What I did on my summer vacation: well, I took a road trip with the gal from here to Vancouver now that the border is finally back open.  One of our stops was Crater Lake, which I had never been to before.  But I could have seen it over thirty years ago!  During my sophomore year of college, I went to Oregon for the first time on a road trip with a friend of mine from high school, and our route took us right by it, as we went directly from Medford to Bend.  (Memories: at a gas station in Medford, we asked the attendant⁠—for Oregon won’t let you pump your own gas⁠—for directions to Bend, and the attendant shrugged and said, “I dunno⁠—I’m 49 years old an’ I never been outta Medford.”  By the time we got to Bend, we were pretty hungry, so we stopped at a pizza shop and ordered a pizza.  We were just about to pay when the cashier asked, “You know we don’t cook ’em, right?”  Thus did we learn about one of Oregon’s regional specialties, raw pizza.)  But we didn’t stop at Crater Lake, and I don’t think I had even heard of it.  Seeing it in person for the first time in 2022, I wondered what I would have thought had I first seen it on that earlier trip, back before the advent of the World Wide Web.  Because now it only takes a second to pull up a thousand pictures of any place you might visit, so my reaction when I saw Crater Lake in person was “yup, it looks like the pictures”.  But I imagine that if I had gone there as a teenager, not knowing what I was in for, my mind would have been blown.

Still, there was one memorable aspect of the visit.  The Northwest has had so many crushing summer heat waves in the 2020s that it is looking like the new normal, and when we visited Crater Lake it was 98°F out.  But Crater Lake also gets heavy snow for something like nine months out of the year, and we found a huge snowdrift that hadn’t melted yet.  So on July 31st, with the sun beating down mercilessly, we had a snowball fight.  Ellie said that getting pelted by snowballs in 98‑degree weather felt heavenly.

When I was in high school we used to talk about “the green­house effect”; by the time I was in college, that term had given way to the more straightforward “global warming”; after I graduated, people were more likely to talk about “climate change”, to reflect the fact that the warming of the globe due to the greenhouse effect didn’t just make the world uniformly warmer, but had a variety of disruptive effects in different places.  Like, temperatures in Portland will hit 115°F in the summer now, while at the same time, it’ll be under 70°F in my neighborhood 500+ miles to the south.  A friend of mine who had lived in Los Angeles for years and had come back for the summer complained that L.A. was now a lot more humid than it used to be and that it was now plagued by mosquitoes, which had never been a problem back in the Before Times.  That reminded me: on a road trip down to L.A. earlier this summer, Ellie and I had been duped by Yelp into trying what turned out to be a pretty crappy Indian restaurant in Van Nuys, and not only were we serenaded throughout our meal by Pentecostals loudly shouting in tongues from the storefront church across the street, but yes, I did end up covered in mosquito bites after eating there.

But one more incident from our Northwest trip: we were driving through the mountains on the way from Bend back to Portland, when all of a sudden the car directly in front of us randomly lost control and careened off a cliff!  We pulled over as soon as we found a safe‑ish spot, and Ellie called 911 on her cellular telephony device.  The dispatcher told us to stay put so that the rescue teams would know where to stop.  We walked back to where the car had gone off the road, and down at the bottom of the cliff, maybe 25 feet below us, we found the car just completely smashed all to hell… but the driver had emerged virtually unharmed, and was actually calling 911 herself.  Car safety technology has come a long way!

The dental resorption issues I have battled since 2009 returned this summer, and when I got back from the road trip, I had to have the first of several rounds of oral surgery I will be having over the next while.  I was stuck on soft foods for a spell, and Ellie had some groceries delivered to me, including a lot of stuff I do not normally buy for myself.  One of these was a can of soup from a company called “Amy’s Kitchen”.  I read the label, which explained, “Amy’s Kitchen was started when our daughter Amy was born in 1987.”  Dang.  Fresh out of the womb and you immediately put her to work over a hot stove?

I am auditing a class for the first time since a pestilence descended upon the land.  When I go to Berkeley Bowl or the local Trader Joe’s or whatnot the masking rate is still over 80%, so I was surprised to walk onto the university grounds in August and find that masking on campus, even indoors, was somewhere around 10%.  Initially I thought, oh, these kids are young and vaccinated and think they’re invincible… but then it occurred to me, hang on⁠—there's another differ­ence.  The people at Trader Joe’s and Berkeley Bowl are from here.  The students… like, they probably just got off the last boats from Bakersfield and Huntington Beach.  They are now in Berkeley, but they are not of it.  And outside this little bubble⁠—even in supposed leftie enclaves like Portland⁠—even a masking rate of 10% is actually pretty high.

During one lecture the professor off-handedly said that something was “as rare as a two-dollar bill. Has anyone here ever even seen a two-dollar bill?”  I took out my wallet, pulled out the $2 bill I keep in there, and held it up.

Professor: “Whoa, you actually have one on you? Why??”

Girl on the other side of the lecture hall: “I have one too!”

Guy a few rows behind her: “Here’s mine!”

Professor: “Whaaaaat?”

Another girl: “My parents gave me mine⁠—I’m kind of their golden child, and they said it was a family heirloom they were giving me for good luck.”

A third girl: “I have one that I kept because I didn’t want to spend it because I thought it was fake.”

As I was parking my car after one of these lectures, I saw that directly in front of my house, a crow was attempting to pick up some kind of large, clear, gleaming marble⁠—a seem­ingly impossible task, since the marble looked to be almost as big as the bird’s head.  I thought, “What on earth is that? I’ll have to check it out when I get out of my car and the crow flies away.”  But as I got out, the crow somehow suc­ceeded in picking up the gigantic marble and flew away with it in its beak.  And now I still have no idea what the hell that thing was.

One Saturday I was woken up by a loud commotion outside, which did not dissipate but instead got more and more raucous.  Suddenly I realized: gyah, it’s the annual street festival⁠—and I couldn’t even leave, because thanks to all my resorption-related bills, I’ve had to take on a bunch of online tutoring work, and I had students all day.  So I taught my lessons, raising my voice so I could hear myself over the commotion even though the noise filters kept the students from hearing it.  Finally it was over.  And then on Sunday… it started right back up again!  Apparently it was extended to a two-day event to celebrate the revival of the festival after it was canceled for a couple of years due to the pestilence that had descended upon the land.  So, same ordeal on Sunday.  On Monday, I checked the news, and the “local” section trumpeted this headline:

Thousands Enjoy Return Of The “Solano Stroll” To The Streets Of Berkeley And Albany

In news that is even more local, One Does Not Enjoy It.

I went to the store to pick up some toothpaste and paper towels and whatnot, and I encountered a woman who was wearing a sports bra as a top.  Jammed awkwardly into the sports bra was a gigantic smartphone, large enough that it verged into “small tablet” territory.  As I passed her, I dis­covered that the phone was blasting some kind of podcast.  I have long found it weird that like 90% of the people I see in public, at least on campus, have those airpod things jammed in their ears⁠—like, you have to be listening to music 24/7? you never want to just hear the sounds around you?⁠—but I guess that if this is the alternative, sure, buy the airpods.