Dashing down the road on my two-wheeled open sleigh!

So, between my hand injury and the fact I had an upper respiratory infection the last two weeks, my exercise quotient has dropped a bit, much to my chagrin. However, through the power of amoxicillin, I'm back to at least being able to bike, if not kettlebell (heeeaaaaal, haaaand!)

Today I went for an exceedingly pleasant 10-mile ride out in the country where I admired such sights as lots of houses, horse farms, and fields full of cattle. The weather was so perfect I pretty much burst into song tooling down the road, and was ready to skip through a sunlit field holding hands.

The last couple months I lived in California, I didn't ride much - between June and the time I left I only put 150 miles on my roadbike, which is pretty shameful. I think my overall malaise at how desperate my situation ALWAYS seemed pretty much took my zest away, and riding seemed more of a chore than a joy. Now that I'm finally getting my financial situation a little more in order and working on getting over this whole breakup thing a little bit, I find myself increasingly back in my happy place.

So, in celebration of that, a picture of my steed, in front of a horsey and I think that's Lake Lavon in the background. Here's to me!

You Don't Want a Smart Dog

As someone working towards being a dog trainer I sit and ponder the relationships people build with their dogs, and more than that, why people choose the dogs they do. Something that I've noticed is when many people meet Guinness, they say they want a dog just like him because he's so pretty, he has so much energy and life, he's so smart. For the most part, it is my humble opinion that those people need to get their heads out of their respective asses.

Here's the thing, people: you don't want a smart dog. You want a dog that's well-behaved, not more demanding than you're willing to give, and you mistake my awesome dog as the embodiment of those qualities. However, what most of these people aren't considering is the sheer amount of work necessary to make Guinness the dog he is - the training, attention, and sheer amount of exercise necessary to content Guinness vastly outstrips the needs of most of the dogs you meet in a day.

More than anything else, this is a factor of breed. Guinness is an Australian Cattle Dog/German Shorthair Pointer mix. It's hard to come up with a more energetic, intelligent breed combination than that and for the average owner, that is way too much time and responsibility to fit into their schedule.

As a for instance, I recently spent about 6 months living with a small mixed-breed terrier, and Guinness. If you were to leave Solomon to his own devices, he was perfectly content to lay on the couch and snooze for probably 15 hours a day. You could cook a meal, clean the house, and all the while Solomon was content to simply chill out. Meanwhile, if I decide to go into the bathroom, when I open the door, Guinness will be laying just behind it, staring intently at the door waiting for me to come back out. If I don't walk him, he starts climbing the walls. He just runs on an entirely different octane than the average dog. It's like trying to make a Ferrari your running-around car to pick up the kids - that car is just better suited to an owner who will realize the full potential locked up within.

Additionally, in the times where I'm NOT walking, playing with, training, or otherwise actively engaged with Guinness, I have to provide for his entertainment. Not in an effort to spoil him but rather because if left alone too long, Guinness will invent his own amusements. For many dogs this includes digging, barking, becoming escape artists, and a number of pastimes that will make the owner regret they ever thought a dog was a good idea.

However, for the prepared owner, an extremely intelligent dog is a very rewarding, engaging experience. I rarely have as much fun as when Guinness and I are out on the trail alone together hammering out another loop. Or when I'm teaching him a new command (for instance, he finds my keys on command, is aware enough of sled dog commands to run alongside my bicycle, and high fives on his right foot, shakes with his left). So for me a dog of such intelligence is a good idea. But most people need to VERY STRONGLY consider themselves before they get a dog they can't handle and it ends up in the shelter system.

Schnick!

So Saturday I was cutting up a potato with a mandolin, like you do. And schnick! I schnicked off the very tip of my righthand pinky almost down to the bone. I sat down on the couch clutching my hand in a pile of gauze. Which I bled through. Actually, I bled through 5 wads of gauze in between passing out.

So we wrapped my finger up and I curled up around my hand and tried to sleep. The next day, when we unwrapped the dressing to clean it, as my hand went under the very small dribble of cool water to rinse it, I then saw white. My next memory is sitting down on the toilet with my mom holding my head between my knees. So off to the doctor we went!

We walked into the emergency care clinic, and my mom tells the lady, "Hi, we called you earlier, my daughter cut her hand?"

Receptionist: How bad is it?
Me: You tell me.

As I pull the wad of gauze I'm clutching off and hold my hand up, I then got to watch her face go white.

Receptionist: I gotta say, I would not be nearly so cheerful about this.
Me: I'm pretty much faking it.

They hustled me back to an area so I could lie down and a nurse came back to clean my hand. Even the doctor-approved soaking-wet-with-antiseptic piece of sterile gauze she put onto my finger to ever-so-gently sterilize the wound made me see pretty colors and stars.

So according to the doc, there isn't terribly much they can do - it just needs to heal from the inside out. Apparently, maybe I could see a plastic surgeon later to make my wonky-looking pinky a little more normal looking (riiiight....this scar is gonna get me soo many drinks with Tanner's chef buddies).

The unfortunate side effect of there-not-being-much-they-can-do is I now have a wound that could be best described as "juicy". When I did something similar to part of my thumb, it took 2 weeks for it to stop periodically bleeding (particularly when I'd like, pick something up). If I recall, it also took about 2 weeks for all the nerve endings in my hand to stop screaming at me every two seconds. So here I am, 5 days later, still bleeding through bandages and shrieking any time I have to change the dressing.

On the bright side....they DID give me 30 Vicodin. I now see why.

Being a Bike Chick

Women are a cycling 'indicator species', according to this article in Scientific American. As BikeSnobNYC notes, much of cycling is shrouded in this "macho" image in which even recreational cyclists feel compelled to do ridiculous shit like try to ride up to Skyline Road in NorCal on fixed gear bikes, mostly (as far as I can tell), because its ridiculously painful.

It became really apparent how unusual it is to be a fairly dedicated Bike Chick the day I walked into Palo Alto Bicyclery holding my front wheel in one hand and holding my Cannondale up on its back wheel by the handlebars. I was instantly surrounded by salesmen. As I spoke to a couple of them, I asked why the sudden attention, and they said "We just don't get many chicks in here towing their roadbike". Huh. I'll be damned. It might also kind of explain why most women's road bikes are either painted pastel or covered in flowers. My bike is about the least flashy women's bike I could find, and it STILL looks like this:



But sincerely, as someone who went from zero to two bikes in a year, I understand. As a chick on a roadbike, if you ride with dudes (and unless you're very lucky, you'll mostly be riding with dudes), you'll almost without fail be the slowest one. You're eternally staring at the back of their heads a block ahead of you, flipping gears, and spinning as hard as you can to catch up. I know, its frustrating.

I also, as a commuter, ride in traffic. My friend Dina was my only chick-friend that rode in California, and I taught her how to deal with traffic. It's scary. Particularly in S.F., where you're dodging traffic, doors, pissed off pedestrians, and oh, have I mentioned it's almost all uphill? Or on the other side, going balls-fast downhill with a stoplight at the bottom?

So I understand why for the most part, women are considered a sign that a city is bike friendly, precisely because it's a dangerous activity. But on the other hand, I wish more women rode if only because while dangerous, it's also incredibly fun and good for you. It's practical, it's easy to be green as a cyclist, your stress level goes down, and so does your waistline. Wear a helmet, hop on your bike, and just TRY riding to the store, and I can almost promise you won't die.

Things I Forgot About

Weather: Oh, how I have missed you, Real Weather. California's weather patterns are best described as "Perfect, but Seasonal" - i.e. in summer it's 90 degrees and sunny. In fall it's 70 degrees and sunny with occasional days of rain. In "winter" it sometimes even gets cold, but mostly just rains constantly with itermittent days of sunshine. In spring: see fall.

On the other hand, Texas brings an amazing element of unpredictability - you actually have to monitor the weather forecast. In the first three days I've been home, the first day it thunder stormed, the second day was cold and windy with only a minor amount of drizzle, today it's warm as hell and threatening-but-we're-not-sure to storm again. I'm now racing the weather to get my dog walked.

Racial Tension: this barely exists in California, however I'm not convinced it's because of any inherent cultural diversity found in California not to be found here. Let's face it, Dallas is diverse as hell. However, the mentality is totally different and I'm remembering what it's like to be periodically disgusted with the ignorant-ass statements you hear while just getting through the day.

TELEVISION: Oh, holy shit, TV. I haven't had television in about 2 years, and haven't regularly watched TV since I moved out of the house. Mostly because I can never remember when things come on. But either way, here at home they have a bigass HD flatscreen and DirectTV with aaalll the channels. I've watched more History International in 3 days than in the last two years.

Also, how much coke do you have to be on to be this guy?

Home again, home again

So I've sat down and written half-a-post a few times in the last few days. Due to Life Happening, I've moved back to Texas, and am officially home as of today. It's a tad surreal to say the least.

They say you can't go home - what I've always assumed that really meant is that you can't ever go back in time. There's nothing in life that is static and the world you grew up in moves on without you. Life is change and you can't expect the world to have frozen in your absence, awaiting your return. And holy shit are they right.

I've been out of the house over 5 years now. In that time, I've done a lot of things, met a lot of people, etc - all the things you do when you bust out onto the world. Meanwhile, home has also changed a lot. My friends from high school have (rightfully) moved on with their lives, I don't particularly care to go back to any of the jobs I had last time I was a resident, I don't even live in the same house.

On the other hand, things are eerily familiar. I know all the streets but can't quite remember how a lot of them interact, partially because some things have been rerouted (big surprise, right? see: life is change, above).

Guinness is at the very least content to be out of the car, fed, and sleeping somewhere stable and familiar tonight. Life really really does not suck. We're warm, fed, and have a roof over our heads. It's just weird.

I went through the desert with a dog with a name....

A couple weeks ago I left California and drove the two days to New Mexico, where we crashed for a day to decompress, and then headed onwards towards home. The drive itself was a long one - a total of 25 hours spent in the car, and only towards the end of the drive did it occur to me I was the only one in the car who had recently done a drive of that magnitude.

Almost a year and a half in California without leaving made me forget what the rest of the country looks like, though the memories of my various homes have stayed visible in my mind.

An odd sensation I got when we rolled into Albuquerque was that of my natural habitat. Guinness and I are BOTH non-natives to California. My family has existed in or around that one city in New Mexico since the 1700s (at least, that we've been able to trace). I got out of the car, smelled the desert, and just felt comfortable.

Outside a truck stop....somewhere in New Mexico. Doesn't he look comfortable?


While I'd only done the Bay Area Southerly Route once, the drive from Albuquerque home to Dallas is one I've done more times than I have fingers and toes on which to count. That being said, however, holy shit is the Panhandle of Texas flat. Like, miles and miles of just.....nothing.

No, really


This was taken 50 miles later. I'm seriously not shitting you, it's just hours of this exact landscape.


I think part of what's so surreal about having moved home is exactly the feeling of being a local. I haven't been a local to where I lived since I was in high school - in Alabama, I was a Texan, in California, I was the chick from Alabama. Here....this is just where I'm from. Me and everyone else that lives here.