Weekly round-up:

On Friday, my college friend Elysia, who's now working at our upstate-New York alma mater, and my friend Jason, from New York City, came to Philadelphia to visit Jenna and I before we leave.  I met Jason after work on Friday to see Tragedy downtown.  We went to Trader Joe's with his friends and ran into Tony Pointless.  Lots of stage-diving, which is a neat trick when the stage is 18 inches off the floor.  A drunk guy kept collapsing into the pit and getting stepped on, so, in a surprising display of solidarity, a bunch of dudes lifted him up and crowd-surfed him to the back of the crowd.  Somehow I ended up getting stuck with him draped over my shoulders, so I propped him up against a pillar and left.  I'm pretty sure he soiled himself.  Tragedy played two covers for the encore - "Holocaust," by Crisis and Blitz' "Never Surrender."  Veri tuff.

Elysia and Jenna were at a gay club, so we headed there afterwards.  I've never been to a club before, nor a gay bar.  A guy kept taking off Jason's glasses and trying them on, or putting them back on Jason's face askew.  Totally weird night.  It was awesome seeing Elysia and Jason, both really fantastic people.

Saw the Liberty Bell and the Edgar Allen Poe house on Sunday with Elysia.  The Edgar Allen Poe house is probably the worst museum ever.  It's basically a very small house with unfurnished rooms and walls flaking probably lead-based paint, with very little in the way of exposition.  The shelves in the rooms were strewn with newspaper clippings, crappy art, and Poe poems on un-laminated printer paper.  Some of the clippings seemed connected in only the most tangential way to Poe - a story from a few years ago on the reality-TV-wannabes who claimed their kid had gotten swept away on a weather balloon, for instance, which, if I were to guess, is supposed to tie into the Poe "Balloon Hoax" story.  But it's a stretch.  The kitchen shelves contained nothing but a frankly terrifying stuffed orangutan and a half-full jar of molasses.

On Tuesday, I got the Professor to rap for me.  He tried several freestyles, each of which touched on his mother being a prostitute and shopping at the smack shack.  The Professor, whose real name is Tim, is a regular character/nuisance around Rittenhouse Square, distinguishable by a curious, round face, big glasses, and a predilection for ill-fitting suits.  He used to have a bunch of Einstein hair, but he's trimmed it down, for the hot weather, maybe.  The Professor describes himself as a photojournalist, and indeed, he has the rumpled, perma-drunk gonzo look nailed down quite flat.  You could easily imagine him wearing a fedora with a press pass stuck into the band.  I don't think he's homeless, nor obviously mentally ill, although his claim that he works for the New York Times is dubious at best, and he delights in telling customers that they're getting cancer from their plastic cups (before asking to borrow their cell phones).  After his rap he tried to convince me that the Russian army was going to stage a coup in the United States under the guise of an extraterrestrial attack, at the behest of the Rockefellers.

There are lawmakers right now discussing, as a legitimate political issue, whether or not it's okay to force doctors to stick a probe in a woman's vagina for no medical reason other than to shame her for trying to control her own body.  Why do people buy into power-behind-the-throne theories when the king is already getting away with murder?  Real life is scarier than conspiracy theories.

Last night, taking the trash out, I tried awkwardly to whistle, then yell to gain the attention of some friends of mine.  I did not succeed.  Moments later a trash bag lurched off the side of the can and exploded on the road.  It took upwards of twelve seconds to pick up the trash, which was irritating, but not as irritating as finding part of a coffee stirrer, carried down my arm on a rivulet of sticky coffee-dairy-sugar trash juice, stuck to my armpit.  Everything sucks.

I can't believe how soon we're leaving. It really snuck up on me. I guess I just kept thinking, "oh, we have a bunch of weeks, we have a good couple of weeks," and now I realize that my last day of work is next Friday, and then a week after that we're leaving Philadelphia to go to Boston to see my dad graduate. Then on June 10th, we leave.

I'm scared. I don't know why-- I guess I just don't know what to expect, and even though I do feel confident, I feel sure now that we will actually go, still I feel scared about what it's going to be like, will we have enough money, will the van break down before we even pass Michigan, etc etc etc. I'm nervous in this kind of generalized way and I'm not sure really what I'm nervous about, I feel like it has to be those specific things I mentioned about money and van problems etc, but I don't think that's it really. I think maybe it's just because it's so new! And because I am such a planner at heart, and though this trip is planned in a way, it's not planned the way I plan things. I can't obsess over details on this trip. I can't do any of the worrying habits I usually would fall into at this point. The way this trip is, it doesn't really work like that. I just have to let go, and realize that there's nothing at stake. Aram and I are finally in a place where things are certain, and we had stable jobs for awhile in Philadelphia, and we saved money, and we made plan for this trip, and now it's going to happen and I just have to stop worrying and stop trying to control everything and let go and just take the trip. And it'll be whatever it is.

I think this is something I really need. I really want to learn how to relax a little more and not worry so much about having everything under control. This trip is obviously a challenge for me since I tend to need to have every detail under control and I also tend to get super super worried very easily (ha! I'm sure if you're my family you already know that.) During the duration of the time we're on the road, I'm going to have to be flexible. Teach myself to let things go, to let plans change...that's a huge point of doing this, for me at least. I think I am very nervous because soon we will actually be living in this van and there will be no going back!

We are in really good shape as far as getting things ready goes, I think. Today I boxed up some more stuff which we will be taking back to Aram's mom's house this weekend-- his mixer, pedals, other music stuff. I also put some photos and art, notebooks, my tax forms, and other boring stuff in a box to take back to Boston with my parents when we eventually go there in June. We had these plastic drawers leftover from college with a bunch of random shit in them that I went through and cleaned out completely. We'll probably offer them to the guy moving into our house or just throw them away.

This weekend, we'll be taking mostly the rest of Aram's work clothes (save a few things for his last week), his music stuff, our bike trainer, Aram's bike, the rest of the art on our walls, and other odds and ends probably.

That basically leaves: several bags of clothes i've labeled "giveaway", our clothes that we're actually taking in the van, our bed, our dresser, our bedside table, my bike, my dad's bike rack that we've been borrowing, our fan, a giant amazing antique mirror, both of our computers, both of our cameras, a few books, my guitar, and about box's worth of random stuff that we will be taking in the van (mini word games/board games, plastic army issue drinking cups, a thermos, a foldable camping plate and a set of foldable camping bowls, my kindle, our passports, our trip planning notebook, my pens and sketchbook)

-The giveaway clothes are going to goodwill or something.
-Our bed is going to the guy who is moving into our house ( our friend max), he's going to buy that and the dresser.
-I'll offer him the bedside table for free (the knob is broken; it's from ikea :( if he doesn't want it, it'll just go in the trash)
-my bike and the bike rack will go home in the van (we'll have to take the bike apart I think)
-fan will stay in the house, we don't need it and it gets so hot here in the summer they will!
-the mirror will go to ambler, pa to my aunt's house, as she has a huge storage space and is kindly offering to store it for us as well as an awesome antique couch we bought awhile back that she is already storing
-the rest of it is coming with us.

That's really it. It's so weird to look around our room and see so little, and then when I walk into the living room and look around I realize basically everything there is our roommate's.

Anyway, this is a pretty boring post, but I wanted to kind of record where we're at. We leave Philadelphia in basically two and a half weeks. The last week we're here we're not going to be working, so we'll be taking care of loose ends like going through the pantry and figuring out what's our foodwise, helping to clean the house and get it ready for Max to move in, buying last minute stuff we need (first aid stuff, a camping "sink" for washing dishes, some more plastic/unbreakable dishes for eating off of, I need to buy some shorts...boring boring but necessary to take care of, cleaning out Aram's car)

And then we leave! Goddamn. We've talked about this trip for years. I think part of me never though we were actually going to take it.

A couple nice things I came across on the series of tubes at work today:

And:


Finally, this is the blog of a friend of mine from Bard, Ben Reed, who just finished up his travels through Asia and the Middle East, including the Birthright trip, which is something that Jenna and I are hoping to do before we age out.  His photos and experiences are very cool.  I've been enjoying reading through it.

Well, this has little to do with the van trip, but I wanted to write it anyway! It's been a long, long road of training for me as a runner. I started in the winter not being able to run 1 1/2 miles without stopping to walk, completely winded and incapable. I slacked off for some periods, I worked hard for others, I felt inadequate and incapable and strong and ready all at once, but it's over! I've been training since Christmas, really, I only started running at Christmas, but it's over today! (not running! just the race I started running for). I finished the Broad Street Run (10 miles) in 1:55:06, with NO WALK BREAKS! This is a very, very big deal for me, as the longest run I had gone on prior to this race was 8.3 miles, and the longest I had ever run in one go without stopping for a walk break was only 6.5 miles. I had an average of about 11:31 minute mile, which is much faster than my usual 12:00 minute mile, and I think I negative split the race (my dad was tracking me and said I picked up the pace pretty continuously from mile 3 onwards)

I am very happy with my effort and time today, and the race itself was really fun. It was very hard at times, but I went through periods of feeling really bad and then feeling pretty good and strong. My lungs and chest felt very capable and strong the entire run, which was awesome. My legs were very sore by the end and even now my knees are quite sore, but I know it'll pass. Gotta get some ice on them!

I am going to keep running. I will be trying to run as much as I can on our trip when we are in safe areas, and building my strength with hiking and other activities. Based on our plan/trajectory, we will most likely be in California by mid September of this year. I have a wonderful aunt who lives out there who is a serious runner (much more serious than me) and I am going to ask her to do a half-marathon with me if there's one around her area around that time! That's the next goal. She just ran one recently so it won't be a huge deal for her but I would love to run one with her! But for now I'm going to ice up, rest up, drink a bunch of rye, and have a great dinner tonight. I'll rest a week before running again probably! I am incredibly sore. But man it's worth it! I feel awesome.

In van news, I sent basically the last of my stuff home with my parents this weekend, who came from Boston to see me run! I am now down to really just some knicknacks, the clothes I'm taking in the van, a few books, and the clothes I need for work between now and when we leave. We also have decided on a farm in Michigan we're going to work at from about June 30th to July 21st. I talked to the mom and the daughter and they sound like lovely people and the farm is going to be great to work at. It feels really nice to have that kind of set in place.

These super-long workdays are killing me.  The crazy thing is, when all's said and done, my check-stubs say I work less than 60 hours a week, which is way less than what some people work regularly.  I'm not sure if I'd be able to keep it up indefinitely, and I'm glad I don't have to find out.

Jenna and I have been getting in contact with WWOOF farms in Michigan, for late June or early July, and in Washington and Oregon, for early September.  I think we've got our first stay booked, but until it's less tentative, I'll hold off on posting details.  The prospects are exciting, and having almost two months free of gas, rent, and food costs makes this sojourn seem more manageable.

Jenna and I have talked a lot about food in the van.  I'm vegan, and Jenna is vegetarian.  What can we eat that is cheap, reasonably nutritive, requires minimal cooking and preparation, and stays good without refrigeration for extended periods?  This is obviously a pretty difficult list of requirements, and there are almost no foods that satisfy all of them.  We do have a refrigerator in the van, but since we won't be plugging into RV sites most of the time, I doubt we'll have enough battery reserves to run it for very long.  Instead, I think we'll freeze Blue Ice packs when we have access to a freezer, and use the fridge as a cooler.

I think that we're going to find out what does and doesn't work through practice.  It's tough to tell in advance, but here are some of the foods I think we're going to rely on in the van, in addition to some basics (spices, salts, sugar, a couple basic sauces/bases, flour, coffee, oil):

•  Fresh fruits and vegetables.  We just have to be judicious and buy only what we can eat in a day or two.  The best types will probably be fruits, salad greens, spinach, carrots, and celery, because they can be eaten raw.  Onion, garlic, yams, corn, and potatoes can be kept unrefrigerated.  We'll eat a lot of dark leafy greens like kale and swiss chard, because they're very good for you and require pretty minimal cooking.  Tomatoes, mushrooms, broccoli, peppers, eggplant, cabbage, beets, and squash will make less frequent appearances. 
• Vitamins.  Off the top of my head, I think we're going to need calcium, vitamin D, acidophilus, probably iron, and generic EmergenC packets.
• Dried beans and lentils.  By using various types of beans, I'm hoping to keep from getting too sick of them.  The major downside is that reconstituting beans requires the forethought of soaking them for hours.  Lentils require much less time, and can pretty quickly turn into soup bases.
• Instant rice.  Crucial for our situation, because it doesn't have to be boiled for very long. 
• Peanut butter.  Keeps indefinitely, lots of protein, delicious.
• Jelly. 
• Canned foods.  Chickpeas, especially, but probably also canned beans as instant taco-stuffers, vegetarian baked beans, refried beans, green beans, tomatoes, canned spinach (if I can learn to stomach it), duck-style seitan, peas, and corn.
• Nutritional yeast.  I put this on every damn thing.  Lots of B-vitamins and it's delicious. 
• Whole-wheat pasta will probably be an occasional treat, at best, because even spaghetti has to boil for three or four minutes, plus then you have the issue of what to put on it.  Jarred pasta sauce only keeps as long as it's sealed, and then there's more in the jar than you can use on one pound of pasta.  Canned sauce has similar challenges, plus, ugh, canned sauce.
• Rice noodles, on the other hand, can be put in not-quite-boiling water for like a minute and a half and they're good to go.  Could probably whip up a somewhat passable peanut sauce with peanut butter, soy sauce, Hoisin sauce, water, sugar, garlic, and hot sauce, none of which need to be refrigerated.  Add broccoli (cooked with the noodles?), onion, and bell pepper and you have a stir-fry.  Alternately, by preparing a simple broth with miso paste, you can have a basic noodle soup.
• We may use more "exotic" grains like bulgur and quinoa on occasion.
• Clif Bars.  A single Clif bar and a piece of fruit is usually enough for me for breakfast, and they pack 10g of protein each (20, for the marginally more expensive Builder Bars), and if you buy them in boxes, they cost like $.75 each.
• Jenna will probably eat yogurt, and maybe goat cheese on occasion.
• Instant oatmeal.  Fibery, filling, cheap.
• Vegetable broth in Tetra Paks.  This makes sense in case we're somewhere without access to municipal water, and can't/don't want to use the van's tank.  You can use it to cook rice or beans in, and it only improves the flavor.  Even pasta, in a pinch.  Coffee, not as much.
• Instant soups.  While I'm sure we'll eat a little Nissin Oriental ramen, I'm thinking more of health-food-store soup cups, canned soups, and Annie Chun's-type noodle bowls.  These are more expensive, but are also a little healthier (depending on the product).
• Tortillas.  Mushroom tacos, tempeh tacos, bean tacos.  Sometimes I just heat them up with peanut butter on them.
• Whole wheat or multigrain bread and bagels.  We're especially partial to the hippie-dippy and surprisingly cheap sprouted-grain loaves available in Philadelphia, but I'm not counting on being able to obtain similar products in, say, North Dakota.  
• Tempeh.  It needs to be refrigerated, but it's too healthy to ignore.  Can be cooked over a fire, or sauteed.
• Tofu, for use in stir-fries.  Same deal as tempeh.  We'll probably spring for processed vegan sausages and hot dogs once in a while, for cooking over campfires.
• Snacks: dried fruits, nuts (especially the Emerald brand cocoa-roasted almonds), trail mixes, Peanut Chews, Tings, Jolly Ranchers.

Our trip to Black Moshannon State Park was relaxing and wonderful.  The weather was a little inclement - it even drizzled a little on Saturday - but we got in some good walks and cooked almost completely in the fire outdoors.  I found it remarkably easy to keep the cabin warm against the high-40s night temperatures with a wood fire.  Actually, I practically cooked us on Saturday night.  I've always dismissed wood stoves as a huge hassle for very little payoff in heat, but I can see now that heating an underground house, for example, with a rocket stove or pellet stove is actually very possible.

I didn't write a post about this when it happened, but I gave notice at my job about two weeks ago. I had been building it up in my head as this huge, scary thing. I was putting it off and putting it off, dreading the moment when I had to tell my boss I was leaving at the end of May. I know I am only required to give two weeks' notice, but my job is not the kind of job you can just put some random person into. It took forever for me to feel adequately trained and able to handle the huge amount of stress and multitasking the job I have requires, and I knew my boss would panic if I told her I was leaving in two weeks. She's been good to me; very supportive and kind, and I didn't want to do that to her, or to my unit/coworkers in general. So I gave a lot of notice-- almost two months.

I built it up in my head, emailing her telling her I needed to have a meeting when she had time. I was practicting this speech over and over in my head, editing it, figuring out how to say that I was leaving...I was so fucking nervous I could barely handle it, waiting for her to schedule that meeting for me to go up to her office. Then one afternoon she just waltzed down to my office (it was the end of the day and I was the only one there, I doubt she would have done it this way if there were others around) and said "So what did you want to talk to me about?"

I completely froze up for a minute, being all like "uhhhh" and then she just says "You're leaving, aren't you?". Bam. Done. She said it for me. We had a ten minute talk and it was fine. I was really honest with her about what I was leaving to do-- something I wasn't sure I was going to be able to do when I first thought about giving notice. I always thought I would say something vague, like "I'm leaving Philadelphia."...I don't know why! I guess I didn't want to see what I thought her reaction would be to this trip, the disappointment of me leaving my position where I know I'm valued to do something technically really "irresponsible" and self-indulgent. However, this was not her reaction at all. She was excited for me, though really sad I was going, and she said this was the time for me to do things like this, and she told me how happy she was for me. She also appreciated how far in advance I told her, so I'm glad I did it that way.

Anyway, I feel silly for making this big deal about it in my head. It was fine, more than fine. And now I feel like I can relax at work a little more, because my boss knows and my coworkers know and I can be honest about what I'm doing and when I'm leaving. May 25th is my last day. That'll give Aram and I a full free week without work to do any last minute packing and cleaning before we leave on June 1st.


In other news, I paid for a WWOOF membership and started looking at farms that Aram and I will want to try to contact to work on during our trip. We've been talking a lot more in detail about this and have located two farms in particular that we want to work on.One is in Michigan and one is in Oregon. We are going to contact both this weekend, first the one in Michigan and then, depending on how that conversation goes, the one in Oregon. We are ideally hoping to work at the farm (or a farm, if the one we want to go to is booked) in Michigan in the end of June/beginning of July. That would give us about 2-3 weeks to go up through Maine, into Canada, and spend some time in Quebec City and then Montreal before heading into the upper peninsula of Michigan. We would then drive to the farm and work there for hopefully 2-3 weeks, which would take us into July. Then we would continue the trip to Chicago and stay with my friend for a week, and then take almost the whole month of August to do the section of our trip that includes Wyoming, Montana, the western part of Canada (Vancouver and Vancouver Island, the Canadian Rockies, etc), Washington and the Olympic Mountains. Then we would hopefully have a farm booked to WWOOF for the end of August/into September in Oregon; again, hopefully for 2-3 weeks. Following that, around the middle of September, we would start the more open-ended part of our trip, going through the rest of Oregon and down the coast of California, where we have some of my family we're going to visit and a lot of sights we want to see.

So this is the slowly forming plan! This weekend it's supposed to thunderstorm both days all day (I'm crossing my fingers one of those is a lie because I'm supposed to be doing my last long training run for the Broad Street Run, which is on May 6th, and I do not want to run 9 miles in the rain this weekend because that would suck) and we're going to hole up at least one of those days and contact some farms and hopefully make some good connections and get on our way to booking them for the times we want (fingers crossed). We're also going to buy some good maps/an atlast and start actually looking at physical roads and tracing the route we want to take more specifically. Also, I am going to take all my clothes out of my completely broken dresser and put it in the trash, and also pack up anything I want my parents to take home with them when they visit in two weeks. I took home a few things when I went home for Passover, but I have a couple little things left that I want them to take home-- not much, really. We don't have that much stuff left. I'm going to send home some of our kitchen stuff that I want to keep but don't have use or room for in the van-- the ice cream maker we got off craigslist for 10 bucks (best buy ever), our juicer, immersion blender...blah blah blah. Can you tell I love kitchen stuff?

Anyway, feeling good about getting more on top of the WWOOF thing and I'm looking forward to having a productive weekend and getting a lot of planning and other things done. We are leaving so so soon, I know it's going to just sneak up on me and I want to do as much as I can before that last week so we're not scrambling with only a few days left to get things together!