December 2003 Archives

We hit San Diego fairly early in the morning yesterday. We headed directly to Balboa Park, one of my most vivid memories of the city. Along I-15, which we drove down from Escondido, we could still see huge patches of burnt ground from the wildfires that swept through here a few months ago.

Much of Balboa Park wasn't open yet when we arrived; we had anticipated that, and we found a parking space and started wandering around as we waited for the museums to open. We spent most of the day wandering through museums of anthropology and art; the most colorful exhibit we saw was of the woven silk Japanese costumes used in Japanese Noh plays. They were rich and beautiful, and I wished I could touch the elaborate kimonos.

At lunchtime, we ate in the art museum cafe. We both got veggie burgers, which were really yummy; handmade bread, avocado, roasted onions, and an aioli sauce made them better than the average veggie burger. So far, that's been the culinary high point of our time in San Diego.

We left Balboa Park at around 4:30, and I knew the sun would set around 5:00PM, so we took I-8 to Ocean Beach to see the sunset. Our timing was perfect; we arrived at Ocean Beach just in time to see the sun dip below the sky. It was chilly, but the clouds and sky were brilliantly warm, and we spent quite a while sitting by the Pacific, watching the surfers in their wet suits and the kids playing along the surf.

I took a zillion pictures, of course; the Pacific sunset looks like the second in a pair of bookends, like the end of our journey that began with a Gulf sunrise. It isn't really the end, though; there will be more updates to come.

After all, we haven't seen the saguaros yet, and that was the original point, wasn't it?

We left Kayenta, Arizona at around 7:00AM Arizona time, before the sun had even started to peek out of the horizon. The plan was to visit Monument Valley early in the morning, then to go to the Grand Canyon before heading toward California. We wanted to get an early start so that we could make up some of the time we lost in the ice and snow the previous day.

From Kayenta, in the heart of the Navajo Nation, it was only a short drive to the Utah state line and to Monument Valley. Before dawn, we could barely see the ominous rock formations standing on either side of us, but as the sun began to rise, we saw their silhouettes against the glorious rich colors of a desert sunrise. We stopped and waited, snapping pictures from time to time, as often as our cold fingers would allow us; it was only around 15†F.

Lots of people can say they've been to Monument Valley, but we can count ourselves among the relative few who can say they've been there at daybreak.

When the sun had finished its ascent into the sky, we left Monument Valley (and Utah) and headed for Tuba City on our way to the Grand Canyon.

(An aside: Every time I see, hear, or think about the name, Tuba City, the worst song ever composed gets stuck in my head. "The tuba, the tuba, aruba, aruba..." Thanks, Dad.)

Between Tuba City and the Grand Canyon, there are a few scenic overlooks which double as tourist traps; to reach the overlook, you have to pass through two rows of stalls where dealers peddle Navajo jewelry to unsuspecting tourists. We, of course, bought a few things. My favorite purchase is a silver turtle with its shell inlaid with azurite and malachite; they resemble the earth as they blend together.

The road to the Grand Canyon is uphill most of the way, and pretty soon, we found ice and snow along the road again. For the most part, the roads were well-cleared, and it didn't take us long to get up to the canyon itself. Traffic was nearly non-existant in the direction we were travelling.

We stopped at a few vistas to look out over the canyon. They say that the Grand Canyon looks different in every season. In the winter, the north rim, currently closed for the winter, is pale and pastel in the distance, while nearer by, the red rock along the south rim is peppered with snowfall on every flat surface. It was stunning, of course, and overwhelming.

There is a tradeoff, of course, to visiting a place like this during the winter. On the positive side, the park wasn't nearly as crowded as it would have been during the summer. Each vista had plenty of room for those who braved the cold winter day to see the beauty of the canyon, and the forest was beautiful beneath the powdered snow. However, as cold as it was, we weren't able to explore the park the way we might have liked to. We could only tolerate 15 or 20 minutes outside of the car at a time. It would have been nice to spend more time there.

As we drove our way slowly down the winding paths toward the exit, we noticed some cars pulled over on the side of the road. To our surprise, a wolf was standing nearby, within range for a beautiful picture. We snapped a couple of shots and left, but we were dismayed to see people getting out of their cars to get a closer shot. Back in the forest, there were a few more wolves scrambling through the snow, but we drove on and away from the canyon.

Once we left the Grand Canyon, we took an almost straight shot to California, heading through Williams, AZ to get onto I-40 and head west. We stopped in Kingman to eat and buy drinks for the road. While we were there, C picked up the soundtrack to the movie version of Chicago. By the time we hit the outskirts of L.A., we knew most of the songs on the CD, and we sang along loudly as we flew downhill with the L.A. traffic. C gripped the seat tightly the whole time, but we had a straight shot down toward San Diego, our intended destination, so we took it. We stopped for the night at a motel in Escondido and went to bed, so that we could be up early in the morning to visit San Diego.

That was our day trip through Arizona. We'll pass through there again tomorrow on our way back to Texas.

Sunday was Georgia O'Keeffe Day for the road trip crew. We started by visiting the O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe when it opened at 10:00 AM.

Before it opened, we wandered around the Plaza area one last time, taking a few daytime pictures of the adobe and the shops. The sky was clear and blue, so it isn't obvious at first glance how cold it was, but it was around 18†F, so we would take a few pictures, then run back to the car and turn on the heat to thaw out our hands.

The museum itself was nice, however. In addition to many of O'Keeffe's works, it featured an exhibit of the works of Alfred Stieglitz, O'Keeffe's husband, himself a renowned photographer. After that, we went to Museum Hill, where we saw the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.

From Museum Hill, the view of Santa Fe and its surrounding mountains was breathtaking, but the wind was bracingly cold, so we didn't stick around long afterward, instead deciding to head out into O'Keeffe country before cutting back to Arizona in the late afternoon.

We took US 84 north from Santa Fe, passing by O'Keeffe's beloved Ghost Ranch and admiring the bluffs and mountains that appear in many of her paintings. It was a beautiful day (though still well below freezing), and it wasn't until we had made it far to the northwest that the roads began turning icy and snowy.

I've never driven in ice or snow before; in Austin, it is common knowledge that freezing weather shuts the entire city down for days at a time. I was rather petrified about driving through it, but it was relatively easy; nonetheless, we never stopped to get pictures of the snow that covered the landscape. To me, it was an impressive amount of snowfall, but C assured me that it was just light snow.

Along the way, a deer bounded in front of us. I was going slowly, and the buck was fairly far ahead, so there was plenty of time to stop and watch him as he pranced across the road.

The icy conditions slowed us down a great deal, and it took us far longer to get to western New Mexico than we had expected. As the sun set, we passed through Farmington, New Mexico. We decided to go twenty miles further to Shiprock to spend the night, but even though that town had a McDonald's and several gas stations, it had no motel, so we continued on to Kayenta, Arizona, about 100 miles away, the same night. We (not-so-affectionately) dubbed the town "Shitrock" as we were leaving. I'm sure the residents don't find that nearly as original or witty as we did at the time.

Thus ended our first journey through The Land of Enchantment.

We've been without internet access for the last couple of days, so I've got to fill in the gaps a bit. C and I are in San Diego tonight, our second night in southern California. It was a beautiful day in San Diego today; chilly, but nothing like the sub-freezing temperatures we'd been shivering through the past few days.

C and I wrote the following bit while driving through the Mojave Desert yesterday. I was driving and she was typing, for the record. I like to call it, "Why Everything Wrong with California is Gov. Schwarzenegger's Fault; A Series in Eight Parts."

---

We're in California, in the middle of the Mojave desert. It just occured to us that we're in Arnold Schwarzenegger country, and suddenly, things make so much more sense. In the hour that we've been in California, we've noticed the following things wrong with the state:

1. The smog. We can't even see the mountains for all the smog. There isn't a city around for miles and miles, and yet there's smog.


2. The sun does not set. We don't know where it went, but it didn't set. It's dark now, and we can't see the cactus, and it's only 4:30 in the afternoon; we hypothesize that the sunset was lost behind the enormous head of Arnold Schwarzenegger.


3. This highway has some major holes. No further explanation needed.


4. The rest stop is broken; we think they--the people of California headed by the big head of Arnold--did it on purpose so we couldn't take a picture of the cactus in the Mojave desert. First, they told us there would be a rest stop in 18 miles; then the rest stop was closed down, and the sign said "next rest stop 78 miles."


5. The Coke bottle, which was purchased in Arizona, is not compatible with the state of California; it won't open despite previously having been opened in Arizona.


6. There are too many cars, and when they break, people kick them with hatred and throw things at them; this might be related to item number 3, the holes in the road.


7. The gas is $1.99 a gallon. Luckily, we drive a hybrid (and no, we don't need to plug it in). We get 42.6 miles to the gallon, but we still have to fill up every 426 miles or so (preferably a little more often).


8. We're 300 miles from LA, and already there's a traffic jam.

On the morning of the third day of our road trip, the thermometer shows that it is 9ƒF outside. For the record? I'm from Texas, and I'm not sure I have the tools to deal with that kind of cold. It's nice to be bundled up in a warm hotel room, but we're bundled up in here without food, so C is headed down to the car to bring in some of the food we left in there.

One of the cool things about this road trip is that we're taking it during the winter. This is mostly incidental; I'm taking advantage of my winter vacation so that I don't have to use much of my annual leave. But since the number of people travelling during the winter months is fewer than those who travel during the summer, prices are lower, hotels are less crowded, and we're seeing things that I've never seen before, despite having travelled through most of these areas before, like the Christmas decorations in Santa Fe. One area I'd like to see during this time of year is Taos. I don't think we'll be headed there this trip, but there's always another winter.

An aside: C just got back with food from the car. We're eating cinnamon-flavored French twists, sweet pastries that taste a bit like Christmas to me.

This morning, we're going to go walk around Santa Fe again (well-bundled, of course), and see the Georgia O'Keeffe museum before we drive northwest into Georgia O'Keeffe country. This region was clearly insipirational to her, not to mention the other artists who make their homes here, and we're coming to discover why.

We left CY's new place early in the morning and headed off into New Mexico. We decided to head to Santa Fe today, despite the unseasonably cold temperatures, because our schedule wouldn't work if we came back to it toward the end of the trip. On the way, we saw the exit for White Sands, and we went there first, though it was a bit out-of-the-way.

The park itself was stunning; the eponymous white sands were formed from gypsum on the sea floor millions of years ago. The dunes are constantly moving, so most of them have very little vegetation, leaving them pristine and glistening in the sun. The temperature was in the 40s, but the sky was entirely clear. In the middle of the dunes, the white sands seemed to extend to the horizon, where they met the mountains, and I could hear nothing but the sound of blood flowing to my ears. It was extraordinary, and I was so glad that I went.

After White Sands, we headed more or less directly to Santa Fe. We kept checking our altitude with the GPSr, and by the time we got to Santa Fe, we were at 6,000 feet above sea level. The temperature dropped continually as we approached the city nestled in the mountains as well; the high temperature in Santa Fe today was in the 20s.

Despite the cold, we wandered around the downtown area, entering shops or art galleries when we needed to warm up. Santa Fe is a beautiful city, particularly in the downtown area, and filled with amazing arts and crafts. We walked around until most of the shops had closed, then went hunting for places to eat dinner. It was mostly luck that we found Cafe San Estevan, a restaurant with beautiful Santa Fe ambience. I had chicken enchiladas with a red chile sauce that was delicious but almost too spicy to eat. C had stuffed poblano peppers, which she couldn't stop raving about.

Tomorrow, we head to the Four Corners area and into Arizona. Though we're both tired, thanks to all the driving we're doing, we're keeping (mostly) sane and enjoying watching the landscape change as we travel. The adventure continues!

For pictures, check the photolog to see where we've been so far.

Seven hundred and fifty miles later, we're sitting in the living room of CY and Ms. Leslita in El Paso, TX. CY made us a lovely vegan Moroccan stew, and we're now ready to rest and prepare for the trip ahead.

We left Corpus Christi as the sun rose over the bay, and we stopped along the bayfront to take pictures to show where we began. From Corpus, we took a straight shot up to San Antonio, and then west on I-10 to El Paso. It's straightforward from a navigational standppoint, but we were on the road for twelve hours, with frequent stops to rest or stretch or take pictures.

We are much further west than C has ever been, and it has been interesting for me to relive the geography and geology of West Texas through her. We went from the flat coastal plains to the rolling hill country, to the dry and desolate plateaus of west-central Texas, to the dusty mountains of west Texas. The air is dry here, and already, my lips are starting to chap.

Tomorrow, the plan is to go to the store to buy sodas, lip balm, and eye drops to combat the fierce dust, and then to explore southern New Mexico as much as we can in a day. The trick will be in trying not to succumb to the urge to do the "look-and-spit" tour of the western US -- there isn't much point in being out here if we aren't going to stop and look at things, at least... is there?

I'm bucking the trend today by not telling you what I got for Christmas. Except for the very very cool Hawaiian shirt that my uncle brought me. And the high-tech tire gauge from C, just in time for our road trip. And a big, fabulous book about photography tips, also from C. And the pedometer I got from my grandmother. Unfortunately, the brilliant idea we had to give everyone in my family pedometers was superceded by my grandmother's idea to give us all talking pedometers. The good news is, C created a packet of informational materials about walking, including a form to track "progress" in walking from Corpus to Austin.

Tonight, we're making preparations to hit the road; we plan to leave Corpus Christi by 7 or 7:30 in the morning and arrive in El Paso by 9 or so. That's 9:00 pm, if you didn't catch it. Texas is really really huge. We're staying at CY and Leslita's place, and I can't wait to see them, though I'm sure we'll be exhausted by the time we get there.

We're packing a cooler, a laptop, and some books on CD for the trip. It's just as well; singing all the way to El Paso would make us far too nutty to be around. But make no mistake: we have our trusty Car-ioke CD, as well. It's a fabulous idea, but not quite as cool as it sounds.

I went geocaching with my uncle and my three adorable cousins today. We found four different caches and got in a decent hike, as well as some birdwatching. Sadly, I forgot my camera, so you won't be seeing pictures of the pelicans (brown and white), the blue herons (greater and lesser), or the egrets (great). It was a lovely Texas Christmas day, with temperatures in the 70s.

Since tomorrow is Day #1 of our road trip, the next time I post, I should be in El Paso. I plan on posting entries from the laptop (hopefully) every day, with pictures as is possible; keep in mind, I may be on a slow modem connection for the rest of the month. Keep your eyes peeled for the girls in the Prius.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.

As we sat down for Christmas dinner tonight, people squeezing in around the too-small table, my aunt Susan said to me, in front of everybody, "Rachel, I need to tell you that you have the most infectious laugh."

I think I looked stunned, because she continued, "Whenever you laugh, it makes me want to start laughing too. I bet nobody ever tells you that, and it's important that you hear it."

Which is true. They don't, and it's the nicest thing anybody has told me in a while.

I spent the evening leading up to dinner playing with my little cousins. C and I went with them to the park and took lots of pictures, I with my digital camera, and C with the black and white film in my SLR camera. We had the black and white pictures developed at the one-hour processing place, and they came out beautifully, cementing my belief that my little cousins are the cutest little cousins ever.

My cousins have been completing puzzles all week on a card table at my grandmother's house. These are complicated puzzles, mind you, with repeating patterns and irregular borders and 1000 pieces. As they were finishing the last puzzle, C and I went to the madness that is Toys 'R Us on Christmas Eve to find more puzzles for the girls to work on while they're in Corpus Christi.

It was insane. The place was packed with people buying last-minute Christmas presents for their kids. It was Barbie and Disney and bicycles as far as the eye could see, and the shelves were rather bare, as though all the Christmas cheer had been combed out of them.

The people standing in line, many of whom looked like young parents who could ill afford the presents piled in their shopping baskets, were all weary and frazzled. In the aisle next to us, a couple purchased some wicker doll furniture and a number of other items, most notably a Barbie bicycle. They peeled off bills with a grimace as they paid the final total, well over $200, and I imagined how hard it must be to have young kids at Christmastime and felt very thankful not to be in that position.

As of about 8:45pm today, I'm officially done with my Christmas shopping. I had over 27 hours to spare, so it isn't really procrastinating, is it? Okay, yeah, I procrastinated.

The most expensive present I bought this year was for my mom. I bought her something she both needs and wants, but I've been second-guessing my choice since before I even bought the item. I've been looking forward to Christmas morning with a sense of impending dread, which isn't really what the adage, "Tis better to give than to receive," is supposed to be about. It isn't that she won't like the gift; it's that I think she'll be upset at the amount that I spent.

The whole thing makes me wishful for the kind of Christmas where everyone makes silly presents for one another, and gifts aren't really an important part of the day. In my family, even though every year someone declares that it will be a more modest Christmas, no one ever seems to survive without the post-holiday financial hangover.

Fiscally responsible? Not so much.

For my part, it isn't that I'm attracted to the material side of the gift-giving; it's that the things I want to give people cost money. Part of my initial holiday roadtrip plan was to skip Christmas with the family altogether and spend it someplace else. Theoretically, I could skip the whole present transaction that way, and just travel instead. In the end, it didn't work out that way, and I'm okay with that.

But next year, maybe I'll just bake cookies.

The Christmas tree went up this afternoon, after a long morning of shopping for last-minute Christmas gifts. My mom and I set up the tree in the stand, and C and I wrapped the red and white lights around it. Then we waited for the kids to arrive to decorate.

The result of having four kids, ages ten, nine, six, and five, decorating the tree is that the ornaments are all being hung at their eye-level, and certain branches are receiving more attention than others. One bottom branch must've had twelve ornaments on it, weighing it down until most of the ornaments were resting on the floor. My youngest cousin was tasked with rearranging that branch, and it's now not quite floor-bound.

It's quite the motley arrangement, but the kids are having fun, and my mom, my uncle, C, and I are having a great time watching them. As my cousin Hayley remarked, "The grownups have the giggles."

I wonder how many oranges a person would have to eat to overdose on vitamin C. In a day at the ranch, I must've eaten twenty oranges.

There isn't much to do at the ranch; I have a hard time imagining living there. It's that downtime -- that utter stillness -- that I love about visiting. Late in the evening, with no lights anywhere around, the stars above our campfire were so thick in the sky that I couldn't tell where the night ended and the stars began.

The little house out there is full of energy. It's hard to describe, but you're never alone inside it, even when there's no one else around. In the chill of the evening, I slept under a pile of blankets, beneath a portrait of a fine Mexican lady with a stern gaze. I never think of anything but the most respectful thoughts in that room, for fear of the well-dressed lady in the portrait.

In the morning, a misty fog lay low over the fields like a quilt, but the trees were bustling with birds and butterflies. Vivid green jays flocked into the trees, staying just out of range until my camera ran out of batteries, then approaching me, taunting. Red cardinals, titmice, and muted pyrrhuloxia ate from feeders along the perimeter of the yard.

We spent several hours puttering around the yard, doing odd jobs and feeding range cubes to the cattle before breakfast. The cattle live on a different part of the property. There are perhaps fifteen full-grown cows, one bull, and three or four calves, one brand new with his umbilical cord still attached. Two of the cows are very close to calving, as well. They came to us when they heard the truck's engine, bellowing loudly as they approached. The brand new calf is too young to be afraid of people, and he let my mother pat him. Most of the cattle are friendly and will eat from your hand, so my mom likes to acquaint the babies with human contact as soon as she can.

I had sustained myself on oranges in the meantime, but the homefries we ate were indescribably delicious and rich by the time we ate breakfast at noon. It was 2pm when we left for the hour-and-a-half drive back to Corpus Christi, after having swept, made the beds, and gathered everything we packed. Since my trip to Romania with C over the past summer, I spend a lot of time looking at the landscapes that are so familiar to me, and wonder whether they would be exotic to someone else. I find nothing exotic about the flat agricultural plains of the coastal bend. The roads stretch on to nowhere, past rustic old farmsteads and old-fashioned windmills until we reach the outskirts of town, where new housing developments are constantly cropping up.

And so we found ourselves home, walking distance from the bay, and it seems unbelievable that the landscape could be so different from the way it was an hour and a half away.

My three littlest cousins are in town, tow-headed girls from Tacoma who stand in a line like stacking dolls at 10, 9, and 6. I haven't seen them in two years, and they've grown considerably in that time. The youngest doesn't remember anyone, after two years away, but she's become fairly outgoing in that time, so it wasn't a hard task to reintroduce myself. They're cute, thoughtful little girls, and I'd like to spend as much time with them as possible while they're in town, so I'm a bit ambivalent about going off to the ranch today.

As I was writing, the little neighbor girl came in to get her daily prize from my mom. She just turned five, and she's perpetually shy; to talk to her, you'd think we'd never met. I've been hoping to see her when I came to town the last couple of times, because she's a sweet little kid, too, but she hasn't been around, so I haven't seen her for close to a year. I keep wondering what would happen if we introduced her to my little cousins.

We're headed to the ranch in a while; it's a two-hour drive, so we'll get there in the mid-afternoon and spend the night, then come back to Corpus in the morning. I'm taking my digital camera, as well as my film camera, full of black and white film that I'd like to develop if I can ever find another darkroom class to take.

The best part of being at the ranch is having a grove full of oranges to pick and eat all day long. Then late in the evening, we'll barbecue ribs for my mom, chicken for me, and vegetables yet to be determined for C. Eating in south Texas is always a complicated proposition.

Hopefully, we'll have the ranch to ourselves; it's not as much fun when there are lots of people there. We'll do some work in the garden and feed the cows, and I'll take a lot of pictures.

I'll tell you all about it tomorrow.

After a fairly impromptu departure, we drove to Corpus Christi this evening, leaving Austin after dark. It was so profoundly dark on IH-37, fifty miles from nowhere, that I couldn't see what was coming around the next bend, but I could see a million stars in the sky.

Let's go fishing in the morning
just like we've always gone.
You can come inside and wake me up;
we'll pack and leave by dawn,
we will pack and leave by dawn.

And the fish will watch our boats
with envy and with fear
because we will live forever
and our days are slow and dear,
and our days are slow and dear.

--Dar Williams, 'Fishing in the Morning'

We listened to this song, over and over and over and over; it's hard to explain what the appeal is, but this is what we do some days. Over and over. The last 65 miles to Corpus, we had it on a loop in the CD player, and after a while, we started doing a different version each time. There was the Shania Twain version, the opera version, the six-year-old version, the choir director version...

Before we knew it, we were laughing until we were in tears, and we were driving down the freeway in Corpus Christi. We're just lucky that I didn't drive us into a wall or a ravine while I was laughing.

The poor cats sat in the back seat silently, afraid that we'd lost our minds.

Home again -- and off to the backwoods of south Texas tomorrow.

I left work on time (which, in my world, feels like leaving work early) so that C and I could go buy the Christmas presents we've been planning for people. Our primary destination was not the mall, but since going to our primary destination would have required us to drive on IH-35 during rush hour traffic, we stopped at the mall to window-shop and people-watch.

For some reason, the area around Highland Mall is always teeming with grackles, large, ominous-looking black birds who love to congregate in trees and terrorize pedestrians who try to walk beneath them. But this afternoon, it wasn't just the trees that were full of grackles; there was a section of the parking lot where thousands and thousands of birds stood on the asphalt and sat on the hoods of cars. It was so full that one could literally not drive through that part of the parking lot, and most curiously of all, they were all facing Mecca -- every last one of them was pointed east.

I opened my window to take some pictures from the car, and as we sat nearby, hundreds more birds arrived to join the ones already standing on the ground. C rather nervously informed me that Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" used grackles to portray the eponymous flock. She was relieved when I rolled my window up again.

I was tempted to drive slowly into the flock to see them fly away, but C was rather persistent in her demand that I turn around and go the other way, so I left the grackles in peace.

Grackles remind me a bit of velociraptors. Their heads have the same wedged shape, and their eyes are almost reptilian. They're known for being very intelligent, which makes them look even more sinister. And though I've heard that people from other parts of the country find them exotic, around here, they're pest birds, particularly in the fall.

When I was an undergrad and living on campus, they'd hire people to come out with air rifles to shoot blanks into the trees and scare the grackles away. Generally, the grackles would fly away -- for a minute, anyway -- and then come back again. They're smart; too smart, really.

When we left the mall, night had fallen, and while we couldn't see the grackles anymore, we could still hear their deafening cries in the trees. The mall, apparently, has resorted to some rather creative measures to try to scare the grackles away. As we walked beneath an awning, we heard a strange loud crunch, like the sound of a can being smashed. C and I looked at each other puzzledly, then shrugged. We were well into the parking lot when we heard some poor (likely underpaid) person emitting a large meeeooooooooow through the loudspeaker.

The grackles couldn't have cared less.

Every year around the holidays, a group of extended coworkers gets together to sing Christmas carols in the (acoustically friendly) foyer of the main building. I always participate, because 1) I like to sing, and I get very few opportunities to practice reading music, and 2) I sorta dig Christmas carols.

It's generally a very pleasant experience. The acoustics are very flattering, much like singing in the shower, and the other singers are very talented -- not at all what I expected when I first got involved a few years ago. We generally have an eager audience to listen to us, and we sing during the lunch hour, so it's not like it interferes with my rigorous daily schedule of meetings.

Today was the second (and final) holiday performance for the year. We sang for an hour, which is just long enough to make my out-of-practice voice hoarse for the rest of the day.

I sang in the choir for six years when I was in school, which means six seasons of Christmas concerts, not including the three years that I've participated with this work choir. That's a lot of time for me to develop strong opinions of many of the songs that we sing. Care to know what I think of them? Too bad. I'm telling you anyway.

1) Jolly Old St. Nicholas. I hate this song. I abhor it. It's so asinine, and very eight years old, and to be frank with you, I haven't been eight in nineteen years. Plus, it reminds me very vividly of the choir in fifth grade, and the stupid Christmas show that we must've performed a dozen times in various venues around Corpus Christi, and the solo that my best friend JoAnn sang. She sang, "Johnny wants a pair of skates," and her inflection was so damned perfect, and I was jealous, because I? I got nothing. No solo, nothing special. I was just part of the choir.

I'm not bitter. Really. But I hate this song, and we sing it every time, and if I never had to hear it again, it would be too soon.

2) O Come Emmanuel. This is one of those rare Christmas carols that I never heard before joining this choir. It's beautiful, actually -- haunting, if you'll forgive the cliche -- and I adore the phrasing the choir leader uses:
piano for the verses --
"O come, o come Emmanuel,
and ransom captive Israel,
that mourns in lonely exile here
until the son of God appear;"

and then a beautiful forte
"Rejoice!
Rejoice!
Emmanuel has come to thee, o Israel."

Truly gorgeous. The text doesn't really convey it.

3) Jingle Bells. Jingle Bells sometimes runs the risk of sounding asinine (see "Jolly Old St. Nicholas" above). I don't particularly like the verses, and it isn't as though the audience can understand what we're singing anyway, but I like how we go from unison on the verses to four-part harmony on the chorus.

4) O Come All Ye Faithful. There's an alternate soprano descant for this song that I don't know yet. A few sopranos sing it, and I sing the melody. It's in a good key, so I enjoy this one.

5) O Holy Night. We don't actually sing this one. More's the pity. It's my favorite Christmas carol, and I can totally handle the leaps near the end. It isn't really suited to a choir, though -- particularly one where all the sopranos secretly want to be the lead singer. (I've described every choir, haven't I?)

6) Silent Night. We sing this one in German, which feels a bit affected to me. Every year, someone has to go through the proper pronunciation of the German words, and it seems to me we could just sing it in English and be done with it. Couldn't we?

It's a nice song, but I think I've sung it a thousand times. I could sing it in my sleep, and you probably could, too.

---

No, I was not one of the lucky ones who got to skip work to see The Lord of the Rings. Nor did I see the midnight viewing; nor did I skip work yesterday to see the entire trilogy. So you will not hear me waxing poetic about what a cinematic masterpiece it is. Not yet, anyway.

While the rest of you slackers came down with the hobbit flu, I was at work, trying to get something productive done. No, I can't say that with a straight face. What of it?

It is a horrible twist of fate that my auto insurance comes due in December every year. With the purchase of my new car, my insurance rates are suddenly rather inflated, and even after the promotion I got a couple of months ago, I suddenly find finances tight again this month.

My dastardly credit card company has seen fit to raise my credit limit by 50%, however, in a sinister effort to convince me to make Christmas purchases on that card. So far, I have resisted admirably, but the month is still young. The timing of this raise in credit limit is certainly suspect, and anyway, that's the card I've been trying to pay off for months! Progress is slow, but I haven't made any new purchases with it in a while. Among other things, my credit card company is (I discovered recently) one of the top supporters of the Republican Party, and I am not. I wouldn't have a "Kill the Whales" credit card, either, for the record.

This week, I find myself mired in the stress of "I have so much to do and no time to do it before the holidays," and I'm tired of feeling overworked and stressed. Vacation is a good thing, and certainly, it'll be more relaxing than what I've been up to lately, but it's always tempered with the fact that, no matter where I go or what I'm doing, those work people know where they can find me if the system goes down and I need to help them put it back up again.

The Grand Canyon, of course, would be an ideal place to do disaster recovery.

I called my mom today to ask her for oranges from the ranch. They're almost ready now, and the selection from the grocery store becomes less and less inspiring as I imagine the ones we pick off the trees out there.

I find myself getting more and more into the Christmas spirit everyday; I didn't really expect that for some reason. When my mom told me she planned to buy a Christmas tree today, and that we could help her put it up when we get to Corpus next weekend, I was more relieved than I thought I would be. In my mind, I can smell the fir already. Everywhere I go, I see Christmas lights, and it seems too soon, the way it does when I see them before Thanksgiving, but it isn't too soon anymore.

At just over ten days until Christmas, though, I haven't really done much to prepare. Shipping is trickier at this time of the season, so most of the purchasing or preparation will need to be done in person. I still have presents to buy (and to choose, for that matter) and preparations to make for the road trip. We still don't know exactly where we're going, but I intend to try to dodge the bowl games as best I can.

It was beautiful and sunny today, and I was on campus for a while after seeing "Lost in Translation" at the Dobie. With the holidays upon us, campus was nearly deserted; I find that I like it best with no students around. I spent about an hour and a half taking pictures of the Littlefield fountain (currently not running, but filled with water), details of the Union, the Tower, all the usual stuff.

Sometimes, I get the feeling that I take the same pictures over and over and over again, and to some extent, I know I do. I'm looking forward to the road trip, to the change in scenery. I'm hoping it'll spark something exciting.

After the party she wanted to attend was cancelled this evening (the hostess came down with the flu), C and I made a split-second decision to drive to San Antonio instead, to see the Riverwalk.

It was a chilly but clear evening when we left Austin. C had heard that the space station would be visible early in the evening, so we stopped in Buda to see it fly overhead at 5:54pm. It looked like a slowly-moving star in the twilight sky, and we watched it for a few minutes before continuing on our way.

Downtown San Antonio was packed when we arrived; there was a Spurs game there this evening. We parked at the River Center and set out from there, walking along the Riverwalk.

Bathed in the warm glow of thousands of Christmas lights, a mariachi band played outside in the cold air. We walked past as they were finishing a set, and the band leader began speaking to the crowd in the mixture of Spanish and English that I love to listen to. It is Saturday night, and the area is teeming with people.

It was a bit like swimming, moving along the narrow walkways with the crowd. We kept to the inside, afraid that the crowd might inadvertantly push someone into the chilly water.

Every hundred yards or so, an old stone bridge arches over the river, and each one is lined in white lights. Overhead, the trees canopy, and colorful lights dangle down, their palettes reflected in the rippling water like an impressionist painting.

A constant stream of river boats drifted silently through the water like ghosts, but on board, the passengers teemed with activity. Some of the boats were occupied by choirs of kids, who sang Christmas carols to people walking along the river.

An article I read recently named San Antonio one of the best cities to spend Christmas, and I can see why. It's almost exotic in its celebration, and the river was lovely. For whatever reason, I'd never been there around this time of year; I'm certain I'll return sometime.

C and I found advent calendars at Central Market in November, and though we had seen them in past years, this year, we broke down and bought them. It reminds me a lot of when I was a little kid, and Advent was my first introduction to the liturgical calendar. My grandmother, who is a Methodist minister, was really the only religious influence in my life when I was a little kid, but it was important to her that I understood that there was more to Christmas than Santa Claus.

It was an added advantage that Advent sometimes began on my birthday, at the end of November; it made it easier to remember. But when I was a little kid, the Advent calendar was one of the best parts of the month leading up to Christmas. Every day, there was a special treat when I'd open the little cardstock door marked with the date.

The Advent calendar I have this year has chocolate inside it, each piece molded into a different shape, but I think the ones I had when I was a kid were just pictures. It was the ultimate resistance to temptation not to open the doors before the day arrived. It's one of those traditions that makes me nostalgic.

Here in Austin, we don't really do much Christmas preparation. Last year, we hung Christmas lights, but this year, due to C's comps (which ended this morning at 9am -- yay!) we haven't done anything but open the windows of our Advent calendars. It doesn't really make sense to buy a tree when we spend most of the holiday in Corpus Christi with my family.

I don't know if my mom is buying a tree this year. I've been a bit afraid to ask; she's spent more time here in Austin than down in Corpus Christi lately. Growing up, it was always of utmost importance to me to have everything the way we always did it. Every year, we'd buy a noble fir. We'd string it with two strands of white Christmas lights and one strand of red lights, and then we'd hang sand dollars all over it. My mom collected a big box full of sand dollars on the beach over the years, and they symbolize "Christmas at home" to me in a way that nothing else can.

After the sand dollars come the red apple ornaments and the red pepper ornaments. I love the tree in that unfinished state; the vivid reds, whites, and greens are so beautiful. After that, we'd hang all the other ornaments, as many as would fit on the branches of the noble fir. Most of the ornaments date back to before I can remember, and it's part of the challenge of Christmas to find specific ones and put them on the tree.

The most sentimental ornaments to me are the fabric birds made by my grandmother. When I was little, every year, she would make me a birthday dress in November, and then she'd use the scraps of the fabrics to make me a bird ornament to match. The birds hang on the boughs of the tree as though they nest there, in the pinks, blues, and purples of my birthday dresses.

I'm starting to think I'm going to have to take charge of the Christmas tree tradition at my mom's house this year, if she isn't going to do it.

CY and I went to indulge in sushi after work. I haven't had real sushi (i.e., not the Central Market California rolls) since the last time I went out with her, and I'd never been to Uchi either, but I'm always game for sushi.

It was all pretty phenomenal, though perhaps not what I should be spending my money on just before Christmas. The talented (not to mention, very cute) executive chef, Tyson Evans, did much of the sushi preparation right before our eyes, and the restaurant was just... gorgeous. Aesthetically, it was the sort of place where it hurt to look at things because they were so perfect, and with every glance, I was framing a potential picture with ideal composition, texture, and colors. I left my camera out in the car, which seems like the healthier choice, though I missed it terribly throughout the dinner.

The sushi bar is the best place to hang out, I think. It was fun watching the sushi chefs work and banter among one another, and it seems like there's always an opportunity to eavesdrop. And the food itself was phenomenal, too. I've always been a bit frightened of unagi, because my first experience with it was a rubbery, fishy-tasting blob, but it came in my chef's choice sushi order, and it bore no resemblance to my previous bad experience. It was incredibly tender and flavorful.

We returned home after sushi to find C still plugging away on her comps. A three-day exam is (understandably) exhausting, and she's definitely worn out. She just has to survive until 9am tomorrow, and I think she'll make it. She took a break to talk to CY and me as we were studying up on travelling to Singapore and Antarctica, and somehow... somehow we got to talking about the fuzzy bunny-monsters.

A year and a half ago, before we got the kittens, C and I were at one of the local pet stores, just to look at the things they had. I wanted to see the hedgehogs, because I wanted to have a hedgehog and name it Hedgewig. It didn't happen, obviously, but while we were there, we saw a little cage with fluff-balls inside. The cage had a sign on it: "Fuzzy Bunny Monsters $15". They were adorable, with misbehaving hair that stuck up every-which-way.

C was telling CY about how playful rabbits can be, and she described playing bunny-tag, concluding, "They're pretty smart, for herbivores." That cracked my shit up, since C is one of my favorite herbivores. And once I started laughing, they started cracking up, too, and pretty soon, we were all laughing until tears ran down our faces.

There are nine hours and twenty-three minutes until C's comps are due. She has more to go, but I think she'll be fine in the end.

She's pretty smart, for an herbivore.

When I was six years old, my greatest ambition in life was to become a princess when I grew up. I wasn't being ironic at the time -- I really meant it. Every picture I drew at that age had a princess with a tall, pointy conical hat with a filmy piece of tulle flowing out of the top.

I think I was seven when a know-it-all at my daycare informed me that you couldn't be a princess without having been born in the country of princesshood. She obviously hadn't heard of Grace Kelly. It had been earlier that same summer that I participated in Winnie the Pooh school, which was some kind of half-assed modelling school that required us to learn the Winnie the Pooh song and the Tigger song so that we could sing it together before we all went out to model the Winnie the Pooh clothes that were being sold at Sears. When they read out my name, and mentioned that when I grew up, I wanted to be a princess, everybody laughed. I could understand why they would be skeptical, since it's not just any girl who can grow up to become a princess, but I was a bit perplexed at why they found this so amusing.

I was genuinely disappointed when I learned that I'd probably never grow up to be a princess, but after I passed quickly through the seven stages of grief, I soon reverted to my backup career choice: school bus driver.

Yes, in my family, we aim high.

But school bus driver seemed like the perfect career to me at that time. My school bus driver in first grade was named Veronica. She drove Bus 86, and she was the coolest person I knew. She had a little radio that she propped up on the floor, and she listened to Z-95 all the time. At least once (and sometimes twice) during that hour-long bus ride, "Total Eclipse of the Heart" would play on the radio. I'd long since memorized all the words I could understand. It was my first favorite song.

Plus, on the morning bus routes, they would sometimes get to practice the bus fire drill. Since I only rode the bus in the afternoons, I missed this, but I'd sometimes see the kids jumping out of the back of the bus at the school in the mornings. Having the authority to make kids jump out of the back of the bus (and then, in theory, to jump out behind them)? That was the ultimate in cool to me at age seven.

I kept the bus driver dream for at least a few weeks, but then I cycled through possible professions pretty quickly. I wanted to be a writer, then a state trooper (like my aunt), then a singer-songwriter, then a plain writer again, then a journalist. My love of writing (actually, it was entirely a perceived love of writing; I never actually enjoyed writing until I was well into my teens) mostly dominated my imaginary career paths.

At fifteen, I wrote a short story. The first line was, "A woman lies dying in her bed." You can imagine the level of morbidity and where it went from there. I was actually a good writer, but I never felt I had anything of substance to write about.

I'm not convinced that I do now, for that matter, but I don't let that stop me from planting emotional vomit onto the virtual page.

My friend CY is flying in tonight to see me. Me, me, me, it's all about me.

(That's a big fat lie. It's not about me, it's about a business trip, but she's still coming to Austin, and she's still going to sleep on my futon in the living room. Mine, mine, mine.)

C began her comps this morning, and she'll be preoccupied with them until Friday morning. I've been preoccupied both with trying to make sure my part of the house is somewhat presentable for CY's arrival, and with trying to stock up with supplies, so that C won't have to leave the house until she's done and we won't look like college boys with our empty refrigerator.

Last night, I went to Central Market alone. (That's what yesterday's entry was originally going to be about, but I got sidetracked.) When the shopping is important and needs to be done quickly, I go alone. It's strategy that I've learned from hard experience, because C is a challenging shopping partner, which isn't to say that I'm not a challenging shopping partner, too.

What it boils down to, I think, are our different shopping techniques. When C enters a store, she wants to compare like items and ruminate about the differences in buying one or the other. She is a price-conscious fiend. Let us say, hypothetically, that C and I were to go to
a store like Target. If I let her, C would sit in the purse section for hours deciding whether paying twelve cents more for the purse of her dreams makes sense if there's a perfectly good purse that costs twelve cents less. This is regardless of whether she needed a purse to begin with.

Generally, after she's debated (out loud, of course) the pros and cons of one purse over the other, she'll leave both purses where she found them and continue on into the store. But don't think she doesn't talk about the purse that might have been for at least a day afterward.

If I, on the other hand, were to be given a code name, it would be "Short-Attention-Span-Theater." Once I've seen the purse section, I'm ready to move on, and if I don't have the impulse to buy something immediately, I lose all interest. I could make two laps around the store in the time it takes C to finish looking at purses.

I generally have to schedule our shopping trips ahead of time, because they're so time-intensive. Usually, once we leave the house to go buy one thing, one of us remembers something else that we might need someday, and "since we're on that side of town anyway," or "since it's on our way home," we follow the impulse. We went to Target the other weekend to buy a scrubby refill for our dishwashing sponge, and we didn't come home for at least five hours.

The problem with grocery shopping is that you can't always space it out until the weekends in order to budget the time. Sometimes, there is no food, and the vegan I live with has to have food, or she'll float back to Romania and her mother will kill me. And what always happens is that we'll go to the store and spend a good hour walking through the sections and finding the things we need, with C comparing options and reading labels and debating the morality of buying oranges from California rather than Chile. And at the end, we'll each spend $20 or so, but we leave with virtually no food.

Yes, I know that the person who invented grocery lists had me in mind. I don't need to be reminded.

Invariably, I can't think any farther ahead than the next meal or two, and I have no idea where the rest of my $20 goes. Maybe it's the soymilk -- we drink a lot of soymilk in my household.

But when I'm on a mission, like last night, I can be astonishingly thorough. I went through Central Market (with a partial list) and came out with that stuff and a ton of other food. I think we could feed a small army if it were to show up unexpectedly, so certainly, it should be enough to feed my vegan roommate for three days. I bought bread, fake lunchmeats, sodas, juices, fruit, olives, vegan tortillas -- it was an inspired trip, and miraculously, there's still food left today.

There might be something to be learned from that.

It should be noted that C seems to be enjoying these entries as much as I am enjoying writing them. I think people secretly like to be written about, even when they feel self-conscious and weird about it. This entry was C's idea (sort of).

Shopping with my roommate is generally an exercise in futility. Let me give you an example.

A few weeks ago, I came home late from work one day. I didn't get home until around 8:30, but we needed to buy some groceries. There was nothing nothing nothing to eat; the cupboards were bare. Since Central Market closes at 9, we went to Whole Foods, instead. And that was fine. We wandered through the aisles since neither of us has spent enough time at Whole Foods to become comfortable with the layout of the store, and we got most of the stuff we needed, with Claudia resolving to pick up a few more things at the Wheatsville Co-Op the next day.

And then we got to the bread section. We needed bread that night. It was very important. And, of course, we don't buy normal squishy Butter Krust bread because C won't eat that kind, and anyway, it's not vegan. So we went to the bakery and found the baguettes. C took a look at the price and visibly blanched.

"$1.99? That's pretty expensive," she said with chagrin. "Baguettes are only $1 at Randall's."

In retrospect? I should've just said, "Fine, I'll buy the baguette." But I didn't. I looked at her unbelievingly and said, "We're at a grocery store, but you want to stop by Randall's on the way home?"

That's when she got that look on her face that clearly indicated that she believed I was a value non-believer, so I sighed a defeated sigh, we bought the groceries we'd picked out (including a couple of frozen items), and we headed home, stopping at Randall's on the way.

Randall's, for those of you not familiar with Austin-area grocery stores, is one of those hotbeds of bad deals that offers a shopping-tracker card that puts its prices back within the ballpark of a normal grocery store. There's one in our neighborhood, but if I can help it, I avoid shopping there. The produce is bad, the prices are bad, and the store smells like old people. The old-people smell can be tracked to the gnome that works there. He's about 120 years old, small and shriveled and hunched over, and I'm equal parts saddened that he (apparently) can't retire yet and horrified by his long, tobacco-stained, mummified fingernails. I'm scared of The Gnome, truth be told, and I'd almost rather go to HEB (about three miles out of my way). Almost.

So we went to Randall's. I repeated the list twice. "We're getting a baguette and paper towels, and that's it, right?" Yes, she assured me, that was it.

So we went in, our sorbet melting slowly in the trunk, and rushed to the bread section. Baguette: check. Then we hurried to the paper goods section. Paper towels overpriced, but we won't have to take out a mortgage since C has her Randall's card with her. Check. And then, on the way to the checkout counter, C sees the batteries and remembers that the smoke detector needs a 9-volt. Alright, fine -- it's not on the list, but smoke detectors are important, so we compare prices and pick a battery. It's $6 normally, but with the Randall's card, it's around $2.49. Good enough, and we hurry to the checkout.

Sure enough, The Gnome was working that night. There were only about three checkout lanes open, so we picked the shortest one. The woman in front of us in line had apparently earned a free turkey by paying too much for canned peas all year long, so we waited patiently in line as the cashier went to the freezer section to locate the turkey and lug it to the checkout lane. That was our fatal error. In the next lane, The Gnome spotted us, raised his wrinkly little fingers, and summoned us to his lane. We shot each other horrified glances, but we couldn't find a way around it, so we moved to his lane.

We had three items. Three. But I stood there at the other end of the checkout lane and watched as he took at least five minutes to scan them and operate the payment machine. My attention was drifting when I noticed C going over her receipt and then pointing out an error. "These batteries were only supposed to be $2.49," she explained to The Gnome.

His yellowed fingers reached out to take the receipt from her, and he pulled it toward himself, squinting through his glasses to read the small print. "Well, you didn't have a Randall's card," he answered. This from the ancient gnome who chided me for not having a Randall's card when I moved into the neighborhood.

"But I swiped my Randall's card," C answered, trying not to look visibly horrified.

"Sometimes, they don't take," he answered. "You should've checked before you signed the receipt."

The customer? Not always right on The Gnome's shift.

"Well, if you bring back your receipt and your Randall's card and take them to the service desk in the morning, they'll refund you the difference," he concluded, and C took her receipt from his gnarled talons and stalked out of the store. She was pissed!

We hadn't even gotten to the car yet before she started bitching. Luckily for me, it's a short drive home. "And I spent $6.00 on batteries," she complained, "and the old man breathed on my baguette! Now I can't eat it."

I stared at her, stunned. "...I'm so glad we saved that dollar," I concluded.

Next time? Next time, I'll know better.

I'm finding that photography is taking over more and more of my thoughts on a daily basis. There's nothing particularly wrong with that -- hobbies are like that when you're passionate about them. More and more, I feel as though I've hit a plateau in that area of my self-development.

Photography never seems quite as simple as just pointing and shooting for me. I divide it mentally into genres, each one with its own set of possibilities and limitations.

Film Photography
I have a Nikon SLR camera that I bought a few years ago, prior to my trip to Ireland. I have the standard zoom lens, as well as a 50mm lens that I bought during a photography class I was taking this summer.

I've done some work with slide film, as well as regular print film, and I took a black and white darkroom class over the summer. Having someone else develop my film bores me, and I'm horrid about taking my film in. The process of taking the picture is far more interesting than actually seeing the pictures I took. The delay of gratification ruins the excitement for me.

What I want desperately to work on is more darkroom development. I really enjoyed developing my pictures over the summer, but it's hard to find darkroom space in Austin. The class I signed up for in October was cancelled for low attendance. I was very disappointed. ACC is offering a darkroom continuing education class in the spring, but it begins at 8:00am every Saturday morning, and it's on the other side of town. I'm dedicated to learning more about darkroom, but I don't think I'm that dedicated. The Austin Museum of Art offers darkroom classes sometimes, but they're really expensive. I'm having problems finding other programs geared toward darkroom semi-beginners.

I'd also like to experiment with other film genres. I'd love to get a lomo camera to play with.

Digital Photography

Obviously, I do most of my photography in the digital genre. I bought a Nikon CoolPix 5700 in June, and I've been using it exclusively since September. It was hard to give up my Olympus 700 UZ. By and large, I'm fairly happy with my Nikon, and it's far more versatile than the digital camera I had before, but I've been struck with a rather stubborn case of camera envy in the past month or so.

It's just that... I miss the feel of a lens in my hands. It's not nearly the same to zoom in and out with a little button, and I'm dying for an intuitive manual focus. I want to be able to switch lenses on my camera and add filters like a normal photographer, without having to buy adaptors or jerryrig something together. I really really want a digital SLR camera. Canon released its Digital Rebel a couple of months after I bought my Nikon, for about the same price as my camera cost. If I'd've known, I would have waited. And even though my camera is nearly brand new (but well-used for the time frame) and I can't really justify the expense, I'm half-hoping I'll drop it, so that I'll have the need to replace it.

A girl can dream, can't she?

One of the things I hated about my old car was that there was no music to be had. The cassette player and radio haven't worked in several years. On the day that C and I returned from Ireland in March of 2001, we had to drive back to Austin from DFW the same night, not arriving until around midnight. In retrospect, it was a pretty foolish plan, making that four-hour journey after having travelled all day from Ireland, but we had to be back the following day; there were no other options. So we sang in the car, in the dark of the night in rural Texas, to keep ourselves awake.

One of the great features of my new car is its outstanding audio system. It's got a radio (that works), a cassette player, and a CD player all built in. It has given me the impetus to start burning mix CDs to listen to in my car.

I'm sure all y'all mix tape aficionados have known this for a long time, but there's a science to creating a mix of music intended for other people's ears. In my case, my primary audience is C, who is far too picky for her own good. Here are the criteria to which I must adhere, if I hope for her to get any enjoyment from a mix CD:

• There must be no men singing on the CD.


• There must be no sad songs (or at the very least, sad songs must be kept to a minimum.


• There should be no orchestral introduction to any song on the CD.


• There must be one catch-song. (We'll cover this later.)


• The general tempo of the mix CD should not be too slow.


• The songs on the CD should not be too folky.

Some of these requirements, I've learned by trial and error. Others, I've been aware of for a long time. And the truth is? I kind of like sad songs. They're pretty, if melancholy. And I really like folky music. The majority of my music collection is made up of cool folky singers you've never heard of, and I like it that way.

So every once in a while, I'll go about putting together a new mix CD. The first mix CD I put together was wildly successful (though somewhat by accident) with the exception of the last two tracks (see the rule about orchestral arrangements above). Any new CD has to have the potential to be more popular than the original, or we'll just go back to listening to the original.

It was an inspired move on my part to include the Dixie Chicks' cover of "Landslide" on that first CD. It became the catch-song, hidden among Dar Williams, Ani Difranco, Erin McKeown, and Lucy Kaplansky, and we sometimes hit the rewind button to listen to it over and over and over.

I made a couple of well-intentioned mix CDs after that one. One introduced an instrumental piece by the Reivers (which was made up of both men and women, but you'd never know that from the song), as well as one of my favorite Nanci Griffith songs. That one was a no-go. Nanci was too folky, and C made fun of her twangy pronunciations. C has clearly never heard Nanci's weird pronunciations, because what she thought sounded twangy was pretty damned normal.

And then, while C was home in Romania over the summer, I began working on a compilation of new songs. I left it running as a playlist on iTunes at work so that I could adjust it as needed, and eventually, I came up with what I thought was the world's most perfect mix CD. It was liberally sprinkled with all the usual suspects: Ani, Dar, Erin; no Lucy this time, because C got tired of listening to Lucy when the cats were kittens and would cry all day unless Lucy was playing. (See? This is complicated.) And then I added "London Rain" by Heather Nova. That last choice is a bit out of place on this CD, being the only single of the compilation ever played on mainstream radio, but I put it near the end and hoped for the best. Turns out, "London Rain" may be the catch-song for this compilation! C hit rewind twice yesterday to hear it again.

The next challenge? Coming up with a mix CD to use for our upcoming road trip.

I started off trying to write a critique of a lecture I saw yesterday on modernist photography, but it occurred to me that nobody but I would give a shit about it, so I threw it away for the time-being and started over. I'll try to work out a less-dry rendition of the lecture and how it pertained to me tomorrow.

It's cold and bone-dry in Austin lately, and I've been feeling a bit miserable. My lips are starting to chap, I've been battling static electricity constantly, and my hair stands on end as often as not. My skin is so dry that the lotion I just applied to my legs is stinging and causing a bit of a rash. Next time, I'll try unscented lotion. And maybe a humidifier.

The weather is supposed to be extra-chilly this evening, with temperatures in the 20s and wind chills in the teens. I anticipate weeks of dry, chapped skin, and that's not a prospect I look forward to. In general, I think I prefer the warm, sunny Decembers often endemic to Texas. Being able to wear sweaters at Christmas seems a paltry reward at this point.

In other news, I've been updating the photolog regularly lately; go check it out if you'd like to see what I've been working on recently.

I'll have more to write tomorrow -- honest!

It all started with one of C's stories, one of the long and rambling ones, where I sit there and think to myself, "How on earth did she get onto -that- topic?" and tilt my head and stare at her bemusedly until she stops and says, "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Do you remember my friend Elizabeth?" she asked, "The one who was supposed to take her comps next week at the same time I do?" I nodded absently. I've never met Elizabeth.

"She had to move it up a week," rambled C, embarking on what I assumed to be some comp exam horror story as I stood leaning against her doorway. "Her family is coming into town or something... I think it's some kind of emergency. So she's taking her exams this week."

As I sat there and tried to figure out what relevance this tale had to me, she began an adept transition to what seemed to be a completely unrelated topic. "She's in my class at school, and she's been putting off presenting all semester, and so she had to present today, during her comps! She came up to campus."

At this point, I think I started nodding off, but the conversation continued.

"...Guess where she's doing her research!" C concluded, after a while.

I shrugged absently. "I don't know, where?"

"Guess!"

"I hate guessing."

"Guess!"

"No! Just tell me!" I answered, annoyed. I'm awful at guessing games.

"What small town in South Texas do you know?"

"I know five million towns in South Texas," I replied. It's a slight exaggeration, but I grew up in South Texas.

"No, no, what small town in South Texas do you know pretty well? You've spent several nights there!"

Up until that point, I was convinced she was talking about Weslaco. We went there with my dad last year over winter break.

"Corpus Christi?" I asked lamely.

"No, what -other- small town do you know?"

"Ramirez?" I asked half-heartedly. Ramirez is a tiny town in Duval County, where my mom's boyfriend grew up. His family owns a ranch out there, and we've been out there several times, including for the last few New Years Eves. It's nice out there, and the ranch has a grove of orange trees that bear the sweetest, juiciest fruit around Christmas time.

"Yes!" she exclaimed, very pleased with herself.

And then another rambling story.

"... She's researching migrant workers ... researched in Mexico ... festival ... statue nearby of San Isidro..."

"San Isidro? Isn't he the patron saint of rainfall or something?"

(For the record, I don't normally keep track of patron saints. The only reason I know of San Isidro is that my mom asked me to keep an eye out for a saint candle of San Isidro, to burn for rainfall. This was a couple of years ago, during a major drought. It's been a fairly wet year this year -- no need for San Isidro right now.)

"Farmers," C corrected me. "And harvests and fertility or something. But she's going to Ramirez to do some preliminary research."

At that point, I made her pause her story, and I went to go call my mom. My mom knows about San Isidro, after all, and I figured she'd think it was interesting.

It was 9:10pm, and my mom wasn't answering her phone. I figured she was asleep.

Sure enough, she called me back early this afternoon.

"Did you call me last night?" my mom asked me.

"Yeah, I did!"

"Did you mean to call me?"

"Well, yeah... it was only 9:10 -- I thought you might still be awake."

She had been asleep.

So I start telling her the story of Elizabeth and San Isidro and Ramirez, TX, and she got really excited.

"You know who would know more about that, is Leo," she told me. Leo is her boyfriend's older brother. "He's always been in touch with the community. Let me give him a call and see if he'd be willing to talk to that student."

A few minutes later, she left a message on my voice mail. "Leo wants to talk to that student, and his wife knows a lot about the tradition, too, and they know other people..."

Rock.

So Elizabeth, who I've never met, is off stressing over her comp exams, and doesn't even -know- that I've set up the social networking necessary for her to start her research in the middle of nowhere in South Texas. And all this is possible only because one person, a Romanian in one of her classes, has been to Ramirez, of all places, and recognized the name when she heard it.

It's all serendipity, I think, and the power of the six degrees of separation.

And, as C says, that was my story.

My cousin was in Corpus Christi for part of the weekend along with his girlfriend and their two yippy little rat dogs. He and I are almost exactly the same age (he's just a couple of months older than I am), and so I think it's natural that we gauge our progress through life against one another. (To be truthful, I don't know that he does that, but I certainly do.)

And the main thing that I noticed, of which I'm becoming more and more aware, is the conspicuous consumption that he seems to have enveloped himself within. Don't get the wrong idea here -- I'm no posterchild for asceticism -- but my fantasies skew toward simplicity lately, and his most definitely skew toward purchasing things. Most recently, he's been talking about buying not only a huge house out in Hutto (currently being built), but also about trading in his Mustang for a new pickup truck. ("I can deal with wussy dogs," he explained, "but I can't drive a wussy truck.")

To be fair, I, the current recipient of an exorbitant car payment, can hardly complain about somebody buying a new car, but I don't think he had the Mustang for more than a year or two.

I'm not sure why I care about this, really. Maybe it's that he was bashing my new car, which I'm rather proud of. He pooh-poohed my hybrid's quiet motor, saying, "I added a muffler to make my Mustang louder," and bragged about the "American power" behind his car, and the 190 horses powering his desired truck. My response was, "Wow, that's a lot of hay."

Maybe it has nothing to do with the car at all, and more to do with the four- or five-bedroom house he and his girlfriend are buying, and the fact that I'm not in a financial position to buy a house now or in the forseeable future, and that I don't have a significant other to split the cost with. Or maybe it's that outside of my extensive collection of gadgets, I don't have a lot of nice stuff -- like furniture, for instance. And, I mean, sure, I could buy some nice furniture, but it isn't really a priority for me. As much as I'd like not to live like a college student, it just seems like buying more stuff means I'll have to sell more stuff in a few years when I sell everything I own and set out to see the world.

When I started off, this entry was going to be about camera envy, but it seems that I've gone off on a tangent. I think I'll save the camera envy for tomorrow.

Every once in a while, it occurs to me that I do a lot of my life-planning in my head or person-to-person, and that I seldom get around to actually writing any of it down. It doesn't make sense to document these things when they're still hypothetical, I guess, and sometimes I have to make sure that all the proper authorities are notified before they read it on my webpage.

And then I forgot that I haven't actually written about it. So it goes with my upcoming road trip.

This is the part where you go, "Road trip? What road trip?" See? If I'd told you