Summer in Illinois 2008

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Once again, the kids and I spent a couple of weeks in Illinois. They went a little something like this…

July 4th: After a nutritious lunch of 7-Eleven hot dogs and Slurpees in front of the store, we took a taxi to the Albany hotel where the airport shuttle takes off from. Hung out in the lobby for about 45 minutes, playing checkers as we waited for the shuttle to arrive. The shuttle trip took about 2 hours and was slightly cheaper than an Amtrak, especially considering we didn’t have to take the Max to the airport after we arrived. Took another shuttle to our hotel and hung out in the pool area for a couple hours. Took the Max to Skidmore Fountain, walked around a bunch for about an hour and then watched the fireworks display. Was lots of fun. Went back home (actually beat the huge crowd to the Max somehow and got on the first one) and to bed by midnight.

July 5th: Up at 5:30am to get ready to leave. Pretty uneventful flights. Watched a movie with Payton on the laptop for about 90 minutes of it. Read my book a lot. (Yet another Mark Twain biography) Hung out in Chicago’s airport for a nearly 2 hours for our layover. Ate at Johnny Rockets in the airport and it was an insane $40 for just 3 of us. Played on the pay phones for awhile. I was having the kids dial random things, like ANI numbers, and I noticed that they didn’t know you’re supposed to wait for the dial tone to start dialing. When I said they had to wait for the dial tone, they didn’t even know what that was. They’re so used to using cell phones. Got into Illinois at 5:15pm.

July 6th: Woke up and looked at my phone – 5:30am. So I tried to fall back asleep for awhile. Then I remembered that yesterday my phone hadn’t switched time zones yet, so I called Alton’s time and temperature number to find out it was actually 7:30am. Still too early, but I got up anyway. The kids and I rode bikes for awhile and stopped at Vanpreter Park. Ate lunch at Steak N Shake with everyone. Went to see Wall-E in Edwardsville, which was great. On the way there, I glanced at Walgreens and noticed that the 254-7111 pay phone was missing! Yet another casualty in the pay phone deaths of 2008. I’ll miss that one most of all. I wonder if the Vanpreter Park pay phones are gone yet. Tonight I went to a concert at Haskel Park. Emily found a huge, unfolded pocket knife in the playground area. 6″ blade, I think. Gotta love Alton…

July 7th: Went to my dentist at noon. After 2.5 years, I still don’t have a dentist in Oregon so I made an appointment with my old Illinois dentist while I was in town. Luckily I didn’t have any cavities since I probably wouldn’t be here long enough to make an appointment to come back. This evening I got to meet John Sever. Yes, the celebrity from the John Sever Fan Club. I was a little star struck, but I tried to play it cool as if I hung out with celebrities all the time. The kids and I went to his parents, ate, swam, caught up, etc. I hadn’t seen his dad in about 20 years and his mom in about 10 years. I traumatized John’s kids by forcing them into the pool against their will and he traumatized mine by hitting Emily in the face with a volleyball and picking up Payton by his ears. Good times…

July 9th: Left at 3:30pm to go to John Sever’s house (without my kids), which is about an 80 minute drive from me. Had tacos for supper there, then went ditch exploring! (You should click here to read about The Ditch.) His wife and kids explored one direction of the ditch with us, then we went back home. After the kids were in bed, we headed to the ditch again and eventually ended up exploring the tunnel side of it. By this time our shoes were soaked. It was approaching dusk and it was pitch black inside. We each had a tiny LED flashlight that put out just enough light to keep us from tripping over anything, but they didn’t give us any light into the distance. Just as we were about to turn around and go back, we saw a hint of light in the distance so we kept going and ended up underneath a manhole cover with open vents on the sides. I turned on my GPS and stuck it outside the vent to find out where we were, which ended up being a couple blocks from his house. John lifted the manhole cover and we climbed out. A car parked on the side of the road with its headlights on seemed to completely ignore us and eventually drove off. John replaced the cover to keep people from falling through and we walked back to his house. John’s account of this whole thing is much more detailed and hilarious. Read it here: http://johnseverfanclub.blogspot.com/2008/07/manhole.html.

July 10th: Payton and I took a bike ride and ended up at the Icee stand. Patty was working and gave us free Icees and asked if I could come by their house and fix their computers. Said she’d give us free Icees for the rest of the week if I stopped by. So that’s cool, even though I hate fixing computers.

July 11th: Emily and I went for a ride this evening and ended up at Piasa Pantry (it’s a BP now) for some Slushies. Around 8:30ish I went to Mark and Patty’s to fix their wireless router issues. The kids came with me since they wanted to see the kids too. It took about an hour to get everything working. Now we have free Icees for the next week and they gave us some drive-in movie passes for some place in Belleville. I’ve never been to a drive-in movie before. Got to hear all kinds of gossip about my old neighbors.

July 12th: Got up around 9 and Payton and I went to get donuts. Went to Raging Rivers for the day, which ended up being a half day since it started storming and they closed the pool. We were all pretty exhausted anyway though. We were too lazy to hang around and ensure that they were closing so we could get free passes for next week.

July 13th: I’m a little sunburned today. It’s Payton’s birthday. We had a cake, tons of pizza and a pinata. And this evening we went to see Hancock at Eastgate.

July 15th: Got up at 7am and left for the City Museum by 9am. The City Museum was the same as always, which is unusual. Usually there’s always something new there. We stayed until they closed, though, and had fun. Emily ended up with a bunch of free Crusin’ USA games somehow (it just kept giving her free games) and was playing forever and me and Payton tried to convince her to come and do something else with us. Once when she protested, Payton replied, “Puh-lease, this game is so easy we could play it on paper!” I don’t know exactly what that means, but it sounded pretty awesome. He always says the weirdest things.

When we got home, my mom told me that Paige called and would be at a game in Vanpreter Park. So we went there and met up with Paige, Gary, Richard and Shirley. Oh, and Casey. Was nice to catch up with them all.

July 17th: Visited Wood River pool all day. Kids got busted several times for stopping on the waterslide so they would run into each other. I finished reading Fight Club, which was supposed to be my book to read on the plane ride home. Now I have to find something else to read. It was a good book and gave lots more detail than the movie, but I still like the movie better. I’m officially going to Defcon this year – I ordered my tickets today.

July 18th: Met John, Liz and their kids at the zoo today and spent all afternoon there. Went to their house afterwards, moved a couch and a giant TV. We didn’t do anything very destructive or crazy, just had fun with all the kids. (Well, I did redirect a sprinkler into a crowd of old people.) John and Liz, you guys are awesome. I hate myself for not getting together when we all actually lived in the same area.

July 19th: Time to go home. Got to the airport around 11am. I guess I shouldn’t have been in such a hurry to get there because check-in was super quick and so was the security checkpoint. We had nearly 2 hours to kill before our plane left. Our layover in Denver was another 2 full hours. Emily wheelchaired all over Denver airport until some airport guy yelled at her and took her wheelchair away. I kept trying to get her to greet passing wheelchair users with, “Hello, fellow cripple!” but she wouldn’t do it. Got into Portland around 7:30pm and into Albany at 10pm, all of us completely exhausted.

I spiced up the barf bags during one of our flights. The pictures are here: http://www.signhacker.com/2008/enhancing-barf-bags/

The PLA Panel at HOPE happened on the 19th too. On our shuttle ride home from the airport, I sent text messages to murd0c and RTF, hoping that I would see them check their cell phones during the presentation on the video. murd0c called me last night and told me that the panel ran about 45 minutes late, so I guess my texting was in vain. He told me the crowd liked my Rickroll. I think I mentioned this in a previous post, but doing a Rick Astley parody was extremely painful for me because of how much I hate that song. I put it up on YouTube, though, so here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGFEyxW1MsM

Today I’m just recovering from the vacation. I slept in until 8am, which isn’t too bad considering it’s 10am Illinois time. Went to McDonald’s for McGriddles since there isn’t any food or milk in my house. Stopped by the post office and my mailbox at home. On the way to the post office, I passed by my old place and I noticed that my old neighbors have moved out. The ones that Warren lived with. This kind of sucks, because I liked living there and only moved because Warren’s friends kept stealing things from me. I should move back! But on the other hand, HAHA, they finally got kicked out!

I’m not sure what’s in store for the rest of my day, other than I’m hoping to go pick up my cat from the people who are watching him. I wonder if he still remembers me.

I’m too lazy to add accompanying pictures to this entry.

Roadside memorial, pay phones

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I tell my kids that the teens pictured in this roadside memorial are buried under the metal doors.

What’s with this roadside memorial anyway? It’s been there for almost as long as I’ve lived in Albany. Don’t these kids have real graves that can be decorated with pinwheels and stuff? It used to be across the street, taking up some of the sidewalk, so I guess it was moved to this newer place to inconvenience less people. But geez, 2.5 years now. How long does a roadside memorial need to stay up?


Biked for a few hours this evening and ended up taking more pay phone pictures. It’s only been a month since I last went on a pay phone picture taking spree and already some of the phones I photographed have disappeared. The Goodwill phone disappeared just a couple weeks after my photo. And last week I noticed the 1 phone at Target was missing. Every pay phone on the community college campus has been removed. These have all been Qwest phones, so it looks like they’re tired of dealing with pay phones.

(This post is dedicated to Sheila and Wenonoa, who fully understand and can both personally relate to my obsession with pay phones.)

Roku Netflix box

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I’ve been a Netflix subscriber for most of this year now and it’s a great service. But what’s turned it into an awesome service is that box in the picture over there. That’s the Roku Netflix player and it rules so much. It lets me stream 10,000 or so TV and movie titles over the internet and onto my TV. Not new releases so much, but plenty of really great old stuff. All that’s required is that I keep my Netflix account. The quality of the movies is just as good as DVD and looks great on my 26″ LCD. I’ve heard that they’re going to start offering HD content soon, but I don’t even care. I’m happy with it the way it is.

This thing makes me even happier than I ditched 100% of my DVD collection last year. And I’m sure the service is going to just keep getting better, especially once Blockbuster releases their own TV box later this year and they have to keep up with the competition.

I’m surprised stuff like this isn’t bringing the cable TV rates down. I haven’t had anything more than the basic network cable for the past year, which I never watch. I only keep it because of the promotional thing I’m on with Comcast makes it cheaper to have cable with my phone and internet than to not have cable at all. Last week the promotional thing ran out, so I called them once again to cancel my cable TV and they set me up with another promotional thing so it’s cheaper to keep my cable. They desperately want me to have cable TV. Speaking of cable TV, look at these girls. I want to punch them both.

My Netflix queue is down to 15 movies now. It’s been consistently over 100 movies ever since I had it, as I’ve been copying just about everything that’s come in. But I’m almost finished with building my collection. After that I’ll be moving to the $8.99 plan on Netflix, which will make my Roku box even more awesome because it’ll be crazy-cheap. Wonder how many months until my personal digital movie collection is rendered completely useless because the Roku box will stream everything Netflix has.

Free pipes at Lowes

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A few years ago I was standing in a long line at the Alton Lowes, probably buying some home renovation junk. The guy being checked out at the front of the line had a cart full of drainage PVC pipes. Expensive pipes and lots of them. The teenage cashier can’t get one of them to scan, so she picks up her phone and says, “Plumbing, call 203!” or whatever the extension for her register was. I pulled out my cell phone and called Lowes and asked for extension 203 and her phone rings. I was at the back of the line, so I turned around and hoped that the man in front of me wouldn’t hear me talking. She explains her problem and reads the barcode to me. I tell her, “Oh, that particular pipe is free as long as he’s purchasing at least $20 of other pipes of the same diameter. That’s why it won’t scan.” So the guy gets 2 of these pipes free of charge. Too bad I couldn’t do that with my own purchases.

I wonder what would happen if I told that cashier of my hilarious prank on her when it was my turn in line. “Yeah, that was me on my cell phone. His pipes weren’t really free. I sure tricked you a good one!” Would she be shocked or amused? Would I get slapped? Would she call security? Thrown out of the store for life? I guess I’ll never know.

Reminds me of when I was at the same Lowes buying the 4′ molds for my concrete footings for the deck. Or whatever those big cardboard cylinder things are called. I had 3 of them, costing about $8 each. And they were all inside of each other so it looked as if there was just 1 of them in the cart. The cashier scans it (just 1) and the rest of my merchandise and I begin to pay. I wasn’t trying to scam her, that’s just how they were stacked on the shelf and that’s how I put them in my cart. Just then her phone rings and she picks it up. I can hear the voice on the phone telling her that I have more mold tubes inside of the one tube she scanned. She hangs up, explains her mistake to me, and scans another $16 for me to pay. I’m guessing it was security who zoomed in on my tubes. How sneaky!

Makes me wonder what kind of crazy things I could get a cashier to believe if I called her on her register phone.

“This is Steven from security. The man in line has a bucket of joint compound hidden inside his coat. Ask him to open his coat for you!”

“Hey Cindy, your credit card machine isn’t authorizing that card properly for some reason. You need to write down the full card number, the expiration date and the 3 digit code from the back. And just stick the paper you write it on in your pocket and we’ll just get it from you later.”

“It’s employee discount day. You’re supposed to be ringing up ALL purchases at the employee discounted rate.”

Or I guess I could do something like this.

Coins on the Tracks

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Today the kids and I biked to some railroad tracks and put coins on the tracks. Even though I’ve lived most of my life near railroad tracks, and played around them often as a kid, I never bothered to try this. Back then I was more into putting logs and giant pieces of metal on the tracks, hoping to derail the trains. We hung around the tracks for about 30 minutes, hoping for a train to stop by, but no luck. We left our coins there and ended up going back home.

Tonight I went jogging and noticed a train passing as I was out, so I stopped by the tracks and picked up the coins. I only got about half of them since I was searching for them by cell phone light and they were hard to spot. But here they are:

I love how the edges still exist perfectly on some of them, but other are cracked and sharp. I honestly didn’t know they would really flatten this well. Or I thought the vibrations would knock them off the track before the train actually hit them. The kids want to go retrieve the rest of them tomorrow. I told them they should try and spend them at 7-Eleven.

A couple days ago, I was reading this entry from Renae’s blog and she mentioned that she always walked with her Garmin GPS to track her distance and speed. I can’t believe I never thought of that! My phone, which I always take with me to play music on, has built-in GPS on it. I use it all the time in the car with Google Maps to keep me from getting lost. So I searched crackberry.com for some software that would track time/speed/distance and found GPSed which is perfect. And best of all it’s a free program. It’s making me love my Blackberry even more.

The program works like a social networking site where you can automatically upload your jogs/hikes/whatever to your profile. It lays out your route on top of Google Maps and displays your average speed, distance and all that. It rules. I could post links to my routes, but they begin and end at my front door and I don’t want any PLA weirdos doing evil things to me. Thanks for the inspiration, Renae! Here’s what the program looks like on my phone…

Looking at my route from tonight makes me realize I underestimated my distance from the other day. I went for about 8 miles, not 6. It’ll be nice to know my exact distance now. Also, I kicked ass with the running tonight. I ran for the first 1.5 miles without slowing for a break. My average speed was around 5.3 MPH. And I ran nonstop for almost another full mile on the way home. I’m getting better at this.

Someone asked what’s with all the fitness stuff lately. I’ve been doing this for almost 2 years now and I’ve lost close to 35 lbs. I plan to lose another 30 or so lbs, which brings me to a healthy weight according to some fitness website. I had a gym membership for about a year, which I kept mostly in private posts. Again, because I didn’t want PLA weirdos trying to figure out which gym I was at. Now that I’m running on my own I guess it doesn’t matter so much.

I also cut down drastically on my horrible eating habits. I still have horrible eating habits and don’t have plans to change that too much, but at least I’m doing a lot less of it. Like, I rarely eat a dozen donuts for breakfast anymore. Or a whole box of those powdered ones. Or 2 orders of Crazy Bread from Little Caesars for supper. Or an entire box of EL Fudge for lunch. A few years back I found out that once you get old that stuff actually makes you fat.

And I’ve given up Pepsi. For as long as I can remember I’ve had at least a Pepsi per day, usually several. Stopping by Quiktrip for a 44oz cup of it was a daily thing for me in Illinois. I always tried to not buy Pepsi in bulk or in 2 liter bottles, because I knew that would make it too easy for me to access. But even then, I still went to the store at least a couple times a day to buy some. But now I’ve quit. At the very most, I only have maybe a 20oz bottle every 2 or 3 months. And strangely enough, the annoying insomnia that I’ve suffered from my entire life has nearly vanished. It’s crazy how well I sleep these days. Speaking of that, I need to quit writing and go to sleep.

Jog/Weezer/Nerf

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Just got back from a SIX mile jog. Ouch. When I say 6 miles, it’s more like 3, because I usually jog for one song, walk for the next, etc. Still, more that I’m used to doing. This one took about an hour and 20 minutes. And wow, the new Weezer album is great! It’s comparable to their Blue album. Really good stuff. Anyone who hasn’t seen it needs to go watch their new video.

Speaking of new albums, Nerf Herder finally put a new one out. It’s not amazing, but it’s got a couple of really good tracks on it. I actually purchased it. With money! Was my first experience with Amazon’s mp3 download service.

Weekend and HOPE

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On Saturday I went on a 2.5 hour hike, then drove to Portland for a few hours. Saturday I took my longest jog ever – about 4.5 miles. Normally I only do about 2. Sunday I hung out with Sheila all day, hiking, geocaching, dinner and a movie. For the first time in my life, I paid more than $40 to fill up my gas tank. It’s now at least $4.00 everywhere. It’s about $20 just to drive to Portland, which is the same price to take an Amtrak there.

As much as I hate that Rick Astley song, I finished up a pretty decent parody of it this weekend, complete with a video. It’s going to be the introduction song for the PLA Panel at HOPE this year. I’m going to wait until HOPE starts to post it on YouTube.

I bought rollerblades yesterday so I can skate with Emily. We skated around on the street for awhile last night. It kills my ankles. We’ll probably end up going all the way to the park on them this weekend.

Biking to the movies

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That’s a picture of Emily throwing her arms up to block a picture from being taken during a small break from riding bikes. We biked about 5 miles to the movie theater today, then back. Definitely their longest biking trip to date. We stopped at their moms, Fred Meyer, and Circle K for movie theater candy on the way. We saw, of course, Indiana Jones 4. Normally we stay at the theater for a 2nd movie, but nothing else really worth seeing was there.

Indiana Jones was good, albeit incredibly unbelievable. I know you’re supposed to suspend disbelief and just enjoy movies like this, but they were just asking us to accept way too much. Like, did you know that you can lock yourself inside a refrigerator and be launched hundreds of feet through the air (via a nuclear explosion) and walk out of the fridge perfectly fine? Or that you can drive your boat car off a 100′ cliff into the water and you don’t even fall out? Then the same boat can fall down 3 separate water falls and you’ll still be fine? They barely even fell out of the boat and just climbed right back in each time. Gotta love movie physics. Oh, and then there were at least 4 scenes with Indiana and his friends running away from heavily armed bad guys, all of them shooting but nobody ever gets hit. There’s just no way they all missed him.

The kids and I watched the first 2 Indiana Jones movies this week and last. I’ve actually never seen either of them all the way through. I’ve only caught bits of them on cable throughout the years and thought they looked kind of boring. I have seen #3 many times, though, since I worked at a theater when it came out.

So that’s my weekend so far.

Pay Phones of Albany

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Yesterday after work, I biked all over Albany for about 3 hours to take pictures of pay phones. Why do I want pictures of pay phones? Well, aside from my lifelong phone obsession, I just think that in another 10 years they’re all going to be gone and it’d be cool to have photographic evidence that pay phones once existed in the town I live in. (Even though I plan to leave this city in about 10 years.)

In the 2 years that I’ve lived here, I’ve seen a pretty significant decrease in public pay phones. In 2006, they renovated the mall and they didn’t bother reinstalling any of the pay phones that they’d ripped out. I think there were 12 throughout the mall. Now there’s none, except for one single pay phone that’s outside one of the doors. And I’ve also been seeing them disappear in public at a pretty significant rate. Most of the time they leave the booth or stand and just take the phone. It’s weird that I notice the decline in pay phones since I haven’t used one for legitimate purposes since… geez, probably not since about 2000 when I bought my first cell phone.

So I want to take pictures of all the public phones and see how long they last. I really think 10 years has got to be it for pay phones. I’m not going to be like 2600 and declare them officially dead this year. Because people obviously still use them. I think. Come to think of it, I guess I never actually see anyone using pay phones anymore. I just assume they still do.
I guess the homeless people probably still use them a lot, but when I worked at the Albany homeless shelter it seemed like a lot of them had cell phones. They were always asking us if we could charge them.

Here’s my set of Albany pay phones: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rbcp/sets/72157605149367852/

I added them all to the Flickr group called Pay Phone Planet, which is a place to preserve pay phone history. There’s a lot of good pictures on there.

I did this in Alton too, back in the early 2000’s. Here’s my small collection of pay phone pictures from there: https://www.notla.com/sites/altononline/payphones.php

I’m going to take another long bike ride later this week and get more pictures. I think I’m just going to keep at it until I’ve covered all of Albany. It shouldn’t take that long. Oh yeah, for the most part I tried to be somewhat stealthy about taking these pictures to avoid having conversations with other humans. But when I took the one in Two Rivers Mall food court, an old man asked me what it was for. I told him that I wrote for an internet publication and we were doing a story on the death of pay phones. So he goes into story mode and starts going on about pay phones and rotary phones and says he actually remembers crank phones when you had to tell the operator who you wanted to talk to. I told him how I had to teach my kids to dial a rotary dial phone (it took them awhile to master it) and that their friends that come over have usually never seen one. It was a fun conversation.

Harry Potter, HHGTTG, Wal-Mart, Hike

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I finished up Harry Potter #7 today. I think I started it on Thursday or Friday. It was easily the best book of the series. I thought it would be boring when I started it. I mean really, after 6 books of wizarding crap can the 7th one really be any different? But yeah, it was great and I couldn’t put it down.

I’ve also listened to 3 “seasons” of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy BBC radio show now. I did a lot of driving around this weekend, so I was able to finish up the 3rd one. It’s great stuff as well.

I ended up at a Wal-Mart and picked up a few phone calls for customers when I heard someone paged to pick up a phone line. It was mostly because I’d been itching to test out this telephone recording device of mine, which resembles a wireless phone earpiece that people wore before everyone had bluetooth. I stupidly messed up the recordings of most of the calls I answered, but here’s one I got:

http://www.phonelosers.org/stuff/do_you_sell_tires.mp3

Yesterday I went on a 4 1/2 hour hike in Corvallis.

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