Summer is officially over

. . . at least up on the tundra. The 2011-2012 snowplowing bill for the driveway at the Retirement Bunker arrived today.

The photo is an old one. Here's a view in the summer of more or less that same stretch of driveway 30+ years later. Rewilding in action.

Hot Springs National Park

Spending the Labor Day weekend at Hot Springs National Park was a mini-vacation I approached with a fair amount of trepidation as the time grew closer. Hot Springs was one of my favorite parks back when I worked for NPS, and I was a little worried that maybe talking it up to the Younger Daughter was a mistake. We had agreed to meet there for the weekend, and I'd sent her some links for typical Hot Springs activities (e.g., the thermal baths). I also booked us into one of the historic hotels downtown, the Arlington, and it began to worry me that maybe she wouldn't be as charmed by its aura of faded grandeur as I was.

I worried for nothing. We had a great time. Our room in the Arlington was lovely; we were on the 7th floor so the outdoor mountainside pool was just a short walk away. We were also right across the street from Arlington Lawn, part of the national park. We were ambling distance from both Bathhouse Row and all the commercial stuff that might interest us (e.g., restaurants) The national park was even nicer than I remembered--park management does a superb job on maintenance--and the ambience overall was Hot Springs at its liveliest. I think the city would have been bustling anyway because of Labor Day weekend, but the Blues Festival happening that weekend probably added to the crowds and fun. One of the great things about Hot Springs is you can go from enjoying the outdoors--the National Park includes several thousand acres of woodland with miles of hiking trails of varying difficulty--to enjoying the nightlife without much of a break in between. Personally, I'm not much of a clubber, but I can certainly see the attraction for people who do enjoy partying.

Hot Springs is, of course, famous for its hot springs, and there are several venues where it is possible to enjoy a traditional thermal bath. One of the historic bathhouses on Bathhouse Row, the Buckstaff, has been providing traditional thermal baths for many years. The traditional experience included a hot soak followed by massage, but could turn into a long, elaborate ritual with steam cabinets, cold cabinets, hot packs, cold packs, and multiple soaks in the thermal mineral water. It's been considerably abbreviated in recent decades. I always kind of wonder about the Buckstaff because it's strictly walk-in--no advance reservations--but I'm told that it truly provides the traditional Hot Springs experience (and that in turn evokes images of burly peasant women beating the crap out of the massage victim while reassuring him or her that being kneaded like a loaf of pumpernickel will cure whatever ails them; maybe on a return trip I'll have the courage to find out).

Another of the bathhouses, the Quapaw (the domed building in the photo above) was renovated fairly recently and offers both a thermal waters experience and a more typical modern spa experience (i.e., your choice of massages, like hot stone or Swedish, and the ever-popular "couples massage."). For a mere $18, a person can soak in a large communal pool, basically an oversized (and gorgeously tiled) hot tub filled with the mineral water from the springs, or they can spend more money and have a more private experience at the Quapaw. In addition to the bathhouses right on Bathhouse Row, several hotels have thermal baths that allow a person to indulge in the traditional soak in remarkably hot mineral water, as well as offering massages and other spa services.

I was really happy to see the Quapaw operating. Another of the bathhouses, the Ozark, has been renovated for adaptive re-use as an art museum, and a third that had been totally vacant the last time I was in Hot Springs now has a cafe and small specialized bookstore. The bathhouses are nifty structures, with each one done in a different style than the others, and a few have some really over-the-top architectural details, so I hope the park superintendent can manage to find some other suitable tenants to help with the maintenance costs for these gorgeous money pits. 

In short, a great park, a fun place to visit, and definitely worth multiple return visits.

Travel tip of the day

If you decide to do a weekend getaway to a hotel that's high and dry and well removed from nasty weather, and you see on the Weather Channel that a slow-moving tropical storm has plans to meander through the area between that high and dry hotel and the city where you live, it might be a good idea to spring for an extra night instead of convincing yourself it's real important to get home on schedule . . . just to give aforementioned tropical storm another day or two to move on down the road.

Driving through Birmingham, Alabama, yesterday while the city was getting slammed by tropical storm Lee is not one of the smarter things I have done.

[Photo from a news report from Birmingham from right about the time I was being dumb enough to try to turn my car into an amphibious vehicle yesterday.]

It must have been the curry

Now I know how the patients in the case reports I edit must feel.

Gastroenteritis. Killer gastroenteritis. Enteritis that had me perched on the throne for hours on end clutching a wastebasket, losing it from both ends,  thinking this was going to be a remarkably undignified way to die* and wondering just how long it would be before anyone discovered the body. How many times would the phone go unanswered before the S.O. called the manager to ask him to check on me? He's still up at the retirement bunker, and we're past the stage in our relationship where we feel the need to talk to each other every day just to hear each other breathe.

Until last night I didn't know it was possible to puke so violently it could feel like I was going to break a rib or two in the process. To say I feel purged. . . there's definitely no excess choler** left in my system at the moment.

Odds are I got hit by a norovirus, but the question is from what? Much as I'd like to blame the curry because it was the last thing I ate, I know the time lag between it and the near death experience was too short. Norovirus causes most gastroenteritis, but it usually takes 24 hours or longer from exposure before the symptoms kick in. The other possibility would be a staph infection from my yogurt, but that just seems so highly unlikely. . .

On the other hand, symptoms for an enteric staph infection do include rapid onset and lightheadedness -- and lightheadedness and dizziness were actually the first two things to hit. And the good news is that whatever it was appears to have come and gone fairly quickly, also typical of enteric staph. I fell asleep wondering if I was going to have stagger down the hall one more time, and woke up 6 hours later feeling more or less human -- although my throat does feel like it was sandpapered.

*Ancient joke: I want to go peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like the passengers in his car. . .

** From the Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum, written in the 12th century:

If Choller do exceed, as may sometime,
Your eares will ring, and make you to be wakefull,
Your tongue will seeme all rough, and oftentimes
Cause vomits, unaccustomed and hatefull,
Great thirst, your excrements are full of slime,
The stomacke squeamish, sustenance ungratefull,
Your appetite will seeme in nought delighting,
Your heart still greeued with continuall byting,
The pulse beate hard and swift, all hot, extreame,
Your spittle soure, of fire-worke oft you dreame.

Where's my wallet?

Saw this over at the Rude Pundit. Definitely a step above "Homeless - Please Help."

How poor is poor enough?

Okay. I had said I wasn't going to think about politics, policy, or bloviating tinfoil hat types this weekend. I was going to purge my mind of all bad thoughts and just go to a happy place for a day or two. Then I made my usual weekend mistake. I turned on C-SPAN.

First up after open phones? A person from the Heritage Foundation who, in essence, was saying it's okay to shred social safety nets because you know what? Poor people in this country aren't really poor. Most of them are still living indoors and enjoying the benefits of being able to refrigerate perishable food. Jon Stewart ripped into this report a few nights ago on the Daily Show, and other bloggers have been going after it since these talking points started making the rounds on Hannity et al. -- "hey, the poor aren't that bad off -- they're not openly starving." "Instead of worrying about all those poor people, we should be proud that our poor people would be considered upper middle class in Europe."

You know what the Heritage mouthpiece was apparently basing a fair amount of that last bit of truly bizarre reasoning on? The fact that Europeans don't live in McMansions -- the average square footage of the typical European home is considerably smaller than that of the typical American (this isn't exactly news to anyone who's ever watched "Househunters International," although the American obsession with the en suite bathrooms and double sink vanities is creeping into newer construction globally). The fact that most European cities are really, really old compared to American ones and have always had to deal with higher population densities couldn't possibly have affected construction or living spaces -- the difference is solely the result of Americans always being better off than anyone else anywhere on the planet. We are number one. Even our poor people live in castles. And pigs can fly.

The other thing that struck me was that once again all the demographic information provided tended to be about minorities (x% of African Americans are poor, x% of Hispanics) without mentioning at all what percentage of the overall population those groups consitute provided more evidence that the reich wing loves to play to the racist fears of its base. You know, if one out of every 3 African Americans lives in poverty, but African Americans are only 12% of the total US population, that would make them a pretty tiny percentage of the folks relying on Food Stamps or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. Ditto Hispanics -- if they're now 14% of the total US population, and they have a poverty rate similar to African Americans, then it's about the same -- 4 to 5% of the total persons in poverty. So if you take that 4% plus 5% and maybe round it up to 10% to allow for other nonwhite groups (Native Americans, for example), that would mean 9 out of every 10 people who are poor are also white. Ninety percent of the useless slackers on the dole, the folks too lazy to pull themselves up by their bootstraps because they're too busy enjoying the good life with their refrigerated food, are not minorities. [Note: percentages for US population breakdown are from the 2010 Census, and I remember the Reptile person saying 33% of blacks live in poverty. Hispanics are a guess, so consider the numbers theoretical. Bottom line is still that most poor people are white, but no one wants to admit that -- and the MSM cooperates in perpetuating the illusion only minorities are poor by almost always focusing on blacks or Hispanics when it covers anything related to programs like WIC or Food Stamps.]

I am totally convinced the Reptile people want to turn this country into Haiti. Or worse. This latest set of "fuck the poor, they're not all dying from starvation yet" propagandizing did nothing to change my mind.

Trying not to think about politics

Instead I'm going to focus on the fact my cactus is blooming for the first time in about 12 years. It hasn't been particularly healthy looking since it got hit with overspray when the painters did the outside of the patio fence 4 years ago, but nonetheless this year it decided to bloom. I'm going to take this as a sign it's looking forward to leaving Atlanta as much as I am.

Large Nameless Agency about to star in movie

If this trailer has me thinking about living in a bubble and never talking to another human being, I wonder just how frightening the movie itself is going to be? They did actually film a scene or two here at LNA, so I'm a tad curious as to what the film itself will be like. Supposedly no zombies, though, which I'm sure is going to disappoint many audience members.

The place no one is supposed to know about

I found this photo while going through some files from my NPS days. The site is in a remote location, relatively inaccessible and out of the way in a park I'm not going to name, and is one of those things that's kind of sliding into local folklore, the tiny concrete village that looks as though Smurfs have set up housekeeping in the wilderness.

I wonder if it's still there? It's been about 7 years since I last saw it, and rumor had it that if the park superintendent ever figured out where it was, those tiny Smurf houses would become mobile homes.

And I've always also wondered about who'd take the time to backpack in either sacks of Quickcrete or shoebox-sized house-shaped lumps of solid concrete, but people have carried stranger things while camping.