3: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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, you'd know about this already.

The plan is still a bit up in the air. C has been distracted with her upcoming comps (someday, I'll tell you what it's like to live with a doctoral student), so we haven't decided for certain where we plan to go, but it will definitely be west of Austin.

See, as longtime readers already know, my friend C is from Romania, and she's never been farther west than Bandera, the self-styled "Cowboy Capital of the World." And she was a bit disappointed when she arrived in Texas to discover that it wasn't a deserted wasteland full of sand dunes and tall cactus. (It always fascinates me why people not from Texas think that it's Arizona!) So I've been promising for a long time to take her west to see the cactus like this (that's C's imitation of a saguaro, for those of you playing along from home). So we've got to go at least as far west as Arizona. After that? Your guess is really as good as mine.

Our biggest limitation is time, really. We won't be leaving until the day after Christmas, because I still can't quite stomach the thought of Christmas away from home, and I return to work on January 5th. That's eleven days. It's not really that much, assuming we stop along the way. It takes an entire day of driving just to get from Corpus Christi to El Paso.

Beyond that? I'm not really sure yet. Maybe we'll go on to California, or maybe we'll stay in Arizona and New Mexico. In any case, I've got a lot to do before then; the car needs its oil changed, and we'll have to make preparations for possible snow. I'd like to get the tires checked out just in case. And, of course, I'll have to re-evaluate my supply of cold-weather clothing. It tends to be a bit on the wimpy side.

The good news is, I intend to take a laptop with me, so that I can update from the road and upload pictures. It'll be a bit like going along, won't it?

Yeah, okay, I'm psyched!