Firestorm

Ok, ok. This isn't meant to be a poor us post. But today, we've realized that our money-saving technique of not renting movies from Blockbuster subjects us to unknown horrors. First we stopped at the Corvallis library (yes, the site of our previous adventure) to see what movies they had. Nothing was left except French and Japanese foreign films. I passed on those and picked up The Corporation and an instructional guitar DVD for Aaron. However, we decided to pass on The Corporation in lieu of trying to find a TV movie. Unfortunately, we turned on the TV and the first thing we saw was on A&E. We really didn't want to watch it. We wanted to turn it off. But we couldn't. It was so bad...and yet, so good.

The beginning was compelling: two hikers, clearly college frat guys, are out in Yellowstone. They see some wildfires and start filming with their video camera. One guy says, dude, they're getting closer. Other guy says, no, this is sweet and keeps filming. Of course, they end up running from the fire, slow motion and all, until the fire takes them and they end up toast. Complete with Big Government-doesn't-want-to-fund-parks, young attractive fire expert and his smoldering (hehe) relationship with perky ranger, and the jerk park director who turns out to stand up for the park in the end, Firestorm: Last Stand at Yellowstone is REALLY BAD. But we've been watching it for two hours, making snide comments the whole time.

Oh wait, there's swelling music! The plan is working! Yay! (I won't give it away. You'll have to watch it yourself to see how they do it. Of course, they drew on some Boy Scout trick mentioned briefly in the beginning of the movie. Oops, sorry.)

I just don't understand how every movie can be so formulaic. I've found this before with every natural disaster movie I had to watch in Mr. Gordon's World Geography class junior year (the man thought Twister, Vertical Limit, and Dante's Peak counted as teaching us about geography).

Don't worry if you missed it, though. Even though tonight was the last showing, you can buy it online.




***

Well, this was a fitting end to another work week, I guess. I had some meetings today that went well. I don't even know how much I should post about my job here because it's very political (haha, right) and I wouldn't want someone to Google and find it. Really, though, forming this land trust is going to take a lot of work and talking to people. I'm quite excited for it. My next tasks are to prepare a report for the city's Housing and Community Development Committee to review for a resolution. I'm also preparing information for our Board of Directors on the options for the CLT. I've started contacting other CLTs around the country to ask for information and guidance and hopefully build relationships and networks that will help us out in the future. It's going to be especially important to talk with land trusts that didn't work to figure out what we can do to mitigate the possible barriers. Man, I'm using housing development language already. And it's the weekend!

Next week we have OMEN training in Troutdale, so that'll be a nice break. However it will make next Monday crunch time for me to put together the stuff I've got for the report so far.

Not sure what we're doing this weekend. Our loose plan is to camp tomorrow on Mary's Peak and then drive to the coast on Sunday morning, check that out, and come back. It all depends on whether we can get our tent which is currently sitting in a box in our manager's office.

Hopefully, there won't be any forest fires. Because God knows, according to Firestorm, the national parks service is horribly inept and has about 10 firefighters in all of Yellowstone who go out and dig ditches to try to stop the fires. I really hope that isn't true. Camping, here we come!

~Allison