Utah 2010

Melanie and I spent my spring break in Utah, visiting family. Believe it or not, we have no pictures to show for it. That’s probably OK. Utah wasn’t looking so great this time around. When we went to Utah last May, I was smitten by Utah’s beauty. This time around, we went too early in the year for anything to be green. But it wasn’t very snowy, either, so everything just looked blah. It was nice to see the mountains. I’ve always loved the look of snow-capped mountain peaks, and Utah still has those. But driving around, everything else seemed dingy and dilapidated in comparison to what I remember. I think it was just the wrong time of the year to be charmed.

Still, the trip itself was overall great. We spent a lot of time with family, and most of it was pretty low-key, which was nice. We have traditionally overplanned our time in Utah, leaving us feeling hurried and exhausted. This time was quite manageable, though we always had something going on. That’s perfect, in my book. I feel bad about not visiting a couple of friends whom I would have loved to see. I was never quite sure when to work that out, and it just ended up slipping away from me. It’s like I wish I could have spent two weeks in Utah, just to do it all without feeling frazzled, and yet psychologically speaking, it would be hard to be there for two weeks. That’s the tricky part of it all. Were it not for kids, it would work a lot more easily. But seeing Eddie and Peter enjoying their grandparents so extensively is part of what made this trip so great, so what can you do? The predicament seems to be this: you can either do it all, and end up hating a lot of it, or you can not do it all, and love everything you do. We’ve usually done the former. This time we did the latter. It was the right choice.

Food wise, we did well. That’s always something I love about visiting Utah. Not just that I get to revisit some of my favorite eateries, but that I usually get to do so on someone else’s dollar. On our second night in Utah, Melanie had organized a Chinese food dinner party of sorts at her parents’ house, and we went a little overboard on how much food we ordered. It was nice to eat very good Chinese food again. Since moving out of Utah, we haven’t found anything beyond decent Chinese (and Mexican) food. (Other people we’ve met from Utah say the exact same thing, even before we tell them that we feel this way. Evidently, the South does not specialize in Chinese or Mexican cuisine.) Very good is better than decent, so we were quite pleased. We also hit some local faves: Café Rio, Grinders 13, Blue Iguana, and Litza’s Pizza. Not too shabby, given that we were only in town for a week. I should mention, though, that I have to take back something I said in a previous post. I was wrong to suggest that in Utah, all Mexican food utilizes cheddar cheese. This is not true. Blue Iguana indeed uses some kind of white cheese, and now that I’ve been there again, I realize that this is what they’ve always used. As I visualize food from other Mexican restaurants in Utah, I’m now realizing that many of them did indeed use white cheese. But the important point still remains that, outside of Utah, the white cheese we’ve encountered in Mexican restaurants tastes like Velveeta or American cheese. It isn’t that great, and the difference is extremely noticeable. That is what led me to the hasty presumption that Utah must have used cheddar in everything. I was wrong. But the cheeses aren’t the same, and Utah is the one getting it right. I’ll leave it at that.

Enough for today. Adios for now.

Royal Flush

Or, Royal Pain in the You Know What

I’m probably not even calmed down enough to be writing this. But I’m going to. I’ve been wanting to write another blog post, as I promised a couple of days ago, and there’s certainly something on my mind at the moment. So I guess I’ll write about it.

About an hour ago, give or take, I went to help Edison finish his business in the bathroom. Things were going fine and dandy until I flushed the toilet, at which point the bowl started to fill with water and make a gurgling, bubbling sound rather than sucking everything down and belching in satisfaction as one would normally expect. It was obvious to me that nothing I had just flushed could be causing the problem, but that wouldn’t have been my first suspicion, anyway. Not lately. Because, after about a two-year hiatus from putting things in the toilet, Edison has started “accidentally” dropping things in there again. And flushing. Two years ago, I found Eddie’s habit rather frustrating. Being that he is almost four-years-old, I now find myself absolutely livid with each new occurrence. Over the last two or three months, we’ve permanently lost a couple of small toys down the toilet. That’s better than, oh I don’t know, a pair of eyeglasses, such as he flushed down the toilet in Atlanta. But as irksome as it has been this time around, tonight was the worst. Not because we lost anything of value, thankfully. No, tonight I am beyond upset because I don’t think I’m going to be able to fix the toilet on my own. I’ve always been able to plunge the toilet enough to get things running smoothly, and sometimes even retrieve whatever was flushed. But tonight, Eddie has flushed a small ball that is basically the perfect size for getting wedged quite tightly, right where you can’t really get to it without just pushing it even further out of reach.

To make matters worse, the toilet water started overflowing, spreading all over the bathroom floor. That’s also something we’ve been fortunate enough to avoid until now. I know this is the kind of thing you eventually laugh at, but right now, the only thing I can imagine bringing a smile to my face is sticking Eddie’s head into the toilet and flushing him a few times. Sigh. Maybe next time.

Ping

I’ve made it through the first major bump in the semester, where papers are coming due in my classes as well as in the class for which I’m a TA. I spent the last couple of weeks grading nearly 60 by and large poorly written papers. I say it every time, but it’s astonishing (and a bit disheartening) to see the writing abilities of undergrads. We’re talking run-on sentences, sentence fragments, blatant confusion of common homophones that should have been mastered by this point in life (e.g. to / too, their / there), and inconsistent, sometimes seemingly random capitalization. Some might argue that the ability to write well is not very important in today’s world, at least for the majority of the population. There is probably some sad truth to that statement, but I think it constitutes a dangerous state of affairs. It means that those who can write well will decrease in number, and the bar for writing well will drop. Eventually, even the best writers will not be all that clear and, I’d say, wisdom will become threatened. But that’s not the point of my writing this. It’s easy to go off on a tangent about the kind of crap I put up with as a TA. I’ll try my hardest to bite my lip and say no more about it for now.

Hmm. Well, crap, I don’t know what to write. I actually did write some crap about feeling busy, but it’s boring and pointless, so I’ve deleted it. I think I just need to write this post in order to get back into the flow of writing something other than comments on horribly written student papers. (Oops! Okay, no more!) I’ll try to get my thoughts (and my act) together and write something worth reading in the next day or so. Thanks for listening, whoever you are!

Drive-Thru Service, Indeed!

You know your city has serious prostitution problems when you see a sign like this…



(See? I knew having a camera in my cell phone would come in handy!)

Now Look Here

If you sincerely care about me and what I do, you should click the below link and read the (fairly brief) news story to which it leads.

Click here if you love me

Unrelated, if keeping drug addicts off of welfare sounds like a good idea to you, as it initially did to me, you should click the following link and read the thought-provoking post by Sarah, whose blog I’ve followed for a few years now. You owe it to yourself to read such a thoughtful—and bravely personal—response. Regardless of where you final judgment falls, Sarah’s post will ensure that you’re not holding your opinion ignorantly.

Click here for Sarah’s post

That is all.