(Sorry, technical difficulties…pictures will have to be included later!)

So my wife and I are in the midst of a grand adventure, driving across the top of the country. Starting from Seattle, heading to New York, puttering around there for a few days, and heading home.

We left on Saturday, around 1pm, after saying good bye to our good friends who are watching our house and cat (whom we also said goodbye to). First, a stop at a local drugstore to pick up a chotsky to act as our talisman for the trip. We then started for the eastern half of Washington, with the fervent hope that we could get out of the state before the end of the day…

Cresting the Snoqualmie pass, there was a traffic advisory for just a few miles ahead…an accident had left a mess of traffic behind. A mess that mostly involved putting the car into Park, while still on the freeway (but by a beautiful lake!), and just waiting.

That seemed to clear up entirely all at once, without much of the slow growing back to speed that normal traffic jams get, so about an hour later we were moving at a decent clip again, and once again hopeful (although less so) that we’d make it out of the state.

At one point along the way, we saw a sign for ‘Wild Horses Monument’, and decided to take a breather and check it out. It was also a lookout point, which gave a beautiful view of the valley below. The main point of the monument, however, was a metal sculpture set up on the top of a nearby hill (with a very steep climb up to it) of a herd of horses along the hilltop, silhouetted against the sky. It’s very evocative, and worth a stop, although we decided it wasn’t worth climbing up to also…

Washington is a truly exquisite state, and the forests and lakes gave way to rolling farmland, and some neat traveler-friendly features. For example, for about 14 miles, someone decided to put signs on the fence beside the freeway, every odd while, with the name of the crops that were being grown at that particular point. Peas, Field and Sweet Corn, Potatoes, Wheat, and even Peppermint flew by.

And then things turned ugly. In the back half of WA, we found a small town, whose city name in the ubiquitous green freeway signs, read simply, ‘George’. A few groans later, and we had reached this annoyingly named town… There, they had a business named ‘Valley Forge Fruits’, and ‘Martha’s Inn’, and the home of the Half-Ton Cherry Pie. *sigh*

We started punning (*I* started punning, I should say, despite physical threats against me, and it dragged out my wife’s competitive nature to respond with puns), and that brought us through a lot of the remainder of the state…

After reaching Spokane, and realizing that indeed, we would make it out of state (albeit barely), we made the decision to end in Couer d’Alene, ID. The small panhandle of Idaho was our stopping point for the first day.

Driving down the main street, the first thing we saw were a pair of Very Large feathers, like from a seagull, but scaled up to truck size. Confused, but dutifully camera-happy, we caught one of them in the camera, and moved on…

Also in Couer d’Alene was the large burger-hoisting Paul Bunyan cutout, which we dutifully took pictures in front of, and Melissa got an onion rings from the associated Paul Bunyan Famous Hamburger. (Mini-review: ‘Greasy and tasty as onion rings should be.‘)

Back to our hotel, across the street for some Outback (and a photo with the outsized alligator in front), and back to the hotel to crash…

Oh, and I finished about 1/2 of The Hobbit over the course of the day, another purchase in the drug store we started from.

All in all a good first day; out of the state, and the speed limit started being 75, which didn’t really change my driving, but more merely legitimized my normal speed.

Sunday was all about the Future Pot Roasts of America.

– Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

I’m really hoping this lets me immerse myself in a crowd of very smart people thinking about cool stuff, so that I can kick-start my own brain cells into working a bit better on my personal projects.

If I talk about anything, it’ll probably be my current attempt at working with NLP and specifically extracting information about whether two blogs talk about similar things. Effectively beating at the ‘information overload’ problem.

Beyond that, we’ll see what happens. I’m hoping I can stay awake for a lot of it. I’ve got my toys (PSP, MacBookPro, Camera), and my pillow. I’m nervous, but excited. Time to get going!

– Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Saturday involved waking up at the inhuman time of 7:30am to get to the Seattle Center – Exhibition Hall by 8:45am, to register for the Magic: the Gathering Ravnica pre-release with , who brought a darn good cinnamon bun which made up for his being on Foxtaur-standard time. I went 2-1-1 (2 wins, 1 draw, 1 loss) with a red-blue (black splash) deck in my first tournament in over 2 years. (My previous was the Mercadian Masques pre-release, and before that it had been a solid 3 years since my last tournament.) I really like the set, it feels…comfortable, somehow. After that, homeward, to catch up on the sleep I missed out on to get there so early, and some delicious dinner. Shaterri came over, played some online poker on the Monsterous Black Couch, and just idly hung out as we watched bad 80′s videos and all plugged away at our own little projects. (Laptops are amazing devices, acting with a powerful suction to draw the eyes to them. At one point all three of us (my fiance, me, and Shaterri) all were engrossed in our own little laptop worlds. The very model of geek socializing. At least we weren’t using IM to talk… ) Despite this, there’s something really comfortable about just hanging out, odd and interesting ideas and theories popping up every so often, blazing out in a fire of brief conversation, and then settling to a genial silence for a bit more.

We started Sunday with breakfast at the Brown Bag Cafe in Redmond, meeting Shaterri there along with another local acquaintence and a friend/couch-surfer of theirs. I was poked a bit to see if my Big Company had job openings for the friend, but without knowing more about what they could do (and they were surprisingly silent all breakfast), I didn’t know where to point them. Plus it’s not exactly like I’m overwhelmed with happiness about what I’m doing myself, which makes it hard to pump to others. For whatever reason, I can NEVER finish all my food at the Brown Bag Cafe. It’s really Good Stuff(tm), but overwhelming. Highly recommended…although I’m going to not go back for a bit, having had it a bit too much recently. It’s really pleasant to spend time with fellow geeks; the new ideas, knowledge, and pervasive excitement at technology is always invigorating.

A bit of shopping, a bit of driving about to find a store that sold ‘We love Katamari’ and ‘Burnout: Revenge’, and it was homeward… Somewhere along the way my lovely fiance had the idea to have fondue that night…

Being of the cheesy sort myself, I would certainly never turn that down…it was just a matter of getting the appropriate tools and parts.

We went to Target (because it was open) and bought a cheese fondue pot, but missed the part about it needing gel fuel to burn, and that you actually melted the cheese in a separate container (mea culpa, sigh). My brilliant lady solved this with a pair of candles, and a double-boiler setup to melt the cheese… QFC actually sells bags of a couple of different types of bread in nice round slices that when you quarter them are PERFECT for fondue dipping. A small veggie platter later, we were in business.

For future reference, the fondue recipe we used (as I recall it) was:

• Two heaping teaspoons of a sun-dried tomato and garlic paste, bought at a nearby Farmers Market
• Some Blue cheese crumbles
• One bag of Sharp Chedder cheese
• One bag of mild cheddar + mozzarella
• One cup of Snoqualmie Summer Beer (“a crisp refreshing ale”), the first time I ever recall buying alcohol
• Black pepper

Mix the sun-dried tomato and beer together and bring the combination to a bare simmer, then drizzle in the cheeses (blue, sharp, mild+mozz), slowly, mixing as you go. Deliver to the fondue pot, sprinkle with a healthy helping of pepper (ground is best, standard flakes work), mix thoroughly, and start your fondue forks!

Some cherry and strawberry tomatoes, raw broccoli, small canned potatoes (each cut in half usually), and apple slices were joined with a bunch of the quartered bread pieces above.

The bread is best if you let it sit for a while, so it gets ever-so-slightly stale. It’s more structurally strong, as well as acquiring the cheese easier.

It was truly, truly tasty, fun, and a great closer to a damn fine weekend.

We put off the typical chocolate fondue dessert for a little while until we can get some flavorings to build a really tasty mixture…

Our fondue ‘sensibilities’ come from spending way too much time (and money!) at La Fondue in Saratoga, CA… We adore the Blue Tomato, and the Decadent One dessert. Being about 800 miles away from La Fondue now, this is our best interpretation of the delicious food to be found there.

After the delicious cheese/bread/veggie dinner, a bit of gaming (Burnout: Revenge for me, World of Warcraft for my lady), the weekend, wonderful as it had been, was over. I don’t need many weekends that comfortable, but it’s really, really nice when you get them.

Here’s hoping your weekend was as nice!

– Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!