The Decompression of a Boomer

We had a hot dry summer this year in southeast Idaho, a summer of seemingly endless blue skies. This past Tuesday thunderstorms rolled through. It was cloudy most of the day, but then the skies cleared, and the sun reappeared. We took an evening walk, David Megan and I …

7:03 PM Tuesday, 9-13-16

in our paranormal states. No particular relation to Slender Man, the meme that compelled two 12-yr-old girls in rural Wisconsin to stab a friend 17 times and leave her to die in the forest. (Do you remember that incident on June 2, 2014, when two girls were charged with stabbing a classmate as a sacrifice to the mythical character Slender Man ?? They are now both being tried as adults.) Yuck!

Shira Chess is a scholar of the Slender Man Myth. So, in case you wonder, Chess’ analysis of Slender Man is that he is a metaphor for ‘helplessness, power differential, and anonymous forces’ – an infinitely morphable stand-in for things we can neither understand nor control, universal fears that can drive people to great lengths, even it would appear, very scary, cold-blooded lengths.

What? Hey, we had Rudy with us…

He only chases cats

Indian Summer… A palpable diminishing of daylight with each passing week. On June 20 the sun set at 9:13 PM! – tonight, at 7:41, nearly 1 1/2 hours earlier. But hey, if we hurry down this hill we can still catch the sunset!

We descend the hill, round a corner, heading north now. “Trump hair,” David says.

The sky is dazzling

Sky to the east

7:26 PM – Sun is setting in the west

I capture several more photos of the sunset:

Back home now, I took what could be one last photo of our impatiens lining our front walk. Extremely frost sensitive. How long before they are nipped and laid limp by the first hard freeze? A week??

Don’t need any help from Slender Man here …

Idaho is celebrating potato harvest. We grow em’ big here! I have sent this post card out as a joke

But the Big Idaho Potato Truck actually exists. It was built in 2012 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Idaho Potato Commission and is now on its fifth cross-country journey. Here’s a link to the Big Idaho Potato Truck. A couple of years ago the Big Idaho Potato Truck tried to get a selfie with the Statue of Liberty. The 12′ wide 72′ long truck was tugged out around Manhattan harbor by The Brooklyn barge company, Hughes Marine. At the barge’s closest pass, Lady Liberty was lost in the background. Here’s a link with a live video of the event.

Yeah, so this 6-ton Idaho Potato made a stop in Idaho Falls, this past Friday. We stopped by to check it out and tried to get a selfie with it. Pretty hard to get a selfie of a 6-ton Idaho potato on a flatbed truck. First I tried to capture a photo of David and Megan with the whole rig:

One of the drivers on the truck tour jumped in to help us:

And captured these photos:

According to the above link the potato on that truck:
Would take over 10,000 years to grow.
Weighs 6 tons (12,130 pounds), equalling 32,346 medium-sized Idaho® potatoes
Is 1,102 times heavier than the largest potato ever grown, which weighed 11 pounds.
Would take 2 years and 9 months to bake.
Would make 30,325 servings of mashed potatoes. Pass the gravy!
Would easily make over 1,500,000 average-sized french fries.

‘Whoopdee-friggin’-do,’ you say?

Well, did you know that the Big Idaho Potato Truck is escorting the Capitol Christmas Tree to Washington D.C. this year? Check out this link! An 80-foot Engelmann spruce chosen to be the U.S. Capitol Christmas Tree will travel from the Payette National Forest in Idaho to Washington, D.C. – Each year, the U.S. Forest Service cuts the so-called People’s Tree from a different national forest and displays it on the west lawn of the Capitol. Idaho last received the honor in 2003.

The tree will be cut Nov. 2, and its journey will launch on Dec. 4 with a celebration in McCall.

“Idaho is a national brand, and the potato coming out of Idaho will make the tree more famous than the tree by itself,” said Idaho Potato Commission President and CEO Frank Muir.

Now, isn’t Idaho a tad more famous now? You can follow the truck at potatotracker.com or call 844.bigidaho. I’m sure you’re gonna wanna meet that 80-foot Christmas Tree escorted by the Big Idaho Potato Truck somewhere on its cross-country route and try to get a selfie.

Tags: 2016 Capitol Christmas Tree, Great Big Idaho Potato Truck, Idaho potato harvest, Slender Man

This entry was posted on September 18, 2016 at 11:58 am and is filed under Fall, Idaho. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.