I'm not sure what it is about 4chan and me spotting random goofy pictures referencing Winnie The Pooh, but I love this art sooo much...

Never did get around to writing about our trip down to the Smokies.

Stopped in Nashville on Tuesday and saw the Grand Ole Opry in the Ryman Auditorium, an old church that they used from the 40's through the 70's and renovated in the last ten years. It was fascinating how they would alternate between acts I knew but Shawna didn't (John Conlee and Jim Ed Brown) and vice versa (Josh Turner and Keith Anderson). Weirdest thing was watching Whispering Bill Anderson sing Shel Silverstein's Unicorn song ("There were green alligators, and long neck geese..."). Very diverse set list, the Opry has.

Weather was great on Wednesday, but when we went down toward the national park, we hit a literal roadblock. All the storms earlier in that week knocked over a lot of trees; we had to veer off on to the back roads and wind up and down and round for an hour to wind up three miles further south.

Later that day on a wild hair we decided to hike up to Laurel Falls. It's about a mile straight uphill then a quarter mile back down to see the waterfall, and Shawna was less than enthusiastic at first. We got to the falls around sundown, and it was definitely worth the trip. As we were stumbling the mile and a quarter back to the road in the dark, we decided to pick up a trail map and see what other waterfalls there are in the park.

A lot of roads in the park were still close on Thursday. We tooled around here and there, making the annual pilgrimage to the Smoky Mountain Knife Works--a combination pocketknife museum and dealership for about every conceivable brand of sharp pointy metal. The best is downstairs where they have a goofy audioanimatronic band that plays country music Show Biz Pizza style.

Friday we made the trip with my family (they stayed down there the same week at a different cabin) to Cades Cove, a part of the park where you can see the buildings left behind by all the people kicked out of their homes to make a national park. Saw a lot of deer and wild turkey, pretty much right up beside the car as we drove through. We tagged along with Mom when she went to go buy a dulcimer, an instrument she's been talking about learning how to play for over a decade.

Friday night I talked Shawna into coming along with the family when they went to the thing that draws them to Pigeon Forge every December, a bluegrass gospel string band called The Primitives. I'm far from the churchiest person I know, but I enjoy the group for what they are, a talented bunch of bluegrass musicians. But Shawna was very wary of the crowd. And when one of he pentacostals started laying hands on her while mumbling about praising Jesus she had to get out of there.

Saturday, we took our map of the hiking trails and set out to see some more waterfalls. Went up all the way to Newfound Gap, bailed off down the backside of the mountains to Mingus Mill, then stopped in Cherokee, North Carolina. Cherokee would be an absolutely sleepy town if it weren't for the Casino. That whole part of North Carolina seemed like it was a couple decades behind the other side of the mountain.

On the south end of park we hiked our way up to a waterfall called Juneywhank, then managed to get lost on our way to the other trail. We're driving along this mud road through the park and suddenly we look to the left and there's an old pickup and a singlewide trailer. We'd apparently left the park a few miles back.

So we drive back to Cherokee and decide that our consolation prize would be going to see Mingo Falls, a waterfall outside the national park. The entrance to Mingo Falls trail feels almost like it's in town. There's paved road right up to the steps and a campground right next door. We walked up a "staircase" with 170 steps. Then a quarter mile along a slippery path to the waterfall. And it is totally worth it.

Thanks to the miracle of technology, this pointless ephemera has been captured for posterity so it can be studied by archaeologists who will be very confused but hey they have flying cars so they can bite it:

• 06:40 Workbench mag wants me to shop at pottery barn. Grandpa was right; they've jumped the shark. #

My nieces have a game for the Wii where you run around a Six Flags theme park running errands for people (this attraction needs fixed, but we need a part and the guy who has the part wants something else, etc). Shawna really seemed to enjoy it so I thought she'd get a kick out of something like the old Monkey Island games, and it happens that the Wii had something like those.

She didn't like it.

I really have to question the thought process whereby one teaches your newbie about the point and click interface (which is clunky enough as a Wiimote) by having them start out on a boat where everything is constantly bobbing up and down.

So she abandoned it quickly, but I stuck it out for a while. It got better, and I had one of those "aha!" moments where something finally clicked after being stuck for an hour and a half. (I then had one of those "duh!" moments when I realized that I had worked out the clever map puzzle on my own when everyone else had the concept spelled out to them explicitly through the Treasure hunt tutorial.

I later got stuck again, only to breakdown and slowly scroll down what was billed as a non-spoily walkthrough so I could find the one puzzle I was stuck on and do the rest on my own.

The answer to the puzzle was the very first thing I tried to solve it with, but I had apparently clicked just to the right of what I thought I had clicked on and got no results.

I'm still deciding if it's worth ten bucks to get the next chapter. I imagine it has some of the same bugs (I had one spot where my character quit walking as normal and just sort of scooted along the ground, and then what was billed as an "enigmatic" statue became even more enigmatic since it was suddenly invisible. I left and came back and it was visible again, which is good since I needed to see it to solve things.) and stuttery sound, but it will also have the conversations with pirate glassblowers who make glass unicorns and the satisfaction of finally figuring out how to get the pink frilly underwear where it needs to be.

After several years of scraping various barrels, I have read 76 out of 77 volumes, the last ten in what could be understood by some people as English.

I really don't think it would make much more sense with a proper translation. The theme made a bit of a shift so that it became more of a poem than a story. It's like...kabuki manga, or something...

But for what twists were left in the remaining skeleton plot, I have to say that I did *not* see that last one coming. Wow.

Thanks to the miracle of technology, this pointless ephemera has been captured for posterity so it can be studied by archaeologists who will be very confused but hey they have flying cars so they can bite it:

• 07:09 Had a lambic beer last night. I was expecting fruity but not not KoolAid sweet... #

Heh. The second panel kills me.

When I used to work the back at Sears (which has probably the most substantial "back" for a retail store that I'm aware of), I once dropped a box with a television in front of a customer as I was loading it in the car. Not hard mind you, just about a two foot straight drop while it was still packaged. The customer looked concerned, so I took the box back into the warehouse, set it down for a minute, had a cup of coffee and then came back out with the same box and loaded it in their car. They were delighted.

Man, today has been the day for otherwise pleasing consumer products to absolutely infuriate me.

I've had Pandora radio on my net-connected cell phone. It has decided in the last few weeks that it will only play 2/3 of a song before dropping the connection, at which point you can click to go to the next one and it will instantly start playing the first 2/3 of that one.

Got a nifty new propane heater for the garage. It's supposed to hook up to a 20 lb cylinder, but the recommended regulator is 3/8", the recommended filter is 9/16" left hand thread, and the 3/8" to 9/16" left hand thread adaptor (this is all stuff from the same company as the heater, mind you) doesn't thread into the 3/8" regulator.

Got a new digital camera (Nikon L100, bigger than a point-and-shoot, but smaller than an SLR) and it takes some decent pictures if you futz with the settings. But this is apparently the first digital camera in a decade that doesn't just act like a removable disk when you attach it to a computer with a USB cable, I have yet to get it to transfer pictures to my laptop, and the desktop for some reason sees two cameras of which only one is functional.





Takes decent pictures, at least...

(We had no decent pictures of Thor until today. He is either constantly moving, or chilling out in the dark. That picture had to be taken from 15 feet away with a zoom lens.

And you have to know Newton to see how nice that second picture is. His default expression is panicking neurotic. In my head, he talks like Woody Allen.)

Thanks to the miracle of technology, this pointless ephemera has been captured for posterity so it can be studied by archaeologists who will be very confused but hey they have flying cars so they can bite it:

• 07:17 "You can bet I took my turn at ridin' Teddy Bear..." You are one creepy dude, Red Sovine... #
• 17:55 Been up since four am. Self inducing turkey coma. Do not resuscitate. #

So my satellite dish's Cartoon Network HD has been screwing up the sound regularly on Venture Brothers, cutting things out for several seconds at a time. (The oddest was two weeks ago when 24 kept cutting out and all I got from the conversation was "OGO POGO......MOTHERF***ING PLEISIOSAUR!") Now Titan Maximum was a full fifteen minutes of non-stop static sound over crystal clear picture.

So I go to the web to see if the episodes online...and it cuts off about five minutes before the end. Arrgh.