A Space Cowboy, a Joker, and Jungle Love

Jen and I had a pretty fun weekend. We went with some friends to see Joe Cocker and the Steve Miller Band in concert at a venue near us called The Gorge. It's called The Gorge because the venue is set into a hill that overlooks the Columbia River Gorge near George. (Yes, there is a town called "George, Washington.")

That means we got to hear songs like, "You can Leave your Hat On," "With a Little Help from my Friends," "The Joker," "Fly Like an Eagle," "Jungle Love," and many others that I didn't realize were Joe Cocker or Steve Miller.

It's funny that this venue is only about 45 minutes away and we have never gone before. It usually gets some pretty big acts. So we probably missed some great opportunities.

The concert was really relaxed and tame as far as concerts go. We took a whole picnic worth of stuff and sat on the hillside listening to the music. It's so dry there that we didn't have any problems with insects. And we were far enough away so that we could talk to each other normally but still hear the music really well.

The physical therapist that Jen assists is really sad that Jen is leaving. So every chance he gets, he brings it up. About halfway through the concert he said, "I bet you can't do this in Illinois." Jen replied, "You're right, the mosquitoes would eat us alive." Not to mention all of the flies and other bugs that would have bundled up our picnic blanket and carried off our food. I think the closest we come to this venue in the Midwest is Alpine Valley in Wisconsin. I've never seen a concert there, but I can't imagine that the view holds a candle to this one.

While there aren't any bugs at the Gorge, there are rattlesnakes. While we were there, I heard a story about a Faith Hill/Tim McGraw daytime concert in August, where you could hear the rattlesnakes (as in hundreds) under the stage. Out there, it's the only place where they can get some shade from the 100 degree heat.

The next day, Jen and I went to Tacoma to visit some friends of ours. They recently had a little girl, Emily, and this was the first chance we've had to meet her and our last opportunity to see her for awhile. In addition to Jen and I moving, they are also moving to Mississippi. And so, it probably would have been Christmas before we got a chance to meet Emily. So we went to Famous Daves (didn't know that it was such a big chain), which brought back some memories of Bloomington and had a long lunch and talked for a couple of hours.

Even the drive to Tacoma was fun. This time of year, there's no beating the scenery of the drive from here to Seattle. It's lovely in the winter, too, but you're a little too scared for your life to pay much attention to the mountains. You're too busy watching for avalanches and rock slides and cars sliding on the snow. Also, it's usually a little clearer this time of year so you can see further. Once you get down around Tacoma, you have a really good view of Mt. Ranier. Overall, not too shabby for one of my last weekends in Washington.

Schlepaphobia

Schlepaphobia: an uncontrollable and irrational fear of entrusting your things to complete strangers, who will haul it half-way across the country with little to no oversight.


Now that Jen and I are moving again, we get to go through all the hassle of packing everything up and hiring a moving company and all that jazz.

This whole situation is exacerbated by how quickly this is all happening. I'm leaving in less than a month, now. And because of how quickly the end of August is approaching, I'll be leaving first, once I'm finished with a summer class that I'm teaching, and Jen will stay out here a little while longer to train her replacement and continue to pack stuff up.

For reasons that make me roll my eyes and sigh with exasperation, I'm flying to Chicago, instead of driving. That means that I'm going to have to carefully choose the things I bring with me and then wait about a month for everything else to get to Illinois. And then I have to trust the airline not to lose the things I do decide to bring.

Really, all I'm worried about is my dissertation materials. I'll probably have a few boxes of books that I can entrust to UPS or something like that. But I also have a boat-load of student papers that are the foundation of my study. So my dilemma is that I need to bring them with me in order to continue working on my dissertation, but I'll be damned if I'm going to trust them to airport baggage handlers or to UPS. I can't even imagine losing those, and all I can hear when I think about putting them on a plane is that they were scattered across the tarmac at SEA-TAC or that somebody put them on a plane to Orlando because they didn't know that ORD was the airport code for O'Hare (that actually happened to me once).

So anyway, I'm sure it will just boil down to me making a set of photocopies or spending the time to scan in the hundreds of pages on our ancient scanner to make a pdf file or something like that. But I'm worried because it's one of the few things I own that is truly irreplaceable.