Where I am

One of the best things about McCarran Airport (Las Vegas) is free wireless internet, particularly when one is spending six hours in said airport today. It's a good consolation prize considering I found out yesterday that my credit card gets me into a new fancy pants lounge for free, but that lounge is in the other terminal. Other consolation prizes include my Moe's burrito and the pretty sunrise hitting the mountains.

So that's where I am right now: the airport. Heading home to New Jersey via Charlotte and Philadelphia (because I couldn't rationalize a layover in New York City to fly to Philadelphia but it was $40 more to fly just to New York or Newark).

Where I am in my life, personally, emotionally (and metaphysically, as Si Robertson would say)...

...that's another story. I am really, really excited for my new adventure in New Orleans starting at the end of the summer, which is sounding better and better all the time (I promise more details soon). I'm excited about another summer at Johnsonburg doing a job that I love. I'm excited about working at the Jersey Shore Arts Center a little in the meantime. I'm excited to see my parents, my family, my friends, the ocean, and pine trees. I'm excited to run the Muddy Buddy in Richmond with Brian in April and see Josh Ritter in D.C. with Brittany in May (and see what other Virginia shenanigans I can create).

I'm really sad that my cat won't be there when I get back tonight.

I'm really really sad about being so far away from Mike. I have a lot of things to be thankful for and excited about, but today it's feeling a lot like, "Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?"

There are things I will miss about Arizona. The desert turned out to be pretty interesting, full of very unique beauty and some glorious adventures. I will miss my hilly morning walks, the weird desert plants, the big sky, and how nice my hair looks when humidity is absent.

I will not miss being unemployed. That made me nuts.

I'm doing all right. Actually, my life is generally pretty awesome these days. And, now that I've wasted some time putting some words down, only one more hour till boarding begins!

Kätzchen

I'm excited to head back to New Jersey on Wednesday, but I've received some sad news: my little black cat  won't be there when I get back.




Kätzchen came home from the shelter as my 15th birthday present. I'd always been fond of black cats. My next door neighbors growing up, John and Ginny, had a sweet little old (and I mean OLD, John knew he'd had him for 23) black cat named Nemo. We couldn't have a cat because our dog Abby, as awesome as she was, was a bit jealous of other pets. So after she died at the beginning of freshman year of high school, Mom blindfolded me and took me to the shelter to pick out a cat.

I cried. It was too soon. But we went through with it. I'm glad we did.



There were three black cats at the shelter, all about ten months old. I held each one. Two of them quickly leaped out of my arms. The third one hung out for a minute or two before peacing out. That clever cat was my Kätzchen, who would never willingly let anyone hold her again as long as she lived with us. She was well aware of whose she was though-- mine. She often slept on my bed, sometimes on my feet, sometimes under the blanket next to my stomach, sometimes over my head as earmuffs.

She was kind of weird. She never really figured out how to meow properly, making weird lamb sounds instead. She was super soft, which may be why she sneezed ALL. THE. TIME. I swear she was allergic to cats. But she was my soft little black cat.

I'm sitting here trying to figure out what to write, but it's not like we had excellent capers like Rumple and I did. She was an indoor cat. But I will greatly miss her warm, quiet presence. I'm grateful that my parents and our vet ended the sudden suffering, but I'm very, very sad that she will not be there when I get back Wednesday night. This was my cat, the petite black cat that convinced me I like both dogs AND cats, pretty equally.



I miss my cat.

Cactus League

If you're interested in the baseball itself, you might be more interested in what Mike has to say about this trip:
The 8 year old inside me screamed!

But even I, the very casual baseball fan, have plenty to say about visiting spring training in Phoenix.

First, Phoenix is ridiculous. When you consider that about 25% of the state's population lives in Phoenix, and about 50% of the state's population lives in the "metro area", it's no wonder that this was the first traffic I've seen since arriving in Arizona in early January. My dad lived here before he moved back to NJ and met my mom and lived happily ever after, but he was confident that the place I was describing was WAY built up since he lived there over 30 years ago. Still, despite the traffic, it was great to drive around all week and get to know the area a little. We also went and saw the house my dad lived in, which was pretty amusing for me.

Second, the drive from Bullhead City to Phoenix was really pretty. I've driven as far on that route as Wikieup, but after that stretch of huge ranches, Route 93 leads into saguaro cacti and Joshua tree "forest" before heading into the sprawl of Surprise, Sun City and all of the -dales outside of Phoenix.

Tree of the trip: Joshua trees! in bloom!

So, baseball. blah blah blah sports blah blah baseball. No, just kidding, I actually have things to say. I actually like sports. People forget that often, because I don't particularly care for watching TV.

Monday night: Reds @ Rockies, Salt River Fields at Talking Stick, Scottsdale. The park was pretty sweet, set up in a way that we were able to stand behind the bullpen all night and chat with the players. We chatted with Arroyo while he warmed up, and hoped Todd Frazier would come by so we could yell all sorts of Toms River love at him... but no such luck. I adored the organ pipe cacti around the park.

Tuesday: Cubs vs. Rangers, Hohokum, Mesa. I almost became a Cubs fan because they kept playing Blues Brothers songs between the innings over the loudspeakers. Actually, I was pretty excited about the ballpark music in general, as it seems Hohokum features an actual human being playing the organ. It was a great game, though lawn seats are intense in the Phoenix sun.

Tuesday night: Giants @ Mariners, Peoria. We were so exhausted from the long afternoon in the sun (the beers probably didn't help), so we only made it about halfway through the game.

Wedensday: Dodgers vs. Royals, Surprise Stadium. An increase in sunscreen and decrease in beer lead to us feeling a lot more awake, but we decided one game was enough. Not that I really had much a stake in any of these games, but man is it great just enjoying a game on a beautiful day and not really care who wins.

Thursday: White Sox vs. Brewers, Camelback Ranch, Glendale. Free parking! I think this was my favorite park. There was something aesthetically pleasing about the fact that the seats matched the sand. The lawn was particularly steep, so not only did we have a great view, but we also had the added entertainment of a bunch of small children repeatedly running up and rolling down the hill.

All right, all right. I didn't actually say much about the baseball games themselves, but I did really enjoy this. The last major league game I went to was a very, very rainy Mets @ Nationals game the day I finished my first year of college in 2005. Dad and I stopped and enjoyed watching a few innings of ball and a field crew tripping over themselves trying to get the tarp out before driving back to New Jersey.

Good trip. I do like a good ball game, live and in person, so five of those was a sweet way to wrap up spring break.

Zion Canyon!

We arrived to Zion pretty early in the morning. It was kind of overcast so the light wasn't doing much for the rocks, but they didn't need the help. The folds and faults and long lines of erosion were going in every direction in many different colors of rock. My comment was that it seemed earth got a bit drunk before forming that part.

It was awesome. Really, really beautiful. In fact, the drive into the park from the eastern side (Mt. Carmel junction) was possibly the most incredible part, with all of the drunk geology. There's a mile long tunnel through rock, which is kind of man made marvel of its own amidst some natural marvels. Just... awesome.

Mike, Katy and I hiked the Watchman Trail, at which point we collectively realized... we'd hiked SO MUCH that week. We were so tired. We must have stopped three or four times to decide whether or not to press on. We did. The top was lovely, looking around the canyon and seeing cars that looks like little toys. We gained a few hundred feet, but had a nice sit at the top of the trail.

The rest of the day, we took it easy. We drove the scenic drive, stopping to look around at the Patriarchs and Weeping Rocks, the latter of which I thought was pretty cool. There were all sorts of funny little ferns and mosses growing out the side of this rockface that had water seeping right through. Ferns! I didn't even hate them!

We stopped in Springdale, a cute little town just to the west of the park, for coffee and lunch before checking out the northern part of the park, Kolob Canyons. It was a beautiful drive. We hiked a short trail at the end of the drive and had a view that seemed to go on forever-- we could actually see the faint outline of the north rim of the Grand Canyon. It was crazy.

The drive back to Las Vegas and ultimately Bullhead City was just as weirdly interesting as the drive up, back through the Virgin River Gorge, back through the desert speckled with Joshua trees, back through the empty, empty part of the desert, back to the crazy city full of crazy lights and crazy people, and after a final meal together, dropping Mike's family off at the airport and heading back to Bullhead City, through what always looks like a moonscape to me when driving through at night. This time, it was a fuzzy looking moonscape, since the recent "rains" have brought a little life back to the desert plants. We saw an occasional campfire way out in the distance, perhaps ranchers settling down for the night. The emptiness was oddly serene, prepping us to sleep like champions upon returning to Bullhead after a week of long , active, beautiful days.

Bryce Canyon!

I like the Grand Canyon. I think everyone should see it. That being said, I was in just as much, if not more, awe when I walked up to the edge of Bryce Canyon for the first time. It's amazing to park the car and turn around and see a big blank spot beyond the immediate trees, and know something huge is waiting there for me to see. I think the Grand Canyon is almost too big to really appreciate in the same way that I appreciated Bryce (and Zion, but more on that later).

Bryce is stunning. The recent snow left a lot of ice and mud on the trails, but a beautiful light blanket over the trees and hoodoos (weird rock spires). I've never seen rocks quite like this before. Katy, Mike and I bravely hiked down into the canyon, which was way more accessible than the Grand Canyon (we hiked to the bottom and back up in just a few hours, while they warn you to NOT do that in a single day at the Grand Canyon for fear of death by exhaustion). It was slippery and there was a lot of "surfing" downhill involved, but what a view. It was just as awesome to look up at the hoodoos as it was to look down. It was a beautiful clear day, so looking up had the added bonus of the bright blue sky behind the crazy rockforms and trees.

Tree of the day: limber pine, which is very complimentary to the hoodoos in its weird spindly appearance. They just grow out of the sides of canyon walls and on top of hoodoos and wherever they want, no matter how strange a place it is for a tree. So neat.

After an intense hike (that altitude will get to you!), we took it easy along the rim trail and then drove through the park, stopping at some of the viewing points. One was over 9000 feet. One had a pretty sweet natural bridge formation. The whole park was pretty incredible.

Arizona, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Arizona, Utah

Brian had a flight out of Vegas on Wednesday (March 13) and the Smithbauers had a flight tour of Lake Powell and Antelope Canyon, so Mike and I drove from Flagstaff, Arizona to Kanab, Utah via Las Vegas, Nevada, which involved a lot of weaving in and out of states on weirdly beautiful highways.

Going from Flag to Vegas was weird, losing the beautiful snow cover as we went down in elevation, back into the juniper-pinyon elevation before the high grasslands and eventually the scrubby desert. It was probably in the teens when we woke up in Flagstaff, and kind of toasty once we got back to the Mohave Valley and Desert on our way up to Vegas. We hit the In-N-Out Burger, whose veggie burger is stupid (a hamburger minus the beef, so a bun, lettuce, tomato and onion) but whose fries and grilled cheese are adequate enough. That was the most local cultural thing we could think of.

The drive continued on through ALL of Clark County, Nevada, which is way bigger than I thought (Nevada, which is more than 12.5 times the size of New Jersey, has only 16 counties, while NJ has 21). It is all desert and passes through some wide open empty reservation land (Moapa).

Back into Arizona, I-15 passes through the Virgin River Gorge and over the Virgin River seven times. It was stunning. There is little in the way of geologic lead-up to the gorge, nor did I have any idea it was coming despite my frequent staring at maps, so I was in absolutely awe when we got there. For an interstate highway, it sure has views. We drove through more reservation land (Kaibab-Paiute) and saw a few gas stations and rest stops but little else.

Then Utah (the first time!). More little gas stations and rest stops till we got to Washington, then Hurricane (why is it even called that?!), before hooking a right and heading back into Arizona, through Navajo land before heading back into Utah.

We stayed in Kanab, which seemed like a sleepy little tourist stop (in the middle of the Golden Circle of national parks, including Grand Canyon, Bryce and Zion). Most of the main roads were under construction, but we had a great meal at a Mexican restaurant across the street from our hotel. Even in town, we had a nice view of the beautiful mountains, which would only get better as we carried on to more national parks for the rest of the week...

happy returns

To kick off Katy and Mike's spring breaks (and Brian's vacation and my general tagging along), we took a grand tour of Mohave County. We started with a drive to Oatman, where the burros were out in large numbers, including several babies (which we've taken to calling burritos) ranging from three weeks to about three months. We even caught the daily gun fight for once!

We took Old Route 66 to Topock on our way to Lake Havasu, where we stopped to see the London Bridge, walk along the water, and visit Barley Brothers. It was a lovely drive through the desert. It has "rained" (mostly been overcast and damp, more so than downpour, although the last time the skies deluged on Mohave County) all of three times since I've been here, which has lead to a lot of weird desert grasses growing, and all of the cacti and brush looking less dead, and... a rainbow of wildflowers have sprung up!

After a grand tour of where Mike's been living for the past nine months, we headed east to the Grand Canyon. It had snowed all weekend until we left Bullhead City, so we were greeted with a glorious, heavy, wet snow hanging onto the ponderosa pines in Kaibab National Forest (and thankfully, clear roads!). It was pretty cool to see the difference between summer canyon and winter canyon. The snow made everything very pretty, and it wasn't too cold out to walk around a bit. We mostly strolled along the south rim trail, catching sunset at Yaki Point, which was new for me.

On Monday (March 11), we went to Sunset Crater and Wupatki. Mike and I visited Sunset Crater Volcano in January, but this time we hiked a bit more and also explored the pueblo ruins. This pair of national parks was nuts. It was snow covered at Sunset Crater, but not the slightest evidence of snow up in Wupatki. The views were incredible, as were the hikes-- a very steep stroll up the side of a volcano cone, and a repeat of the good loop around the a'a.

The next day, we took all of Mike's people to Sedona. Katy, Brian, Mike and I hiked the perimeter of Red Rock State Park, like Mike and I did in January. It's such a beautiful park with great views. Hiking all of the trails is just the right amount of challenging-- a good workout, but not so hard that you can't do anything else for the rest of the day. It was nice to repeat this park, too, but we also managed to get in one more trail than we did last time (the Kisva trail along the creek). 

It was so cool to show Katy, Brian, and Mike's aunt and uncle around these parks that we liked so much. I never get sick of looking at these crazy rocks, either. It was nice to be able to add new elements to things we already enjoyed, too. This all served as a good foundation for the rest of the week in Utah!

I said, a hey, hey, hey, yeah!

next year's geography

Chinook, Montana
+little agricultural town
+far away from everything
+near the Canadian border
-not really utilizing my education
+but I like the work anyway (being a youth director or working with seniors in town)
+and would have more free time to further career-relevant experience on my terms
+small program (two other volunteers)
-far from major airports (making travel to certain beautiful friends' weddings more challenging/expensive)


Boston, Massachusetts
+the food justice program sounds really exciting, and relevant to my skills and interests in a way that compliments what I want to be when I grow up while stretching said skills and interests
+the director is super enthusiastic
-might be difficult to be so close to home without really being able to visit much
+Paul and Laura will be living there
+it's this program's first year so I might be able to help get it off to a good start
-it's this program's first year so it's not especially established
-geographically, just not as attracted to living there as other places

New Orleans, Louisiana
+++the CHART program is in my wheelhouse (wetlands rehabilitation, research, education, outreach)
-that's the only program that's really relevant
+but there's a pretty strong chance I can do that
+I had a really good connection with the site coordinator (and she loves NJ)
+New Orleans seems like a cool new different place to live for a year
+I don't know why I have little else to say about it because the program seems awesome