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.)
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Sunday, February 14, 2010
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.
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
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.
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.
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