My Birthday Weekend: Trip & Pictures

[robotech_master]

It was during the week before my birthday that my friend Sandy invited me over for dinner; he'd made dim sum (little shrimp dumplings) and egg rolls, and it was quite good. Being from the Bay Area, Sandy has definite Ideas about what Chinese food should be, and has been rather disappointed since moving to the Missouri area that Missouri Oriental food runs to thick, sweet sauces—as if the first Chinese restauranteurs in the area took note of the local cuisine that heavily features gravies of various kinds, and adapted their food to fit the local palate. It's funny; I had never before thought about there being regional differences in foreign food. Chinese was just…Chinese.

Anyway, he was aware that the coming weekend would be my birthday. For my previous birthday, he invited me over and made a birthday cake, complete with little SD Gundam figures on top. He suggested that we could celebrate it by taking a trip somewhere, such as to St. Louis or Kansas City, or—a trip he'd been planning for a while—to Tulsa to see the J.M. Davis museum. Then I suddenly recalled that one of my on-line friends, Mercedes Lackey (with whom I play City of Heroes and write the occasional odd CoH fanfic), lives in that area with her husband and other friends—and I'd been wanting an excuse to get down there and meet up with them for a while. So after checking with her to make sure it would be all right, and noting that the museum was open earlier Saturday than Sunday, a plan was made.

So, at 7:30 Saturday morning on March the 8th, Sandy came by and picked me up. I brought along with me my copy of the book Mapping the World of Harry Potter, a collection of essays edited by Mercedes Lackey, to be autographed. We stopped at the Braum's on Glenstone just south of Chestnut; I got a breakfast burrito and a large chocolate malt. I promptly spilled 90% of the malt all over the floor of Sandy's SUV, and we had to stop at a filling station to clean it up. Not the most auspicious beginning, but we hoped that this counted as our disaster for the trip, and the rest of it would be smooth sailing.

We headed west on I-44, to background music from Sandy's iPod. He played me "Doctor Who Girl" by Mitch Benn (utterly hilarious) and "David Duchovny" by Bree Sharp (amusing and a little disturbing). I read him the Mercedes Lackey essay from the book, "Harry Potter and the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Counselor." We made good time.

One little hitch we encountered: I had wanted Sandy to pick out a good made-in-Missouri wine before the trip, to take along as a gift for Misty. (He has more experience with the local wines than I, as most of the wine I drink comes from a plastic bladder inside a cardboard box.) Unfortunately, he apparently hadn't gotten the email I sent him about it, and hadn't done it—and I forgot to bring it up until we were already across the border in Oklahoma. We stopped at a tourist info station just outside of Miami, and they gave us directions to a local liquor store that might have such a thing, but we missed the one exit on the interstate and there wasn't another for twenty miles. Sandy assured me that any decent liquor store in Claremore or Tulsa would have a selection of regional wines—and while I was a little doubtful, I didn't want to waste time trying to find another such store on the way in.

We hit Claremore about 10-10:30ish, and went directly to the museum, where Sandy took a lot of photos (and I borrowed the camera and took a few myself). It's really amazing just how much incredible stuff there is in that museum; our photos barely scratched the surface. If you live in the area, you should make a trip down sometime yourself. I know that if I had the chance I'd visit it a lot more often.

At about 12:30 or so, we decided we'd seen enough for the time being, so pausing long enough to take each other's photos next to the tank in the parking lot, we sought out someplace to pick up that bottle of wine. A lady at a nearby grocery store pointed us in the direction of a shop that, if we had gone the opposite direction from the J.M. Davis museum than the grocery, we would have run right into: a wine and liquor store called "Spirits of 66." I admired the pun in the name, and noticed that Sandy was indeed right: there was a regional wine section, and they had wines from Stone Hill, a Missouri winery that was the largest winery in the country before Prohibition killed it in its original incarnation. There was a very nice wine there that I had even tried before, at Sandy's; it was just the ticket.

After that, we looked for a place to eat lunch. We found it in the form of "Cotton-Eyed Joe's Barbecue," which we spied from the wrong side of a railroad track and had to backtrack to reach. Sandy, who writes reviews of restaurants for the local paper, asked of the waitress the incisive question, what was the restaurant best known for. The answer turned out to be its ribs, and we decided to go with the "pork feast." When it arrived, it looked so impressive that Sandy was moved to run back out to the car and get his camera to take some pictures of it.

How was it? I won't say it's anywhere near the best 'cue I've ever had—the ribs were tender, but not really well-smoked—but it was a decent enough meal for two hungry travellers. And there were plenty of leftovers; I just had the last of them last night. We finished eating at about 2 p.m.

After that, we headed in to Tulsa. We had planned to visit the Will Rogers museum in addition to the J.M. Davis one, but I wasn't strongly attached to the idea, so when Sandy asked if we could skip it for this visit I was agreeable. (Sandy remarked that the road signs of Will Rogers, which showed his facial features without the border of his face—just his eyes, nose, and grinning mouth—looked rather creepy, kind of like Frank Gorshin from the '60s Batman series. Wish I had a photo.) Sandy had used Google Maps to find about eight different comic, game, or bookstores in the Tulsa metro area, and had plotted a "travelling salesman" route to hit each one. However, he had forgotten to label what each one was, so we would just have to go to the addresses and be surprised.

There were a couple of decent, and several not-so-decent shops. At one, I found a copy of the Comico Robotech: The Graphic Novel in a poly bag in near mint condition for $7. I snagged it. Another shop had Robotech Art III for $9, but since I had that one already I gave it a miss. By far the best/biggest of the stores was Gardner's Used Books (if I'm remembering the name right), which was a pretty decent-sized outfit, with a coffee shop and Mexican restaurant attached at either end. In fact, it's probably the only one of the shops I could really get behind visiting again. Though Sandy was enamored of one bookstore, which was a new bookstore with not just a coffee shop but an actual lunch counter in it. He remarked that such a place could do a pretty decent business if it were located near a college and stayed open late hours.

While engaged in the bookstore crawl, I called Misty Lackey and asked about plans to meet. They suggested a Mexican restaurant in Claremore, El Sharro's, and we were amenable. I called them again when we were on our way, and we got there around 6:30ish. Misty and her husband, artist Larry Dixon, soon arrived, and we ordered. On their recommendation, I had a dish of which I can no longer remember the name, but it was the Mexican version of a Philly cheesesteak sandwich, on a tortilla.

They were very genial dinner companions; they insisted on picking up the tab as a birthday present to me, and that wasn't the only present they brought. In addition to autographing my Harry Potter essays book, they presented each of us with books and proceeded to autograph them for us. I didn't record what Sandy got, but mine were The Phoenix Unchained, Reserved for the Cat, and And Less Than Kind (hardcover), and The Chrome Borne (paperback). Then they invited us out to their place, and we became two of very few outsiders to be allowed to visit "High Flight."

Their house has a remarkable history to it, which I'll allow them to tell in their own words:

Misty: "High Flight is the weirdest house in Oklahoma. Once upon a time there were two brothers named Kelsey. One was a contractor, the other a dentist. The contractor saw this ad for concrete dome houses and thought they were pretty cool, and tornado proof. He talked his brother into letting him build one. Well, Kelsey the dentist got into some trouble with the law and lost everything, including the house. A contractor bought it and thought, it may be neat, but people drive by this thing and say `That's weird.' To sell it, he figured he had to make it look more like a house. So he put an octagonal wooden-frame shell over the existing concrete dome, sort of like putting a little cup inside of a big cup. However, in order to put that kind of shell over a dome that's already 2-1/2 stories tall, he had to make the shell-5 1/2 stories tall. Little bitty short-eared owls and screech owls come in and hunt for sparrows inside the shell, and we can actually go spelunking in our own house."

Larry: "It's a very strange sensation to go between the dome and the shell, which are actually structurally independent of each other. You can climb up the side of the dome, stand on top of the house, and look up another few stories to the top of the shell. It's full of little secret passageways and hidden rooms and stuff like that."

We didn't get to see "secret passageways and hidden rooms," nor did we got much of a view of the exterior since it was kind of dark, but I did get to meet Misty's "featured children," who were considerably louder than anyone who has not been around such birds would expect. Larry showed Sandy some other things, too, though I didn't get to see those since it was while I was visiting with the birds. Well, that just means I'll have more to see next visit.

Larry then showed us the stuffed and mounted eagle that was digitally photographed from all angles to serve as the model for the eagles in the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies, then the four of us spent an hour or so sitting in his studio chatting. Then I noticed it was getting late, especially given that Daylight Messing-Up-Your-Body-Clock-For-No-Very-Good-Reason Time was starting the next day and my parents were coming up for my birthday, and so after I got my photo taken with Misty and Ikaika the Cockatoo, we reluctantly bid farewell and hit the road for home, promising to come again someday when we could spend more time.

On the way back, I read aloud to Sandy the Websnark essay eulogizing Gary Gygax that I'd brought up in conversation earlier, when Sandy had remarked how sad it was that, in the inverse of that quote about evil living on and good being buried with people, there is a tendency to forget the bad stuff and talk up the good stuff of someone recently departed. Sandy allowed as it was a quite good essay, and could probably be professionally published if it were tightened up some.

After a brief stop at a roadside rest stop to use the restroom and grab a drink from a vending machine, we rolled into Springfield at about 2 a.m. I IM'd Misty that we'd gotten home safely, and crashed.

Sunday marked a bit of an oddity for me. I was reminded of an anecdote I saw in a Readers Digest "Humor in Uniform" column, about a sailor who was having a really bad few days. "But at least tomorrow's my birthday," he told himself. "They can't take that away from me." But during the night, the ship he was on crossed the International Date Line—and so when he woke up, it was the day after his birthday.

My birthday was a little like that, this year. Due to Daylight Giving-You-A-Big-Headache Time taking effect that morning, it was one hour shorter than usual. Still, my parents came up, we went out to eat at the Century Buffet, and then we watched the Wallace & Gromit "Cracking Contraption" shorts before they had to leave.

All in all, not a bad weekend.