Category: General

That one time I was briefly stranded in Montana

General

Red-haired Caleb was in the backseat, sleeping. I was in the passenger seat, enjoying the music and looking out at the vast empty Montana prairie in front and on either side of us under the late afternoon, early evening summer sun. The car smelled of junk food and sweat. It was Day 2 of the trip, still early in the morning, a day after we had left Portland in a rented car.

Jake, dark-haired, features sharp, was driving, hunched forward, hands gripping the steering wheel, face suspiciously blank.

The car, a 2000-ish Subaru Legacy, lurched a bit as the engine backfired. The blank expression on Jake’s face shifted almost imperceptibly into worry.

I turned the music down a bit to facilitate conversation. “Everything OK?”

“Could you check the map and see where the closest town is?”

I reached down into the footwell and picked up the paper road atlas. Omnipresent portable GPS was still a decade away. It was the afternoon of 20 July 2002, and we were about fifty miles east of the Montana-Idaho border on I-90. It hit me. “We didn’t get gas, did we?” Jake glanced over at me, and nodded. I craned my neck and saw the gas gauge, needle dead on empty, the orange gas pump-shaped light on, steady.

Gleefully wasting gas

Three hours earlier, I had been resting in the back seat, having driven through the night on one of the first shifts of our epic road trip. We had all gotten out of the car to take pictures of the famous Montana Big Sky at sunrise, marking our progress toward our destination, Mount Rushmore, formerly The Six Grandfathers (Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe to the Lakota). We stopped in Butte (hehe, butt) to get gas and breakfast. At some point over the next few hours, I had laid down in the backseat to get some rest, Jake taking shotgun for Caleb driving.

I got maybe 20 minutes of rest before I heard my friends giggling, the engine at full speed. Jake was leaning over toward Caleb, holding my digital camera to get a picture of the pegged speedometer without obstructing Caleb’s view of the road. I laughed, sat up, and we commemorated our breaking in of getting the rental to an indicated 120 MPH. Caleb and Jake explained that we were taking advantage of the Montana freeways’ lack of speed limits, a plan they had hatched shortly after we had crossed into the state and without consulting me, the person financially responsible, on paper, for the car rental.

Dusty out of focus picture of a Toyota instrument cluster. The fuel guage is at 3/4 of a tank; the speedometer needle is pegged above an indicated 120 MPH, and the trip odometer, ominously, reads 773.4, or HELL if read upside down.
Somewhere between Missoula and Bozeman, we hit maximum speed.

Legal intervention

Around 10:20 AM, east of Billings, a state trooper pulled up behind us, red and blue lights flashing. Caleb panicked; he wasn’t yet 25 years old and technically not a legal driver for this car, at least as far as Hertz was concerned. After we pulled over, with the trooper looking into a car filled with the detritus of three white guys on a road trip, he asked the question all cops ask: “Do you know how fast you were going?”

We learned that Montana did have speed limits on its freeways. In 2002, the posted limit was 75 MPH, and the trooper ticketed us for exceeding the limit by 25 MPH or more; his radar clocked us at 102.5 MPH, according to the ticket. I still have a picture of the ticket, which I won’t post because it shows info about Caleb I’m sure he doesn’t want on the internet. We pulled $40 from our gas fund and paid the officer immediately in cash. The ticket was our receipt, and we continued into Billings.

As we were coming down from the high of speeding and the stress of legal entanglements, and as we looked for a place to eat that would meet our agreement (no fast food chains, only local establishments). We made another stop, to top up in Butte. Then we got lunch in Butte, because all of us were men and could not resist a city called Butte. As we pulled in to town, Jake reminded us “We should fill the tank before we leave!” But we did not.

The consequences of forgetting

Now, 300+ miles and almost five hours of freeway driving after filling up in Butte (hehe, butt), and an hour past Billings, as we neared the Montana-Wyoming border, we faced the consequences. The car’s backfiring increased in duration, jolting Caleb awake. After we explained to him the situation, he shared our worries. The map showed a possible exit ahead, Exit 544, and a town named Wyola. We coasted to the top of the off-ramp on fumes. Down below us, at the bottom of the off-ramp, a sign mocked us: “No Services”.

Close up shot of a Toyota instrument cluster. The gas guage is at empty, and there's an orange light in the shape of a fuel pump on. The speedometer is at 0 MPH; the car is at rest.
This is what it looks like when a car is out of gas.

We used the universal signal of car trouble: hood and trunk up, emergency flashers on. I worried that we had created a new problem with the car, thanks to incomplete information: I thought fuel injectors were damaged by running empty. We joked about Jake’s luck, and how he always seems to land on top of things. Except this time; he was driving when he noticed we needed to fill up, and was driving again when we failed to fill up. Unlucky.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if some bus full of the Swedish Bikini Team pulled up to take Jake to get gas?” Caleb joked. “That would be more his luck.”

Rescued

Not too long after, a large recreational vehicle pulled up alongside, and the nicest little old lady leaned out the door. “You boys having some trouble?” She was wearing a plaid shirt and faded mom jeans, not a silver bikini.

She and her husband, whose names I have sadly forgotten, took Jake up to the next exit, who knows how far away. Caleb and I held down the car, Caleb eating some of the cheese we had stashed in a cooler in the trunk, despite his lactose intolerance. Maybe an hour later, the kindly old couple returned Jake to us with a can full of gas. We tried to pay the couple for their time and effort but they refused. “Just pay it forward,” she told us. “We’re happy to help.”

The car ran fine after we topped up the tank, with no trouble with the injectors, for the rest of the trip.

Super tired

Daily Story Project, General

Had a good day, good first week at the new job, spent some time with dad tonight.

But just super tired. Trying to think of 500 words that work together in order, along with punctuation, to make a blog post tonight, is hard. I’m literally just typing this out as a typing exercise to see how quickly I can hit 500 words. Maybe it will turn into something, maybe it’ll just take up space. Trying to turn off my inner critic and just type whatever comes to mind right now. I’ve said right now a couple of times now and part of my brain is trying to tell the rest of my brain, my sleepy tired brain, that that’s bad and I should stop. Not gonna stop, though, got a simple goal, an easy goal.

Type until the number of words is 500. Or maybe I should type it as five hundred, because that’s twice the number of words and will get me to that goal faster. In fact, I shouldn’t type contractions; I should not type contractions because this will also help me reach my goal faster. Is this making sense? You see what I’m going for here. Sorry if this isn’t entertaining, sometimes I just have to show up and let things happen without trying to make it into something good.

Every good writer I have ever heard talk about the process of writing has said that you just have to finish the story. First drafts are supposed to be bad because you can fix it when you re-write it, but you will not know what needs to be fixed until you try to tell the whole story, start to finish. I understand that advice on an intellectual level but have always had a hard time implementing it. I know, I swear I have talked about this before but hey, it’s a theme, a blog theme for me.

Gotta keep writing. Keep going.

Dan Harmon once said that if you’re feeling writer’s block because you are afraid you are going to write shit, then turn that into your motivation. Write the shittiest shit that ever was shat, just to show your dumb afraid-of-writing-shit brain that it is right. The goal then is to just get writing and once you are in the process of writing, once you have started, it will give you permission to keep going and you will see that writing anything is better than writing nothing.

Maybe I am explaining this wrong but that is how it came out. If I were to do a second pass on this blog post I would go back and fix it, or I might actually look up the exact quote and find out if it was in fact Dan Harmon who said that and not some other writer. Maybe I said that and now my brain is so tired it is refusing to believe I could say something smart like that and is instead attributing it to Dan Harmon?

Who knows, man, I am now over 500 words. I win again.

G’night.

Sometimes it works out, eventually

General

Got home from my new job (about a 35 minute commute because traffic was backed up on I5 and it spilled out onto the surface streets) and when I got out of my car, my dad was standing there smoking.

“How was your first day?” he asked.

“It was… good. I’ve got a good feeling about that place.” I chuckled. “I mean, I spent most of the day, about 90%, just signing in to things and resetting passwords. But, yeah. I like the people I work with.”

“That’s great, son. I’m glad it worked out for you.” Dad had been confounded by my stories about job hunting in the tech sector in The Year of Our Lord Two-thousand and Twenty-Three, for sure. Stories about being called in for three or four interviews and having the employer choose someone else. Stories about phantom job postings, where it’s clear the company isn’t hiring, just advertising positions for whatever economic gain it gets them. Stories about how me asking good questions in the interview caused the employer such distress about not knowing what they want this position to be, they pulled the listing, selected no one, and went back to the drafting board to start over from first principles.

It’s been a long job hunt, is what I’m saying. But I’ve landed in a good spot, I think.

Dad is basically of the Greatest Generation or slightly after, not quite a Boomer, and when he was job hunting he literally just had to walk in to a place, talk to the owner, and convince them to hire him. Much easier in the trades, I’m sure (he was an electrician) but pretty much standard job hunting behavior across many careers back in the day.

It’s almost never been like that for me. Early on, the only way to find jobs (that I knew about) was seeing a “Now hiring” sign in a window, or finding a job through these listings called “The Classfieds” in what we used to call “newspapers.” Then, at the very least I had to fill out an application, hand it in, and then wait to be called back for an interview when I started out. That call would come in to the phone in the house, which was wired to the wall, and not stuffed into a pocket that went everywhere with me.

Of course it’s not like that now. Jobs are advertised on the internet, same as every other thing, on specialized websites where I can upload a digital resume, which gets scanned and used to fill out applications, which are reviewed by computers and potentially forwarded to screeners and HR folks, or recruiters. That may trigger a phone or video call where they size you up. If that goes well you get forwarded to a hiring manager. If they like you, they’ll have you interview with even more people.

That’s how it works normally. Sometimes, sometimes, there are detours.

In the case of my current job, I did use one of those job posting sites to make the initial contact, and got a video call with the owner of the business. Except for it being digital, it could have been very much like my dad’s experience. That first conversation was casual in tone but covered a lot of ground as far as experience and my temperament went. I must have made a good impression, because there was only one more round of interview, a panel interview with the other owner and two of the techs I’d be working with, and literally three days later I had a solid job offer.

After 250 days of being an unemployee, I am now, once again, an employee. Better days are ahead, friends. I can feel it.

Another post about another day

General

Another day another dollar. Wait, I didn’t get a dollar today. I did perform a minor repair of my car, had a great job interview, got called back for a third job interview next week, and had dinner with the family at a fantastic, vegan, worker-owend cooperative Sri Lankan restaurant. But I did not earn a dollar.

I also thought and talked about D&D, hung out with my dad, talked to my bestie, and am now writing something completely random instead of the five or six other ideas I jotted down in my IDEAS file. But no dollar.

I drank not just one but two delicious pineapple ciders, a Mexican Coke, and a bunch of water. Made myself a chicken quesadilla, drank coffee for breakfast. No extra dollar to be found there.

I shaved, wore a white button-down collared shirt and black slacks at one point; t-shirt and jeans and trail shoes; workout clothes and running shoes; different t-shirt and cargo shorts; and a different t-shirt and sweat pants. Nobody paid me anything for those.

I’m thinking about going to bed early, because I got up a couple of hours before my normal wake-up time, and did a shorter walk than usual for my daily walk. Walked around the wrecking yard but somehow that did not count as exercise to my Watch, to which I have delegated the tracking of my exercise and physical activity, so I am now counting this time, sitting in front of my computer writing this post, as a “Mind & Body” exercise just to close my rings. None of this, alas, is worth being paid. It’s just maintenance of my physical form. No dollars for any of that.

I planned out, with my sister, getting my dad to and from some doctor’s appointments next week. Planned out what we’re doing for Father’s Day this weekend. Planned out a weekend-long game-playing vacation with my friends. Planned for the follow-up job interview next week. No extra dollars were given to me for any of those activities, though a few of them might lead to getting a salary. One lives in hope, of course, but the job market is tough these days.

I’m racking my brain right now to see if I recall anything else I did today. Y’know, for documentation purposes. I also racked my brain to answer a question about Azure AD DS, but came up empty. I didn’t have to rack my brain for the other five or six ideas I added to my IDEA file; those came to me naturally and in the normal course of thinking, and I immediately added them to the list so as not to forget them. No dollars, no quarters, no dimes, nickels or pennies. Nope.

I sang along to Harvey Danger songs. I used a digital map to help me navigate around the city. I used voice activation and my Watch to update my grocery list. I did not see any income from these activities.

So

Another day, no dollars.

This one’s for me

General

Tonight I am feeling many things and maybe, just maybe, writing about them will help me sort them out. Bear with me, this might just be personal ramblings and thoughts. I’m warning you up front; feel free to skip this one if it doesn’t interest you. This one’s for me.

It’s been a busy couple of days. That emergency I mentioned before is almost completely fixed; I still have some things to take care of but I have all the information and pieces I need to do that. But the stress of it is still with me, worrying about why it happened, and if I could have done anything to prevent it, and why it had to happen right now, alongside all the other things in my life I’m dealing with. Philosophically, as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t think bad or good things happen to me for some unknown reason. Things just happen and I get to decide how I react to them. But it is stressful to have to deal with several different minor crises at the same time.

The other minor crisis is the job hunt. I have been interviewing lately and that’s a good thing because eventually interviews should, under normal circumstances, lead to a job offer. But it’s been many months of searching, and many interviews, and I’m a bit tired of the process and wishing it was over. I do feel a sense of duty to show up, though, and I always give the best I can give at any one moment. The anxiety and stress feed my Inner Negative Voice, which tries to trick me into thinking I deserve bad news, but as mentioned I don’t actually believe that. All that Inner Negative Voice does is wear me down and tire me out and get me to lower my defenses against hopelessness. I’m stronger than that.

I’ve survived every bad day life has ever thrown at me. And I’ll survive many more. I’m not done yet, not by a long shot.

Might just need some rest, though. As soon as I’ve gotten this post to ~500 words, I’ll do that.

The other crisis is my dad’s living situation. He’s still staying with me, and I’m happy and glad to spend time with him and provide him with a place to stay while his living space is being repaired. But seeing him deal with the process of aging, and seeing how his health is declining (rightfully so, since he’s lived a long life already, full of all the things life can throw at someone), it’s eye-opening and… tragic? Tragic feels like the right word. He and I haven’t always gotten along, worse when I was much younger, but we have gotten to a good place in recent years, and I… I don’t want to think about him not being here. I’m not ready for that. I’ll just enjoy the time I do get to spend with him. I’m glad he’s here, in multiple senses of the word here. Here in my apartment, here in my life, here on the right side of the dirt, as he’s fond of saying.

Only good things

General

Having trouble thinking of something to write tonight. Had an eventful day but most of it was negative or stressful and I’m not sure I want to share it all here. It did get half-way sorted out eventually, which is good, but it took a lot out of me.

Let’s see what good things happened. Bioware dropped the gameplay trailer for the next Dragon Age game and I could not be more excited. Varric is older and still a badass with empathy. The actual combat reminds me of the fast-paced action of Dragon Age 2 or Andromeda, which is a plus for me. Rogues can switch between melee and bow in combat again! As a dedicated rogue player I love that so much.

Talked to a friend about it and they said that it didn’t feel like Dragon Age to them, which I’ve heard others say. Their take on it is that to them, Dragon Age is serious and dark, and seeing Varric make quips and take a drink in the middle of a tense situation involving his old friend Solas. I could see their point… but I disagree. Yes, dark horrible things happen in Dragon Age games, but the characters are often cracking wise or sarcastic with each other in the midst of it all.

Like I said to my friend, Purple Hawke has entered the chat.

We do agree however that of course we will be playing it, of course we are. New Dragon Age game! And coming this Fall, which is sooner than I would have expected.

Hmmm. Other good things. Hung out with dad; he’s housesitting a very grumpy old cat this week, so I drove him over there. And got to info-dump about D&D with my nephew for almost an hour. We love sharing stories of our separate games with each other, although I’m always afraid I do more of the talking than the listening. My nephew is very kind to listen to my ramblings, though.

Our next game is tomorrow night. I have a city map that I’ve been working on and it’s enormous and detailed and almost entirely unnecessary for play but I’m having a blast. And I have another map I’ve been working on the past couple of days for a potential encounter. No spoilers in case my players read this but I’ve learned a lot of new tricks making this map. Have I talked about Inkarnate before? It’s so good. And they’ve added new Room and Path tools that make it so easy to outline a building or a wall or a fence or stairs. Just such a delight to use.

Because the emergency took up time I was supposed to use grocery shopping, I ordered pad Thai chicken tonight for dinner, which is an absolute favorite of mine. And I watched the next episode of The Acolyte, which explained some backstory that other shows might have held back or fed us in drips over the season. I’m glad they gave this to us in episode 3; it feels like they’re going to deal with the fallout of that backstory now. An old rule of improv is skip to the interesting part, and the writers of The Acolyte are following that advice. Good stuff!

See? I did have 500ish words of positive things in me tonight. Thanks for reading! Tomorrow is another job interview, bright and early. Something’s gotta happen soon!

Failed quest trigger

General

I can still hear the crows cawing outside. They’ve been out there all afternoon. I first noticed them around 3:00 pm. There was a whole murder of them (nailed it!) and I could hear them circling around outside my computer room window, which is on my second floor. I got video of them and they were literally circling around above my patio. When I went out to see them, I tried talking to them, and they landed in trees just past my patio but did not stop cawing.

I went downstairs to see if dad was out on the patio; that’s where he goes to smoke. He wasn’t; he was on the couch watching TV. I asked him if he’d heard the crows and he hadn’t. I tried to get some more video but it was just sound; they weren’t in sight, just sitting on tree limbs.

I am the kind of person who respects crow’s intelligence and curiosity. I even talk to crows when I’m out and about. I treat them like friends, say hi, ask them how they’re doing. I rarely get an answer, though, and I never have any treats to give them, so I never expected to build up a relationship with the local crows.

So weird. OK, maybe it’s not weird. I edited my video clips together and posted them on Instagram and TikTok. My joke was that the Raven Queen had a mission for me.

You don’t know who the Raven Queen is? That’s a D&D reference; she’s one of the canonical D&D gods and her domain is death and memory. And I’ve used her as a motivator in my current campaign, even before I knew that Matt Mercer had used her for Vax’ildan’s (Liam O’Brien) character arc in Campaign One of his enormously popular Let’s Plays. The Raven Queen rules from her domain, which is in the Shadowfell, a dark mirror of the primary world, what us grognards called the Prime Material Plane. But, I digress.

Clearly these crows, corvid messengers of Our Lady of Death, had a message for me. But what could it be? I talked to them, told them it was safe to speak, that I was ready to listen, but they just continued squawking, agitated, non-stop. They were still doing it hours later. By now, the sun has gone down, and they’ve mostly stopped but every once in a while I can still hear one or more of them calling.

Sure, it could just be that they are alerting me and everyone around that there’s a hawk nearby. There’s a game I play that I’ve written about before called The Long Dark, and in that game, hearing crows can give useful information about the environment. Crows (in that game, I’m not sure if they do this in real life) will circle above a dead animal, making the carcass which provides meat, hides and guts easier to locate. And crows in the game have a special more agitated call that will alert the player of the presence of a bear. Gotta know where the bear is because it’s very dangerous if you’re not prepared.

That would be a mundane explanation, sure, but isn’t it pretty to think more interesting things, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone? I’m just sad that no matter what I tried I wasn’t able to trigger the quest. Nothing has shown up in my journal. Boooooo. Hopefully it’s not a timed quest. I’ll try again tomorrow.

Goodbye, Major General Bill Anders

General

Astronaut Bill Anders died on Friday, apparently attempting to perform a stunt in a Beechcraft over the Washington coast. He was 90 years old. It’s just speculation that he was attempting a stunt; he was flying alone, and the crash is being investigated by

Bill Anders took the photograph now known as Earthrise while in orbit around the Moon, on Christmas Eve 1968. That same picture is the one I chopped up to make my header for this blog, so Major General Anders has had a direct influence on me and Lunar Obverse. I thank him for his service and for his place in history as part of the first crew to orbit the Moon in human history.

The picture he took inspired him to talk about how we should treat our planet better – like a fragile Christmas tree ornament, in his own words – and led to activists organizing the first Earth Day.

The world is lessened by his passing. Goodbye, Bill Anders.

June is Pride Month

General

Before I begin, wanted to state up front: I’m typing this from my own brain. This post is from my own experience and my own mind, and written without deep research, so take it with that in mind. If you want a more objective definition of Pride and it’s relation to the month of June, I’d suggest starting on Wikipedia, and further than that, reading and listening to gay voices and scholars and historians. Before I get started with my own thoughts, below, here are a few of those voices, a place for you to start. It’s an incomplete list; feel free to let me know of others you know of. I know enough to know that I don’t know a lot of queer history. I’m happy to learn more.

Today is June 1st, which marks the start of Pride Month. If you’re not aware what that means, the pride is specifically gay pride, a time for the community of people of all queer orientations to celebrate their community, to be out and remind everyone that they exist, they deserve the same kind of safety and visibility and rights that belong to all human beings.

I am absolutely in favor of everyone to have full access to the rights and privileges of society. I don’t care what your orientation is, you can live your life in whatever way you want without fear of being ostracized… or assaulted, hated, legislated against. So I am one thousand percent happy to see the month of June be a time for LGBTQ+ people to celebrate themselves and their peers.

This blog is a safe space for marginalized identities. Hate and bigotry are not welcome here. Just want to say that up front. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, pan, trans, asexual, aromantic, plus all others I’m not even aware of, basically any and all of you: I love you, I see you, the world is better with you in it, I stand with you.

A question that might come up, since I’m talking about pride month right now, is: do I consider myself part of the LGBTQ+ community?

That’s a good question. It’s one I don’t have a clear single answer to, though. I’ve been attracted to such a wide variety of people and representations, but my attraction is often mild and intellectual, which makes me think I might be asexually pansexual, if that makes sense. I don’t really know if that orientation has evolved over time. It’s possible that when I was younger and just learning about sexual attraction, I fell in to the default societal binary, and that I have spent the decades of my life unlearning that binary and becoming more in touch with who and what I am. Would that be evolution? I don’t know. I’m loathe to apply any specific strict rules to the undiscovered country of my own mind.

I’m just me. I don’t know that any specific label feels correct. That being the case, I’m probably less comfortable with the gender binary, which means I’m somewhere in the circle of the Venn diagram that includes LGBTQ+ folks. Take that as you will.

Feelin’ that way

General

Tonight’s post is brought to you by the letters F and U, and is about the inability to write something specific.

I have another domain that I intend to use to post my many, many, many stories about working in customer service, help desk, and tech support. It’s basically set up, it’s just waiting for me to start posting things so that when it does go live, there’s more than one post on it. I probably want to start with 3-5 longer posts before it actually launches.

I have a long document that’s got all my notes collected over the years; weird things customers have said to me, observations about tech and customer behavior, quirky problems I found the solution for. I just have to, y’know, pick a few, flesh them out into a post, and post them to the tech blog. I just… don’t.

I don’t know why I don’t. My brain, my motivation, my habits, are an undiscovered country to me. Although I believe, on an intellectual level, that were I to pursue a diagnosis of ADHD, that I could succeed in getting one, I don’t actually have that diagnosis. What I do have is a feeling that my brain would probably fit many, if not all, the criteria for that diagnosis, which has been garnered from reading posts by other people that do have that diagnosis talking about the way they think and react. Those posts remind me of me and how I act. Which means, at some level, that I believe I can’t be motivated the same way a lot of other people are. I need more stimulation, more urgency, or more interesting things to focus on.

Is that why I’m not writing these posts, though? They are stories I’ve lived, stories that, at the time they happened, were interesting to me. And I do need some income, which, in theory, this blog could generate for me, through ads, affiliate links, or eventually becoming the source for a book collecting these stories. And my financial situation is dire, more dire than it’s been for a long time. I need income and the normal “apply to jobs, get interviewed, get a job offer” process is not working as well as it has in the past.

For whatever reason, though, the interest and urgency and personal nature of these stories is not getting me to sit down and even start writing one. Maybe… maybe that’s the trick I need to do. I just need to set a timer for 20 minutes, open a blank document, and start writing. See how I feel once I get something down into words. “Just write” is advice I’ve gotten from amazing, talented, and successful writers. I just need to start.

As just one example, I’ve managed to turn this whole complaint about not being able to write into a 500-word post. And I think I’ve said something real, something true, something… vulnerable, ugh. How did I do that? I opened a blank page, put my fingers on the home row, and started typing out what I feel. If I can do that for this topic, I can do this for any topic. Starting is the best motivator.