On the road

Thanks for the birthday wishes, I guess there is no point in trying to dodge them!

I'm on the road, en route to Vancouver with numerous stops in between. Generally not urban ones, I'm traveling on the cheap (relatively) and cities kinda cost a lot. Tonight I'm in Mt. Shasta, and will be going snowboarding tomorrow. Tomorrow night, I'll hit Rice Hill for some truckhawkin'. Not that I expect any great success, but it never fails to be entertaining.

I forgot a bag. A whole bag. My travel checklist is obsessively perfect; I never forget anything. (It's the same checklist I use for catering, so it HAS to be perfect.) But I was quite busy this morning and ended up leaving it behind. Fortunately, it's a small one filled with entirely generic items, all clothes, and in fact it's things I have to buy more of anyway. But still, I feel really burned about it. This has NEVER happened before. I will have quite a bit of time in Corvallis so I think a little shopping will be in order. In the meanwhile, I have only one pair of socks, and I have to snowboard in them tomorrow. Tasty!

My attempt at an Internet date failed again. Since I started using the various sites my dates have had a 100% failure rate. Every single one has been canceled for one reason or another. This time, he got the day wrong and called Monday to confirm for Tuesday - I had said I'd meet him in Red Bluff today. At least I'm not actually being stood up, but still, it's amazing to me. Each individual case is plausible and understandable, but collectively, it's ridiculous.

So I canceled the Red Bluff motel and elected to stay at the Woodsman, in Mt. Shasta, considerably closer to the slopes. They have (relatively) good rates, and I was somewhat irrationally sold on their nightly wine and cheese hour. (Cheap wine, cheap cheese, stale crackers, but I was able to schmooze some potential clients.) It's funny, both the Woodsman and the Strawberry Valley Inn are right across the street from each other and owned by the same people - it's as if they intended to market one side for women, the other for men. The wine thing was over there, on the girly side in a frilly parlor. Over here it's all rough timbers and wood panels. Grrrufff!

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to eat in the local chinese restaurant. These are comfortable places to eat alone, with their cagey little booths where you can hide. I had forgotten, though, how totally vulgar the food is. My mongolian beef plate was so hideously awful that it got me wondering how it became that way - the place was quiet, and I could hear that my dinner was being made to order, but how can you turn a single (albeit unreasonably large) serving of beef and green peppers into a pile of festering slime in only ten minutes? It must have been made with frozen ingredients, there's just no way you can take fresh beef and vegetables and ruin it so badly. And the fried rice? Gah, I should know better by now. Hopefully it will not kill me.

The crazy thing was how enthusiastic the waitress was about the food. And there was a table near me where the couple was positively squealing over how wonderful everything was. I accepted a take-out container if only to give the stuff a decent burial. I approve of the notion that you shouldn't eat anything you wouldn't kill yourself, but I would have a really hard time explaining to the cow that he was going to die for that. I suppose if you're a logger eating one meal a day it's great, but the whole experience just left me feeling embarrassed.

[And what did the fortune cookie offer by way of guidance for my 40th year? NOTHING. It was empty. Oh woe, I apparently have no future at all!]

Not feeling like hanging out in any seedy redneck bars just now. Time to call it a night.