Random Things and Stuff

We are still on I-80 and since we have not passed any Freddy Krueger hands today or had anything terribly exciting happen, I thought I would share some random thoughts.

Dane Cook

Ryan Reynolds

There will be no useless facts today!

Random thought #1
I am pretty sure cloning has been perfected, at least in Hollywood.  It seems like actors are coming in pairs now.  For example Dane Cook and Ryan Reynolds or Christian Bale and Eric Bana, is this two people or four?

Cristian Bale

Eric Bana

Random thought #2


Why do men get athlete's feet? Himself and I take showers in identical cootie filled places, we wear similar hiking style shoes and he gets it and I don't. Is there something different about girl feet?

Random thought #3

I saw a woman in a truck stop today and here is the visual I want you to get: Granny Clampet in Daisy Dukes.

Random thought #4

Overheard at a dinner buffet in a truck stop by a burly truck driver, "Ooh good, they got snausages!" Isn't that a dog treat??

Speaking of good food, in Alabama we saw jars and jars for sale of pickled pig lips. Whole lips, hair included. Really, one jar 2 lips, $3.99.

Oh, the trucking life is exciting!

A Nightmare in Iowa

Today we are on the ever exciting I-80 through Nebraska and  Iowa and by exciting I mean really, really boring. Although to be fair, there is a new sculpture on an overpass in Council Bluffs that is fairly exciting, in a super sized, scary and sharp sort of way.

It's called "Odyssey" and was created by Albert Paley and sponsored by the Iowa West Foundation. There are four separate 60 foot high sculptures that Paley says "... are seen as the gateway of Iowa. The whole thing is about an act of passage, of creating a sense of place and an identity. When you're driving, especially on the interstate, it becomes fairly monotonous, but the magnitude of these sculptures really defines Council Bluffs' image."

Uh. Yes, if that image is one of a horror movie icon.

The Iowa West Foundation has launched a public art initiative and have put in place several works of art throughout Council Bluffs and I applaud their efforts. I like art as much as the next person, but this thing is hideously ugly. Local man, Chris Ragle, told reporters that the sculpture "looks like Freddy Krueger hands trying to grab you."

This is not an exaggeration, it is a scary looking thing to come across on the highway. I have a friend, let's call her Mona, who has phobias of things like trees, the sky, hedgehogs and she would absolutely freak out if she were driving under this hulking mass of sharp pointy-ness.


Here are some facts about Odyssey:


~The structure cost $3 million
~Approximately 85,000 cars and trucks will pass it everyday.
~It took 13 flatbed trucks to bring it in from where they were fabricated in upstate New York
~Paley and a team of 16 studio assistants assembled the four structures
~Each piece has between 46,000 and 70,000 pounds of bronze and steel
~A 120 ton crane was used to lift the pieces into place

Here are some facts about Freddy Krueger:


~The famous Freddy Krueger "glove" was originally made of upside down steak knives

Nightmare Glove

~A Nightmare on Elm Street came out in 1984
~The film cost $1.8 million to make
~The colors of Freddy's grungy red and green striped sweater were chosen because of an article in Scientific American that said they were the two most contrasting colors to the                  
human retina
~I personally know of a 5lb Yorkie named Maya who has a Freddy Krueger sweater but she wears it with such panache that it's not at all scary

Who knows what the next 500 miles of I-80 will bring? I'm hoping for something a little less sharp!

On the Road Again

Ahh...on the road again. We have been off the road for a week, as you may have noticed there were no posts. I do apologize to my loyal followers (my mother and that crazy guy I used to work with!) this is supposed to be a trucking blog and we weren't doing any trucking so you can see I was in a sticky pickle!

Now we are heading east again, sadly, since we miss being out west. We are picking up Great Northern and Pinto beans in western Nebraska. I did not realize that they grew out here but apparently they are quite abundant. We have passed three bean plants right at the border between Wyoming and Nebraska. Known as dry beans, pinto beans are the most popular dry bean in the United States followed by navy beans, Great Northern beans, red kidney beans and black beans. This is according to the US Dry Bean Council, and they should know.  Nebraska is the 3rd top producer of dry beans, following North Dakota and Michigan. Beans have been grown for about six thousand years in the  Americas and did you know that beans are not in fact a magical fruit but they are good for your heart, bean consumption can lower your risk for heart disease. Now you know more than you ever wanted to about dry beans. It's not a good year to be a farmer of dry beans though, they are getting half of what they got last year for them in this area.

It was nice to be home but it's nice to be back in the truck again too, since we work 10 times harder at home than we do on the road. Himself has a never ending supply of energy and work projects so I have to do my best to keep up. One of the nicest things about being home is having my own bathroom, what a luxury to have it all to myself. And the only cooties are our own, not some sweaty, unwashed truck driver! Seeing friends, eating home cooked meals, lazing around in the morning over multiple cups of coffee... these are also a few of my favorite things.

Speaking of coffee we will be going through Lexington NE, one of my favorite places on I-80 because they have a $5 coffee shack with truck parking. Yum!. These little coffee houses are so popular out west, our little home town has 2 drive up ones and one in the hospital and one in the bookstore, but you hardly see them east of Nebraska. Of course there are Starbucks everywhere but that's just not the same (don't get me started).  I like the local ones that are just drive-ups the best and a lot of time they have homemade goodies. So now I really have something to look forward to and even Himself likes a $5 coffee (extra sweet & milky) and a scone now and then. I can't wait, although at the rate we are getting loaded it may be late afternoon before we get there. The bean counters are still loading us...

Homeward Bound

Wyoming

Transplanted

by Patricia Midge Farmer

If I had not come to these high plains,

my heart would have missed

the beat of this love of place,

my guts would have yearned for

some unknown fulfillment,

my mind would have shrunk

to a small civilized size,

and my soul would have tentacles,

searching, always reaching out

for what I found here. 

But I am now like the tenacious sage

wide roots forced into

this seldom yielding ground

to make a place for me

to hold on tight

to nurture and be nourished

and, oh this land does feed me.

Let's go out to the Movies...

Well it’s official. I have a girl crush on Angelina Jolie. Actually, I have always liked her as an actress, except for that horrible Mr. & Mrs. Smith that took itself too seriously and it was way overblown. Yesterday we finally got to a movie theater (see the New Orleans post for the last time we tried) and we saw Salt and it was good. The kind of movie that satisfies when you're in the mood for car chases, explosions and fight scenes.

You've come a long way baby!

Salt is an action movie and for me hits all the right notes that an action movie should have; fast-paced, violent, lots of action and a story that’s not so complicated you have to stop and try to figure it out. The action star is a woman and that just hasn't been done before. Angelina Jolie is tough and believable (in that unbelievable action star way) and I really liked her in this movie. Very few women could pull it off, she has the perfect combination of kick-ass-ness and fearlessness that just comes off her in waves. I’m gushing, I know but I just came out of the movie theater really excited. I don’t call myself a feminist and shy away from labels in general, they are too confining, but I admit to being sucked into the vortex of woman power and I watched the movie in glee as she did all sorts of impossible James Bond things. I loved it, it’s about time and she was the perfect woman to do it.

Spam and the jolly Green Giant

Weird signs of the day in Minnesota:  "Toward Zero Deaths, Safety Corridor" followed by "Concentrate on Driving" How does one go toward zero deaths? I don't think it is a mathematical possibility to go toward zero anything and we are so busy concentrating on this philosophical quandary that we cannot concentrate on driving. The signs cancel each other out.


Speaking of Minnesota, we went through the city of Minnetonka today, which made me wonder if that's where Tonka Toys come from, so I looked it up on the Google and no they do not.  Tonka Toys started out as Mound Metal Craft in Mound Minnesota, right next door to Minnetonka and Lake Minnetonka which is where they got the name.  The company started out with the intent to make steel garden implements but got sidetracked. 


This is all from Wikipedia, with whom I have a love/hate relationship. I love them because they are laid out in such a way that is very readable and informative and I hate them because they are so easy to use that it makes me too lazy sometimes to verify and it can be changed at any time by any body.  I firmly believe in the Trust but Verify model of internet searching but sometimes it's a pain to verify. I am a skeptic by nature and with all this information available at my fingertips, I don't want to fall into the trap of believing the first thing I read on the Internet. There is a website for every thing under and on the sun, all with varying levels of factness.


Back to Minnesota. Once again we will be close to the Spam Museum with no time to stop there, what a shame.  Located in Austin, MN the museum features 16,500 square feet of SPAM® artifacts, history and fun—and all for free! Yes, that’s right— it’s free admission to check out vintage advertising, answer SPAM® trivia, try your hand at canning SPAM® products, stock up on collectible SPAM® memorabilia, and learn about all the SPAM® products, even the hard-to-find varieties. I stole this right off the Spam website so it has to be true.

Did you know that sodium nitrite is what makes Spam pink? They say that if it wasn't used in pork products like Spam, bacon, ham, etc. the meat would be gray. I don't know about you, but I like my gelatinous cube of meat pink, thank you very much! 

They are crazy for Spam in Hawaii and even have a Spam festival there and Burger King and McDonald's both offer it on their menus. Lots of places make Spam sushi. There are even theories about why it's so popular in the south pacific having to do with cannibalism and it tasting like flesh but it's not true. Much.


One thing we have done in Minnesota was to take our picture next to the Jolly Green Giant and his buddy Sprout in Blue Earth, MN.  We had dinner there once, right next door to the JGG himself. 


According the Blue Earth chamber of commerce the city got its name from the Blue Earth River that circles the town.  The river was named for a blue clay that is found high in it’s banks.  The Native Americans of this area, which were the Mdewakanton Tribe of the Dakota Nation, called the blue clay “mah-ko-tah” or “mah-kah-to."


I wonder what the Native American word is for Spam?

What is this tree?

Today we are travelling across northern Ohio. Lots of corn, soybeans, some grapes and apples, I think. There is a small farm that we have passed a couple of times and they have the oddest looking trees. These trees are not very big, maybe 15 feet tall, definitely fruit-y looking but we go past them too fast to really focus on what kind of fruit it is. They look like the kind of trees that would live in one of those scary forests in a children's story. The branches come up and then droop down heavily, like they are just too tired to hold themselves up and they look vaguely sinister.

I decided to look up these trees online so I would have some enlightening bit of trivia to tell, but apparently it's a state secret. I have looked and looked on the Google (remember when George Bush called it the Google? I'm stealing that!) under various search terms and have found out lots of things but not what this weird tree is. Ohio's state tree is the Buckeye which is a slightly poisonous nut that should not be eaten. Slightly poisonous? What does that even mean? Isn't that like slightly pregnant? But Buckeyes are way bigger than this. According the Ohio State University website fruit trees in Ohio include apples,  pears, peaches,  nectarines, apricot, plums and cherries. A quick look at those trees on the Google and still no luck with the creepy trees.

I wish that farmers would put a sign on their crops. It would be so interesting to know what that stuff growing on the side of the road is and maybe that would make regular people like us more interested in food and where it comes from. There is a section on I-90 in eastern Washington that does this and we love going by there and seeing the variety. This is the only place in the country that we have seen these signs and there is a lot of country out there believe me and a lot more than boring corn. If you know what this tree is, please tell me and I'll tell the Google!

If you want to know more about food crops and how the variety of what is grown is dwindling, check out Barbara  Kingsolver's book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle...A Year of Food Life".