And welcome to 2008. The Lovely Beck and I took the pups up to the local park the other morning for a jaunt / sprint around the vast expanses; a good time was had by all. We're lucky to live smack in the middle of the suburban heaven that is Scottsdale; just check out the view we get from said nearby park:
Borderline idyllic. The titular New Year has been treating us reasonably well. As predicted, Beck fell asleep at approximately 9 pm on the eve, leaving yours truly to a Dick Clark-less rockin' NYE of the Eddie Murphy / Richard Prior classic Harlem Nights which, for all its stupidity, was actually quite palatable. I sucked in a couple of episodes of Family Guy on TNT in an effort to stay up for the grand moment, and a firework or something went off on TV and/or in real life, because Beck actually deigned to grant me her conscious presence for the 12 am moment. We ecstatically watched a two hour old replay of New Yorkers celebrating the new year, proposing to their girlfriends and the like. Tres monumental. Phoenix wins super bonus lame points for failing to display its own NYE celebration, bowing to a rerun instead. Must be the writer's strike.
New Year's day, in contrast, was quite excellent. I went on a 5.5 mile run in the AM, arriving home in time to shower and watch the first outdoor NHL game in America, Pittsburgh at Buffalo, which was a lot of fun. Sidney Crosby is a bad-ass. I took some notes on the game with some kind of blog post in mind, but all I ended up noting was how ridiculous their focus on the weather conditions was (it's snowing! Yep!) and how reverent they were towards one of the announcers anecdotes from the 70s or 80s or so in which hockey players went into the stands and beat spectators with the spectators' own shoes. Contrast that aw-shucks reminiscence to the holy-hell terror of the sports media coverage of the Ron Artest melee from a couple of year's back, and I'm sure you have at least a thesis or two on the unequal treatment of white & black sports stars in the U.S. Just sayin'.
The rest of the week went swimmingly - I tutored a bit, by far the highlight being my efforts to teach an 8 year old girl how to add and subtract the numbers 0-9 without using her fingers to count. I kept her mightily entertained and engaged - she even said, "wow, I only feel like I've been here ten minutes!" when she had to leave at the hour and a half mark, shattering all reasonable scales of cuteness in the process. Tutoring otherwise continues to merely roll on.
It thankfully sounds like the Sime-ster is doing reasonably well up in Boston; I would say to pray for his recovery, but Richard Dawkins has been telling me that such thoughts are frivolous at best, pernicious at worst. I've been listening to The God Delusion over the past couple of days as I've walked to work; so far I am limited to the impression that Dawkins is way too pissed off on the topic for a true "rational" discussion and that his complaints thus far are wholly unimaginative and played. I.e., I haven't really heard anything new thus far, which is pretty disappointing.
By far the biggest news of the new year is that after a year of here and there, non-focused and interrupted effort, I've finally sorted my iTunes library and now everything is correctly dated and album covered. (I know, I know, hold your applause). This takes a RIDICULOUS long time, but it's pretty satisfying to me to be able to sift through my album collection on a computer screen as though it were a real set of albums. Somewhere, there's a french guy screaming about simulacra and simulations. Seriously, though, my iTunes is pimped. So.... yeah.
Otherwise, it's been a fair amount of running (5.5, 4.8. 3.2, and 4 since 2008 began, go me), culminating in today's sitting around and watching the first couple of games of NFL playoffs (see outraged extra point diatribe below). Beck and I also hit up Before the Devil Knows You're Dead last night (review pending) which left us both wanting more (and less, in terms of PSH sex scenes - egad). And beyond that, it's the usual game of feeding, walking, and observing the dogs in their natural state of extreme sleepiness - some all-timers in this set. Enjoy the pics below as I drift to sleep wondering if this blog has devolved into a SW shrine. I am a 21st century cat lady.
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Of course, you can't pass up an opp to post a pic of the sleeping Beck AND a Sparkle, the former modeling her schwank Candy Cane pajama pants:
Goodnight Peeps.
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