The Most Enjoyable Experience with a Woman Ever

On Sunday September 15 at 1:20 PM I got the first text message:

Hi :)

This was on the dating app OKCupid. The woman texting was cute, far younger looking than her stated age of 51, and Chinese. She looked 30. I thought it was a fake account the first two days of texts, too good to be true but nothing to lose with a few texts.

Then she started talking different from the typical scam/fake accounts and the next texts were really special.

Something about this was already so right. A woman strong enough to say what she wanted, and said it in very classy beautiful way. 

Friday September 20 2019 we met for the first time and went out for sushi at Aji Sushi & Grill. When I'm both really at ease with someone, and attracted to her, this ability to charm and entertain comes out. I had her laughing at my stories. I can't make this charm come out, only with the rare right one.

We made love on her living room floor. 

A few days later we met for dinner at her place the evening of Tuesday September 24 2019. She was dressed casual, unlike the first night with a striking black dress. 

We talked as she did things at her stove. It was at that moment that she began to provide me with the most cherished romantic memories in my life.

She was in a casual shirt, no bra. Her breasts were too small for any bra size, yet present. 

Attraction in it's most stark true meaning.

The most beautiful curves I had ever seen. It started that night, the realization I would never tire of seeing this. 

That night she noticed my tattoo for the first time. Simply my son's name. She glanced at it and hid her face and her tears. I know in my bones that's one of the moments she fell in love with me. 

I could feel her falling for me. American women had always made the prospect of loving difficult and murky with contradictions, often with an almost militant opposition to heterosexual love and bonding. With this woman, I could feel real love.

Nights I was not with her she went to sleep after watching her cellphone videos of me playing electric guitar.

I told every wild story and she would laugh like crazy. The first time I bought North by her place both North and I were overflowing with antics and stories, while we sipped tea I was telling some story about China and the Mongolians with more than usual flare for the dramatic, North chiming in with his own wit, and C wide eyeed and smiling at it all.

C is the most awesome combination of traits. She is a Chinese hedge fund millionaire, hasn't worked since a brief stint in the 1990's. She watches only winter sports of football and hockey - mostly to see a few white guys she finds attractive. She travels extensively, but never to the third world. She professed no affinity for India or Africa. No interest in Spanish speaking cultures. No interest in Native Americans. No care for LBGT. She spends every Chinese New Year in Fuzhou. She likes Japan more than typical Chinese, and loves traveling and shopping there. 

She was manic about cleanliness. Her place was spotless. She didn't like going to Seattle's old Chinatown, too dirty for her liking. She could stand only new shiny places with all affluent people. 

Talking with her was to talk with no baggage of disagreement on world politics, culture or interests. It was so nice to have a conversation with no sense of opposing views or friction.

Her voice. Once again I remind you of pure unmitigated attraction. Her voice became that to me. It was deep, and of course with a Cantonese accent. It is not enough to call it sexy. I loved to hear it even if she was mad.

I love her voice. 

Eventually pragmatics were manifest. We sat down and had an adult conversation, both openly declaring this is not pleasant but necessary. 

She was wealthy enough for her lifestyle, but just barely. She could not afford to support me and maintain the same shopping and traveling habits. She had over a hundred designer purses.

Even if I had gotten back in the software development world, 150K a year would have been too little to live her lifestyle.

I never contemplated her supporting me, I didn't even like her paying for our nights out for dinner. 

I was there to gaze on her curves, this spark in her face when she was listening to me, talking...and most of all her voice.

The most attractive experience of my life.

First Camping Trip in new Jeep

On most of this blog I have tried to post seriously major memories, and put an effort into writing. This entry feels a lot lighter on all respects. But it may turn out to be a big memory in North's own autobiography, so I'm putting it here as a resource for that day.

Saturday March 15th 2014 at around 10:30AM we set out for Streamboat Rock State Park. This was North and mine's 9th camping trip there, all the previous ones in 2013. At the split up of his mom and I in September the camping trips stopped...for no good reason. Then North developed an obsession with staying inside either his mom's home or my home, with school the only exception. I was worried, so I got this new Jeep to stir things back up to being active.

North was a little afraid of the open top, but after he got exposed to the great feeling and visibility with the top and half-doors off, he got to loving the Jeep.

This trip was the last weekend of this Winter. So only parts of the trip were right for having the top and sides off. We drove the first 140 miles with the top up. Then as I saw the temp rise to 55, and sunny in the arid desert, I stopped and pulled the top back and took off the doors around Roslyn.

The Jeep has an extreme heater, I think they designed it to keep people warm with the top off in cold weather. It sure does. North loved watching the wide expanse of the desert go by with the heater blasting on him. Then we got to the Columbia Gorge crossing of I-90, and in a Jeep with its extra height and the half-doors and no top, it was an amazing view while driving.

Once in Moses Lake we had an extra treat. The area is used for testing large jets, and today one of the largest military jets I've every seen was doing almost stunt-like testing moves around. Then at a traffic stop it made a low pass right over our open top. I honestly believe North will remember that forever.

Memories. For the first time North started telling me his memories. We were going down I-5 in Seattle and he pointed to the portion of Capitol Hill that runs along I-5 and he said "we walked there when I was a baby". Then the same about the REI Store. He wasn't a baby, but I know what he means: a long time ago in his mind. 

Anyway, now I know I'm making memories for him. I deliberately did that walk along I-5 in Capitol Hill to generate a specific big city walking experience for him. We walked an area with a vista of the Interstate and all the skyscrapers of downtown.

Back to our trip. Driving through the Coulee Corridor is like driving right through the Grand Canyon, only the walls are 800 feet high, not the mile high of the bigger more famous canyon. I've got a travel tip blog entry about the area here. 

All along the way I kept trying to find legal, free off road trails to climb just to give North the thrill. I found a few, then just a few feet into the trail a sign was posted "No Unauthorized Entry". Bummer.

We got to the campground and set up...Jeep style...not our old Volvo style.

What you see there is two 20 degree sleeping bags, one red cheap sleeping bag, and Big Doggie...our stuffed animal that comes on every camping trip. 

We made a fire, cooked some hotdogs. Watched a full moon rise over the canyon walls. Then was sat in the Jeep with the top off to see the moon and the stars. We ran the motor and blasted the heater, sitting in temperate luxury. North was obsessed with Minecraft and I did my ritual for that location of finding an interesting AM station. Not saying I only listen to AM. But those canyon wall do weird things to AM signals, I've gotten Calgary Canada and this night a really good history segment from Idaho. 

North the Engineer:

He has an innate capacity to figure out engineering problems. In the last 2 years, in the realm of camping, I have went from the comically worst campfire starter to..well...dependably OK. This trip North made a point of mentioning several times for me to make a bridge with the logs. I did. Then I noticed that OMG...that is the best design for starting a fire. 

I told him how brilliant that design was. I just love that boy.

For sleeping I put the top back up and the doors/windows back on. But the back window was left at home...deliberately. So we would be a exposed to the night time air. The low was 37. North normally tosses and turns, and keeps me awake too. That night he didn't. That morning he woke and said something he's never said before "wow, I slept so good". 

Immediately I did the usual ritual of starting the vehicle, getting the heat on, and getting North seated for the trip, and then gathering up and organizing for the exit. 

Driving back...I know all the alternative routes back...I told North we'd go through Quincy. I love that big big big agra town. Its got wide open desert spaces, fields dense because of irrigation, and the Cascades in the near distance. 

Oh and along the way we finally found a Federal Lands offroad driving area. We drove up and down a basalt hill, and through a shallow pond or huge puddle, which ever you prefer. It was really fun.

We are on the cusp of Spring, so farmers were fertilizing their fields with manure. North got to smell that and tell me what the fertilizer was.....cow poop. Oh, and he was the first to mention a farm...saying with exclamation "THAT is a farm!".

We drove on. I'm always concerned if he is comfortable. Basically I want him to experience the big and the wide, but I never want him to endure misery. So I got the cheap red sleeping bag and put it on his lap and over his body. We got on the Interstate. I kept looking over for signs. He was smiling big many times. 

Then miles past the Ryegrass Summit (ok it really is Whiskey Dick Mountain) he started crying, an "I'm enduring it" kind of expression. We were near an exit and I took it, telling along the way I was sorry and I didn't want him to feel bad. 

At the truck stop, one we've been to dozens of times, I put on the top and the windows. We were safe in the a properly covered vehicle, the heater so warm he asked to turn it down. 

North, if you ever read this, I only wanted it to be big and fun, never something that made you cry. I felt so bad. 

My son is the Master of the Bicycling Universe

Master of the Bicycling Universe is a little over the top, but that's how I feel about my son and bicycling today.

My son was diagnosed autistic at 2 years old. He is now 5 years old.

You can find so much on the web about challenges. I want to just put forward a story of this wonderful kid and his talent.

Within this last year he suddenly asked one day to start riding his blue bike (in photo). No training wheels, and never on it before. He said he would use it as a balance bike. I didn't provide too much coaching or insulting his intelligence, though I secretly chose city parks with no big hills so there would only be flat-ground challenges.

He rode in balance bike mode for three days. Then it happened. I saw him pedaling.

Perfectly. And by that I mean no out of control moments, and more importantly no crashes.

To this day he has never went down. 

In the last week he has had a spike in a sense of maturity. He has begun to vocalize fantasies of independence. "Daddy, I can get a yellow boat, say bye to you, and go out on the water in the boat and go fishing." "Daddy, I could ride my bike up that hill by myself. I could say 'bye daddy' to you and ride my bike up that hill and then ride back down." These ideas are kind of connected to his talking about being 10 or older. He's making plans, good plans I'm all for, by vocalizing these scenarios of saying bye to his daddy...and I love it...I give him affirmation that yes he can do that someday.

Today he wanted to ride his bike on the street. I nudged his goal away from riding totally in the street, instead riding in the parking lot of our local Fred Meyer superstore, and riding on sidewalks to a playground.

He did perfectly, stopping at street corners, riding near me, and never going too fast or away from me. People in the parking lot of the Fred Meyer came up and praised him.

I do want to mention a negative experience, but only to convey a relativistic narrative. At the push of his mom, we tried soccer. It was a little bit of a struggle the first summer. The next summer it was full on miserable, he would run from the practice after just a little time into the session. Then he ran from it right at the start of class. I asked him if he wanted to stop coming to soccer, he said "yes". I called my wife and said this is over, he hates soccer.

My story and object lesson is simple, folks. At least with my autistic kid, all I have to do is listen, respect both when he is conveying something is a misery for him, and even more importantly: provide the tools, opportunity space and sincere respectful verbal support when he voices the desire to take on a challenging new activity.

Along this long journey I expect us to drop misery inducing things like a hot potato, I don't give a ferrets rear end how normal it is for others. And we are going to look for what he fantasizes about, where his wanderlust is, what great big ideas are his ideas. With those I expect we'll just need to open the starting gate, and he'll do the hard stuff, the grand stuff.

Like he's done with biking.

Father dies and the 2500 mile road trip to his funeral

     June 2012
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Below are a few Facebook posts that capture what I wrote in the days surrounding my father's death. He died in the early hours of June 12, 2012, and the evening of the next day I set out in our Volvo driving 2500 miles to be at his funeral. I drove from 8:00 PM Wednesday night till 5:00 PM Friday. The funeral was Saturday afternoon. Sunday morning I left Little Rock around 7:30AM and arrived in Seattle at 1:15 AM Tuesday morning (June 19).


June 12 2012 Facebook post, and was later extended for the eulogy I improvised at my dad's funeral service:

My Dad

He was born in September 1939.

No one in his family drove a car, so when he did it was a big deal. He was forever crazy about cars, especially his cars, after that. His first car was a black 1949 Ford sedan.

Later he got the car that would make him known in Little Rock -a 1955 Chevrolet. It was white with "Ghost" written in Gothic script, it was lowered. He met my mom while driving that car. Legend has it he cruised along side a car full of young ladies that included my aunt and mom, and he asked "who is that?" about my mom, they told him "Martha Sue King" and he smiled and sped off. That move got them all talking and my mom interested.

My mom was 19 and my dad was 22 when they had me.

In 1967 my dad bought a new Magnavox audio system -record player, tuner, amazing amp and speakers- for $500.

$500 in 1967 has to be several thousand dollars today. And in those days, especially in Arkansas, average people didn't buy high end audio equipment.

We had all the albums by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and movie soundtracks that are still respected compositions such as The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly and all the James Bond movies. Played loud and all the time on the $500 stereo.

I lived enveloped in great sound.

My dad took me to drag races starting when I was in second grade. We would stand near the starting line and the cars would take off in a barrage of smoke and thundering sound. We would hang out in the pits talking to the drivers and looking at the cars while they were worked on. Don Garlits -the greatest drag race driver of all time- gave me a spark plug from his dragster.

The next few decades were rough. I was wild and not normal, going off to adventures on oil rigs in the Gulf, studying everything my dad hated, identifying myself more like a New Yorker and punk rocker than a Southerner that drives cars too fast.

Then in 2002 I came home for a visit and my dad really tried to show he loved me. We sat watching TV and he was raving as we watched some of my favorite guitarists like The Edge and Pete Townsend. My dad really put on a good show going on about the things I liked.

In 2005 two men broke through the door of my mom and dad's home, held guns on them and threatening to kill them. My dad talked them out of killing them, and the men just stole their money and car. My mom and dad left that house and never went back, selling it and retiring sixty miles away.

My dad always loved his hometown of Little Rock Arkansas. I'm sure it was a let down to have been chased out of the city because of crime, to die in a place with less connection to his memories.

He later told me loved his new town of residence.

In June 2012 his vital signs became extremely bad. My mom asks for me to call immediately. I call and she says I need to say something to my dad, he can hear, just can't speak. I tell him I love him,

North the day of the phone call.

appreciate all we had, and I know its hard right now. North is yelling 'daddy' at my side, and I tell dad that's North and he's excited to be talking to my dad. I tell him I love him one more time.

After I'm done speaking to him my sister takes the phone out of the hospital room and tells me the doctors said someone about to pass away holds on till they speak to some person not present but that they want to hear from, and once they do they pass away.

I was that person.

He died 3AM June 12 2012.

June 17 2012 Facebook post:

Sitting in a truck stop with free wifi, 700 miles into the trip back. My time back home in AR was deeply meaningful on so many levels. The funeral service for my dad brought out stronger crying than I've ever done. They asked me to do the eulogy -most everyone laughed at a few stories, cried, and clapped when I was done- all this made me feel good but more importantly I think my dad and the things he liked got represented. My uncle (or someone) said most kids don't know their parents lives with such detail and ability to summarize as I do, so my dad got a good story told of his life. While there I drove downtown and saw where we used to live, that part was great too. Then seeing my life-long friend Greg's awesome living-space within music studio within old warehouse in the industrial district near the airport was a hoot. Hanging out with Greg Ward and Traci Michele was even more of a hoot.

One thing this trip did for me was being able to indulge once again in a roadtrip across the Rockies and high plains. I have been frustrated and longing for seeing these roads I used travel so much on in 1990's. Now that I've actually done it again I found out its not such a big deal, even the greatest scenery in Utah and Wyoming didn't cause rapturous emotions like it once did.

I got a good dose of home, cried about my dad, saw all my family, got to roadtrip and now I just want to get back and fix North his breakfast and sit with him and watch his airplane video. He usually leans against me and puts his head on my arm through a lot of the video. — in Ellis Kansas at Love's Truck Stop, 200 Washington Street, Ellis Kansas 67637 (map) .

Pacific Northwest Seattle Times article featuring our family

On October 27 2011 I got an email from Tyrone Beason, a journalist for the Seattle Times. He was in the process of "...writing an upcoming piece about people in our region who are struggling to move into (or remain in) the middle class at a time when many are slipping down the economic ladder. If you're interested in participating and sharing the story of your family, it would be great to chat and go from there..." Over the next several months we did several interviews and photo shoots with Mr Beason and award winning newspaper photographer Ken Lambert. Eventually the article was published with our photo on the cover.

Scrimping and saving for a piece of the American dream
-by Tyrone Beason. Seattle Times.

Photo Journal: Snow in Fremont (neighborhood of Seattle)

I know this is an autobiographic blog, and relies foremost on telling stories through text. But sometimes just a series of photos tell a story as well, and in some cases the photos themselves are the most interesting thing to come out of that day.

These photos were taken in a time when I was a stay at home dad, my son North was two years old, and we lived in the very core of Fremont, in the Bridgeview Apartments near the corner of Fremont Avenue and 35th Street in Seattle. In late November 2010 we got a good layer of snow, and I took these around 4:00 AM, before the daylight and the traffic would remove most of the white stuff on the streets. Also fortuitous was the timing of the snow storm with the placement of Christmas lights on the buildings and trees that time of the year.

This record also shows how magical the immediate few blocks were of the place we chose for North began his life in.

Family Vacation in Wallace Idaho

On November 23, 2008 our family embarked on a vacation. It was a unique time -ten months after the birth of our first child, and in the middle of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Some might have chosen to skip a vacation altogether, but we chose to have fun while being mindful of what we spent. We chose to make a trek to Wallace Idaho.

We live in Seattle, and do not own an automobile. We walk to work, to the store, and only use a car occasionally. When we do, we rent a Zipcar. What the heck is a Zipcar? Answer: Usually a Honda, Subaru, or Toyota; parked in our neighborhood, which we can rent anytime, paying per hour or per day. For example, we rent for one hour to make a run for a large load of groceries. For this trip we needed an all-wheel drive car for the winter conditions on the mountain passes, so we chose the Subaru Forrester just two blocks from our home. Our trip was for five days, so we had to contact customer support and make a request for keeping the car that long. They were fast and courteous with a response of yes, and the little wagon was ours for those dates. (booking a car for the more usual few hours of use is much less trouble, just login the site and select a car that is not booked.)

November 23 I got the car packed and the family loaded and we were on the Interstate 90 at 6AM. The first light of dawn came when we ascended Snoqualmie Pass. It was my first interstate road trip driving a car since 1995. I have travelled across the country a few times by train or bus since '95, and thousands of miles by air around the world, but driving has an appeal and beauty all its own, and Interstate 90 is a great highway for it.

Interstate 90 at the Columbia Gorge.

The scene as we approached the Columbia River was surreal. There was a thick fog filling the river valley, which is more like a canyon than valley. Driving past this we proceeded through a geological region known as the Columbia River Plateau, a lava plain known by most as Washington State's only desert landscape. The air was dryer and colder, and I kept commenting to my wife how great it felt. She just grinned warily, knowing I prefer cold, dry, tree-less climates.

We got to Moses Lake before 10AM, and took an exit to have breakfast. Out in a vast desert plain, Moses Lake is one of the largest towns for a stop along the Interstate in this region. In Seattle, we have an almost endless number of nice restaurants. What I am about to say may sound, um, like I don't know much about good restaurants. I think I do know something about good food, and with that proclaim: I love the Moses Lake Denny's. We ordered omelettes served on a hot griddle. I'm not a paid spokesman, I promise, but the hot plate breakfast dish I had ( it was the more spicy of the selections ) totally rocked.

Our experience at this Denny's made me think up a motto: Being on a budget makes you go to average places, and have average things. Its great when this average stuff is great. Enjoy it.

After Moses Lake we did our best re-enactment of Dukes of Hazard, and sped (70MPH) towards Wallace. Our baby's only crying was somewhere between Moses Lake and Ritzville, then slept, like a baby, till our next stop.

Within a few miles of Wallace I began to question whether we had made the right choice. A few of the towns before Wallace seemed really cute, from what I could see driving on the Interstate. Then Wallace appeared. Clouds clinging to the edge of town, mountains rising right from behind the town buildings, and dozens of ornate "story book" brick buildings. I remembered why we came: it stands out as the prettiest small town on I-90.

Our reservation was for five nights at The Ryan Hotel, a circa 1903 miner's residential hotel. Our room was an especially large suite, with a wrap-around couch the size of a 747 airliner. A microwave, refrigerator, and space larger than our apartment in Seattle -all for $38 per night. Note that $38 is the price of the smaller suites, they simply gave us the master suite because it was vacant and we had a baby. The hotel was clean, everything worked, and looked like a movie scene about a ritzy hotel in the Old West. The hotel manager, John, was more like a nice cousin looking after us while visiting his house. He made sure we had everything we needed.

Once we were settled we walked around town. Any point in town was within a ten minute walk, or maybe five minutes. A three floor store, Tabor's Drug, is on the first corner next to The Ryan. We shopped there looking at all the toys. baby clothes, and sourveniors. The ladies at the counter were fun to talk to, interested in us and why we chose Wallace for our trip. We had that same conversation several times around town. Wallace is a "destination", for skiers and mountain bikers because of the ski slopes and huge trail system in the area. But a family simply staying there to see the town, particularly in the tourist offseason of Thanksgiving, was a little unusual.

We may have been some of the first customers ever at the newly revamped "Vintage Games". It is more like a tourist trap than any place in town, but wow, what a cool tourist trap. It has a wireless cafe ( maybe the only one in this region of I-90 ), bookstore, upscale sci-fi and toys store, all kinds of oddities store, and retro game arcade with old pinball machines. They even had a LIFE SIZE TYRANNOSAURUS HEAD for sale. $5000. Briefly, I wanted to stray from our budget constraints to buy this obvious bargain. A once in a lifetime chance to grace our living room with a VW sized dinosaur head.

My wife did not want a dinosaur head for $5000. ( She is a conservative New Englander. )

Later at the hotel we made sandwiches. Being on a budget, wary of spending money during a world financial crisis, we planned to fix our own food for lunch and dinner during the vacation ( when not on the road ). We had stocked up on cold cuts, fruits and milk; even packed our coffee maker. This is not as romantic looking as the marketing photos promoting most vacations, but as Sting sang in the old Police song : When The World Is Running Down, You Make The Best Of What's Still Around. We watched a lot of cable TV while at the hotel, this was a treat for people with no TV or cable at home. I was glued to the 24 hour news when in the hotel room.

We planned to eat out for breakfasts. We ventured out around 9AM and quickly settled on the Brooks Motel Restaurant, which had a sizable crowd already being served. I had eggs, bacon and toast; and our son liked looking at all the new people. He got to crawl around on the floor playing with year old girl. Her family lived in town, the father's home state was the same as mine: Arkansas. We both went on about how we liked the Northwest. There was an elderly man that stopped and talk to us and entertained our baby. He looked every bit the part of old miner -an old tough but jovial man who had lost his wife, telling us stories of his old heirlooms he had stashed in his house, and his kids taking and wearing some of the old jewelry without his permission.

Wallace is not a resort, it is full real people like this. What is nice is it is not a typical working class town either. There is no McDonald's/KFC/Pizza Hut/Wendy's or Burger King, no mall, and no Wal-Mart. There is a Harvest Food (full size grocery store), TrueValue Hardware, and Tabor's Drugstore. The town is thriving with nice restaurants and bars. It is the Silver Mining capital of the world, with businesses and people that really serve that way of life. Think of a thriving Old West mining town in 1920, that is what Wallace does, without any fakery or mock up. It is the real thing.

The Brooks was advertising a Thanksgiving buffet from Noon to 4PM. We decided to go for it. It was our first Thanksgiving as parents, as a real family. A lady I assume is the owner offered to hold and entertain our baby while we ate. When we came back the next day she remembered our son's name.

On our third day in town we toured the Wallace District Mining Museum. They have the semi-famous last traffic light on Interstate 90. Wallace was featured on 20/20 as the town that stood up against the building of an Interstate through it. I-90 had a detour in Wallace, traffic had to exit the interstate and travel through a few city streets and then re-enter I-90 on the other side of town. The museum has that traffic light. Historical note: the Interstate was eventually fully built by building a bridge outside the town, leaving the town untouched by the construction.

I got to jaw with the Museum proprietor about Wallace and how it reminds me of towns in southeast Alaska, along the Inside Passage. Like in SE Alaska, Wallace is hemmed in by topography, not able to sprawl out indefinitely. The mountainsides are right in town, with a few houses built right on the hillsides. The proprietor opined that the land had made a people that are tough, independent, and hard to categorize.

On Friday night I got an early birthday gift -I got to go out to the bars. I started my bar hopping at the 1313 Club. There I was able to test an early run of "Orehouse Amber" from the totally new Wallace Brewing Company. I even got to meet one of the brewery's owners, Chase Sanborn. My taste test put the beer somewhere close to Seattle cult favorite Mack & Jack's African Amber. I stressed to Chase this was a compliment. Beyond the good beer, I got in a really long and indepth chat with locals, including one guy back home for the weekend from Portland, talking about crime on my side of the mountains and how unfortunate that is, and how fortunate the people in Wallace are.

1313 Club. Wallace Idaho

I closed down the 1313, and went on to the slightly rougher Silver Corner Bar and Grille. It was packed. Within minutes a crazy drunk woman knocked a beer bottle over and onto me. Now this was a bar! I eventually got in a conversation with a group that included a Navy man on leave back home, with his wife who had moved here from Dallas Texas. Later I met a brilliant electrical engineer and we talked tech stuff till I finally called it a night.

The next day was more of the same. I visited the little computer store and got to geek out talking about my favorite subject with the owner, then had a huckleberry milkshake at the Red Light Garage. They were closed for a little renovation, but let me in for a milkshake, even pressing me to taste test their micro-brew ( which was good, tasted like Killian's Red ).

That afternoon we decided to pack up and hit the road to beat the Sunday after Thanksgiving traffic. I drove to the entrance ramp on the east side of town, so as to get one more look at Wallace.

For anyone in the Northwest, Wallace is worth a look.

New York Times Photo Essay: Wallace Idaho

The author of this blog also has two books available on Amazon. Athena Techne uses some of the autobiographical content of this blog and adds a philosophical perspective utilizing the ancient Greek god Athena.

Athena Techne :: Amazon.com Page

Autistic Crow Computer is a fiction set in Seattle, about an autistic boy and two crows. The book was written for young autistic readers, although reviews by non-autistics have been positive.

Autistic Crow Computer :: Amazon.com Page