Here’s another bit of landscape that I saw while camping last week. The rocks along the south side of West Clear Creek were crumbling like this along 100 feet or more of trail, which showed a lot of interesting damage like this.

I figured out why Sideshow seemed so familiar: I’d actually read it 15 years ago. Then, I’d done the same thing that I did this time, and thought it was the first book in a trilogy. Oh well. I don’t know how I read the book, remembered most of its plot, and then thought its title was Grass.  I have done things like this before. Once, I got a Linux question about an obscure piece of hardware, didn’t know anything about it, Googled it, and the most relevant hits were things that I had posted 1.5 years ago.  So somehow, I had found information about something obscure, solved a user’s problem, and forgotten about it in 1.5 years.  Is it any wonder that I’d forget a bunch of stuff about a book that I’d read 15 years ago?  Sigh.

Well, I can read the first 2 books in the series that Sideshow belongs to later.

Last weekend, we saw this caterpillar crossing the trail in front of us. I thought it was interesting enough to take a picture, since caterpillars are sort of rare in Phoenix.  (No squirrels, either.)

Saturday afternoon, I was walking to the library when I noticed a truck pull into a nearby parking lot.  The people in the truck got out and ran towards me.  I wondered what was going on, then as they passed me, I looked behind me.  A mattress had fallen off the back of the truck, and was occupying one lane of the road.  They were lucky that this happened to them on a weekend, and not during rush hour.  They got the mattress back on the truck with little traffic disruption, though.

One of the books I got was Sideshow by Sheri S. Tepper. The dust jacket of another book had made Sideshow out to be the first in a trilogy, while other sources say it’s the third.  It’s also connected with Grass in many ways, which I had read about 15 years ago and almost forgotten about until now.  Well, this means I have one book to read after this one, then another one to re-read.

Caturday! Fuzzball is not quite as pleased as this, but she’s happy that it’s the weekend.

Again, not a lot to report. Recently read through When Languages Die, by a professional linguist. This is semi-interesting for its accounts of people who speak uncommon languages, and the subtle and non-subtle differences that those languages have from the main languages in use today. However, I can’t agree with his main thesis, which is, “We absolutely have to study all the languages available right now, because every language that is not spoken anymore decreases the amount of knowledge available by a huge amount!”

The examples that he gives of languages holding “special data” are not particularly convincing. So some Siberian reindeer herders have a language where “5-year-old castrated male reindeer” is one word, and most other year/castration status/sex combinations of reindeer have other single words to denote them. You know what? Big deal. We here in Western civilization have a generic word for “automobile”, and hundreds of subsidiary terms (“ricer”, “junker”, “truck”, “dually”, “coupe”, “family sedan”, and “beater”) for specific kinds of automobiles. If reindeer suddenly became as important to us as cars are now, we’d have 20 different single-word terms for various kinds of reindeer before you could say “Cunning linguists”. English still has multiple terms for various important livestock animals; “heifer”, “cow”, “steer”, “ox”, “calf”, and “bull” are all subclasses of “head of cattle”. Basically, the book has some interesting parts, but it was worth less than the $3 that I paid for it. (For future economists, $3 is about 40% of the price of a lunch or a normal paperback book.)

This is a shot from last Sunday, when we were walking on the trail near West Clear Creek. Most of the country near the campsite looks kind of like this.

There’s really not a lot to say, though. Recently finished The Scar, by China Miéville. Yeah, I’d lent it to Nathan, he said he enjoyed it, I ended up reading it again. I think that English departments in most colleges would totally love this book if only it was not possible to classify it as “steampunk” or “weird science fiction”. The characters are compelling, there’s a fair amount of action, and there are a ton of things in the book that would consume plenty of class time and possibly even make students think.  What things do the Lovers tell us about power and obsession?  What is the significance of Bellis’s letter?  What could the avanc symbolize?

I don’t think that anyone in whatever passes for the literary establishment took any notice.  They probably saw the dust jacket, said, “Oh.  Steampunk science fiction. Bah!” and dismissed it. This definitely happens; the short story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” was a study in how authors have to say, “Hey!  Look at me!  I’m engaging in Serious Literary Subjects!  Even though I’m using sci-fi and fantasy tropes left and right!” to be heard.

In honor of tax day, here’s a cat illustrating the government’s attitude towards your money.

Not a lot to report from work.  On Wednesday night, went over to Steve’s place, played Rock Band.  Also heard that Steve’s applied to be an instructor at UAT in Tempe.  If he’s accepted, he’ll probably be teaching introductory Java to first-year students.  This should be interesting.  If nothing else, Steve will learn how much patience he has.

Sunday morning, we woke up to no rain and people fishing in the river next to our campsite. That was a little odd, but what the heck. We built a fire, and Zach made bacon and coffee. The coffee was not all that strong, since it was made in an old-time percolator which wasn’t over the hottest part of the fire. Oh well.

Then we went hiking along the trails that we’d explored on Saturday. This time, since it wasn’t raining, we brought Sarah and our cameras. About 3/4 mile from the campsite, there was an abandoned structure:

We didn’t have any idea what it was or why it was there. We walked down the trail a ways and found remnants of old pipes that had probably connected to this building. Zach thought that the place had probably been used in some sort of mining, with pipes carrying water in and out for some sort of sluicing operation.

We continued up the trail, with a few detours to check out side trails that looked interesting.  There was one patch of trail that was more treacherous than normal, since it had rained recently, but we got over it with no problems.  Unfortunately, the trail ended after about another half mile, with no apparent way forward that didn’t involve crossing the river.  We didn’t want to do that.  So we went back along the trail, this time taking the trail’s other branch, which was closer to the river.

When we got back to the campsite, I took down my tent, packed up, said goodbye, and left.  Had stuff to do back at home, like laundry and feeding Fuzzball.

Trivia: We had everybody except Kelli, who was attending some Nathan Filion-related event.  We also heard stories of Patti being pulled into coordinating a baby shower for someone, Zach injuring himself with a hatchet years ago, and other tales of random stuff.  At some point, I said, “I woke up this morning from a dream where I had been imprisoned on charges of possessing illegal firearms and ammunition.  And Billy Mays was acting as my defense lawyer.”  That was true, even though it made absolutely no sense.  Well, dreams are weird.  We were tied for second place when I left.

Various problems due to me being really, really tired meant no update yesterday. But I’ve gotten some sleep. So:

The directions to the campsite looked easy. They neglected to mention that the Forest Service roads are dirt/gravel and not that well maintained. Oh well. After 5 miles of washboard road, I finally got there on Saturday just after noon.
This is the mountain that was to the southeast of our campsite. I didn’t get any pictures of the campsite itself, but got more pictures of the forest and the hiking trail. Zach and I climbed about 3/4 of the way up this mountain on Saturday, then spent some time hiking along some of the trails in the park. It rained intermittently all day on Saturday, which is not all that common in AZ this time of the year. Sarah didn’t go hiking with us. When we got back to the campsite, Zach built a fire.

The problem was that the fire was too big to fit under the camping grill that I’d brought. I tried to get an old Coleman stove going, with very little success. Zach then looked at the stove and found that it had a leak, which made it almost totally useless. Zach rearranged the fire so we could set the grill up, then we had grilled bratwurst, hot dogs, and reheated chili. Food grilled over an open flame tastes really good if done right. Zach and Sarah roasted marshmallows in the remains of the fire.

By that time, it had gotten dark, and it had started raining. We put the fire out and decided to turn in.

Caturday! Time to rest from the work week and curl up with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Or go camping, which I’ll be doing Saturday. I’ll be unable to do anything computer-related until late Sunday when I get back into town, so there will be no entry tomorrow. Also, I got a text message from Zach Friday night. He said, “Could you pick up some bug spray and bring it tomorrow?” Mosquito repellent is totally essential when camping in Michigan, but I had been assured that there were few if any mosquitoes here in AZ. Hm.

Most of the people on my team worked from home on Friday. Instead of going out for lunch, we went to the cafeteria, where I got a large and tasty meatloaf sandwich for a very reasonable price. Just as Sherry was paying for her food, a cafeteria employee brought out a huge red velvet cake. Sherry said, “I dodged a bullet on that one—that cake looked so good, but the cashier had already rung me up.”

Then I fixed a number of stupid problems with an internal web app, handled a few trouble tickets, and saw just about everyone leave half an hour early. So many people had the day off that traffic on I-10 was really light, and the bus dropped me off 10 minutes earlier than it usually does. Yay!

Thursday was really annoying in that I got a call, probably from work, while on my way to the store. Traffic was heavy enough that I couldn’t get the phone out of my pocket before they stopped calling. I figured that they would call back or call someone else if it was really important. So I shopped as quickly as I could, then drove back as quickly as I could so I could check my e-mail and find out what it was all about.

Imagine my surprise when there was no mail at all. Whatever whoever it was was trying to contact me about must not have been important. All that annoying stress for nothing at all. Getting a trouble ticket is part of my job, but is it too much to ask for those tickets to be actual problems worth responding to? Argh.

We also went out for lunch on Thursday, which we don’t usually do. I forget who suggested that, but it was a nice change of pace.

Wednesday was reasonably normal, except for getting a helpdesk ticket right before I got in the car to go to Steve’s. This was a bit annoying, because A) it wasn’t my stuff that was breaking, but a co-worker’s B) dealing with this made me late. Oh well. This is one of the hazards of being on-call.

For a while, there was a site where you could combine a random “Family Circus” cartoon with a random quote from Nietzsche. This is one of the things that it coughed up that I thought was amusing.