Oh, my stars and garters!

Mishappiness

 

The Palo Duro Canyon is beautiful. Stupidly beautiful, really, and incongruous in the Texas Panhandle. You could drive right past it and never guess the brown, flat plains drop away to something so colorful and dramatic. 

 

I think the canyon deserves a better park. Don't get me wrong, I love state parks, and Texas Parks and Wildlife does very good things with criminally limited resources. But something this lovely really could use nicer facilities and more sophisticated educational programs and literature, plus more firepower when it comes to acquiring more of the canyon and making it accessible. This really should be more of a destination in the state. It's a shame that it's not.

 

Still, the park is pretty damn cool. Look at the CCC cabin we stayed in! It was very cute. Although it had a mouse, and the roof leaked when it rained really hard the first night, and while the bathrooms were close by, it's never close enough when you have to put on a coat or don a poncho every time you have to pee.

Besides all that, the chimney didn't draw properly, so even though we followed the instructions to keep our fire small, it was a windy night and the room filled with a disturbing and then dangerous amount of smoke. Our romantic anniversary fire ended with Eric pitching damp, smoldering logs out the door with a pair of hot dog tongs while the smoke detector shrieked and I stamped out embers all over the floor. 

 
Also Randall County, like most of the Panhandle, is dry, so for god's sake bring lots of beer, or at least be sure to load up in Lubbock.

(The whole weekend was kind of a mixed bag, in case you couldn't tell.)

 
The drive there and back was extremely entertaining. There is so much to look at in a seemingly empty landscape, and on the way home we had a really good oldies station out of Lubbock to help us along. 

 
  

So we had kind of a weird, soggy, not-very-well planned weekend at the Palo Duro Canyon, but there was a lot to look at and think about, and it was mostly fun and almost never boring. I know the park does have nicer cabins with bathrooms in them available. I have no idea if the chimneys in those are more effective, but if I go again I will spring for one and find out.

Canyon time is over.

 

We're back. I'm weary. More tomorrow.

Second anniversary is canyon.

Google Street View is pretty great, although I guess I didn't really need to refer to it to know what driving through the Texas Panhandle will look like.

This will be our view for several hours this weekend, but from what I hear you drive and drive, through Abilene and Lubbock and Plainview and Tulia and Happy,* and it all looks pretty much like that picture above, and then you take State Highway 217 off to the east, and you drive on that for a while, and then you come around this bend and there is a dropoff into this huge dramatic canyon right in the middle of the flattest, emptiest, crankiest part of the whole state. And that canyon is where Eric and I will hang out until Tuesday, hiking, drinking beer, and grilling steaks.

We leave Saturday, and I can't wait. I haven't even looked at it on Google Street View because I don't want to spoil the surprise.

*According to the Handbook of Texas Online: "Happy uses the slogan, 'the town without a frown.'"

Snow whoa!

Wow, I've never seen it snow like this in Austin. At first I was mad that I was at work, but it was really fun to watch so many people stream out of the building to take pictures and stand under the flakes for a few minutes. It's like 34 degrees, so it's not going to stick or anything, but it's still pretty great.

New friend

This is four-fifths of the coolest cat I know. She lives one street over from us, and whenever we walk past her house she rushes us, insistently pushing up against our ankles until we stop and deliver some head pats and ear rubs. After that she follows us up the street for three or four houses, then stops and sits down to watch us walk away. Once she climbed up my pants and clawed up my jacket and rested, purring, on my shoulder. It is all very flattering.

I always joke that I want to steal her away and make her ours, but Eric points out that she would just sit in our front yard and wait to latch on to some other couple as they walk by every day, and then where would we be? Clearly, this cat is kind of a whore. We'll just enjoy her when we can.

And another:

His final act, a fireballing kamikaze crash that killed an Internal Revenue Service worker believed to be Vernon Hunter, 67, and seriously injured two others, immediately eclipsed the quadruple slaying known as the Yogurt Shop Murders of 1991 to stand as the most spectacular crime here in a generation, since the former Marine Charles Whitman shot 44 people from a perch atop the University of Texas Tower in 1966.

Who is this writer? He's making my head hurt.

Here, have a terrible sentence:

In this once sleepy college music town, where waves of expansion borne on semiconductor seas have made an unofficial city motto of the bumper sticker slogan “Keep Austin Weird,”, no one could have seemed more normal than A. Joseph Stack III, the amateur pilot who crashed his small airplane into an Internal Revenue Service office building on Thursday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/us/20crash.html?hp

Grumpy

I lied about the nicotine gum. I stopped using it two days ago just to get this quitting crap over with. Ironically, now I feel drugged. Everything seems weirdly flat, except when I'm experiencing a wave of giddiness, rage, or extreme sentimentality.

After gritting my teeth through multiple cycles of that at work yesterday, I took the rest of the week off to do pretty much whatever I want for a few days. I mean, I have the time, and I don't think you get any points for doing this the hard way.

I hate that I'm still making such a big deal about this; it's been almost four months, just be done with it and shut the fuck up about it, right? But it kind of is a big deal. It wasn't until I divorced nicotine from cigarettes that I realized just how powerful a drug it is. There's a reason why so many people quit only to take it back up again, and it's not just because smoking cigarettes is really fun.

Time to quit whining and find new and better distractions. You all have a good weekend, you nice people, you. 

Skitter

I'm tired and weird and stupid from this incessant stepping down on the nicotine dosage. I'm down to two pieces of gum a day, which hardly seems worth bothering with considering I spend about half my day in eyelid-twitching withdrawal anyway, but I really want to get this right. Discomfort aside, it seems to be working. For now I will be patient and keep chewing. Chomp. Twitch twitch twitch twitch. Chomp.

I'm playing around with a new design for the site, so don't be alarmed if all of a sudden everything is ^tiny or red or <null> for a little while. It's been six years since I set up the current one, and I keep thinking I'll learn CSS and make this site my own awesome thing. That clearly hasn't happened yet, so I'm stuck futzing with Typepad's boring templates.

Oh! I finally finished tagging and posting pictures of the trip to Japan last year. Four months later, I am still amazed at how much fun we had, and you know I can have some fun. The completed set is here, in chronological order, if you want to see it. I wish, I wish, I wish I'd had my new camera on the trip, but I still have more than enough to remember the trip by, and Eric more than picked up my slack. His set is here.

Ok!

Presidents' Day

 
It would have been tricky in any case to preside over a country recently reunited after a bitter civil war, but Andrew Johnson did not exactly do a stellar job. Widely regarded as a decent and well-intentioned fellow, he nevertheless granted blanket amnesty to Confederates during a Congressional recess, vetoed legislation that would have granted rights and support to former slaves, and became the first U.S. president to be impeached after he replaced his secretary of war without Congressional approval, intentionally violating a law specifically enacted to protect the sitting secretary.

Wait! What's going on here? There's no room for nuance on Presidents' Day! Enough with the historical background--it's time to congratulate Andrew Johnson for being the seventh president in our series of lame, crappy, or boring presidents!

Previous years' honorees:

George W. Bush

Herbert Hoover

Franklin Pierce 

James Buchanan

Warren Harding

William Henry Harrison