Hello, Blazerfanfriends!

I've gotten my head above water at the office during a brief respite in the deluge of busywork which has been worsened by our understaffedness and training issues for folks back-filling vacant posts, so I figured I'd pop in here and Bedge out for a bit. What's been going on, y'all?

(I also wanted to be assure everyone that I continue to be Blazer lifer even in the face of the Kings becoming an upwardly-mobile team of intrigue and the wheels getting really wobbly on the Blazers wagon. Sure, I peeped at their games in that series, but I was pleased to find myself watching both of my former fave teams face each other with as little skin in the game as any completely objective fan just wanting to enjoy some good basketball with perhaps a side of drama. I was actually very pleased to see the Kings eliminated because lighting that beam into mid-May or possibly June might disrupt bird migration patterns at a very important time. I'm still eager to hear Swainson's thrushes swirling those flutey calls to each other in my backyard. If they're about two weeks late, I'll know it was because of those Kings! But enough about basketball.... This is the junk drawer!! Even many front-page articles are only tangentially about basketball during this time of year anyway.)

So, summertime is coming. I know we're all sweating and getting sunburned already with these early 90°F temps, but it's still summer plan-making time. What are you all looking forward to this summer?

Who's into gardening here? What are you growing? How are things coming along?

We're gonna try to do some spontaneous camping at some first-come/first-served campgrounds if I can get some people trained up enough to handle the few chores at work that no one else but me knows how to do. Jeez.... I guess making summer plans can actually be quite complicated. Nearly every vacation I've taken in the past four or five years has involved me bringing the laptop along and still logging in nightly and early every morning and still being kinda on-call for emergencies. I think I left my laptop at home once last year and tried to force myself to ignore work altogether for a quick camping trip just a 30-minute drive away. It was really just a calculated gamble that there'd finally be a Friday where nothing happens that can't be left to linger undealt-with til Monday. But I was thinking about it throughout that weekend.

In late July/early August, we're finally gonna make a family trip to Yellowstone. We're hoping to see all the sights and not get stuck in too many traffic jams due to engine-idling wildlife-gawkers being utter dumb-butts. At some point I wanna go to North Cascade National Park and walk from Cascade Pass to at least the ablation zone of the Sahale Glacier. I haven't touched ancient ice for probably a decade and a half. I'm really feeling a use-it-or-lose-it vibe coming from my body these days. I'm giving up a prime hike-break opportunity right now as I type this.

I'll share a bit of music that I'm really enjoying here...

The Toads are part of the burgeoning Australian underground rock scene and are comprised of people who probably play in two or three of those burgeoning bands each. It's funny how sometimes a scene seems so vibrant with dozens of rad bands, but if it seems like it's, say, 50 bands, it still might just be a milieu of like 20 people making it all happen. But even though The Toads are like a side-project of a side-project of a side-project, they still sounds fully realized to me. And even though The Fall made hundreds and hundreds of songs from the late 70s til Mark E Smith's death only a few years ago, sometime I wish they made even more songs--especially in the early to mid-80s--so The Toads really scratch that itch. They sound like a spitting image of that era of The Fall except they don't have two drummers. The singer's vocal rhythms domineer like Mark E's did, and his turns of phrase about civil service seem so much more British than Australian, I almost expect him to glottalize his T's.

Of course, the floor is open to geek about about whatever movies or TV you're watching, or whatever else.