Puddin' Head

My last side trip during my stay in Arizona was a trip to White Sands, New Mexico, as I had a friend living in Las Cruces at the time.  I think it speaks to how desperate I was for any sort of family to spend Thanksgiving with for me, who loathes road trips, to not think twice about driving seven hours by myself to see her for the weekend.

First, a word about my friend Katie.  We met my junior year in college, where she had just moved from Las Cruces to the frozen tundra of MN for a year as a college exchange student.  She was fabulous, an English-major-theater-minor who was a breath of fresh air among my engineering classmates.  Here's Katie:

I was once complaining about how nervous I was about changing my major.  I had contemplated it for weeks, excessively going back and forth and back and forth about what to do.  She tolerantly listened to me for a while, going on and on and on, when finally she stomped away, yelling, "Life is change, Chris, if you're not prepared to change you're not prepared to live!"  Stopped me dead in my tracks.  Changed my perspective immediately, and I still think of this even today when I'm worried about making decisions.  She, of course, doesn't remember saying this to me at all and said she probably read it on a fortune cookie at lunch.

We would hang out in our dorm rooms, and in an effort to come up with creative ways to delay studying, we would bring out the thesaurus and see how many words we could find that also meant "jerk".  "Eater of Rotten Meats" and "Pudding Head" were our favorites.  One night when I was eating ice cream, lamenting another relationship that hadn't gone they way I wanted, I confided that I thought I might be bulimic, because I liked to eat so much.  "Without the throwing up part, though." I added.  "Um, that would just make you... a pig." she corrected.  Oh, right.

On to less personal things, and to our trip to White Sands.  Did you know that it is the largest gypsum dune field in the world?  The gypsum isn't actually white - it's clear, but as the wind bounces the sand grains along the ground, they collide and scratch each other.  The scratches change the way the light reflects off the grains, making the sand appear white.

This trip was also significant to me, in that this was the first time I realized I liked taking pictures.  I mean taking them for art's sake, not just to remember stuff.  I want to decorate a room with these colors.

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And thus ends my short stay in the Southwest.  I miss the beauty but not the heat, the friends but not the job, and the one time in my life I've even remotely had a tan.

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Next up?  Being bad in The Badlands.  Sort of.

Grand Ol' Canyon

Picking up where I left just a few short... months ago. : )

(Reminder that we're flashing back to 1994 - the world wide web is just starting to take hold, and the NFL announces that the Jacksonville Jaguars will be the league's 30th team.  Just a reference point.)

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Last minute trip to the Grand Canyon!  Who thinks it never snows in Arizona?  This is just outside of Flagstaff, where we were caught in a bit of a storm.

We stopped for gas and the clerks were running outside to help so we didn't have to get out of our cars.  I waved them off saying "I'm from Minnesota.  This is nothing."

After reaching the Grand Canyon, we continue the theme of embarrassing pictures of me in iconic places.  What is with the hat?

I love how I only took four pictures while I was there, and a pictures of this explanation of why prices at McDonald's are so high is one of them.  Apparently I found it fascinating at the time.

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Next up?  White Sands.... of New Mexico.