All I Ever Wanted (Summer 2010): Part 5 (Salt Spring Island)

Ah, the home stretch...

• Woke up Wednesday to a crunch-crunch-crunching that was too arhythmic to be human. Indeed, there were deer in the yard chewing on the grass and intermittently stepping on branches. The island is super quiet, so this came in loud and clear (though it only woke me and not the Beck).
• Beck got up early, and we went on a quick (and unfamiliarly hilly) three mile run down the road. Good to stretch the legs; my knees killed, natch, but I was quite proud that we responded to the super-relaxing setting of a B&B by exercising. Team Beck & Nyet wins.
• We grabbed luxurious baths and strolled our way downstairs for the first of three excellent Blackberry Glen breakfasts. Now's as good of a time as any to throw in some shots of the B&B; I'll end it with our delicious quiche, coffee cake, bacon and fruit breakfast.

• Awakened, cleaned and well fed, and armed with some good recs for sight-seeing around the island, we headed out to Mount Maxwell to get a handle on the surrounding islands. Nice views:

• After a brief swing through a pottery gallery, we headed to the first of many serious highlights, Salt Springs Island Cheese. Delicious goat cheese and a wide variety of jams and chutneys, making for a welcome early morning snack. Free coffee taboot. And the presentation was fantastic - here are some highlights of the highlight:

• Next stop: Salt Spring Island Bread Co., a home bakery up in the hills with gorgeous views. We bought loaves of rosemary and seed bread and munched on them for the duration of the trip.

• We quickly went by Tony's Tarts, a sweet and savory tart countryside stand, only to discover that they were effectively sold out for the day. Still full from our earlier cheese / chutney sampling, we elected to munch on bread for the time being, have a late lunch and head down to Ruckle Park. Home of, apparently, purple starfish:

• Swung by another art gallery featuring cool insect sculptures - we grabbed one that complemented our beetle (pictured first) in the Nyet and Beck abode bug collection:

• Hit the recommended Moby's in Ganges (the small town in the middle of the island) for a late lunch and had a top meal of the trip. I had a Piper Ale and a halibut burger with mango chutney, and Beck had a pecan burger plus an oyster shot. Our WCW did not disappoint, claiming upon being asked how it was going that she was "mediocrely wonderful," a phrase the meaning of which we have yet to deduce. Excellent meal overlooking the aquarina; here's the beer commercial-esque shot:

• We headed back to the B&B for afternoon hot-tubbin' and apple wine sippn' (and yeah, we ate some more oatmeal cookies). There was live music at the Treehouse Cafe that night, so we headed over after a bit for a late-ish meal. A dude named Sean Ashby, former guitarist for fellow Canadian Sarah McLaughlin, provided the entertainment; he was a solid guitarist, engaged in a bit too much cheesy stage banter, and otherwise tore up some covers of hit songs. Our WCW, upon being asked, "what is the Salt Spring Ale like?," responded "It's light. Good. It's won awards. I don't know." Sub-helpful. Anyhoo, another great meal - I got a bean and cheese burrito, Beck got a squash gumbo , and we enjoyed a breezy summer night. Beck also snapped some shots of boats / planes in the bay. Highlight pics:

• I had a hankering for some Mack & Jack's after dinner, but the Ganges liquor store was closed, so we headed back and settled for apple wine, tea and hot-tubbing. If I haven't made it clear, we were in heaven. We hit the bed around midnight and got ready for another full day...

Are Than Ow? / Pickup Line

Good times on the home front - Beck had both of the weekend days off and a quarter marathon to run on Sunday, so we took it relatively easy on Saturday - hit up Lola's and dominated the NYT Saturday (!) puzzle over mochas and pastries. (No Saturday morning frisbee por moi because most of the Phoenix disc scene was in L.A. for Lei-Out, a beach tournament I attended last year with the Tuftsmen. I stayed home this year to cheer on Beck in the P.F. Chang's race). We ran by the Phoenix Concention Center (I think) to grab Beck's race paraphernalia and enjoyed the spectacle of the alien master skinny race that had descended on Phoenix for the weekend. I ended up circling the downtown block while Beck ran in to avoid the ridiculous "EVent Parking" charges, and I had a grand time trying to figure out the logic of the one-way streets of downtown Phoenix. Came home to watch a disaster (locally speaking, anyways) of a playoff football game b/w the Cards and the Saints. Speaking of his holiness, I'm pretty sure Warner got sainted at one point during the game:

Yowsers. Fortunately, the debacle was tempered by some ridiculously delicious and, I'm sure, healthy chipotle-velveeta-sausage dip and chips. Mmmmm ... the second game did not fare much better, with some idiocy before the half by the Ravens allowing the Colts to run away with things rather handily. In fact, this play pretty much exemplifies the kind of day the bad boy Ravens had:

Oops. I ran over to the Parlor at some point to grab some carbo-loadage for Beck and a pizza for myself. All in all a groovy day - we went to bed pretty early for the early-to-rse that needed to happen on Sunday morning.

Took Beck to the starting line in downtown Phoenix at about 7:45 AM, hitting a mass of traffic. Something like 30,000 people were participating in the marathon and half-marathon, and I'm pretty sure all of them drove themselves down there. I ran back to the house to take care of the animals, drove to the local Circle K to get Beck some post-race electrolytes, and drove to our pre-determined spot on McDowell Rd., approximately at the 10K mark. Dan & Christina nicely met me down there, though the McD's breakfasts they brought were, I think, a direct taunting of the running masses. We got to enjoy the antics of the surrounding spectators - one group just yelled out things people had on their jerseys or pointed out things about people's clothing ("Yeah! Go Penn State! Yeah person wearing pink socks!") while a dude acroiss the street was offering "Free High Fives" to the racer, complete with a homemade sign and an excessively anthusiastic voice - Dan guessed that this guy was in marketing and not engineering. As a side note, I am not sure what inspires people to watch foot races - it's one thign to cheer on someone you know, but to just stand there and yell at a morass of strangers? I mean, props for supporting them, but there are more exciting things to do with your self. Among other things, the constant motion of a crowded footrace can actually induce some "moving ground" optical illusions, further proving that Descartes was right and we cannot trust our senses. (Ftr, *if* you are going to attend a race with teh sole purpose of telling jokes along the side, please spend the previous evening writing some clever one-liners. The racers may only hear you once along a 13.1 mile course, but I heard your repeated junk for an hour and half! UGH).

It didn't take Beck and hour and a half to do the 10K - she got placed in about the 15th wave of runners and so started at 9:00 instead of 8:30 as scheduled. She ran a solid 1:05 10K, which is awesome. We congratulated her and headed back to the car I had parked around the corner. After a shower and some recovery, we spent some Lux bucks on a well-deserved late breakfast. And conquered the NYT Xwd, nasty Avatar clues notwithstanding.

Caught the end of the sixth of seven bad playoff games so far, this one involving the utter embarassment of the Cowboys. I couldn't take another crappy viewing, so I headed down to a fun game of afternoon pickup instead - got some great running and silly layouts in for the first time in a few days. It's supposed to rain a lot this week, so I'm not sure if we'll get Sprawl in; glad I got a chance to at least stay moderately in shape. Cam ehom eot some delicious Chinese food - not P.F. Chang's, but close enough.

And now I'm taking in my last day before classes kick back in tomorrow. Should be good to get back in the swing; I've got lab and Jenny's course to TA tomorrow, and plenty of my own work to do. Routine will be good. But until then, I'm going to enjoy my MLKJr. Day and the dreaded, dreaded birthday eve eve. Sprawl might be off tonight; hope not, but playing in the cold and rain can be pretty miserable anyways. We need the work, though. We'll see...

I'm Told the Eventual Downfall...

Caught this on NPR recently, and I must say that Neko Case is one charming lady (with a beautiful voice, taboot!). If you're unfamiliar with her solo work or The New Pornographers, well 1, you suck, and 2, get thee to a Waterloo Records.

Good news from the Ultimate front: we worked on zone D Tuesday (primarily the trap), and despite handling all practice AND handling a lot on the trapped side AND breaking the zone with breakmarks, scoobers and hammers, I had a whopping zero turnovers. WAHOO! That's even morer like it. Small victories, even if the D was griping that my upside down throws would not have worked in windier conditions. Fie on that sound, I say.

Went on a run this morning - ankles are still bugging me, so I stopped at the 2.5 mile mark when I had originally intended to go 3 to 3.3. Baby steps, though - this would be the rare instance of me exercising prudence w/r/t my running program. Beck is so proud. I took it a little slower than the other day because I was running early in the morning (I am a stiff-jointed old man), but I still managed a 19:15 or so pace, which is roughly 7:48 miles. Close enough for funk.

Finished the last bit of Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings and conquered quite a few articles yesterday. REPfLB, for a Phil of Sci book, was surprisingly accessible, which either means that I didn't get it or that I'm getting familiar enough with the terms / concepts / authors that I'm not getting as bogged down as I have been. Progress, or something easily mistaken for it. I refuse to believe that it had anything to do with the clarity of the writing, as there was an entire section on level organization and three dimensional system complexity graphs that... well, just trust that you understand exactly as much as I do about it from that one sentence description. Or not so much fail to understand as fail to see the point of. I think there's a middle ground that people are aiming for - don't want to be analytic, codified-in-logic-equation philosophy types, don't want to be Continental obscurantists - that they are not quite getting, and as a consequence you get dumbed down unanalytic generalized accounts that don't say much. That's not a knock on Wimsack, nor does it characterize the book fairly; I'm just noticing that the failures of both ends of the phil-writing spectrum are hard to eliminate when trying to write in some middle-grounded, useful and accessible way. We'll all press on, okay, alright already we'll all press on.

Busy day ahead - meeting w/ Jason, more reading, frisbee tonight (women's league is back on, though without team captain Joanne, who indeed suffered a torn ACL - poor lady), packing and then a seriously early departure for Rachacha and another iPReunion, the first I've managed to attend in a few years. Looking forward to it. And now, to work...

(Oh, and this has been on my radar for quite a while now... but I am starting to catch an idea that maybe I should do it, if just to break the string of philo books. It'll be a "read from the nightstand only type of thing. I'm three or four weeks behind, but I can catch that pretty quickly, I suspect. I'll keep you updated).

Study Break / Broken

I haven't done anything resembling long distance running since I sprained my right ankle in a hat tournament over a month ago - but sitting inside / coffee / sodas gave me a severe case of the antsies, so at 5:40 (and 113 degrees) I ran 2.5 miles around my neighborhood - and made it back at 5:58. Booyeah! I mean, that's not really fast or anything, but 7:15 or so miles after a month off: I'll take it.

Back in the Valley, Back in the MMIX

Happy Belated New Year everybody. The Beck and I are back in the valley after a nice, quick visit to SA. The goings on to close out the year:

• Had a nice faux-Christmas morning in the usual family fashion on Wednesday. My extraordinarily generous parents got us a lot of stuff, including clothes, some beautiful framed wedding pictures, a cool digital photo frame, and some cash / gift-certificates for home furnishing projects. Combined with some gift certificates from Beck's parents and M/G, we've got some shopping to do over the next couple of weeks. Sweet, and big thanks to everybody.
• Found a pickup game down at Trinity on NYE afternoon, so Aaron and I headed down there to get in the last Ultimate of 2008. Pretty sloppy, no offensive formation game, and as luck would have it the teams were divided along hilariously uneven lines. The captain from Kansas University was there, so 'twas fun to play against a very talented / athletic youngin', but his team had the two other throwers and the other runner - our team was limited to Aaron and me in the skilled frisbee-player department. All of this was a wash anyways, because Aaron re-hurt his quad about 10 points into the game and had to sit out for the remainder. Boo. Ah, well, at least bro and I got to play together for a little bit.
• Had a fun NYE - Mom prepared sandwiches, Deb made some very-good-for-us cheese-and-beef dip, and we had a low-key, Sam Adams-fueled NYE celebration. Ron, Pat and Grandpa rolled in a little later (Ron & Grandpa left at 9:30 or so), and we spent the remainder of the evening listening to Aaron's true confessions and playing a funny game called Imaginiff. Beck impressively made it all the way to 11:5... we'll go ahead and give her credit for midnight this year. YEAH!
• Woke up early and went for a four mile run around the neighborhood. I briefly had some "1000 miles in 2009" type ambitions, but as my bruised feet, sore ankles and knees throbbed a bit that morning, I thought that maybe 20 miles per week not including Ultimate was a bit much. We'll see. For now, we'll post it as 4 miles jogged on the year (and to date, 3 hours of Ultimate played, counting Saturday and today).
  
• We went shopping for a short while NYDay; I got the 2008 version of the Best American Non-Required Reading series which has fared well in the past. We goofed for the afternoon - got some frisbee throwing done in the afternoon; Beck is looking awesome. Beck also made two kinds of chili for dinner that night, and we capped things off with some cutthroat Rook which, if you aren't aware, is a sort of Bridge-for-Dummies kinda game.
• After I taught my mom the wonders of Gmail on Friday morning, the lady folk went to get pedicures and we got a greasy greasy burger lunch at Culver's. Hijinks galore. Later, Aaron headed back to Austin and we spent the afternoon at the San Antonio Art Museum - quite a cool place and impressive collection housed in a converted brewery. We came home, packed, and hit up Taco Cabana on the way to the aeropuerto. A completely non-eventful flight - Beck watched Horton Hears a Who and at least the start of Step-Brothers, with Mamma Mia! being the to-SA selection - and we rolled back into the casa at 10 or so on Friday night.

So, a good trip, and now we're back to normality. As referenced above, I got in some disc Saturday morning at a casual game in Scottsdale and got in some rain-ridden 3 on 3 stupidity this afternoon. Interspersed with reading and sleeping and generally reorienting, I get back in the swing of things tomorrow. Huzzah - classes don't start for another two weeks, but there are grants for which to apply and websites to design. So, game back on.

Hell-o-2009.

I Don't Believe We're On the Eve of Consumption

Santa by Dice Tsutsumi

Just returned from a failed excursion to buy Chanukah candles at the store. Sure, they have big fat XMAS Santa Coca-Cola Starbucks Vanilla Latte Scented Candle-tastics Coated with Reindeer Blood and Elven Bile in Blue-Ray TV Show Box-Sets, but no thin candlesticks by which to do my chemistry homework¹. Truly upsetting. I bought some AA batteries and carrots for the dogs instead. (The carrots are for the dogs, not the batteries. They, of course, are hybrid gasoline / hot dog vehicles. The dogs, not the batteries). You know, doing my part. For the economy. Fighting the 7:15 AM Fry's crowds. With piped tinny holiday tunes. And Merry Christmas goodbyes.

We heard a report on NPR yesterday about a man who gave out five dollar checks during the Great Depression to help familes out during the holidays. He had gone out of his way to keep his identity secret so as to not embarrass those accepting the gifts - many of them were fallen-on-hard-times bankers who probably knew the man. The man didn't want any credit for his actions; just wanted to do something nice for his fellow humans. Of course, we heard this from a guy who figured out that the mystery man was his grandfather and decided to out him on national radio. You know, defying his wishes. Thanks for that, grandson. NPR also informs us that $5 was a lot of money in those days. All this made me think was that 1, I wish I could time travel, and 2, MC Escher must have grown up in those same snow-covered magical times when both home and school were uphill from one another.

Beck is working today; only until 2. We have been pulling off our own Chanukah miracle lately with a disc of burrito filling that has lasted 8 nights. Tonight, I think we'll break the legumonotony and go out for dinner, saving tomorrow night for a big Christmas dinner. Some cold rainy times here in PHX - cold being a high of 55, which trust me, after having your blood thinned² by 120 degree summers, is quite cold. (Beck and I have been fighting off using the heat, but when we noticed that it was 58 in the house the other day - colder than the 62 we used to keep it in Natick! - we had to cave. I've taken to drinking tea and wearing a scarf inside; it feels like 2003 all over again). I managed to get out for a quick 2.5 mile run yesterday, trying to slowly get back into it. My other big plan for today is to continue reading Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is thus far excellent.

Alright, maybe some links later. Maybe not. Hope everyone's having a good one - holla to the Texas and Rachacha crews!

¹ One heat-waved July night in Boston, in our post-bac-pre-med/vet days, right before a big chemsitry exam, the power went out due to excessive AC use around our neighborhood. We had to study, but no diners or coffee shops were open at that hour. We scoured the house for candles and all we could find was Beck's inherited silver menorah. Out of options, we studied limiting reagents by candlelight - a veritable festival of "ites." There are still blue wax drippings on our textbooks. I will forever associate Chanukah with sweating and ionic salts. Somehow I think the general scholarly attitude of the Jews will help the powers that be forgive us.

² What does this mean? Blood thinned? Do I smell a metaphor? And in smelling a metaphor, do I smell a metaphor? No, seriously, I have little doubt that this effect is real as I am now a huge pansy when it comes to slightly cool temperatures. But I'd like to know what tragedy has befallen my skinny blood.

Saturday Fright

So, continuing the Ultimate vein, this morning I biked up to the local high school track to do a little mini workout - warm up, 8 100 meter dashes, 4 200s, a medium paced mile and a cool down lap. I felt pretty good, thanks for asking. But the big weirdness worth blogging was that there was a pop warner football game going on that had morphed into a little suburban microcosm: ridiculously overweight parents, surgeried cougar scottsdale moms, barking coaches, kids dressed head to toe in Underarmor, brand new cleats, you name it. I swear, every kid walking by me had to have on a cool $500 of equipment and clothes. Crazy. But what pushed it over the top into a post-apocalyptic nightmare was the fully decked out corps of eight year old cheerleaders. All of this taking place at the site of future high school football games; I swear, it was like watching enculturation in action. Please kids, think for yourself! I won't be there for you.

And to that end, Beck and I are now going to leave for Dr. K-gorium's Magic Emporium and a big ol' Karaoke Party. I see no irony in this whatsoever. O! Suburbia! I mock your structure yet reap your rewards. There ain't no nothing nowhere.

(And yes, there will be a post-bash post. The forecast calls for a 90% chance of a "Sweet Child" with a very probable "Of Mine." Stay tuned).

(Please your bets on whether the Beck will deign to sing tonight. If anyone calls the song, you win a free... copy of the Ballad? Ugh).

(Random side note, and then yes, it's Dr. K-araoke time: the other day in class, when the aforementioned poli student kept dropping names, I wrote in my notebook, "He's very well read; it's well known." The person sitting next to me looked at my notes and gave me a very quizzical look. Sigh...)

Decision Branch

Result: Beer and Baseball?
Decision: Skip Ultimate this afternoon :(
Result: Feels better, thanks.
Decision: Ice foot for an hour upon arriving home.
Result: Ouch.
Decision: Walk 3 miles with a rolled ankle.
Result: Make it about half a mile before stopping. Still 3 miles from home. Ouch.
Decision: Try to run on rolled ankle.
Result: Run into by a biker (again); roll ankle on uneven pavement.
Decision: Continue running down slanted sidewalk to ~3.5 mile mark.
Result: Encounter crappy road construction and tilted terrain.
Decision: Keep running on Hayden.
Result: Meet fork at 2 mile mark where I could stay on street or turn off onto Green Belt.
Decision: Run on surface streets to avoid flooded Green Belt.
Result: Now running long on Fri/Sun, after a monstrous storm on Thursday night, instead of planned Thur/Sat long and Fri/Sun short.
Decision: Run with Beck Thursday morning and cut things off at 3 miles instead of planned 7.
Result: Doing this running program.
Decision: Attend Brett's wedding eleven years later and see the ultra-slim groom v. unslim friends, get inspired.
Result: Befriend Brett.
Decision: Take Philosophy of Mind at Rice with Brett.
Result: Good times.
Decision: Regrettably attend Rice University with my dreams crushed.
Result: Failure to get drafted out of high school by Chicago Cubs.
Decision: Attempt to study, be "well-rounded," etc., in high school instead of devoting 100% of my time to my baseball career.
Result: Take this to heart.
Initial Event: Someone tells me at some point that "being well rounded" is important.

So the ultimate outcome of an attempt to be well-rounded is an ankle that is... well rounded.

(On the plus side: with 20 miles over the last four days, and oh yeah, we're gonna go ahead and count that 3 miles walked on one foot, that's 27 for the week and 107 for the past four weeks, soundly meeting my "somewhere between 100-150 miles" goal. I think the revised goal is for 25-30 per week for the next four weeks, so 100-120 overall - but that may get off to a slow start, pending on how tender this continues to be. Ah, well. Hope everyone is enjoying their Sunday).

Come On Let Me Stand Next to Your Fireworks

Pretty low-key fourth here: Beck and I both had the day off, so we lounged about, walking the dogs and snacking. The big plan was to barbecue turkey burgers, make some margaritas, and go see fireworks with D&C out at the Fort McDowell Casino. Our entertainment, brought to us by your social disease! Anyways, more or less done and done - Beck made some incredible margaritas, we saw an elongated fireworks show and the fourth was the fourth. Really, once you've experienced The Third, or you've had fireworks at your pre-wedding dinner, it's going to be hard for silly July 4th celebrations to register in our memories.

Beck got off work quite late on Saturday, killing our plans to go enjoy another dose of the Beautiful People with D&C. They had won a couple of nights at a local resort for the weekend, and spent at least part of Friday and Saturday admiring the silicone at a safe distance. The reported highlight was a big, scary strong dude with a tat across his back that read "Punisher." This pales, of course, to Dan's back tat which reads "Programmer."

Pretty wussy running effort by me this last week: skipped a couple of days, blah, blah, blah, and only ended up going 18 miles. D'oh. That still brings the three week total to 80 miles, so I'm within marathon distance of that 100+ miles target I set for myself. Hooray for our side! Also played Ultimate Sunday night after seven mile morning run, so between that and that thing from the Dalai Lama, I've got some stuff going for me.

(And seven more miles this morning, so hello 87!)

Before the disc on Sunday, beck and I went to SMoCA to check out the new exhibits. Nice little exhibit from the permanent collection on painting (as in, focusing on the act of painting), a not-entirely-spectacular installation on brands, and a cool exhibit called "Lisa, Light and Dark" from versatile artist Pae White. Really great museum, and a great way to spend an icy chilly afternoon.

So that's about it on these fronts. Counting down the days til the Ben-Ali-Party Bus comes to town. T-minus ten! Yahoo! OR, um, ALTAVISTA!!!

Penance for a bad joke: enjoy this comic.

Oh, and get fired up for THIS MOVIE:

Love... is a Burning Thing

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Now With 4.4% Less Nyet!!!

Skidding our way into July here, only six weeks until I re-re-restart my real life at grad school. I am completely typical in my balance of anticipation and anxiety - and beyond that, I am thoroughly eager to stop tutoring for a while. I don't know why - maybe it's just a bad string of kids - but work has been particularly torturous lately. Oh, well, nothing I can't tolerate for another month or so. A month that, according to the computer here, is going to feature highs of 109 every day until the apocalypse. So we have that going for us.

Beck has recovered from an unpleasant week - after the cat bite to the hand and the antibiotic / tetanus shots, she was sore and had some weird reactions that gave her achy joints. Better now - her hand's still sore, but she's walking / running normally, much better. We've been keeping things pretty low key of late - haven't been hiking because we like not dying of dehydration - and generally sticking to A/C-laden destinations or cooling off in the pool. Sometimes I feel I am not living the world's most exciting life. Ah.... well. No, seriously, we've been having fun times keeping it chill of late - finished the Deadwood series, have generally eaten like kings, watched a slew of terrible number-based movies - the hits just keep on coming.

Saturday we enjoyed the flesh-fest that is Ra Sushi - met up with Dan and Christina in North Scottsdale to observe the habits Peoplicus Beautifulis up close. The helium-voiced plasticine hostesses balked and then actually showed us to our tables, the low red light atmosphere of the joint reflecting just so off their artificiality. I openly questioned if we were pretty enough to eat at such a restaurant; perhaps coincidentally, we were put in a booth in the back. Dan openly questioned whether they were Russian Lit or Communications majors; he's judgmental, that one. We eventually enjoyed a delicious if stupidly expensive meal - I am admittedly not a sushi man and resorted to chicken teriyaki, so when I say "we" I mean "they," and when I say "stupidly expensive" I mean "stupidly expensive." Try to keep up. To cap things off, the waitress nickel and dimed us over some coupons that we had brought - turns out the definition of "free glass of wine" is up for debate, and rather than placate a customer, the management decided to debate the finer points of the fine print and charge us. Really? Let me tell you how much I love conversations with waitresses that involve pointing at tiny, coupon-sized pieces of paper and saying, "It says here..."

Barf. Screw you Ra and the rip-off horse you rode in on. Next time I want to see the pretties, I'll read People.

I had heard via Christastrophe that NBC was re-airing the original episode of Saturday Night Live (hosted by, RIP, George Carlin), so we came back to the condo to sip on beers and watch a comedic legend. And... hmmm. Decidedly unfunny, actually, or at least super campy. I mean, this is one of the best things EVER:

But the rest of the skits were pretty low-energy, one-joke numbers. And Carlin's contributions were little segments of his stand-up routine which largely involved a lot of mugging and trite observations. I appreciate historical comedy with the best of them - you can see that Carlin is setting the roots for the bulk of standup to come, and maybe this was just a bad sample of material - but wow, I felt pretty dumb for suggesting this as the night's activity. Oh, well. We did also get to see Billy Preston doing "Nothing From Nothing" (note: that's not the actual performance, SNL being the copyright-protecting jerks they are) and Janis Ian singing "At Seventeen." Solid 70s fare.

D&C left so they could go get the new Guitar Hero at midnight. You know, with all of the other 14 year olds in Phoenix. Use that information as you will.

Lots more low-keying on Sunday - I got up early to shoot some baskets and watch some pretty high quality pickup soccer down at the park, then came home and watched some of the highest-in-the-world quality soccer, the European Championship Finals. I watched a lot of the tournament, so it was good to see a fantastic end - and now Beck is in love with this guy:

How can a Nyet compete?

My athletic exploits of late: 7 miles on Thursday, 4 miles on Friday, 7 on Saturday, bringing me to 32 miles for week 2, 62 for the past two weeks. I also played Ultimate Sunday night and did another 5 miles on the treadmill Monday. WOOHA. Some other significant stats: Two weeks ago I weighed myself before and after running at the gym, and it was 204 and 198. This week it was 195 and 190. So things are headed in the right direction!

AS mandated by Beck, though, today i am doing NOTHING athletic for the first time in 15 days. So hopefully I'll come back rejuvenated for Wednesday. We'll see. Now it's off to Tutor Corps for a few hours and then back to hang out with the beck, who has today off - sweet!

Shaven, Still Not Stirring

Heat continues to rule the day / headlines here in Sunny, Sunny Azz. Took the pups in to get a fur cut today and they're still lounging around the house like sweaty Cleopatras. No relief in sight. We get what we deserve!

Am continuing on the road-blazing trail: I indeed ran 3 miles on Sunday morning to complete the 30 for last week, and have since run 7 on the roads and 4 on the treadmill and another 3 jogging / sprinting combo this morning. So that's 14 for this week, 44 for the one month time frame. Yeeha!

As a consequence, though, I am hella tired. Barely made it through my scant tutoring hours today, though that is admittedly 50% due to exhaustion, 50% due to sheer boredom with all aspects of the SAT. Blar.

Tired as I am, I am not touching the Beckian levels of last Saturday. She came home from work, we started to eat some of the leftover pizza from Friday and next thing I knew, she was muttering, "I'm just going to rest my head," and falling asleep. At 6:30, or thereabouts. So much for the Deadwood marathon. We both effectively hung out around the house on Sunday, stopping momentarily to lunge in the pool. Man-o-man, no fun this time o' year. We did managed to take in a few more Deadwood eps and are now just about at the thrilling conclusion of season 3, looking forward to some Hearst-blood. We shall see.

Speaking of blood: poor Beck got attacked by a clawless cat today who sank its fangs into her hands multiple times. She then had to go to the clinic to get antibiotics, which apparently came in the form of shots... in her hands. Ouch. Occupational hazard, but still, no good. I am taking the dinner reins tonight in order to help her rest her paws.

And speaking of dinner: Beck is kicking all kinds of culinary butt these days. Yummy salmon on Sunday, turkey burgers last night... all delicious. I am reminded every day how much I WIN.

Speaking of, there's a leftover turkey burger calling my name for lunch. Mmmmmm...

(Btw: some reviews are slowly making their was down the Ballad Factory conveyor belt. SO you have that to look forward to. Some of them will come from my lauded "And Civilization" series. Get psyched!).

Untamed Dinner

The Jullietta is in town!!! Yay!!! SO call your favorite nature show hosts and settle in! Juliette and her mom are both in Phoenix to celebrate the 100th birthday of Julliette's mom's first cousin. Yep - Julliette has a first cousin once removed who is 100 years old, destroying all notions of the myth of generations. Wowsers.

Picked up Speckle about 7:30 from her hotel on Central Ave. which turned out to have an address different from the one she gave me by an order of magnitude. This would not have been a big deal if, say, she had been at 3 Central Ave. but was instead at 30, but unfortunately she was at 4000 instead of 400. There was a gigantic gutted building / scaffold where her hotel would've been, so I figured things out relatively quickly. No probs - got her, went down to the restaurant on 5th ave and beat everyone there by a solid fifteen minutes. Beck, Dan and Christina met us down there for a little Lovett '99 reunion.

We went to Cibo's, an italian restaurant in a converted house in the middle of a downtown neighborhood. Very tiny, so we ended up waiting 45 minutes - hour, but that was cool, as we got to hang and chat at the bar. As mentioned here previously, J-ette is engaged, but we managed not to drown her with wedding questions for the duration. She's still kickin' it up in Boston (Cambridge, actually), rocking the computer consulting world and occasionally playing Ultimate with Polaroid*. Doing well in all respects (though she did have the pleasure of staying in Newark last night due to a missed connection. And it turns out the airline won't reimburse you for "an Act of Air Traffic Control").

* - This just in: Polaroid nearly got blackballed from playing in league this year! Turns out there's an option to list teams that you don't want to play due to past conflicts. And six teams listed Polaroid! Ouch! Turns out only one of them could even possibly be connected back to when I played, so I can't take too much blame. Good to see that "Spirit Foul" lives on. People ended up talking it out with some of the other captains and got the black marks removed from the team's record, but egad man! Serious drama in the northeast!

(Of course, this being Ultimate: sounds like a team named "Black and Blue" cheated last year and brought a ringer to the tournament, got caught, and got banned from league this year. So they... changed their team name. And have been playing as though nothing happened. Ooh. Stupidity reigns).

Anyways, when we eventually did eat, we had excellent homemade single dish pizzas, and it NAILED the night. Fantastic. Great meal, great hanging, and a continuous flow of water to parch our desert-dry throats. We were seated directly under the air conditioner, so when we finally left it was about a fifty degree transition from inside to out. Exciting. Took the Julliette back to the hotel and headed home - probably won't see her again this weekend as she has all kinds of centennial parties to attend, but great to see her for the time we did.

(This morning: full of pizzafied energy, I went for an hour long 6.8 mile run. So with two miles yesterday, that brings the total for the week to 27.1 miles. I'll go 3-4 tomorrow, depending how my legs feel, and that will put me over 30 for the week, well on the way to the 100-150 range I'm shooting for over the next month. Yeah, doing it, etc.).

A Refined Wedding Ethic, Pt. 1

With scribbled directions from GMaps, we headed in the direction of Charlottesville, Virginia, home of UVA, Monticello, and the site of our friends Brett and Heidi's wedding. We added a Thursday night to our trip which turned out to be multivariable calculus for the hotel staff - they couldn't give us the wedding rate for the room, and if we wanted to extend our reservation to include the Thursday oh, it turns out, we would be out of the wedding block and have to pay full price for the entire weekend. And did we mention that the Thursday rate is actually lower than the wedding rate? Huh? Eventually Beck threw down and just made a separate reservation; that way we got the wedding rate for the wedding rate nights and the Thursday rate for the Thursday night. This did not guarantee that we would get to stay in the same room, though, so there wa a fleeting possibility of having to lug our suitcases back down to the Dodge Avenger on Friday at 12 and wait until 4 at checkout time to put them in a new room. Ugh. Fortunately, a wiser behind-the-desk mind prevailed, and we were able to keep good ol' room - yep - 210 for the entire stay (210 was our room at Rice - the back room, anyways).

Beck and I got to the town about 6 or so and headed downtown to check out the local scenery. Charlottesville is definitely a college town, but they also have a "historic downtown" section, a nice outdoor mall with shops and restaurants and you name it. We found ourselves a fantastic hybrid Indian-etc. restaurant that had been featured on page 13 of Brett's 73 page entertainment guide. We hadn't had Indian food (cue Ali joke) in quite some time, and the dining there was delicious taboot - good stuff. We did have to endure a extremely loud bald dude who verified that every dish was "as authentic as possible." He even chased down the waitress a couple of times. Fun. But it was a nice sitdown dinner, and we successfully passed the time until 9, when people were meeting at the South St. Brewery.

We got their early like a pair of dorks - turned out that was the night that Brett and Heidi's respective parents were meeting for the first time and their dinner ran a little late. No worries - we recognized the borderline two-dimensional Brett when he walked through the door with his dad, Chip. Beers were immediately ordered - fantastic selection, if you ever find yourself in the area, might I recommend the "Satan" - and we sat down in a circle of four that grew to 6, 8, 12, 16, 20 or so as the evening progressed. Heidi and her sister were among the second wave to arrive, and a slew of brett's UVA Business School (Darden) classmates came in, too. Matt rolled in a little later - we all hung out and had a great mass conversation while the Lakers cough-cough-choked game 4 away against the Celtics above the bar. Nice evening, and it set the good laid-back but fine tone of the entire weekend.

On Saturday morning, after a "deluxe" continental breakfast featuring tires and skunks, Beck and I trekked up to Monticello, a destination eagerly anticipated by her because she studied it in arts classes throughout college. 'Twas nice, but the tour was highly regulated - the guide spoke as though reading from a script, and she ushered us through the various rooms pretty quickly. (My favorite part of the tour, btw, was the seemingly required-by-law quick mention of Jefferson fathering slave children - just a perfunctory sentence about it, and then a "which seems strange, what with the 'All men are created equal' and such." You see, our hero myths can handle contradiction! In aside form!). The grounds were gorgeous - they've kept up big horticulture / gardening projects, and everything atop the hill looked quite majestic. Here are the requisite tourist snaps:

Beautiful stuff. Beck and I also visited Jefferson's grave and took a nice shaded path back down to the car after our tours proper. Called up Brett and Matt & Ebbett, who were free and up for lunch. We met them in the historic downtown district (TM) and went to a downhome type lunch place - fantastic. I had Jamaican jerk chicken and mashed potatoes and cornbread and macaroni, tres bien. Good to see M&E and their 8 month old baby "Not Otto" Benjamin. Brett got their a little later; we were glad to be able to sequester him from his groomly duties for the time we could.

After lunch, Beck and I parted; she took a walk around UVA campus while I went on a little five mile going-to-die run. While I melted away, Beck got the following nice snaps:

Row 1 and Row 2,1-2: The Rotunda, smack in the middle of campus. Row 2, 3-5: The chapel in which Brett and Heidi were wed. (2,6): A rather violent antiestablishmentarian logo present on the bulk of UVA signage.

Ran into Ryan (pronounced Ree-un) and Jay in the hotel hallway and made arrangements to head to dinner before reconnecting with the wedding party peoples later that night. Both guys were away from their respective eight month olds and seemed to enjoy the respite. Beck, it turns out, did not get to enjoy the chicken and dumplings special that afternoon at lunch, so we ignored the substantial sections of the BEG (Brett's Entertainment Guide) and went back to the exact same place. Hoo-ah! I had: the exact same thing! A lie: they were out of mashed potatoes, so I ate spicy black beans instead. Sigh. Another great meal, and our college friends, save Macy's related factors, are about the same. Jay riveted us with an excessive amount of talk of business travel - I can't imagine that's a fascinating talk even for frequent business travelers, but hey, Jay's never been one to consider his audience. Ha! We had a good meal and time, the first among many that weekend. Headed back to the hotel and walked up to another bar to wait for the wedding party.

To wait and wait for the wedding party - things ran late, though I'm sure in no way related to a Brettian propensity for epic speeches, We had a nice enough time chugging beers and waters in the upstairs bar - when Brett et al (noticeably minus Heidi, who made a brilliant strategic move to avoid puffy-eyed-brideness the next day) (speaking of, props to the parents of the bride - they were out every night until the wee hours, and kept kicking the whole while. Now we see where Heidi gets her beer-festivaling ways) showed up. Too late for us, so we decided to save our A-game for wedding day.

"But wait!" you demand. "Weren't Dan and Xtina staying with you at the hotel? When will they enter the narrative?" Dan and Christina, it turns out, got SC-rewed by the airline. They had a 1:15 flight out of Phoenix, showed up at 11:30 only to be told their flight had left at 11:15. Huh? Yes, apparently they can do that. Their only option was to take the red eye to Hotlanta and then catch a flight up to Richmond early Saturday morning. Lame, and it meant essentially an under 36 hour stay in Virginia for them. Ouch. Props to them for coming; lesser friends would have bailed in those circumstances.

So our Saturday started with another barftastic breakfast courtesy of our friends at the Cavalier Inn and a drive to Richmond to retrieve bleary-eyed friends. Got em! But not even Mitch Hedberg could keep C awake on the ride back to Charlottesville. With excessive wrangling, we contacted all the appropriate peoples and agreed to meet at another B-recommended diner for, yep, a brunch (and a morally righteous brunch at that). Elaine had just made it into town, so she met us at the diner just in time for Olympic bacon.

(Hadn't seen Elaine in a while - wow, can she ever channel the spirit of Ali of Gringoat fame. It was a little uncanny - a rough facsimile, of course, you can't duplicate the real deal. But she regaled us with a half-hour tale of breaking her ankle with such violent hand gestures that we couldn't help but expect to see Ben coming around the corner at any moment. Eerie. No substitute - we get the real deal, as mentioned, a month from now!!! Can't wait).

Good brunch - Beck broke the party down just in time to get us back to the hotel and ready in time for the wedding...