On the road (the road home) again…

Our weekend on the road is drawing to a close. We’ll be heading home, starting the three-hour drive from Pocatello, ID to Orem, UT around 8:00pm. It’s been kind of nice having a holiday of sorts.

Yesterday Sandra and I enjoyed the rare opportunity to go out to eat together without the kids. Granted, here in unfamiliar territory we decided to settle on a franchise restaurant rather than something with a bit more local flair — Red Lobster.

I grew up in Florida, and my memories of Red Lobster were “I got overcharged for second-rate seafood.” Granted, there was a lot of first-rate seafood around, so I was kind of spoiled. I have to confess that I was pleasantly surprised by the Red Lobster on Yellowstone Road here in Pocatello: everything was delicious, and I only felt slightly overcharged. It’s possible the franchise is now doing a much better job of moving fresh seafood from the coasts to the heartlands, but I can’t say for sure. Mostly we had shrimp, and those ship well and are hard to screw up.

(Note: Two weeks ago I made the mistake of having shrimp at Sizzler with a couple of good friends, and said shrimp were awful. Hard to screw up, yes, but not impossible.)

Anyway, that was Sandra’s birthday dinner, and the two of us had a very nice time.

Right now I’m missing that time alone. The kids seem to know that there are only a couple of short hours left in which to play with their cousins, and they’re all dialed up to 10, hollering and shrieking fit to compete with a chimpanzee war band. *sigh*.

Anxious though I may be to get home, there’s one thing I dread — the air quality in northern Utah is currently awful. We noticed the brown skies on the road north, and they lasted all the way into Malad, Idaho, clearing up only after we went over the pass at Devil’s Creek Reservoir. The skies were blue and beautiful all weekend in Pocatello, but the internet tells me that brown, gritty skies await back in Utah Valley.

This, of course, explains the asthma attacks. It’s not about the cold. It’s about the AIR, which is full of tiny particulates, and which isn’t clearing up because the entire Bonneville basin is under a massive inversion; cold, dirty air is trapped in the bottom 1000 feet of sky, and it’s not going anywhere until a good sized storm flips the inversion and washes the sky clean.

Maybe when I’m back home I’ll take a half-day and drive up the canyon above the bad air and go for a nice hike… in 10-degree air and 8 feet of snow. *sigh*.

3 thoughts on “On the road (the road home) again…”

  1. When I was staying in the northern Czech Republic (brown coal country), they used to bus the schoolkids up into the mountains to play above the inversion on bad days.

    I was in Teplice, at the junction of Germany and Poland, and everything was beautiful, when you could see it.

  2. Hello! You don’t know me (or possibly you remember me from me quoting Schlock Mercenary and being found by Technorati, a few months ago). I have a slightly unusual request.

    I’m attempting to put together some little throwaway computer games. I’m a recreational programmer and I do a lot of silly things that don’t tend to get anywhere. Would you be okay with me using Schlock Mercenary artwork in such games? Obviously I wouldn’t be selling them, but I might put them up on a web page and give them away. If I wrote something worth the trouble of making it downloadable, I’d naturally add something like “Artwork from Schlock Mercenary used by permission of Howard Tayler” to the web page and somewhere in game credits, and let you know where to find it. More likely, it’d never get that far.

    In case it wasn’t obvious: I’m not asking you to draw me a bunch of artwork — this is your job, after all, and I’m not paying anything. I’m just asking for permission to cut up parts of the existing online Schlock Mercenary archive for things like backgrounds and/or character artwork.

    You can respond to me here or reply to my LJ name at livejournal.com. Or you can ignore me and I’ll fade away and not bug you again 🙂

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