things i like...

1) A good stylist who gives me a good haircut, consistently. My stylist just moved from one salon to another, and I didn't spend 0.1 seconds trying to figure out whether to be loyal to the salon or the stylist. Curly hair ain't easy, y'all!

2) Ice. It soothes aching muscles, it brings coffee down to a comfy summer drinking temperature, it makes my dogs scrabble across my kitchen floor chasing its frictionless fleeting form. No end to the hilarity OR usefulness of ice.

3) Growing and nurturing things. Fish. Plants. Dogs. Marriages. Well, just the one marriage, but you get the idea. I can't bake, but I can make stuff grow!

4) Swimming. I like the way it feels when I'm suspended in the water. I like the way water slides over my skin. I don't know if I'll still be so in love with swimming this winter when the weather is cold, but for now, I lurve it.

5) Air Conditioning. The south didn't get civilized until this handy invention became commonplace. I wouldn't live in the cold, cold north unless I was paid to, and even then it would have to be sums of money in direct proportion to the volume of snow I have to move in the course of my daily life. But without air conditioning? I would not so much enjoy all the easy access I have to sunshine, beaches, quality mexican food, and year-round motorcycle weather.

count those blessings, y'all!

avalanche

The words have been stuck in my head for weeks now. They carom off the inside of my skull, scream through treetops raising birds and ripping up great rooster tails of leaves. They bound across rooftops and cityscapes, ping against shiny panes of glass, the windows of my soul, but they don't break through. They scream into mountaintops laden with a snowpack of emotions, threatening to start an avalanche, a tumbling solid wall of cold feeling, ripping through the valley and coming out my fingertips onto the keys. But the avalanche doesn't come. These words cannot illuminate, not with the soft glow of a candle nor the acrid flash of lightning. They cannot organize themselves, even as much as the wind can organize enough sharp left turns to make a dust devil. So I'm left with cold, dark, disorganized and gusty words, wreaking chaos in my head. Contained chaos, with no escape, no avalanche, no tornado, no explosive release. Maybe that's why my dreams for the past few days have been all about spittle-flying screaming fits of anger, or furious searches for items that maddeningly refuse to be found. I can't get the words to coalesce into so much as a cloud, and all I have to say is that I have nothing to say.

More good stuff than I can stand

I was going to log on this morning and complain about the weather. In an ironic way, of course, because my nasty 40-degree day probably sounds deliciously warm to people living in Ottawa right about now, or blessedly cool to those in Sydney. So even though I was chained to a desk all week while it was lovely out, and the weekend is going to be chill and dreary, I've got a new perspective.

My wife made sufganiyot (aka: Jelly Doughnuts). Yeah, I'm easy to please. But, as I may have mentioned, I'm not the baking type. I've never had a baking teacher (love ya, mom!) who did anything more complicated than cake mix or cookie dough. My grandmothers both made cobblers and pies and bread and stuff like that, but I was probably out trapping squirrels or chasing snakes while they were doing it. It honestly never occurred to me that you could get a jelly doughnut out of your kitchen. I just figured it was one of those things that required industrial jelly-injection technology, as featured on Mr. Rogers, and it was beyond the reach of mere mortals. (Didn't you love that bit about how stuff got made on Mr. Rogers? They have whole TV shows of just those bits these days, God bless cable.)

So my wife volunteered to make sufganiyot for the rugby club's post-game dinner today. We've been puttering in the kitchen since yesterday afternoon, at this very task. Jelly injection technology suffers complete failure when you try to use "real fruit preserves" and a whole strawberry gets stuck in the little injection tip. Also, powdered sugar has its own special kind of food coloring called "petal dust." Who knew?

Anyway, who cares about gray weather when you have homemade, jelly-filled, petal-dusted, hand-kneaded, rugby-ball-shaped, doughy goodness on your counter? I've gotta go take care of my part of this operation: quality control!

GUM. BO.

yesterday dawned uncharacteristically cloudy and cold for a texas spring. from a low of 50 to a high of 65? this is our winter weather, not our april weather! so, i did the only thing a right-thinking person could do to console herself in such cold temperatures. i made gumbo. i made yummy, dark brown roux, added andouille sausage (because bratwurst does not a good gumbo make!), peppers, onions, okra, mushrooms, and - at the very last possible minute - sweet texas gulf shrimp. yum!!!

the last time i did this, i left it all in my big soup pot and heated the whole mess up whenever i wanted leftovers. this had the unfortunate consequence of overcooking the delicate okra and shrimp and so it was a bit ... mushy ... after a few days. this time, i packed it up in small tubs and froze it. of course, we ate it for dinner last night, but as anyone who's made stew or casserole or sauce knows, the best time to eat it is the day after cooking. after all those lovely ingredients have had time to really SOCIALIZE, get to know each other, converse, buy each other a drink, make out, mingle themselves inextricably, smoke a cigarette... the next morning when they're all putting their socks back on and promising to call each other is really when you should be setting out your bowl and spoon. i'm looking forward to dinner tonight in ways i'm afraid i cannot put into words. forgive me if i drool.

thanks to rose for the lovely suggestion... and for shopping for all the bits with me ... and for not murdering me when i interjected, "crap! i have no celery!" while standing before a nearly-done roux at the stove last night.

wow.

i don't know what to say about this but that it's just so pretty it makes my heart ache... i shiver listening to it, and not because it's 40 and raining in "hot"lanta. i've always loved this song, i've just never loved a recording of it before.


for laura h: The song is "Hallelujah" by Lenoard Cohen.
swiped from the youtube poster:
Canadian indie singer-songwriter Allison Crowe's uniquely potent interpretation is heard on her album, "Tidings".

whoever sent me this birthday gift is FIRED!!!

snow sucks. snow on my birthday sucks even more. the only consolation is that at least i work from home now so i don't have to go out in it. oh, and i hear that snow on your birthday is good luck. i really hope that proves to be true.

i totally forgot to pull my plants in at the beginning of this freeze, but last night i decided they couldn't get any MORE frozen than they already were, so i left them out to get snowed on. so now i've got little green icicles growing up from pots in my back yard. poor things, they really deserve better mothering than i give them. the iris will be fine, i know. the palm? maybe not so much.

the OTHER consolation is that my girlfriend is taking me out for dinner tonight in her 4-wheel drive pickup and we're going to celebrate with some yummy food. 4-wheel drive and sensible driving guarantee that we'll get there and back in one piece. my girlfriend's company ensures that i'll have a celebratory evening, in spite of the funk i'm in over this whole frozen-housebound thing.

until then, i return you to your regularly scheduled snow. bleh.

oh, yeah! i forgot my other HappyThing... i finally got my secondary fish tank set up. i have moved my fishes from their big tank downstairs that was getting WAY too much direct sunlight (and was thusly growing big, nasty, slimy mats of algae in places where my algae-eater couldn't go) to their cozier tank upstairs. that took all of MLK day, basically. well, that and some WoW business, cuz i'm a big ol' geek...

anyway, that freed me up to move the big tank across the room - because you don't want to move a fishtank while it's full, and i didn't even have to try it to learn that! in its new spot, it will get a very small amount of indirect sunlight. so i've cleaned all the fish and snail poop out of it and filled it with chlorine-free water. i'm going to hook up the filter and airlines tonight and start cycling it (growing ammonia-eating bacteria) so that i can get some fish in there with my next paycheck. yippee! this is going to be my artsy "concept" tank in which all the fish are black, white, or black-and-white. i may even move some of the zebra danios (bet you can tell from the name what color they are, huh?) from my upstairs tank into the downstairs one so that i can add some more of the colorful tetras upstairs, now that the snail poop is under control. maybe i'll even go get a buddy for joey, the clown.

all food, all the time!

wow. i'm about to do one of those things that i hate to read in other blogs, so if you're not into food, you can just skip this post. i'm NOT going to give you a boring list of what i've eaten over the last three days, but i AM going to rave about some of the yummy stuff that's passed across my plate.

for one thing, i should preface this by saying that i am (for reasons unknown) experiencing a massive potato craving right now. and by "right now" i mean the last three months. i finally (after talking rose into two orders of large fries at every rest stop between dallas and victoria and college station) bought a bag of taters for the house. so i've cooked 'em at every meal since. roasted with onions and garlic, mashed with sour cream and cheese, simmered in veggie stock and herbs - we've done almost every decent thing you can do with a potato. and the craving is STILL HERE. oh, yeah, you're probably wondering about simple baked potatoes? i made her take me to jason's deli for those.

and here's a funny aside for you about jason's deli. they boast in their menu that they've got 1 lb. baked potatoes. now, to put that in perspective, your average "sack of potatoes" is a 5 lb. sack. so a 1 lb. potato is well nigh as big as yo' head. large. potato. ain't no small potatoes goin' on at jason's. we went there for dinner one wintry evening because i was craving potatoes, duh. and once i got way down in my baked potato entree, i noticed something curious. although it was presented as a single humongous potato topped with broccoli cheese soup, i was actually eating TWO potatoes of lesser size which had been semi-cleverly spliced together by cutting a round socket into the end of one potato so the other would fit into it. i can only imagine the enraged argument that took place between the kitchen manager and the potato supplier when these small potatoes were presented and the kitchen manager was trying to figure out how to meet the demand for the advertised 1 lb. potatoes when he was clearly dealing with 1/2 lb. potatoes in the delivery. the apparent solution stumbled upon by the clever kitchen manager was the jason's deli potato-splice.

potatoes aside, last night we went for a potluck/games night to celebrate lohri (an indian new year's sort of festival, as i understand). we didn't actually do much that was lohri-specific, so i don't know anything more about the holiday than i did yesterday noon. however, we did have a fantastic potluck dinner. the hostess had made some sort of yummy tomato-ey potatoes (yum!!!) and chicken dish to be served over indian rice. i brought (of course) more potatoes! i was in carb-craving heaven all night long. the co-host served a divine (from scratch) chocolate-raspberry cake for which he had cooked ACTUAL RASPBERRIES into a glaze. i was commenting that i don't ordinarily like raspberry-flavored foods, but that i was very much (*wipe crumb from lip*) enjoying this particular dish, when he set me straight on the raspberry-flavored vs. ACTUAL RASPBERRY nature of the cake. that settles it. i LOVE raspberries, i LOATHE artificial raspberry flavoring. those of you who make me desserts - take note! oh, and before i get much older, i need to learn how to make that tomato-ey potatoes and chicken stuff.

we played cranium after dinner which some of you may recognize as my favorite game of all time, evar. and my team won. (yea!) a good time was had by all, but honorable mention performances go to yours truly for an oscar-worthy stage fall (i was attempting to convey through charades the phrase "around-the-world trip" and was apparently quite convincing in the tripping act); my team-mate for almost, but-not-quite, acting out "winnie the pooh"; t for a delightfully-hummed rendition of "It's Rainin' Men!"; and the hostess for asking our dear art-major friend why she was drawing so poorly before recalling that it was one of those odd questions in cranium where you have to draw out a clue for your team WITH YOUR EYES CLOSED.

tonight, i had "jewish soul food" for dinner. i have no idea how to spell "choulnt" in english, but that's my best guess. it's sorta like roast and sorta like stew and is entirely YUMMY! i had seconds, and because it had both potatoes (yea!) AND barley, my carb cravings for the night were satisfied. it was absolutely ideal food, of the sort my dad would describe as "sticks to yer ribs", for this icy/sleety freezing weather we're having.

y'all stay safe and warm. i'm off to heat up a leftover mashed potato. mmmm!

fresnosnow

note that in the title, i've cleverly morphed the name of my current location with the newsy item "no snow". thus, you may assume that i'm relatively much happier than i was last week in wyoming. yea! no snow here! when i mentioned my bliss over this fact to my class, one of the students said that it HAD snowed here recently - in 2000. :) yup. i love cities where they recall the last snowfall merely by the year in which it occurred. that's heavenly.

i would like it noted, for the record, that i have a new standard for rapid reproduction in the animal kingdom. it is not, gentle readers, as you would surmise from pop culture reference, the rabbit. it is, contrarily, the snail. do you think, honestly, that i could fit one more comma-delimited aside into this paragraph?

seriously, yos. i refer you to my previous post on the snail issue as regards my fishtank here. well, apparently, i never did post about the snails the first time. i've just searched through all my archives for a record of a post on the bonus snails when they were discovered, and such has not been found. since i mentioned them, however, they have been multiplying at an ALARMING pace. i've now got so many snails that they're literally clogging the filter. some of the wee ones got sucked into the filter and just lived in there for a while. they come out every night to feast on my driftwood and poop. snail poop doesn't sound like it would be a significant problem, but when they reproduce faster than rabbits, it really is. and, unlike rabbits, there are few natural hazards in the fish tank environment that these little poopers have to survive. i had no idea what to do about the little menaces! they don't need partners to reproduce all the time. for those of you in shocked disbelief, see here where wiki informs you (as it did me) of this True Fact (TM, pat pend). i did a little research, and discovered that some fish will eat them. so i went out and got a couple of those. unfortunately, one of them croaked. i blame the snail poop for polluting the water. anyway, the snails are reproducing at a rate which has no simile or metaphor. they're way faster than rabbits, i assure you. hopefully, the one remaining snail-eating fish will help with the snail decimation project.

i'll keep you posted, because i know you're dying to know.

i HATE snow.

just in case i've never mentioned it, i hate snow. i don't hate snow angels, i only hate snowballs when i'm in a bad mood, and i actually adore it as a medium for skiing. furthermore, it makes for a nice decorative feel on an otherwise bland landscape. so, why do i hate snow? i'll tell you...

i hate snow because you've gotta scrape the shit off your windshield. that means that while your coffee is sitting warm and dry in a cupholder inside your car, YOU are standing out in the weather that produced the snow (i.e.: cold, wet weather) with a ridiculous plastic tool in your hand, scraping the icy shell off your car so that you can see out to drive. the main reason i tolerate snowballs is that i can, with reasonable precaution, avoid most of them. if i'm in the mood for them, however, i can indulge. NOT SO WITH WINDSHIELD SCRAPING. good mood or bad, running late or on time (and let's not kid ourselves about how often i am the latter), healthy or ill... snow has to be scraped off the windshield.

seriously, yo. i'm in Gillette, WY, the self-proclaimed Energy Capital of the Nation, on account of their cold-bed methane mining operations. couldn't they convert just a little bit of that methane into a giant blowdrier, just like is used to give you a spotless finish at the car wash, but with a little heat added? you just roll your car through the dryer and voila! the ice is melted away and the water blown off so it doesn't re-freeze when you park your car for a day at work. i think those should be installed on all hotels in Gillette, WY, and i mean forthwith.

rotten travel day, whiner post

today:

• i woke up on time, but after only 3 hours of sleep, i'm not sure whether that's a plus or a minus.
  
• i forgot to pack shoes that go with the socks i packed for my business trip. or i forgot to pack socks to go with the shoes i packed. see the above item for possible explanations not utilizing the term "airhead"
  
• i found TWO dead fish in my tank. one i kinda expected. he was sickly yesterday. the other one surprised me and indicates that i've got a LOT of work to do on my tank when i get home.
  
• i got caught in two traffic snarls and some construction trying to drop off my dog at my sister's house. yea metroplex!
  
• i got a speeding ticket on my way to the airport. harrumph. is it a plus that irving police are so concerned with getting you off to the airport after they ticket you that they have electronic signature pads and portable ticket printers, just like the UPS guy?
  
• my customary parking lot was full and i know from experience that i can't exit the airport to try the "remote" lot without paying the $2 passthru toll. plus, i was running late and didn't have time for that. see all of the above items for explanation not utilizing language i don't want to type out in front of my mother. (hi, mom!)
  
• i wound up parking on the roof of the infield parking zone for $17/day and parked at the wrong end of the building. i am NOT an airhead!
  
• by the time i'd found parking and walked all the way to the opposite end of the terminal, i'd missed the check-in window for my flight
  

on the plus side, i did manage to get to my destination without too terribly much trouble after that. i had a delightful walk across the frozen tarmac in denver that only involved a small amount of ice. the flight was on a prop-driven plane from denver to gillette, but i like roller-coasters and i have a strong stomach. plus, i didn't eat much today so there wasn't anything to feel nauseous about. although i flew standby, i got good seats on both my planes and (here's the important part) my luggage made it with me. in fact, when i got here, i was at the rent car counter getting my paperwork done while waiting for luggage to arrive. the crowd picked the "belt" clean so fast that the luggage guy actually found me and brought me my bag while i was standing at the counter. i have "belt" in quotes, not because i don't know how to use them, but because calling the luggage claim thing here a "belt" in the sense you're used to from places like denver, chicago, or dallas is a semantic stretch of india-rubber proportions. it's more like a metallic ramp that they back a truck up to and toss your stuff on so that it slides down onto the floor.

in other good news, since it gets too cold and dark here to fly out after 4 pm, i'll be flying out on saturday morning after my class at 6:30 am. the upside to a small airport is that you don't have to arrive two hours early to check in for your flight. the plane only holds maybe 20 souls, counting the crew. and believe me, they're only running one flight at a time.

here i am...

So, I'm in Ohio. It's cold, but not bitterly so. I was chatting with a coworker today who was here just last week when it was 20 degrees and snowing. I'm grateful for 40 degrees and overcast, thank you.

Things I learned while spending too much time at the airport yesterday: When reviewing one's past through scotch-colored glasses, one should maintain a sense of humor. When one is not fond of talking about one's feelings, one should not expect to find a lot of detail regarding them, even in one's own journal. In fact, one should expect a two page entry to summarize three months of holidays in a page and devote the next entirely to the process of selecting and installing a door in one's home. Or, better yet, to summarize two months of depression thusly, "well, that sucked." just before one spends two pages writing out a list of upcoming expenses. that, ladies and gentlemen, is my journal. i have whole YEARS that are completely unrecorded in it (i'm serious) and then i've got seemingly trivial parts of my life emblazoned in five-page-long daily entries.

sure, i do some of that stuff online, but i really need to get after that pen-and-paper journalling on a more regular basis. you can just hush now about the irregularity with which i update this space.

finally, on reflection, i think i told three stories at dinner tonight that were about seasickness or some other really un-dinner-ly conversation topic. i'm not sure what got into me. i usually manage to avoid such, but in my defense, i wasn't the only one.

Madness Apace

Well, I got over the strep and I got home from Denver, and I slept for a week straight. I've been doing double tutoring duty lately, and I'm proud of both of my students. That makes the late nights and shortage of blog time easier to swallow.

I had a trade show here in my hometown for a week, and now I've got a week of downtime to prepare for a class I'm taking in Ohio. Round on the outside, Hi in the middle... I've never been. I'd be lying if I said I was looking forward to going that far north in November, so I won't say it.

I don't even know where Ohio is. Hang on, lemme pop off to Google Earth for a second...

Oh, crap! Thanks for hanging around, by the way. It's on Lake Michigan. Have you ever watched Spongebob Squarepants? Do you know that there's a squirrel living in Bikini Bottom with Spongebob and Gary and Squidward and the crew? She wears a diving suit full of air and has a biodome with an oak tree in it for her house. When Spongebob visits her, he wears a diving suit full of water. I think I want one of those full of warm Texas air for my visit to Ohio.

when NyQuil is your friend...

... you probably need to get out and make more friends. As soon as the coughing, hacking, sore throat, not-sleeping business is over at any rate.

I'm trying to teach a class in Denver this week. I lost my voice in the first two hours. I'm staying on DayQuil and NyQuil to keep the less socially acceptable symptoms at bay, but even diner waitresses are "poor thing"ing me right now on the basis of the voice. Cross your fingers that this passes quickly. It's been a hexed experience ever since I tried to catch my flight last night, only to discover that the travel office had booked the flight for tonight. My class started at 8:30 this morning, so I was lucky enough to make standby on the first flight out this morning and get here relatively close to the appointed hour. The software I'm teaching wasn't installed on the computers in the room and the student manuals were still packed in shipping boxes when I arrived. I sacrificed a cheap pair of nail clippers to the Packing Tape Idols and managed to loose enough manuals to conduct the class. Still, teaching a software class without software is a feat beyond even my humble talents. Oh, yeah, and at the end of the day when I left the training facility in a 35 degree rain, my rental car wouldn't start. I must've turned the lights to Parking instead of all the way off when I got out of it this morning. Hell, maybe I just left the darn things on all day and never even attempted to shut 'em off. The car was beeping and blinking and alerting me throughout the drive from the airport. I only figured out what about half the alarms were for, I just tuned out the rest. I probably did the same thing with that "you left your lights on, you nitwit" alarm, too.

back from connecticut

well, i'm back home safe and sound from connecticut. the road signage continued to be woefully inadequate at almost all times. the interstate freeways themselves, because they are under federal guidelines, were adequately marked. however, getting onto them from the state and local roads was occasionally a very dicey game.

yesterday was the gay pride parade in dallas and i rode my motorcycle. i'd affixed a texas flag and a us/pride flag to the back. my girlfriend had attached a us flag and a banner for her motorcycle club, so we got to lead the group out with our flag display. i picked up a passenger. she was some cute kid who had turned 19 just the day before and had ALWAYS wanted to ride on a motorcycle, etc. her girlfriend rode along as a passenger with my girlfriend, so that was some nice symmetry. it was slick and rainy and there was junk all over the street that various floats ahead of us had tried to toss at the crowd and then missed. how you could throw and miss a wall of people 4 feet from you, i don't know. but i assure you, there was plenty of flotsam atop the oil slick atop the water-slick streets. it made some of those parade maneuvers a bit scary. it was my first time carrying a passenger, and i was terrified that i might drop the bike in a turn or hit a string of beads just as i was braking down a hill and slide right into the antique car in front of me. anyway, i survived. and photos seem to indicate i was smiling:

that's me out front looking at the camera. in the vee between my flagpoles you can see my girlfriend laughing out loud at something. now, back to the trash on the street question - how can you throw something at a crowd like that and MISS?!?!
here's another picture. it's a little blurry, but it's got a much better angle:
it rained on us all day long, which was a mixed blessing. the temperature was cooler than our daytime average, but then... we were all wearing wet underwear and socks. really, nothing dampens my mood quite like wet socks and underwear. hunger and cold can make me really cranky, but for general mood funk - wet socks and underwear are the ultimate trigger.

the photographer noted that she'd never seen my hair braided up like that before. it's really just gotten long enough for that quite recently, since i'm growing it out again after having donated it to Locks Of Love. i think i've only worn it braided 4 times this year. braiding my own hair is one of those phenomenally useful skills i picked up along the way rather by accident and didn't appreciate the value of until well after the fact. the other two skills i count in that way are typing and the "roll step".

i rebelled against taking typing when my mom "suggested" it my freshman year of high school. "but moooooom! i'm not going to be a secretary, i don't need typing!" you almost have to be a freshman in high school with no understanding of how an office works to comprehend how much scorn i heaped on the words 'secretary' and 'typing'. needless to say, i've used my typing skills nearly every day since then and couldn't be more grateful to my mother for insisting that i learn.

the "roll step" is something you learn in the marching band. it's a way of placing your heel and of rolling your weight along the outside of your foot as you walk so you don't jounce along and break your teeth off with the mouthpiece of your musical instrument. if you like coffee, and have ever tried to walk back to your desk with a hot mugful, you realize the application immediately. until i made the ridiculous mistake of trying to wear women's dress shoes that matched my business attire better than they matched my lifestyle, i never spilled hot coffee on my fingers as i passed through the office. the "roll step" requires a reasonably flexibly-soled shoe with a relatively low heel on it. a glorious open-toed black franco santo with a 2" heel on it does NOT work with the roll step.

the hair braiding thing i owe to the air force academy. my hair is a giant mop which is not, under even the best of conditions, militarily uniform. nobody has the time or inclination to braid their roommate's hair every day, so my roommate showed me basically how she did her own and left me to adapt the technique for myself. i practiced a lot while reading history texts and eventually my hair got long enough and i got good enough. again, it's something i've used so often since then that i can't begin to imagine getting through my rugby career, my surveying jobs, or my professional career as an alarm-over-sleeper without it.

I'm not QUITE dead yet...

But i AM a gigantic slacker. I've been on the road, from Dallas to Medicine Hat, Alberta, to Watertown, Connecticut passing through Charlotte, NC (good crabcakes in the airport there!) and Hartford, CT, too. As I've been so busy LIVING my life, I've not sat down and taken the time to WRITE about it. So I'm attempting to make amends. I'm actually teaching a class at this very moment, but the students are occupied working on the exercises I've assigned, so I might manage to sneak a quick update in before I have to get back to work.

And that was about it. Class finished their exercises and now we're off to lunch. Ah, well.

For the record: road signage in Connecticut is thoroughly inadequate. temperature fluctuations of 30 degrees celsius in a travel day are hard to plan/pack for. road food is bad for you.

Two Rides, Two Myriad Feelings.

So, this weekend I'm off in godson-visiting land for birthday parties. Courteously enough, the second one arrived much earlier than he was expected, but only a week (and some years) after the first. So that means I can knock out both of their parties in one visit, at least for as long as their parents are willing to host two parties in one weekend. This makes my life a little easier, and I hope they continue the 6-year tradition. This is the first year that I recall the parties being here and not up in grandparent-land, so it's a change in the routine, but none too worrisome.

That said, one thing it means is that I'm not on the bike this weekend. I could've probably gotten down here with all the gifts (I'm a sucker for these boys) stuffed in my saddlebags or tied onto the luggage racks, except for one item. I'm delivering a 9000-lb towing capacity winch to my cousin, who happens to live in godson-land. The winch and its accessories and all the birthday gifts and my stuff would've been hard to fit on the bike. The winch probably weighs 70 pounds by itself. Lest you accuse me of making stuff up, I judge this because it's got more heft than the oldest godson, who proudly informed me this evening when I hoisted him for a hug that he weighs "about 64 pounds". If he's 64, the winch is more, and so as not to be found guilty of exaggeration, I'll say it's 70. That, and the bike is in the shop getting a 24k mile maintenance done. It only has 13k miles, but the 24k is basically a "replace everything, check everything else" sort of service. Since I bought the bike used and am uncertain of her maintenance history, I'm buying the peace of mind and hopefully averting any looming mechanical disasters.

Now last weekend, my girlfriend and I went on two good rides. The two rides were very different and each left me with different feelings and maybe different lessons. I'm nothing but typical when it comes to taking my own sweet lesbian time to "process" things, so it took me a week to wax philosophical about my riding. Sue me.

Saturday we spent the whole day painting. I'm about to move in, and before we add furniture to the house, we thought we'd get the remodeling finished. It's much easier to motivate yourself to a home-improvement task when that does NOT entail moving furniture. So Saturday evening, we sat back and looked at the gorgeous, freshly-painted walls and patted ourselves on the back. In so doing, we espied our watches and realized that if we showered and dressed in a low-maintenance way, we could still make the evening ride of the VRCC out to Sanger for good catfish. Yea, I don't have to cook! So, we showered up, geared up, gassed up, and rode to the meeting place. There we stood alone, looking at thunderclouds, for about 10 minutes. The ride leader got there just on time, and we waited just a few to see if anyone else would turn up. They didn't, so we had a group of 3 riding out.

I wish I had a camera. I wish I'd had the mental clarity to use my phone camera. I wish I had enough miles on me to feel comfortable snapping a photo from the saddle. Lots of wishes, none of which produce the pixels for you. Sorry. I'll just have to try to explain how wonderful the sky looked. We were riding west through the farm- and ranch-lands between north Dallas and Sanger. The isolated thundershowers that had rolled in over the course of the afternoon had dropped the temperature 20 degrees, at least, so it was hovering around a heaven-sent 80 degrees. With the wind of our passage, that was perfectly comfortable riding weather. The sky before us and to our left was still threatening rain, and all along the horizon there were smudges of black clouds. In places, you could see the horizon and the yellowing sky beyond, in places the clouds were sporting the slanted tails that obscured the horizon and signalled rain. There was even some jaunty lightning spread around, lest we take this for a gentle spring shower. Parts of Dallas and Tarrant county were having glorious, turbulent, summer thunderboomers. Ahead and to our right, the sun was setting. It was dipping down and tucking in among the spent rainclouds that were off to their retirement in Oklahoma, like lifelong Texans who believe those ridiculous stories of mythical lands with 4 distinct seasons. "We're off to see SNOW!" they said, and moved north, never to be seen again.

The road was plenty twisty, there were some hair-raising 30-mph "twisties" and some more gentle and well-banked "sweepers" to take on. It was my first group ride and my first ride on anything that could be called "twisties". I was a little nervous in places, but I think I managed to keep up alright. In any case, I had a delightful time. We rode on, enjoying the cool, the scenery, the lightshow, and the fresh scent of rangeland after a rain, until we got to the restaurant. By then it was just coming on full dark, so our timing was perfect. We ate good fried catfish, and I introduced my girlfriend to her first Fried Green Tomatoes. She liked 'em, by the way, so I can keep her. She also recently passed her first "pickled okra" experience, so I'm working on ferretting out of her which other Southern Classics she's missed out on so that I can get her fully immersed in the folk experience of the South before she gets too old to teach her any new tricks. *Wink* We came home by the highway, and it was pleasant, but not as memorable as the ride out had been. We made it home late and exhausted, but full and happy.

The second ride was totally different, although it traversed some of the same country and even started and ended on the same highway. We woke up at the crack of noon on Sunday and decided that we were hungry and wanted to ride to breakfast. Since one pancake house is as good as another and we were going to ride anyway, we picked one as far away as we could envision wanting to go. Oklahoma. Okay, not exactly in Oklahoma, but close. Unfortunately, dire pangs of hunger gripped us about an hour or so out of the metroplex, and being the flexible people we are, we decided to cut east toward our planned route and just scare up some food along the way. Well, it took us a couple of small towns before we finally found one that had any open food options on a Sunday afternoon. We ended up at a family-run grocery in Van Alstyne (after quizzing a local) as it was basically the only thing open that didn't involve turning around and riding up to Denison. There, a very kindly older woman made us sandwiches from her deli counter, served on WonderBread, and delivered in those little sandwich baggies with the fold-over top that I haven't seen since grade school. She even taped them shut with scotch tape and tagged them with her price-tag gun. It was precious! I assume her grandson was working the cash register, based on a little family resemblance and some age-based math. Anyway, there had been no rainstorms that day to drop the temperature, so by the time we made it into the grocery (serving Van Alstyne for 50 years!) I was ready to kiss the first person with their hands on a cold drink. And lo, in the door of the store was taped a hand-lettered sign which read "Cold GatorAde". It probably would've shocked the register kid even more than it would've shocked my girlfriend, so I refrained from actually kissing him. I did, however, down a quart of gatorade in record time. And polished off my sandwich.

At the store, we had a rather odd encounter with a bearded biker on a Yamaha V-Star who was wearing the largest silver Harley-Davidson ring I've ever seen in my life. He was an engaging character, and if anyone has a chance to participate in the Blue Ridge Poker Run, benefitting underprivileged kids in Blue Ridge who want to play team sports, I think you oughta join. The guy seemed to know his business, and I bet the ride would be great. After Van Alstyne, we bumped on through Princeton and across what's left of Lake Lavon (reduce your water use! it's not a hoax!) and after wrangling with a slightly misleading map we managed to get headed on home. Again, the day was full of good twisty roads and good company. I did a MUCH better job of maintaining something that looked like "formation" than I had the night before. Still, toward the end, when I got tired, I lagged. I lagged enough that some trollop in a Cavalier was able to pull between me and my girlfriend on 75 as we rode south back into Dallas. I was incensed! I realized quickly, though, that we were exiting in 1/2 mi. and that it was my own dumb fault for lagging enough to let someone squeeze in.

Anyway, the feeling after the first ride was relief that I'd not been overconfident. I've done a bit of reading about "first rides" particularly by women riders and the authors seemed to be a lot more scared than I was. Strike that. The authors seemed to be petrified with terror by comparison. It got so I was wondering if I was overconfident. I think I wasn't. I tend naturally not to be afraid of anything, and I logically knew that even if I had a worst-case scenario and went off the road that there would be folks there to help me out. Aside from that, if I were to get lost from the group, I know enough about maps and FM roads to get msyelf back to the highway and home. Nothing could have gone wrong that I couldn't handle, so there was nothing to fear. With that attitude, it was merely a technical matter of mastering throttle control and lean angle in the twisties.

The feeling after the second ride was much harder to identify. I think that's because it's a mixed bag of feelings and that no one feeling predominates. I was relieved to get back home. We were out for about 5 hours, most of that hungry and thirsty, and all of it hot. There was also some rueful "trust your route leader" mixed in there. We had a mishap with a poorly-marked map and then a couple of moments where we weren't certain which way to go. By then, my flexibility was low and I just wanted home, and I muttered a bit about stopping to check the map and not flying by the seats of our collective pants. Of course, the irony that the map had led us astray the first time did not occur until my brain was air conditioned in the aftermath of the ride. Naturally, the ride leader got us home by the safest and fastest route from the point at which we decided that that's what we wanted. I need to have a little more faith my girlfriend's ability to get the job done her way instead of mine. There was also some bubbling confidence in my ability to keep up with the pace of the ride. My girlfriend is quite an experienced rider, and I'm ... well ... NOT. She complimented me on how I handled my bike and that just made me glow from top to bottom. Finally, there was a desire to get back out there and DO IT AGAIN. I rolled over the 1000 mile mark while we were out there in the boonies, and I want to experience that feeling over and over again for miles and miles to come. So I hope to see you out there in the wind somewhere. I'll be the one grinning. beaming like a loon.

Brody Brings the Ice

So, this weekend was the second time my friend, Brody, has visited me in Fort Worth. This is also the second time that Fort Worth has completely iced over, necessitating the use of sand trucks and ice scrapers for and among the populace. Coincidence? I think not.

We managed to have fun, anyway. We tried to trek across the metroplex to visit Ikea in Frisco on Saturday. However, just as we reached downtown Fort Worth on the freeway, we were halted by a wall of vehicles coming to the most rapid halts they could manage on the slick roads. There was a sand truck turned perpendicular to the flow of traffic and there were an array of flashy-wirly lights in the thick of things. Ordinarily, I'd be completely thrown by the combination of whirly and flashy things, but I managed to avert my eyes long enough to make an exit off the freeway before we were enmeshed in the traffic snarl. We had a minor adventure on our exit because it involved some unsanded bridges and some Texans who don't understand that the appropriate approach to such things is neither your accelerator nor your brake, and that a 2-second following distance is insufficient when the driving surface is ICE. Seriously, dudes, the Tundra in front of us was turned sideways relative to the direction of his movement and i think he might have bounced off the barrier wall more than once.

So, we ended up staying home, making stew and chili con queso, and watching movies. A great time! I must say that the movie Ray, while it is a terrific story and was very well made, is LOOOOOOONNNNNNGGGGGGGG. Longer than is comfortable to sit still for, really. We inadvertently watched the "Extended Version" which probably only added 10 minutes, at most, to the film. I was up and down several times while watching the film to stir the stew and let Molly out to potty (aside: if your dog can't hold it through the movie, the movie is DEFINITELY too long) and I still felt a little stir-crazy and chairbound when it ended.

The other film we watched was The Woodsman. It was intense. It deals with the struggle of a convicted pedophile (who apparently got off on smelling little girls' hair) to reintegrate into society. It's hard to find housing, hard to find a job, hard to find friends. In the end, the character finds redemption, but it's uncertain up until the very last moment whether he will or not. According to Brody, it's a very realistic portrayal of the sex offenders' struggle to be "normal". Some other areas of the film (like the love story and the family reconciliation story) suffer, just because the movie can't be long enough to treat everything with the same depth. All in all, intense, but worth watching.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, my fish survived me leaving them while I was in Austin last weekend. The weekend feeder tablet did the trick, apparently, because there were no floating fish skeletons waiting for me when I returned. We're into the third week of tank cycling now, and I'm researching other fish I can keep. I was really keen on one kind called the Black Molly, for the obvious and cheesy reason that it goes with my dog, Molly, a black lab. However, they have a water temperature incompatibility with the Zebra Danios I've got in the tank right now, so I think I'm going to look at keeping tetras. They come in a number of shiny color variations which I think would be fun, and they're supposedly not too hard to keep alive. This is good! The only thing I worry about is that if I get a bunch of them, I'll become mesmerized by their shiny flashiness every time I walk past the tank...