Sticky

You're right: I should have updated sooner. I mean, it's not like I'm actually doing much in Houston. I go to work, and then most of my evenings are kind of spent bumming around. I'll get dinner once or twice a week, go to the gym, but there's been plenty of time to update.

I'm glad I didn't, though. I wouldn't have wanted to be hasty about anything I wrote, hasty about assumptions or susceptible to falling into moods that might pass.

I've been down in Houston for about six weeks now, and the humidity is already warning me that I'm going to be a greasy, sweaty mess for at least half the year as long as I live here. Memories of three years in Florida, including my first two years of high school, swim in the back of my mind when I wake up and it's sort of mildly cloudy and damp. Tonight I came back from the gym and found a mosquito sitting on the outside wall of my apartment; thankfully, it wasn't nearly as big as the mosquitoes in Alabama, that sticky place I spent my senior year of high school.

Tonight I also finally started hanging pictures on my wall. It's to make my little apartment feel more like home and less a place I happen to sleep when I'm at work, ticking away hours between trips to Fort Worth.

I left Fort Worth after four years, the longest I've ever consecutively lived anywhere. The city was good to me—it gave me an education in college, when I was there for school but left at every chance to go home and be with Topper. It gave me a job, a career start, a place to let Topper live with the pony, an epicenter where my friends and eventually family would be. It gave me the love of my life (Dutch's burger, in case you were wondering . . . oh, and my guy, too). It gave me a place to really work on growing up.

The most peculiar thing about this move is that I'm going back. I've written before about how going back to places I've once lived is an extremely rare opportunity, which makes me often feel like my past is imaginary. I'm going back to Fort Worth frequently on weekends—my family, my friends, my soulmate (Topper) and the love of my life are all there. It's four hours up the road. I have a car, I have cash, I can return.

And it's almost as strange as never returning.

Every time I'm driving north on the highway that leads toward downtown Fort Worth, I have to check my mental state. Am I happy? Am I relaxed? Am I unnerved? Do I realize I don't live here any more? It doesn't matter that I'm not gone long enough to miss much, that I read the newspapers every day and most of my life is still there: I am not there. Not really. I am just a visitor.

I really like most of what I've seen of Houston so far. I'll delve more into my work, my neighborhood, all that stuff in the future, but I still haven't realized it's home. Maybe I'll somehow keep deluding myself that Fort Worth is still home, or maybe it's that place that I'll call home from now on. People will ask, Where are you from? and I'll answer, Fort Worth. Right now, I just say, I moved from Fort Worth. I don't claim it yet. But it looks like maybe I can, maybe I will.

It's hard to tell.

First Of The Last

Tomorrow is my last day at work.

This is, I guess, my first grown-up job, which doesn't include having back-up income from student loans or nannying or something like that. My freelancing when I first got out of grad school was pretty fun, except for the whole barely-able-to-pay-rent-why-does-the-daily-only-pay-once-a-month-this-is-bullshit part, and when I quit that I basically called the metro editor and told him I got an offer of a full-time job. He told me I should take it. I told him I had.

So tomorrow, really, is the first of what I'm sure will be many (hopefully not too many) last days of work. I've already turned in all my stories, already contacted all my favorite PR people to tell them how much they've helped me over the years and how I only know like three phone numbers by heart (one is Dan, two others are PR people), and so if I end up in a car accident and they can't find my phone and they need an emergency contact and Dan's not around, I'm calling them. Tomorrow I'm basically going in to finalize a list of contacts and story ideas for my editors and to pick up items and drink beer.

I'm still processing this whole thing, the whole "holy shit, I'm moving to Houston" thing, but I'm feeling calm now. My work here will be done. I'll have a week off. I'll go with Dan to the North American Handmade Bike Show the weekend before my first day, and then I'll be going back and forth until I can move everything with the much, much-appreciated help of my parents. I went down over the weekend and found an apartment, and I'll be signing the lease and getting keys and paying for a place that includes all bills, and you know what that means in Texas: I can crank my AC down to 62 in the summer and not have to pay extra. Bonus points for also being able to not feel the guilt for slowly killing the planet one fake Fahrenheit at a time, since I won't have to pay more for it.

Today I cut out of work an hour early and checked in on a fossil site near the office, since it hadn't rained in a while and I figured the creek bed would be nearly dry. I wandered around picking up sea urchins and snail shells for an hour and a half, because clearly I need more rocks before I move halfway across the state. I just realized yesterday that I could perhaps find more recently deceased (or live) sea urchins or snails near my new home, since Galveston will be nearby. I've often been close to the shore -- D.C., Boston, Florida's Fort Walton Beach -- but it will just be so different after living in Cowtown for four years, which is Texas prairie.

I guess I mean that to say that yes, it's all going to be a big change. But some things don't change. It will still be Texas, and one thing I've learned about this state is that it does have the power to continually surprise me. I look forward to the next surprises, and I'm crossing my fingers for lots of pleasant ones.

Remember That Time?

Remember when I said I was going to do the NPR Three-Minute Fiction contest? Well, I did write it, actually. I just forgot to send it in. It was a bit of a whirlwind weekend--it's been a bit of a whirlwind several weeks, actually, but more on that in a moment--and so it completely slipped my mind to send it in. You probably don't believe me when I said I did finish it in time, but it is 599 words (one under the 600-word limit!) and I posted it on my other site, Journalism's Dark Secret, for all you who are not creepers and who are actually friends. Yeah, it's totally randomly thrown in, and if you read preceding posts, it makes ZERO sense, since that's where I put Nanowrimo stuff, but just go with it. Right? Right.

Right: So I took a new job and I'll be moving to Houston in like two weeks. I'm trying not to think about it, because denial is a pleasant state right now, since I have no place to live down there and I know three people in the whole damn city (and work with one, so that's nice) and my room here in Fort Worth is such a damn fucking disaster that the thought of packing makes me feel slightly hive-y.

I've been in Fort Worth as an adult (read: post grad school) for four years now, and I feel good about the change. On the other hand, I feel sad and miserable and terrified. Dan will start looking for a position down there, but he'll be up here, and we'll be doing that whole long-distance thing while trying to finish planning a wedding. (We have it all planned. We just . . . well, we haven't actually executed most of it. We're working on it.)

The horses will stay up here and will probably be moving down at a later date, once I find an apartment and get some paychecks and all that good stuff. They're at an excellent full-board barn, so they'll be looked after nicely, but still--moving Topper is always an experience, and I mean "experience" the same way people say someone is "interesting," which is never in a good way.

So many of my friends are here in Fort Worth, as are my parents and sister and Dan's parents and a few siblings (after one comes back from Stanford and discounting another who is in the Army). My Horned Frogs and TCU are here. My favorite burgers and pizza are here. My favorite seafood is still outside DC or on the Emerald Coast, but I've learned to live with these challenges.

Growing up moving around a lot, I got fairly adept at getting shit to happen, making living situations work and moving on. I expect it will take a bit longer now to make friends and settle in--I'm really looking forward to working with everyone at the new place (more info to come), but I also think I'll be on the younger side again, so may not be in the same stage of hanging-out-abilities as coworkers, so that might mean it's slower to make friends. How do you make friends as an adult? Through friends of friends is mostly what I've seen. However, only knowing a few people in Houston, I don't know how well that will work out there. We'll see.

Anyway, I'm excited. This will be good. Don't expect any updates soon, but if I am updating, leave me a comment telling me to shut to fuck up and GO PACK. Because seriously, this place is a disaster.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Home For The Holidays

I haven't updated lately, although I meant to write about what a transcendent experience it was to be at the sold-out TCU/Utah game a few weeks ago. I showed up with my signs for College GameDay, ate a giant burger at Dutch's, drank warm beer and then cold beer given to me by the guy who was my editor when I was but a young reporter at the college newspaper and then another cold beer given to me by a former professor. I fought the lines for the bathroom--sometimes I wish I could pee like a guy--and watched TCU kick the shit out of Utah. It was good, and the fans were so noisy and everything was so great I almost wanted to cry.

But anyway, enough waxing poetic there. I've been mostly keeping up with the National Novel Writing Month that is November. I'm about 34,000 words into what needs to be a 50,000-word short novel by 11:59 p.m. Nov. 30. I didn't really start with much of a plot, except I'd have a reporter who gets laid off and gets a job at a horse stable, and I've gotten that far. I don't know what else to really throw in, so I'm making stuff up as I go along, under the careful watch of the wonderful Kate, who's a great coach. Maybe I'll actually do a triathlon some day. She'd be a great coach for that, too.

(Hey, Kate, tonight I'm going to go running for the first time in . . . well, a very, very long time. You should turn your whip that direction, too.)

Thanksgiving is this week, and it's so nuts to think about the holidays with my parents nearby. They're about 50 minutes away, which is just mind-blowing. My parents buy me like a week's worth of barbeque and send me home with leftovers, and this time I'll see them without the vacation days and flights to Reagan.

Winter and the holidays were always my time to be in Virginia, to be riding the Metro around D.C., to be walking around in the cold from museum to museum, iPod on and hands in pockets. I knew when I was at home (I refer to everything as "at home," it feels like; my apartment, my parent's place, Dan's apartment, etc) in July that I'd miss Virginia. I miss the gray skies that hold the possibility of snow. I miss the fat squirrel who lived behind our first house and the fat rabbit that lived behind the second one. I miss driving around to the Bloom grocery store or the Safeway, and I liked the church our family went to there, since there were windows to look out and see the trees through.

Since I was a sophomore in college, holidays always meant Virginia. I spent summer vacation and spring breaks there, too, and I did spend two brief Christmases in Tampa when I was in grad school, but they're pretty firmly linked with Virginia in my mind.

This holiday will be fantastic, no doubt. But at the same time, I won't have the luxury of stepping completely, totally away from my responsibilities as an adult to go home anymore. When I was halfway across the country, there was no chance of an editor calling me to do something or of me worrying about getting something in the mail. My parents are close, now, and their new home is, too. I just won't be able to get away from my home, either.

I love Fort Worth, I sort of think of it as an adopted home, but I am antsy.

Looking Up

I know it's taking me forever to post all this stuff about New Mexico, but it seems ever since I got back that things have been busier than they've been in a very long time. Work stuff, coordinating with Dan's schedule, the barn, the parents--all of it has come together and I was grateful tonight to spent two and a half hours in a laundromat, just reading.

The biggest reason I chose to go to Albuquerque over the dates I went is because of the Balloon Fiesta, the most crowd-drawing thing the city has to offer. Every year, people from around the world bring their balloons to show off, compete in challenges, race, and all sorts of other things, and a ridiculous number of people show up. Every day starts off before dawn, when a small contingency of balloons light up in the darkness like luminarias and go up to test the weather conditions. Thanks to the Sandias on the east, the Three Sisters volcanos on the west and some funky air currents, Albuquerque is a great place to fly a kite--wait, a balloon. Probably a kite, too.





We wanted to show up for the mass ascension, the very first event of the festival every year. Showing up before dawn means pulling on many, many layers of clothes, fighting traffic jams at 4 a.m. (or doing park and ride, which we did), and buying cinnamon rolls and breakfast tacos and coffee at the park. People get so excited when the balloons start going up, and slowly dawn reaches Albuquerque. It takes a while, since the sun has to come up over the mountains, but the balloons grow up like technicolor bread dough rising in the giant park.





To get the balloons up, the material is spread out across the ground and the basket is tipped on the side. Fans are used to initially puff up the fabric, and sometimes a person will go inside the balloon to help it along. Once the balloon is upright and the basket is tipped the right way, noisy burners are set off. Needless to say, no smoking is allowed anywhere in the park, but crowds always try to gather around the balloons. It's cool to see that kind of fire close up--fire that can be harnessed to put people into the air--but the warmth is also a big draw. Balloons of all colors and shapes went up--there are much better photographs out there by others, I'm sure, but at the end of the morning there was a huge swarm above us, gently bumping into each other as they took off and then floating away to the northwest, like paper boats sent down a slow stream.















Later in the day, my companions--Amy, my second host and her friend, who was a middle school science teacher--went back to the park for a second round of balloons. (Why did we go back? Well, I'm a science journalist, Amy's an audiologist, the teacher is a science teacher . . . there were extreme dork levels, and we gave in.) Late that afternoon gas balloons--not heated, but filled with gases like helium--were supposed to take off for a race, and we kept waiting for the start. The sun started to set, we amused ourselves by drawing mustaches on our fingers and talking in funny voices. We gave an 8-year-old a mustache when he asked for one (with his parents' permission, since it was permanent marker. And yes, it was the journalist walking around with a giant bag of pens and markers in her purse.) The wind got bad, the balloons ducked and bobbed and partially collapsed. Nothing took off. The moon came up. They set off the fireworks, so no one got a weather refund. We packed it in, went to a bar and did karaoke. I butchered Steve Miller Band and the White Stripes.











Sunday I spent some time out wandering around off the Cottonwood Springs Trail at the western foot of the Sandias. Later that day I would drive around the streets of the city, revisiting various childhood places, but I'd never been on these trails. It was pretty, peaceful, quiet broken by lizards scuttling in dead leaves and mountain bikers skidding down narrow trails in the distance. I got off the trail and wandered through a dried creek bed, looking for fossils. I think I saw petrified wood sticking out of a giant rock, but I don't know. Quartz is abundant out there. I tried to remember not to walk around always looking at the ground, checking for ways I'd trip and hurt myself, but to look up every once in a while.

Childish Things

The second time we lived in New Mexico was from 1990 until 1993. We briefly lived in Albuquerque in the mid-80s for about four months before we moved to England while my dad finished some special ops flight training stuff (or something). I was really young and don't remember much about the first time. Here's what I do remember:

We lived in the pink apartments (but then, everything's pink and adobe in N.M.)

I almost drowned in the complex pool (my mom told me not to go in, but I did)

I refused to eat the green eggs and ham (made with a touch of food dye when reading Dr. Seuss at playschool)

And I was terrified of this place:



This is an exhibit in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, a place that would become one of my favorite spots on the face of the planet (besides the barn and the Rio Grande Nature Reserve) when we moved back to Albuquerque after being in England.

This volcano exhibit scared the shit out of me because the floor was of thick plastic with red "lava" running underneath. When I was little, the first time in Albuquerque, I was about four and my dad had to carry me through this room because I was afraid the floor would collapse and we'd sink into the whooshing lava below. This is probably why today, if I ever lay down on a tanning bed, I can't stop thinking about what would happen if the plastic cracked and I fell onto the light bulbs.



There were other great things about the museum, though, including the dinosaurs and the exhibit about the start of life on earth. I loved the tiny colored diodes that came together to form DNA; even as a little kid, I was a dork. When I was in elementary school, after we moved back from England, I'd generally gotten over my volcano fear, but I still didn't particularly like that room. When I went back this year, I saw they'd opened a new dark and dramatic room about the end of the dinosaurs, filled with strobe lights and crashing sounds and shaking floors, and they feature a nice warning for parents. There's still no warning on the volcano room. The new room also features this awesome photo of tiny rat-like creatures eating a T-rex carcass. That's mammals FTW, for those of you keeping track at home.





I did the science museum on the first full day in Albuquerque. That day I woke up, hiked around one of the canyons that is part of the Petrogylph National Monument (more on that later), went to the museum, dinked around Old Town (which is like the Stock Yards in Fort Worth, filled with tourists), and then went through the nature reserve (more on this in a later post, too). My last full day in Albuquerque, Sunday, was again partially spent looking at my elementary school years in New Mexico.

We moved from a tiny community in England, a fishing village, to Albuquerque, where I got ridiculed for my accent and the administration at the school tried to put my sister and I into speech therapy. It was a confusing time for me, that first year (second grade). Third grade got better, and fourth grade was one of my best years of school, period. It may have been THE best year of school for me before graduating from high school. Those three years were spent at Kirtland Elementary School, right outside Kirtland Air Force Base (where my dad was stationed) and within walking distance from the base housing. I'd walk to school every day with some other kids from base housing, and after a while, I loved that school.

There are new murals on some of the walls, now, and the playground looks infinitely smaller than it seemed when I was little. I remember buying popsicles after lunch for a quarter, trying to eat them before they melted into the sand, and catching lizards on the playground. All the play equipment is new, shaded, covered in brightly-colored poly. There are still portables where some of the classrooms are, and there's one tree in the back playground. There's still a carefully cultivated green quad that's shaded with big, handsome trees where I studied Van Gogh for the first time.





Tooling around the perimeter of the base in my car with the windows down was strange. Very little had changed, except now what was one of the centers of my life--everything within the borders of that base fence--was now off limits, gone. That's something I can't go back and visit again, like so much of my past. Well, I guess I could if my parents escorted me on base as a visitor, but that doesn't do much for my personal love of revisiting the past on my own.

There were three blue-tiled pieces of public art near the base that I took a lot of delight in as a kid. One was a giant car, up on an arch, that actually had a hole all the way through it. I always thought it was a real car they somehow gutted and holed out, but now I think I was probably wrong. The other was this odd, slanted table coming out of a wall. The third piece, a blue armchair that appeared to be sinking into the ground, is gone. I found the piece of land it used to be on, but now it's flat and empty, pink concrete that no longer has a quick-sand appearance due to the disappearing chair.







I guess some things do change, after all.

The East Side

When you're driving west along I-40 toward New Mexico from Amarillo, the ground abruptly drops off from under you about 20 miles from the Texas/N.M. border. I got up early on Wednesday morning to make the drive to Albuquerque, unsure of how long it would take (turns out it took considerably less time than Google Maps and Mapquest and the GPS thought, thanks in part to the time zone change).

The drive was fairly uneventful, passing through occasional small towns that reminded me of the places I went to high school my junior and senior year. My junior year was at Moriarty High School in Moriarty, N.M., 20-odd miles east of Albuquerque and on the other side of the Sandia Mountains from the big city. When I was making the drive, I caught my breath momentarily with recognition when I saw the Sandias and I saw roadsigns for Moriarty and Edgewood, the next town over (and where we actually lived).

It's strange going back to places you've been. I discussed this with my mom when I got back, and it turns out she feels the same way I do--that there are certain large chunks of my life that feel like a dream and feel like they may never have really happened. Driving through Moriarty to the school, which I could still drive by instinct despite only spending one year there, affirmed my experience. I did go to school there. I hated a lot of it, but I really enjoyed other parts of it, and the school was largely the same. It was about 4:30 in the afternoon, and the only students were with the football team, so I waltzed myself into the school, wandered around, took photos, and no one ever questioned me.



I think every school has these big school year posters that show senior class photos of everybody from that year. When I was going down the main hall, I saw that poster for the 2000 kids--I had somehow ended up ahead in most of my classes, and so my junior year was spent surrounded by seniors. It was weird, looking at all the kids. There was the skater kid whose locker was next to mine, to pulled me into this weird waltz down the hallway one day; the one out gay guy, who caught a lot of flak but showed off his shaved legs in shorts regardless; the meathead who was a total jerk to me and once made me cry in the middle of civics class; the Army ROTC kid who sat next to me in civics class; the girl who was obsessed with comic books and introduced me to some really funny British comedy shows; the cowboy kid who worked at the supermarket we went to and was always really nice and polite and was always wearing shitkicker boots. The nametag on a nearby classroom was the same, too; it was my civics teacher, a liberal New York-state Democrat in a generally Republican town whose brother was a movie director.

After leaving the school, it was only a short drive to Edgewood, and I drove through town (it used to be just a supermarket and a few tiny restaurants; now it's a supermarket, a Super Wal-Mart and a few tiny restaurants) and headed north toward where our house used to be. It's easy enough to find, since there aren't a lot of streets and all of the houses have at least a few acres. It's easy for me to get turned around in a big subdivision, with houses crowded and lawns all the same; out there, most houses are adobe or have colorful metal roofs. The house we leased was still there, still looking largely the same, although our landlord had sold it and the people who lived there had a ton of broken-down vehicles on the edges of the property. The large hill--or is it a mountain? I need to find out some day--was still there to the north, and the sky was clear. I'd forgotten how it was so damn windy all the freaking time out there on that side of the mountain.





I still had time to kill before I met with my couchsurfing host, so I cut through back roads to Tijeras, another tiny town, and took the scenic Sandia Crest Highway up to the peak, slowly winding 14 miles up. Some of the trees were starting to turn; chipmunks and squirrels darted out of the way. At the top was a viewing area, a good 15 degrees or so colder than at the base of the mountain. Teenagers in T-shirts, tucking their arms inside, were up there. The inside of the bathroom doors are stenciled with a black bear, the New Mexico state animal, and with the words "Feed a bear, kill a bear." A fenced-off area full of radio towers was fascinating to me, almost more so than the view down to the west, over Albuquerque. The sun cast a glare over the city, so it was hard to distinguish anything, but the towers and wind combined to make a sound like a jet engine revving nearby.





With the sun sinking and making photos more difficult, I climbed down, got into my car, and drove down. I passes cyclists, huffing their way up the roads, and wondered what they would do when it turned dark; the sun sets earlier, and I'd be afraid of getting hit by a car (or wandering black bear?) out at night on a bike. When I cut back through Tijeras to the highway and then through the pass to Albuquerque, the sun was setting and the sky was dark orange. When I called my parents later that night to tell them I'd made it, my dad was disappointed I'd unplugged the GPS and put it in the back seat when I got into New Mexico. I was afraid I'd come back and everything would have been developed, that large, generic and faceless rows of strip malls and housing complexes would have taken over, but not much had changed. I didn't need directions.