Dad and I began the day with an early drive down the highway in the brand-new Audi to try to beat the crowds to the Bake Shop in Girdwood. There were quite a few people around, most of them there to spectate at the U.S. Nationals at Alyeska. The breakfast, especially the sourdough bread, was delicious, and we shared our table with a couple of ski brats discussing who was the better skier, Bode, Daron, or Byron. The edge went to Daron, with no disrespect to Bode, and admiration for the up-and-coming Byron.
I had the pleasure of driving the car back to Anchorage, testing out all six of its gears while not going above 5000 rpm because the engine isn’t broken in yet. It has a lot of zip, and feels solidly built and not at all like a station wagon. A nice LCD displays stats about the car as well as cd track and disc number in a very German-looking layout. The Recaro seats really keep you in around the corners, and the engine has a nice, throaty roar.
We pulled over to take some pictures of the beautiful morning light on the mountains, and as soon as we stopped, it became apparent just how fast the ice in the inlet was moving. It was impossible to see from a moving car, but the ice floes were really moving, mushily bumping into one another, wearing each other down and disintegrating along the rocky edge. It sounded like a giant Slurpee being stirred, making an eerily audible and constant whoosh as we stood and watched.
After we got home, we spent the rest of the afternoon putting up track lights in a couple of different rooms, and putting up maps, prints, engravings, drawings, and anything else that needed putting up onto the walls of the second floor hallway and staircases. The map that looks like a rabbit, the map that looks like a “T,” the engraving of the walrus hunt, and all of the other familiar sights of the second floor hallway were returned to their traditional spots, unless we couldn’t remember exactly where those were.
I spent a little time investigating some of my many boxes in the basement, and came up with a real find: my box of cassette tapes, circa 1985-1990. Store bought tapes (every Weird Al album I could get my hands on, the beloved “Christmas Rap” tape), hand-taped compilations (a mystifying mix of songs like the Fat Boys’ version of “The Twist” and Kylie Minogue’s “Locomotion” as well as intro banter by Shadoe Stevens [he’s an artist!] and various local “personalities” all taped off the radio), and the best find of all, recordings of Scott and me as kids, including what I think is the great, lost “Sinking Ship” radio play, which consists of Scott and I screaming “Women and children first! Aaaah!” while banging buckets to simulate the sound of panicked passengers. Or so I remember… I’ll listen to it tomorrow.
After a run at the gym, Dad and I enjoyed some of Mom’s chili, conveniently frozen and labeled for us, and watched The Ox-Bow Incident. Finally. And it was great, a solid, hard-packed 75 minutes of frontier justice and mob violence. Worth the wait – especially when we watched the special features that showed the difference between the 1993 restoration and the 2002 restoration used for the dvd. I must have known not to watch it back when Dad first tried to convince me to – I was holding out for a better version.
