Comets and Satellites

My parents still live in the house in Scottsdale, Arizona, where I grew up, from the time I was about 5 years old. They are well-rooted people and they raised us, my brothers and I, with the same tendencies, I think.

My wife and I have lived in our little two-bedroom townhouse in the Sunnyside neighborhood on the east side of Flagstaff, Arizona, for more than a dozen years, too, since the day we got married, when the lone Scotch pine out front was a lot smaller.

My wife would like to move, someday, to a place with a real yard and without a parking lot out front. And, I'll be honest, there are days when I share this desire. But we've been happy here in our little house, and for the time being it still fits the three of us (and our cat and dog, bikes and skis) more than adequately most of the time.

We have few complaints about this life, generally speaking, but one.

Living in a town like ours, where good jobs are few and often far between, and where the cost of a home is more than most can bear, we've watched way too many of our good friends up-anchor and sail away to greener, more fruitful locales. I suppose it's a kind of advantage, or at minimum an interesting component of conversation, to say that we're fortunate to have friends doing all sorts of fascinating things all over the nation and the world. But that's poor compensation for their absence from our lives on a day-to-day basis. We miss our long-distance friends and regularly wish they were closer.

But we have found over the years that the lure, the special-gravity of Flagstaff, seems to regularly bring many of them back into our lives, like comets and satellites, albeit only for a moment. Whether they return to visit family, or to relive a moment or two in their old home town, or even as they're just passing through our crossed roads on their way elsewhere, we often have the chance to reunite with old friends as they all-too-briefly pass through town.

It snowed today (mostly above 8500')

Yay snow!

It's now officially become a sort of a tradition of ours (bear with us: we have so few traditions) to seek out the first significant snow of the season and make a snow-girl. Today we found it off Snowbowl Road, not too far afield from one of our favorite places, Alfa Fia tank, at about 9000 feet. Two inches of wet-and-heavy with two inches of fluff on top for a total of maybe (maaaaaybee) four inches of snow in all. Not the ideal conditions for making snow-girls... but fun, regardless... despite our only-half-preparedness (note: our daughter's wearing stretch-pants not snow-pants). Nevertheless, hopefully this snowfall's just a harbinger of bigger-and-bigger and better-and-better storms to come.

Last year about this time we hit up Brookbank Trail for our snow-girl making. There was less snow on the ground, but it was much better snow for sculpting.

How I get home

My job. It can be difficult.

I have a theory, a kind of rule-to-govern-my-professional-interactions, that everyone (almost everyone?) carries around this impression, this sense, this subconscious attitude, that their job is "The most difficult job in the world." Remembering this when I have to deal with other people, especially people at work, helps me to meter my expectations, and my reactions to their reactions, too. If I remind myself that they're usually thinking "He has no idea how busy I am. How can he be asking me to do this? Doesn't he know how hard my job already is?" I find I'm way less surprised by the ways people react when we interact, and then we're usually on track toward having some sort of mostly-positive collaboration.

The same thing tends to be true when people ask me to do stuff, I think... And lately, I've been trying to proactively counter my natural inclination to think or project the attitude that "I've got the hardest job in the world" on my end, too. I've been trying to kind of actively push those thoughts aside when people ask me to do stuff or make demands on my time. I dunno if it's working, but I hope it is.

'Cause the truth is, my job, it can be difficult. And I should remind you: you have no idea how difficult it really can be. I know, I chose it. And have (almost?) had chances to get out of it. Plus, I know: I have no real obligations to keep doing it, even though it (almost?) pays the bills and is (almost?) basically secure.

But, seriously, working with nine-year-olds (to say nothing about teachers, administrators, nurses, counselors, speech therapists, OT/PT specialists, secretaries, receptionists, aides, and sundry other school support staff-types) everyday, day after day, for years and years and years... Let's just say: It can get taxing.

There are lots of ways to keep your sanity in any demanding job working with all sorts of demanding people (who may or may not intend to be demanding), students and/or coworkers alike. Some of us turn to drink. Others spend wildly. Many quit for greener pastures.

Me? I ride my bike home everyday. For two reasons. One: my family is home. And I love my family.

And Two: because this is my ride home, and it rocks...

Lava-toobin'

I visited the best known of our 3 or 4 local lavatubes* with my brothers and some of their kids this weekend. The older boys came up from Scottsdale with their Jr. High church youth group and met up with the rest of us out in the woods on Saturday afternnon. Phoenix, apparently bored after a morning of leaf-peeping, was out at the lavatube in-force, too, so there was quite a crowd all along the tube's 3800' distance. One group of out-of-towners even managed to crawl out of the cave only to find one of their party missing-in-action, necessitating an urgent call to the county Search and Rescue crew, helicopter and all [Update 07 October: they found her safe and sound]. Exciting. Crowded. A bona fide natural wonder.



* Other local lavatubes and caves that come to mind:

• The much-shorter, way-harder-to-find but very awesome Slate Lake Cave north of Kendrick Peak near Slate Mountain.


• The otherwise nameless but still quite legitimate and somewhat tricky-to-find Ice Cave (a collapsed lavatube) near the Sycamore Rim Trail.


• The closed-to-the-public Ice Cave at Sunset Crater.


• Any and all of the truly uncountable, thoroughly unmapped volcanic caves, tunnels, and cracks along the base of Mount Elden

Maybe making amends

I almost never take my camera on bike rides, so I have very few pictures and almost no video footage of my friends and I riding the trails around Flagstaff. A scant few pictures from back-in-the-day have survived.



And there's this old, crappy edit I shot with my Aiptek (at 8 fps) several years ago with my buddy Dave when we went on a cyclocross ride on Mount Elden. It's one of the few videos I have to show for nearly 20 years of riding around here.





But that's really about it. Sad, huh.

I've taken my camera to Sedona on more than one occasion over the years, and some of the stills have come out okay, I guess.



But the only video I have to show for it is this horrible thing. What a mistake, to think my chest-mounted ski-camera apparatus would work while riding. Alas, at least the music is good.

Lately, just about once per weekend, I've been able to get out in the woods with my kid to ride the trailer-bike together. Technically, I didn't bring the camera on these rides either, but I'm grateful to my wife, who hikes along behind us with the dog while we ride out-and-back a few miles, for shooting a few images now and then.

Today we rode about a mile in and out of Pumphouse Wash out behind the Kachina Village area.

However, as of this week, I'm kinda excited to maybe make amends for my lack of good images of our local trails. I've got a plan and a deadline to write a piece for publication on Trailnation.com about riding the trails around here. And I'm kinda especially stoked about it because my editor is sending me one of those fancy helmet-cams so I can add a little multimedia-appeal to the piece. Could be fun. We'll see how it goes.

A Confluence of Dogmas: El Nino, Part Two

I'm probably the only person in the world with daily, up-to-the-minute, ongoing Google News search filters for both Calvinism, and Rick Renzi.

I have Google scour the news for mentions of Calvinism [Wikipedia] because I enjoy reading almost anything either for or against this particularly contentious theological position. I think it's fundamentally one of the most important religious debates of all time. But that's just my opinion.

I likewise have Google comb through the news for mentions of Rick Renzi [Wikipedia] because I simply never liked having a resident of the state of Virginia as my Representative in Congress. Our differing political persuasions notwithstanding, I just always thought it was wrong, in a Constitutional-sense, that he could be allowed to do that, chiefly because he had lots of money, enough anyway to buy a house in the district, a house in which he never really lived. When he got into other trouble a while back, and chose to not run for reelection, I must admit to being pleased. He may be gone from Congress and Arizona Congressional District 1 now, but in my heart he's not forgotten. And, as he awaits trial on a number of serious charges, I read each update with great interest. I try not to gloat. But it's hard not to feel a little bit vindicated even though what he's accused of has nothing to do with his lack of concern for the democratic principles established by our Constitution.

But, these days, in the midst of this strange confluence of dogmas, there's my new favorite Gooogle News filter. I created it just a couple of weeks ago and it looks for news about El Niño every day. Not a day has gone by recently where Google hasn't aggregated a host of fascinating El Niño [Wikipedia] headlines, which seem to uniformly point to an ever-strengthening El Niño situation building in the eastern Pacific. If you live in Arizona, like I do, and you've lived through an El Niño winter or two in the past, as I have, this news makes you very optimistic about the prospect of big, deep snow on the mountain this winter. For both Argentine soybean farmers, and skiers in North America's southwestern region, El Niño winters are often a real boon, as they usually tend to be abundant producers of rain and snow.

Of course, if you're an Australian wheat farmer, or a Chilean sea lion pup, El Niño's nothing but bad news all around... starvation, reduced crop yields, and even death.

And that probably really sucks.

Better than Xmas: El Nino!

If my previous post, featuring lots of fun old skiing videos, didn't make you want to ski (and in Dave's case, buy a season pass) ASAP, this lengthy-but-fascinating discussion of the El Nino sea-surface-temperature slash weather-making-phenomenon and its potential impact on the 2009-2010 winter in northern Arizona should for sure!

This kind of thing makes me almost giddy:

"Since the Climate Prediction Center is forecasting at least a moderate El Nino, we have fair confidence we will see above normal precipitation this winter [in northern Arizona]. What does that mean in terms of snowfall for the higher terrain of northern Arizona? Most El Nino events produce near- or above-normal seasonal snowfall totals. Strong El Nino events produced consistently, and in some cases considerably higher snowfall totals."

You can watch NOAA's Powerpoint presentation on their El Nino forecast here.



Yee-haw!