And I would drive 2900 miles (But I wouldn't drive 2900 more)

Since Sparkle does such a fantastic job of epitomizing our general attitude toward starting our cross country trek, I'll let her take the lead of the post:

That's the little goofball taking up residence in the backseat with her head pressed between the driver and passenger's seat - the observant among you will note one, her stylish backseat hammock, an attempt by the beck at keeping the Wrigley from falling into the seatwell, and two, the fact that the car is so packed that Sparkle's food bowl is resting right under her chin. Awesome. You'll also notice that in order to be in such a position, Sparkle had to sit directly in the middle of the back seat, shoving Wrigley way into one corner and directly ignoring all such "this is my half of the car" - "touch, touch, touch" arrangements of children. Sparkle is a bully. We tried to keep this to a minimum, and hopefully Wrigley didn't suffer too much - in fact, if I try not hard at all, maybe I can find a pic of Wrigley expressing her love of car rides...

So confident, that one! Anyhoo, after a scrambling Monday where Beck and I packed and shipped stuff and generally got everything ready to go, we headed out early early Tuesday morning. Beck and I, being stupid, naturally forgot about the hour we gained as headed west - there were many conniptions generating from the general San Antonio / Nyet's mom area about when we would arrive at my Uncle Randy / Aunt Luanne's house in O'Fallon, MO, though these were mostly smoothed over by Luanne herself. We ended up getting here right about 7 at night, a solid and thoroughly uninteresting day of driving (except for the fact that it caused us to hear the best song ever for the first five of what would turn out to be ten total times on the trip.

We had a total blast hanging out with Randy & Luanne for the evening - fed their coy, drank some beer (Sam Adams for me, cleverly beck's for beck), ate some pizza and played with Kelsey. Great to see them, even if did Randy did seem to laugh a little too much at the coy trying to eat my fingers off... "girl's yelp" was Beck's description of my response. Yikes. Though rumor has it that coy can skeletonize a cow in something like `8 months, so i didn't want to mess around. Anyhoo, a pic of the pond and a trio of Kelsey shots:

So we got out the next morning early early and headed for the old homestead, SA. While I'm thinking of it, I shouldn't forget some of the glories of the Midwest: a gigantic candle factory, an even bigger Barrel factory***, the biggest cross I have ever seen in my life, and a full sized billboard with a picture of a five year old giurl thumbing through a Playboy with the simple caption "Pornography Destroys." There was a R = -0.99 correlation between the number of Country, Latino and Gospel stations in a given region and our latitude as we headed south. The river water in Oklahoma had an eerie blood tinge to it. These are not things that surprise, just things we encountered as we traipsed our way.

*** - The definitive highlight of the trip was when Beck spotted the barrel factory sign, leading to this... um, exchanges happen between people, yeah? So it led to this soliloquy...

"Ooh! Sweet! Bagel Factory! Let's... oh, it's not a bagel factory. BUT WAIT! YAY! It's a Barrel Factory! Wahoo! Even better!"

From the height of disappointment to the throes of barrel-ridden ecstasy... crazy, Beck. I do like the idea that she thought that there would be a giant Bagel Factory in rural Missouri. No, no, Beck, the jews are found in a state of Misery...

So we made another 14 hour day of it, getting no time bonus this time but managing to hit San Antonio at 9 and then enduring another 20 minutes as we circled 1604. That's 1604, not "The 1604" or "The Loop." I refuse to let these crazy Phoenicians dissuade me. So we made it, and glady anticipated a day of not driving. The dogs, too, were SUPER-PSYCHED to be back in Texas and to run the Wrigley 500 around my parents' ginormous back yard.

I've been skipping over it a bit, but the drive itself was merely okay. The first two days, beck drove the first 7 hours and I drove the second. We stopped roughly every 3 hours or so to bathroom / eat / take the dogs for a walk, probably for a total of about an hour's delay each day. So not too bad. The radio was full of the aforementioned bad pop and we actually listened to a fair amount of country, so I can now identify George Strait a little more efficiently. We ate up a few hours with my games (the movie to actor game, the name all of the Simpsons characters game) and ate up about ten minutes with Beck's lamest game ever, the "name animals that start with each letter of the alphabet game." We will NOT be patenting that one.

I'm going to head down and play some disc now, so stay tuned for the day in SA and the final leg of the grand trip...

UFChumpionship

We headed over to Wren's* house to watch a thinly veiled sampling of homoerotica aka the UFC "Ultimate Fighting Championship" 73: Stacked Pay Per View Special. It was, as suspected, brutal, bloody, and arousing enough so that we got to hear grown suburban men scream out "man, that guy is ripped" in a semi-legitimate atmosphere that quelled all suspicions of engorgement. It was also, according to the announcer, a ballet of violence.

Um, contest. I had never watched the UFC before, my general impression being that it was something you might call the reality TV version of the WWE, something that appeals to our basest trainwreck proclivities and our need for sublimely idiotic narrative attached to adrenaline-inducing thuggery (With all apologies to A.C. Newman et al, I think it's really UFC that is the new pornography, that thing of sexualized content with no independent artistic merit). Having viewed it, though, nothing of my opinion has really changed, except that the homosexual porn jokes are even easier to make than I thought. It turns out that no holds barred style fighting does not often lend itself to ballet or even bad modern dance; it rather lends itself to calculated and brutal fighting with a distinct problem. In any given fight, it seems, one fighter would be at an advantage if the fight were to remain upright and stay in the realm of traditional boxing / kickboxing / karate style battles. The other, therefore, doesn't want to stay at arm's length and submit himself to getting drilled; he tries to get inside the other's reach and grapple instead. And so the majority of the time of the fights was spent not with two men artfully sparring, but instead had them trying to get into Greco-Roman poses on the ground with one man at the advantage.

Which simultaneously provides both the lack of anything ballet-oriented and everything with the other undertone orientations: most of the fights consisted of two scantily clad and sweaty men crawling all over each other, thrusting and grabbing and generally invoking blushing from even the least Victorian among us. It's not that it wasn't savage - there were elbows thrown at heads in these situations, kidney punches, and something affectionately known as the guillotine where the apparent intention was to cut off the opponent's carotid arteries and pop his skull out of joint in the same headlocked process. There's also strategy involved, as the smallest moves allowed for advantage and leverage that would determine the outcome of a match. We were watching with a bunch of Wren's friends who all seemed to be serious fanboys, who spoke of the technicalities of the moves and the figters' histories with equal fervor(though, to be fair, there were ample calls of "Elbow him in the spine!" as well). So I have to acknowledge that there was a lot going on that perhaps with repeated viewings I would become more inclined to easily see and analyze and enjoy.

But as it stood, on the one hand I was turned off by the base "let's watch dudes beat each other up" brutality of it, and on the other, I was dumbstruck by the boredom of it. The rounds were five minutes long, and the fighters would often spend the last four of those minutes writhing on the ground. Combine that with the WWE style story-telling, the product-shilling and the general LCD thick-necked heehawing of the general audience, and I don't think I'll be coming back. I'm all for cultural equality and embracing the low brow and all, but if I'm going to watch "Ultimate Fighting," I guess what I was really looking for WAS that violent ballet, and impressive as it was, not the mat-level wrestle-fest that I saw.

(Super-qualifier - if you actually are a UFCer and reading this, then by all means, you are awesome. You are ripped and muscular and strong, though I emphasize that I mention that for the "yikes, you could crush" me aspect and not the wink/nod/lip-lick "you could crush me" aspect. I give you an A+ on your performance; please don't come to my house).

* - "Wren," not Ren. A tragic development, really, as it prevents a dearth of "and Stimpy" jokes from flooding your way. Or maybe I'll just keep telling them anyways, relying on the homophonic situation to include such gems as "Nyet, how do you feel about the correct spelling of her name?" to which I would obviously reply, "No sir, I didn't like it" after a pregnant pause.

St. Lucian Times

SO yes, many a fantastic time was had in St. Lucia. We stayed at Ti Kaye, a small cliffside resort on the northwest side of the island. There were a slew of other couples in various stages of honeymoon / anniversary celebration, so everyone was ina sweet mood and was good about chit chatting but not necessarily getting into anyone's "grill." The daily routine essentially went something like:

Wake up about 8 and go get an awesome breakfast / coffee.
Slather up with sunscreen.
Lie on the beach and read.
Play frisbee in the surf.
Go get drinks / lunch at the cafe.
Go back to the beach, OR, go to the pool.
Reslather, continue lying around and reading. Drink drinks. Play frisbee again perhaps.
Enjoy sunset and get ready for dinner.
Eat a scrumptious dinner and listen to fairly horrendous island music.
I'm not kidding; you will hear steel drum "Wonderful Tonight" fifteen times.
On occasional nights, watch the Spurs destroy the Cavs.
Enjoy the stars.
Go to bed.
Rinse, repeat.

Fun times indeed. Lowlights of the trip included nearly missing our flight in San Juan and having to sprint through the airport; not getting picked up by our taxi on the last morning and having to endure some St. Lucian NASCAR Driving up some crazy curvy roads to make our flight on time, and then spending six hours in JFK. Ugh. But as you can see, the badness bookended the trip, so in the middle there we had a solid wonderful seven days. I didn't get sunburned too badly; Beck didn't really get that seasick. Only a mild amount of guilt suffered at being waited on hand and foot by locals. All in all - awesome. I definitely highly recommend Ti Kaye and St. Lucia - it was, naturally, somewhat insanely expensive, but their version of insane was mor esane than other versions on the island. All relative. So check it out.

And now we'll try something new- I didn't really want to throw up 15,000 photos on here, so I put some of our St. Lucian photos on flickr. I'll post a couple here, and then you can follow a link to my highlights album. If that isn't enough, the Beck and I have about 500 more photos on her computer, so you'll just have to come visit. So here are a couple of enticers:

So there you have it. SO if you want to check out the remainder over at flickr, click the photo of Beck doing her best Salvador Dali impersonation below:

A Big Brown Bag, Inside a Zoo

LAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSST Night... The Beck and I joined D & C in Phoenix for "First Fridays," an open art gallery street festival type thing thrown by Artlink. We ended up wandering through a few of the lower end galleries housed in former houses, checking out some photography, some paintings, some of the usual high concept (paint drippings + poetry) fartsiness and something Dan referred to as "Attempt to Gross Out" art. Here's a pic of new blog stars Dan & Christina along with the Beck and me, just so when I quote the guy or the gal you can have some kind of visual reference:
So the galleries were largely unairconditioned, so we quickly found ourselves shuffling about the city in search of beverages. And as we worked our way through the crowd I started having all the usual alienation experiences, and the general thought that there are vastly too many people on earth. But this did not stop me from noticing a street preacher with an accompanying interpretive dancer, a guy who looked like he was straight off the Latest Trey tour doing some spinning of the Grateful Dead and the Beastie Boys and a whole lot of rhythm section way too loud cuts, and another religious street rapper who rhymed "Internet Porn Blocker" with "Chewbacca." Can we get an A-men / for Lando Calrisien. That is probably not how you spell that.

So somewhere around the time the fourth or fifth band or the seventeenth alt-indie dolled up wunderkind passed my way, i caught a glimpse of the art community as machine. Maybe it's a little too much evolution lit in the past six months - but it seems like the whole thing is a carpetbomb philosophy, mass effort of many with the anti-teleological result (not aim) of some sort of cream rising to the top - like individual artworks are random mutations toward some kind of trait improvement, or maybe just commercial viability. That's not even to the say that the best will rise up, just to say that there is an awful lot of understuffing to whatever rears its head in the big way to become known and/or impactful. Like the American dream is a mechanistic selling point towards overall progress. This is not anything profound - it's just that seeing the hundreds and hundreds of destined failures at street level that way made it stand out a little more, that every success story has a million dream-crushed silly believers in its wake. It extends, natch, to businesses or career or sports endeavors or any other arena. So how much of that follow your dream, pursue-pursue-pursue ethic is authentic and how much of it is purely mechanistic - it's a good thing to tell the kids as it will propagate the success waves, not for the individual but for the mass effort. It's a sort of cross between whether the dream pursuit thing is the way it should be or just the way it is.

(In actuality, I don't know if any of this was real analytic type thinking or just a reaction to the multitude of heroin chic retro t-shirt stylings and haircuts that made me utter "Wow, Spinal Tap's getting back together" more than once. Beautiful People, indeed - I think I've officially crossed tha tline to the age where what is "it" is weird and strange to me - though I suppose you would have had to have existed in some kind of it comfort zone to make claims that you've crossed a line from within to without it. So I withdraw the sentiment - i don't get the cool people. Or think they're lame and cynically find their silly dreams naive. Which makes me cool, right?).

So after those cynical drippings wormed their way in, we headed to a Thai place that made us wait a solid 45 minutes or so for some reasonably good food and terrible too loud thump thump uncha uncha uncha music that was actually being played by a DJ and not a faceless cyborg electronica-bot 5000. Hideous! But a good meal (Half a thing of Pad Thai for the Beck and me; a plate fo something resembling Curry vomit / baby food for the D & C. It was reportedly good despite its appearance. The service was not. But the companyof D&C was fun. And tonight, we continue the shenanigans, heading over to a pregnant lady named Ren's house to watch homoerotic Ultimate Fighting Championships. Eediots, all of us - but should be fun, and will drag us away from watching the DBacks get their ass kicked for the umpteenth time in a row.

Peace out, for the now.

This Morning's Farneheit Adventure:

Unfortunately this morning's Green Belt run got off to a bit of a late start... 9 am or so for the run, so it was about 99 or so. Yowsers... but five and a half miles of bright fun and I survived. And, as lovingly pointed out by PGoat & Grin last night, at least I didn't get lost and find myself wandering about 122A in a thunderstorm. The Green Belt is a path and is therefore Nyet-proof; if I get lost I can simply turn around.

Fortunately at the end of my run aka our condo, we have the following view from the front window:


So I was able to cool off after I rumble bumble stumbled home. You may wonder how we got such an excellent photo of the pool; here in fact is photographic evidence of the Sparklinator scouting out the shot:


As you can tell, we managed to pick something with windows of the perfect height...

Speak of the... Phone Calls and Canine Fluoxetine

So no sooner had I clicked the "Publish Post" on that last entry when the phone went all abuzz and the Gringoat themselves were on the line! Huzzah! Turns out it's Ben's birthday - his, egads, 30th - and they were on their way back from Boston and a meal with Ben's parents and decided to pay me a phone call. Sweet.

And I have to give myself an F minus. I am no good on the phone, especially when there is essentially no vital news to report, just a lot of "Yeps, it's hot and no I haven't found anything to do yet." So now I feel bad, though in my defense, they were on speaker phone and using some kind of CB technology where I couldn't talk and hear them at the same time - like there was a delay to all of there responses, and as though the distance weren't enough, time had to be displaced, too. The main effect was that I couldn't tell if my jokes were funny, and lacking my usual ego-filling feedback mechanism, I found myself at a loss of things to say. Not that there are any, as noted above.

So my apologies to ben & Ali for a lackluster phone session; all the more motivation to visit so we can get back to our dynamic in person chemistry. WAHOO! NEways, it does sound like things are going well up there in the Providential area of the country, so the usual props go out to my NE buds. Here's a shoutout to them and their awesome dog, the Heid-star:

And yes, that is supposed to say "star," as she is one. Speaking of dogs, the Sparkle ran out of fluoxetine recently. We haven't had any (knock on Kerry Wood) trouble in the Wrigley-mauling department lately, but given this general facial expression worn over the course of the move:


you can see why it was important that she get back on her SSRI dose ASAP. So I went to the store and tried to pick up the prescription for Rebecca, only they couldn't find it because it was actually under "Sparkle Jones." HA! Then after I paid for it, the checkout lady told me to hold on - and because I am a new customer, their official pharmacist had to come over and explain to me that Sparkle was not allowed to drive or operate heavy machinery if she combined her medication with alcohol. Duly noted, and I then explained to her that Sparkle was a dog. And she tried to keep her speech going about the mechanics of opening the pill bottle, but then she lost it. Laughter galore. Welcome to AZ, Spah-kull. Inherent absurdity is everywhere - but it's a little more obvious when you're picking up prozac for your pup.

Checklist

Faint whispers from the vortex... ghostly taunts as if from dreams... where you at, Nyet? they taunt. We want our updates - please, take five seconds and pretend that we are just as centered on you as you are...

Huh? What? Sorry, I was looking for a melodramatic re-entry to the Nyetverse, and after a rather insanely packed six weeks from May 20th - July 4th, this is all I could come up with:

TO DO LIST, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER

1. Watch a sophomoric sex comedy featuring actors from one of your favorite TV shows with an NBA Finals MVP. Check.

2. Escape the hellacious trappings of a do-nothing winter only to find yourself in the more climate-wise accurate trappings of a hellacious summer. Check.

3. Gain something resembling but not actually remotely approaching internet fame (237 views!) for drunken idiocy at a wedding. Check.

4. Oh yeah, get married! To an extraordinary cutie in Beck! Check! It Out:


5. Drive 2900 miles in three days with a quick stopover in San Antonio. With beasts in tow. Check.

6. Leave a certain, full-time job as a math teacher at a school for the arts for an uncertain, no-job future in the Southwest. Um, check. Figure out what you want to do before you get to Phoenix. Un, check.

7. Buy a new Prius. Check.

8. WHAT? R U CRAZY? I thought you said in "6" that you had no J-O-... oh, wait, that's right, move to Sunny Azz because your now wife has a dope job as a veterinarian and can afford such things (so long as you figure out something to do within a reasonable amount of time). Also, said vet job needs to induce the phrase "turtle's prolapsed oviduct" within 2 days of starting. Check.

9. Play more "real" disc golf in the past month (10 rounds total in Rochester and Scottsdale) than you have since your last round at Rice in 2000, twice getting a sore arm because of over exuberant driving. Check, course reviews coming.

(Scores: +12, +8, +5, +4, 4, +4, +4, +3, +3, +2) (Seems we are progressing in the correct direction).

10. Speaking of frisbee, check out the local Ultimate scene and find it tragically lacking... Boston, you have spoiled me (though, to be fair, it is the middle of the summer and I haven't played in a league and/or checked out the club team yet). Actually, I should probably hold off until league play to assess this - in the meantime, I'll just get some pickup in. Check.

11. Become a "convenience factor" Diamondbacks fan, and tolerate it because none other than Fatty Fat Mark Grace is on announcer duty. And he is actually good / funny. Sweet. Check.

12. It should not be forgotten that in there I spent a week with my SLW (special lady-wife) hanging out on a beach in the Caribbean, reading a ton and generally getting our relaxation on at Honeymoon camp. Check, and that was awesome... if only I could remember what that looked like... (Click and stare for beach-view)


(Pardon me while I gaze longingly into the screen for a while)

...

(Actually, as long as we're waiting, check out the book / movie reviews that I owe you:

Time Traveler's Wife
Cosmopolis
Water for Elephants
Middlesex

Pan's Labyrinth
Babel
Knocked Up

And I'll probably finish Three Junes soon, too, so... get excited)

Also, during your honeymoon, watch your hometown team win the NBA Finals while a bunch of Cleveland fans cry. I may have mentioned this already. Check.

13. Remove a copious amount of wedding gifts from the guestroom of friends Dan & Christina. Check. (D & C have angled their way into probably "most frequent Nyetverse guests," btw).

(And lest you get all in a tizzy, thinking that some of your favorite characters have been written out of the script, fear not - Gringoat and Sarah-stophe have graciously agreed to visit Phoenix at least once per month and supply the 'verse with antic-filled shenanigans. Either that, or they'll e-mail me or something. We seriously miss you guys, btw... :( - but in all seriousness, your presence in Arizona this winter is mandatory).

14. Write thank you notes for all of those gifts... and boy are my arms tired. Check. Seriously, a big thank you to everyone who got our Scottsdale abode off to a great start.

15. Listen to this, the best new song in the history of holy pop radio, no fewer than ten times on our way across the country. Check.

Okay, I'm tired of that. I will throw together a pictorial account of St. Lucia and our cross country trek in the upcoming days, and I'll show you what hybrid living is all about. And I'll try to start a steady flow of Arizona pics / stories, plus I still owe that Boston in review thing. So much to do in the next few... in the meantime, check out this RIDICULOUS pic of Sparkle...


Back in effect... tune in soon for muy mas updates...