Sep 25, 2007

Chicago to Portland

I set this down in writing mostly to cement my own memories, but also to share the experience with anyone who might be interested. I had intended to blog/journal every day, but I never seemed to have the time. So it goes, travelling with a newborn, I guess. As I write this tonight, all in one sitting, the trip is not quite completely over.

Eleven days ago, we said goodbye to Chicago and set out for the West. We had sold all of our furniture; returned anything for which we happened to have a receipt; donated to Goodwill anything without resale value; and sent everything else across the country via Amtrak freight, at the extremely reasonable rate of 41 cents/pound.

To transport ourselves, we paid a hundred dollars for a pop-up camper, dirty but in good working order. We spent a week customizing and cleaning it: discarded superfluous racks, brackets to nonexistent accessories, a pair of rusty propane tanks; from the interior, temporarily removed the cabinetry, tore out the linoleum flooring and ragged panelling; put down new pad and carpet (taken from Markie's bedroom), installed new paneling (the only out-of-pocket expense); re-installed the pair of bench cabinets, ditched the rest; replaced the decaying kitchenette tabletop with one from our patio furniture (which J stained to a shade of mahogany); scoured every surface inside and out; and laundered the curtains and upholstery; did not have time to follow through with our plans to paint it. Perhaps in the future.

Some befores:


Afters:



As you may well know, moving can be a chore. The final stages seem absolutely unending. My mom came up from St Louis and watched Markie while J and I focused on our projects for the final forty-eight sleepless hours leading up to our departure. Our goal was to pack light as possible and bring along nothing unnecessary, but at a certain point, we gave up on doing it all perfectly and just wanted the hell out of our apartment. We crammed everything into the trailer, the trunk, the back seat, left the house keys by the fridge, and hit the road, pulling a trailer for the first time.

...
Day 1. Sunday, September 16

As the sun rose, Mom tailed us to Dunkin Donuts for 5 a.m. coffee and sugar charge up. We all exchanged hugs, and then Mom drove South for St Louis, and we peeled off onto the 294 tollway, westward. We tried to work up some nostalgic sentiment for our last views of Chicago, but the thrill of being done with it all was too great. That excitement was enough to keep us from conking out for approximately twenty minutes. Eyelids crashing, heads lolling, we exited the highway and pulled into a hotel parking lot where we slept deeply, upright in our seats, for five hours. Not even beyond the city limits, the liberated sensation of travel was strong. The randomness of our spot made us invisible, and after the car nap, J put a blanket on the grass and laid down with Markie for a while. The dogs roamed. Markie burped up; we changed her outfit and diaper. Someone had dumped out a cooler on the lawn, and so I scooped the free ice into our own cooler.

Getting out of the apartment had been our final responsibility. No job waiting for me in Portland, no rent due (We'll be staying with my aunt and uncle, once we arrive in PDX), no school, no homework. Huge, unnatural freedom. Furthermore, at just ten weeks old, the demands made by Markie are at their lifetime minimum, and her capacity for sleep is at its max. No schedule, no plans, no itinerary. Watch the weather, check the atlas, drive when we're in the mood, stay an extra night when we find a good spot, so on, so forth. See how Markie handles long stretches of driving, see how livable the camper is, see what the Volvo is capable of.

Concluding our heavenly pit stop, we promptly found ourselves disoriented and confused, choosing between poorly marked on-ramps, atlas locked in the trunk under the fully loaded bike rack; little dog Murphy spontaneously vomited a stomach-full of dog food and putrid scrounged mystery liquid, coating car seat and Markie, now squirming and screaming. On the shoulder of the freeway entrance, I ineffectually wiped off the car seat with paper towels while J changed Markie's clothes for the second time in twenty minutes.

Markie didn't seem to mind the stench of her car seat, so we trundled off, frazzled but not disheartened, all the more eager to get some miles behind us.

We used the De Kalb Oasis free wi-fi to make reservations at a KOA just beyond Des Moines. Made it there around ten pm, set up the camper, took showers, bathed Markie, decided to spend the next day organizing the camper and car, examine atlas and guide books, enjoy the campground. Slept with the “windows” open, let the night air blow through the mosquito netting.

...
Day 2. Monday, September 17.

Slept late. Cooked a breakfast of bacon, eggs, and toast on the Coleman stove. Organized the living space, consolidated boxes. Loaded the trunk with all items that didn't have to do with the trip. Patched a tube. Drank coffee, read the New Yorker in the shade. Once the sun reached its full height, we zipped the rubber windows and tried out the AC. It works.


...
Day 3. Tuesday, September 18.

Got in touch with J's friend Liz in Omaha, made plans to meet for lunch on our way through. Liz invited us to stay the night, so we did.



...
Day 4. Wednesday, September 19.

Ate a ridiculous complimentary breakfast at the French delicatessen where Liz works. My first time eating caviar, I think.




Headed North for the Badlands. Sunset rest stop.




Arrived at the Badlands around 1:30a.m., found a campsite, tried to set up quietly.

...
Day 5. Thursday, September 20.





Toured the Badlands by car. Lured prairie dogs with gravel.




Wall Drug.

...
Day 6. Friday, September 21.

Woke with the sun.



Mt. Rushmore. Refused to pay the $8 parking lot entrance fee, so these are the pics we got. Watched the landscape change from pure farmland to wooded foothills of pine.




Crazy Horse.


Set up for the night at a mediocre RV Park in Worland, Wyoming. Fixed chili dogs on Coleman stove.

...
Day 7. Saturday, September 22.

Woke early, romped with dogs in nearby field. Forecast in Yellowstone called for snow, so we decided to skip it.

Crossed the continental divide.


Buffalo.


Drove South through ridiculously beautiful Wyoming. Stopped at some anonymous body of water for a picnic roadside brunch of pancakes, bacon, and eggs.






Looked around after brunch...





Found this. I'm not sure—does the graffiti date itself? King Diamond, Bon Jovi, KISS, Judas Priest...




As the below pictures make clear, hips and berms aren't my everyday terrain, but this discovery was perhaps the peak experience of my bike riding life. Thanks to J and Markie for enduring the blowing sand and for snapping the pictures.




Sweaty back and torn jeans, onward to the next stop: Preston, Idaho, the real-life setting of Napoleon Dynamite. Arrived very late in chilly Preston, rang the motel doorbell, and got a room. Cast and crew for Napoleon stayed here while shooting, turns out.

...
Day 8. Sunday, September 23.

Napoleon sightseeing all morning. I wouldn't call myself a Napoleon “fan,” but I also wouldn't say my taste in movies is very sophisticated. Sad to report that the restaurant where Kip and Uncle Rico eat is no longer extant.

Preston High School:


Summer's house:


Napoleon's house:


...I couldn't believe Idaho's natural beauty. Large-format Hasselblad would be appropriate, but I just went ahead with my compact digital point-and-shoot and fired away through filthy windshield. These shots were all taken while driving, as J and Markie slept.



















Tumble weed. Temperature dropping as we climb.



Made camp in Mountain Home, Idaho. Coffee pot ramen noodles. Did laundry.


Rented a dvd to watch on the computer. Here's a hot tip—sign up for a new account at Video Gallery, get a free rental!
...
Day 9. Monday, September 24.

Started the day with an oil change for the Volvo. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the transmission gave us trouble for the first time ever. The automatic transmission just didn't want to upshift or downshift, had to go way above or below the usual shift points. Checked the fluid (as I had at every other gas station stop), and it was fine, as I knew it would be. Checked with four local mechanics, none of whom had a spare second, and none of whom knew anyone that worked on Volvos. I decided that since the transmission wasn't actually slipping, maybe it wouldn't hurt it to continue driving. Got back on the road and the car was normal within thirty minutes. Fixed itself. I'm planning to share my story with Car Talk this weekend...

Beautiful day, beautiful Eastern Oregon, beautiful wife.




Arrived in Medford at 11p.m.
...
Day 16. Monday, October 1.

We lingered in Medford, Oregon, had a fully satisfying visit, and made sure that Markie got plenty of Grandma time.

After a week, we packed up and said our goodbyes. Rather than a straight, five-hour shot North to Portland, we opted for Highway 101, the scenic two-lane that hugs the coast. We dipped down through the California Redwoods and then hit Brookings, the southernmost town on Oregon's coast. It was already mid-afternoon when we stopped to check out the Brookings public beach. When we found that the park included a campground with vacancies, we happily concluded the day's driving.

This was the greenest campground of the trip, and the spot we chose proved the shadiest, soggiest of them all, appropriate for our official arrival in Oregon.


Set up camp, watched the gray sunset.


At just $17/night, we decided to stay the next day, too. Hung out, edited video, let the dogs run.



Rather than spend $8 on two cans of Coleman fuel, I bought an electric skillet for fifteen; only wish I'd done it sooner. Sausage links and french toast for dinner.


...
Day 17. Tuesday, October 2.
Drove north. Pit stop at the Oregon Dunes, ocean visible in the distance.



Couple hours later, stopped for a cold-water swim. J stayed dry.



When it was time to find accomodations for the night, we decided not to stop. Instead, we called our family in Portland and let them know that we would be arriving late that night, and they said they'd have our room all ready with clean sheets.

So we drove and drove, made a late sunset photo stop in Depoe Bay, where we honeymooned three years ago.


Arrived in Portland just before ten.
...
Day 18. Wednesday, October 3.
Slept happy, woke happy. And this is home now, for the next long while.


Aug 26, 2007

"crazy planets sizes"




I've been watching this ridiculous video over and over for the past couple weeks. Blows my mind every single time.

Recommended!

Jul 30, 2007

History.

In 2003, Ben edited together a three-minute video of our friends to share online. It was simply titled The Dailygrind Crew, referring to the website he was running at the time. First there was the popup-riddled dailygrind.freeservers.com, and, later, once he had filled up his allotment of free web-hosting space, there was the no-less-irritating dailygrind.8m.com domain. The sites remain today as shaky internet relics--a low-tech, unnavigable template; dated fashion and bike parts; youthful faces; and tricks we probably wouldn't bother archiving today. Ben could have taken the sites down, but he chose instead to leave them up as tributes to the happy years documented within.

All nostalgia aside, we were riding our hardest, truly, and I think it shows, on some level. No, that's not Adobe Aftereffects--that's authentic third-generation analog videotape shot with a VHS-C camcorder. To fully appreciate, download in high-res, ~57 mb.

... Or here's the YouTube, where it will just look like normal crap YouTube:


Locations/Riders: Everett, Washington: Phil Lastname, John Lastname, Andrew Longstreet, Shay Shefflebein; St Louis, Missouri: Ryan Johnson, John Haase; Portland, Oregon: Darus Albon and Dustin Anderson; and Ben and myself, jetsetting worldwide, riding and filming. Most of these guys are featured in the new video.

Here's another video Ben and I made in 'o4 or 'o5. Different concept. Call it "street riding." At 7mb, I really think you should just download the .wmv file, but here's the YouTube, in case.


After the session, Ben and I barely managed to load the block into the back of my Oldsmobile station wagon. As it was far heavier than I could lift on my own, it remained in my car for an entire year, ruining my mileage, before I finally dumped the thing in the alley behind our house. I can't imagine someone putting in the energy that removing it would require. It's probably sitting exactly where I left it three years ago. If anyone in STL is interested, I'd be happy to provide directions. And I would hope you'd post footage of whatever ensued.

Jul 25, 2007

Last Chance to Contribute

I'm done filming. I'm done capturing. Editing is 90% complete, and I could finish that, too, but I am under the hopeful impression that some people still want to contribute footage. I know where that footage will go, if I receive it, but I can't hold up production waiting for just one more clip. No more delays.

Working on credits now. Final Cut makes things like scrolling text idiot-proof, so it's not hard to get what's in my head onto the screen; but there's a part of me that's self-conscious of the lack of custom motion graphics. Production levels on bmx videos are way way up, all across the board, and our video will definitely be in the class of "local scene video." That's fine with me. Some of my favorite videos are scene videos...

I edited a sort of "trailer" calling for people to submit their clips.
The full res 12 mb .mov file is available to download here, or you can watch it via YouTube, which is easier, but not nearly as pretty. I also wish I could undo the automatically selected video still, but, ah, well... so it goes. I'm glad we're here.



To everyone that produced--huge thanks.


MMP


My daughter arrived at 6 am, Tuesday, the 10th of July. She is perfect.

Seven pounds. Apgar score: 9, 9. The nurse, before she measured length, had me guess how long, and I knew without hesitation that she was exactly twenty inches.

(BMX!)

We put up a public flickr slideshow here. As of this morning, her first growth spurt has yet to hit, so she is still balls up to the approximate size of a beautiful, beautiful football.

Markie is her name, after my dad Mark.

Markie Maze Piff.

Jun 7, 2007

all not lost









After returning my $28 Circuit City 6pin-to-4pin firewire cable, I went in search of a 6-to-6, which would enable me to connect two computers directly and hopefully rescue the video project from a dying hard disc. I initially paid $14 for firewire at the Apple Store, and I thought that was a pretty sweet deal, but later the same day found a CraigsList seller with cables for seven dollars a pop. I bought a 6-to-6 and another 6-to-4. (Holy profit margin, CircuitCity!)

The good news doesn't end there. Next morning, I jacked the MacBook into the iMac, booted up (nervously), and transferred forty gigs of data in under an hour. Effortless. This is the part where I express my gratitude to Apple for designing products that work. My goodness. Then I installed Final Cut on the MacBook and attempted to open one of the transfered video project files. These project files are pretty simple, I guess. Each one is just a timeline, not actual video, and the timeline points to specific moments within the raw video files. I had my doubts that the timeline would be smart enough to find its video, now that nothing was in its place any more. But no--project opened as if nothing had happened.

I'd been advised by a "MacGenius" at the Apple Store that, while the iMac hard disk could not be "repaired," I might have luck doing a system "restore," formatting the hard drive, re-installing the operating system, and returning the computer to its factory settings. Maybe the hard drive wasn't, in fact, bad? With all my files backed up, I went for it. It may have worked.

Computer is running and not crashing. Re-transferring the files back via firewire is slower than the first transfer, however. I started the transfer, ran some errands, came back many hours later, and it still said "3 hours remaining." So I cancelled it. Haven't had time to try again.

I forget the specs, but I think the desktop processor is a little more powerful than the laptop. Not sure. Don't want to deal with a bad hard drive. I'll proceed with editing on this machine and fiddle with the iMac when I have time.

The weather has been incredible, and I find myself using my designated bike time for riding instead of editing. I guess that's a good thing, on some level. After eight months riding pegless, I put just a front left peg on for hang-fives, and I was amazed to find that my body knew the balance point. It must have something to do with all this coverage of Josh Betley.

Rolling on the front wheel is an incredible sensation. If I get this trick locked down, I could see myself becoming a dedicated flatlander...

Jun 1, 2007

Every single thing.

Last post, video production was stalled, waiting for three things:

1. Capture cam from Ben, because the one I bought broke.
2. Final Cut disk from Ben, because the application spontaneously stopped working on my computer and needed to be reinstalled.
3. Firewire cable from Ben (to connect camera to computer).

Ben and Atika came up for a visit, and Ben remembered the camera, but nothing else. We visited them in St Louis, and I remembered to grab the disk, but not the cable. So I bought the cable from Circuit City, intending to return it once I'd captured everything--thirty bucks for an item that could be had off ebay for fifteen shipped.

First night I had everything together, I started capturing right away. The problems began promptly. For a select group of tapes, the cap-cam absolutely refuses to play back sound. All the tapes from Ben's trv950, I think, maybe seven in total.

The trv950 was our longtime workhorse, the camera that documented our hardest years of riding, right up until last year, when Ben got married and we began to film a lot less. When we go out filming now, it's always for bangers, but those occasions are fewer and farther between. The trv950 footy is the stuff I had in mind for the video all along, and I've been working with everything else.

So, I captured everything I could, and I gave Ben back his camera.

Working with this small amount of footage, I edited and re-edited, tried out lots of different things. I have this dogmatic belief that focus and detachment are the essential state of mind for writing and editing. And with the right editing, anything can be made to work. After a million painstaking re-edits, I have almost seven minutes that I'm totally happy with. I guess you would call the video a "mixtape." No rider gets his own part, no names on the clips, just super tight, watch it, get fired up, go ride. That kind of thing. I even know exactly where the remaining footy will go, once I figure out how to get it captured.

However, night before last, the computer acted up, taking longer and longer to boot, and crashing sometimes, which never happened before, finally refusing to boot altogether. I suspected a bad hard drive, took it to the Apple Store for diagnosis yesterday, and my suspicion was confirmed. We were able to pull some test files off of the computer, so maybe I'll be able to back everything up. Maybe not. All I need is a six-pin-to-six-pin firewire cable, and I can use the MacBook as an external hard drive.

I went to Circuit City last night with this knowledge, eager to return my useless video-to-computer firewire cable, get my money back, and buy the new computer-to-computer cable.

Denied. Fifteen days past the limit for money-back returns. Blew that one. Well, at least I was still eligible for store credit and could exchange for the new wire.

NO. Circuit City does not stock a six-pin-to-six-pin firewire cable.

So, thirty dollar gift card! That's the update. To recap, I must now

1. Buy computer-to-computer cable.
2. Back up data.
3. Repair or replace hard drive.
4a. Best case scenario: captured video still viable.
4b. Alternate scenario: re-capture and re-edit all footage.

That would bring us back to where we were. Still need to
5. Acquire capture camera.
6. Capture remaining video.
7. Finish editing
8. Figure out how to burn a dvd.
9. Get dvd's duplicated, distributed, etc.

Part of me is surprised at how short this list is, and part of me thinks that the list is impossibly long. Again, it had been my intention to finish this before the baby's birth. I don't mind continuing to work on the project, except that our footage continues to age...

Finish on a high note?.. All of the sudden, winter is over. It's 3 a.m. and seventy degrees out.