regression with dummy variables on two catchment systems? I am a good person. I brush my teeth twice a day. I use my turn signal, even when parallel parking. I pay my taxes. Who came up with this horrible stuff with Greek letters? Why couldn't they have just done eenie-meenie-miney-moe and left it at that? But no. They couldn't. Because they are evil and sadistic and want to torture grad students with textbooks that are ONE BILLION PAGES LONG FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND ALL THAT IS HOLY WHY DOES MY STATISTICS TEXTBOOK WEIGH LIKE 45% OF MY ENTIRE BODY MASS WHY AM I DOING THIS ON A FRIDAY NIGHT AAAHHHHHHH

I mean, for real. My professors are all like, "woohoo R programming is like AWESOME for regression models and the codes are pretty easy to write once you get the hang of it R programming it is like sooooo much better than SAS software look here's an R code no problem OMG LOL!!!11!!11!" And I'm like "OH MY GOD I AM DOING THINGS WITH COMPUTERS OTHER THAN CHANGING THE FONT SIZE FROM 12 TO 11.5 IN WORD MY BRAIN IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE"

My friend Joseph Conrad was SO thinking about statistics when he wrote,

"He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—"'The horror! The horror!'"

That is pretty much me, every time I get a new statistics assignment.

Also, I might possibly have had too much coffee today. That is entirely probable. Like, significant at the 0.05 level with a CI of (0.983, 1.025) noooooooostatisticssssssmwioa#$(#@*Yer8p932th34298tgn ejafsovithp9 i#*($nfiufnhgjesliu par ibt4qpiugh934869(8Y50325(#@!$^87Y

Screw this I am going to go eat a WHOLE LOT OF ICE CREAM

Triumph of the Fightin' Squirrels

I straight up jacked this picture off a facebook album because Dumb Brother hasn't provided me with one yet. I am sorry, Sarah, we are not even facebook friends yet.

BREVARD COLLEGE NATIONAL COLLEGIATE MOUNTAIN BIKE CHAMPIONS 2009

(I just checked The Hoo's blog and she has the same picture so things are cool. She also did some serious spanking of the competition, so check out her blog.)

Way to dominate the podium. As we say here in Canada, "It's not hockey, but it's got body checks so it's okay, and it's pretty much aboot time Brevard won, eh?"

Meanwhile, my new university is doing its utmost to prove that it is not good at any sport other than hockey. Definitely not football. Apparently we just lost a game to Simon Fraser University. What the F is the deal, Thunderbirds. Shape the hell up. UBC is 130 places above SFU in world university rankings (second in Canada! and U of Toronto is great and all but it doesn't count because it doesn't have a nude beach OR a pump track) and hogs THE prime piece of real estate in Vancouver (which actually doesn't even belong to us, it belongs to the First Nations people, but they are kind enough to let us use it). And, Simon Fraser has like 32,000 students, and we have like 48,000. If I have to put up with being trampled by 22,000 tights-wearing undergrads (excluding the grad students and most of the penis-possessing organisms, but including emo males) every time I venture out onto the sidewalks, then our stupid football team can DO WORK. However, our hockey team kicked Manitoba's frozen ass, the weather here is obscenely beautiful, and one of the headlines of the student newspaper (named The Ubyssey, which I alternately pronounced "you-bee-uh-see" or "uhhb-uh-see" until last week, when two of my professors were kind enough to explain that it's just an alternate journalistic-cutesy spelling of "UBC" and is pronounced "you-bee-cee," and I felt somewhat like a moron because I THOUGHT THEY WERE TRYING TO BE ALL HOMER'S ODYSSEY although that definitely verifies that I am a moron, because "Odyssey" is not pronounced "oh-dee-uh-see" and I just totally understood why they spell Ubyssey that way and THIS IS WHY I AM NOT A JOURNALIST.)

Anyway, one of the headlines of the student newspaper says, "Grad Students Get Mandatory Three-Week Vacation" and I had to read it twice before I realized that they weren't bullshitting, and three times before it occurred to me that we get a three-week vacation because our departments OWN OUR SOULS and we are supposed to be working YEAR-ROUND. Summer break is nonexistent. Fall break is nonexistent. Spring break happens in February this year (this way I can pretend that it's actually national observation of my birthday and spend two weeks at Rouge Brewing and Olympic National Park). Nevertheless, it's nice that they make those three weeks mandatory.

And speaking of the gigantic event happening here in February that Air Canada is having a feeding frenzy on, WTF is up with these?


I just saw these for the first time. It is totally freaking blowing my mind. I think they are spiking the hot chocolate at Tim Hortons. Is that a Sasquatch with a tattoo of a First Nations sculpture? Why is the alien panda winking at me? Is the poky, feathery thing a triceratops-vulture hybrid?

Two minutes of professional grad student internet research tells me that yes, it is a Sasquatch, the apparent tattoo is of Ilanaaq (Ilanaaq is the Inuktitut word for friend, and Ilanaaq is the actual symbol of the Vancouver games), the poky-feathery thing is a Thunderbird (I should have known that), and the panda thing with a cowlick is a Sea Bear. Like, DUH! A Sea Bear! Of course. They also have a friend, Mukmuk, who is a marmot. Naturally, since Canada, like the US, has quite a few extremely white people who want to be as exciting as Wonder Bread, there are some unbelievably white people out there who all have their panties in a wad because the Winter Olympic mascots aren't European enough. (Really.) One of them, who apparently has secret aspirations of being Ann Coulter's lesbian lover, went so far as to say that there is no representation of the "Europeans who built Canada." Um, somebody's out there showing her ass. Intelligent AND classy!

And yes, the Vancouver Olympic mascots totally school Atlanta's lame-o mascot, Izzy, which as far as I know didn't really do anything or resemble anything other than a particularly colorful and obnoxious sperm.


There are a billion people talking very loudly in the hall outside my office and it is making me SO MAD because obviously I am super focused and working on Important Things. There were also about three people randomly hanging out in my doorway because there was no more room in the hall, so I just went over and closed the door kind of in their face. Sorry people. Important Things demand silence.

Brevard College braaaaaaap

Gooey Ducks

There are many kinds of sea critters out here. Some of them are quite edible.

Others are purportedly edible. But dubious.

Julius and I were at Taylor Shellfish Farms, which would not make a great pet store unless you prefer pets of a very non-cuddly variety. Anyway, we saw some live geoducks for sale. That is, by the way, the correct spelling. I asked Julius what a "geo duck" is and got laughed at, because apparently LIKE EVERYONE KNOWS it's pronounced "gooeyduck," even the culinary school dunces. It's a type of clam that is popular for food in Asia and sells for like $30 a pound. Wikipedia tells me that the geoducks are an $80 million industry in the US, which astounds me. I have such faith in you, Wikipedia, do not lie to me now. It might well be correct, though.

These things look seriously disturbing. I was planning to put up a picture of a geoduck, but they are all so pornographic that I'm afraid someone will report me if I so much as add a link on my blog. I leave it up to you.

Wow. Reading further in Wikipedia, I found this:

"The geoduck is the official mascot of The Evergreen State College, located at the southernmost tip of Puget Sound in Olympia, Washington. The school's Latin motto, Omnia Extares (or, "let it all hang out") is at least partially intended as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the creature's phallic appearance."

!!!!!!!!!!!

(Break for frantic google search to validate this claim.)

As my former Wheelworks employer Jon Dalman would say, I shit you negative.

HAHAAHAHAHAHAAAA HOW DOES THE WORLD NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS??!!?!!?

Well, everyone needs to just quit freaking worrying about my alma mater's proud reputation as one of the nation's top ten party schools.

The Saga Continued WITH PHOTOS

Unbelievably, pictures are loading faster today than ever before, so this will be a picture-intense blog post. To begin, all those mountain bike your mom's a freerider type movies from the Pacific Northwest ARE TRUE. IT LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE THAT IN REAL LIFE. With ferns and moss and huge logs and elevated bridges and a few unshowered hairy potheads and everything.

The ferns are all over the place and they are huge. Some of them are as tall as me.

Every trail looks like about like this. Or much, much gnarlier.

Typical view from the trail.

A tip. I learned quickly to never, ever diss the mountains around here, even though with the exception of Mount Baker, their summits are nowhere close to the elevations of Pisgah mountains. It occurred to me halfway up the Death Climb the other day (it was already called that, I didn't just name it that, I'm not that much of a wimp) that 1500 foot peaks, although not sounding like much in western North Carolina, mean something VERY DIFFERENT when your back door is literally at sea level. More than once, I actually found myself trying to reason (aloud) with the trail: "GOD, trail, I KNOW I'm kind of out of shape, I GOT IT ALREADY. WHY DO YOU KEEP POUNDING THAT FACT INTO ME?! I just FREAKING MOVED ACROSS THE CONTINENT AND I AM SO BUSY I HAVEN'T EVEN BOUGHT SHAVING CREAM YET! Give me a BREAK. CAN'T YOU SEE I'M TRYING?" The trail had no reply other than a stiffer grade and more round slippery rocks, and once, a shrub branch that conveniently whipped me across the eyeball. How there was enough force for it to do any damage, I do not know, as I was making my painfully slow way around an uphill singletrack turn at the moment, but I wasn't able to see clearly out of that eye for a really long time. However, my eye is completely fine now. Thanks to my chef for making me an eyepatch. Obviously, I need to start wearing my stylin' clear sunglasses.

I know! I look awful! But I only had one functioning eye and Julius was abusing the powers of flash photography!

(Yes, that is Cheap Beer on the table. We're attempting to be financially responsible adults.)

The sunset from our living room windows.

Julius putting together our table, which was nice and cheap, probably because it took him like 4 hours just to assemble the chairs.

Our first dinner in our new house. This is the beginnings of pasta with shittakes (local), cherry tomatoes (local), squash (local), pancetta, and pesto (local basil), topped with parmesan cheese. The pan it's cooking in is called a French pan. It was kind of expensive, but absolutely worth it. We use it for almost every meal. Julius says the two most essential pans for anyone to have are a French pan and a cast iron pan.

The finished product.

Julius lovingly cradling our new plant in one hand while tossing the pasta with the other hand. We bought our plant at the farmers' market.

And now for something completely different.

After a long day of driving from Topeka, we got into Boulder at sunset and headed right up to Lyons (fifteen miles north of Boulder) to try some Oskar Blues beer at the actual brewery. Hate to say it, but we were sadly disappointed. Believe me, Dale's Pale Ale is much, much better out of a tap in Jordan Street Cafe in Brevard NC than it is out of the tap at the brewery itself. We were sadly astonished that the vibe at Oskar Blues wasn't more interesting. Maybe we were just unlucky enough to have a grouchy bartender who seemed to be going through menopause, but also, everything was insanely overpriced. I mean, come ON, $6 for a pint of beer at the brewery where it was made, when good ol' Jordan Street only charges like $3.50, and it's like a billion miles away?! And $7 for a basket of onion rings? Dumb!

We hiked in Boulder the next day (Hey Jen! Thanks for letting us stay in your house even though you were out of town! Miss ya!), then headed up to Green River, WY and stayed with some of Julius' friends. Then a long, hot drive across desert into Idaho. We went through Arco (America's first nuclear-powered town, which is every bit as weird as you'd expect it to be) and camped at Craters of the Moon National Monument. This place is FREAKING BIZARRE. It's a bunch of millenia-old lava flows in the middle of the desert. It has a strange, eerie beauty, and it's actually a great, if somewhat spooky, place to camp. The wind whistles around the towers of lava rock. Super creepy.On our way into the Sawtooth Mountains the next day, we stopped at this sketchy looking local restaurant by the road and had a FANTASTIC breakfast (pancakes with fresh blueberries for me, fried steak for Julius) that was cheaper than IHOP. Screw you, IHOP.

IDAHOOOOOO. The place where I spent a summer working for the Forest Service. We went kayaking in Redfish Lake. There are hot springs (very hot) everywhere along the South Fork Payette River (very cold).

Of course I had to swim in it.

The hot springs are the weird-colored stuff in the foreground of the picture. It's hard to tell, but Julius took this while standing about 20 feet above the river. The hot springs flow down the hill and over some rocks in a waterfall and form pools right next to the river. There were a bunch of people in swimsuits inhabiting the pools, so he didn't take any pictures of them.

Many hours and a noisy campsite after Idaho, we got to the Columbia River Gorge, and then to the temperate rainforest.

This is a waterfall fairly close to Mount St. Helens.

Also, we began to see SLUGS.

Portland has the Rogue Brewing Company DISTILLERY, where they make vodka, gin, and rum. EXCITING. Check this out. But expensive. So we just had a couple of fantastic beers. Also, we checked out Widmer Brothers Brewery. They are famous for their Hefeweizen, which I'll admit is not a style I particularly like, but if anyone out there is Hefeweizen-obsessed, apparently this is the place to be. However, even though we didn't sample the famous Hefeweizen, we tried the Broken Halo IPA and it is fantastic. Just about on par with the quality of Pisgah Brewing Company back home.

From Portland, we headed up the coast to Seattle and the fish market. This is a place we MUST return to in a non-tourist season. It was fantastic, but there were many many people getting in the way. However, we did have some tasty fish and chips and more good beer at Pike Brewing Company. I love their XXXXX Stout, although I kind of felt like an idiot when I was ordering it. ("Yeah, I'd like the XXX...X...XX...X how many of those are there? Crap. Okay, I want the stout. You know what I mean.")

Seattle is only 90 miles south of Bellingham, so finally, we arrived. Two frantic days of driving all over the place looking at apartments and houses, and we got our place. We're working on sampling the local cuisine and microbrew options. We went to Chuckanut Brewery and Kitchen on our first evening in town. I had a yamburrito (AWESOME) and Julius had a bratwurst slathered in sauerkraut (I happen to love sauerkraut. However, I am not sure why, but sauerkraut hath no greater enemy than my father. If anyone wants to gross out Mr. Cowie, which otherwise is very hard to do, bring him a big jar of sauerkraut.) Another night, we went ot the famous Boundary Bay Brewery and Bistro. BBBbbbbbbuh. I take slight issue with their (probably unintentional) alliteration, but otherwise, this place is GREAT.

Well, I'm quickly becoming fidgety, so I'm off to do my Annual Run in the Name of Cyclocross Training, which I always do sometime in late summer or early fall, setting out with the best of intentions, and then swiftly (within approximately 30 seconds) beginning to hate myself.

Bertrand Russell wrote a book called Why I Am Not a Christian. I've never read it (although I want to, and I intend to do exactly that when the time comes for a break in reading about glaciers) and I must admit I know nothing about it, although I think I can infer from the title that it is probably about why he is (was) not a Christian. I've always sort of admired the nice simple forcefulness of the title. Also, every time I go running, I form my own mental work of literature, known as Why I Am Not a Runner.

1. It makes my knees hurt
2. I am slow
3. Bicycling is faster
4. Slowness is ego-damaging
5. My running shoes are kind of ugly

Bertrand Russell would be SO PROUD.

Also, if we want to, we can go crabbing in our backyard.

And here is a picture of me not looking like a pirate, although this reminds me that I have a bad habit of doing this weird asymmetrical eye thing when I'm out of breath and smiling. I had pretty much just climbed from the bay down there to the clifftops where I so inelegantly posed for this self-portrait. I really need to work on that eye thing. Wow.

My teeth look pretty nice though. If I do say so myself.

Mateys

At the moment there are two pirate ships firing fake cannons at each other in Bellingham Bay. Full-sized ships with all their gigantic sails up.

This is a little bit weird.

It seems that a nice landlocked activity like mountain biking might be a safe choice this afternoon.

Learning

Wow! So Julius has been working with the natives and learning lots of stuff! He got home from work and educated me.

1. Remember my blog post of a few days ago in which I enthusiastically complained about how slow people drive around here? Well, it REALLY IS what you were thinking. It's what Julius and I jokingly hypothesized while we were on the way back from IKEA Seattle the other day. But it's true! Everyone drives slow around here because they are stoned ALL THE TIME.

2. It seems that we are in the town known around Uhmerica as "Hamsterdam," because it's like Amsterdam, but smaller.

3. If you want to make Julius mad, tell him you like your steaks well done. My chef is a connoisseur of meat (and everything), but he's much happier with vegetarians than he is with people who don't like their beef still twitching and bleeding all over the plate. In fact, at his new restaurant, any steak order of medium well or well done rings up in the kitchen as "steak fucked."


He recommends the above image from askthemeatman as a guide for morons.

"If you want to eat a steak above medium, eat chicken!" he says. (The word "chicken" is kind of an obscenity for him. He is not a fan.) "Or chew on a piece of my shoe! Eating a steak medium well or well done is the equivalent of butchering a steak that's already been butchered. Fat is what makes a steak juicy. Marbling is key. If you cook that all out and dry the steak out, chew on my shoe again. You are not worthy of Real Steak. No, wait, chew on some random person's shoe. Chew on Dick Cheney's shoe. You are not even worthy of my shoe."

That is a direct quote. He promises to bribe me with steak in order to update his blog for him in the next few days, so you totally ought to check it out pretty soon. Not yet though. Long day. Sleepy. Much more exciting learning things to come soon. Such as bacon donuts.

Garlic Bread: The Elite Edition

Tonight is Julius' first night of work at Dirty Dan Harris' Steakhouse, which has an unfortunate name reminiscent of a sketchy theme restaurant on the Vegas strip, but luckily is instead one of the area's most expensive restaurants. According to their website, they "specialize in custom aged corn-fed natural beef, slow roasted Prime Rib, hand-cut steaks, wild Pacific Salmon, Halibut, Dungeness Crab, Alaskan King Crab, Chuckanut Bay local shellfish, Prawns, Scallops, Pastas, hickory smoked ribs, specialty fare, grilled vegetables, incredible appetizers, fresh soups, crunchy salads and delicious desserts." Yes, I certainly hope their appetizers are incredible, because a half order of freaking garlic bread is $7.95. That must be some mighty special garlic bread. I would also volunteer that there is probably a more intriguing, less obvious adjective to use for salad than "crunchy," as I would hope that "crunchy" is a given in regards to salad (likewise for "delicious" and "desserts"), but I suppose I should spend less energy on criticizing, because I have plenty of other things to spend energy on at the moment.

Speaking of Julius and food, he is somewhat averse to pictures of himself, so they are difficult to obtain, but in case anyone wants a visual, here is a photo of him chopping things with a very sharp knife, which is his general state of being.


(He was doing a cooking demo on the patio of a restaurant, which explains the odd bars behind him in this picture.)

Also, we were surprised to find out today while looking for other things on the Washington State Department of Labor website that the state minimum wage is:

$8.55!!!!

Holy crap! Someone's got their head on straight!

I am not sure whether to be humiliated or outraged by the fact that I have NEVER made as much as $8.55 an hour. Not yet. (Okay, my tips at coffeeshops would have probably averaged out to that, or a bit more sometimes, but my actual hourly salary has never been that much. And in Washington, the $8.55 an hour applies to EVERYONE, including restaurant staff. They work it out in restaurants by requiring the servers to tip out to the chefs, which will bring Julius' hourly wage up a fairly decent amount.)

So anyway, I promised a more thorough update on the trip out here. So we packed up and left town, which was weird, and not particularly fun because I hate saying goodbye to people, and it was a crazy rush of getting things done, and I won't dwell on that because I do not enjoy departures from places I love, even if the departure is for positive reasons. And I miss everybody.

We got to the western side of Knoxville. This was fairly late on a Saturday evening. We were planning to drive to Sewanee, Tennessee, where I went to college, and camp out sketchily somewhere on campus (not as weird as it sounds, because as anyone who went to Sewanee knows, the campus has 10,000 forested acres). I was driving merrily along on cruise control when the car jerked and stopped accelerating. There was a moment of shock when we both looked at each other doubting that it had really happened. But it had. Oh yes, it had. And to affirm our fears, the car refused to go above 3,000 rpms without shutting off.

Note: this car is a 2004 Honda Accord that had been immaculately maintained by Julius' sister, its one former owner, who had only ever had it serviced by Honda dealerships, was completely up to date on maintenance, and has less than 100,000 miles. Improbable.

Note #2: THIS HAS NOT SHAKEN MY ABSOLUTE FAITH IN HONDAS. I LOVE HONDAS.

We were at a random exit that contained nothing but a couple of gas stations, but we managed to get back one exit, which in an immense stroke of luck was the mall exit, with loads of things to do like go to Earthfare, go to Target, go to Circuit City, go to Starbucks, and go to overpriced clothing stores. There were hotels. Unfortunately they were of the Hilton suites type. We didn't have an option. The car wouldn't go more than 35 mph and we had no idea how long it would keep going, or what damage we might be doing by continuing to drive it, or at what point it might completely quit and leave us needing a tow truck. It pains me to stay at a Hilton. But nowhere else had open rooms, and when the only other option is sleeping on the grass median in an upscale strip mall and probably getting arrested...well, I'm just saying, do not judge me. (Not even you, ex who would probably think me less evolved because I did not pitch a tent in the corner of the Target parking lot as you would have done, and I strongly suspect that you do not read my blog anyway. I greatly appreciate my particular genetic makeup and I am deeply content with my state of evolution, so scram.)

So anyway, guess what?

Car dealerships are open to sell you cars on Sunday. They are absolutely not open to service cars on Sunday.

So, we parked the car and spent an incredibly enjoyable day going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth on the same two-mile stretch of crappy strip mall feeling like we were really about to lose our minds. Strip malls are absolutely not designed for walking anywhere. It would be so easy to make them that way.

It seemed that we would never escape the time warp that held us in the Knoxville mall exit. At 7:30 am on Monday, we were at the dealership. They give you free coffee while they work on your car. It is terrible coffee. But fabulously, the problem was relatively small and inexpensive and fixed in less than an hour, and we were on our way. We detoured through Sewanee, where I admired the new science building, and we looked at Foster Falls, where I went swimming about this time six years ago at the start of my freshman year.


(The picture isn't from six years ago. Although I probably look about the same otherwise, I would like to point out that in that time I have upgraded from Tevas to Chacos. Sport sandals are, like, a couple of steps below haute coture (look!!! French words!!!!) but I do try.)

Then we went to St. Louis.


(yay for the arch)

Now, there are probably those of you out there who have had positive St. Louis experiences. I've even had one myself, when I was on a family trip and we walked around the arch and it was really huge and exciting, because we were seeing in real life one of the things on the state quarters and in books and so on. In fact, some people reading this might even have some kind of St. Louis connection. We did not even slightly enjoy it, though.

So we got there in a heavy dusk. (Dad always makes fun of me for describing the state of light as "heavy dusk," because he says dusk can't be heavy, but I think it totally can, so whatever Dad.) It took a bit of a struggle to find the downtown tourist area. By the time we did, it was so freaking dark we couldn't believe it. I mean, NO streetlights. And lots of creeps out on the sidewalks. Pee on the sides of buildings. NO RESTAURANTS. (Well, there was a Hooters.) WEIRD. We spent about 45 minutes walking around getting sketched out and then decided to leave. With a lot of trouble, we got back on the HUGE MAJOR interstate. Suddenly, a sign that we hadn't seen before. The HUGE MAJOR interstate was closing in three miles and offered no hints about detours. Thus commenced a horrible mess of clueless navigation, sketchy neighborhoods, crazy other drivers, and generally being lost. We were both starving and by the time we FINALLY got going the right way, it was after 10 pm and most restaurants were closed. It was a DISASTER.

That is how we ended up at The Sketchiest Grossest IHOP In The World, where we were charged $5 for some of the nastiest coffee I have ever had the misfortune to drink. We sort of gnawed on some disgusting pancakes and tried to drink the coffee, then paid a ridiculously large amount of money (given the quality of the food) while people who bore a striking resemblance to "Meth is Death" billboards skulked in the restaurant's shadowy corners. Proceeding hopelessly on our way, we drove straight into an enormous rainstorm and noticed that the state of Missouri (HOW do you spell that state?! Did I spell it right? Am I just dumb or have I had so much coffee today that I have pushed myself over the edge? And I'm supposed to be going to grad school?!) has no interest in re-painting lines on their highways. We abandoned the idea of camping and drove to Topeka, which just seemed to be a weird place, but maybe I judge unfairly because it was 3 am, then paid too much for a crappy hotel room, slept for a while, and set off towards Colorado and the mountains.

This is a long story. Ha! I bet I'm making people bored. I was bored too! The midwest is gigantic and boring! Sorry, People Who Have Lived In The Midwest And Might Like It, but it IS.

And by the way, thanks Rayna, for reminding me of some good times we had at the Russian border. Yep, at least I learned to NOT TAKE PICTURES OF THE BORDER!!!!! Luckily for everybody, the Russian border patrol is totally on the ball. I feel SO much better knowing that NOBODY American is EVER going to sneak over the Mongolian-Russian border at Sukhbaatar. Or take pictures of it. Whew.

Ok so I'm hungry and would like to have a beer, but I get too confused doing two things at once, like trying to drink a beer or eat while blogging, and I should definitely be working on unpacking my clothes, since we've been here for over a week now, and I suppose it would be nice to at least take out the recycling and garbage because boyfriend is undoubtedly very busy making food and earning money in a hot kitchen right now. The saga of our trip will be continued soon. For now, suffice to say that we did get out here somehow, and we get to look at this every evening (that isn't cloudy, and granted, lots of them are cloudy, but that's why there are so many berries and ferns out here so I can deal with it).


(PS there are mountains too and I love mountains.)