Last year when I was setting up this blog, I had a few go-rounds in trying to buy (rent?) this domain. I played cat-and-mouse with the .net form a couple of times–waiting for the company that bought it to give it up after five days when it didn’t make them enough ad revenue to pay for the domain fee–and then saw that the .com was going to break loose after thinking it wouldn’t be available till this year. Then, because it was a Network Solutions domain, I just paid SnapNames their scalp money to get the .com for me before non-SnapNames/NS people could try for it. Done and done. Then NS ticked me off and I transferred the registration. Mwahaha.

I looked up the .net today. It’s owned by a company I never heard of but the contact email is at SnapNames. Now here’s the fun part–it’s covered in ads, of course, but most of them have to do with The Lord of the Rings. “Anwyn” is not a Tolkien name by nature–I decided it sounded like a name a girl in Rohan would have, that’s all (Eowyn, etc.). But I guess TheOneRing.net’s Anwyn pages sat high enough in the search engines long enough to make whatever system sets up the ad pages think that Tolkien was the most likely thing people would be looking for if they searched on Anwyn.

Which is a tiny little feather in my Fifteen Minutes cap. Kinda cool for a piece of Friday trivia.

I live in Portland, where we have an insidious governmental interference called the Urban Growth Boundary. It’s a line drawn around the city to prevent urban development outside its borders. When it was first drawn, there was much land inside it still undeveloped, so that development could continue on a pretty ordinary schedule without running up against the line. But now the suburbs are pushed slap up against the boundary. I can literally drive down the line and observe the “house farms” on one side and the actual farms, open land, on the other.

It’s no surprise, then, that the house I live in is built on a development plan of about seven houses to the acre. There is a plot of grass the size of a postage stamp that, surprise, doesn’t entice any of us to hang out outside, though I do maintain some rosebushes and herbs in the half-postage-stamp front yard. The price of houses with yards rises exponentially to the amount of land they sit on, and these houses are likely to be much older and thus require a larger investment in renovation and repair. And because most of us live on the postage-stamp patches, going outside for any amount of time requires us to … drive somewhere, often upwards of 20 minutes, to find a nice outdoor area. That’s right–in a city that prides itself on its greenness and its obnoxious mania for outdoor sports and demonizes auto traffic to the point where our traffic congestion rivals that of much bigger cities because the highway system is not big enough to support the population properly, we have to drive to play outside comfortably.

The UGB is frequently touted as helpful to farmers–you know, so they won’t have to make those hard choices when the dirty developers come knocking on their doors with their fistfuls of cash, because the poor dears just couldn’t handle such a thing. But if they find farming unprofitable, woe to them since they can’t even pay developers to take the land off their hands, since most rural land is zoned in such a way that it can’t be divided into lots smaller than five acres. Even worse, some owners find that when the UGB is moved back, as it periodically is, Metro will thoughtfully tell them their land will be “preserved” instead of rezoned “suburban” with the rest of their neighbors, meaning it will still be worthless to developers.

Today I walked down a street I’ve walked many times before. I’ve always admired how the homeowners there have managed to hang on to their acre-plus plots with houses in the middle, surrounded by a sea of seven-to-the-acres. There was one house in particular that sat in the middle of an acre–a barren acre. Nobody was doing anything with it; it wasn’t even lawn. I used to daydream about what I’d put in there if I could live there. No chance of that–the going price was close to a million the last time it was sold–and though the house looks nice and probably a bit bigger than mine, it’s not a million-dollar house. Today when I walked by, however, the house was jacked off its foundations. A woman I met in the course of the walk told me she heard that the house was to be moved to the back of the lot and eight more would be built on the acre. Oh, did I forget to mention that some of suburbia is zoned nine houses to the acre?

Portland is reaching the point where the density is so high that people will not want to live here. I’m reaching the point myself of wanting to find, um, greener pastures. Metro will not take it into its head that for people who don’t live the hiker/biker lifestyle, a little bit of green to call their own is more important than the finest scenery in the world–especially when Metro doesn’t even want them to drive to see it.

One of my church’s current Wednesday-night classes is viewing Islam vs. Islamists, the documentary that PBS really didn’t want to show. Maybe I can hold off from the church shopping awhile longer.

My Ten Fingers Stepper arrived today from Sippican Cottage Furniture, built, painted, and distressed just for me by Mr. Sippican himself.

Gorgeous solid wood furniture to take away my IKEA blues, with its own story attached, built by a guy who writes, and I mean writes, not just blogs, on the side? Sign me up. Not a minute too soon for this piece, either, as I spent the weekend hopping on and off chairs to reach my high cabinets containing the cakemaking stuff for The Little Bean’s birthday. The Bean and I will both get use out of this one for years to come.

So there’s a big excuse to drink and ogleAce-worship fest going on this weekend. I’m not going. I’m too scared.

Instead I’ll head to Boston a few weeks from now, just for a weekend. Anybody spent time in Boston? Got any don’t-miss sights, restaurants, activities?

I’ve already got my eye on the Freedom Trail for some of the biggie historical stuff, and I want to see whatever there is of the John Adams homeplace. Other than that I haven’t done much research yet, so lay it on me.

Don’t tell me to go to Fenway. Five hours out of the 48+ I have to spend there is probably going to be a bit more than I want to devote to baseball, historic though it may be. I cut my fandom teeth going to Wrigley. Fenway can wait a little longer. I may change my mind, but believe me, it’s already on the radar. Tell me about everything else, whether well known or obscure–history, culture, food, scenery.

I caught two minutes of Desperate Housewives last night. I don’t know if I can bring myself to watch it despite Nathan Fillion’s presence. One thing’s for sure, I’ll just have to catch up via episode recaps, because I can’t slog through enough of it to find out what happened the last two seasons and I don’t want to be completely lost.

More bad news from Yes, I’m So Behind the Rest of You world: I’m not into the first season of Heroes. At all. I’m scared for the little boy, scared for the cheerleader with the scary dad, irritated by the guy running for Congress and his brother (yes, your brother puts his Congress run ahead of everything–does that give you the right to wander about his campaign headquarters blabbing about flying at the top of your voice? No). So far the only ones I really like are the cop who can hear thoughts and the addict artist. More slogging ahead before I jettison it, though …

And now, the question on everybody’s minds, what new shows will Anwyn add this fall? Wait no longer. You can always tell what a Baggins would say on any question before you ask him, and similarly you can always tell which shows Anwyn will watch if you know enough about which actors she likes–which is easily told based on which shows I loved in the past. So this fall’s new dramas are:

Private Practice, the Grey’s Anatomy spinoff that previewed last spring. If it doesn’t do better than the rather turgid, Ally McBeal-esque-without-Ally McBeal pilot, it won’t last long for me.

Dirty Sexy Money, starring Peter Krause of Sports Night Six Feet Under fame. I know him from Sports Night, though, because I don’t get HBO and haven’t watched Six Feet Under. If it doesn’t do better than its title, it won’t last long for me.

Big Shots, starring Joshua Malina of Sports Night The West Wing fame. This I’m a little more hopeful for, although I have my doubts about a writer who names a character “Karl Mixworthy.” And I always hated Christopher Titus every time I saw a commercial for, well, Titus.

The Bionic Woman. This one’s mostly out of sheer geek curiosity rather than any particular attachment to the cast, although I love Mark Sheppard and know that Katee Sackhoff will be at least guesting. Could be a knockover. Could be a dud.

Too many shows, is what it really amounts to, but at least with the cancellation of Veronica Mars, What About Brian (shut up), Standoff, and Studio 60, it’s no more than I attempted to watch last year.

You haven’t lived until you’ve been ensconced at the kitchen table, where “we” are making the latest craft involving pompoms to come from the Luciferesque minds of the devil editors at Highlights magazine, except it’s really “you” making the craft, because gluing pompoms together requires hot glue, because craft glue or Elmer’s simply won’t hold pompoms together, and hot glue, as we’ve already discovered in the earlier part of the project, does not get cool enough quick enough for a three-year-old to mess with, even only to press the items together after the glue has been spread, as Mommy abjectly apologized for while we hung over the sink rinsing a little finger in cold water, listening to your three-year-old sing, as he blithely plays with his toys while Mommy makes the devil craft,

“The first mate, he got drunk;
he broke in the captain’s bunk [sic];
the con-sta-bull had to come and take him away!
Sheriff John Stone, why don’t you leave me alone?
I – feel – so – broke – up – I – wan – na – go – home.

“Mommy, are you making the frogs right now?”

But after dropping five dollars to play, I found five dollars’ worth of little-girl ponytail ties abandoned in a cart in the parking lot.

So it’s like it didn’t cost me anything.

I crossed three of them today. I’m pretty beat, but home again to all the same clutter I left a month ago. Woo. Yay.

Slow blog because I’m on vacation, although not entirely–I brought an editing project with me because it’s freelance and I can’t exactly say, sorry, that project won’t get done until a month after I get back.

Here’s a sentence pulled from the current MS, a compilation of excerpts of the writings of women travelers up to the Victorian era (I’m not editing the excerpts, just the biographical information connecting and surrouding them. This one’s from an excerpt):

“Between Jalapa and Perote, and still more between Vera Cruz and Jalapa, the astonishing prodigality and unutterable magnificence of the tropical vegetation [are] perfectly overpowering!”

Find me another clause with that many words over three syllables that doesn’t need to be simplified. Listen to the way the syllables bounce around your brain as you read it. Pretty cool.

Update: Here’s a little portion of the biographical matter:

Matters with Chazal, Flora’s husband, had never been settled. She had not been able to get a divorce from him, in part because of a prolonged battle over child custody, and Flora had been campaigning for a change in the divorce laws. Shortly after Flora returned to France, her husband shot her in the back. The divorce was granted.

My folks’ place in the country, where The Bean and I are visiting, has no internet access. Twitch. I’m hooked up to a McDonald’s WiFi. Posting will be light or nonexistent until I make it to my next destination early next week, visiting friends in St. Louis, where the man of the house has enough internet access to supply the whole neighborhood.

I’ll be around and about for the next few weeks, visiting friends and family. Blogging will be extant but possibly sporadic. Possibly prolific. Possibly ranty. Possibly random-thoughty. Possibly brief.

You just never know.

For somebody who’s moved as much as I have, this map is pretty spare:

Create your own personalized map of the USA.

I’m including states I’ve driven through enough to see well (like Montana, which you can say you’ve visited after driving through once, it’s so big) and states I was taken through in passing when I was little, well enough to remember, but not states I was only through once, in passing. If I included every state I’ve ever been in, even only in a vehicle, in a vehicle in the dead of night, or during an airport layover, it would look more like this:

Create your own personalized map of the USA.

Better, but misleading. Lot of states I need to make a real visit to.