Other stuff

Here's the second of maybe three posts that will make up for my monthlong post deficit. It tells the story of the things that aren't my exhaustively recounted trip to Oregon.

One thing I did a lot was working on my next font. It's called Walleye, though there's the chance I'll change its name sometime. It's a serif font, and it has Russian and Greek in it too. Here, I'll illustrate it real quick.

This isn't very exciting, but somewhat more exciting is the fact that my latest font, Solveig, has finally made it out of my computer onto the market. It's for sale here. It only just went up this month, so I don't know how many people have bought it or how popular it's going to be, but I think it may be a hotter seller than my other font, Newt, was.

What else? I could tell you about hanging around with my friends. For example, there was the night Keith and Aaron and I went to Newport on the Levee. Mostly we played pool, but also Keith bought us all foofoo girly drinks and we talked with Aaron's friends. Keith met a woman who claimed to be a porn star, and insisted on getting his picture taken with her. Aaron got propositioned by her. Then we wandered around, but came back, and sat at the bar and drank Arnold Palmers (iced tea and lemonade). Keith said lots of random crap, like he always does, and asking the bartender if she knew of weird, obscure drinks. She hadn't heard of any of them. Then he made a joke about how she must've flunked out of mixology school, and she all of a sudden turned into a Greek Fury or something. After she was finished telling him off, he was completely silent, which I've never witnessed from Keith for longer than ten seconds before. We all finished our Arnold Palmers and paid. That was ten minutes later, and when I told her, "The key is not to take anything Keith says seriously," she basically said he was a completely worthless person and she would have liked to get her guy to throw him out of the bar and he should stay indoors far away from people forevermore. He paid (and tipped her exactly twenty percent on a $2.65 bill—I wish I could have seen how she reacted to that), and we left. Then we collectively tried to figure out what in blazes had just happened in there. The only word Keith could think of to describe it was "bonechilling", and he repeated it many times. The closest we could figure was that she had actually flunked out of high school and she had a real sensitive spot about it. Probably also she had been dealing with jerks all day and bottling it up and finally let her rage out at the end of the night on him. To top it all off, as I was jumping down the stairwells (I never walk down steps if I can skip them altogether by jumping down), I surprised a janitor and she turned around and yelled, "Okay, now that's uncalled-for." Aaron was the only one who got out of the night unscathed, unless you count being propositioned by a porn star.

Hmm. I made some baked goods. I made cookies, and challah, and a pizza. It all turned out pretty good, except I still haven't really gotten the challah right. Maybe I'll try it one more time, or maybe I'll branch out to try other breads instead. I enjoy baking when I have the time. I wish we baked all the time here.

But besides things like that, most of the exciting stuff I've done outside of Oregon was related to getting ready for my train trip. Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm going to get killed by murderous zombie hobos, and then I'm going to get killed again by getting tossed under a train, and then they'll send my doubleghost to jail. I've studied this pretty hard by now, and I think if very drunk people can avoid train wheels and police and zombies, I have a good chance. But let's get back onto the topic of cool stuff I've done to gear up. For example, one thing that I did just recently was I made this cool camping stove. If you're not big on camping, you might not know that camping stoves cost about a hundred dollars. That's a stupid amount of money, especially because I had found directions online for how to build your own camping stove out of some beer cans. I had to drink a Heineken, and in so doing I found out that I may finally have experienced a beer that I don't like. I guess that means my palate is developing. But Heineken has the right shape of cans, so I drank it anyhow, and made the stove. Then I tested it. It runs on ethanol. I loaded the top compartment with alcohol—maybe an ounce of it in total—and lit it and put a pot of water on top. This was about enough water to make a pot of ramen noodles, and it boiled in 2½ minutes. What's more, it kept boiling for 4 more minutes. And this was no sissy boil with a few bubbles drifting up from the bottom. It was a roiling, angry boil. That test was passed. Then I tested it with the "simmer ring" on. This made it burn slower and cooler. After 2½ minutes it wasn't boiling but there were definitely little bubbles on the bottom, what I'd expect with a slow flame. It kept on burning, and burning, and burning. For thirty-seven minutes and forty-five seconds. What a stove.

But perhaps you find it boring to read about stoves. How about a stealth campout? My trainhopping partner—who I'll refer to as just "V" until we both come up with suitable hobo names—and I decided to test out our skills of sleeping inconspicuously. So a couple nights ago, we went to a big city park and walked away from the trails and laid a tarp out on the ground and had a nice night's sleep. Deer wandered around us. Around dawn, the squirrels started moving around too. It wasn't threatening to rain, so we didn't need a roof, and we just looked out at the stars. That was cool. On our way back, we scouted out a trainyard, watching it from a bridge. We've scouted this one out pretty well. The other night, we saw some chassis of military tanks being carried on flatbeds. That was cool. See? Trains are interesting and unique!

I guess I could finish this off by explaining about my research project. It's a semester-long capstone project for my linguistics concentration. The topic is why academic writing is hard for people to understand, and the issue that I'm focusing on is the abundance of Latinate words in academia, against the fact that most of the core words that we use in conversation are Germanic words. My theory is that people find Latinate words harder to understand and parse, mainly because they can't break them down into their word roots as easily as they can with Germanic words. To research this, I'm going to take a survey of people from the college and the town, and ask them to break words apart as best they can, and then compare the Latinate results to the Germanic ones. I hypothesize that people will mostly find the Germanic ones easier, but people who've been in college a long time will be progressively more able to analyze the Latinate ones according to how long they've been in it. Will I be right? Only the next semester's worth of research will answer that question! Stay tuned!

Photo post to follow perhaps. If I find the time. Things are getting a bit crammed, because I'm preparing to leave on my train journey on Monday, and before that V and I are also going on a short practice run. And I also have to repaint my car door with Dad tomorrow, because I rubbed it against a telephone pole in a very cramped neighborhood, to my great dismay, and scratched the door. So I've got a lot going on. But I still write.