Tree Blood

You could get almost anything to eat in Hong Kong, provided that you didn't ever want to eat potatoes or cheese, and normally didn't want to eat wheat or dairy. The Mexican food I also advise against, and it is fair to warn you that they fry the french fries in McDonald's in fish oil for that uncanny "familiar and yet alien" taste you haven't been pining for.

Bread was made with wheat, sold in little 8 slice packs since it was such a novelty, and we found one grocery store that sold cheese, in the entirety of everywhere they looked. They had three kinds, and normally about two packages of each. With these we could make grilled cheese sandwiches on our single-burner heating plates in a wok. Milk came in individual glass jars.

Fresh fruit was an adventure. We made a game of bringing random fruit home and trying to guess how to eat it.



After several incidents of eating rinds, seeds, stems, things which weren't suppose to be eaten unless they are cooked, and various grossly unripe or overripe things, we more or less gave up and stuck to pineapples and pomelos. Most of the fruits we never learned the names of, but the red thing with the green spines is a Dragon Fruit, the one with the points is called Star Fruit, and the one opened on the newspaper is Jackfruit.

After getting tired of fruit, the Russian Roulette activities continued as a drinking game using random candy with no English on it whatsoever, which became nearly ubiquitous during New Year's celebrations.

Pizza Hut was, unbeknown to us, a very classy establishment. The first time we went we had already had a few beers before we piled in to order pitchers of beer and a few pies, which we ate barbarically with our hands, without noticing the black tile floor, the nicely dressed waiters, the pasta dishes and mocktails on the menu, or the violin music in the background. Half way through dinner I turned around to see a local man wearing a tie and looking rather forlorn. His girlfriend, in black dress, looked unhappy, and I was suddenly struck with the realization that we had ruined the very nice dinner he was trying to treat her to.

We found wheat flour and made pancakes at home sometimes, because they were familiar and easy. We searched high and low, but couldn't find maple syrup for them anywhere. Eventually we started asking coworkers about it.

"What does it look like?"

"It's thick brown sauce, and it is sweet"

"What's it made of?"

"You take sap from Maple trees"

There was a pause, and my coworker gave me a very blank face

"Liquid in the bark, it brings food to the rest of the tree..."

"Yeah yeah"

"Then you boil it down a lot,"

"Ok"

"And then it's ready!"

My coworkers looked at each other for a long moment. Then one smiled, and in his most polite and patiently culturally-understanding voice he explained, very delicately as to not offend us,

"We're sorry, but we don't drink tree blood in China."

Magpie's New 5 Ton Truck

Why Magpie has been wanting to buy a 2.5 ton truck ex-military vehicle since 2006 isn't a question I can answer. All I know is he wanted one. The holdup had always been how to get the giant vehicle in an unknown condition transported home. So he sat and he lurked on government liquidation websites and craigslist waiting for the idea to come.

The truck he found on craigslist was 5 tons instead of 2.5 tons. It gets a glorious 5 miles to the gallon. A gallon of what you ask? Pretty much anything, the engine plate reads "fuel spec - all petroleum distillates up to a maximum octane rating of 85m-95r." Magpie offered $2500 on a whim, expecting to be laughed out.

The offer was accepted but the owner remained skeptical it would run without towing. It had only been driven about 15 miles since being purchased, and Magpie would have to drive it 550 miles to get home. The owner offered to send more pictures of the truck that weekend so Magpie could think this over, but Magpie had already started packing.

Magpie, Lion and CoLo drove all through the night Friday and arrived at the owner's place at 7AM, where they discovered that people don't answer their cell phones at 7 in the morning on a Saturday. Around noon they found him. The owner thought they had bailed on the offer and that they were completely crazy, but also was delighted to see them.

In Magpie's words, the owner had "a large quantity of approved lawn art and fun toys," including a lifted Jeep Grand Cherokee with big tires, a few spare transmissions and engines, a jeep c10 pickup, a stack of tires, and a jeep cj on what must have been at least 38" tires. The owner himself rolled up in yet another jeep with 56" mud tires in the back. I can understand why the two of them liked each other so much.

A few quick repairs on the military truck later the thing is ready to roll, and Magpie realized he didn't know how to drive stick, so they found a parking lot and started practicing.

Mall security was highly distressed to find Magpie with all 10 wheels and 20,000 pounds of military grade near-tank learning to drive stick in the Macy's parking lot, but didn't really seem to know what to do about it. Never to be taken for not being in charge, they had Magpie to solemnly promise to not run over anything, and permitted him to continue.

On the road home the group split up at about 10PM. CoLo had some friends to see in another city, and Lion and Magpie wanted to take the truck off-roading. Lion trailed Magpie in his vehicle to make sure he didn't break down, and promptly lost him as everybody's cell phone simultaneously stopped working. Lion arrived at the campsite at midnight, but Magpie didn't get in until 5AM because he looped back to find Lion. The whole affair was rather miserable seeing as the truck had no roof and it was absolutely pouring.

3 hours of sleep in Lion's car later they wake up, still soaking wet, to find the rain hadn't let up. Determined to still go off-roading, they demolished some trees with their 20,000 pound military cargo truck, and empirically verified how bad their turn radius was. The mirrors seemed slightly in danger of coming off, but the rest of the truck didn't seem to mind the abuse in the slightest. The military made this thing rock-solid and no frills: no roof and no muffler. Magpie drives it with earplugs.

On the road home Lion was in fine spirits, driving loops around the truck since it topped out at about 55 mph. He saw a large number of chunks of what he assumed was one of Magpie's 10 tires blowing up, but when he saw Magpie continue driving, he assumed everything was ok and didn't say anything.

Turns out Magpie had lost the air compressor belt, which took the tachometer belt with it, which took the water pump and fan belts with it, which in short order caused the truck to have zero air pressure, the alternator to stop charging the battery, and the engine to heat up. He tried to pull over, but he had also lost mechanical assistance to the brakes, and wound up more or less standing on the pedal for half a mile on the shoulder before the truck finally ground to a halt 180 miles from home. Lion was terribly amused, and Magpie wasn't.

The inside of the hood was covered with bits of belts but both the phones and the data plans were working again. An auto store, a few belts, and four gallons of coolant to top the tank off at a nice even ten later all the important bits were spinning again, and the truck was drivable the whole rest of the way home.

Come Monday morning, Magpie decides his life isn't interesting enough, and so opted to drive his new vehicle to his very respectable cube-farm of an employer where he was forced to park it across three parking spaces to fit it, but politely left enough room for the neighboring Prius to back out. He was sorry for being late, and explained that his new truck needed 15 minutes to warm up, 5 to cool down, and topped out at 55mph. One question led to another and once his boss had confirmed that Magpie had somehow managed to fit this monstrosity in the parking lot, he started laughing.

"Bet that thing is a real chick magnet!"

It was meant as sarcastic, but two girls about Magpie's age overheard the conversation and were the first to go out and see his prize. When he drove it to work a second time on Friday apparently every girl in the department came out to see it.

And that is the story of how Magpie got four hours of sleep on a weekend, bought a battle wagon, learned to drive standard, and won the attention of all the ladies.

Disgustingly Happy

We met because his roommate was trying to hit on me at a conference. He was too tall for me, but you couldn't really tell when he was sitting. He had beautiful eyes which were one shade with contacts and another without. He hadn't the faintest idea about hardware, but in almost no time we wound up rearranging things to attend the same lectures. He had wild dreams about where computers could go in the next 40 years, a big interesting stack of books in his room, and we both liked beer.

"So, what's going on with you two?" his friend asked him.

He was also a pretty terrible liar.

We both knew the odds of seeing each other ever again were rather low, and in some senses it made the time we did have a lot more precious. Sometimes I was annoyed at him for always being nearby, but as soon as he did give me some space I found myself looking around, and that I missed him.

"So, how far do you want this to go?" he asked hesitantly.

I didn't really have a good answer for him.

He saw in me all the things I wished I was. He loved that I was both a professional at my career and a female, and that I could interact with him as either. He liked it when I smiled.

I dozed off sitting next to him on the last night of the conference several times, and each time I woke up he was still holding me, and looked down at me sadly. We had walked home from the bar through the main strip of Vegas more or less hand in hand. We laughed at the fake plaster everything in the hotels, watched the crowds stumble from bar to bar, and pitied the people swept up in the shopping, which dress was cute, and the tourist photo ops with their yard-long margaritas in hand.

"Pretty sure I don't even like this city normally."

We stopped and watched the fountain at the Bellagio from across the street play. Not a lot to see, but it was nice to be held. We found Optimus Prime and a stormtrooper street performer, and tried to convince them to fight.

"Pretty sure I'm never going to forget this."

We considered elaborate schemes to joyride the boats at The Venetian, and watched another street performer paint. We laughed at the astroturf park, and admired how many ways Las Vegas had figured out how to twist an escalator. We found a rippled plastic wall of a fountain, and stood there grinning, pressing our hands in the thin coat of water which ran over top of it, reaching up and letting the water run down our arms and onto our clothes. We did a million stupid, meaningless things, but mostly we did them together.

And we were disgustingly happy.