Who do Hoodos? Do You do hoodoos?

This is me wandering around in a Dr. Seuss book.

Home Improvement!

Before: the problem was that this old tub spout leaked whenever i pulled the tab for the shower head.  This meant I was losing precious water pressure and precious hot water (it felt like mostly hot water was being lost through the leaking).  I bought a cheap plastic spout from Home Depot cuz that was all they had but it didn't fit this particular situation. 

During:  So i came here during my lunch break.  It was a surprisingly entertaining errand. The guys who work there are good old local guys who seem to have a lot of fun and enjoy their work.  Probably, they were all pretty stoned too.  The guy who helped me out, just by looking at the old sprout I brought in, guessed where I live almost exactly.  He was only about two blocks off.  that was amazing.  I would recommend this place to anyone.  hours suck though, 7:30am to 4:30am Monday through Friday.  It's mostly geared towards professionals or harder to find parts and supplies, but quality stuff, and great staff for sure. 

during:

after: shiny. 

Now I'm all good.  Lots of water pressure, lots of hot water, and all it took me was about 20 minutes of work. 

dinner mar 10 2014

steamed white rice, grilled white asparagus and sauteed chicken with Kashmiri curry that is totally not from a can. Totally not from a can.

I began physical therapy today.  Which I guess is another way to say I started getting old today.  It's my knee.  i blame sitting at a computer all day. 

My biological clock is ticking.  I learned on this trip that my body isn't getting any younger or stronger and if i want to do another epic around the world backpacking trip...well...the clock is ticking.

forced intimacy:  sitting on an airplane with others. sharing a hotel room with an unknown coworker.

I slept with my boss....in the same hotel room during our work conference.

I'm thinking about small town america and the prospects for an individual born and raised in one of those places places to go somewhere grander, less depressing and with a horizon... how difficult it must be.  I guess this is where student loans, not getting pregnant, good test scores, money, talent, ambition, life skills all come into play for a child wanting to leave small town America.  Good luck if your poor, god help you if your native american living on a reservation.

Some more details about Zion and driving and eating

Drove through empty highways and high desert and small towns listening to bad country music, static and christian preachers on the radio:

driving down a road with music:

i feel like driving through and seeing this side of "small town" america should better inform about the culture war and conservative mindset.  But i still dont' get it. I sort of see the need for big four wheel drive trucks to navigate the snow and ice and hills, I get the big pieces of cheap land, I get the non existent police presence (saw one cop car in my four days north of phoenix), I get the small town vibe, i get the overwhelming pervasiveness of religiosity...but...I still don't get it.

Anyway,

Here's a picture of me in front of my motel room and rental car, and the view from the parking lot of my Zion motel room.

 I think I drove over a thousand miles in those four days.

Drove a thousand miles and ate nothing but Americana:

breakfast: 

Dinner: chicken fried steak: (with guacamole as contrast of flavor and texture, so maybe it's not that americana, in the end)

Utah drinking laws.  I had two pints and was wondering why I wasn't catching a buzz before I remembered I was in Utah, so I googled utah alcohol laws on my smart phone and realized those beers could have at most 3.2% alcohol content.  what a waste of my money. what a disappointing way to cap off days of hiking and traveling. 

Zion, Bryce and GC Summary

I'm going to brag a little and talk about how awesome everything worked out for me on this trip.  I was three for three with my travel goals based off of my Feb 21st post: :

Selfie at Grand Canyon: Check.

Naked picture at the top of Angel's Landing?  Done and Done (still can't believe I pulled this one off)

Dinner at Leopolds: Check. Check plus 5 liter boots of beers with bosomy Aryans in leiderhosens.
I ordered the trout and it was delicious.  Went with James, his girlfriend and her friend Dasha. Ended up drinking at a private club till about...late...then i slept for a few hours before waking up to catch my flight home.

The trip was made better by the fact I made the right decisions around the weather. The flights I caught were great too.  First Class from Hawaii to SFO had guava mimosas.  SFO to PHX was a perfectly normal short hop.  PHX back to SFO illustrated how the little decisions we make shapes the pleasure's and pains of our lives. .. 

...Who would have thought that a little mouse click, a difference of random millimeters on the computer screen during the seat selection process of booking an airline ticket online  could work out so well.  On my flight back to SFO from PHX, the plane was completely full...except for the seat between me and a quiet self-contained businessman.  That one person I was supposed to sit next to didn't make the flight, so i had all the leg room i needed.  In contrast, in the row in front of me, in the middle seat, sat this mean crazy bitch who was all attitude coming on to the plane and she started crying and sobbing with her head between her legs the whole flight, i think she might have been puking too, although if she was, she was very discreet about it.  I think she had motion sickness or was just terrified of flying or something.   All i know is, if i had clicked on one seat instead of another when i bought my ticket over a month agao, my two hour flight would have gone much differently.  

Then, on the almost six hour flight from SFO back to HNL, the plane was mostly empty, so.... leg room for everybody!  it was fantastic.  Plus, I love Hawaiian Airlines, they are the best.  They serve free meals, the only airline that still does that, AND they ended the flight into Hawaii with a FREE  tropical rum punch!  awesome! 

Also, the fact that my original flight got cancelled made these pleasantries possible, and i realize in hindsight that it was a good thing that flight got cancelled cuz if had tried to catch the red eye, that first night's lack of sleep would have really made my life difficult for the rest of the trip.  As it was, my sleep and energy levels was quite tolerable this trip. And I doubt United would have given me free meals and booze and tons of leg room on my trip.  

AND, while waiting in SFO, i got to see this guy:

Angel's Landing

Just got to have faith that, sometimes, all will turn out beautifully.  The weather looked like this when I was expecting rain and clouds and snow:

That little peak at the top of the  mountain on the left is the top of Angel's Landing.

I totally got fooled again by travel writers.  It was presented as a kind of dangerous spur ridge trek that is anchored with metal chains to help people across, and that it was so scary there were only five foot wide paths with chains on them where you could fall to your death thousands of feet below.... but seriously, you could pirouette your way across that thing in the dark with a bottle of rum in one hand and not even blink twice.  Might be a little harder in the rain though, those sandstones can get pretty slick.

it's pretty big.

Sometimes, you got to have faith.  on my way up the trail, a giant group of frat boys caught up to me and were being themselves, loud and annoying. And i kid you not, while hiking through some of the most god-graced scenery in this great land ours, one guy was talking about some "slut" he hooked up with last week.... jesus save me.

So, I turned off and hiked a different trail for a little while because i didn't want to be stuck near them on the ridge (which is usually slow going and backed up because of the one-person at a time path). There were so many people coming and going, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to meet my goal of getting a naked picture at the top of Angel's Landing in Zion.  I walked around the West Rim Trail for awhile before going back to do Angels, I got to the peak, then this happened:

...I had the top to myself.  

Angel's Landing is amazing and fun and beautiful.  I would go back for sure.  It's just fun hike, lots of scrambling.

Lesson: never ever travel anywhere during high season, travel during cold weather is perfectly fine.  I went when I went, and it was still kind of crowded and annoying.  I can't imagine that place during high season.  I can't imagine that place in hot weather either.   Much like how I wouldn't want to go to India during the summer monsoons, I wouldn't want to go to the high desert national parks in the hot summer. 

Zion

Sometimes, I forget that you just have to have faith.   The weather today, Saturday, was fantastic.  The weather forecast was predicting rain and clouds and cold weather, it turned out perfect.  It was good that I didn't try to force Angel's landing yesterday and saved it for today and changed my plans to spend two days in Zion.

I learned that there are some things in life that are true across continents, cultures and societies, and that is: weather reports are useless.

I learned that there are some incredibly depressing "settlements" along northern arizona, that I can only assume are Indian reservation lands.  They are dilapidated homes miles apart from each other and if near each other, in clusters of no more than a handful.  I don't know who lives in these places, nor why, nor what they do.  They are in the middle of nowhere.

It doesn't surprise me that all they do on the reservations is drink and kill themselves, if these are what reservations actually are (i had no idea they looked like this).  What else are you going to do?

Update: timely article: The hard Lives and High suicide rate of Indian Children

McDonald's, I learned is more than a fast food chain, they are a part of the American infrastructure (and culture too, i assume).  They do something that the US government really doesn't do on those long lonely highways, which is to provide free restrooms (and food too if you eat McDonalds) and highway signage.

Small town America trips me out.  

Highway 89

Highway 89 and 89A looks like this:

Zion won today.  The late arrival and the rain at Zion turned me off on the idea of attempting Angel's Landing hike today.  I wanted to do it because I knew there would be nobody on the trail, but I decided not to do it because I didn't want to fall off the 1,000 foot vertical drop on the five foot wide path near the top in the wind and rain and possibly snow.  I'll try again tomorrow, but the weather is about the same so my chances of dying will be about the same.  

Bucket List

Item 67: See Grand Canyon


The Grand Canyon is grand.

  So I took my clothes off.

My blue umbrella is my traveling gnome.

A decade of drought in the region, and just my luck, a giant rain and snow storm blows in just as I arrive.  Thursday, my day at the grand canyon was fine.

Today, Friday, it was overcast and on/off rain.  I've always enjoyed hiking in cool rainy whether, so I'm not too upset about hiking around Zion today in the cold and rain.  There is a certain stark beauty to grey clouds and rain, as there is beauty in sunny weather.  Traveling through this kind of weather is dreary and dramatic in a melancholy way I can't help but love.

The great thing about traveling around in the off season of late winter/early springtime is very few crowds and traffic; and cheap hotel rooms!

The grand canyon was cold because of the windchill.  Zion today wasn't too bad, not much wind, just rain, probably upper forties, low fifties.  Tomorrow should be about the same, mostly in the fifties.

If I make it to Bryce, through the snow and icy roads, it'll be much colder in Bryce.  If I make try to do it.  Driving times have been longer than i expected; my lazy ass sleeping in late everyday hasn't helped me keep to my itinerary either.   I am behind schedule and was forced to spend two day in Zion, which is a good problem to have, but I will try to squeeze in a few hours in Bryce on Sunday if I can before driving back down to Phoenix.  Bryce will be in the forties with some wind and snow on Sunday, temperatures overnight will be well below freezing so it's going to be icy.... which is a little worrisome to me having never driven on icy roads before.   If Angel's landing in the slick rain doesn't kill me, Bryce's icy roads might... and if neither kill me, Winter will have to try to get me some other year.

what a a week!

After my first flight got cancelled, i ended up having to cancel my first ticket and book a new one with Hawaiian instead.  The good thing was there was a ticket, the other good thing was that it was first class, so i was forced to splurge and fly first class to get to my work conference on time.  First class is pretty awesome, even for a short trip on a small plane.  We had Guava juice mimosa's served to us right after we boarded.  Guava juice mimosas.  I had a feeling this was going to be a good trip from that point on.

This is a meal on first class on Hawaiian:

This is leg space on first class on Hawaiian.  The arm rests were so far apart, i couldn't even comfortably put my arms on them:

Sat next to a lady whose mother was going schizophrenic, kind of a heavy conversation for single serving friend, but my prayers go out to her.

Then SF.  Hostel.  Drinks.  Hostel. Airport.  Carpool. Monterrey, CA. Got into SF, nice little homecoming to the Adelaide Hostel I stayed in all those years ago.  It was pretty much the same. San Francisco was even awesomer than i remembered.  Had a quick drink with James that turned into three or four drinks until closing.  then woke up to go the conference.

 The work retreat gave me about an hour to explore the area.  I came up with this:

Feet in sand is becoming a thing.

Then... Airplane to Phoenix, then stayed the night at a hostel called Camelbackpackers.  It was a pretty nice place.

Then i Drove from Phoenix.  I17 North, took the scenic route through Sedona via 179, then 89A. The drive was okay. Not great, not bad.  Then back on I17, then on to 40 and 64 up to Grand Canyon.  At this very moment in time, i am staying in a roadside trading post that is surprisingly nice.  I paid $69 for a giant room with two queen beds and amenities.   This room is so sweet I am beginning to doubt the modus operandi of hostels and backpacking... But then again... i could spend three nights in the place up above, for the cost of one night here... plus the hostel has free food and cool people and guitars and music and free coffee and stuff...so no, backpacking is still awesome. 

February 2014 Travel Denied

Well....that was anticlimatic.  Flight cancellations suuuuuuuuuuuuck. Weak-ass pilot calling in sick.  

February 2014 Travel

Awwwwwwww yyyyyyeyeyeheyeheyahaheaheaheahehae.

song

Here are my goals for this trip: 

1. Take selfie at Grand Canyon

2. naked shot at top Angel's Landing at Zion park



3. Dinner at Leopolds in SF

Organic Jack Cheese with Portabello Mushroom

There's this really good cheese (see title) at Safeway that isn't always available, it's available now.  I would advise anyone reading this to go get some right now.

I love Justin Beiber's DUI mugshot.  The photographer's all like, "Now, give me a bloodshot glazed-eye smile of denial.  Bigger, yes, just like that, hold it... beautiful."

I never paid much attention to Beiber, I've never known more about him then what I accidentally learn from article headlines while perusing Google News for more important things.   I never liked him, but he's really won me over with this picture.  This is a guy with a sense of gallows humor.  To be able to smile like that in a mug shot that probably signals the end of your career takes admirable gumption.

omelette, toast, salad and grapefruit soup. 

I can see my house from here!

i like this picture.  I like the contrast between the deep and light blues, the shades of verdant green demarcating levels with the rusty brown foreground.

Also, my nekkedness acts as a riveting focal point that provides a delicious aesthetic tension; your eyes can't quite decide whether it wants to ogle the majestic Hawaii landscape or admire the firm, yet soft and pale undertones of my ass.

Do coffee shops stay open on Christmas Day?

A: no, they do not (unless you count 7-11 as a coffee shop).

We fed the homeless today.  I suppose I could feel sad and cry about how tough their lives are.  I suppose I could feel good about feeding the homeless, but really...i just feel silly.  Feeding the homeless once a year is like putting a band-aid on a patient with stage IV terminal cancer.

Where was everybody when the City Council tried to outlaw laying on public sidewalks?  

First thanksgiving at my new place, second turky I've every baked in my entire life.  It was meh.  Can't complain considering it was the first time i used that oven too.

Tribe-less.  Outcast.  Outsider.  I have wandered the desert of a life for too long.  too long it has been until now.  i have found my people. I have found my tribe.

 The people at the mall bookstore at 9pm on a Saturday night.  My People.  Home. 

Moving

What are friends for if not for helping you move heavy furniture hither and thither. 

There was a lay buddhist who lived by the rule of 100.  In his simple home, he had 100 items... his rule was to never have more than 100 material possessions.  a mattress counted as one, a bed sheet was another item, a fork was another... one hundred objects and no more.  anytime he acquired or was gifted a new item, he must get rid of something to keep the number below 100.  I want to live like this.  i want bare empty walls that echo my footsteps back to me when i come home from work.  i want a chair.  a table.  a lamp.  for one.

I never want to move house again.  I will never have to.

but its hard to live with few things in my new home when my mom keeps decorating the place with things i don't want during the day when I'm at work.  fancy bookcases when i want disposable lightweight particle board shelves... vases with live plants when i want institutional severity.


so many thirtieth birthdays...so many people having babies...

His name was Daud.  he played sad sounds. 

I've been disinclined to write in this here blog of mine.  may be cuz I've found easier times.  But I won't just delete this web site yet.  This too shall pass is what they say and interesting times will come my way again someday. 

this man with this song makes me hurt and i am doing you a favor by sharing this pain

Premise 1:
Generosity while possessing great wealth is easy.

Premise 2:
Generosity and giving when you have little is difficult.

Conclusion:
If you are financially poor, but want to give, give those ephemeral things which everyone has an abundance of: Love, Time, Compassion, Help, give of yourself, rather than material wealth.

But if you don't have financial or spiritual wealth to give, or just don't want to give what little you have, no worries.  Givers can't be Givers without Takers, right?

Yin and Yang.

It's a beautiful thing when you hear about a poor person giving generously of what little they possess.  But "the fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion."  Or does it?  I will have to think more about this.

The Hawaiian Islands: a Retrospective

It's been years since I've been to the outer islands.  I haven't set foot on the outer Islands since at least 1999.  I've forgotten, assuming I ever knew, how beautiful the islands are.

Each island is different.  Big Island has the lush east side, with volcano landscapes.  The west side is drier, almost dessert-like at times.  Maui, the parts I saw, had undulating pasture lands.  Kauai was lush all around.

I see why tourists come to Hawaii.  It's a pretty place.

I attended a keynote speech at a tourism conference today, actor and travel writer Anthony McCarthy.  I agreed with everything he said.

He spoke not about the facts and figures and corporate activity of selling hotel rooms and plane tickets.  He talked instead about the beauty and spirituality and inner growth experiences of Travel.  I laughed when he argued there is no difference between the definition of "travel' and "vacation".  I had just learned myself that there is a big difference between those loosely associated terms.  Though I would say the two are two completely different activities, I agree with him when he says that both lead to learning moments.  I waited after his speech and spoke to him and shook his hand because I was so tickled by his speech...I totally "got" what he was saying.

He spoke about the superficial Hawaii vacation, i.e. the Mai Tai's at a beach side hotel bar in Waikiki. But he also said that Hawaii, and traveling in general, can provide a deeper experience to individuals.  He called them "ah ha!" moments.  I just call them moments.

Here is a moment  on a deserted black sand beach on Maui:

Reminiscent of El Salvador many miles away.

One of the more relaxing moments on my cruise trip.  I believe this was on the Big Island.  A few miles south of Waikoloa Village.

good wine and bad chinese food, or was it the other way around?