The Terror of Icons!!!

That's the line of icons staring at me in my (new, souped up, wow!) Firefox browser Accuweather Forecast Fox Add-On. Off the top of my head, I'm not sure I recall the boiling point of mercury, but it looks like tomorrow we're in trouble. Egads.

So I was about to run today when Beck recommended that I not go crazy on my achy brakey knees. So I was almost out the door when I thought better of it, and decided to take the pups for a walk instead. We eschewed the Green Belt - they water over night and the area near our apartment becomes a complete bog early in the mornings - and went for a jaunt on the pavement instead. About four minutes into our walk, the dogs went absolutely insane for something on the sidewalk. I had the camera with me. At the risk of completely grossing you out, check out this macabre pair of images:

Goodness goo. And you thought it was unlucky when they lost their foot! Some hawk probably got a hold of this poor guy and devoured everything sin la cabeza; the dogs went nuttier than I have ever seen (and trust me, I've seen them go pretty nutty). Yeck. We live in a little Oasis-condoplex with tons of these little guys hopping all over the place, so it's a little eerie to see one so... sans body. Yikes.

In other dog-related news, poor Speelarkle chipped a tooth on something while we were away on vacation, and the tooth died. We're gonna have to get it removed pretty soon - it's a right up fron in the middle of her smile, so she's going to look a little goofy. So it goes. We presume it was when she and the WD got into a scuffle while we were gone while Haylee was taking care of them. We're not sure how much of a real scuffle it was - they generally aren't easy to separate if they're actually in kill one-another mode, and Haylee said she just kinda pulled them apart. But it only takes a bad gnashing of tooth on tooth to end up with what Sparkle now has. Poor little kid.

After the dog walk, I decided to forego running for the day and bike the entire green belt, bog and all. It was about a 25 mile roundtrip and I got pretty tired by the time I got home. The path ends down at Tempe Town lake which is more or less the barrier between Tempe and Scottsdale. Got this nice shot of Sun Devil Stadium down there:

Soa pretty good day, exercise-wise, though I'm feeling pretty exhausted at this particular point in time. Before I go on to the continuing story of the vacation, a couple of sports thoughts:

1. Tiger = ridiculous. I watched a lot of the playoff from the elliptical machine on Monday and wowsers, dude just... wow. There was one shot from a fairway bunker on about the 15th or so that he dropped within ten feet of the pin. The guy on the treadmill next to me fell off. Pretty spectacular, pretty dramatic with the grunts and clutches and knee pain, and seventh level when you learn he's been doing all of this with a missing ACL for the past year or so. It doesn't seem to make much sense - what with normal distributions and all - that one person could crush other professionals like that. Some waste-of-carbon columnist at ESPN said that rooting for Tiger was like rooting for Justin Timberlake to get laid. Okay, I hear that, just like rooting for the Yankees in the 90s was rooting for Godzilla to crush, crush, crush those urbanites! (Now, incidentally, rooting for the Yankees is just rooting for Godzilla). But I don't think the comparison is apt - Tiger doesn't have the same on paper payroll advantages as the Yanks. Rooting for him is rooting for spectacle, for mysterious greatness, for a dominant "the best" narrative. It's very nice for some people to have such clean stories in their minds. "Babe Ruth was the best ever" and the like. Weirdly, having such a ridiculously disproportionate king of the sport keeps things simple.

2. The Celtics: watching the final game on Tuesday, I noted how commonplace the whole event seemed. Now that games are on 24/7, unlike back in the day when you got a game of the week and some of the playoff games, it's easy to look at the screen and say "ho-hum, another game." (And in a way,they are, ho-hum, just other games). But I thoroughly enjoyed the rout, and I got some nice chills - for the first time in a while - as the home team crowd got their schaudenfreude on and chanted "Na x 8, Hey x 3, Goodbye!" at the Lakers. Hatred-fueled, a definite moment of in-your-face, but spectacular. Also spectacular: that Lamar Odom didn't kill someone in the final few minutes of the game. The Lakers were down by 40, and Odom was out there losing his mind, shoving and wrestling and generally looking like a madman ill-equipped to deal with a 40 point deficit reality. Good thing nothing broke out. That's got to be a werid dynamic, of course - a courtful of raging egomanics, and one of them can just laugh at the other side for the final quarter of the game.

And also: Kevin Garnett? Lunacy? Idiocy? His unstable mental status (intensity / desire to win on the good nights, lost cool on the bad) is well documented, but wow, that was second level incomprehensibility there after the game. Mad anti-props to the morons at ABC/ESPN, who continued to try to interview him through his babblings. And one thing I still haven't complete figured out: he screamed "Anything is Possible!" like he had just taught some inner-city kids calculus or something. Which seemed odd at the time - but then I remembered that Kevin Garnett wears Adidas, the shoe with the slogan "Impossible is nothing." Was this meant to be super-emotional product placement, and Kevin Garnett flubbed his line???!?! I really hope so.

(Hope the rabbit head wasn't too disturbing. It did make up a surreal, loud-dog part of my day).

On to NC.