San Francisco

once we had ridden across all the deserts, we then had to ride through the winds that keep them so dry. california has some un-freakin-believable winds. we didn't quite make it all the way over to the pacific coast highway (Highway 1) but we did ride the Historic Camino Real (Highway 101) which parallels the 1 on the eastern side of the Coast Range. it's not as twisty, or as pretty, but it's faster for it. as an added bonus and a surprise, one of our friends from bakersfield finagled a little time off from work and joined us in the morning for our ride out to the 101. we enjoyed a fantastic twisty ride with gorgeous and unique scenery, a local guide, good eats, and great company. here we are, taking pictures of each other taking pictures:


the winds made the 101 just as exciting as the pch, i promise! i've heard other people tell stories of riding down the freeway with the bike leaned over like it was in a turn just to balance out the wind. and really, deep down, i thought they were exaggerating. motorcyclists are just a skosh shy of fishermen for dramatizing things.

so there i was, riding my behemoth of a bike up the 101 freeway in california, and i had to lean her over to keep her flying straight. it was bizarre. my friend (in the pic just above) who was riding with us from phoenix to san francisco has half as much engine as i do, and with her passenger, she had twice the load. her engine was maxed out, so we slowed down a bit below the ambient speed. even then, the wind made handling the bike an electrifying experience. and i mean that literally, in the sense that every single one of my hairs was standing on end... and my senses were crackling with the sights and sounds and smells... and the hot, dry air made me feel baked and chilled at once... i was aware of every truck on both sides of the highway... and all the passenger cars jockeying to get past the trucks and each other... and the yawning golden valleys on either side of the road waiting to eat me up if i leaned too far or not far enough, misjudged the wind, or misread a car's intention. by the time we hit the traffic jam rolling into san jose, i was ready for a break.

we did just almost require a tow truck to get my girlfriend past the exit to Cupertino, CA, where her beloved mac HQ is located.

then, after about 10 minutes sitting still on the outskirts of san jose in our black safety gear... we decided that we'd had enough of a break from the wind and we began my initiation into the most simultaneously civilized and barbaric practice in motorcycling: Lane Sharing, aka: Lane Splitting. in california, while this practice is not specifically allowed by law, it's not illegal; and as a practical matter, if you want to get anywhere in the gridlocked traffic so common there, you have to do it. so basically, a 4 lane freeway becomes a 7-lane freeway, with bikes running between the cars. at very low speeds this is tolerably safe, even if it is white-knuckling to the biker. studies have shown that it actually improves cyclist safety because it cuts down on the oh-so-common rear end collision that occurs when a distracted rush-hour driver fails to see the bike because they're looking for something car-sized. ask anyone who has ridden long in california, and they'll tell you all about their personal safety rules (usually a speed above which they won't try it) and the number of mirrors they've dinked or the times they thought OMGIMGONNADIE! i had been leading up to that point, but i declined the privilege during this exercise. and, even with my behemoth of a bike, i made it. we stayed reasonably close together, went just a few miles an hour faster than traffic, and when the traffic started moving consistently, we just slid back into a gap in the regularly-scheduled lane space. i'm not sure whether i liked it or not. it was definitely a mixed experience, but that's what i said about snow-skiing before i learned how to stop. well, i knew one way to stop, but that was basically to throw myself into the snow, and the results made for a very MIXED experience of skiing. it was always exciting, but not always fun.

this was us in california, one of my favorite pictures from the trip:

Alamogordo, Tucson, Phoenix, Bakersfield, and San Francisco

for the next three days of our trip, we weren't tourists. we were riders. we just pounded out the interstate miles gettin' where we had to go. at our first gas stop out of New Mexico, we pulled off the freeway to get gas and gatorade (the staples of desert riding!) the convenience store operator was also a rider himself and had a fabulous route suggestion that would save us time and miles getting into Phoenix, it bypassed Tucson and covered some prettier miles on the old US highway route. ordinarily, we would both have leapt on the opportunity to get off the freeway, save time, save miles, and see Something Pretty. unfortunately, rose was experiencing an intermittent microphone problem with her CB, and that meant we couldn't take the cool route because we had to go to Tucson.

Tucson, you see, is the headquarters for J&M, the manufacturers of our CB units. so we glued our wheels to the interstate and pushed on into Tucson. it was hot as blazes, but the kind folks at J&M fixed the microphone free of charge and got us back on the road quickly. they even gave us good directions that bypassed the nasty interstate construction and traffic logjam attendant thereon. the directions were perfect, too. as we approached the freeway on-ramp from the city street, we could clearly see TRAFFIC NOT MOVING on the freeway. we figured we had been led astray. we'd have to sit in NOT MOVING TRAFFIC for a couple of miles until we got out of town and out of the construction. i'm not sure i can adequately express how miserable NOT MOVING TRAFFIC is when you're in the desert, straddling a 6-cylinder engine, wearing a black jacket, black gloves, black helmet, and deprived of any mechanism of air cooling aside from the hot exhaust coming out the tailpipes of the NOT MOVING TRAFFIC in front of you. but lo, as we accelerated up the ramp, it became clear to us that the on-ramp joined the freeway about 50 feet past the end of the construction zone. the traffic behind us was still NOT MOVING. we, on the other hand, were MOVING. yea!

we stayed over with friends in Maricopa, AZ which is just south of Phoenix. the next day we stopped off at a really unique little diner in Gila Bend, AZ for breakfast. The place was called "The Space Age Diner" and it was all decorated up to make you feel like you were in a space ship. Or, like you were in what people in the 50's thought space ships would be like, really. It paid tribute to all sorts of space stuff, both the historical and the fictional, the decor was fun and funky and the waitress kept the coffee coming. my girlfriend, the NASA groupie, loved it. i couldn't ask for more, especially at that hour of the morning. i'm literally rendered mute without coffee, and if i'm not i should be.

one of the other staples of desert riding is Getting Up At The Crack Of Dawn.
at that point in the day, the temps are relatively low but you can still see well enough to ride safely. so we did. those of you who know me know that i am more the Getting Up At The Crack Of Noon sort of girl. so mornings are all a little blurry in my head, but they mostly involve lots of coffee and me squinting at the horizon and asking "is that what sunrise looks like?"

sometimes the answer was "no, that's a power plant" or "no, that's a big truck with lots of yellow lights". eventually, i'd get it right. the sun would come up, and then it would be, as my friends in college liked to say "Africa Hot."

so, when you're powering out the miles on the interstate, there's not much to see. it goes like this: "oh, look! a... well, i'm not sure what it was. it went by so fast." but we played silly motorcycle games and we took pictures of each other. so for three days, the ride looked like this:
Riding with friends


Me on the Valk


Africa Hot

hey, look! my new niece!


welcome, baby girl. just wait 'til you can reach the passenger pegs. you're gonna LOVE motorcycles. (sis: i'm just kidding!)

in other news, richmond is nice. by the time they were done delaying my flight last night and got me out of town, we were several hours off schedule. the plane was mostly full of boy scouts on their way home from philmont scout ranch in cimarron, nm. i have a soft spot for them because almost all of my uncles were boy scouts, rising to the top rank of eagle scout. my grandmother used to look on in amusement when my sisters and i pulled out the scout manuals for guidance on how to tie each other up with clotheslines. she did occasionally comment that the eagle scouts in question would probably be horrified to know that we had learned their secret code language and their special knots.

anyway, the practical implication of a plane full of boy scouts, instead of the usual sunday night road warriors, is that by the time the beverage cart gets back to you in row 28, the only drinks left are diet soda and bloody mary mix. if i'd had any cash on me, i'd have gotten the real thing. as it was, i made do with my virgin bloody mary. probably for the best, since i didn't get to my room until 2 am. if you're going to drink that late at night, you need to drink so much that you don't notice the tiredness. unfortunately, that usually disposes the rent car guy very poorly to handing you any of his precious stock of keys. it's not usually too bad, getting a cab to your hotel, but then you have to get up in the morning and figure out how to get to work.

waiting on the weather

i was supposed to fly out for richmond tonight at 6:35. it is now 7:05, and my flight has been delayed a third time, to 8:00 PM. eventually, i'll get out of dfw tonight. (see, i'm still an optimist!) and then i've got a class to teach.

so i'm sitting at the airport waiting on the weather delays to clear out, so the regularly scheduled flights can resume. i wonder if the dudes responsible for scheduling these things ever get frustrated by such persistent rains. knowing that it's just going to rain and scramble these flights, i wonder if they have trouble motivating themselves to make up a schedule in the first place?

anyway, i had a marvelous weekend visiting my godsons, until the last hour and a half. the children took complete leave of their senses and abandoned all their usually publicly acceptable manners and acted like heathens at lunch. i've been out to eat with them about a bazillion times, and it's usually pleasant. the kids wheedle a bit about what and how much to eat, they struggle with the instruction to sit upright and mostly still, but they do it. i don't know what got into 'em today, but they weren't fun to hang out with at lunch. which was not a great way to wrap up the weekend, but that's what i got.

Carlsbad, NM

the roadtrip was originally scheduled to begin at o-dark-thirty on tuesday. but then i decided that i could work a crammed half-day on monday so that we could get a little closer to our tuesday goal (El Paso, or thereabouts) on our first day. Dallas to El Paso is a hella long day, so getting part of the way there on Monday would spare us a Hellacious Tuesday.



so the new plan was to leave at noon on monday, ride as far as we could or until we lost the light, and then start at o-dark-thirty on tuesday from a better launching point (which ended up being Abilene). but then, since we our tuesday was going to be easy-peasy instead of hella-hard, we decided to add an extra stop into the trip. and thus, we set our GPS for a waypoint of carlsbad, nm.



carlsbad is an unreasonably hot place in the chihuahuan desert (where there are NO dogs, wtf?!?!?) that lets you enter an unreasonably cold place 750 ft below the floor of the chihuahuan desert.

 
when you arrive at carlsbad caverns national park in an air conditioned car, you have difficulty arriving in the appropriate clothing to enter the cave. when you arrive on a motorcycle, outfitted for riding across the desert, you have no chance.

rose had never been to the caverns, and i had only been once when i was about 12 years old. i remembered a lot of the more lurid details of the place (rocks that look like nekkid bits! teehee!)
 
  but did not remember how cold it was. and it's a deceptive cold, because it's wet. and of course, you enter it from the desert, which is the epitome of dry heat. so at first, it feels all welcoming and cool and refreshing and great. then you notice the goose bumps, then the shivering sets in, and then your jaw locks up and you die huddled on a bench trying to warm yourself on a fluorescent bulb just enough to call for help. srsly. rose claims that she had no such trouble with the atmosphere in the cave, but i think she was just playing tough. damn that butch-girl ethic!

still, once i got back to the surface and thawed out my jaw muscles, i was able to tell rose that i really enjoyed the cave and would love to go back some day for a tour of the parts we didn't get to see. but only if i get to bring my sweater. and lest i make it sound like a bad place to go, the cavern really was quite beautiful. it's a natural marvel and i would love to go back for more. in a sweater.

i have a niece!

a new one, that is. she was born last night (and thus now shares a birthday with her two older sisters) and is named Rebecca Faith. she's 9 lbs and change. congrats to my sister and my brother-in-law and to the new big sisters. i'll get a picture up here as soon as one comes available.

13 days, 7 states, 4500 miles, and my hiney hurts.

so, after i whacked off all my hair, i set off across all the deserts on my motorcycle, along with my girlfriend. we actually had a good deal of fun doing this. i'm going to try to make a series of short posts regarding the various legs of our trip, but this one is a starter and a summary:

Deserts we crossed: (see Desert USA for a basic map)

• Chihuahuan Desert
• Trans-Pecos Desert
• Sonoran Desert
  • Arizona Upland
  • Borrego Desert
  • Colorado Desert (It's in California. WTF?)
• Mojave Desert
• Northern Mojave
• Southern Mojave
• Great Basin Desert
• Sevier Desert
• Painted Desert (by the broadest definition)

Mountain ranges we crossed*:

• New Mexico
• Antelope Ridge
• Guadalupe Mts
• Sacramento Mts
• San Andreas Mts
• Cedar Mts (as nearly as I can tell, this was the Continental Divide)
• Arizona
• Peloncillo Mts
• Dos Cabezas Mts
• Dragoon Mts
• Picacho Mts
• Maricopa Mts
• Gila Bend Mts
• Plomosa Mts
• Dome Rock Mts
• California
• Chuckwalla Mts
• Little San Bernardino Mts
• San Gabriel Mts
• Tehachapi Mts
• Temblor Range
• Caliente Range
• Coast Ranges
• Sierra Nevada
• Cathedral Range
• Nevada
• White Mts
• Silver Peak Range
• Monte Cristo Range
• Toquima Range
• Monitor Range
• Sulphur Spring Range
• Pancake Range
• Grant Range
• Egan Range
• Schell Creek Range
• Snake Range
• Utah
• Mountain Home Range
• Confusion Range
• Fish Springs Range
• Coal Cliffs
• San Rafael Swell
• Roan Cliffs
• Colorado
• Rocky Mountains (Continental Divide, again)
• Sawatch Range
• Sangre de Cristo Mts

This list format makes it seem like we crossed a lot more mountains in Nevada than we did in Colorado. The funny thing is, Colorado was ALL mountains and Nevada was mostly high-altitude desert with mountainous accents here and there. But since the whole of western Colorado is one gigantic mountain range, it collapses into "Rocky Mountains" and leaves Nevada looking like the Mountain Champion State. Not so. Hopefully, some of our pictures will bear that out, as I get them posted in the coming days. Oh, and we didn't cross any mountains in Texas. Texas has a few mountains, but they're only in the part that's south of New Mexico, and we didn't get there.

Miles we rode:

• Day 1 - Dallas to Abilene, TX: 345
• Day 2 - to Alamogordo, NM: 344
• Day 3 - to Maricopa, AZ: 457
• Day 4 - to Bakersfield, CA: 550
• Day 5 - to San Francisco, CA: 336
• Days 6-8 - farting around the Bay Area: 274
• Day 8 - to Jamestown, CA: 138
• Day 9 - to Ely, NV: 483
• Day 10 - to Green River, UT: 333
• Day 11 - to Salida, CO: 387
• Day 12 - to Dalhart, TX: 347
• Day 13 - back to Dallas: 467

National parks we visited:

• Carlsbad Caverns
• Yosemite
• Great Basin
• Arches

Other unusual sights/attractions:

• San Francisco Gay Pride Festival and Parade
• Space Age Cafe in Gila Bend, AZ
• Artesa Winery in Napa, CA
• Flying tour of Point Reyes National Seashore and San Andreas Fault, CA
• Royal Gorge Bridge in Cañon City, CO
• Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, TX

* As far as I can tell. Mountain ranges, especially as they're rendered on road maps, don't have crisply-defined boundaries.

i got a haircut!

every few years, i like to grow my hair out. i grow it out until it's as long as i can stand it to get, and then i whack it off short and start all over again. i usually start growing it out about the time the phrase "yes, i know this is the women's room" starts to roll off my tongue even before the woman coming through the door can try to tell me i'm in the wrong place. unusually short hair, unusually long legs... sometimes the first impression is wrong. and eventually, that gets old.
it takes me about two years to grow my hair out to 12 inches, and i know that because the last time i got my hair cut was when my nieces were in the NICU. they're turning two this month, so that's how long my hair's been growing. i wanted to cut it before my monster road trip because my mop of hair is NOT something one wants to deal with on a two week motorcycle adventure. it's especially not something one wants to wear in the desert, and as i already mentioned, i was crossing ALL of them. (seriously: the chihuahua, the sonora, the mojave, the great basin. ALL the deserts)

it's the second time i've done this and donated the hair, but probably the 4th time i've done the drastic hair-chopping thing. this time, instead of just taking a borrowed pet trimmer to my own head, i got rose's sister to cut my hair for me. she did a great job! i like the process, i like the way it makes me feel lighter in body and spirit, but i really like knowing that all that time in maintenance and upkeep isn't just going into the trash. so, since 1 pic = 1k words, i'll just say that i donated the hair to Locks of Love and let you read the story below...

before the cut!

a foot of hair...

i'm ready. are you?

cleanup. with STYLE...

ta-daaa! high speed, low drag, easy-maintenance hair for the desert...

CB mania. Breaker 4. Over.

I have been riding my motorcycle for almost a year now. In celebration, and because I'm stupid, I'm riding it out to San Francisco next week. Why does that make me stupid, you might ask? San Francisco is a perfectly lovely place to go and ride motorcycles. The answer is because I'm starting in Dallas. And if you recall your American Geography lessons from elementary school, everything east of the Sierra Nevada range in California until you get to ... well ... Dallas is part of the Great American Desert. So, yeah, what that means is that I'm going on a very long ride through deserts and mountains to end up in San Francisco. Mark Twain never said that "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco," but he could have. In fact, he implied the same thing about Paris, France in an exchange once and the famous quote morphed from there. Still, the fact remains that San Francisco has cold weather, and lots of it, and often even in the summertime it is a chilly place to be. Blame it on all the leftover seawater they get from "The Deadliest Catch", I guess.

In preparation for the ride, and by way of spending the cash-ola that I got for Christmas, I decided to get a comms system for my bike. This means that when my girlfriend and I are riding together, we can actually exchange phrases like "I'm out of gas." or "Did you see the hair growing out that guy's ears?!?!" Usually, we have to wait until we get to the next gas stop to swap such observations. Further, we've been on a long and mostly unsuccessful hunt for a way to play our iPods that doesn't interfere with our ability to communicate important facts and get each other's attention. The solution, it turns out, is a J&M CB system. This lets us talk to each other and many of the other vehicles on the road, which is useful if you ever get tired of your entire 60 GB music library and need other forms of entertainment. It's also very, very helpful if you're trying to figure out what the weather and traffic are like a few miles up the road and whether you should pull over or try to make the next town. So we bought the system for me (Rose already had one for her bike) and let it sit on our kitchen table for about a month while we mulled over the options for installing it.

We ended up doing the installation ourselves, and it turned out better than I expected. Rose had to re-install hers because she'd had a malfunction in her driver/passenger intercom system and had sent it in for service. Hers had been sitting on our dining room table for three or four months while we mulled the installation options. There's nothing like "the last minute" to get you motivated to tackle these sorts of projects, eh? I was having a particularly difficult week with asthma and allergies and a navel-gazing moody spell, so I let Rose handle most of the installation work herself. I did put the antenna mount on my bike (which involved the use of power tools and was thus quite good for my moody psyche) but after that, I pretty much stayed out of Harm's Way - aka: The Garage. I have to say that she did one helluva job, and that is unalloyed praise.

But... (sorry, honey, i have to post this part. it's too funny.)

When she called me to come out for the first test broadcast of my new system, I came out to the garage and held the microphone and mashed the button and transmitted. Yea! It worked! And then I noted that the bike wasn't "on". None of the lights were on, none of the instrument panels were glowing. She didn't even have the keys in the bike! Problem: if the accessory will run without the key in the bike, it can drain your battery while you are sleeping with the keys on your nightstand. This problem is easily surmounted if you're methodical and ALWAYS turn everything off, but it's a Disaster Waiting To Happen when you're easily distracted (oooh! shiny thing!) and forget to turn off the accessories sometimes. You can guess which of the aforementioned cases applies to me.

The logical thing to do at this point was to pick up the manual and see what it said about installation. And I know my girlfriend NEVER reads the manual. It's a part of her life philosophy that she developed while working hel(l)pdesks. So, on page 3, in fine print, in the third item of a numbered list, was the instruction that you should power the thing from a switched circuit on the bike, or better yet from a fuse-enabled accessory terminal. Well, I just happen to have one of those! I installed it so that the Mobile Dog Unit could have taillights. Some day, I swear I'll write about that. Anyway, I took the covers off and moved the power wire from the positive battery terminal (where she had connected it) to the accessory terminal so that it would only allow the CB to power on when the bike was on. Yea! And lest I make myself sound all fancy and knowledgeable about this stuff while bagging on my girlfriend, let me admit here and now that it took a bit of trial and error to find the right port on the accessory terminal. I didn't get it right the first time, and I had to cut off all the wire ties I'd used in my first run at it and re-route everything. You can bet I tested the wiring setup before applying any wire ties in the second run. Anyway, with the wiring fault corrected, I was happy with the installation and I was forgiving of my girlfriend because (after all) the important instruction was pretty well buried.

Then, I happened to be tidying up after the installation, and when I got to the little nest-like pile of tools, spare bits, empty water bottles, and dirty spoons that seems to accumulate wherever my girlfriend works for more than 2 hours, I discovered that there was a Quick Start Guide to the installation. And then the forgiveness EVAPORATED INSTANTLY. It might have even FLASH BOILED, it went so fast. In LARGE BOLD TEXT on the quick start guide, was the instruction "Do not EVER connect this accessory DIRECTLY to the BATTERY!" Yeah. So it's a good thing I read the manual, eh? My mom figured that out about 25 years and two Barbie Dream Houses ago, of course. I've been the Designated Instruction Reader in my household for as long as I can remember.

walky man, and tampa

so, i promised a photo of the canadian walky man forever ago, but my phone was roaming the whole time i was in canada, so i could never upload the image. i remembered to upload it last week two weeks ago while i was in missouri, but then i ran out of time at the airport and didn't actually post it here.

so, without further ado, the SUPER JAUNTY canadian walky man:

i think he looks a lot perkier than the standard issue american walky man. maybe it's just me. i mean, he has feet! and he's shouldering bravely into the wind!

and in yet another bathroom weirdness post, i leave you with the following message that was printed on paper and taped up in the bathroom stalls of the Tampa Municipal Building:

Ladies, in consideration of ours please cover before disregard products in** can.

Now, the obvious flaw here is that "can" is a euphemism for toilet, but those of you who've ever had to plunger a tampon out of a ladies' room in your day know what they're trying to say. The next problem, which you'd have had to be there to appreciate, is that where i typed the ** there was white-out on this sign. Let me say that again: THERE WAS WHITE-OUT ON THIS SIGN. I was so curious that i turned the paper over to see if I could make out what they'd decided was so inappropriate that they had to white it out. Turns out the word "in" originally read "into". This set me to giggling. In two lines of text so grossly grammatically incorrect, they'd decided that "into" was the wrong preposition, and "in" should be used instead. The remaining corrections are left as an exercise for the reader, if you can bear to think about it any longer.

travel roundup - jeffcity, mo

i just now am sitting in the airport in kansas city. it's not all that large an airport, and it's not all that fancy. but i'm in the admiral's club, enjoying my comfy chair and the fact that the bartender brings the drinks to me, and it could be a LOT worse. again, tonight, with the dallas weather and me being lucky: this is probably the fourth time this year that i've been scheduled on the one and only flight that is actually leaving for dallas because the weather has caused all the others to be cancelled. i guess that's the hidden blessing in the fact that i almost always end up on the last plane of the night. usually, by the time my flight is scheduled to land in dallas, the afternoon thundershowers have been robbed of their fuel by the setting of the sun, and so my flight is able to land.

whew. i really didn't want to spend the night in kansas city. getting here has already been an adventure, and all the adventure i need for a while. my flying day on the way here very nearly took over the top spot as my worst travel day ever. but it managed not to, and for that i'm grateful. the bullet-list of BadThings (tm, pat pend) that happened to me on my way out here:

• I missed my flight out and got redirected through St. Louis
• The TSA inspectors in Dallas decided that my hair gel might be in a container larger than the allowed 3.4 oz.
• The TSA inspectors in Dallas decided that my hair gel might be a threat to national security since it was in an unlabeled bottle and might not even BE hair gel
• The TSA inspectors in Dallas decided (after long deliberation) to throw away my hair gel and my Downy Wrinkle Releaser (the wonder drug that works wonders for the ironing-averse)
• The Dallas ticket agent who re-routed me through St. Louis neglected to change my second-leg ticket, so it still said I was flying from Kansas City when I was clearly standing in St. Louis.
• The delay caused by unraveling the Kansas/St. Louis conundrum caused me to check in so late that I was pulled aside for super-special seekrit sequiriti screening. At least those TSA agents were nice.
• The airplane from St. Louis to Columbia, MO seats TWO ACROSS. Not two on either side of the aisle, but TWO ACROSS the whole plane; it's tiny.
• The Enterprise desk in Columbia lost my reservation.
• The Enterprise employee was not at the desk for 30 minutes, so I didn't know he'd lost my reservation until I finally tracked down his manager with my cell phone.
• The desk clerk in my hotel SSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHH'd me while I was in the lobby talking on the cell phone about my travel misadventures. I think she took offense at the f-bomb I dropped regarding my hair gel.
• THE TSA THREW AWAY MY HAIR GEL!!! it was in a 3 oz. bottle, in a quart-sized plastic bag. clearly, they are haters of teh curleez.

the good things that happened?

• i got pizza and cookies for dinner.
• the hotel had NOT lost my reservation.

and now, in spite of the evil weather that's coming on... i think i'm going to end up on a plane bound for dallas tonight. i had to drive up to the airport instead of flying back here on the tiny plane from Columbia. the weather in Columbia was threatening, and they tend to cancel flights on those tiny planes for much less weather than it takes to cancel a big jet flight. i had the time to drive up, and it was more appealing than sitting in Columbia on the hard plastic chairs for four hours to find out they were cancelling my flight. i actually got to the Kansas City airport before i'd have arrived if I'd waited for the flight in Columbia to take me. plus, they don't cancel the freeway for light rain, so i was guaranteed to get there, barring the usual highway travel perils befalling me.

and here's something funny for you... the airport bathrooms in Columbia, MO (where they have one gate and everyone waits outside security because they don't open it until the plane lands) were a helluva lot nicer than the ones in Minneapolis/St. Paul. in Columbia, there were self-flushing toilets and automated paper towel dispensers. the place was clean and smelled not unprofessional.

travel notes and coincidences

so i'm at the chili's too in minneapolis/st. paul airport. and i managed to sweet talk my waitress into placing an order for me off the lunch menu even though i arrived during breakfast hours. that was good, because i was none to excited about a breakfast burrito from chili's and i really didn't want to pay $9 for a cup of yogurt and a plastic tub of cereal. i don't mind so much paying $9 for hot food.

while i was eating, i decided to use the washroom. that's canuckistani for "restroom". and i had to go outside of the restaurant to use the ones provided by the airport. and they were by far the most disgusting airport bathrooms i've ever seen. honestly. i've been in a texaco gas station with external bathrooms that you have to get a key from the clerk to enter, and they were cleaner, better maintained, and working more efficiently than the ones here. yuk. just yuk.

on the way back to my table, i happened to trip over a U-19 (that's rugby for "high school") team on their way to the national playoffs. unfortunately, due to some bad flight karma, they were sitting at chili's mid-morning on saturday while the games were going on one more hop down the line. they hope to make the last game of the afternoon. they were stunned and amazed to find that texas a&m had a rugby team and had had one long enough for an old geezer like me to have played on it. :) i wished them luck and now i'm off to catch my flight. and to see if i can't find a bottle of hand sanitizer. i know the CDC now disavows antibacterial sanitizers, out of fear that they're contributing to the rising percentage of the bacterial population that is antibiotic resistant, but i feel OOGY after useing that restroom, even after washing thoroughly with hot, soapy water. ugh.

on, one quick note: coincidences - when i wasn't playing rugby and wasn't interested in playing rugby and really just needed a break, i never ran into rugby people out in public. it seems like, now that i'm contemplating getting back to some involvement with the sport again, i trip over it at every turn. coincidence?

in response to the question "what do you do, and why do you like it so much?"

i'm an "applications engineer" or a "solutions architect" depending on who you ask and what day it is and whether or not the wind is coming from the north with a hint of snow on that day.

i spend most of my time teaching engineering modeling software to engineers. i like this for three reasons: primarily - i get to teach and that's probably my favorite activity of all time, unless my students are functionally illiterate! secondarily - i'm doing enginerd stuff with my brain that keeps me interested and challenged. tertiarily - i'm toying with modeling software, which i've always loved. any sort of lab experiment in which i get to recreate something that happens in the real world is my real joy.

the rest of my time i spend doing sales demos of and consulting for the software that i teach. demos are fun for me because i was always too extroverted to fit in with the other engineers. seriously, my excessive gregariousness was once described as a "character flaw" and was always a job liability for me. now, i put that flaw to good use earning myself a commission. (my sister's favorite joke: how do you know when you're dealing with an extroverted engineer? she talks to your shoes instead of her own!) consulting is fun because usually the reason people hire me as a consultant is that they don't know how to model something complicated. essentially, i end up teaching them how to use the software to do the hard and/or complicated stuff. and that's really fun for me, because i not only get to troubleshoot, but then i get to teach my solution to the clients.

it's the best possible set of tasks for me, and the fact that i'm responsible for upwards of 9 different software titles and each of those runs on at least two, if not four graphical platforms just makes it better. boredom comes easy to me and it's the kiss of death for my performance, but with this much variety in my workload, i haven't managed to get bored at this job yet.

grade eh!

i'm in regina, sk tonight. and no, the name does not rhyme with "tina".

so far, so good. the only thing unusual or noteworthy so far is that the pedestrian crossing signals here are weird-looking. the green walky-man is very jaunty looking, his shoulder raised as if to forge his way through the prevailing "plough winds" as they're called here. he also has feet, which i've never noticed on american walky-men before. i'll snap a picture of it, if i can remember to do so tomorrow. i have no idea if i'll be able to post it or not. i'll try.

additionally, i had a delightful elk steak with cherry sauce for dinner. and on the wall, on my way into the steakhouse, i saw a large and glossy poster bearing the following ad slogan for the canadian beef association:

Grade Eh. Canuck beef is better.

i wished AGAIN that i had a camera with me. these guys have the american beef association and their "beef. it's what's for dinner" beat hands down. maybe they have better material to work with, but i would actually buy food as a result of the canadian poster. the american one just makes me smile and hum a few bars of that copland tune the american beef people used in their tv commercials.

i <3 Dahlia Lithwick

if you're scratching your head and wondering who that is right now, hie thee hence to slate.com and just peruse a few of her articles. she's an insightful journalist who never fails to cut through the b.s. with common sense and a really good look past the hyperbole to the issues at hand. i love her articles, and i hope if i ever get to have a cup of coffee with her, i'd like her, too.

her latest is on the blogosphere and what can be done or what should be examined about some of the hypersexual threats aimed at women bloggers these days at clicky. unsurprisingly, this is an issue of keen interest to me. not that i attract the sort of attention that tends to bring on detractors, but i would hate to think i ever attracted a stalker. i just don't want to have to choose between sharing these little random slices of my brain with you and the sense of security i cling to when i lie down in my bed at night.

sunday morning sidewalk

my sister and her boyfriend stayed over last night. aside from the fact that that entailed a massive housecleaning effort yesterday, it's great to have company. i needed the kick in the butt to make me crack out the vacuum and do the stairs, anyway. so, on this sunday morning, i'm kicked back in my living room sipping my mocha with my dog at my feet and blogging. for reasons unexplainable, i've slept well into the PM for the last two days. this morning, at 7:30 AM (!!!) i woke up and was unable to go back to sleep. i ran off to einstein's and procured breakfast for the masses, and i'm still sitting here waiting for the ungrateful louts to roll out of bed an hour and a half later.

on the upside, i did get to watch my computer clock roll through 05/06/07 08:09:10 this morning. nerdy, huh?

okay, maybe the sleeping in wasn't entirely for reasons unexplainable. i just got back from my place-of-employ's annual conference on the left coast. the most inexplicable part of that is that i never once ate sushi while i was out there. not even at the airport! food was provided at almost every meal by my employer, and it was tasty, and i had precious little time to go in search of dinner between all the various socials that went along with the conference. i must declare that the most fun was probably at the canuckistani social on tuesday. i still owe paul a couple of beers. somehow, he got stuck with the tab for my scotch, and i was drinking good scotch that night. hey, it's not my fault the bar was so well stocked. i finally got to try lagavulin, which really IS laphroiag's politer younger brother. and they had both talisker and oban, two of my all-time faves. if i'd been able to hold another drop while still maintaining vertical positioning, i would've gone for the dalwhinnie and made the night a grand slam. as it was, i retired at just the right time, because i was wearing my enormous hair down and loose, and it had gotten so large and wild that it was about to achieve sentience and crawl up to the room for some shut-eye without me.

the albuquerque airport

a friend of mine suggested recently that when i'm traveling, i should make notes about any particularly interesting or weird or good or bad things i encounter. that way, it'll be recorded for posterity and she can look it up here someday if she should travel to one of these locations. so here are my notes on the interesting features of the albuquerque airport:

the bathrooms there were built fairly close in time to the development of the efficient self-flushing toilets. in fact, they were probably built after the first generation of self-flushing toilets (which worked very poorly) and before the current generation. as a result, the toilets have all their plumbing tucked into the wall as self-flushers do, but you still have to flush them yourself. for this purpose, there is a large black button on the wall right where the sensor would be, if these things had been installed a year later. no problem, right? wrong.

it seems that user humans have so adapted to the self-flushing toilets that at some point, they stopped noticing that these toilets had buttons and no infrared sensors to go with them. to fix the problem of people walking away from their bowls with the job undone, the management of the albuquerque airport undoubtedly had many choices. they went with the simple and cheapest one. they installed stickers above the buttons on the wall that read, quite simply "Please Flush". and to make sure you didn't miss the message (i think this is the smartest part of the arrangement) they added an extra sticker on the door of the stall, right at sitting-eye-level, that says the same thing.

it worked. i flushed.

and in other news, i still hate southwest airlines' cattle call boarding. i like that i can check in online 24 hours in advance and ensure my status as a member of Group A, but i still hate the process. i want a guaranteed seat assignment, damnit! they're considering letting people pay a little extra for a guaranteed seat, and if they do, i'll be the first to sign up for the service. giant amazons need aisle seating. somewhere near the front. with a little bin space. it's not too much to ask, don't ya think? far better would be riding out to gigs on my valk, but that takes more than twice as much travel time, and i don't always have it. wish i did, though. the weather in gallup was gorgeous. of course, the sinus infection would've made riding much less fun than the usual. i can't imagine the how heinous it would feel to sneeze inside my helmet at 70 miles an hour. ugh.

i'm not quite dead yet...

sorry for the long gap since last publishing. for those three of you who've been checking in on me, umm... HI! thanks for checking in on me!

for the rest of you, i figure you'll catch this update sometime next year when you're cleaning out dead bookmarks from your favorites folder. ummm... HI! don't delete me! i still write!

so, rather than try to catch you up on all my missed details, i'll fill in with the fact that i've had "blogger's curse". that is, i'm too busy living my life to have time to write about it. and i've been entirely too busy to craft interesting and witty things about it. i'd rather not write than write bad boring "this is what i ate and that was the temperature and my health was fair today" sorts of posts. plus, my work waylaid me.

so this week, i'm in gallup, nm. i'm sick as hell. everyone i know and love got a sinus infection early last week. so i followed suit by getting one late last week. which meant that i had two days of antibiotics in me before i had to get on a plane for new mexico. ordinarily, that's plenty of time for antibiotics to start doing their magic thing. you can probably tell from the fact that i cleverly prefixed that last sentence with the word "ordinarily" that something out of the ordinary is about to happen, can't you? yeah, my antibiotics didn't even start kicking in until today, tuesday. that means i've taught 16 hours of class with the distinct sensation that one of the clovis, nm aliens had taken up residence in my sinus passages and was trying to claw his way out through my lungs. yum!

aside from the sick feeling, however, all is well here. this is an unusual class in that there are double the usual number of students. i wasn't going to try to push them all through a single class, but scheduling and budgets being always like a good miniskirt (short and tight), there was some pressure to do it this way. the only way i could pull off something like this, however, was to have an aide. and i've never taught a class with an aide before, so i had no idea what to expect. furthermore, the aide i was offered is a salesdroid. ummm... like, hell no. but after my initial fears were aired, it turned out that this particular salesdroid was a helldesk tech for three years on this software. so, umm... yeah, she knows how to use it. not only that, she also knows exactly what parts of the software the lusers are going to trip themselves up on. i am thrilled with her assistance. she's got a great, patient manner with the students and (of course) total mastery of the topic. yea! it's making for a good experience. one more day to go, but it's been all good so far. plus, she's been good fun to trave with. we're in a single rental car and had a two hour drive out here from the airport on sunday, so i'm glad that she's good company.

i'm looking forward to getting home and sleeping for two days and getting a pedicure. then i'll be headed off to los angeles for a conference and hopefully some good debauchery with an old friend from high school. let's hear it for debauchery!

oh, and just for the record... i hate flying southwest. i hate the cattle call boarding procedure. it makes me nuts. but since southwest could get me home to dallas on wednesday night, and all the other airlines couldn't get me home until thursday morning, i'm flying southwest. bleh.

Stupid, stupid, stupid...

The horoscope dude is treading on dangerous ground today.

You tend to be more aware of your own feelings when the Moon is back in your sign, but this can be a mixed blessing. You might be rather uncomfortable in your own skin, as your moods change so fast that you cannot figure out how you feel. You prefer to have one emotion and deal with it, instead of having to manage your instability. Keep in mind that this dilemma is what makes you human.

Didn't anyone ever tell him that if he said stuff like this to a woman suffering from PMS she might very well kill him with an incorporeal icicle of instability? I'd like to kick him in the shins, personally. Either that, or kick myself in the shins just because then I'd be able to maintain a steady anger instead of the weird mix I've got going now.

I'm home sweet home this week after a fantastic week out on the road. I took the motorcycle down to San Antonio last week. It's partly because the weather's finally nice enough for that sort of thing and partly because I need to get my butt in shape (literally!) for a loooooong, looooong ride out to San Francisco this summer. I was down there for work, but my schedule was flexible enough for me to do a little riding on the weekend and to take prettier back-road routes on several legs of the trip. I'll post maps of the routes as I get a chance this week. Also, since I'm still employed after my annual review, I'll probably get around to finally writing up the construction of the MDU (mobile dog unit) and post pictures. Lofty goals, but if I don't kill anyone with an icicle this week, I just might get it done.

giant gaping hole in my food knowledge

as some of you know, i'm a part-time vegetarian. it's not something i'm strict about and i don't really mind eating animals. i just don't like all the weird processing and steroids and chemicals that go into mass-marketed animal food. and i abhor the government/economic model that drives our corn-based food economy which is central to so much of that. so i don't eat meat most of the time.

one of the ways i pull that off in cities like nashville, tn (where i am this week) or other southern locales where every other restaurant is a BBQ joint is to eat indian or chinese food a lot. almost every chinese restaurant in the country will sub in tofu to any dish on the menu. and indian restaurants accommodate vegetarianism with a greater degree of variety than any other food places i've been. yeah, i can always get a salad. but thanks to the damn atkins-ists out there, you can't buy a salad these days that doesn't include a chopped steak or whole fried chicken on top. and they don't charge you $5 less if you opt to get it without meat. you have to pay for the meat you're not eating. i hate to sound like a skinflint, but if i'm not eating yardbird, i don't wanna pay for it. that's the whole point of the part-time vegetarianism thing. i don't want to contribute my money to a system i disagree with so much.

so here's the rub: i know the finer points of difference between enchiladas, flautas, burritos, tacos, taquitos, and gorditas. i can distinguish between farfalle, spaghetti, gnocchi, manicotti, cannelloni, and tortellini. i am LOST with indian food. i think the language barrier is part of the problem, but the total lack of a teacher is also part of it. i would be able to figure it out myself if i could make sense of the language, but most of the dishes are named using the phonetic spellings of hindi words. it's so non-standardized and i am so ignorant of the basic principles that i'm unable to make any headway. i don't know where to start in order to learn.

anyone wanna teach me indian food basics? i'll buy you dinner if you'll let me soak up knowledge and nibble off your plate. heck, bring a guest. :)

real live e-mail convo with someone i love

i just got this e-mail. it cracked me up, so i'm sharing it. i (like most geeks) do a little tech support on the side for my friends and loved ones. it's usually rewarding, but not usually entertaining. today, i was entertained.

Huh??? I got VIRTUAL MEMORY?????

Just when I thought Mother Nature and Father Time had depleted all my resources, I find I got virtual memory!!

The resident guru at Office Depot said my computer sluggishness might have to do with me nearing the limit of my virtual memory. He told me how to check it and the instructions went in one ear and out the other (without a lot of impediment I must say). In fact I believe the exit was faster than the entry!!! (instructions have a phobia about wide open spaces and darkness!!)

If you think this could be part of the problem, write me back and give me some intsructions. I remember something about cntrl/alt/delete which I thought was one of the seven venial sins......

first, i had to respond that there are 7 cardinal sins. there are, however, as many venial sins as the human mind and the devil's whispering voice can devise. go-go gadget catholic school education!

then i dispensed boring, but accurate, technical advice. i'll spare you having to read those bits. those of you who know me well might guess from all the asides and parenthetical notes that i'm somehow related to the questioner. and you might be right.

plug and play?

excerpted from a work e-mail containing some instructions for tricking windows into thinking it has a printer when it doesn't. this, of course, does you no good for printing things, but it enables you to send things to the printer in a software demo without getting nasty error messages on your screen.

2) From the Control Panel, Go to> Printers and Faxes

3) Select> Add a Printer

4) At the Welcome Screen, select> Next

5) Select "Local Printer" (the default) and UN-Check> "Automatically detect and install my plug and pray printer"

6) Select Next

note the emphasized word in step 5. that's my emphasis, of course. i don't know if my boss sent me that to be clever or if it was just a typo, but it put my keyboard at risk of a coffee shower this morning. i laughed so hard that i had to come share it with you.

have you ever noticed?

have you ever noticed how people talk about meat that just "falls off the bone"? that's generally considered a good thing, y'know? however, if it happens while you are holding that meat over a pot of boiling-hot water... it can be ugly. i had just fished the chicken out of the soup pot and was letting it drip a little before plopping it into a bowl to cool. (how weird is the phrase "i had just fished the chicken"???) i glanced away to tell my dog to quit trying to insert herself between me and the stove (she seems to think i'm going to drop yummy food on her tongue if she can only get into that magic 2" space) when the chicken began falling off the bone. plop! into the boiling water...
"eeek! hothothot!" i shrieked and hopped away to nurse my scalded hand.
*snurfle*, molly made her move for the sweet spot.

some of the chicken ended up in the bowl (hrmmm, maybe i'm better at basketball than i thought?) whence i flung it as i hopped away from the soup pot. some of the chicken ended up (sans bone) back in the water. luckily for all parties concerned, although molly would argue that this wasn't luck, none of the chicken or chicken stock ended up on the floor. the dog would've much preferred that the chicken had fallen on the floor, even if it did mean burning her tongue on the scalding hot, but yummy, food.

so... my chicken is literally falling off the bone. tonight, there will be chicken and dumplings!

and my hand isn't all that burned. *happydance*

yeah, another meme. i'm busy...

Modern, Cool Nerd
82 % Nerd, 56% Geek, 26% Dork For The Record:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
You scored better than half in Nerd and Geek, earning you the title of: Modern, Cool Nerd.

Nerds didn't use to be cool, but in the 90's that all changed. It used to be that, if you were a computer expert, you had to wear plaid or a pocket protector or suspenders or something that announced to the world that you couldn't quite fit in. Not anymore. Now, the intelligent and geeky have eked out for themselves a modicum of respect at the very least, and "geek is chic." The Modern, Cool Nerd is intelligent, knowledgable and always the person to call in a crisis (needing computer advice/an arcane bit of trivia knowledge). They are the one you want as your lifeline in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (or the one up there, winning the million bucks)!

Congratulations!

Thanks Again! -- THE NERD? GEEK? OR DORK? TEST

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

	You scored higher than 88% on nerdiness
	You scored higher than 82% on geekosity
	You scored higher than 38% on dork points

star-crossed

why is it that on days when i really want to crawl into my shell and hide, i get horoscopes like this?

Your emotions are closer to the surface now that the Moon has returned to your sign, yet you may be overly concerned with what others think about you. It's difficult for you to trust your feelings, and therefore you may attempt to hide them from everyone else. Paradoxically, you will be accepted for who you are more easily when others truly know how you feel. Push past your fear of being vulnerable for your own sake.

stupid goat sign.
hmph.

meme that's going around...

How evil are you?

yeah, so i'm basically a fluffy bunny. anyone surprised? i didn't think so.

parents vs. the first amendment

i read an op-ed over at the LA Times recently by Eugene Volokh, and it really set me to thinking. Here's the gist of the opinion, quoted from the article:

If the rule is really "children's best interests above all," these results may make sense. Say a dying friend asked you to choose a custodian for his children. Wouldn't you reject candidates who would teach the children harmful ideas, whether racist, pro-terrorist or, depending on your views, pro- or anti-homosexuality?

But the question, which few courts have grappled with, is whether judges, using government power, are allowed under the 1st Amendment to make such decisions. A family court judge is a government official, bound by the Constitution. Orders mandating or forbidding certain kinds of speech pose serious 1st Amendment problems. So does allocating civil rights, such as the right to spend time with one's child, based on a person's speech.

But does the 1st Amendment mean something different when it comes to parent-child speech, especially when the parent is divorced? On the one hand, children are immature and less able to resist their parents' ideological excesses. There may be special reasons to protect children from parental teachings that harm their best interests.

On the other hand, parental self-expression rights are especially important. Many people would trade all their free-speech rights for the right to teach their own children. And government power to constrain how parents teach their own children is dangerous: Restricting the spread of ideas from parent to child can help today's majority, or today's elite, entrench its views for future generations. Also, the power to suppress parents' speech may not stay limited to broken families but might spread to intact families too.

I think the 1st Amendment should impose some constraint here. The Supreme Court has recognized that the equal protection clause bars courts from considering a parent's interracial remarriage in the "best interests" analysis, even when the remarriage might have led to social trouble for the child. Some state courts have likewise barred judicial consideration of parents' religious teachings, at least unless imminent physical or psychological harm to the child is shown.

The same should be done for parents' ideological teachings. Such "harm" standards are themselves often subjective, but at least they are better than letting judges routinely decide when a parent's ideological teachings are against a child's best interests.

All this having been said, of course situations like Mujahid Daniel's and Mujahid David's remain troubling. Should children be exposed to a jihadist philosophy that may lead them into crime, violence and war against our nation — which could be fatal for them as well as bad for us? Even if their father hadn't been a felon, might his teachings still have been so dangerous that we should protect his children from them?

However we answer these questions, we should remember that the rules courts make don't just apply to jihadists. Any parent whose views may be seen by some as against the child's best interests — because the parent is atheist, intolerant, pro-gay, anti-gay or whatever else — could find a judge curtailing his parental rights and his speech rights.

The spark for this story is the decision in a divorce case to censor the father's ability to speak to the children about his religious beliefs. The father is described as following a quasi-Muslim philosophy, being very jihadist, and exhorting his children to remember their duties as good soldiers. Clearly, the kids need to be shielded from that sort of thing before they end up as the next John Walker Lindh.

I think I agree with the author. Children should be shielded from hate speech from their parents when it's possible to do so. I also think the standards for defining what speech children should be protected from need to be a lot tighter than the judge's subjective definition of "best interests of the child."

Why me?!?!

y'know... i'm about to whine and complain. if you hate it when i do that, you might want to skip this post.

when the year started out, i was asked to sign up for a slate of classes that i would teach and/or attend to learn stuff so i could teach it later on. two of the locations i was really excited about visiting were chicago, il and walnut creek, ca. both of them for substantially the same reasons: because i've got friends there and the cities themselves do not suck like, say... newark. (for those not familiar, walnut creek is a suburb of san francisco. i had to look it up the first time, myself.) so the walnut creek one got shifted to houston. alright, i could understand that given that the other dude who would fill in the schedule lives in cali. it doesn't make sense to fly him to texas and fly me to cali, and i've got friends i could visit in houston, too. i can't scuba in houston, because i have no interest in participating in extraneous limb generation research, but it wouldn't be a total loss if i rode the bike down there. and since i wear a helmet and protective gear, i stand pretty good odds of returning with exactly the same number of limbs i left home with.

well, now my chicago class is being cancelled, too. instead of chi-town, i'm headed to Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. yeah, go take yourself a second to look that up on Google Earth or mapquest or your research vehicle of choice.

what's happening in regina? do any of you know anything about the place? because i don't. i'm trying to keep my usual optimistic spin on it, but all i can say at this point is that it rhymes with "vagina" and i'm not sure whether that's a plus or a minus at this point.

comments?

so tired...

hey, i bet you thought i had turned into a clogger, didnt' you?

well, i haven't. i've just been at home sweet home enjoying my fabulously purple living room and my dining room table and my recently-painted office. that, and working my tail off.

some other boring stuff has been going on, too, like researching used fish tanks on craigslist. it turns out that joey is going to get very large. in fact, he's going to grow to about a foot in length, if i manage to keep him fed. he's also going to want some company of his own kind soon, so he can quit schooling with my Flying Fox. so i'm trying to do a better research job on this new tank and build a semi-functional ecosystem that will require little maintenance. if any of you have ever seen me get single-minded about research you know just how much tunnel-vision a quest like this entails.

this week, i'm in phoenix. and let me just say that my travel people are FIRED. first off, i wrote a very nice note with my travel request specifying that although i'd indicated i was flying in on sunday and out on sunday, i was checking out of my hotel on friday because i'd be spending the weekend of 2/3-2/4 in the phoenix area with friends. my first itinerary came back and had me booked into a hotel for ONLY the weekend. and i didn't have a rental car until friday, either. i ask you, gentle readers, did they think i was going to sleep under a bridge and hitch all week while i was teaching a class for the company? and then use a rent car and hotel that they'd booked for me for two days of lounging over the weekend? furthermore, they booked me into a completely shitty hotel. i requested one of two nice chains at which i have frequent-flyer status. instead, i'm in the red roof inn. and let me tell you what the red roof inn, phoenix, az does NOT have:
1) Irons
2) Ironing boards
3) Coffee pots
4) Room service that could bring me coffee
5) Internet connections
6) Bath towels in sufficient sizes/quantities to dry a giant amazon after her daily shower
7) Coffee pots

I may have mentioned the coffee more than once. I'm a little miffed about it. I don't function well without caffeine. Why, in the name of all that is holy, would you want to work in a hotel with decaffeinated guests?!?! I don't even like my own self before my morning coffee, I know nobody else wants to talk to me. Crack-smokin' hotel managers.

I only have the internet connectivity due to the remarkable goodwill and overly-trusting nature of someone named connie. she set up an unsecured wireless network that i can receive if i sit in the superbly uncomfortable chair at the desk in my room. i can't get it from the comfy chair or the bed, however, so this post is about to be cut short by the tingling numbness in my left cheek.

the weather's been pretty nice, at least compared to the sleet and snow they've had in dallas this week. and the food's been outstanding. i recommend Tomaso's Italian on Camelback if you ever find yourself in Phoenix. and get your caesar salad WITH the anchovies. it's da bomb.

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!

those who can...

y'know, some people just ARE NOT teachers. and some people are. and some people can manage it but they're not great at it. i think i had a fair number of the latter two as i was going through my primary and secondary education. it wasn't until i got into college that i met people who were totally brilliant within their fields but were utterly incapable of conveying their knowledge to (let alone sharing their brilliant insight with) anyone who didn't already have it.

i was listening to a talk radio program yesterday on my local NPR affiliate yesterday called Think and the host was interviewing the authors of Made to Stick. they were talking about some of the things that make ideas powerful, make them stick to the public consciousness, enable them to be turned into action, and generally inspire results. they used an example of an interesting study to make one of their points about how ideas should be expressed if you want them to stick. the study involved "listeners" and "performers" who were paired up. the performers were given some common tune that should be easily identifiable (like the star-spangled banner or happy birthday) and were instructed to simply tap it out on a desk. the listeners were to guess what tune was being performed. the performers were asked to predict the success of the listeners, which they estimated would be around 1/2. the actual success rate of the listeners was 1/40. the thing is, the performers, while they were tapping, were actually hearing in their heads the fully orchestrated version of the song. the listeners were basically getting morse code. and that's what happens when a manager comes into a meeting and says "i want to motivate you all to improve customer service. go get 'em!". in the manager's mind, they're hearing a fully orchestrated version that clearly conveys "reduce wait times for callers" and "decrease the rate of escalated service requests" and stuff like that. the employees in the meeting are just hearing morse code and they may go back to their desks thinking they're supposed to pass along every call that they're not totally sure of to an escalation tech and spend more time on every call making pleasantries. so, if you want your idea to be correctly interpreted, and also to "stick", one way of helping that happen is to convey it in the form of a story. use concrete examples that are easily related to the situation you're dealing with, even if you have to make them up, because that's how you put your orchestra in your audience's heads.

one of the things that makes a person a good teacher is their ability to narrate a lesson so that it is a story. it's not absolutely essential, i've seen teachers get by without this storytelling skill. however, the best history teachers i ever had turned our history lessons from dry recitations of strategy, tactic, name, date, location into stories with personalities and plot and motivation. it's something i've done instinctively in my teaching all along, but i wonder if it can be taught? can you teach someone how to think about what they know in such a way as to explain it to someone who doesn't know? and if you can, is there some way to make it mandatory training for professors?

new year, new space

Living Room! i helped in the wall painting, the hardwood flooring, the fireplace cladding, and the art hanging. who knew I was so handy?

I just read a news blurb that says some ridiculously large percentage of blog entries begin with the word "so". as a result, i'm trying to cut down on my use of that opener. it's a tempting opener, though! i typed and erased it for this entry two or three times before deciding to go with this explanation of why i'm avoiding "so" instead.

i moved in with my girlfriend in September. since then, our living and dining rooms have been completely inaccessible. i had enough furniture for a two-bedroom place, and she had enough furniture for a two-bedroom place. between us, this three-bedroom townhouse wasn't big enough for all the STUFF. we had couches cheek-and-jowl with loveseats and futons, chairs willy-nilly through the mix, and tables sitting atop tables being shored up by other tables that were so big they had to come in the door sideways. it was chaotic.

chaotic though it was, i travel for my job a LOT. and we travel for fun a LOT. and we procrastinate a WHOLE LOT MORE than we travel. so it got be thanksgiving, and we still hadn't finished the unpacking. in fact, we'd barely started the unpacking. only the very most essential items had been pulled out of boxes and everything else was still sitting on the floor of our living and dining rooms.

the obvious solution to this problem was to set ourselves a deadline. we'd done this before, however, and it'd fallen flat because we just picked a random day and called it a deadline. this time, we needed consequences! thus the idea of the new year's eve party dawned. after all, we had six whole weeks to get it done!

foolish mortals.

still, we sent out invitations to a party "in the way of motivating our lame asses to open a box or two and paint the damn walls, already" and that provided us a deadline with consequences. we procrastinated for a while, we diddled with a few suitcases, we went and bought some paint for the office. the office, you see, was the key to this entire operation. it was painted in a color that i think of as a rather heinous cross between "yellow baby poop" and "peach" and it had a terrible wallpaper border featuring baby animals that was meant to look like a quilt in classic baby pastel colors, the kind you get when you're too anachronistic to look at the sonogram and figure out whether to buy a pink or blue border. so we had to peel down the border and paint the office before we could put up bookshelves and unpack all the office gear. that was all in the way of the other stuff, so the office walls were the bottleneck in this whole unpacking operation.

we finally managed to paint the office, the weekend before christmas. we spent the next week not unpacking, as you'd expect, but building a dog trailer. yeah, that's for another post.

but the week after christmas, we spent - UNPACKING!!! and preparing for the party, of course. the week leading up to the party was hard work, but nothing phenomenally interesting to write about. i'll spare you the task list, but we had to tidy, clean, declutter, shop, sweep, mop, scrub and move pretty much everything on the first floor of the house. the upstairs got a pretty thorough going-over, too, as it houses the infamous Bottlenecking Office where so much was unloaded. it also happens to house the Guest Room Of Stuffage in which we shoved all the boxes we didn't have time to deal with before the party.

once we got things arranged, however, they looked quite presentable. my girlfriend has a history in the food service industry and is extremely talented at managing herd feeding operations. i contributed one recipe for a brie/raspberry/chipotle hot appetizer and she did ALL the rest of it. that's the picture here, showing our loaded-down kitchen table in our newly becurtained dining room. i'm the one in the spongebob regalia, cradling my drink and preparing to snarf down some food, which pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the party.


as you may have guessed, it was a pajama party. we even dressed our mannequin in pajamas! what?!? you didn't know we had a mannequin? well, we do. she was for sale in a store we happened into because they were clearing everything out for a total renovation. and she went so nicely with the fireplace, we just had to have her. her name is Marie Antoinette, named for the famously fashionable and ultimately headless former queen of france. so here's marie, in her pajamas:
another day, i'll post about the dog trailer...