Pug’s Place

Last weekend was the first weekend I spent in Gainesville since the 14th of October. To recap, the month of lost weekends went like:

1. Weekend of October 21st: In Melbourne, FL interviewing with Harris Corporation
2. Weekend of October 28th: In Statesboro, GA competing in the southeast regional programming contest
3. Weekend of November 4th: In Phoenix, AZ interviewing with General Dynamics
4. Weekend of November 11th: In Boston, MA interviewing with Microsoft / Groove Networks

This put a major damper in keeping ahead of projects and general deadlines, which, of course, meant that I was in a state of pretty high stress for the past month. Ignoring the stress aspects, I did have a good time travelling around like this. I wrote about Statesboro and the programming contest already, and I posted an entry from Phoenix, so now I’m going to talk about my trip to Boston (and Odette!), then I’ll mention my interviews with Google, my plans for January and ideas about the future.

(Random note: The picture to the right here is one I snapped of a bee landing on a flower in the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix)

Despite being a Linux guy, last January when I was contacted by a Microsoft recruiter I decided to go ahead and do some phone interviews with the company. My recruiter was quite interested in having me fly out to interview in person but since that was January and I don’t graduate until next month I asked to hold off on that bit of excitement until it was closer to the time when I was really going to be job searching. I would be willing to accept a job with Microsoft given sufficient incentive, so I wasn’t just leading them on, don’t worry. At the start of this fall semester my recruiter got back in touch with me and we began talking about once again flying me to meet with a Microsoft product team. Due to time conflicts with everything else that was happening throughout October (and the first week of November), this interview trip got pushed back until the second week of November. I readied myself to fly to Redmond, WA during the start of Winter. After plenty of mental preparation I received an email with instructions on reserving my airline tickets… to Boston, MA. Perhaps I was being dense but I had no idea that I wasn’t going to Washington. I was chatting with Odette at the time the email came through and our conversation went like this:

Pug: WTF!
Odette: ???
Odette: Holding chips good, wtf bad.
Pug: Wiping potato chips off hand so I can type faster…
Pug: holy crap
Pug: Mind if I come visit?
Pug: It appears that I’ll be in Boston in two weeks!
Odette: Ohmygosh!!

Moving forward in time two weeks, early on the Thursday morning of the 10th of November I drove to the airport to catch a 6:20 am flight to Boston via Atlanta. By 11:30 am I was with my gal again! Thank you, Microsoft! That afternoon Odette had both work and class to take care of and I had a phone interview with Microsoft folks in Redmond, WA, so we parted ways until evening. I made good use of the time after my interview catching up on sleep rather than doing homework as I had originally planned… Anyway, the next day was Friday morning and I had to make my way north of Boston to the suburb of Beverly, MA (formerly part of Salem, MA, actually) via train to meet with Groove Networks.

Groove is located in a truly massive office complex called the Cummings Center which was at one point the largest factory in the world. It’s not only very large, it also has an unintuitive method of numbering its offices. Despite getting there about 30 minutes early, by the time I found the right place I was only 5 minutes early. I learned that in anything other than clement, moderately warm conditions that walk from the train station would be miserable - some of it was without sidewalks, for example. Regarding the actual interview, Groove’s people greatly impressed me with their expertise and humor. I spoke to a couple of closet Linux fans, heard about Windows Vista upgrades failing, got to discuss C++’s implementation of a vtable and discuss non-blocking I/O, massively parallel algorithms, lock-free and wait-free implementations of common concurrent programming problems and other geeky topics of which I have decent familiarity. Groove (and by extension Microsoft) gave me my most technical interview, even in comparison to my phone interviews with Google engineers. However, the atmosphere was still light and humorous - I think it would be more accurate to say that I had a day of geeky conversations rather than a day of interviews.

The whole experience was a positive one, though I could not imagine myself living in the Boston area. Fall color might be pretty, but despite the unseasonably warm temperatures everything looked cold. That didn’t stop me from having a great time exploring Boston with Odette the following day. She and I began our Saturday with a walk through Harvard, then around Boston Common, the Public Gardens and the surrounding areas with views of several Emerson buildings, the old State House and other historical landmarks. I got to have my picture taken with the adorable statue depicting the protagonists of Make Way for Ducklings as described in this earlier photograph from Odette which pleased me to end. They were fuzzy ducklings and I was prepared! Our wanderings extended in the afternoon to eventually finding our way to the New England Aquarium where we spent several hours ogling the penguins, the various fish and the crush of people who were doing the same.

Night was strolling its way across the harbor at the time we departed the aquarium but we still decided to continue poking around the city - after all, how often am I in Boston? (answer: this was my first time in Massachusetts) So we wandered around some shopping areas near Faneuil Hall Marketplace, watched a street performance by a man climbing a free-standing ladder and then walked to the Paul Revere House before returning to Cambridge.

After a nice lunch at Zoe’s near Harvard Square, I flew back to Gainesville on Sunday to feverishly work on neglected homework. Anyway, I had a great time — thanks, Microsoft!

In the midst of these weekends out of town I was slowly progressing through phone interviews with Google’s new office in Phoenix, AZ. If you look up comments on Google’s hiring practices they tend to point toward multi-month interview processes. I didn’t have multiple months so I didn’t expect anything to come from talking with Google and I wasn’t surprised to find they weren’t even close to being able to meet my desired schedule. Anyway, their interviews were mostly problem-solving. Not much to say there except that I’m not going the Google route, but my cover letter did manage to get some attention, so agonizing over it had some positive effect.

Last week was my deadline to decide what was going to become of me in January and where I’d go to work. After lots of deliberation I did reach a decision: I’m moving to Phoenix, AZ and going to work for General Dynamics C4 Systems. This probably won’t surprise anyone since I’ve been talking about moving to Phoenix since high school, but the decision finally came down to the factors of “want warm weather” and “want Odette to be able to get a job in the area”. I’ve secured a sub-leaser for my room here in the apartment and am in the process of setting up a moving company to pack up and haul my stuff out of here around graduation time. Then I’ll be driving home for Christmas, having my car loaded onto a truck in January and then flying out and having my stuff (and my car) meet me there. Sorry, Jachyra - I’m not going to drive all 1,800 miles, so I won’t be stopping in on my way. Then I’ll have a residence where less than a 2.5 hour private flight will take me to Las Vegas, ski slopes or San Diego Beach.

Oh, speaking of: I’m studying up to start private pilot training in January. In moments of free time I’ve been reading Rod Machado’s Private Pilot Handbook, studying everything that seems to be handy and trying stuff out with the latest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator on a Windows partition installed for specifically for the purpose. I even bought rudder pedals so that I can learn how to drive a plane on the ground and make coordinated turns in the air. (I figure $200 on simulator equipment could save me considerable amounts of money in plane and instructor hours throughout my training.) The awesome flying weather in Phoenix and the surrounding areas also factored into my decision to move there, as does the idea that winter sports, mountains and beaches are within reasonable flight range.

Wednesday I’m going home for Thanksgiving and one of these days I’m going to do some video editing.

In other news, the hood of my car (and two cars next to it) was spray-painted by vandals Friday evening. I got to give a statement to the local police and spend some time Saturday morning carefully applying pure acetone to the affected areas to clean it off without damaging the car’s real paint job. More graffiti was sprayed on the walls here in the breezeway, too.

I get my Master of Science degree in Computer Science on December 15th.

August wanes and as is traditional I’ve started the fall semester of classes here at UF. Katie has departed and now I’m ruminating over what has happened this summer.

I started the ’summer’ off by immediately driving up to Greenville to spend ~two weeks as I previously posted. Upon my return I swung into classes: Programming Language Principles and non-thesis ‘research’ work making a PLIB-ODE integration library and its accompanying documentation. Additionally I began working for UF’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research initially on a project to convert its research call center to Voice-over-IP (and Asterisk, an open-source PBX). I spent my off-time in May plotting things to do for the rest of the summer and watching things like American Dad. I also vainly tried to make OGRE and Newton or ODE play nicely together, but that’s another post… Finally, I spent the last Saturday in May at the Florida Folk (Music) Festival listening to everything from banjo jams to bluegrass to Kingston Trio-wannabees.
June was a bit more busy. I started to feel some stress about not having created any real products yet in my physics-3D integration effort, additionally I engaged in other time sinks such as playing an Ewok Jedi Guardian in a Star Wars role-playing game for half of the month (his name was Gwidug) (yes, I’m serious, an Ewok Jedi. Yes, it was funny). Some of Theresa’s D&D friends put this together and I was able to weasel my way into a character slot. It was … a different experience. I’m somewhat ambivalent about playing RPGs with non-CSC members… still, I mostly had fun, despite being the ‘outsider.’ E. and I started watching a lot of movies since I renewed my Blockbuster Online account, additionally I re-watched most of the extended editions of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers on a weekend whim.

I spent most of June at work prototyping SIP-protocol software telephones. E.g., writing things like Skype, but with specific features for our call center’s employees. This was interrupted in the last week of the month with a different project: learn Java 2 Enterprise Edition and fix a major crash issue with a piece of production software whose chief maintainer was about to leave the country for a month. I quickly found that JavaBeans are annoying… Also in the latter part of June Theresa, E. and I saw Stomp! at the Phillips Center. As one could guess, noise was created and the audience was enthusiastic. People clapped hands, clapped the floor and probably clapped each other. It was just that kind of show. The audience in the balcony surged upward in their seats when one of the cast clomped out on stage wearing the oil barrels on his feet; the audience-surge was alarming, luckily the engineers who designed the balcony accounted for occasional audience craziness and we didn’t all plunge into the Orchestra Center seating.

July began with a couple of important events: Katie arrived, Independence day happened and the newly reformed Trio went to Farm To Family, an area bluegrass get-together. The first was an event of great joy for me. The middle was of moderate joy: Katie and I went to Micanopy for their fireworks show. Like any good Americans we celebrated the Independence of our country by blowing up a part of it… like any good mosquitoes, they celebrated by feasting on everyone present. I had enough bites on my legs that E. thought I had either fallen off of my bike or had gotten some other sort of rash. Finally, the trip to Farm To Family was quite entertaining. It started out slow, got bad and then got quite good. The first act was alright, the second act was rather bad. We couldn’t help but chuckle quietly at those performers, especially when one of their songs had the chorus, “I’m sooooo… out of tune…. with you!!” Too bad I wasn’t the only thing he was out of tune with… The last act we stayed for made it all worthwhile. Not only were they quite talented, they also sang some rather hilarious songs. Possibly the most ludicrous thing they did was play Young M.C.’s “Bust A Move”. With Bluegrass instruments. That song gets *so* much better with a fiddle, a banjo and the Bassist singing the background vocals in a falsetto.

Actually, Farm to Family isn’t the only thing that happened on that weekend - earlier that day Katie and I went to the Florida Natural History Museum. Impressions: it’s a lot bigger than I expected! It’s worth wandering through if you’re in Gainesville. It also has a quite cool “Butterfly Rainforest” exhibit which Katie and I had to go visit. Inside that “Rainforest” room are enough butterflies that they’re effectively everywhere, always fluttering by you. Amusingly, one of the Monarchs decided that Katie was sweet. First, one landed on her shirt and decided to take up residence for about 5 minutes. Shortly after that one departed, a Blue Morpho landed on Katie’s cheek… and took up residence for what must have seemed like an absurd amount of time to Katie. Despite our attempts to gently dislodge it from right underneath her glasses it persisted in perching there, deliberately tasting Katie over and over again with its proboscis. Obviously, butterflies prove what I already knew: Katie’s sweet. Oh, and kids and adults under the age of 80 around Katie during this time found her predicament both very humorous and cute. I don’t know what Katie felt about that, but perhaps she’ll comment below.
Katie started her summer internship at the University Press of Florida that week and we began a routine of having lunch together in the middle of the Warrington College of Business every day we were both working. She only had two weeks in Gainesville before the largest of my summer plottings occurred: Katie and I spent a 4 day weekend in Savannah, GA.

Among the various things we did in Savannah was take silly pictures of each other. Oh, and I learned that I should Avoid Pi! I’m not taking heed of this advice.

The next weekend, in the tradition of keeping busy, the Gainesville Crewe made a trip I’ve been intending to make for quite some years: Theresa, Katie, E. and I went to Silver Springs. Oh yes, I never did make a writeup about Silver Springs… Well, first, I have a photoset on Flickr titled very appropriately, Theresa Pets Everything (our Silver Springs Adventure). Silver Springs is a nature theme park whose primary attraction is one of the largest artesian spring formations in the world, producing nearly 550 million gallons of clear, clean water daily. It’s also the head of the Silver River, upon which the park’s glass-bottomed boats drive tourists around.

Anyway, Silver Springs was a load of fun. It wasn’t overly expensive and it was perfectly sized: we arrived when they opened and finished seeing everything right before they closed. It had lots of animals for Theresa to pet, lots of reptiles for us to stare at (and be stared at by) and a surprising number of little “rides,” like a Jeep-trailer through some random forest, several glass-bottomed boats on both historical and pretty parts of the Silver River and a “lighthouse” spinny-go-up-in-the-air-in-cupolas ride… Hrm, this description is appearing to become rather forced, so I’d best wrap it up: Theresa became every mean bird’s best friend. Additionally, she helped a “small human” get a souvenir stamped penny and she petted a “corn dog plant”. Like I said, “Theresa Pets Everything”. A random point of trivia: Silver Springs is now owned by the same company which now owns Big Kahuna’s in Destin.

It was very useful to me to be doing fun activities like this because at this time at work I was busily frustrating myself trying to track down problems relating to JBoss, Enterprise Java Beans, inordinate amounts of memory consumption and thread leaks. If that sounds obtuse and annoying, you’re half right: it was also disheartening because I wasn’t, at that time, solving any problems.

After Silver Springs we had another important occasion to mark: Katie’s birthday (photos here!) We had the gang over for made-from-scratch pizza (and I roasted the red pepper!) and Quick After-Battle Triple Chocolate Cake (like what we did last summer. Hey, it was good!). Of course we had an appropriate number of candles and sang for Katie. We also had some extra fun immediately after all the candles were lit: as I was instructing Katie to “make a wish,” one of the candles became too tired to continue with the whole rigmarole and decided to lay down on the cake. E., for her part, reacted instinctively to preserve the sweet, sweet cake: she blew out all the candles!

E. claims she didn’t make a wish so it didn’t count. Anyway, we re-lit them all and the true birthday girl had the joy of making fire go ‘poof!’ Additionally, as pictured on the right, Katie had a brief fling with Theresa (her words, not mine!).

The next weekend Katie and I went home so that I could meet my niece and nephew and she could celebrate birthdays with her family. On our way back to Gainesville we stopped in Marianna to see the Florida Caverns park there. It’s a fun distraction for a couple hours - delving underground and seeing nifty rock formations and the like. I had never been into a cave before, let alone one with stalactites and their varied friends. I took some pictures there but none turned out very well - most look very flat when in fact nothing down there was flat, leastwise the walls!

That brings us to August; as you see, my plottings made for a busy July! August wasn’t so busy. It began with James coming back into town on his way from Texas where he was working as a scout leader-type fellow. He dropped in Friday night and stayed for a few days. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time with him because Katie and I had, of course, plans laid out. Saturday morning she and I drove to Gainesville’s airport and (as previously posted) went flying with Barry, one of my coworkers. On our flight we did some sightseeing over both Silver Springs and Saint Augustine, forming a nice continuity bridge with our next out-of-town trip a week and a half later.

That night after returning to Gainesville Katie and I once again skipped out on James to have dinner with Jennifer, a friend of ours from IB. (Poor James, we just weren’t even home while he was visiting.) Katie and Jennifer did a lot of catching-up (as they hadn’t seen each other since our high school graduation) while I did a lot of looking pretty.

We did spend the next day, Sunday, around the apartment and thus around James. But Monday morning we forced him to leave early since Katie and I were driving down to spend an afternoon with my parents who were at the Governor’s Conference on Tourism in Orlando then. Katie and I had convinced my Mom, who was at the time thinking about buying a laptop for herself, to go to an Apple store in Orlando and try out one of the MacBooks before making her decision on a laptop. So, we got in my car and drove to one of Orlando’s giant malls, found the Apple store there and everything went to hell.

Rather than introducing my Mom to MacOS X, demonstrate that she could indeed use a Mac and that it did everything she could want, my Mom had decided to buy one for me. In my defense I did little but object to the idea, but at the end of the trip I was walking out with a black MacBook. We went back to the resort and the three of us went down to the various pools - Katie and I grabbed rafts in the Lazy River and went ’round and ’round through bubbly areas, waterfalls, sporadically-firing water cannons and the like while Mom read a book. After some Italian for dinner Katie and I returned to Gainesville.

That week was very busy for me; I had my final exam and both of my projects due. Neither of the projects was entirely done, so I had to scramble to finish the documentation for the ODE-PLIB integration stuff and to try and solve my remaining problems with the term project for Programming Language Principles. As it turns out, I never solved those problems. All the time I spent trying to solve them was time I didn’t spend studying for the final exam. In fact, I never studied for the final exam. Luckily, I got a perfect score on it anyway. Heh heh heh…

My stress level had been rather high that whole week so we didn’t do anything more special than go out to eat after summer classes ended. I de-stressed that weekend and then began Katie’s last week here.

Monday night we went to a birthday party for Linux hosted at Fiber Optics Plus, a local business. The local Linux Users Group decided that we needed to honor Linux turning 15 years old and so the Fiber Optics Plus people pulled out a grill, ordered a birthday cake (labeled “Happy Birthday Linux”, no less) and about 20 of us showed up to partake of the festivities.

As the picture on the right proves, Katie and E. both came with me to the party and they had fun with the Karaoke machine. Prior to Karaoke we socialized and played the ever-popular Werewolf. I should note that, as should be obvious when you bring girls to a party of mostly geeks, where ever the girls sit is where all of the guys congregate.

Wednesday of Katie’s last week we made a day trip out to the remaining check box on my plottings for our summer fun: Saint Augustine. This time from the ground, of course. The primary target of our trip was to see the Castillo de San Marcos, a fort I’ve considered Really Cool since my parents took me there 10 years ago or so. Katie also finds old forts to be of interest (like Fort Jackson), so we had a good time poking around all of the history there despite the oppressive heat. Following the Castillo we tromped into some of the revitalized downtown (which is mostly tourist shops, of course) to poke around and bask in air conditioning and cool drinks. Katie got complimented by a stranger and had an overly enthusiastic food vendor try to force samples of yogurt on her, but we managed to survive the shopping somehow and make our way to someplace slightly more reputable: Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum.

If you’ve not been to one of these places, you should go at some time. It’s just a mansion full of crazy. It’s expensive, of course, but they have something for everyone… as long as you’re at least a bit messed up in the head.

The last night Katie was here we went and watched the ~100,000 bats by Lake Alice wake up and fly out for their night’s hunting.

It was a grand summer, from its start in Greenville until its symbolic conclusion watching the final bats take a turn around their roost before going hunting.

Now it’s the Fall with a new set of classes, a job search, a sub-leaser search, the Programming Team and one more graduation. More on all of this as time and inclination merge to bring it to you, dear readers.

On Saturday my coworker Barry invited Katie and I to join him on a flight from Gainesville to High Jackers Restaurant at Flagler County Airport (north of Daytona) for lunch (see: The 100 Dollar Hamburger) and some aerial sightseeing. In addition to lunch at Flagler, we also went about 30 miles along the Atlantic shore watching boats, surfers and the like in a truly picturesque way up to Saint Augustine. Then from Saint Augustine we flew across the state to Ocala to view such sights as Jumbolair, FL and John Travolta’s house there. Finally we swung over Silver Springs Nature Park (remember that? Oops, I guess I never wrote an entry about it. Oh darn.) and captured some pictures of the springs from 2,200 feet rather than 80. Then back to Gainesville.

The photos we took during our flight are now in a photo gallery on Flickr for your enjoyment!

Total flight time was about 2.2 hours; we were in a Cessna 172 Skyhawk. Oh, and yes, Barry is quite a fine pilot.
My apologies for the lack of updates of late; I’ve a lot of work left to do before everything’s due in … three days.

Odette did a better job writing up our Savannah trip than I could at present, so I’m going to link to hers: “Savannah” on Vulcan’s Peak.

We also have some pictures online in the fairly normal location.

So… I’m back from spending ~10 days in Greenville, South Carolina having a mighty good time with Katie, Jen and Cort. I had a wonderful time and did plenty of fun things with highlights like:

• Seeing the Furman Symphony Orchestra and Oratorio perform Mozart’s Symphony No 38, Prague, Great Mass in C Minor and Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy. Katie was in this Oratorio making it extra special.
• General fun hanging-out-with Jen and Cort (at whose apartment I was so generously allowed to stay)
• Attending Furman’s Honors Night to see Katie get an award for her poetry.
• Eating a lot of really good food prepared by Cort, who is a very competent chef (Thank you Cort! Thank you Jen!)
• Attending Katie’s induction into Phi Beta Kappa (WOOHOO, KATIE!).
• Lazing around Furman and Furman’s library reading good books like ones starring Lord Peter.
• Watching the Furman Theatre’s rendition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (which was very well performed and wholly enjoyable).

All in all it was a wonderful vacation. And while this isn’t the proper medium for expressing gratitude to my hosts, I’m going to do it anyway for they were of exceptional kindness: Thank you again, Cort and Jen!

I was greatly amused at just how sparse Furman’s campus is, even during peak times during a primary part of their school year (their Spring term isn’t complete until the end of May). The density of students walking around is very, very low compared to UF. Of course UF has 10 times the student body but Furman’s campus is tiny compared to that of the whole of UF. I mention this because now I am for the first time taking summer courses here in Gainesville and, amusingly, the student density here is very similar to Furman’s right now. The campus is practically deserted. Thus the title of this blog post: UF in the summer does look like Furman in the spring.

Both my classwork and my office-work are looking to be greatly interesting and worthwhile. I’ll blog about the former and perhaps some general notes on Asterisk (the open source PBX) at a later date.

My Dragon*Con Pictures, and the group’s photos (coming soon).

Theresa’s doing a good job of writing out what went on for our group. I’ll add to her notes later, but for now I’m far too busy and fatigued to proceed. So, look at Theresa’s Recaps: Part 1 and Recaps: Part 2.

I’m at Dragon*Con for the weekend. No updates until Monday.

Hollywood, FL was the location of this year’s Florida Governor’s Conference on Tourism, so my parents and I spent 5 days in the Westin Diplomat. In addition to reading a lot, Mom and I lazed by the pool, drank piña coladas and went on an air-boat ride through the Everglades.

In the Everglades, well, what can I say? We met alligators, alligators and alligators! Most of the photographs I have in the above slide-show are of various gators in the everglades and in the “gator theater” attached to the place where we hopped on our air-boat. Mom and I weren’t as entertained by all of the alligators being showcased around as the Hollanders and New Englanders were, but I still took enough pictures, sheesh.

Wednesday afternoon (the 20th) I left work early to head to the airport. Unfortunately, I was going there to negotiate with the Delta ticket counter people as I had been told minutes earlier that my outbound flight in two hours had been canceled. The negotiations were fruitless as there was no better solution than the one Delta had already rescheduled for me: leave Ft. Walton Beach 2 hours later and arrive in Manchester at 1:30 AM. So I drove home, having no desire to return to work for the day, and waited for 6 o’clock to arrive. By the time it did I was at the airport and my outbound flight had been pushed back another hour to 7 PM, but luckily I had had two hours of layover in Cincinnati already, so I was not going to be stranded. I wasn’t, and I got in at just past 1:15 AM local time on Thursday morning with Katie standing there waiting for me.

She drove us back to her place while we listened to Gaelic Storm mp3s I brought on an mp3 CD (Gaelic Storm being a very lively Irish band). The roads there were dead at 2 AM, and we were back at her place in the deep darkness around at around 2:30. Crash -> Sleep.

Thursday after both of us slept in we toured Peterborough (est. 1760, named for Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough), the town in which Katie works. This involved a little shopping (such as for birthday cake ingredients), a museum visit (the Mariposa Museum), and general wandering through the downtown area.
I surprised Katie then with our travel plans for the weekend while casually tossing her her passport: a visit to Mt. Washington and a day in Montréal. We capped that evening with tickets to see the local professional theatre, the Peterborough Players, present Inherit the Wind, a drama loosely based on the Scopes-Monkey Trial. The play was well performed, presented in a quaintly converted old barn and an excellent way to spend a summer evening! I’ll leave it to Katie to critique the play and the performance.

So Friday we hopped in Katie’s Scion xB and headed north to Franconia Notch State Park and Mount Cannon. Our stopping at Mt. Cannon was entirely spur-of-the moment. We were traveling through the State Park on our way to Mount Washington when we read a bland brown park sign stating “Cannon Mountain Aerial Tramway Next Exit.” Intrigued, we stopped and decided to indeed ride to the top of Cannon. It was a pretty but short ride up the bulk of the mountain, and then Katie and I picked a steep trail and bounded our way up to the summit’s observation tower. Our trail up to the tower was the “short” trail and, while steep, was only perhaps a 5 minute walk. Nevertheless the 4180 ft altitude made us happy we weren’t exerting any more, we weak-lunged sea-level folks.

We spent a fair amount of time on the summit tower looking at the gorgeous views over the state of New Hampshire and into Maine and Vermont. While up there we also watched a small plane make two trips towing gliders up near the mountain and releasing them to soar around the White Mountains (where we were) and the Presidential Range (where Mount Washington is). It was peaceful, crisp and intoxicating, but as in so many other situations, our stomachs got the best of us and, cursing ourselves for not bringing our sandwiches up with us, we hiked the long, not steep way back down to the tram station (taking more pictures), returned to the car and ate lunch. Sated once more, we bid Cannon farewell and continued into the Presidential Range and toward the base station of Mount Washington’s cog railway.

Mount Washington has a rare sort of train which navigates its steep walls: a train with a locomotive on the wrong end which maintains traction and locomotion through a cog and slotted track setup. In other words, a cog railway. This train was built in the latter half of the 19th century and is still a coal-burning engine today, carrying tourists up ridiculous grades to the 6,300 ft summit. Unfortunately for us, the cog railway has a steep price tag associated with tickets. At $50 a person we weren’t fighting for the right to ride, but we went to the cog railway depot because we wanted to see Mount Washington more than its neighbors in the Presidential Range (due entirely to its prominence in Julian May’s Intervention and Galactic Milieu books!) and this seemed a more obvious place to find a trail up its slopes than anywhere else around it. Once there we toured the cog railway’s museum, watched a train begin its trip up the side of the mountain and wandered straight onto a trail which terminates at the summit. Being good little adventure seekers, we struck out on that trail for a good while.

Katie proved that she is much more sure-footed than I, as she could move across wet and loose rocks with much more alacrity than I could manage. There’s nothing quite like having weird conversation and apples by a waterfall on the side of a mountain. Some pictures later, we turned around since skies were darkening (waaayyy too early) and we still had a long way to go to reach Montréal that evening.

Back in the car we struck off north to the Quebec border where we were appropriately harassed by a French Canadian customs agent who seemed to think Katie and I were smuggling in firearms and tasers (Luckily, we had already sold all of the firearms to rogue Shakers). Beset by torrential rain and heavy traffic, the trip west toward Montréal was not a fun drive, but Katie did and excellent job of getting us to the city. Someone was watching out for us though since we reached a Montréal which had no rain and good lighting conditions. Unfortunately it was also a Montréal with lots of traffic. Katie did an excellent job of navigating our trip across the St. Lawrence and downtown, even when our chosen street was blocked off for the setup of a festival and we had to make a large circle (thank you, one way streets!). We parked underneath the Complexe Desjardins in which the Hyatt is located [map], adjacent to the Place de Arts. We checked in and immediately set out to wander the city streets and find ourselves a late dinner. We picked Guido’s and Angelina’s [map], an informal Italian restaurant next to a small cathedral ,which did an admirable job of catering to our needs. After dinner and a little more wandering we returned to the hotel to…

Watch Futurama and Star Trek VI en français! We are such geeks, I love it! In actuality, listening to French Klingons and especially a French Scotty was more than a little disturbing, so we refrained from watching the whole movie.

We spent most of the next morning wandering the downtown, poking into the odd shop here and there. We did a fair amount of art appreciating (mostly impressive Inuit stoneworking), picture taking and general out-on-the-town doings: wandering the harbor, watching street performers, attempting to buy cold drinks… As happened the day before, we were waylaid early in the afternoon by hunger and decided to use that as a cue to return to the car and drive back to New Hampshire.

We had a much prettier view of Quebec on our trip away from the city than the one the day before: clear skies revealed quaint farm houses, gently rolling plains and an unbelievably high number of passing cars whose passengers craned their necks into all positions to get better looks at Katie’s Scion. The vehicle doesn’t appear to be on sale in the smaller areas of New England, and there certainly are not many on the roads! (Katie has seen two in the past two months). They’re apparently still quite uncommon in Quebec, too. In more than four out of five passing cars with passengers, the passengers all turned around and stared. Katie got quite a kick out of this, but not so much as our experience with the American customs agent at the border:

(we drive to the booth)
Katie: Hello.
Customs Agent: (staring)…What kind of car is this?
Katie: (making sure to mention a large car company) A Toyota Scion.
Customs Agent: (thinking it must be a hybrid) So… what kind of gas milage does it get?
Katie: Nothing special, around 30, 31.
Customs Agent: Is that all? Not one of those…
Katie: Nope, nothing special.
Customs Agent: You know…. it’s kinda… ugly.
Katie: (laughing) It is! It’s my box.
Customs Agent: You should have it in yellow, then you would really stand out.
Katie: I stand out well already!
Customs Agent:Well, have you been in Canada long?
Katie: Just over the weekend.
Customs Agent: Well, welcome back…
(drive away, laughing like maniacs)

We took a different route back to Peterborough and instead followed the Connecticut River down the Vermont-New Hampshire border (on the Vermont side). Hills, river, lakes, pretty countryside everywhere (Too bad it would be a death trap while covered with ice!). Since Katie drove, I had the benefit of soaking in all of the beautiful views, and soak them in I did. By the time we reached Brattleboro, Vermont, we were ready for dinner so we rustled up a table downtown at a New Mexico-inspired restaurant; In other words, this was Tex-Mex in NM-style. Katie broke down and had a New England-ish meal (her first one so far) of salmon drizzled with maple syrup, and I, not to be dissuaded from keeping in touch with my inexplicable and possibly counterfeit Mexican heritage, had an enchilada. Then, under cover of darkness, we crossed the state line and proceeded back to Katie’s place, hampered severely by a traffic accident that for a long time halted traffic on a twisty country highway. But eventually we got back, Katie exhausted.

On Sunday another instance of sleeping in occurred, halted only by the opening of presents! We simply hung around Katie’s place all day on Sunday, first baking Quick After-Battle Triple Chocolate (Birthday) Cake, then making dinner. The cake baking was a hoot! First off, this cake recipe comes from Patricia Wrede’s novel Book of Enchantments, and the instructions involve actions such as mixing the batter in the helm of one of your comrades. Second off, this cake uses lots of chocolate (chocolate milk, chocolate chips and cocoa). Third off, we didn’t have a mixer so we used a food processor (which worked surprisingly well, except that the batter didn’t have as much air in it as one would optimally want, so the cake was somewhat flat). Fourth off, we decided to attempt to make frosting without having a clue about how to go about it.

While I know now several methods of making frosting (both with and without heat), at the time we were simply the blind leading the blind and, after many small trials, our saucepan contained not frosting but chocolate rock candy! Always resourceful we crushed the rock candy into a coarse powder and shook it on the top of the cake as a sweet topping anyway. The end result was a lot of sugar! SUGAR! Dinner was one of Katie’s favorites, a kind of southwestern ’sloppy joe’. Ask her about it sometime, it’s a pretty good dish!

Monday was the departure day, and while I didn’t leave until afternoon, the spectre of departure always skulked nearby. Still, good conversation, speedy packing and good food all occurred before the drive to Manchester and the fare-thee-wells. Delta, reliably, got me back here two hours late. Figures.

An excellent trip with lots of adventure and lots of miles put on Katie’s new car!