Okay, okay, okay. I said I'd update once I got back from my trip, but what I didn't realize was that classes started just about the day I got back. And I know I said there might be pictures, but what I didn't realize was that I have no idea where the cord that connects my camera to my computer is. Don't worry, there weren't any good pictures anyway.
So, I've been getting ready to write a really long entry recounting the details of the trip, but I was getting bored just thinking about it so I can't imagine it'd be particularly interesting to read. Instead, some highlights:
SPOILERS! (Click to view)
The dinner's on the train were all pretty interesting. They sit you down in the dining car with a table full of strangers and you've got no choice but to talk to them, which is pretty nice. I spent the first dinner with a couple who rode the train from Mexico to Montreal to visit their son. They didn't speak a whole lot of English, but could more or less understand it, and I don't speak any Spanish but can understand a little of it, so between the three of us we managed to carry on a nice little dinner conversation.
The second dinner I ate with a Grandfather and teenage granddaughter on their way to a rafting trip with the Elder Hostel, and a guy from Detroit who was moving to Seattle. I ended up eating dinner with him the next night, too. The grandfather looked like John Locke from Lost. He had that same kind of hundred yard stare and a sort of a solid Midwestern common sense thing going on. The granddaughter seemed a little skeptical about the whole rafting thing, but like she was enjoying spending time with her granddad. The guy from Detroit was an interesting sketch. He'd never been to Seattle, but was moving there to start over. He made some comment about starting fresh, but avoided going into any of the details about why he needed to leave, stating simply that he needed to "get away from the hate." He was a finish carpenter, but was on his way to meet up with his brother who was going to give him a job at a concession stand he owned in the stadium in Seattle. Although he was from Detroit, he had spent his summers with sort of a foster family on a farm in Vermont, so we had that to talk about.
Dinner three was with an older couple from Wisconsin and my friend from Detroit. The man had been an engineer who worked on MRI machines from their advent until his retirement. He actually reminded me very much of the grandfather from the earlier dinner, and I had trouble telling them apart when I ran into either of them later on during the trip.
The fourth and final dinner was with a father, mother and ten or so year old daughter on their way home to Portland from a trip in the Rockies. The father was a professor at a junior college in Portland, either that or a junior professor at a college in Portland, and the mother was a blood technician at the VFW. The little girl was a cute, indulged little thing. While she was on the hiking trip she was very nearly rammed off the trail by a mountain goat, and the family had the good sense to regard the whole thing as an amusing story to tell now that the danger was past.
So, after the trip out to Portland, a couple of days in Portland, and then a relatively lightning trip back East in my fiance's car. Not a whole lot of interesting stories to tell, but a lot of road. Don't drive a Honda Element through Utah. It picks up the gusts of wind like it had a sail.
I read "We Wish to Inform You That in the Morning We Will Be Killed With Our Families" on the train. It's a pretty amazing book. I'm not usually a genocide junkie, but I read it because of the recent allegations that France was involved in the genocide. I wanted a little more background. The book does a fantastic job humanizing the genocide, and giving a broad picture of the whole mess without getting bogged down in statistics.
On the ride home I listened to "The Time Traveler's Wife," on the recommendation of the lovely Oubliette, "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim" by David Sedaris, "Rant" by Chuck Palenhuik (or however you spell it, and "Frankenstein." I really like imagining Mary Shelley tiptoeing around Lord Byron and Percy Shelley pretending she didn't have a thing on the two great poets, all the while writing a novel that would last as long as any of their poetry.
"The Time Traveler's Wife" is a very beautiful love story. I'm not usually the kind to go in for beautiful love stories, but this one was interesting. The characters where good, and the confused chronology lit both the general narrative and the love affair in an unusual way. Worth the read.
"Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim" was pretty great. David Sedaris is so funny and tragic, and its pretty great to hear him read his own stuff.
"Rant" is engrossing. I didn't read "Fight Club," but I saw the movie, and it seems Palanhuik seems to think social revolution kind of grows out of the ground, and the plot development seemed a little arbitrary on account, not to mention a healthy dose of bullshit metaphysics, but it was pretty good anyway.
Well, that's kind of all I've got for the moment, but I hope you're all doing well.
Also, the mice in my new cabin seem to have a strange and disturbing predilection to crawling behind the uncovered outlets and then dying, and then going unnoticed until they putrefy. I've had the smell of rotten mouse trapped in my head like a bad song for days. 
