A Penance

For those of you keeping score at home, November came and passed without me finishing Nanowrimo. Am I disappointed? Yes. I have a ton of excuses, too, ranging from work stuff to personal stuff. Do I want to finish what I started? Yes. I'm going to try to finish it before the end of the year, effectively giving myself another month to write (and I'm losing days already, because HOLY FUCKING SHIT, we're in December).

As a sort of peace offering, a penance, an act of contrition to the Great Writing Gods, I've decided to instead, here and now, finish the story of Dan and I traveling to Leadville. Remember that trip, way hell back in August, the one where we killed Dan's car and went through Boulder and tooled around at such high altitude that three flights of stairs to our little prudish Victorian hotel room made me feel like I'd run a mile without breathing? That one. For a reminder, here's the first part of the trip, and here's the second part. I never finished it because, as you can tell, I tend to take on writing projects that never quite get completed.

So the alarms go off at an ungodly hour to wake us up for the race, which starts at 6 a.m., just when it's getting light. It's cold out, and Dan and I eat breakfast at the hotel, which graciously had a Riders Breakfast earlier than usual and filled with things like peanut butter, hard-boiled eggs and oatmeal. Dan kitted up, I pulled on about nine layers of clothing and got my bag of supplies and cameras, and we went to find a place on the street for the start. There was a vibrating sense of urgency and excitement as families and crews did checks with their riders. Do you have your CamelBak filled? Do you have your other gloves? Are you warm enough? Did you eat enough? Do I need to get anything else to put in my bag?

Just before the start

The shot finally went off, and about 1,600 riders went off and out to the great beyond. The day before I'd met a really nice woman whose husband was racing, and she'd offered to meet up with me, and I'd met another woman who'd offered the same thing. The three of us met after all the racers went (there were very few women racing, so a lot of the crews were headed by women) and we went in one of their rental cars up to the first viewing spot.

Didn't see a lot at that viewing spot--except the race leaders, including Levi Leipheimer, go smoking by and kicking up a huge tail of dust. The younger woman and I decided we'd like to get on to the next stop, our riders be damned, and so the older woman stayed and the younger and I hitched a ride with another woman to the next stop, which was on a damn right before the really scary ascent up a big mountain.

When we were lugging all our assorted shit to the next stop was when I realized it wasn't the weather I'd banked on. I was prepared for rain, cold, sleet, snow, an apocalypse, and instead it was getting warm, bright, sunny, and as we waited, watching. There were drunken frat-type guys pounding Natty Light, there were kids playing, there was a really long line for the porta-potties. I didn't have any food for myself--a major oversight--so had some Gatorade and a few bites of a Powerbar. I propped open my giant umbrella and pinned my TCU flag on it so Dan could find us (and the husbands, who'd been told about my flag), and tried to stay out of the sun. I met one dude who had possibly the most impressive thighs I've ever seen.

Seriously. Glorious. And yes, my shirt does say "I Love Jens Voigt."

One of the women I spent the day with. We traded the shade; I haven't seen the latest Leadville documentary yet, but I hope my TCU flag makes an appearance.

I didn't see Dan on the way up the mountain, but I did see him coming down. It's an out-and-back course, so he saw my flag and I yelled at him and he stopped, grabbed his bag, refilled with fluids, gave me a quick kiss and went on his way. I felt dusty and excited when he arrived--he was riding with a vengeance, mad because a guy had crashed into him and another rider on the way down the mountain due to carelessness. We'd packed up bags for him at each stop, in case I couldn't find him, and the volunteers at the race were ridiculously quick about getting his bag, filling his CamelPak, shouting encouragements at him as he took off again. I felt a little light-headed and really happy when I saw Dan disappear going toward Leadville again, knowing that he was more than halfway to finishing.

Made it back to Leadville, where the mayor was acting as announcer and calling each rider's name and hometown as they came over the line. I went to a little bakery and bought cookies to eat while camping out waiting for Dan to pass the line. It was nice to eat, nice to watch each rider come through the finish. Some looked like death; others looked so jubilant that they might float away. Lots of kids ran through the finish line alongside their parents as they rode in. It was like a festival, and everyone was jovial.

I was keeping up with text messages, telling Dan's mother, my mother, his best friend and another friend of ours what was going on. When he rolled across the finish line, I hung over the barriers and yelled at him, and he came over to the barrier and sat down for a bit. His knee was gashed open and bleeding and he was covered with grime. He looked exhausted, but they put a medal over his head and I passed him a water bottle, so relieved he'd survived and I wouldn't have to come back next year. (I'm pretty certain if he hadn't finished in time, he would have gone back to try to do it in time again.) The only bad thing is my camera had died, so there are no photos I took of him finishing.

He rolled out of the finish area and he said he wanted someplace quiet to sit, so we went to the back side of this bar (free Sierra Nevada beer if you have a medal!) and sat down on the sidewalk, in the shade and away from the crowd. We sat for a few minutes in quiet, and he reached into his saddle bag, pulled out a ring box and proposed. No one cried. I giggled like a mad man. Then about thirty seconds later, a volunteer medical person came by and asked Dan if he would want to get his knee cleaned out in the medical tent. He helped us up, and I pushed Dan's bike along as he gimped to the tent.

Honestly, I'm glad the man came along, and for more than the obvious reason that Dan needed someone to clean his leg out and bandage it up and make sure he was ok. I do better in life if I have a purpose, so pushing the bike, gathering up all the stuff, running to get some more food and drinks for Dan while he was waiting, and then walking slowly with him back to the hotel was nice. He showed, I showered (I got a wicked sunburn, which hurt), we got a pizza and marveled at ourselves. We called people, sent text messages, and then pretty much fell asleep by 8:30.

The next day was the awards ceremony, and they called up every single finisher to get their prizes. It was a long wait -- some 800 people completed -- but Dan and I sat through it, and by chance ran into a really nice guy who was talking about the drive home (turned out to be the same guy with the Futurama outfit; I hadn't recognized him without seeing so much leg) when he and Dan saw Dave Wiens walk by. Wiens is a god in the Leadville world (six Leadville wins, has beaten both Floyd Landis and Lance Armstrong on the race), and when the two stopped him to ask if he would mind doing a photo, he obliged, very graciously and very politely.

Dan had me print off a copy of this when we got home. I fully expect it to be on the bedside table when we move in together.

Dan and I tooled around Leadville a little bit; I wanted to take photos of the old shop paintings and various murals around town. We got pictures of him and his medals and silver belt buckle in various places. The main drag of the town is about six blocks long, so it was easy for him to limp along slowly while I stopped with my cameras. We loaded up all our belongings and took them to the Budget van to drive home, and we filled the CamelPaks with ice cubes to wrap the internal bladders around Dan's knee on the drive.


We had a lot to talk about on the way home, of course. It helped pass the time, since the drive was considerably slower. I was the only one who could drive (Dan's legs were useless), and the van went about 15 miles per hour slower than the car had. The time change headed back east also caught us. But we got back, and here we are in cyclocross season, with Dan racing on weekends and then accompanying me to the barn, and we're planning a wedding. It's fun, I guess. There's a lot of it that's bullshit. I could rant about it, but I won't. I will say, however, that I'm excited to be marrying Dan, and that as awesome as the Leadville experience was, the whole wedding thing can't be any more of a roller coaster than that was.

Ethics And Apple Screwed Me

Today I traded an Apple iPad for a flu shot because it was the ethical thing to do and because journalism is clearly out to show me just how much the industry hates me.

I went with a coworker, one of our ad reps who has the same first name, to the opening of this clinic run by a big local hospital system this morning. She's friends with the guy who does all the sales and marketing for the clinic, and I'm the health care reporter, so it made sense for us to go. We went, took a tour, got some free coffee (and a nice travel mug) and a danish and put our names in a drawing at the urging of the guy who works there. Why not, right? It'll probably just ensure I get put on their mailing list, but I'm the health care reporter, so it's cool, I want their mail.

I got back to the office and added a story about the opening to my budget, since it's going to be a noteworthy thing for our kind of readers. Midmorning, the ad rep comes in bouncing off the walls that she won the iPad and the guy had called her to tell her, and she was so psyched and I gave her a hi-five and thought, Dude, iPads are sweet. I've been lusting after one since they came out (after I got done making all the feminine hygiene jokes, because they write themselves, right?), and I secretly hope I get one for Christmas from my family but I can't justify buying one because I'd got a wedding party to finance (alcoholic journalist friends are expensive to buy booze for) but maybe we'll put it on our registry. Whatevs.

The ad rep swings by to go pick up her iPad, and then I get a phone call in the early afternoon when I'm driving back to work after a late lunch. It's a person who works at the office who says, Congrats! You won an iPad! And I laugh and can hear the ad rep laughing in the background and think it's all a giant joke.

Because journalists do not win things, people. Never happens. Except that one time Dan won a 10-pound Crunch candy bar as a door prize, but it was at a college journalism reunion thing, not a work thing, and it doesn't count because I'm still bitter that he didn't let me have any of it for a YEAR. He just displayed it like a prize on his bookshelf.

Anyway, so I think it's a joke and laugh and they say, No, really! And I say, Yeah, sure, give it to our ad rep and she can bring it back.

Turns out the guy who does all the sales and marketing just read the first name on the slip that was drawn, assumed it was the ad rep, called her ans said, You won! when in reality is was my name on the slip and I won. The ad rep was all dejected and came back with an iPad, and I then I was stuck: I couldn't accept an iPad. A health care reporter who regularly reports on this parent company and who is writing a story about this opening cannot accept a $400 piece of glorious touch-screen wonder life-changing awesomeness.

Phil, since you were my ethics professor and mentor, I know you would be proud of me. And damn, I wish you were around so I could tell you this story because it is so good.

So I have to call them back and be like, Well, I thought you guys were joking, and now that there's an iPad sitting here in the office, I can't accept it. You guys will have to redraw. We have a general editorial policy of accepting nothing worth more than $10--it lets someone buy you a fancy-ass cup of coffee, maybe, or get some general trinket/token they give out to everyone (like the awesome mug).

The guy who worked there was very nice about it all, and came back to pick up the iPad so I didn't have to drive it over (which would have made it so tempting for me to steal it away and then to claim, I was hijacked! Someone stole it!). Then he said he felt horrible and had to offer me something. Could I, would I, accept a flu shot?

I said yes.

(This Is A Long Sad/Angry One)

Dear Phil--

Today I went to your funeral. I found out you died on Monday morning, when Dan called me at my desk with the news. It was pretty surreal--remember when he got laid off and I had to have him repeat what he just said to me? Same sort of thing. He said that you'd died, and I just felt shocked, angry and sad all at once.

All week I've been grappling with this feeling that you're not really dead. That it's just a rumor, or a crazy story I've heard, and that I should file it away in the back of my mind to tell you about the next time we met for lunch.

I'm so glad I got to see you about a month ago or so for lunch. Thanks for paying, by the way. You get it--you'd been a cops reporter before, you'd worked all sorts of journalism jobs, and you knew that even though Dan and I could pay for ourselves, it would help if you paid. And you did. Even for the slices of pie we all had.

I also wanted to let you know I joined the membership of the church we had talked about, St. Mary of the Assumption. Dan and I didn't know what to do in terms of joining a church and establishing a membership to get married, and I was really glad when you said you liked St. Mary, just down the street from where I live. That's the church where you got baptized and where you got married, and that's where Dan and I plan to walk down the aisle next fall.

I'll be honest, I'm really, really angry you're not going to be there. In so many ways, you were like family and friend wrapped up into one, and you know that's not an easy thing to do. Dan and I even briefly considered trying to get you to marry us, but then we opted for the full mass instead, which requires a priest, not a deacon. Remember when we were joking about getting Bob Schieffer to our wedding, and how we asked what we had to do to get him there? You said that you'd probably have to die in the same week, because then he'd already be in town and might be willing to go to the funeral of two journalists he's never met. He gave a beautiful eulogy today, by the way.

After the funeral a bunch of fairly young college alumni went out to eat and drink at Fuzzy's Tacos. One of the former students said that was where you used to take your college journalism ethics students after the end of the semester, which made me feel old (I know I'm not) because you used to take classes to Jon's Grille, when it was still around. One person made the comment that it was very Irish of us all, going out to drink and talk about you and life and journalism, and I answered that it was just very reporterly of us. What else were we supposed to do? (On a side note, I'll admit I'm writing this with a few drinks under my belt, but you never turned down a good drink and I've seen you drink mai tais with little umbrellas, so I feel ok about that.)

You were one of the kindest people I ever met. When I was a senior in college and became really, really sick with mono and a host of other concurrent infections, you gave me some leeway on my final project and let me turn it in late after seeing how sick I was and how I had a hard time just getting through classes, much less doing anything outside of class. Of course, you also expected the best of everyone, and you were totally right when you scolded me and my editors for eating a cake that had been left in the ads department. It wasn't our cake to eat (even though it was really, really delicious.) I'm really glad I bought a replacement cake before you found out about the whole incident. I feel like every journalist who's known you should always keep in mind, "What Would Phil Record Do?"

There are a lot more things I've thought about writing, because all week I've know I'd have to write you and let you know my thoughts on all of this. For a while I thought about writing everything out longhand, in a reporter's pad or something like that, but I feel ok with putting this on something goofy like a blog. You were a big proponent of communication, of the media, no matter what form it took. I always looked forward to getting e-mails from you, when you'd start by saying "Beloved Liz" and end saying, "Love Ya, Phil." I don't know how to hold on to those things that you sent me. Do I print out the e-mails? That seems bizarre. Do I keep them in a folder? That seems even more bizarre, since maybe someday e-mail will be passe and everyone will communicate in some other way.

I don't know what to do to hold on to the few things I actually have that you gave me in some (semi) tangible form, but I do know that everything you taught me, starting more than five years ago when I was just a student in your media ethics class, an editor of a student newspaper, will stay with me. I like to think I'll be a journalist forever, I won't give up and do something else, but it wouldn't matter if I did. The things you taught me -- to be a gracious, kind-hearted person, to expect people to try their best, to forgive when people didn't, to laugh frequently and to never had a bad day, to be proud of the people you love in your life -- will last forever, even if my journalism career doesn't. You should have seen all the people at the church today. They all felt the same way. And that, in my opinion, is saying a lot.

I love you and I miss you,
Liz

Carving It Out

Today I carved two pumpkins in fairly record time, dressed up as a zombie cheerleader (there was lots of glue and paper on my face and paint and it was righteous, I can assure you), handed out candy with Lacey, ate pizza, found out the Rangers lost Game 4 of the World Series (it's now 3-1, Giants), and now I am freaking the fuck out because NaNoWriMo starts in less than an hour.

It'll be posted on the other blog, Journalism's Dark Secret, and if you can't sign on to it, then there's a decent chance you're a creeper. (We're all creepers in some respects.) I haven't much decided what I'm going to write -- I thought I'd have all these nice long runs to think about what I'm going to write, while I'm training for this godforsaken half marathon, but it turns out it takes way too much effort to think about running while running. Who knew?

I might start tonight, or it might have to wait until tomorrow. I really don't know. I feel a lot more apprehensive about it this year than I did last, actually. It's probably because I've been spending so much time thinking about baseball and Halloween costumes (for the party yesterday I was Edward Scissorhands, and let me tell you, making scissorhands is a bitch) and running, along with all the usual day-to-day things that consume my thoughts.

And now I'm blogging in an attempt to get an idea. It's not really working. I'm going to go think about my scissor hands again.

It's Kinda Dark Outside

Ok, it's not dark outside, at least not yet, but I went to the barn last night after a long and kinda train-wrecky day at work and it got pitch black out there before I could walk down to the paddocks, and there I was stumbling around in the dark, following Topper's voice and using my cell phone to make sure I didn't sprain an ankle.

Fuck, man, it's fall!

On one hand, I'm really glad it's here--cooler weather! College football! Not too hot to eat Italian anymore! I can wear layers!--and on the other hand, I'm freaked out. This usually happens every year when I realize the end of the year is within sight.

This is just a short little thing to say I have NOT forgotten about the rest of the Colorado trip! I will post more about it. At this rate, the final posts will be up almost two months after the trip itself. Two months: That's a motherfucking 1/6 of the year. Wow. I'm lazy. That and I keep forgetting I have to do that when I'm at home and I can hook up the external hard drive where all the pictures are. That and I'm lazy.

On another note: NaNoWriMo starts soon and I will be participating. I know I've said this before, but consider it a PSA: I will post everything on a blog again, but you must have my approval before you log on and read it. Last thing I need is someone telling my editors what a genuinely shitty writer I really am. Leave a comment if you want to get added onto the list.

I also just want to post about ice cream for a second. This little shop opened up here in Fort Worth where you choose from about a dozen fresh-baked cookie flavors and about a dozen Blue Bell ice cream flavors and create your own ice cream sandwiches. Not only is Sweet Sammies the most genius thing I've heard since . . . well, maybe ever, but each sandwich also only costs $2.25. I am cheap and love dairy and baked goods and this is blowing my ever-loving mind. I'm not ashamed to say I went there twice in four days last week.

I'm just letting everyone know right now that I want a franchise for Christmas this year. Start saving your quarters now, friends.

Also? We just added comments onto our website at work, and I think I've already racked up the most hate comments. (It's like two total, but still. And "hate comments" might be inflammatory, but that's why I'm an objective journalist.) I'm glad we have comments, finally--yay for the 21st century!--but I'm also hoping some day to get some real comments going, some discussion, some talk. Come on, readers. I defend you and your intelligence all the time when I'm talking to others who know nothing about journalism. Don't prove me wrong, here.

Boulder and Beyond

I realize this is like a month after the fact, but things have been crazy with work and schedules after work and I feel like I barely get any time to just sit down, and when I do, all I want to do is nap or read. Anyway: So yes, we got to Boulder, spent a few days tooling around here, mostly eating at restaurants, wandering in and out of shops, going to the farmer's market, eating some more, taking a tour of the Avery Brewing Company, drinking beer, wading in the very cold Boulder Creek, watching street performers on the Pearl Street Mall, and getting woken up by Dan's uncles' bizarre dogs, since we were sleeping on the floor.



As I mentioned during recaps of my time in Albuquerque last year, it's very grounding to me to have mountains nearby. In Boulder, they were always there--sorry, Sandias, I love you so much, but these mountains were so much bigger--and I felt right at home. Dan was ready to move there. His uncles lived outside the city, where people had little organic farms and kept horses or a few cows, and so we got to drive through that into Boulder, which was a pretty small city. I'm not sure I could live in a city like that without a really big city (like Denver) within an hour's drive. Maybe some day I could, but not yet.

On the morning we left Boulder, we traded in the rental car for a Budget moving van, the cheapest option to get us, three bikes and a bunch of bags to Leadville and then home to Texas. We stripped everything out of Dan's car and left it with his uncles, who are mechanics--I don't know what they've done with it, but Dan told them to sell it for scrap, use it as spare parts or get a new (used) engine in there and sell it, it was up to them.

We drove to Leadville and got there midday Thursday, and we parked the Budget van in the Delaware Hotel lot and took everything up the steep stairs to our room. We showered and changed and found that the wind had picked up--it was cold and dusty--and spent the afternoon wandering in and out of little stores. Almost everything closed at 6 p.m.


On Friday we did mostly race related things--all the riders were required to do an information meeting, we had to make bags filled with spare tubes and extra clothes and food for each of the stops, and there was a free carbo-load dinner for riders and their crews (mostly friends and families and other bike bitches). We found a little bit of spare time to take a cruise around the roughly 12-mile loop known as the Mineral Belt Trail, which climbs into the hills around the town and through old mining sites. I won't lie: The ride totally kicked my ass, lung-wise; the altitude plus the climbing portions of the ride made it tough for me, even though 12 miles is an easy distance. I took lots of breaks, making it look like I was really psyched to stop and take photos. I also nearly ran over an ungodly number of chipmunks.




Saturday, people started lining up for the race before dawn, so we went to bed early, but neither of us slept very well. Dan had been training for this ride for roughly six months, and I'm the planner and the organizer for these sorts of things, and kept running over lists in my head: Did I have everything packed for the next day? I didn't have a car to get to the stops; was I going to get to all the stops and see Dan at all?

Hot damn, those alarm clocks went off early on Sunday morning.

Unexpected Delays

I thought I'd be able to post about the trip to Colorado and Leadville sooner, but things devolved into utter and total chaos as soon as I got back into town, so apologies on that front. On the other hand: Look! I'm posting! And I don't think I'm posting quite as late as I did when I went to New Mexico last September/October, but I'm not going to check in case I'm wrong and then feel bad.

Dan and I left for Colorado on a Sunday, when it was beautiful outside and sunny and we could stop for breakfast in Oklahoma City at a Waffle House with his childhood best friend, who lives and works in OKC at the moment and always has great stories about how dismal it is.

We were making good time through Kansas--whole lot of nothing in that state, I found out--when Dan's car, a Honda Passport, decided to die. Not just die, but like shudder and screech to a slow halt on the freeway two miles from the Colorado border. When we cracked the hood, there was smoke. Not good.

To make a very long story short, we think the engine seized, and we got towed to the nearest Colorado town (Burlington, no use in backtracking into Kansas, since the nearest town there was also 20 miles away), and we spent the night in a gross, seedy motel until the mechanic told us the next morning that yep, the engine seized. And blew. Or something. I don't know. Dan was on the phone with them; I was on the phone with everyone else I could think of, trying to find us transportation to the race and then back home with three bikes and luggage. The 10-year old car, with 200,000 miles on it, had just become a giant, useless piece of junk.

One of Dan's uncles--we were going to stay with two of them, brothers who live together in Boulder--got a U-Haul dolly and drove about three hours out to pick us up and then make the four-hour drive back to Boulder. (It took longer going back because his car was definitely not big enough to tow Dan's, but we made it work anyway.) However, the uncle couldn't come pick us up until that night, so Dan and I had a day in Burlington, Colo. This is what we found: shitty Mexican food (possibly even worse than the stuff in Enterprise, Alabama, where I did my senior year of high school) and a 105-year-old restored antique carousel.



These people weren't kidding around with their Kit Carson County Carousel. Thing was gorgeous, hand-carved, fully suspended and made in 1905 by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company. It was for Denver, but in the late '20s that city got all fancy and wanted a jumper carousel, where all the horses went up and down individually, so Kit Carson County bought it with $1,200 of taxpayer dollars (people were ticked and several commissioners lost their seats over this, since that was the cost of an average house at the time).



When the Depression hit, the town shuttered up the shell around the carousel, the sort of building that protected it from the elements, and filled the whole damn thing with grain, like it was a silo. Grain around the horses, the smug-looking camels, the goats, the St. Bernard dog, the sleds and the lion--everything. In 1976, for the Colorado centennial and the country's bicentennial, the community decided to gather up about $16,000 to start a five-year restoration project.

The restoration project turned out to take 25 years and cost a total of about $3 million, largely raised by the town people through things like bake sales. They did get some grants, since they got the thing declared a historic landmark, but since the thing had been filled with grain and mice and God knows what else, it was a big project. There are hand-done canvas paintings around the inner core of the carousel, and there were big rips in some of those, so they had to be mended.



The great thing? Costs only 25 cents to ride it, so Dan and I definitely did. Only cost a buck to go into the museum, which we ended up not doing since we had to go meet Dan's uncle, but we spent about an hour and a half, maybe two hours, sitting outside the carousel, watching it go around. The older ladies who worked there were really nice and kept us entertained with talk and backstory, and we saw handfuls of tourists and families come through. It seems like a pit stop area, and considering the nothingness in Kansas and the general nothingness until you got to Colorado Springs or Denver, it was a nice break from the road.



If you'd been on the road, that is. We were stuck. But we did get to Boulder, and got a rental car for two days to tool around, and I'm saving Boulder and Leadville for some other posts. But let me just say: It sucked like nobody's business to have the car die on us, but we got through it and got to see something really awesome, too.

On High

Tomorrow morning Dan and I head out to Colorado for a solid week of beer tastings, reading books, cycling, eating and enjoying the fact it's not 104 with a 110 heat index outside. Holla atcha altitude!

For those who are interested, the Leadville 100 bike race will be next Saturday, Aug. 14, and I will be live-tweeting the whole thing because fuck, what else am I supposed to do? No way in hell I'm riding that thing. I will be bundled up, reading books and watching riders, waving a giant TCU Horned Frogs flag so Dan can find me in all the crews (side note: Ranked No. 7 in the nation pre-season, fuck yes!).

I will also be making random tweets during the whole trip because I easily amuse myself that way. The computer is coming with, so if I get the chance I may upload photos/post while I'm away, but no guarantees.

I just looked at our list of possible things to do while we're out of town, and two-thirds of the list is restaurants/microbreweries. We're chic like that.

Blown Away

Like that nice play on words there for the title and Chicago's nickname? I thought so. I impressed myself with it too, I have to admit, particularly because it's a Monday morning before noon. My brain cells rarely work well on Monday mornings.

Dan and I and Loren, Dan's best friend from way back when and a close friend of mine, too, all spent several days in Chicago toward the end of June for another friend's wedding and a mini vacation. It was a fantastic trip--the only down sides being that Loren lost his phone and his shoes, I found that none of my shoes are really comfortable for long-distance walking, and Dan and I had to jump through hoops to fly home with mechanical and weather delays--and I do have pictures.

Dan and I landed and got to the hotel midday, where Loren had already gotten a room. We all shared a room in the interest of saving money and having more fun, and we went out to find food, first of all. I have had Chicago-style pizza before and have always hated it, but this was a revelation in cheese. We theorized that they made a pizza crust, put a wheel of cheese on top, covered that with more crust and then topped it with sauce. I ate about seven pounds of cheese and it was delicious.

Then we wandered for the rest of the day through all the parks and through the Art Institute of Chicago, which was free and open to the public on Thursday nights. We were exhausted, footsore and slightly delirious, and spent the evening floating in the cold hotel pool.

Friday morning we got up early(ish) to do a tour of Wrigley and hit up a local brewery for lunch, since the wedding was in the late afternoon. After the tour of Fenway Dan and I did the day after I moved to Boston, I can now say I've been to the two oldest ballparks in the U.S. and sat in the press boxes of each. I don't think that earns me extra points in the game of Living or something, but I feel like it should. There were more pizza, too, when Daniel (who also went to high school with everyone) showed up famished and in need of a haircut.

The wedding itself and the reception afterward were beautiful and fun. Laura, who went to high school with Dan and Loren, is a fantastic person I've gotten to know over the past five years or so. She's smart, funny, generous, ambitious and she and her new husband, Adam, will have a fun life together while doing a lot of good throughout whatever communities they end up in.

Saturday was spent nursing a bit of a hangover, but we all went to the Field Museum and then Dan went off on a bike ride while Loren and I sat on a river boat architecture tour, revelling in the breeze and pretty buildings. The Field Museum was really impressive--I've seen a lot of museums, because I'm a dork and because I've lived in some good places, like Boston and the D.C. area and London. They had an exhibit on art of Native Americans and ancient Central and South American cultures, and in the gift shop was this fairly wide array of pottery and art, Acoma, Pima, Zuni, Jimez, etc. These are pueblos from around the Albuquerque area, and the art was very much like the art at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. I wondered if some of it was by the same artists, and it was a bit bizarre to see all these pieces I'm used to seeing in one context suddenly showing up more than a thousand miles away in another city not even close to the pueblos. I wonder if tourists other parts of the globe feel that way, seeing things from their home in this place they've never been to before.

The mummy exhibits were also great--as a kid, I was fascinated by mummies, specifically by the idea of pulling out organs and mashing up brains with hooks up through the nose. All the good stuff. It was really crowded in that part of museum, too, and I had to refrain from strangling these parents who would tell their children lies.

"What's that, Mommy?"

"Those are toys that little boys in Egypt used to play with, like you play with your toys."

(Not true. They were statues of boats and houses and servants, which would be animated and would be at the disposal of the dead person in the afterlife. Don't fucking lie to your children about history and facts, man. You can gloss over things a bit, or you can give very simplistic explanations, but don't lie. Geez.)

"Is that the mummy of a little boy?"

"No, that's the mummy of a midget."

(Not true. It was a kid. Again, don't lie. Of course, you could also teach your 8-year-old to read the signs for themselves, but I won't go off on a literacy rant here.)

The architecture tour later that day was prefaced by beer and hotdogs at the Billy Goat Tavern under Michigan Ave, a place where journalists from the Tribune and the Sun-Times would hang out and drink and clog their arteries. The hotdogs had a slight taste of bologna to them (bizarre, I know), and the beer had little flavor but lots of coldness, so all in all it was satisfying. Besides, all we were doing was sitting on a boat, taking a thousand obnoxious photos.

The last meal in Chicago? Pizza. Again. Naturally.

Also: I want this tree in my front yard.

My Thighs Still Hurt

I moved over the weekend because the good Lord didn't give us three-day weekends to actually have us enjoy ourselves. Nuh-uh, no way. Three day weekends are there to give us a false sense of security about what we can attempt when our weekend is longer (now with 50% more weekend!), and this one falling so nicely at the end of the month meant it coincided with my lease ending.

So yet again I mostly moved by myself, since Dan's work schedule got shifted around a bit and he also got shafted with having to work the holiday. This isn't a huge surprise--he often got assigned to work holidays at the various papers he's been at, since he's generally the youngest person working there and it's a whole hierarchy system. But the move meant a lot of lugging my things down stairs, loading it into trucks, driving it and unloading it in the hottest weather of the year so far.

After borrowing two trucks from two families and returning trucks and spending time in laundromats trying to get smoke smells out of my clothes (so glad I no longer live next door to a smoker!) and drinking way too much Diet Coke and not eating enough to keep from getting lightheaded and having lots and lots of anxiety and dragging my sister and Dan into everything, I got it done.

As I mentioned a while back, I'm really excited to be living with these two lovely ladies who are my new roommates and the new (old) house. There are beat-up hardwood floors, a shower in a giant stand-alone tub, chipped paint and a rather endearing child's landscape in colored chalk on one of my bedroom walls. There's also a dog, and while Fenway doesn't trust him, he also boldly walks by and can stop the dog in his tracks with an Evil Eye that is admirable.

Things are still busy with life in general, but that's OK. Busy is fine by me. It keeps me from thinking about how fucking hot this forsaken state is, because damn, it's fucking hot. (Yes, friends, it is time to listen to me whine about the heat again! Yay!) But on the upside, I have swimsuits and a gym membership at the Y, which has two pools, and a box of ice cream sandwiches in the freezer.

Dear Teacher

My French-Canadian couch surfer, Lino, and I were talking about our lives and education last night, and it was on my mind this morning when I was at work. Waiting on phone calls to come in, I started looking up things from my high school years, including the website of the first high school I went to in Fort Walton Beach, Florida.

I don't think the school had a website when I was there in the late '90s as a freshman and sophomore, and even now it's a fairly shitty one. There isn't a lot on there, but there are staff pictures, so I was browsing through and looking at the teachers there. I remembered a handful--the math teacher who oversaw the math club I was on (YES, it's been established I'm a mega dork, shut it), the teacher who taught me AP European history and whom I always disliked because she was such a bitch and whose class I only passed because I copied one of my best friend's homework every day, the Spanish teacher who started crying in the middle of a lecture because the plight of the indigineous people of South America was generally terrible.

There was also a picture of my favorite science teacher ever, a woman whose classes I took and whose books I borrowed when I became a student aide. She had a huge menagerie in her biology classroom--parakeets, frogs, guinea pigs, fish, pythons, iguanas, chameleons, hamsters, a hedgehog who would throw up every time you picked him up--and was pretty indulgent to me as her aide. I was there during her break period, so sometimes I could nap, sometimes I'd watch TV (I think I watched the Columbine shooting unfold on her classroom TV), I made her a poster that said "Gravity: Not just a good idea, it's the law."

I got psyched, seeing that she was still teaching there, so I got her e-mail address and wrote her an e-mail, saying I hope she remembered me and thanking her for encouraging me and telling her that although I never went to med school, I still knew about symptoms of Marfan's syndrome and toxoplasmosis during the lecture I went to at the med school when none of the first-year students knew the answers.

She wrote back using lots of exclamation points, saying of course she remembered me, and she was on her way to a meeting and would write back in more depth as soon as she could. It made me feel special that she remembered me, even though this was more than 10 years ago, and I hope I made her feel good, knowing that she really was a huge influence. It prompted me to look up the faculty list of the school outside Albuquerque, N.M., where I did my junior year, but none of the names really stand out. (And fuck Enterprise, Alabama. I hated that school, hated my senior year, my journalism teacher thought man walked with dinosaurs, and I have zero desire to contact anyone there.)

The exchange also made me think about teachers from middle school and elementary school. I remember a few teachers--fourth grade, for example--that were fantastic, but now they're untraceable, retired or even (in the case of a band director from middle school) deceased. And then I think, Shit, people my age are teachers now. That's freaky.

My mom is a career elementary school music teacher, and she's still doing it, and I've considered off and on through life that it would be something worth doing. I'm not born to be a teacher or anything, the way my mom is, but I do think I could be a decent one, and it's always floated in my mind as an option in case I get pushed out of journalism. I would never, ever teach journalism, and strangely enough, I think I'd decide against teaching science and would rather do literature or reading or even straight-up English. (My copy editing professor from college would probably faint at the thought of me trying to explain the difference between "lay" and "lie," because I still don't know what the difference is.)

But teachers were always people I (generally) respected, even from a young age, and it's nice to think that maybe if they knew their students as adults who are working toward ambitions, they would respect us, too.

Edits

I decided that I would finish edits to my project from November by the first of July. I started last week, opening the document and starting from the beginning, going through and line editing and trying to flesh out some things.

It is so painful.

I hate, hate, hate editing my own work. I don't think I'm particularly good at doing it, and the problem is that I always feel "Ugh, I've already read this, I fucking wrote it, how boring." I think if I could set things away for years, then it would be fine, I could edit well. For example: I have these massive three-ring binders hidden away in the bottom of a box of books at my parents' place that has printed-out copies of a ton of shit I wrote through high school and into my freshman year of college. Now, a decade or more (fuck, I'm old) after I've written all that stuff, I can look back on it and not get bogged down.

This was one of my biggest challenges in school, too, especially in college and grad school. In journalism classes I was always told to read through my stuff before I handed it in, but I never could. Not really. It's just so fucking boring, reading what I just did. I got pretty miserable grades on some stuff--my reporting teacher would dock 5 or 10 points for every little thing, like a comma in the wrong place or misspelled word--but I just could never make a habit of reading my stuff well.

Even in grad school, we were supposed to do lots of drafts and edit ourselves, particularly in this final-semester class on long-length narrative nonfiction. That class killed me. I love writing, and I enjoy editing other people's material, but I'm just too close to my own work to self edit.

I guess this isn't a surprise or anything. We're all too close to ourselves, too close to our decisions and lives and what we create, to accurately judge it. But then again, maybe ignorance is bliss. And maybe I'm an awesome genius who churns out Pulitzer prize winning first drafts and shits gold.

(Kidding. Just don't tell my editor I never read my stuff and don't ever intend to. I think just the concept would give her a conniption.)

Close Neighbors

It's official: I will be moving out of my one-bedroom apartment, where Fenway and I have been living on our own since last May, and will be rejoining the world of roommates come the beginning of June, the world of neighbors on the other side of walls who you have to actually get along with and all that shit.

Just to rehash, I signed the one-year lease on this apartment about a week before the first round of furloughs were announced at work. I even went through the trouble of asking the publisher if he thought we were going to have any financial issues, and he said no, so I signed and then BAM, paycheck cuts. Then two more rounds. We've been (knock on wood, cross fingers) without furloughs so far this year, but I don't trust it all.

Also, I've put a student loan on semi-deferment, and my grace period on that is up at the end of May, so I'll be looking at higher bills. It made sense to look for a cheaper place. I'm moving in with two other lovely ladies my own age who are renting a house, and I'll have more on that topic later.

As much as I adore living on my own, moving will be a good thing. I won't be stressed the fuck out about money all the time quite as much, and as of today, my AC in this little old apartment has gone out for the second time in the past three weeks. That shit's just not acceptable in this state. It's hot in here, and I can sit around in a tank top and shorts, but Fenway's stuck in his heavy fur coat. He's a snob like that.

Like I said, more to come later. For now, I'm going to spend the night at Dan's, where it's cooler, since the property manager won't do anything after 5 p.m. on a Friday unless the temperature is over 90.

Cats Eat Birds

My mother gave me a little Easter basket a few weeks ago, and I saved the Peeps because I wanted to share them with someone I knew would enjoy them the most. Besides seafood, the other food he adores is marshmallows. He's strange, I know.

We Are Family

This weekend saw a new addition to my little household. Behold: That Bitch.

Ok, so she doesn't have a name at the moment, or at least not a new name. She's a hand-me-down fish from a trainer at the barn, the woman who helped me find someone to lease Rio. She took in this fish, a female betta originally named "Barbie" by a five-year-old girl, several months ago.

Barbie got booted this week, though, because after living peacefully in a community fish tank, she turned into a serial killer and ate one guppy and seven shrimp just this week. The trainer, Mariam, was looking for someone to take her in, and I've always had a good time with bettas, so I offered to take her. Mariam's husband was the one who called her "that bitch" after her final killing, and I'm waiting for inspiration to strike before I name her again.

As you can see, girlfriend's scales are pulling apart because she ate so much. She's also got a nice gut hanging there, but hopefully she can do well on her own.

From the moment I brought her home, Fenway was excited. I had bettas before I had him, so his only fish experience is mooching seafood off my plate. He would rear up to peer in at the fish a bit better, but I tried to dissuade him from doing this because I could just see him knocking it over somehow and me being a fish killer. I eat a lot of fish, but I don't want to be responsible for the killing myself.


It's like cat TV. He spends half his time turning, wherever he is in the living room, so he can fix his gaze on the bookshelf. I did buy a new tank with a lid, since my others were open-topped, and I'm hoping that since the tank has yet to be sabotaged, we can all get along.

And while I don't have any photos of Little Jens Voigt, the last betta fish I had (who lived at home as well as on my desk at the Business Press until one day he died and was ceremoniously flushed in the middle stall of the upstairs ladies' bathroom), here's a photo of Noel, my first beta. I got him the first week of my junior year of college, and he lived until my summer internship in grad school. He grew to be massive, almost the size of this new fish, but he never ate other fish and he never got a gut. He did, however, fly home with me during Christmas and summer breaks when I was in college, and my senior year he largely lived on my desk in the newsroom at school. I would put him in a Gatorade bottle and take him on the plane with me, riding in the seat pocket. This was back in the golden days of terrorist watches, when you could still take liquids on planes. They always swabbed his bottle for explosives, but I think the TSA agents got a kick out of seeing some college girl carrying her fish everywhere. I was a dork. I still am a dork. I still think Noel was the best betta ever.

Belated

On March 11, I had a birthday. It wasn't terribly exciting: Work (and a deadline day), driving to Dallas, Dan gets off work late, he got me flowers, I got stuck in a motherfucker of a traffic jam on the way home and had to detour all over the damn place to get home.

I also, I'll admit, had a minor breakdown. It wasn't anything in particular--I actually was fine until I got stuck in Dallas on the highway without moving anywhere for a half hour (at 10:30 p.m., no less). Then I started getting all overwrought and thinking how boring I was/my life is/etc.

To make myself feel better, I thought back to everything I'd done over the past year. I'm actually pretty satisfied with the year, because I feel like I survived with some gusto. Within the past year I've joined Twitter, so I can waste more time; financially survived three rounds of furloughs; saw my family home in northern Virginia, outside D.C., get moved to North Texas; saw George W. Bush in person (so he wasn't some front cooked up by Cheney and Rove after all!); took a solo trip to Albuquerque; started and abandoned a few side projects; started and finished a fairly crappy novel in 30 days; saw my boyfriend on Christmas Eve; saw a lot of snow; saw Eddie Izzard; and made plans for 2010, including two trips to states and cities I've never visited before.

It does make me feel OK, the past year. It's just this upcoming year that seems daunting. I didn't get this uneasy feeling when the new year started on Jan. 1, but I'm getting it now, instead. When I was in school, my years, the way I kept track of them in my head, all started in August. Now they start with my birthday. Maybe one day I'll use January as a starting period?

But Reporters ARE Like Children

One of my favorite PR people, a woman who is a year older than me and works at one of the local hospitals, was at a press conference yesterday that Dan went out to go cover. He sent me a text message saying he thought she was pregnant because she said she'd be out for the fourth quarter and just introduced the person who would be replacing her.

And sure enough, Dan talked to her afterward and she is expecting. This woman will be a fantastic, enthusiastic mother--I've discussed infants with her a lot for stories, and she's always exciting. She actually got most of the way through nursing school before she realized she didn't want to actually be a nurse, so she's got a great geeky background, which I admire. I saw her get all teary-eyed once when we were in the same room as a birth (long story, but we didn't actually see anything behind a curtain, we just pounced on the poor woman for an interview like 5 minutes after she just pushed a baby out, how heartless are we?), and so I know she's got to be excited.

Anyway, the point is, when Dan called to confirm this with me after the press conference, I was simultaneously excited for her and reeeeaally bummed out because she is great at what she does and won't be around to cater to my every insane request for a few months at the end of this year. I feel like she should have taken a poll of local journalists before she went off to have a family, should have asked when would be a good time to take off. (Answer? Never.) Why didn't she think of the reporters?!

Paper

This is just a quick note of sorts, since I should be heading to bed. (Watch me turn this into a long and nonsensical piece of rambling bullshit, right?) Today I was at the symposium at TCU, and it was open to students and faculty of the nursing school, and there was this student sitting on the same row from me, a few seats down.

She was dressed like most students--jeans, T-shirt, backpack--and she pulled out this three ring binder, snapped it open, pulled out a few leaves of paper and got ready to take notes when the speaker came up. It was the paper that caught me--three-hole-punch, college-rule, beautiful paper. I don't think I've used paper like that since I got done with grad school in December 2006.

I'm a sucker for office supplies--especially pens (although I hate blue ink, so I guess that probably means I'm racist or hate babies or something) and notebooks. Seeing that paper made me think of the reams and reams and reams of notes or drawings or essays I've done on that sort of paper in the past. Today, when I go to get paper to jot something down, it's usually from a reporting notebook, torn out, or it's a sticky note or it's a blank sheet of white paper from the printer tray or something. There is no ruled paper like that anymore in my life. It made me sad and happy and nostalgic all at once.

Tomorrow I get paid, and I think I may stop by somewhere and buy a pack of paper and a little binder. Until just a few short years ago, that paper was the symbol of limitless possibilities. I'd like to bring that back into my life, I think.

Change It Up, Change Them Out

Last week I sat on this panel for a marketing association that was holding an event to show PR and marketing people how to get their health care stories into newspapers. The panel had been scheduled last year in November or something, and I'd consented without thinking once I figured out a reporter from the daily would be there as well as people from the daily and business newspaper in Dallas.

The week before the panel, I get an e-mail from the reporter at the daily who said she was starting a new position in the newsroom and couldn't come. I sent her back a congratulatory e-mail; she'd edited me once or twice when I was a freelancer, and I frequently saw her around at events once she started reporting (after layoffs). Then, later that week, and just days before the panel, I see on the Dallas blog that the editor from the Dallas Business Journal who was supposed to show at the panel got canned.

Needless to say, I was pretty curious how things would work out, and I showed up at the panel early and saw the health business reporter from the Dallas Morning News, a really nice guy that I think I could learn a lot from. (I have plans to befriend him and absorb all his wisdom by osmosis.) Then I find out the other health reporter from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram is going to show up, since the woman I was used to seeing around town was presumably in her new job. I was glad also to see that the health reporter from the DBJ was able to come, since the editor who was originally scheduled was off cursing the heavens somewhere.

Ok, I don't know if he was cursing the heavens. But if I'd gotten canned, I'd sure as hell be shaking my fist at the sky and bellowing, right?

So there were four of us at the panel, all representing the four big papers in Fort Worth and Dallas, and I was pretty proud of the marketing group for making it look like everything was seamless, even though I know they were probably panicking in days leading up to the event, when things started falling apart.

And even though I had jack shit to do with any of it, I was proud of the four of us panelists as a whole, for showing up and representing, even in the face of the merciless and unpredictable journalism industry.

As a sort of side note, the health reporter from the Star-Telegram who showed up told me that evidently the woman who got switched to a new position got moved back to her old position earlier that day. How fucked up is that? A daily can't get its shit together enough to move a person without fucking it up? And having to move her back? Again, if I were that person, I'd be cursing the heavens. It's not like the newsroom is so huge that there are too many people to keep track of. They've laid off practically half their staff, so it shouldn't have been that hard to keep everything in line. Ugh. This is why journalism is a cold hard bitch.

Now on to non-journalism things. Spring appears to be making tentative progress here, and I have high hopes that pretty evenings will be back in about a week and a half, after the daylight savings change. We're in March right now, and after March comes April, and in April comes my favorite event of Fort Worth: The Main Street Arts Festival.

(I know you're ask yourself, Wait, she doesn't love the Stock Show the most? Really? Buckle bunnies and calf scrambles and Future Farmers of America goat judging? But no, my friends. I like art more, and walking around in sandals, not worrying if I'm stepping in pig shit. I am that yuppie liberal, I guess.)

(Whatever. I totally voluntarily and willingly walk around in horse shit. I'm not going to feel bad about liking flip-flops for the time not at work or at the barn.)

(I do not have anything else to add and so will end awkwardly and with parentheses, because I heart me some punctuation.)

I Forgot!

Dan totally got into the Leadville race. I think a bunch of people already know, because I announced it on Twitter and Facebook and everything but oh yes--the lottery system came through and he was chosen to be a participant in the race.

This means we'll be vacationing in Colorado in August. I'm hoping I can get onto my bike when it warms up and do some on-the-road training so I can dink around up there, too. There's no way I'd enter a race like that, or even 50 miles at altitude (I can barely due that in Fort Worth when I'm in cycling shape), but I do want to bike my way through Independence Pass. Dan and his sister did it last summer as part of a roadtrip to California, so I'm hoping I can make it up since I bike as infrequently as she does.

San Antonio briefly in May for a wedding; Chicago in June; Colorado in August. While furlough days would make scheduling better, I'm crossing my fingers we don't get any so I can continue to save money. I'd rather burn my vacation days up than be bummed out over a docked paycheck.

(Our publisher gave the newsroom permission to buy a modestly-priced camera. I'm hoping this is a sign of good financial things to come. This is the same place that quit buying monthly birthday cakes last year for the staff, after all.)

SNOMG

No kidding--SNOMG was the title Dan's TV station used when a record amount of snow fell on North Texas Thursday. It was beautiful, ranging from nine to 12 inches, and while it's not unusual for there to be a hard freeze or snow around Valentine's Day, this was more than anyone expected.

So anyhow, you can see why the news is going down the crapper. When it comes to print, we can't turn down a pun, and when it comes to local TV stations, they inappropriate and unironic uses of textese.

The good news is we all got sent home early on Thursday, and then Friday was declared a work from home day. The work I did? I sent an e-mail. It was awesome.

Before everything turned into a disgusting mess of slush and mud, the way much of the Northeast is for much of the spring, I went out to the barn to let the horses out of their stalls for a while. They have played in snow in New Mexico and in Virginia, but this is the first serious snow in Texas that stuck around long enough for them to (safely) play in. (Topper slipped on ice below snow once and tore a hole through a ligament, part of the reason he's no longer jumping, so I'm always pretty paranoid about when to take him out in it.)

Anyhow, here are some pictures. No real frolicking, since they were on lead lines the whole time, but you can see Topper eat the snow and see Pony push his way through it to eat the grass underneath. You can guess which one of them would survive in the wild. And apologies for the bizarre blue color of some of the Po's photos; I was having flash/no flash existential crises.

Winter Itch

Last night I had dreams about drag queens.

This isn't really that strange; I found RuPaul's Drag Race, season two, on the VH1 site and watched the first episode. I love a good drag queen; the metamorphosis of it all, the pageantry, most of them don't take themselves too seriously.

After I woke up around 4 a.m. with Fenway, I went back to bed and dreamed about Albuquerque. I think I've written before about how I dream about London with alarming frequency (I'm too lazy to sift through my previous posts and find out whether I did indeed write about this, so sorry about that). I had a dream about London just over the weekend. They almost all have to do with walking from the Bloomsbury area south to the Covent Garden area and across toward Soho and Trafalgar Square and all the museums.

Anyway, I think this was maybe the second or third dream about Albuquerque since my trip there in October. Dan and I have been talking a lot about travel plans for this year, since we have some out-of-town weddings to go to and then there's the possibility of Leadville, and over the weekend I was thinking about Albuquerque, just picking up and driving back. I got this overwhelming urge to get in my car and just go.

I think it's because it's a time of year where everything sucks. Work sucks--we had all these furloughs last year, and I got used to taking lots of time off. I have more money now, true, but I can't spend it yet since it's all going toward trips. There are also shifts with things at work that are grating on my nerves because I'm that kind of a pessimistic-yet-prideful person, the way newspaper journalists tend to be after being at a paper for a few years. It's been raining for weeks on end, it seems like, and everything outside is a mudpit. The riding arenas are a mess. It's generally cold and still fairly dark.

Everyone is itching for a change, everyone is waiting for spring, and that's why I thought about New Mexico, I think. It's just the irritability that comes with late winter. If I were still up in Boston, I'd be going crazy about right now, because winter never really ends until around March, and spring is all rain. At least I'm not on the East Coast, 10,000 leagues under the snow.

I've decided a project to get me through the rest of this season is to work on my Spanish so I can exchange at least a few words with the guy who works at the barn in the evenings. I've tried looking things up in dictionaries and trying to remember some conjugations, and it should be remembered that I only had two years of Spanish in high school and only made a B in each class. Those classes were more than 10 years ago, now, so there's a lot to be learned. These days I can say about four lines in Spanish, and all of them have to do with horses or being sick.

Some day I will get back to griping about the newspaper industry, don't worry. A big shout-out to those who are still sticking it out. I heard someone once refer to us all as "The few, the proud, the morons." I'm glad to be a part of that, even if just for the martyr aspect.

A Whole New Year

Although we're at the end of January, there's still an entire 11 months ahead of us in 2010. There are some things in the works right now that I'm hopeful about--nothing actually has anything to do with me directly, but that's ok. I'm going to be cryptic about it all anyhow on my blog because I can.

One of my goals for the year is to get back on the bike (when it gets warmer, because I'm a fucking wimp and already spend enough time in too-thin tights at the barn) and to be able to climb up all the hills around my apartment. I'm going to be moving out of my lovely little smoke-smelling wonky-window-blinded one bedroom in the spring, but before I do, it'll be warm and I'll have the chance to tackle the nearby roads and hills.

Part of this comes after years and years of encouraging/berating words from Dan. Dan got into cycling and moved over here to this part of Fort Worth, and he would sometimes take me out biking with him. This is before I had a bike, so he'd go on his road bike and I'd follow on his mountain bike, a huge heavy thing that was too big for me. He'd go through these really hilly neighborhoods, and I couldn't pedal up the hills, and I'd start to panic and the slight asthma would kick in and I'd panic some more. I never really made it up the hills. I walked up them. There was one time I threw his bike into someone's front yard and kicked it out of frustration. Dan wasn't a fan of that, but he still tried to talk me up everything.

Once I had my bike, things got better, and I became a semi-OK climber because I can break out brute strength for brief periods of time. However, I have zero stamina for stuff, so long hills still generally eluded me.

Then I got out of the bike routine, and everything went to hell. Last big hill, in the fall? Walked up it. Now I'm doing this spin class twice a week, though, hoping to at least sort of get into the groove of pedaling and pushing big climbing gears. We'll see how it works out.

The reason I bring this all up is this is one of the things in the works. Dan applied to do Leadville this year, a 100-mile bike race at extremely high altitude in Colorado. It's a lottery system, so he's hoping he'll get chosen, and he'll find out in two weeks. If he gets it, I'll go with him, mini vacation, see Colorado. He wants me to bring my bike with me so we can go riding in Colorado, and I keep wondering if he remembers how poorly I climb in Fort Worth, much less in a mountainous state. However, he's perpetually optimistic and keeps assuring me I can do some of the shorter routes, 20- and 30-mile ones. We'll see.

I have to admit, I'm grateful to have a boyfriend who encourages me even at things I'm really generally awful at. I'm also glad I still have several more months to try to make myself not so generally awful.

Mental Inventory

Remember back when we were in middle school, before everyone had programmable phones and you had to remember phone numbers or write them down? I used to know about a dozen phone numbers by heart--home phone, naturally (in case of stranger danger), work phones for parents, friends, maybe the barn.

Today, I know about a half-dozen phone numbers. I know Dan's. I know how to call work. And I can call about four PR people for various hospitals. But that's it. I don't know my parents' numbers, even though their cell numbers have been the same for about eight years. I have no idea what my sister's number is. I couldn't call a single friend.

Tonight I went to this lecture at an engineering school, and it was one of the most tech-y tech lectures I've sat through in a long time. Usually I can muddle my way through, remembering vague bits of physics and math, recalling statistical things from some college biology research classes. I'm much better at the biological- or medicine-based lectures, but this one was supposed to be about the semiconductor revolution, 1947 to present day, so I thought I could handle it. Frankly, I'll be lucky to pull together a short story. It was all numbers and theories and abstract stuff.

As I think I've written about before, and as I'm sure some have heard me complain, I am amazed at the stuff I've learned and forgotten. I used to know calculus. In fact, I was a year ahead all through high school when it came to advanced math. I didn't even have to take math my senior year because I'd already taken calculus. (Keep in mind I went to dinky high schools where only like 20 students took calculus every year and Cal II would never be offered.) But today? I've forgotten all of it. I've forgotten all the algebra II I took my freshman year, too, and pretty much everything about every chemistry class I ever took.

I'm better with the big-concept stuff, like history or literature. There's more room for bullshit there, and you can talk about theories and consequences without getting bogged down in details like dates or which king was actually leading England at that time, if you throw in enough superfluous information.

So tonight I was driving home, again baffled at things I've forgotten, when I decided to try to think of everything that is taking up the room in my brain where calculus and chemistry and physics and whatnot used to be.

--I know a lot more song lyrics than I used to, and I still remember the lyrics to all those soft-rock songs and musical numbers that my mom listened to when I was a kid. So I figure that's a good portion, right there, because there's a lot of songs out there and I love singing along to them, preferably loudly and slightly off-key. Fist pumping is optional.

--Books. I'm more well-read than I was in high school and even in college, when the reading was required. I told one of my grad school professors that I spent more time reading narrative nonfiction books than doing work for her narrative nonfiction class, and looking back, it wasn't a mistake to do all the reading but it was a mistake to tell her that.

--Sports stuff. I didn't have to remember Jacoby Ellsbury's birthday before he joined the Red Sox and became unbearably awesome. I also didn't have to know anything about cyclists, bicycle engineering and mechanics or European races prior to meeting Dan.

--Dan's family history. There's four kids, and he's the youngest, and he's got a sister-in-law and two nieces and there are tons of aunts and uncles and it's an ongoing headache.

--Celebrity gossip. One of the blogs I follow distills everything into a handy twice-a-day bullet-pointed listing, which I read when I'm waiting on my e-mail at work to load.

--Health care. When I was in high school, I had this little pocket-sized notebook I'd fill with descriptions of bizarre diseases (like Prader-Willi syndrome) and concepts (a fetus is a lot like a tumor) because I was a weird kid and kinda pretentious. I never shared or showed this notebook to anyone, but I liked thinking I could diagnose someone's problem and save them the trip to the ER or something, probably. Today, I know about even more useless stuff (the hemicorporectomy) and also a lot of useful things, like health disparities and preventive medicine and the names of PR people and their phone numbers at their office, since I don't know how to program their numbers into my work phone.

--Beer. I still know jack shit about liquor and wine, but I'm slowly learning more about beer. And granted, I don't know a lot, but it's more than I used to and I know what I like and that's the most important thing, right?

--How many miles past an oil change I can go in my car. Because my old car would spontaneously die even if I'd just gotten an oil change.

(And in case you were wondering, I know I can get at least 5,000 past the recommended mileage.)