Pokéthulhu: Gotta Catch You All.
Author Archives: wjduquette
A Spray of Heather
I’ve been memed by Heather at The Practicing Catholic, and I must say I’m in good company. Being a spoilsport I’m not going to tag anyone else (hey, I’m on vacation!) but I will respond to the meme-ing. The rules are:
- Link to the person who tagged you.
- Mention the rules on your blog.
- Tell about six unspectacular quirks of yours.
- Tag six fellow bloggers by linking them.
- Leave a comment on each of the six blogger’s blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged.
Obviously I’m not going to do 4 or 5. Anyway, here goes: six quirks:
1. I cannot abide the thought of eating crustaceans. I say they are giant bugs, and I say the hell with them. Most people I know applaud this attitude, as it leaves more for them.
2. I have no real taste for poetry. I enjoy light comic verse (i.e., Lewis Carroll) but serious poetry generally leaves me cold. In my world (software development), communicating clearly and concisely is the most important thing. Whether my lack of taste for poetry is a cause or a symptom, I dunno. I generally regard this as a personal flaw.
3. I have no real interest in travelling to foreign countries. I’ve twice been to Australia on business; in the past I’ve had opportunities to fly to Germany and Korea on business. I’ve been glad to decline. Please note, this is no reflection on Australia, Germany, or Korea; and if I had the funds to fly First Class (or even Business Class) I’d possibly feel differently about it.
4. I like peanut butter more than most people. I suppose that really ought to be “more than most people do”; but it might possibly be true either way.
5. I have never seen an episode of Lost, 21, or any of a number of other shows I hear people enthusing about. I stopped watching TV about the time I got out of college. I started watching again when my kids were really small, because it’s something to do while holding an infant; but when my eldest announced that he couldn’t get his homework done because he had to watch his cartoons, I said, “Oh, really? I can fix that!” and disconnected the cable. It’s been that way for about three years now. (We don’t watch broadcast TV, either.) I’ve seen about half of the episodes of Firefly, though, since a friend of mine has them on DVD.
6. I have never been seriously drunk. Scratch a computer programmer, find a control-freak; I don’t like the feeling of not being able to control my limbs.
There you have it. Six things you didn’t need to know. But now they are in your head, and you won’t be able to get rid of them.
Winding Down
Well, we’re winding down.
Wednesday we took it fairly easy…went to the Museum of Northern Arizona, which had a neat exhibit on a kind of dinosaur which was previously unknown to have existed in North America; an MNU paleontologist found it in Utah, in a fossilized seabed. An odd place; they figure it must have floated some sixty to one-hundred miles out to sea. They call it a therinzosaur; they’d previously been known only in East Asia.
Yesterday we went to the Grand Canyon Caverns, which are about 90 miles west of Flagstaff on Route 66. I remember going there as a kid, and thinking it was neat, so off we went; yesterday I discovered the meaning of Route 66 Roadside Attraction. The tour guide’s patter, in particular, reminded me of Cheetos: dangerously cheesy. The boys liked it, and it was interesting to see it again, but I don’t think I’d go back.
Then we toddled off to Jerome, a mining town which was once the third largest city in Arizona, with more than 15,000 residents; it now has 500, and that’s an increase. They have some interesting museums. The boys were wiped by then (and so was I) so we didn’t walk around much. Instead, we went back to Flagstaff, had dinner, and went swimming.
Today we paid a brief visit to Walnut Canyon National Monument, and then headed south to Phoenix, where we are at present. We’re about to go out and get some ice cream; and later on, when it’s maybe a little cooler, we hope to play some miniature golf. Tomorrow, we might take in a museum or two, before heading off to the airport. We shall see.
The Grand Canyon
We went to the Grand Canyon today. We went, we saw, my boys’ capacity for grandeur was exceeded, and eventually we left. I’ll possibly have more to say later, but for tonight I’m tired. We’re gonna take it easy tomorrow.
A Matter of Taste
So today, as planned, we drove down through Oak Creek Canyon to Sedona. We visited Flagstaff about eight years ago, but we didn’t get to Sedona on that trip; so it had been almost twenty-two years since I last saw the Red Rocks. I’d forgotten how impressive they are, and how beautiful the area around Sedona is.
I’d planned on driving around Sedona a fair amount, revisiting the places Jane and I went back then: Airport Mesa, the Chapel of the Cross, Tlaquepaque, and so forth. As it worked out, we parked in the “Uptown” part of the Sedona, and never really got any further into town. We looked at the shops, and had some ice cream, and bought one “Red Dirt” shirt each (T-shirts literally dyed with the local red soil). I don’t know if it’s the shirts or the dying process, but they have a really neat soft feel to them, and they are more-or-less the color of the Red Rocks.
But we spent most of our time in Sedona not actually in Sedona: we took a Pink Jeep tour up Schnebly Hill Road, the old, mostly unpaved road that goes up the side of the canyon and which was the first road between Sedona and Flagstaff. The views along the way are simply stunning.
I asked my boys later whether they’d enjoyed the tour; yes, very much. What did they like? The scenery, or the bumpy ride? The bumpy ride. Well, it was fun.
After the tour, we headed out of town again; there’s a ton of roadwork being done in Sedona at the moment, and the traffic snarls, which we saw from the jeep, were horrendous. We decided to cut our losses, and had a picnic in a picnic area about a third of the way up Oak Creek Canyon instead. Interesting place: there were ants absolutely everywhere, except (for some unknown reason) on the picnic tables, and we spent a considerably length of time just watching them.
I dropped a peanut on the ground, just to see what would happen. The little black ants found it first, and definitely found it an object of interest; but before a real trail of them could be formed, the peanut was discovered by one of the much larger red ants…which commenced to drag it toward its nest. I was floored: the ant was much smaller than the peanut, but while we watched the ant moved it over a foot. Eventually another red ant showed up, and while I think they were from the same nest they didn’t work together all that well.
After dinner, back in Flagstaff, I noticed that there were some significant clear patches in the sky, so we headed to Lowell Observatory to let it get dark, and see if we could see some stars. We live in the L.A. Basin, and the light pollution is such that you can see maybe seven stars in the entire sky, if you’re lucky. My kids have no real idea what the Milky Way looks like.
We got to enjoy the Observatory’s visitor center, but by the time it got dark the cloud cover had increased again and there were no stars to be seen, darn it!
And so, back to the hotel, and so to bed.
Who Do You Love?
I suppose that really ought to be “whom”, but be that as it may.
There is a significant dynamic in the Christian life. God loves us, and in order to receive that love we must pass it along to others. In fact, loving others increases our capacity for receiving God’s love; so not only must we love our neighbors as ourselves, but in loving our neighbors we are loving ourselves.
So who are our neighbors, and how do we love them?
First, there are those we know personally, and those we don’t. Those we know personally–our family, our friends, our co-workers–can be the easiest and that hardest to love. Easiest because they are right there, in front of us, and hardest because their faults are also right there in front of us. Of those we don’t, there are again two categories: those we see, and those we don’t see.
Those we don’t see are those in other towns, in other states, in other countries. These are generally quite easy to love: write a check, drop it in the mail. Say a blanket prayer for disaster victims in Myanmar. The check must represent hard-earned money, but writing and mailing it is pretty quick, and I don’t even need to leave my house. Saying a quick prayer is even easier.
The hard ones are the ones we see but don’t know: the hordes of people we see at the movie theater or the shopping mall or walking down the street. We don’t know them. We don’t know what they need. Most of them are not obviously hungry, or sick, or in need of alms-giving. There’s probably nothing they want our help with, and they’d be surprised and dismayed if we offered. (Try accosting someone at the mall, and asking them if there’s anything you can do for them. How would you react?)
How can we love them, in more than an abstract and theoretical sense? How can we let them know that it isn’t our own love we are offering, but God’s?
I can think of all sorts of things that won’t work. Is there anything that will?
Male Pattern Bonding
I am approaching the end of another very busy day, our first full day here in Arizona. We are staying at the Embassy Suites, which has a nice complementary breakfast, so we started the day with that. The boys had bacon and Froot Loops (though not mixed together).
After that we went to the grocery store and visited the bookstore across the street; and then we went to mass. Flagstaff has three small Catholic churches, but they’ve evidently been combined into a single large parish named San Francisco de Asis; all Sunday masses are at the particular church called St. Pius X, and so we wended our way hither. At first glance, St. Pius X wasn’t much to look at, and I suspect the mass would have given hives to some of the liturgical purists around and about the Catholic blogosphere. Be that as it may, the sanctuary, though plain and boxlike, was clearly furnished with great love, and if the mass was of the “happy-clappy” variety it was also jammed. Both the sanctuary and the parish hall were completely full of people, and we were lucky to find a seat. Folks at the parish are involved in Knights of Columbus, Cursillo, Marriage Encounter, various Bible studies, and a variety of other activities. Oh, and the sermon (given by a deacon) was right on, dealing with the day’s readings in a clear, no-nonsense way.
This is a vibrant, living parish. And tomorrow at 6:30 PM they are breaking ground for the construction of a new (presumably larger) sanctuary. Woohoo!
After church we returned to the hotel and made a picnic lunch from the stuff we’d bought first thing in the morning, and headed northeast for Wupatki National Monument and Sunset Crater. Jane and I had visited both on our honeymoon quite a many years ago now; and the boys had seen them before on a previous vacation when David was three-and-a-half and James was in a stroller.
The weather was adequate today; it rained on us a bit, but nothing to worry about. To a certain extent, that was due to visit to Wupatki; according to Weather.com, Wupatki hasn’t gotten any rain lately despite lots of rain to the east, west, and south. One imagines that this is why the Indian ruins there have survived so long.
We didn’t play Munchkin tonight; instead, we had a long swim and an overly long dinner.
Tomorrow I think we’ll head down Oak Creek Canyon to Sedona, there not to take the art galleries too seriously, and possibly to ride in one of the famous Pink Jeeps. We’ll see.
A Nice Little Hideaway
As I write, my boys and I are in Flagstaff, Arizona. We flew into Phoenix this morning, cranked the tunes on the iPod in our rented Dodge Caliber, and cruised north, making brief stops at Montezuma Castle (a Sinagua cliff dwelling) and Montezuma Well (a natural well and sinkhole, with cliff dwellings in its walls). We’re now sitting in our hotel room. The boys are watching a show about Celtic bog mummies on cable TV (a rare treat for them), and I’m checking out the hotel’s wireless network. It’s raining outside (well, it is monsoon season), but catty-corner across the intersection is a big Barnes & Noble.
We’re here on vacation, and over the next week, weather permitting, we’re going to do all kinds of touristy things. We plan to visit the Grand Canyon, and the Meteor Crater, and Wupatki National Monument, and like that. Tonight we need to do a little shopping, and hit the bookstore, and we’re gonna have dinner at the Cracker Barrel.
Life is good.
Sopapillas!
So happens I’m off on a business trip this week, to the wilds of New Mexico, where they make sopapillas! I ought not be eating sopapillas on my diet, but you can’t get them here, and I haven’t had one since a brief sojourn in Santa Fé eight years ago. I intend to indulge.
Business trips being what they are, blogging will be pretty much non-existent here through the end of the week, the more so as I will be trying to continue working through one chapter of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Compendium Theologiae per day over at Blogging Aquinas. Hope to see you there.
MarsEdit vs. Ecto, continued
I’ve been using MarsEdit daily since I first wrote about it last week, and I have to say it’s working for me. It’s been absolutely bullet-proof, with no unpleasant surprises at all.
That post did get a comment from one of the Ecto maintainers, asking me to e-mail him so that we could talk about the problems I’m having with Ecto; I sent him an extensive e-mail about the specific problems I’m having with the latest version, and have not yet heard back.
The View from the Foothills 