Rumblinations
Filed Under (Culture, Theology, Jetsetting, Kith and Kin, Stark Raving Mad, Home and Hearth) by Nathanael on April-25-2005

Sarah’s parents came to town for the week. We spent the weekend with them in a garage apartment on the beach. I perched at the dining nook table so that I could study (for the Principles of Test and Evaluation final that I took this morning) whilst looking out over the grassy dunes to the sea. I’m not quite sure why Sarah and I don’t go to the beach more often; we like it well enough. At any rate, it should take less than a visit from the inlaws to make us leave Valparaiso.

On Thursday, her parents, my parents, and we are going to New Orleans for the weekend. Preservation Hall, here we come. I’d like to check out the Bywater neighbourhood whilst we’re there - we never venture beyond the French Quarter (for books and beignets) or the Garden District (for Copeland’s). Maybe we’ll take a riverboat ride too.

We’ve put a bit of time into planting flowers, vegetables, and herbs over the last month. I’m looking forward to summer crops and tithing marigolds and parsley leaves - maybe some amaranth grain too. Unfortunately, tithing five longnecks out of fifty bottles of Smoky Porter could cause some divisiveness in the church. Why should the elders be the only ones who get beer tithes? I’ll be sharing a lot of that batch, I suppose (That is, if it turns out better than the last two batches. I may have to farm it out to my former brewing partner in Atlanta, as he’s had a lot more recent successes than I.)

Sarah, we should formalise our arguments over paganism and sophistication to post them on here as a debate so that everyone can see what a rube you’ve married.

Speaking of rubes, I found out today that Hunter Thompson was assigned to Eglin Proving Grounds in 1956 where he wrote for the base newspaper and moonlighted for the NWFL Daily News under the name of Thorne Stockton. I think that I should make a trip to the microfilm room at the Fort Walton Beach Library.

Finally, I also learned today that Amtrak offers rail passes. Particularly inviting is the North American. For about five hundred bucks, one receives thirty days of “unlimited” travel in the United States and Canada. The caveats behind “unlimited” include the following:

  • Your trip must include at least one journey between the United States and Canada.
  • Your trip must include travel on Amtrak and Via Rail Canada.
  • Pass holders must obtain a ticket for each trip.
  • The pass may be used for a maximum of four one-way trips on any given leg.
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Comments:
Archer on April 25th, 2005 at 7:38 pm

Perhaps you can throw some beer my way….Or maybe jammer and jonny can donate their share since in the past they have borrowed mine ;-)

Brianna on April 27th, 2005 at 3:58 pm

Come to Canada. (Preferably my part of it.)

joebrodie on April 27th, 2005 at 10:31 pm

Let me know if you need help again with the brew. If I can scrap a few coins together in the next month, then it will be wine making time!!!

Brianna on April 28th, 2005 at 2:46 am

I just realized that your weblog title is a Coleridge quote. How strange, considering I quote the first two lines of Xanadu obsessively from time to time, that I never made the connection.

Nathanael on May 1st, 2005 at 10:32 pm

Just to display my ignorance and a little zeitgeist, for the last several years, I did not know the origin, the true origin, of the phrase “Down to a Sunless Sea.” I’d read all about Kublai Khan’s stately pleasure dome in high school, but the poem really didn’t stick with me. One thing that did stick with me through high school and college was a fondness for works of Paul Linebarger, aka Cordwainer Smith (for a nother story on Smith, ask Sarah about the long, cold night I spent on her parent’s stoop with nothing but Smith’s complete works to keep me company). One of his short stories is named “Down to a Sunless Sea.” It’s not one of my favorite stories (see “The Planet Named Shayol” or “The Dead Lady of Clowntown”), but living near the sea as I do, it seemed appropriate for a weblog title. Only over Christmas holiday did I make the connection to Coleridge, but in a very roundabout way. We were having a Christmas party at my mother’s parents’ and I wandered back into the old playroom and found that all the comics that I used to read as a kid were still back there - Scrooge McDuck, Archie, The Rescue Rangers, etc. I picked up the first copy of Scrooge that I saw and started reading it. In that episode, Scrooge and his nephews discover the treasure of Kublai Khan and Xanadu. All the while, Huey, Dewey, and Louie are reading lines from Coleridge out of their Junior Woodchuck manual. One of those was the bit about the sunless sea.

Brianna on May 5th, 2005 at 9:09 pm

Time for more blogging! Slackers.

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