Dear Marcia,

I had to do some work today, which is never fun on vacation. I conducted the most frustrating interview ever in the back of a car with my cell phone cramping my neck, a dying computer, and people listening to everything I said. I was angry for awhile after that. But then we went to the Thomas Edison museum, which was fascinating. He really is the father of today’s world.

Apparently, Edison lived in Louisville for two years before he became a famous inventor. He worked at a local telegraph office but was fired for spilling acid, which ate through two floors of the building. I would like to read Thomas Edison’s journals now. [Ed note. Actually, I don’t know if those are in print. I guess I’ll settle for a biography.]

After that we went shopping. I like all the old gorgeous buildings that are for sale in Louisville for cheap. Kyle and I want to buy a cathedral, just because. Wouldn’t it be awesome to own a cathedral?

~ Joy

Dear Marcia,

We took a dinner cruise down the Ohio River with Kyle’s mom last night. It was fun. We ate fried chicken and watched the sun set on the water.

The only thing about the cruise is all these Southern men dank Coors Lite and turned into stereotypes! At one point, I was taking a picture and one drunkenly shouted, “Hey honey, you gonna take myyyyy picture?” I said no and walked away and he said, “WELL I GUESS NOT–HEEEE-yuck heeeyuck heeyuck.” Then later one tried to romance me by discussing how lovely Louisville is by starlight. He was 60-something. I decided to make Kyle go everywhere with me for the rest of the cruise.

~ Joy

Dear Marcia,

Now we are in Lexington for the conference. It starts tomorrow. We drove here from Louisville and stopped in Frankfort for lunch. There were lots of rolling fields with thoroughbred horses in them.

We ended up taking a wrong turn and came upon an abandoned bourbon distillery. It was like something out a fairytale with torn down buildings and vines covering all the factory doors and a tractor sitting there in the middle of it all like someone had just walked away from it.

Then a deer walked by and stared at me.

I wonder why that place was like that?

~ Joy

Two weeks ago, Kyle and I went to Kentucky to visit relatives and for me to attend the Woman’s Writer of Kentucky Conference. Instead of re-writing the entire trip, I decided to just paste up my (edited) e-mails to Marcia, which pretty much sum up the trip. Here they are along with pictures:

Dear Marcia,

Today we went to a cave in Indiana. It was discovered by Squire Boone, Daniel Boone’s brother. He had a mill there, which we took some time looking at. I saw a goat and a cat that were friends:

And a guy with a confederate flag license plate. [Ed note. People I know from Kentucky would like me to point out to you that this guy was from Indiana.]

Inside the cave, I saw stalactites and stalagmites for the first time. I had never been in a wet cave before. It is amazing and beautiful.

(Its estimated these will touch in 250 years)

At one point, the guide shone a light at a crevice and a bat flew out and almost hit my head! Then it veered up and flew over me into another part of the cave. It was just like in the movies.

(A rock in the cave that looks like a bat.)

I also saw a cave crawdad. It only lives in the cave and as such, it is white and blind.

After that we went shopping and soooo many things are cheap here it is hard not to buy everything that is even slightly cool. I bought two mood rings and a glow-in-the dark bat teeshirt and some glass beads and a book and other stuff.

Tomorrow we are going to go to the Thomas Edison museum and then on a dinner cruise around the Ohio River. We also might go to some Kentucky antique stores and also, did you know Muhammad Ali lived here? He has a museum. Go figure. On Wednesday, we’re seeing Kyle’s friend Jeremy. On Thursday, we’re going to Lexington for the writer’s conference. For a trip I wasn’t all that excited about, it’s going pretty well so far.

~ Joy

(Kentucky butterfly)

It’s true! According to CNN:

Obama:

Occidental College: Two years studying Politics and Public Policy
Columbia University: B.A.Political Science, specialization in International Relations
Harvard University: Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude, Editor-in-Chief, Harvard Law Review

Biden:

University of Delaware: B.A. in History & B.A. in Political Science
Syracuse University College of Law : Juris Doctor (J.D.)

McCain:

U.S. Naval Academy: Graduate–Class rank 894 of 899

Palin:

Hawaii Pacific Univ: 1 semester, Business Administration
North Idaho College: 2 semesters, general study
University of Idaho 2 semesters, Journalism
Matanuska-Susitna College: 1 semester
University of Idaho: 3 semesters, B.A. Journalism

Joy:

University of Oregon: B.A. in English
San Francisco State University: M.A. in English (Creative Writing)

Awesome. Do you think I could be vice president?

On Saturday, Kyle and I bought a gramophone at a garage sale. It is a His Master’s Voice (HMV) gramophone from 1926.

(A picture of gramophones just like the one we bought)

It is such an elegant little machine. Even though it is 82 years old, it works great. It has a crank that you wind every time you play a record. Talk about energy efficient. It comes in a spiffy leather suitcase about the size of a trumpet case. It even has a place to hold your records. We were probably drawn to it because we visited a Thomas Edison museum in Louisville a couple of weeks ago and learned about the evolution of the Victrola. Also, I like machines I can understand just by looking at them.

We got a bunch of old 78s at a thrift store and have been listening to them. I thought I knew big band music, but I guess not–I hadn’t heard of most of these orchestras. We spent all Saturday night listening to records and trying to teach ourselves the fox-trot. Our favorite discovery was Twilight in Turkey by Raymond Scott Quintet. We liked it so much, we bought a CD of the band, (which was out of print!). You can listen to a rather shoddy rendition of Twilight in Turkey here.

Back in May, the Word Pirates held our second public reading. As part of that, Marcia and I made a little movie to play before the performance. It still makes me giggle. Here it is.

Kyle is going to be writing a new book in the next couple of months. It will be the Official Ubuntu Server Book, published by Prentice Hall in late spring/early summer. He is co-writing the book with Benjamin Mako Hill, one of the developers of Ubuntu and an adviser on the One Laptop Per Child project.

The book is due in March, meaning that Kyle’s going to be writing up a storm between now and then. I told him that if he can write a 400-page book in five months, I guess there’s no excuse for me not to finish my novel–if for no other reason than I would like to move on with my life.

Sounds like we have a busy fall and winter ahead of us.

UPDATE: Kyle appeared on Linux Journal Live last night. Take a look.

I want to buy a leather couch. In my head, I know exactly what I want. Here it is:

I want that couch, only in dark brown or black untextured leather. Why don’t I just buy that couch, you ask? I tried. They had discontinued the leather I liked and they didn’t have anything other than textured leather, the kinds with little pockmarks all over it.

Even though no furniture store in the Bay Area carries a couch like this, I don’t think I’m asking for something strange. I just want: simple lines, low arms, square cushions, wooden legs. Why is this so hard to find?

And even when I want to buy furniture, it is snatched away from me. I am not being dramatic. On Wednesday, I wanted to buy this sideboard from the thriftstore. It was a great deal: Dutch modern, solid teak, only $85. I had Kyle rush home early so he could look at it, and we went to the thriftstore a half-hour before closing. Some other lady had already bought the sideboard! I was soooo mad.

Or in Louisville last week, I wanted to buy this dumb-waiter side table from an antique store. Kyle and I spotted it immediately and knew it should be in our living room. We asked the store owner how much it would cost to ship the table to California, and she told us she would take the table to UPS to get a rate and get back to us. Then she didn’t call, so we went back in the store, and she still hadn’t taken the table to UPS and said she would call us. Only she never called us, and that was a week ago, and now we are back in California and over the table.

So you see, even when I find furniture I like — which is extremely difficult since most furniture is ugly — I am not allowed to buy it. Therefore, shopping for furniture blows.

All this to say, if you know any place that has a couch like this, let me know.

UPDATE: I asked Apartment Therapy about this and they are asking the world for me. Rock.

The next day, I was really sore from the hike and sleeping on the ground. We drove to a cinder cone that formed in the 1700s. It was by something called the Fantastic Lava Flows, and they were indeed fantastic—piles and piles of black volcanic rocks that looked like someone had pushed them there with a bulldozer. I saw this little creature. I don’t know what it is. At first I thought it was a baby chipmunk, but it doesn’t look like it. Some sort of chipmunk-colored mouse?

We started down the path to hike the cinder cone. Problem was, it was covered with this ground volcanic ash, so it was like hiking on sand. The two-mile hike quickly started to seem a like more to my tired muscles and sore back. I was trying to be tough and suck it up, but I am not tough or good at sucking it up.

Then the cinder cone came into view.

It looked like a giant pyramid. You could see the tiny people on the top. I thought, I do not want to climb that. As we approached, I realized that there was a steep, sandy path going right up the side of the cone.

I let Justin, Stephanie, and Kyle climb to the top and I went back to a lake and edited sort stories. Apparently there was a huge crater and pretty views at the top. Here are the pictures Kyle took:

View.

Crater.

Three kinds of terrain.

Another view

As amazing as that is, I was glad I didn’t push myself to go on the rest of that hike. If I hadn’t been so sore, I would have done it, but as it was, I was happier editing short stories. After all, look what that hike did to Justin and Stephanie:

Purple lakes. Boiling puddles. Black pyramid-like cinder cones. Sound like crazy land? No! This is what I saw on my camping trip to Lassen Volcanic National Park a couple of weekends ago, which I went on with Kyle, Justin, and Stephanie. (Justin and Stephanie have already written about the trip here, here, and here.)

Although I had heard about this park all my life–my sixth grade class went there for a class trip (I didn’t go)–I didn’t know that Mount Lassen is an active volcano. As such, it’s a geological wonderland full of weird and cool sights to see. The first day, we hiked up Bumpass Hell, a place full of all the things described in the first paragraph: boiling mud pits, exhalation of steam, bleached landscapes, etc.

The park warns you not to step off the path because you could easily die or lose a limb. That’s what happened to Bumpass, the fellow who originally owned part of the park–he stepped into a mud puddle boiling at 240 degrees and lost his leg. The knowledge of this added a life-and-death component to the hike that was pretty cool.

So cool, in fact, that we decided to hike on to a cold boiling lake. Doesn’t that sound awesome? A lake that boils, but is still cold? It is not awesome, in fact. It is a mud puddle that bubbles somewhat. Luckily, it was beside a real lake that was just lovely, although perhaps not worth the extra four-mile hike to get there and back. Well, nothing is perfect, I suppose.

Pictures:

Picture of the park with a big rock

Bumpass Hell with a random guy in the shot

Close-up of the steam. It smelled like rotten eggs. The smell didn’t actually bother me unless I happened to be in the middle of one of the steam blasts. Then it was kind of like being farted on.

Purple mud–apparently it is purple because of pyrite bubbling to the surface.

At the end of the trail was this bright blue puddle of water that I thought was pretty.

Speaking of puddle, here is the boiling “lake.”

Luckily it was by a real lake, so it wasn’t a total loss.

I am currently in Kentucky. I’ve had a great week and am coming home tomorrow. I saw Joyce Carol Oates speak at a conference yesterday, and was delighted by how brilliant, articulate, and adorable she is (she was wearing a shiny pink blouse that her mother had sewed).

Perhaps because I just saw a great writer speak that I’m extra shocked and saddened to hear that David Foster Wallace killed himself this weekend. (More here.) Although Wallace’s particular style was a little too cerebral and meandering for my taste, there’s no doubt that he was an excellent writer and at age 46, he probably had a lot of work left in him–not to mention life. Very sad.

UPDATE: The last days of David Foster Wallace.