Checksum Arcanius

I have been running very low on my disposable contacts for quite some time now. Were it not for the extraordinary lifetime of the ones I am currently using, I would certainly be out by now. Billed as two week disposables, I have actually been wearing these for much longer – I don’t know exactly how long, but certainly over six months, and, I believe, perhaps even more than a year. I have one pair left, and I decided I really probably should move along, since I cannot rely on these guys to hold out forever. Past ones have torn, been lost, began irritating my eyes, and so on. In fact, my right contact is beginning to irritate my eye sometimes, but so far I have usually been able to get it feeling ok again after a while. Nevertheless, all signs point to my need to move along.

So today, I began checking out where to get some more. I went to 1800contacts.com, and was thrilled to find that I could simply enter in the same information contained on the bottom on my current contacts box and get some more. But there was a catch: I needed to enter my eye doctor’s info. The problem this created for me is that I haven’t seen an optomitrist in a long time – so long that the only doctor I’ve ever seen moved to a new private practice. My old prescription is still working fine, and I don’t see any particular reason to have another check-up at this time. But why do they need the doctor’s info at all? When I checked with other contact-delivery stores, the story was the same. All wanted to talk to the doc that I hadn’t spoken to in 3 years. Why would they need that info?

A little link titled “Why do we need your birthday?” led to more information:

A Federal Law passed in February 2004 requires us to verify your prescription with your eye care provider. Many eye care providers use your birthday to find your prescription information.

When did contacts become a controlled substance? Who will be harmed if I order the incorrect contacts? What are their addictive properties? What possible cause could there be to require contact distributors to check in with an eye doctor?

And the simple answer is, of course, that some group of optomirists lobbied to make it so. By requiring that eye doctors be in the loop, they entrenched their own position, making it illegal for people to take them out of the loop. They became another layer of government-enforced oligarchy.

The end result is that I don’t know if I’ll ever get new contacts without jumping through a series of ridiculous hoops to get there. All due to a government that has replaced a love of liberty with a subtle – but very real – tyranny.

Thanks to everyone who made this trip great – especially to the Cramers in WDC and Maneesh in NYC. Also of great help were the John and Jess, the wonderful Maine couple, two guys at the sandwhich shop in New Hampshire, Brian, the Hartford driver, all the smoking hot sandwhich shop ladies, and Scott for putting up with my wild antics. Its time for us to bizord the subizzle. See you all at or after 10:30 today.

While I have been posting a few tidbits here and there , it doesn’t really give an accurate perception of what has transpired since that last real update on the trip.

We left the Thompson Public Library some four hours after we got there. After I posted we were used the internet connection there to look up possible routes to speed the journey into New York where we hoped to recooperate Scott’s knee while staying with Maneesh, who has a place on Manhattan. We hit up a pizza place for lunch, then we were planning on heading out of town to find a place to pitch a tent on the side of the road. It began to rain and I started pushing for us to get moving in case it got worse. Right then, a man pulled up and asked us what we were up to. We told him the story and mentioned that we were looking for a place to camp. He directed us to the West Thompson Lake Recreation area, where the Army Corps of Engineers maintains a nice and inexpensive ($12/night is much nicer than $25-$35) camping place. We pulled in as it got dark and for the first time, had the joy of setting up camp in the dark. That obsticle was more than outweighed, however, by the fact that we were also staying at our first established campground of the trip, with a nearby restroom, shower, water spicket, and about 20 RVs full of nice old people.

The next morning, June 29th, we decided we’d stay another day, but we were low on food so while Scott rested the knee, I biked, unloaded, into the nearby Putnam to buy some groceries. We ate well that night, but we didn’t end up using too many of those groceries because the next day, Scott’s birthday, we decided that with the condition of Scott’s knee, we were not going to be able to keep up a worthwhile pace, and would only be doing more damage. So the focus of the trip changed from biking to ending the biking portion of the trip, and salvaging some time on Scott’s first experience of the East Coast.

On the 30th, we turned inland, taking route 40 west towards Hartford. It was by far the most greuling portion of the trip – the undulating, unending hills stretched all the way to Hartford, some 50 miles away. I tried to take as much weight as I could manage from Scott, and ended up with a bike so back-heavy that it balanced at its seat when I lifted it to test its weight. Still, Scott had the harder job of pedaling with mostly one leg as we climbed the hills and descended into the valleys again and again. I was surprised by how much Connecticut reminded me of more hilly Louisiana, with each valley hiding a swamp. And while climbs were torturous at times, the downhill portions led to some of the more exhillerating, albeit short, experiences of the trip.

It turns out that there are no cities worth mentioning directly between Thompson and Hartford until you get to Manchester about 45 miles later and just a few miles from the center of Hartford. We stayed the night at a very nice (by our standards) Super 8 motel there in Manchester, did some laundry, and planned how to finalize the trip the next day. Well, thats what we were going to, but no firm plan really emerged, so we headed out the next day thinking we’d simply go into Hartford, find a bike shop near a UPS store, walk a short distance to the train station, and head south to Washington DC, where we had arrangements to stay with some of my relatives for the 4th of July weekend.

However, it turns out that Hartford has no bike shops. In fact, they are spread quite evenly all around Hartford, among the many subburbs. So while we easily found the train station, we had to bike another 8 miles or so to a bike shop. Where we ended up, Newington Bike, turned out to be the perfect place. The staff members there were extremely helpful, giving us water, bike boxes, and helping us ship the bikes home. Afterwards, however, we were left 8 miles away from the train station without a way to make it back to Hartford, the bikes in boxes, the taxis saying we had to wait at least an hour, zero knowledge of the bus system, and the last train leaving in about an hour.

At this critical juncture, a family exited Newington Bike and struck up a conversation with us. They had, like most of the people we met along the way, gone on a bike tour in their past. They were preparing for another, now that their twin boys had reached 16. Like so many people that had been nice to us along the way, they offered us a ride to the train station. Their intervention got us there on time – and we got on the train for Washington DC at 7:20 pm.

Stay tuned for the next segment, “Adventures in DC.”

I recieved a call from my mother moments ago informing me that the big packet arrived from the University of Washington today. As opposed to last year’s small letter, this means that I was accepted into the school.

Contrary to what UW admissions initially told me, I did not need to get into a major to gain transfer admission to the university. So I am in the school, but not in the Bioengineering department yet. This may be for the best because in reality, I’m still torn between computer engineering and bioengineering. I will have to put in more research to figure out which I really want to pursue, or if its worth the extra work to do both.

Here in New York, except for the heat, and the humidity, and the trash everywhere, and the sky-high prices of renting, it seems like an ok place to be.

Today, after walking around Manhattan for a while, where we saw Wall Street and the World Trade Center site, Scott and I took the subway out to Brooklyn, where we walked down the street to a park. There was literally not a another white person anywhere in entire one-mile round trip we took. Its two whole different worlds all here in the same city.

Thanks to Dan Marsh, Tim Montague, and my dad, SilverFir.net is fully recovered from what I can only surmise was a series of remodel-related power outages that caused harm to the filesystem. I would suggest that silverfir.net users check the integrity of their data, if they care about such things.

I am sitting in the Thompson Public Library, accessing the internet for the first time in about a week and a half. It is nice to be typing on a computer again. I didn’t really notice how much I was missing it.

I kept a paper journal of a good part of the trip so far, so I will transcribe that below. But for those that don’t want to read all of that, here is the summary:

Scott and I boarded a Greyhound bus in Seattle on Friday, June 17th. Only though much pleading and careful watching did our bikes make it all the way to Portland, Maine with us three and a half days later. We assembled our bikes between 10:00pm and midnight behind the closed bus depot, then rode to the Motel, where the real adventrue began. After working our way down Maine into New Hampshire for a couple of days and battling four flat tires, Scott hurt his knee, and we had to take it easy for a couple of days. We headed off again and passed though Massachusetts (sp?) before crossing into Connecticut today.

Now, the long version: [Denotes addition – not in original journal]
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