The freeway, not the place the freeway goes / The driver, not the man

(Not back yet. On Schwern's computer again. Still no word on mine, I'm gonna do a nudge call on Tuesday.)

I'm still posting on Twitter these days, andas you can see, there have been adventures.

• Got lost on Mt. Tabor. Liveblogged it.

• Finished re-reading Infinite Jest! Such an engaging book. I have all kinds of thoughts about it, and I think I understand the ending and the Year of Glad completely differently than I did eight years ago.

  But that all should probably wait.

• Filed for unemployment and received my first $45 worth of food stamps. Whee. (I had to file in WA state instead of Oregon, which was confusing.)
• Made bread. (SHOCK.) I've been banging polenta and levain together to see what happens. So far, the dough is incredibly unruly and I can't make the math make sense, but it's resulted in some really impressive loaves. I have this hunch that fully-cooked polenta acts as a sort of moisture reservoir and yields a chewier and more professional-looking crumb, but I can't be sure until I can manage to separate the variables out, which is proving difficult on account of the aforementioned unruliness of the dough and math.
• Motored out to the fish hatchery at Bonneville Dam. Fish are weird—a bunch of coho were all queued up in the ladder and milling around, and it was totally surreal, a combination of serene blankness and totally intense concentration.
• And then, get this, my license plate fell off on I-84.

• And then I actually managed to find it.

  Incidentally, if you ever hear a rattling noise and pull over to discover that your license plate is hanging by a single rattly bolt, the obvious course of action is to just take it off and pocket it for later re-attachment. It'll be pretty easy to explain if you actually get pulled over, which isn't gonna happen anyway. The thing NOT to do is to just tighten the nut with your fingers and hope it'll hold fast until you manage to limp home. Right? I mean, seriously, only an idiot would do that.

• I'm learning Objective C and Cocoa and Xcode and all that jazz; managed to find a really good book at the library.

  It's fun! Really!