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I must say I'm impressed by how well this came out!

I'm just going to shamelessly link you guys over to opalmirror's Flickr photos of this weekend's festivities.

We´re back in Reykjavík again for another overnighter, just returned from the lovely Landmannalaugur area. Thanks to the  previous misadventure in the Westfjords, we did not have enough days to walk the Laugurvegurinn trek, which is a real shame. On the other hand, given the nasty weather we encountered again, we were quite happy to just camp in Landmannalaugur. We soaked for hours in the hotspring there, managed to pitch our tent in very strong wind and rain and not get blown away. Yesterday we did a reasonably hard dayhike over to Ljótipollur (the 'Ugly Puddle') which is a gorgeous blue lake inside of a red rock crater. Very pretty landscapes around the area, which were sadly hard to photograph in the foul weather.

Again, we were cursed with very strong winds and cold 45F rains. Amazingly our tent stayed almost dry and did not blow away in the wind. Other campers were not so lucky - we saw one tent get a pole broken from the wind and the inhabitant crawled out and stared sadly at the pathetic wreckage of his dwelling. Rough weather, but we managed to stay almost dry much of the time. And, thank god for hotsprings. We soaked for 3 hours each day that we were there.

This morning we bused back to Reykjavík, the 4 hour trip made even longer by a flat tire (requiring everyone to get off the bus so they could jack it up) and some hilarious neighing Spaniards that made me get an attack of the giggles. It´s also pretty amazing to ford glacial rivers in a fully loaded bus. Yikes.

Horse trek starts tomorrow, and we´re so excited. For tonight, we´re just thrilled to get a little clean laundry.

We just returned from an incredibly intense trip up to the Westfjords area of Iceland.

( A Saga-length post, which I suppose is quite fitting for Iceland )

We´re now just relaxing in town for the day, enduring excessively loud rock music blaring into the internet cafe from the festival outside, and trying to sort out What Next. We probably don´t have time for the Laugurvegar circuit hike but we´re going to see about taking the bus out there and doing some dayhiking out of that area for the next few days.

We arrived in Reykjavik yesterday morning after an all-night flight that should´ve been spent sleeping but was instead spent chattering nonstop with canyonwren about our love relationships. I´m sure after 8 hours of this the guy sitting on her other side was either really amused or really confused. Hee!

We got in and dragged into the BSÍ bus terminal and had some incredibly awful vending machine coffee. Then off to find a place to sleep, as we were both trashed. I was especially exhausted because I´d pulled an all nighter before we left and in the end I was awake for about 42 hours straight. Except for the 5 minute almost-nap on the bus that resulted in me drooping forward and startling awake as my forehead went bonk! on the seat in front of me.

A guesthouse was located and obtained, where we happily dropped giant heavy backpacks. Then, trying very hard to resist crashing into soft beds with fluffy down duvets, we forced ourselves out to go reconnoiter and obtain details about how to get to the Good Stuff. On the plane we´d finally narrowed down what we think the Good Stuff is. The plan is to spend 4-5 days hiking the Hornstrandir peninsula up in Westfjord, reputed to contain many cute and friendly arctic foxes as well as stunning geography. Then, we´ll squeeze in the Landmannalaugur circuit, about a 4 day trek geothermal areas and multicolored rhyolite mountains along the way. It is reputed to have outstanding soaking pools that may or may not still be infested with "tiny itchy parasites spread by baby ducklings" so I´m really hoping that issue has been resolved! Lastly, the pony trek that I just managed to get booked before we left, which will be a 4 day ride in the Þorsmórk national park area. We´ve got just enough time for a night in a guesthouse with showers and beds to get cleaned up and repacked between each Good Thing.

So, with all of that settled we crashed around 1pm. I slept until about 10pm and then we went to hunt down some dinner. The whale entree and puffin feast looked very intriguing, but we settled for the more modest lamb tenderloin. Then back home to try to sleep some more. canyonwren had a very vigorous snoring session and I lied awake excited and tired but not sleepy. Around 6 I rousted her out of bed (an unprecedented event in the entire history of our 5 year friendship) and we went out hoping to find a bakery and coffee. Instead, we found the tail end of Reykjavík´s professional drinking sporting event, picking our way through tons of broken glass and weaving around sloppy drunk horny young people. One fellow in particular was dressed nicely in a suit coat and black dress shoes. Except that he was missing his pants. I took a picture as discreetly as I could and tried not to laugh audibly. We never did find coffee or baked things, although we literally followed our noses to a yummy wafting bakery that was up and running but not open to customers yet. We scritched and loved no less than 4 friendly kitties on various streets.

We´ve resorted our packs and are happy to unload at least 20lbs of gear to the secure storage of our guesthouse as we travel light to go backpacking for the next few days. Off to finish lurking about downtown Reykjavik now, we´re flying up to Ísafjördur tonight. It was a choice between a 40 minute flight or a 2 day bus ride on squiggly less-than-fully-paved fjörd tracing roads, so we gladly forked over the cash. Time is more valuable.

If you take good care of yourself, you help everyone. You stop being a source of suffering to the world, and you become a reservoir of joy and freshness. -- Thich Nhat Hanh

Since joining Facebook, I don't normally post external content here on LJ anymore. Because, yeah, most of it's just kinda silly and pointless crap anyways.

This, however, is one of the most amazing things I've seen in a long time. It's medically informative, hysterically funny, and entirely worth watching!

Lost Tampon Video

Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

1. The Earth's Children (series), by Jean Auel
2. The Chronicles of Narnia (series), C.S. Lewis
3. Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales
4. Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond
5. All Creatures Great and Small (series), by James Herriot
6. The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
7. The House of God, by Samuel Shem
8. The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho
9. Spanish Steps, by Timothy Moore
10. Watership Down, by Richard Adams
11. By the River Piedra I Sat Down And Wept, by Paulo Coelho
12. My Side of the Mountain, by Jean George
13. The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold
14. Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice To All Creation, by Olivia Judson
15. Bitchfest: A Feminist Response to Pop Culture, compilation


( And a few more comments elaborating on these... )

The Usericon Meme

1. Reply to this post with 'Icons!', and I will pick five of your icons.
2. Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose.
3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.
4. This will create a never-ending cycle of icon glee.

My icons, as chosen by tylik:

( Read more... )

Submitted via their customer service website:

As a longtime Amazon customer, and also as an LGBT-identified individual, I am deeply offended by your recent business decision to censor LGBT-related media.

Thankfully, I live in beautiful Portland OR, where bigots are few and independent booksellers are plenty. I will be giving them my business from now on.

regards,
Diane

Courtesy of opalmirror, who knows what I find funny:

I've been doing a bunch of reading and testing and dinking around with image management ideas. I think I've finally settled on a reasonable management plan:

1. Picasa desktop client to perform local tasks like EXIF tag management, inventory, and basic editing needs. The GeoSetter application does a nice job of managing geotagging in a Flickr compatible location format. The goal here is to have all of these images' tags stored locally in my own inventory, instead of that information only existing on Flickr. If you define the information properly on the desktop, it automatically gets picked up and displayed when you upload to Flickr, so there's no duplication of effort.

2. Flickr for web publishing/community/photo hosting. There is a picasa2flickr plugin that integrates fairly well with the Flickr Uploadr application, and this works pretty well. I like the look and feel of the Flickr community much more than Picasa Web. I'm no longer interested in self-hosting. To get all of the geotagged images added to your Flickr map, if you've already geotagged everything before upload, you can use this very handy Importer page to process all in batch.

Right now I've got photos from 2004-2006 being hosted on my ancient PHP Gallery site, running on a server in my brother's basement. He's gently suggested that this is going to go away, and to not rely on it indefinitely. For now, I'm more excited about uploading trip and other photos from 2007-2008, most notably the New Zealand photos as well as a slew of other hiking/travel/outing/trip photos.

Long term, I'll need to rehost all of the 2004-2006 photos. Also, all of the various photos that I'm hosting and hotlinking to from blog entries, forums, etc. will also need to be rehosted and references updated where possible.

So I'm going to try to just gently nibble away at this task for a while.

So, I've normally enjoyed songs by Death Cab For Cutie in the past. Until now. There's this song that's been playing on the radio for months now, and it totally creeps me out.

It creeps me out because I don't think they're overtly trying to be ironically stalkerish, unlike Sting's famous "I'll be watching you". It creeps me out because I find the language so emotionally manipulative. It creeps me out to imagine young women listening to these pretty words, sung along to a pretty song, and thinking that this is what love sounds like. It creeps me out because even otherwise normal people will even rationalize saying things like "Oh, yeah, I guess, hmm, well maybe that does sound a little creepy, but c'mon! It's DCFC! I'm sure they're really just nice guys who mean well! Stop being so sensitive!"

Every time the song comes on, my brain supplies a running commentary.

( Here's what it says: )

The excellent linaelyn posted a link to a Wired photo contest, themed LOVE. Of course, I couldn't resist submitting the (in)famous photo of trolleypup and I nuzzling.



Also, this photo is now sitting as the lone awkward sole photo in my Flickr account. I normally do all of my photo hosting elsewhere, but I was concerned about possibly intensive bandwidth.

The last letter I sent them did the trick. A few days ago I received the letter in the mail I was hoping for.

I am officially no longer listed as a member of the Mormon religion.

And then the next day I got another monthly spammy newsletter from the guy who is my neighbor. I'll let this one slide, since he probably hasn't been informed of the change from On High. We'll see what happens next month.

A recent post by linaelyn  inspired me to make a meme:

How many entries are in your cellphone phonebook: 64
How many of these are for humans: 31
How many would probably let you crash on their couch, on short notice, with no questions asked: 21
How many would you consider calling from jail: 11