Visit to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison

Last weekend, I took a brief trip to Montrose, Colorado--flying out Saturday and back Sunday--primarily for the frequent flier miles (the flight, after a voucher I had, cost me $50!), but rather than a pure "mileage run" where one flies out and immediately back, I did spend a little bit of time on the ground.

I drove up to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, which features the Painted Wall, the highest cliff in Colorado, a portion of which is pictured above. Volcanic inclusions in the rock walls result in the lighter-colored strips in the stone where the canyon walls had been eroded away over the eons.

The Gunnison River plunges at a rate far steeper than the Colorado River does in the Grand Canyon, making for some very steep canyon sides indeed--in a couple of places, the drop to the river below is well over 2000 feet! In the photo above, consider the trees atop the cliff on the left for a sense of scale and perspective; even though the shadows cloak the river far below, the visible portion of the canyon wall alone is taller than the Empire State Building (which would reach just over halfway up from the Gunnison River).

The weather was perfect, with temperatures on the ground in Montrose in the upper 60s and in the park itself the low 50s--though snow was still extant in several places in the shade, as well as atop the Elk Mountains in the distance, off toward Telluride, CO.

The park as a whole was beautiful, offering in addition to the gorgeous views of the canyon itself many natural scenic features, like the lichen-crusted boulders above and the many plants adapted to the semi-arid conditions.

Tyranny of the Masses: Referendums Need to Go

In yet another state, gay marriage was brought to referendum and defeated tonight in Maine; every single state which has held a "direct democracy"-style referendum has dealt a blow to gay rights by outlawing same sex marriage. "The people have spoken; it's the will of the voters," the bigots who defend this abhorrent abridgment of human rights claim--which is, quite frankly, a view completely ignorant of the history of democracy in the United States. I'll be up front: it's time for referendums and other vehicles for voters to directly decide policy issues to go for the incredible threat of tyranny of the masses they enable.

Worse, in Maine, the elected legislature had expressly legalized gay marriage; there was no wiggle room for conservative bigots to shout about "activist" judges. Rather than undertaking the proper representative democratic process, through which unhappy voters would campaign to unseat supporters of the enacted law and replace them with representatives who could then enact legislative change, the mob mentality prevailed yet again.

Our founding fathers--heroes one and all to the conservatives who are so hell-bent on depriving honest couples the legal codification of their relationship--expressly opposed direct democracy and instead favored representative democracy, where voters elect representatives who in turn vote to enact or repeal legislation. This mechanism serves as a powerful check on demagoguery and mob rule and works to help ensure the minority groups (be they by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or even political philosophy) are not trampled upon by the majority.

Once again, too, the churches played a huge role in the political process--a move which should cost them their tax-exempt status and could be seen as a violation of election law. Where the Mormons dumped cash and deceptive activism into enacting California's Proposition 8 last year, in Maine it was the Catholic church who played the primary role. Both from within the state and across the country, the Catholic church itself sent millions of dollars to support this anti-gay-marriage miscarriage of fundamental rights.

(Let me indulge for a moment in a bit of anti-Catholic jeering: just ponder the irony of a church which has a documented and extensive history of enabling sexual perversion and pedophilia and harboring its guilty practitioners spending millions on ad campaigns which made such outrageous claims as gay marriage would mean sexual predators in schools, kids being taught to embrace gay marriage, etc. It's rather sad when you think of it, and it's little wonder to me why there's so much anti-Catholic hatred out there when such a large and supposedly benevolent organization continues to practice such rampant discrimination and hurt.)

And a hint to the opponents of gay marriage who make the (potentially dubious) claim that they stand with the majority: the majority once supported slavery, too. The majority once opposed interracial marriage (and ridiculously, at least one moronic public official in Louisiana still does...) How about you lead and choose to stand on the right side of history for a change? Don't the churches claim they made a big deal in helping end slavery? Wouldn't it be a feather in their caps to be able to say, "In the interests of human rights and justice for all, we as Christian leaders feel it is time for the discrimination to end."

Personally, as a straight, married man, I don't get what the big deal is for all the folks who get their panties in a wad over gay marriage. For those citing religious reasons, hey, think about this for a moment: the Christian Bible also says the cure for leprosy involves sacrificing several birds, and that women should be subservient to men in all things. But mainstream Christianity has rejected those (and many other) ridiculous notions--so how about rejecting the utterly ridiculous notion that gay marriage is evil? No one is going to make you get married to someone of the same sex, and the notion that allowing gay marriage will require your kids be taught to embrace homosexuality (or will allow pedophiles into schools--or even that gays are somehow all pedophiles) is simply ridiculous and an insult to anyone of intelligence.

So, back to my original point: we have representative democracy (a republic, as conservatives are so wont to point out when it's convenient for their purposes); even our President is elected indirectly via the much-loathed Electoral Congress rather than directly by voters. What we saw last year in California and now this evening in Maine are proof of just why we have representative rather than direct government, and why referendums like this need to go.

Finally, the First Warbler: Chateau Papillon Bird #53 (Yellow-rumped Warbler)

Although I'm sure the towering trees of Chateau Papillon's backyard and the county nature preserve behind us played host to several warblers during spring migration, neither Beth nor I spotted the elusive little neotropical migrants--and the few possible calls I heard weren't clear enough for me to identify with any certainty.

Finally, though, with the tail end (no pun intended) of fall migration passing with a long, dreary storm that's dumped several inches of rain on us, I confirmed our first warbler at the new home. Though he may be the most common warbler in eastern North America (if not the continent as a whole), the male Yellow-rumped (Myrtle subspecies) I saw in the branches of one of fall-bare trees was a welcome sight indeed. Now, if only the rain had given me a better shot at a photo...

Manufacturing the Chateau Papillon Graveyard, Part 3: Pumpkins

Something Beth and I both used to enjoy about Halloween--for me something going well back to childhood--was carving pumpkins into Jack O' the Lanterns. Back in Blacksburg, we went so far one year as to create a couple of Goomba-style (think the Super Mario video game series) "alien" carvings from strange, mushroom-shaped melons we picked up at a farmer's market.

We've kept such busy lives the past few years, though, that even during our rental home years in Vienna, we didn't get to indulge in sculpting melons into creatures of horror and whimsy. This year, hurried and hectic as it's been, we managed to put together a couple of pumpkins, though--I made a point last weekend of picking several up at Safeway and Sam's Club:

I'm not sure quite where I got the original idea for poor Peter Pumpkinhead here and his grisly demise. I think I'd just read through the latest set of hung-over pumpkins making the e-mail rounds (a creative use of pumpkin innards, I must admit, if one that gets recycled each year), and maybe thought back to the scene in It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! where Linus bemoans Lucy "killing" the pumpkin with her incision. There's probably even a bit of Calvin and Hobbes' demented snowmen in him.

But at any rate, Peter came out on the wrong end of some argument--perhaps King Eggplant came home and caught ol' Peter in bed with his wife the Summer Squash. That knife didn't just grow from Peter's forehead, though, and his expression of shock at the discovery quickly gave way to a fatal dismay. Poor Peter!

After crafting Peter's sorry, sordid tale of death by plastic knife misadventure, I tasked Beth with designing an evil, menacing pumpkin face. The result above does Jack O' the Lantern himself and his cursed fallen soul proud; I took her design and carved a few embellishments (like the slits in the eyes) and the row of gnashing teeth beneath his two vampiric fangs. I'm only surprised Mr. Jack didn't send a few more kids screaming in terror.

Finally, I wanted to share an after-dark photo of Peter Pumpkinhead. Though in the shadows you can't see the blood running down his gourdy forehead, his tragic expression is rendered that much better.

A successful return of our pumpkin-carving traditions, wouldn't you say?

Manufacturing the Chateau Papillon Graveyard, Part Two: Resurrecting Graveyard Man

Several years ago, Beth and I came up with this creepy figure as part of the decorations at our rental home in Vienna. We'd been out at Fair Oaks Mall and stopped by the Spenser's Gifts store to look at their Halloween selection, and I came across the mask pictured above. It was pricey ($40 if I recall correctly!) but fantastically creepy.

I built an armature out of some heavy-duty wire, added some upholstery foam for structure, and voila--a head to place the mask atop! I also wired in two flicker-flame candle bulbs as eyes (the orange pinpricks seen in the photo above), which really makes the ghoulish gent.

His arms are more sturdy wire, surrounded by a pair of flannel "sleeves" I sewed from some scrap fabric; they're stuffed with plastic grocery bags for volume. As for the title of this piece--Graveyard Man's resurrection--that is a story in and of itself. During our last year in the Vienna rental house, some rats got into the storage shed and ate away Graveyard Man's hands (a pair of monster gloves that fit over the wires). Fortunately, I had the mask safely inside with our costume supplies, but his hands were ruined, and we didn't get him set up at all that year, or last year (since we were in an apartment, waiting out the last two weeks of our short sale purchase of Chateau Papillon).

The hands I found at Spirit this year as replacements aren't perfect, but they work. I still want to add animatronics; the plan is to use a through-shaft motor (e.g. the axle goes all the way through and is on both ends of the motor, not just one end) and two cams to cause his arms to jiggle. I even had the perfect motor at one point, bought as a kid to try to add power to the big plastic van Babykins and his pals drove around in--but who knows what has become of it. Perhaps next year I'll have time.

(p.s.: that's one of the concrete tombstones we cast this year behind Graveyard Man.)

Manufacturing the Chateau Papillon Graveyard, Part One: Casting Tombstones

Ever since childhood, I've enjoyed "do-it-yourself" Halloween decorations. I think it started with some old stereo equipment and "spooky sounds" LPs; I know I made a loop tape from a spooky thunderstorm track on said vinyl and set speakers up in the shrubbery outside my windows, piping out a bit of Halloween atmosphere to accompany the decorations. (I was probably around 7 years old at the time.)

Later displays included hand-painted light bulbs--making up for my allowance not covering fancy colored lights by adding "blood" to plain white incandescents--set up to illuminate a ghost constructed out of a rubber devil's head mask, a white sheet, and a strategically-placed box fan. My sisters got involved as well, and we even drafted some trusted neighbors to help out, with the apex of our work a display (including a too-lively scarecrow seated on the porch, played by my sister Erika if memory serves) terrified a group of the neighborhood kids, sending future reality TV star Ashley McNeeley and several others running screaming down the hill.

My wife Beth and I enjoy decorating even today as adults, and a few years ago put together quite a nice setup at our rental home in Vienna, Virginia, with the centerpiece a zombie we titled "Graveyard Man" built from a wire armature, structural foam, and two flicker-flame bulbs in night light sockets as "eyes" set behind a fantastic latex mask I picked up at Spenser's. The past two years, we haven't gotten to put our ghoulish talents to work; we simply didn't have time in 2007--particularly to rebuild Graveyard Man's hands after a rat got to them in our storage shed!--and in 2008, we were in a temporary apartment (itself a bit of horror, mind you) waiting out the purchase of our new home.

This year, though, despite some rather uncooperative weather, we've gotten back to work, and the centerpiece of the display is to be a graveyard next to the front porch. Whereas in the past we used cardboard boxes, duct tape, and some craft stone-textured spray paint to set up our tombstones, having a home of our own has inspired us to do more. This year, we're making our own concrete tombstones.

The task isn't as hard as you might think, but nor is it as simple as it could be. I wanted to have several of the traditional arc-topped slab tombstones, and we wanted to have carved or etched lettering on them as well. The design would be fairly simple, and concrete isn't that hard to work with; you just need a suitable mold.

From all of our work on renovations and other improvements, we have plenty of scrap wood sitting around, and my table saw made short work of cutting some sides and bottom to make up the tombstone shape; the backing is one of the cheap particleboard shelves I pulled out of the pantry when redoing it with leftover plywood from the library. The trickiest part would be the curved top of the tombstone; no problem with the table saw, though, as I simply "kerfed" a strip of the same scrap plywood used for the sides and bottom.

The space left by the wood cut away by a saw blade is the "kerf," and the technique--commonly used to create curved pieces of wood--makes a series of cuts which almost but not quite go all the way through the wood (leaving a thin veneer atop the cut). As anyone who's made a balsa model knows, thin wood bends easily, and each cut will allow you to bend the piece slightly.

Assembling the mold was a bit tedious--primarily because I wanted to make it easy to disassemble and reassemble, as breaking concrete free of a mold can be a challenge. I secured the sides and bottom with as little hardware as possible, instead putting fixed braces along the edges in several places (look at the sides, above). The kerfed top I glued in place and braced at several points to keep the desired shape.

Beth lined the mold with wax paper to ease in breaking the concrete free once it set. In the meantime, I mixed up the concrete itself, combining a ready-mix blend with a shovel of clay-laden dirt from the yard to make the final product more natural in appearance (sculptors will often blend in all sorts of things to achieve artistic effects, such as hypertufa concrete). I used some scrap metal rods as reinforcement, placed into the concrete after filling the mold halfway; I need to track down the leftover wire I used for Graveyard Man's armatures for future castings, or else cut up one of the garden's tomato cages, perhaps.

After letting the concrete set for 15-20 minutes, I pressed in some wooden letters we picked up at Michael's (here, spelling out the traditional abbreviated Latin requiem)... then waited. A couple of hours later, I pulled the letters out, leaving their images behind in the quick-drying stone.

Fast-forward 24 hours; when I got home from work today, I carefully unmolded our tombstone by placing a slab of scrap plywood over the mold and then inverting both (the wax paper really helped--I barely had to wiggle the mold at all--and didn't have to remove any of the sides to free the set tombstone).

The concrete was still a little "green" despite being a quick-setting variety, so I handled it pretty carefully and set it aside to dry more before we try standing it up in our "graveyard." (We cast a bird bath from some concrete left over from setting posts for our compost bin--so I know the blend I made will firm up quite well despite the addition of dirt as the bird bath mix had dirt and even potting soil mixed in.)

But as you can see from the photo above, it's going to be quite a nice addition to our Halloween display! I cast another one by flashlight this evening (inscribing this one with a date and a stylized cross instead of "RIP"), and we also made a different tombstone shape (a trapezoid) which we plan to use. Only thing is the weight: even though the tombstone is only 2 inches thick and about 12" x 20" in dimensions, it weighs a good 30 pounds or more! Definitely a bit more of a pain to move about than those styrofoam ones sold at megamarts this time of year... but oh so much more realistic.

It Started with the Pepper Mill: Or, Everything Goes to Hell

It started with the pepper mill.

After refilling it with a fresh load of peppercorns, the pepper mill simply quit grinding. I tried cleaning it out, refilling, tightening various bits and pieces of the mill, etc., but unfortunately, the "lifetime warranted" William Bounds pepper mill we've had since around 2004 was, to use a kitchen cliche, toast.

Then the dishwasher went out; the retaining nut holding in place the agitator snapped clean off. This one was fairly simple to fix; I only had to squint at parts diagrams on Sears' Web site for a few minutes and try to match up lines and labels on the figures to the unusual part names and descriptions. Although shipping was a whopping $20 for a $5 part (well, I could have put off using the dishwasher nearly two weeks for only $8.95 shipping and handling--I'm far too impatient for that, and we go through a load of dishes about every day and a half anyway!), once the replacement part arrived, the repair was rather simple.

Then Tabitha, my GPS, developed a severe, progressive, and incurable case of dementia. From stuttering the occasional "t-t-turn right" she went on to depressingly-long bouts of "loading maps" to finally admitting "no data" for requests for anything map related. A course of electroshock therapy (soft- and then hard-resets) failed to clear up this electronic case of Alzheimer's. Eventually, Garmin sent me a replacement under warranty, though the new Tabby is a refurb (a bit loose, if you ask me) and although a newer GPS chipset, a "downgrade" in that the prior one was a quicker-to-acquire, more sensitive version which chatted up the celestial orbiters in 1/4 the time the newer (but I'm sure cheaper) replacement does.

Our server crashed over the same weekend, apparently the victim of a fried hard drive logic board. I tried an identical drive (bought refurb for $40) to swap printed circuits and bring the middle-aged gal out of retirement long enough to recover backups without resorting to pricey data recovery joints, but in the end, we had to send the drive off to ESS Data Recovery and fork out an ungodly sum of money for my mistake in having not made off-system backups for several months.

And my car apparently has a bearing going bad--despite dropping over $2000 into service a month or two ago (a lot of that was on the maintenance schedule, but still...!) I'm debating what I can do to tackle the repairs myself, or if I want to go ahead and fork out the cash to keep the Exerda in good working order.

I just replaced my laptop's keyboard for a third time; maybe it's my typing... but fortunately, e-bay found a brand-new replacement for $15, shipping included, so it was only having to wait a week for the new one to arrive (and mashing the "E" key with extra force in the interim to avoid typing "th quick brown fox" "ovr and ovr" again).

Let's not forget, either, the leak in the backyard pond liner, which so far has received to no avail two complete sealant treatments of the likeliest points of leakage. I've got some ideas to find the leak that go short of buying a new liner sheet entirely, but it's still annoying nonetheless.

If I hadn't gotten a clean bill of health at my physical, I'd be a bit afraid to look myself in the mirror for fear of what might break down next!