Positive Thinking! Positive Thinking!

I leave for New Hampshire in eighteen days, which is very strange. I feel like I just got here. As many of you know, New Hampshire isn't exactly my favorite place in the world, but I am trying to keep the blog-whining to a minimum. To that end, I've decided to talk a bit about things I'm actually looking forward to (!!) about returning to the Live Free or Die State.

• Living free or dying. I intend to live free.

The other option is dying hard. This kind of shit happens in New Hampshire all the time.

• Teaching. Oh man did I miss teaching this last year. I can't wait to have students, to be in front of a classroom again, even to grade papers--Smarthinking has made me realize how awesome it is to grade and evaluate on your own terms.

• Writing and reading. Sure, I'm writing and reading this summer, but it's going to be fun to have myself exposed to stuff I wouldn't pick up on my own, and to have a dedicated writing schedule. Writing over breaks always feels kind of like a dalliance or a hobby, even when I'm really cranking it out; in school it's basically all there is, so it feels much much more important.

• Shipyard Summer. I know this is weird, since I'm in the land of microbreweries, but I have been totally craving Shipyard Summer Ale. I've been enjoying a lot of Northwest summer ales and IPAs (apparently there's a very distinct "west coast" style of IPA, pioneered by WA and OR microbreweries, that has a lot more kick to it than its east coast cousin, which explains why all the IPA in New England sucks except for Smuttynose) but the Shipyard Summer is kind of like liquid crack-beer. It accompanies hot, muggy weather quite nicely. I promise I'm not cheating on you, delicious Northwest brews! It's just a fling.
  

• Having a car. New Hampshire is going to suck a lot less when I can get around it, or leave any time I want to go Boston or Portland or the mountains. Thanks for the car, Kate and Adam! You have noooooo idea how awesome this is. (Fingers crossed the Civic makes it across the country incident-free.)

• My new apartment. I can't wait to have my own space and fill it up with books and video games and brand new kitchen stuff and the things I like. Plus, it's in downtown Dover, right next to an awesome used books store and a bunch of nice bars, coffeehouses, and restaurants. Sweet.

My building. I'm in one of the studios on the corner.

• Fall in New England. We haven't had a ton of summer weather in Washington, which I'm just fine with. I'm already done with 85-degree-plus weather, sweating myself to sleep, sitting in front of fans, etc. (And has anybody else noticed how the red lights in Seattle are one or two minutes longer once the temperature gets to about ninety? I swear I'm not making this up.) I know that once I arrive in New Hampshire I'll have even more miserable weather to deal with for awhile, but then fall will be here, and it will be nice and cool and pretty-colored, and I can eat apples and candy corn and wear coats again. Huzzah!

Yeah, it's pretty there.

• Hiking. I hear the hiking in New Hampshire is great, and they do have lots of woods and mountains (sorry, "mountains"). I'm going to buy a best hikes book and use my newfound transportation to travel the state and walk all over it.
  

• Seeing my cat. I miss her.

Clementine circa early 2007.

See, positive thinking! Maybe I could follow this up with a list of things I won't miss about the Pacific Northwest. It might be short, but worth it.

Notes on beer

The day we arrived we hit the grocery store to stock up on essentials. I investigated the beer aisle. Beer is cheap here, and our local supermarket (Hannaford) carries beer from quite a few microbreweries I recognize--Kona, Dogfish Head, Blue Moon, and Red Hook to name a few. I've also heard it's easy to find Alaskan over here. What isn't easy to find is Pyramid, and this is going to be a big problem when winter rolls around and Snow Cap hits the shelves in the Pacific Northwest. Ashley assures me that there will be good winter brews here too, but my stomach still yearns for Snow Cap.

Also, Sam Adams is everywhere. Everywhere. I'm trying to think of a beer that's as prevalent in Washington as Sam Adams is here, but I can't. There are Sam Adams displays, letterboards with sales chalked on them, giveaways, flyers, delivery vans--everywhere I look I see the smug grinning bastard face of Samuel Adams.

Drink my beer, Ian. You're in my land now. Mwahaha.

I had a glass of the Sam Adams summer ale at Fat Belly's, a grill Ashley and I stopped at in Portsmouth, and it was very disappointing. I know their lager is good, though, so maybe not all is lost.

That first day at the grocery I picked up a six-pack from an excellent brewery in Maine called Shipyard. Like almost everything else in Maine, this beer has a lobster on it:


This beer was excellent. Yesterday at the store I tried to pick up their Export Ale, but they only had twelve packs and I was feeling poor (also, I have nobody to share the beer with), so instead I picked up a six-pack of Smuttynose IPA. Smuttynose is based out of Portsmouth, just a few miles from my apartment, and this is one of the better bottled IPAs I've had. It's as hoppy as some of Boundary Bay's brews. It reminded me of Bellingham. Pretty tasty stuff.

In other beer news, Ashley and I made beercan chicken a few nights ago (this was a disaster--don't ask) and the only can of beer we had in the apartment was the Sturgis memorial lager.


For those of your unfamiliar with beercan chicken, you have to drink the can about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way down before you can use it, so it was up to me to choke down six horrible ounces of biker brew. Unsurprisingly, it tasted like crap. Friends and family, you better get ready to fill me with delicious Northwest beer when I return. And now, here are a bunch of random pictures from the last week. Click for less blurry versions.

Our new apartment, still in its early stages.

Bedroom mess.

This is the single most difficult piece of furniture I've ever put together. Gah!

Ashley and I took a walk through Portsmouth, and it was good.

More Portsmouth.

Five questions for New Hampshirites (and New Englanders in general)

1. What's up with all the bunting? It's everywhere, along with tons of American flags. I've never been to a place that has so much red, white and blue. We drove past a house that had an American flag in every window (and the old houses here have lots of windows)! There are Obama-Biden stickers everywhere, and a surprising number of still-hanging-on Kerry-Edwards stickers. Some sort of New English pride thing, maybe? All of this I can understand, except for the bunting. I don't think I've ever seen bunting outside of period films, and now it's everywhere. What's up with all the bunting?


2. How are west coasters supposed to eat here? Food here is generally cheaper than back home (no sales tax, sweet), but we're finding it difficult to find some of our staples: no Tilamook cheese, yogurt, or sour cream; no Adam's peanut butter or gourmet peanut butter of any kind; no Hershey's syrup (that one's weird); and on a weird note, it's not called Dreyer's ice cream over here, it's called Edy's, even though it's the exact same product.


3. Why so serious? A mean way to put it would be that everybody is just a little uptight, but that's not quite accurate. Ash characterized it as a lack of west coast earnestness, which is a good way to put it, but I think there's also a lack of self-deprecation. Everything is important. And with good reason: Dover was established in 1623, a donation from Andrew Carnegie helped establish the University of New Hampshire, and many local restaurants, no matter how skeezy, proudly trace their history (Asia Fantasia! Fine Chinese and Korean takeout since 1958!). This all isn't to say New Hampshirites don't joke or have fun—we bought our bed from a jocular, elbow-nudging old guy named Frank—but there's kind of a current of seriousness running beneath everything.


4. Why does your traffic suck so bad? Everybody gets backed up at the tolls as people frantically lane change between the cash, EZ Pass, and exact change lanes—that's to be expected. But why does Dover, with barely 26,000 people, get swamped by bumper-to-bumper traffic during rush hours? I have two theories about this. Firstly, the town is so old there's no grid system—streets intersect at weird angles, there are no stoplights where there should be, occasionally stoplights where I'm used to seeing stop signs, pedestrian-only roads, giant six-way intersections where two or more of the roads are one-way.... it's a giant mess. I'm getting used to it, though. Secondly, nobody here takes the bus. Everybody drives. I'm hoping this changes when school starts and the students return.

5. Why is wine so expensive? When we find bottles we recognize from Bellingham and Seattle, they're four to seven dollars more expensive. The local stuff is expensive too, although oddly the French imports aren't too much more than they are at home. What makes this even weirder is that beer is much cheaper than in Washington (haven't compared liquor yet). As we are too poor to afford a $13 bottle of wine that tastes like a $6 bottle, this makes Ashley very sad.

This came out a little gripier than I intended. Sorry New Hampshirites, I really do like your state! It's just the little things that hang me up and make me remember I'm not at home. Last night my friend in New York posted a Facebook status update about a meteor shower from midnight to five a.m. Man, I thought, wouldn't it be cool to be on the east coast so I could see that? I didn't realize until this morning that I am on the east coast, and, had it been clear last night, I would have seen the meteor shower. This is going to take some getting used to.

Road Trip Day 3: Where the heck is Wall Drug?

There it is.

Wall Drug is difficult to describe. Signs appear for fifty miles beforehand—and a few scattered ones in the empty parts of Wyoming and Montana—advertising free ice water! Fudge! Five cent coffee! Tyrannosaurus Rex! Free coffee for Vietnam vets! Homemade pie! Yes, Wall Drug has every good thing in the entire world.


When you get there, Wall Drug turns out to be a kind of weird tourist trap. But not just any tourist trap! It's a tourist trap so large, so weird and entertaining, that an entire town of other, smaller tourist traps has sprung up around it. It's like a drug store, a museum, a gift shop and a playground all rolled into one place. Ashley and I wandered its halls, sampling the five cent coffee (surprisingly drinkable), eating the fresh-baked doughnuts (delicious), looking at the hundreds of 19th century photographs of South Dakota and the American West, examining the huge concrete jackalope and the stuffed buffalo, and feeding money into the mechanical band (those robots do a mean version of “Bad Moon Rising”).


It's one of the few roadside attractions I don't feel gypped spending time at, because there's so much, and it's all interesting. There's even an entire room dedicated to photographs and newspaper clippings of Ted Hustead and his family, who have run Wall Drug since the early 1930s, and are basically the reason anybody stops in the tiny town of Wall, SD.

It's way too much to take in, and we would have loved to spend another few hours there, but we had a cat overheating in the car, so we had to leave. On the way out, however, we stopped at a gas station— overrun with bikers, just like everything else—and purchased a Sturgis 2009 Rally souvenir beer, which I plan to try out in a live video on this blog. Technology allows us to do such useful things, doesn't it? I could go on for so much longer about how amazing Wall Drug is, but instead I'll shut up and leave you with some pictures.

Harleys everywhere


Jackalopes

More Jackalope.