Today was a rest day in Seattle. I came down with a killer head cold I’m going to blame on sharing the air with 300 of my closest friends on a commercial airliner.
It started coming on late Saturday. I was moderately miserable on Mount St. Helens yesterday, where I shot this photo that sums up how the world looked to me.
Since all of the trees in the blast zone were knocked down when the volcano erupted in 1980, they had to be replanted. Because they are all about the same size, their branches line up and cause your eye to think of a fuzzy test pattern. I thought I was REALLY sick until Wife Lila said she was seeing the same thing.
Mountain from a speeding car
Once we got out of the mountains and onto the Interstate, Wife Lila took over the driving responsibilities. She’s paranoid about getting my cold, so she made me ride with my head out the car window all of the way home. To reinforce her message that I should keep my distance, she’s been eating raw onions and garlic on everything including her breakfast pancakes.
She decided the best thing we could do was hole up in the room while I slept all day.
Laptop, junk food and meds
She was doing payroll and dealing with other office stuff on her laptop while I sawed away. At one point, she woke me up so she could make a long distance call. She said I was making so much noise she was afraid the caller at the other end would hear me and not her.
Finally, she said that she had endured all the serenading that she could and grabbed the car keys to go shopping. That didn’t bother me until I saw that she had returned with a huge plastic shopping bag from Bed Bath and Beyond. A bag much larger than the bath sponge she bought would have required.
I’ve seen those stories about Dr. Kevorkian and his machines. That bag looked to be just the right size to fit over a snoring person’s head.
Don’t let cherubic smile fool you
“I don’t know what happened, officer. One minute he was making the sound of a chainsaw chewing through sheet metal, then he got quiet. I just assumed that he had turned over and found a comfortable position. Oh, officer, I’m sorry about the onions. I had a big hamburger just before you got here.”
[Editor’s note: I actually made good use of the day to work on a video of the trotline experience. Youtube told me that it was going to take 869 minutes to upload. I hope it gets done before we check out.
{Right after I had typed that – and 300 minutes into the upload – a message popped up on my browser saying that my connection with the Hampton Inn’s Internet service had timed out and that I’d have to enter the super-secret code to reactivate it for 24 hours. The desk clerk didn’t know if it would drop a connection in progress or if it only kept you from establishing a new connection. He told me to call the 800-number support line. As soon as I heard the words “ATT,” I knew I was in trouble. Eight minutes after I heard the “we are experiencing a high volume of calls” announcement, a tech came on who was as clueless as the desk clerk.
[When I didn’t see the upload incrementing, I started another session. Oh, and don’t bother to use YouTube’s Advanced Video Upload with “resumable uploads.” It doesn’t resume.]
The ecosystem in the blast zone of Mt St Helens is “blasting” through what were some generally accepted theories about how things develop. The general consensus was that the ecosystem begins simple and then “evolves” or develops into a more and more complex environment. What is being observed is that the ecosystem is diverse and developing almost as if a gardener or farmer were directing the activities of all the biologicals. There is, people, we just don’t see him in action – he created it to work that way.