Tomorrow we’re going to stay close to home. We’ll smoke chicken and beef brisket and have a lazy backyard picnic. The doggies really hate fireworks, and we live near an Indian reservation so there are lots of fireworks in our area. Once the sun goes down and the noise starts up, we’ll hole up inside and put on a good movie for background noise.

The rest of the weekend? Who knows? It depends on the weather, which has been cool and thunderstorm-y. (Check out Beast Mom’s pictures of the lightning strike near her home!) If it clears up we’ll take the boat out for some time on the water, and if not, maybe we’ll just stay home and get caught up on projects, movies and reading.

I love long weekends though, they’re full of possibilities. If you haven’t already talked about it on someone else’s blog post, what are you doing with yours?

Poulsbo from the water. It’s a ridiculously cute little Norwegian-themed, tourist-friendly harbor town.

Mt Rainier, viewed across Liberty Harbor and through the Poulsbo Yacht Club marina.

Thanks to Sadiq, Nathan and Jim, who have been doing a great job of photographing their areas for visitors to their blog.

Dune by Frank Herbert
This book is a classic. I first read it in a high school literature class; I’ve since read my paperback version to tatters and have acquired a hardback to replace it. It has everything: epic scope, religion, politics, science, compelling characters, plus it’s very quotable. “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.” Frank Herbert’s sequels are passable, declining in quality with each successive book, but his son’s prequels are mostly pretty awful.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
The tale of precocious and tortured Ender, who goes away to school and ends up winning an interstellar war and wiping out an alien race, is wonderfully told. Ender and his friends are wonderfully well developed characters and the battle school seems real. The author’s parallel story line, returning to view the universe through character Bean’s point of view, is an uneven but fascinating look at the same sequence of events.

Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
This older book is a gripping perspective on the end of the world. If it doesn’t have you stockpiling beef jerky, ammunition and insulin, nothing will. It sure makes me wish I had more truly useful skills than I actually do!

Childhood’s End by Arthur Clarke
Others prefer different Clarke books but this is my favorite. It’s simple, elegant, and desperately sad on so many levels. Clarke’s writing can sometimes be a bit cold, focused on ideas and technology, but this one is very human and we feel the characters’ fear and grief.

Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
I enjoy most of the Heinlein books up to his turning point book, Time Enough for Love. His juveniles are all excellent, and I think read every one of them before I was thirteen. It was tough picking a favorite, but I think Starship Troopers is at the top of my list. It’s a well-disciplined story, with great ideas, a noble, honorable character, a well-defined military universe, and it’s a compelling page-turner too.

Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold
Almost everything Lois writes is fabulous. (Unfortunately, I don’t like the Sharing Knife books.) Memory is at the top of my list, though, because it’s about Miles screwing up past all possibility of a solution, and figuring out a way to keep on keeping on anyway. It’s a book about redemption and persistence, and reinvention, and in many ways it’s the most inspiring of the Vorkosigan books.

Clowns of God by Morris West
This book is only tangentially SF because of its religious/post-apocalyptic subject matter. It’s the story of the Pope being given a revelation of the second coming and the end of the earth, being hounded out of office, and pursued by agents that would like to see him fall and fail. It’s very well written, with beautiful characters and a very liberal theology of love and persistence in the face of evil, and a great piece of literature.

Slant by Greg Bear
Many of Bear’s works are wonderful - Moving Mars, Darwin’s Radio, Eon, but this is my favorite. It’s very stylish, readable cyberpunk, with a vocabulary and slate of ideas that’s as fresh and inventive as Neuromancer seemed when it first came out.

This Alien Shore by CS Friedman
Friedman is better known for her dark Coldfire fantasy series, but my favorite is this SF book. It’s a exploration of the cultural definition of sanity and what that means for our future. The universe may require very different capabilities from us someday. It’s also got an excellent paranoid edge; I love paranoid books.

Heavy Time by CJ Cherryh
Cherryh is probably my favorite single author. I have enjoyed all her series, fantasy, sociological SF and hard SF, but my favorite of her books remain her Merchanter/Alliance universe novels. Heavy Time, and its sequel Hellburner, are wonderfully fast paced, paranoid, stylish novels about life in a far future universe where no one is looking out for us but ourselves.

Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress
What if we no longer needed to sleep? What could we do with that additional eight hours a day? Starting from there, Kress extrapolates a scary near future world where humanity splits into rigid classes based on their intelligence and ability to produce - with the Sleepless at the top of the hierarchy.

Gibbon’s Decline and Fall by Sheri Tepper
Most of Sheri Tepper’s books are fairly strongly feminist, and this is one of the most vehemently so. It’s a fascinating story of a group of middle aged women who have remained friends since college. They are fighting a scarily possible theocracy that wants to relegate women to nothing but childbearing vessels - or less. For all that it’s an angry book, it’s also a great story, interweaving legend, action, and possibility together with great characters.

Accelerando by Charles Stross
This is one of the most wonderfully, joyfully creative books I’ve read in the last 20 years. (The other was Slant, mentioned above.) The ideas, the vocabulary, the universe, and the well-realized vision of a possible singularity are all really well done. I’m not usually a fan of experimental fiction because it can be hard to get into, but this had solid and sympathetic enough characters that it was accessible and a fascinating read.

Vigilant by James Alan Gardner
This author has several standalone books in a “League of Peoples” series, but this is the most profound and far reaching. The heroine joins the Vigil, an elite group that oversees the government of a multi-species planet. After years of training, she survives the implant of a live data link. She saves her world, unravels old mysteries, and gets her own life together. She is a great character, really fun to follow, and the book is excellent.

Overshoot by Mona Clee
Clee is one of those frustrating authors that only wrote a couple of things and then disappeared. Overshoot is one of the best books I’ve ever read. It’s the intertwined stories of a young woman learning about her world in the seventies, and the same woman as as an old woman living after the collapse of civilization in a global-warming disaster. This one, too, makes me want to stockpile bottled water and penicillin. If you can find it in print, it’s a very entertaining and all-too-prophetic book.

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What was also interesting was looking at books on my shelf that I loved 20 years ago but leave me cold now. I have a huge collection of Anne McCaffrey, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Lee Modesitt books that I haven’t picked up in years. I guess I’ve outgrown them.

Steve Carrell is excellent as Maxwell Smart, although he plays him a bit smarter than the original Maxwell Smart, almost too smart to be useful in the field. Anne Hathaway steals almost every scene as Agent 99; her comedic timing is excellent. And Dwayne Johnson is a hilarious, over-the-top super-agent - I confess to a teeny-tiny movie-star crush on him because he’s so Hollywood-perfect.

The writing is snappy and the action scenes move briskly; it’s very true to the timing and comedic feel of the original series. Many of the original gadgets are there, just as dysfunctional as they were in the series - the cone of silence, the shoe phone, the sliding doors, the phone booth. The dialogue is hilarious, very quotable, and I predict people will be tossing lines from this one around for many months to come.

It’s definitely worth the price of the ticket - a great popcorn movie.

However, I can concede (and be pleased with!) a resemblance to Liv Ullman and Carl Sagan. Now if only I had a brain like Sagan…

The asterisk (*) is for airports only - I’m not entirely sure they really count. I should certainly be able to make it to the other 15 states in the next 25 years or so.

What states have you visited?

Update: version upgrade is done and tests fine, but sidebar widgets are still a problem. I don’t know if it’s a theme issue or a WP issue. It’s going to be a crazy week at work, first and foremost, so I won’t have a lot of time for other technical stuff.

On the way back we detoured to alpha geek destination Devil’s Tower, Wyoming. It’s the starring location of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Why aliens would choose to come to earth at Devil’s tower (or Roswell, NM), I wouldn’t know. if I were an alien, I’d choose Beijing, Rome, or Mexico City - historically significant AND highly populated. I hope Zach and Ben don’t start sculpting their mashed potatoes into tower shapes now.

Devil’s Tower, Wyoming

We also stopped and spent a quiet hour at the site of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, in Montana. The battleground is peaceful now, the rolling hills are blanketed in waving grass, wildflowers, and sprinkled with gravestones. A Crow Indian ranger related the history of the events leading up to the battle and described the conflict itself - she was a very good storyteller and made the site come alive.

Cavalry soldier’s grave

Cheyenne warrior’s grave

It was a lot of driving and we are very glad to be back home. Our doggies missed us and were happy to see us.

Grave site photos by Zach - who is now going through his 10,000 (seriously) photos from the trip to post a gallery up on his deviant art site.
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Mileage total: 615 miles for a total of 2,945 miles
Road reading: The Dragon’s Nine Sons by Chris Roberson
Gas price: back in the land of $4.27 a gallon but we heard rumors of $3.69 a gallon in Cheyenne, WY

Did they think I was asking just to make conversation? Is it a polite conversation starter, along the lines of “Isn’t the weather great?” and “How about those Mariners?” (The answer to the latter is “Just about as wonderful as your wireless coverage!)

Three nights out of four on this trip our hotel wireless has utterly sucked. It’s been either nonexistent, one out of four bars, or so congested we can’t stay connected. As an IT geek who needs to manage work and personal email during a trip, this has been very annoying.

BlackBerry GPRS Internet access is just not sufficient. I’m not set up to moblog (blog from my handheld - I don’t think it’s secure) and browsing is annoyingly slow.

Must… have… Internet. Going… through… withdrawals. I guess that’s what a vacation is for! Fresh air, pine trees, hiking trails and all that Outward Bound type of stuff.

I heard on the radio this week that Chrysler is coming out with a 2009 car that provides mobile, in-vehicle wi-fi access. I like it.

Miles covered: 583
Road reading: In the Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

In the Bighorn Mountains, some enterprising state geologist has carefully placed roadside signs labeling the various rock strata by type and origin. The most amazing was the exposed Precambrian granite bedrock, estimated at 2.5 billion years old. The huge outcroppings of granite were lovely, a subtle rose with large dark crystal inclusions and metamorphic streaks. Laying hands on the stone was almost a spiritual experience.

Geologic time encompasses such an incomprehensible breadth of years. Our time on the earth is such an insignificant flyspeck by comparison. It makes our stresses and conflicts seem pretty petty and minor.

I don’t like feeling insignificant, so I had a vision of polishing and cutting granite into a kitchen countertop. Take that, ancient geologic artifact! We humans have tools and in our brief time here on earth we’ve learned to use them!

Environmental types, really, I’m kidding. I wouldn’t chop up Precambrian granite for my home. I actually do view such things with a degree of reverence.

This stone has been here 2.5 billion years. And it’ll probably still be here another 2.5 billion years after we’re gone. It deserves a little awe.