OD on TV

I awoke this AM from a nightmare where a man was convinced his local police were so stupid they couldn't catch him as he shot people at the local post office from his front window. Yuck. I can only ascribe this dream to watching some 6 or 7 hours of TV yesterday. I barely turned the damnthing on for the three weeks T was gone. Now we're clearing the DVR of all the shows he saved. Three of them had plotlines about snipers.

Gah! Is my head digesting the Thich Nhat Hanh I've been reading? He is a Vietnamese Buddhist Monk who has some wonderful stiff to say about happiness and mindfulness. I just got to the part in his "Heart of the Buddha's Teaching" where it talks about whether the TV shows we watch are helping or hindering our freedom...

Road Trip

To continue this morning's missive... T suggested something we haven't done in ages: a road trip. We used to do this all the time, and I was bemoaning the fact that we hadn't to someone else just the other day. All of a sudden he comes up with this, so I jumped on it. We gassed up the Prius, stocked some provisions, and headed for the hills.

We used to know the backroads hereabout like they were our neighborhood. When we had little money but lots of time and gas was cheap, we would cruise the logging roads of the coast range. We had a full set of Forest Service maps between PDX and Roseburg. We didn't always use them, just when we really got in a jam. Most of the time it was just grabbing a road and following it. That's what we did today.

We went out to Lobster Valley, a little place miles from everywhere where we lived fro about 8 mos. Get a map, draw a triangle from Corvallis to Eugene to the Coast. Put your finger in the middle of it. That's Lobster Valley, so called because Lobster Creek runs through it (where there are scads of red crawdads). Our old place is still there. Then we went south toward Five Rivers and off on McCready Road. After many lovely miles of forest ridgeline, the road ended in a slide two miles short of Five Rivers.

We turned around and came back, stopping at Clemens Park and splashing in the Alsea River.

It was great. Save that we came home and the TV went on again...