Snow Break 2010

We're going to play, "How badly can I bog down the internet connection." Its this game where I see how many demands I put on the internet and see how it reacts.  Currently I'm uploading pictures of our Arizona trip, a feat I normally do at two in the morning when I can't sleep because it takes up all available bandwidth.  Now I'm blogging while uploading the pictures.  We're talking it takes so much band width to upload the pictures that I can't even get the website to reload the pictures.  As part of my blog I want to upload pictures, so we'll see exactly how well that goes. 

For the more pressing matter at hand -- stories about the desert.  We left on Thursday after work.  We flew down and got off the plane into air that was at least double the temperature of what we left.  It was strange.  Naturally it was dark -- but it was really dark.  Apparently because of an observatory around Tucson they can't have street lights.  I loved looking at the sky!  It was great to be in a semi-big city, be standing in the backyard and finding constellations -- and not just the main stars in the constellations, the small ones too.  We could easily see most of the Seven Sisters and Orion and a few others that I never remember the names of.  Chris did though and was pointing them out with names.  We also saw cactus.  I hadn't ever seen a Saguaro cactus before.  In OK we had prickly pears and such, but never the Saguaro.  At least if I'd seen a Saguaro cactus it hadn't ever been as tall or as majestic as the ones we were seeing.

On Friday we went to the desert museum.  Basically they've cordoned off part of the National park there outside of Tucson (well, I tried to google the name of it, and I got that I couldn't find a server which means there's no extra bandwidth, one point for the internet apparently) and have made a living museum.  They have some animals in enclosures, much like a zoo, but they also have cactus gardens and things that explain desert ecology and stuff.  It was neat.  I liked it a lot, but that's just me.  I really liked the sea of cacti that went on in every directions as far as I could see.  It was wild to think about exactly how old some of the cacti were.  I mean, if the cactus grows an inch a year (roughly) and is twice my height then that cactus has been there a while.  It also takes 100 years to grow an arm, so those with several arms jutting out everywhere were how old exactly?  The skeletons were also really cool. There's a picture of one below.  I also went for a nice easy run on Friday -- it was in the seventies.  I was wearing a singlet and shorts while everyone else was in sweat pants and long sleeve shirts.  It was a CLEAR day and it was nice to run.

Saturday we went to Phoenix.  Emily's mom lives there and so we started by going by Em's mom's place and picking fruit off the trees.  I'd never picked oranges or grapefruits so it was fun to climb trees and pick fruit.  It took us about 15 minutes to get four or five large bags full of oranges.  We also had lemons -- they were HUGE!  It took 5 lemons to fill a regular grocery bag (just to give you an idea of size).  Linda and I climbed the back fence (well, I started to scale it then couldn't so Chris got me a ladder while Linda just went on over) to get grapefruit.  We only picked a bag of those, but that still left us with quite a bit of fresh produce.  After picking fruit we went into Phoenix proper to pick up my race packet.  That was a mad house -- only a small omen of what was to come.  That night we went to see Avatar in IMAX 3D.  Finally.  It was great.  Overall I felt it was more political than actually having a plot line, but the imagery and the language was really neat.  I think I may be a linguist at heart. 

Sunday morning I ran the race.  It was ugly.  There is no other way to put it.  We got to run down strip club boulevard early Sunday morning, and actually circled around parking lots.  I will not be giving it a favorable view rating when I get to rate it.  It was pretty to see the sunrise before the race started, but overall it was an ugly race.  Temperature wise it was great -- it was even cloudy.  I did okay, I think it is my second best time for a half marathon.  Seeing as I hadn't really been eating much except meat and carrots for a few days I did well.  The post race madness was crazy.  It was entertaining to try and get several people who didn't have a clue where they were together.  Then getting back to Em's mom's house was funny too.  We kept following arrow signs pointing in the right direction, yet they never put us on the freeway.  We had talked about going hiking up to some wind caves, but that was vetoed because my foot was hurting as was another person's in the group. We drove back to Tucson and got to see a georgeous sunset.  It was flat with the mountains in the distance.  The mountain rings were everywhere and really cool.

Monday I woke to the sound of rain.  Yes it was sprinkling in the desert.  We didn't do much, just chilled and got ready to go back to snow land.  We didn't really have any troubles once we got on our plane, but it had been delayed for weather problems in Las Vegas (where the plane was coming from).

Today we went back to work.  It was warm here (about 30), but much cooler than the past weekend.