I had this guilty little thought while I was out riding my bike at lunch today that I had failed to update this blog as planned following my return from England, so I decided to take a few minutes here before taking Alex up to football practice to write a little update.

So, as you can guess, I’ve been back for a bit, around 9 days. I’m just now starting to get out of this incredible bout with jetlag that hit me like a ton of bricks. For about the first 4-5 days back I felt like hell pretty much all day - tired, irritable (more so than usual), and just generally lethargic. Now I’ve managed to get back to some semblance of normalcy - the only remaining problem is that I’ve been incredibly hungry for the last 4 days. Beth claims that it’s probably stress related, and as usual she’s probably right. There are a number of little subplots going on in my life right now, some of which will be fairly stressful until they are played out.

The question I seem to be asked the most since my return - by family, friends, and other folks in the community invariable seems to be some variant of “were you scared/worried/nervous/crapping your pants.

Actually, no. Just irritated. Let me explain.

Now, it’s not a very deep secret that I don’t really like flying - in fact, in terms of expectation management I normally walk on an airplane fully expecting it to fall out of the sky. When this doesn’t happen I’m thrilled. Now, I’ve been told that this isn’t really the best way to deal with this and that it may mask some deeper emotional issues (no shit) - but hey, it works for me.

Even with that fear, I flew three times at the tail end of 2001. I walked the ghost town that was Pittsburgh at the end of that September. I flew to the UK in October for a conference while ground zero was still a mass of wreckage. I was worried then - let’s face it, watching a few jets plow through a pair of skyscrapers tends to make you a bit nervous when you’re hopping on a Boeing 767 - but I still got on the planes.

The media hype did get to me a bit - at various times I worried a bit about the anthrax scare, I worried about going to the mall. I started to work my way into a state of paranoia on most of this - as Jerry (Drummer, Geologist, and at times my personal Therapist) would say, I worked my way into a mind-f**k (sorry for the use of technical medical terms - but this one seemed appropriate). I asked Jerry about this paranoia, and he sent me back and email that pulled things into perspective for me.

People suck. Mean people suck even worse. A good friend once told me that you can’t live life waiting for the other shoe to fall. The more attached you are to this life the less of it you’ll actually lead. Kind of like wasting all of your time telling someone how much you’ll miss them instead of just enjoying the time you have.

Simple…but oh so true.

So when I was in Manchester and found out about the plot and the arrests - my first thought wasn’t that I was going to be blown out of the sky, it was more along the lines of “crap, I’m going to get stuck here”. Followed immediately by “nothing being allowed on? I can’t take a f**king book onboard! It’s an 8 hour flight!”

Yes, you heard that right. I was more worried about dying of boredom than anything else. That and a slight bit concerned that my laptop, iPod, camera, and a bunch of other somewhat sensitive equipment and toys would be subject to the tender ministries of the crack Delta luggage crew.

I was good - but It was apparent from talking to Beth that she was worried, and it seemed like some of my other friends and family were as well. So I fired off a few emails to let people know what I was up to - basically “I’m fine, things are screwed up, but I’m not worried and you shouldn’t be either”. Or at least that’s what I was trying to convey.

The flight home - hell, the entire airport experience sucked. To put it in a nutshell, I woke up at 6:00 AM BST (1:00 AM EDT) and got off the plane at Akron/Canton at 9:30 PM EDT (2:30 AM BST the next day). Included in that time was around 10 hours of flying, coupled with a good 5 hours of waiting in lines (queues, for those of a UK-ish persuasion).

I was going to write something about the fact that it seems like everyone got all worked up into a frenzy about this in way too short of a time and on way too little information. Oddly enough, someone out there has already written a bit on it that is so good I’m just going to give you a snippet and a link.

So the answer to how did I feel about this whole mess? Well, as John Rogers writes:

I am just not going to wet my pants every time some guys get arrested in a terror plot. I will do my best to stay informed. I will support the necessary law enforcement agencies. I will take whatever reasonable precautions seem, um, reasonable. But I will not be terrorized. I assume that the terror-ists would like me to be terror-ized, as that is what is says on their nametag, rather than, say, wanting me to surrender to ennui or negative body image, and they’re just coming the long way around.

Check out the complete post at http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2006/08/wait-arent-you-scared.html. Me - I’m going to get back to this enjoying life bit.

Ahhh, Sid Vicious was a poet, wasn’t he?

Nothing quite so fun as waking up on day 12 of a two week trip to the UK to the news that the UK has gone to a “critical” alert, and that air travel is going to be….oh, what’s the quaint English phrase…..”extremely disrupted” over the next few days. This is all because some jackasses were planning on blowing up US-bound planes over the Atlantic. Which, since my plane is scheduled to fly over the Atlantic in 2 days time to the US, is of a fairly high concern to me.

I’ll be heading out this afternoon from the client site that I’m on in order to purchase another piece of luggage or a duffel bag to pack some of my clothes in, since I’m going to have to check my laptop on Saturday. Shit, I’m going to have to check everything down to my glasses case.

My biggest concern? They’re not allowing books, newspapers, or any reading material on the flight - now, I can live without my iPod, my laptop, or my Zodiac. But books? That begs the question as to what I’m supposed to do for the 10 hours in the air. Let’s face it, watching the inflight movies on those 1970’s era CRT’s that droop from the ceiling of the 20 year old boeing product I’ll be flying on is beyond painful in the extreme and probably violates some component of the Geneva Convention (and don’t even get me started on the selection of movies - if I have to watch Richard Gere or Antonio Banderas dance on one more inflight movie I’m going to puke).

It’s going to be interesting - I’m sure they’ll be a few stories to pull out of this. Oh, and the picture up top vaguely reminiscent of a scene from Dante’s Inferno? It’s the current queues at Heathrow.

Beth and I took a trip to Grand Canyon a few years ago during a weekend getaway to Las Vegas. This was totally unanticipated and unplanned by me. Of course, this probably had quite a bit to do with the fact that the sum total of my input to her question “what do you want to do in Vegas” was answered by random grunts, gurgles, and rantings about whatever it was I was working on or trying to work on at the time.

I can be such a pain in the ass.

In spite of that, Beth just quietly went on her way in the background and planned everything out. She booked us tickets to see Penn&Teller. She booked us to some other bizarre show involving half-nude women dancing around to the dulcet tones of Billy Idol (apparently it looked good on paper).

She also surprised me with a trip down into the Canyon via helicopter. Now, I was a bit nervous and cranky about the trip at first. Well, maybe a bit nervous is somewhat of a misleading statement. Frantically paranoid maybe? Just a whiney little bitch? Let’s explore….

I’ve always had this amazingly morbid streak since I was a small child. Maybe it’s due to the fact that my parents didn’t take me to the zoo enough, or the fact that my hamster died when I was only a year and a half old. Maybe it was the lead based paint in our house. Maybe it’s just genetics. No matter what the root cause, I kept seeing images of the helicopter slamming into the side of the canyon, as shot by a tourist with a video camera. In the worst version, my explosive death is part of Americas Funniest Home Videos replete with a Bob Saget voiceover and laugh track.

Do you see what my friends and family have to deal with? I’ve always been able to work myself into a frenzy about the most miniscule things. This ability - completely involuntary, mind you - truly borders on the amazing.

Oddly enough, once we showed up at the airport I started to calm down. My concern at that point was less with the fact that I was going to be hovering several hundred feet above the hard desert floor, and more related to the fact that they had gone to great lengths to point out that there were no toilets for 3 hours once we left. So images of fiery wrecks were replaced with thoughts of a gastrointestinal crisis 3 minutes out from the airport.

It sounds so contrived and cliche, but once in the air everything changed. We flew from McCarran Airport in Vegas out towards Hoover Dam and then onto the Canyon. To me, the desert southwest is a beautiful place. The colors of the various rock strata…the cones of the extinct volcanos and the lava flows…and the Canyon. Flying over the rim and down into the Canyon was one of the most exhilarating experiences that I have had. The sheer scale and majesty of the canyon was hard to describe - the most eloquent I could get was “damn, this is big”.

I guess what this post is building up to - the main bullet point to take away, if you will - is the fact that Beth is the coolest wife, and not only because she puts up with me.

Postscript: After leaving Barringer Meteor Crater on our trip to Arizona (described in this post), Bruce and I went off to visit the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I wasn’t too excited about this, after all I had already seen the Grand Canyon. However, that didn’t last much longer than the time it took to walk from our car up to the canyon rim. Nothing like looking out over millions of years of geological history to cut you (and the rest of humanity) right down to size.

Mountain streams. Mountain lakes (with, I’m told some nasty little parasites you don’t want in your body - thanks for ruining the mood, Todd!). Spectacular vistas.

And lots and lots of dust.

There were a few other interesting occurances on the remainder of the trip - the cyclists repeatedly slamming their bikes into some rocks and falling off, Bruce falling asleep on the way back through South Tahoe, Darrol (aka McGyver) filling up the tires with air from a compressor mounted on his engine - but for the most part I was overwhelmed by the scenery.

Take a look for yourself here. Slide show would be the best way to view….

BAM!

SCRAPE!

BAM!

Well, we were definitely on the trail. Deer Valley trail - I found out later - likes to get up close and personal in the first 500 yards or so. In fact, I was told by several members of our party that the first 20 minutes of the trail was the toughest part of the entire trail. Once again, I just nodded my head and muttered my agreement, hoping I didn’t look too much like an idiot.

Progress when going on a trail is very slow - in most cases you could probably walk faster than the jeeps go - but it is sometimes very violent. The jeep rocks from side to side as you position the tires on the rocks, and if you come off a rock you may get a hideous scraping noise as your skid plates drag across a rock. And worst of all, the parts of you that fit in the seat slowly start to become numb from all the pummeling. Perhaps that has to do with that purple paint bit from the first post in this series?

You learn really quick that people running trails don’t like to hear scraping noises - I was told there were “bad” scrapes and “really bad” scrapes. Unfortunately, about 30 minutes into the ride I got to see what a “really bad” scrape was all about.

It happened as we crested a small rise, but hit the rocks wrong and got hung up on a good size rock (well, more like a small boulder). This is not a good thing, because with the bottom of the jeep “high centered” on this rock we weren’t going anywhere.

Stacking. That’s what you do in times like this. Sounds simple and easy, but although the former is true the later surely isn’t. You run around and collect rocks to shove under the wheels to try to give the jeep the ability to climb off whatever it may be that you’ve gotten yourself stuck on.

Didn’t work in this case. Of course, I did get the exciting experience of diving out of the way of one of the nasty side effects of stacking - that is, a stack of rocks under a rotating object (in this case, a tire) have a strange habit of taking flight and flying off at a high rate of speed.

So that’s when we got to use one of those cool winches I was talking about - Darrol attached the able up to a tow hook on Todd’s back bumper, and Jim pulled us off the rock.

So we were back in action, somewhat. While we were hungup on the rock, Todd had noticed a worrying “click” somewhere in his front end that seemed to be related to the front differential. So we were forced to take the jeep out of 4×4, but since we had already hit the more difficult part of the trail the consensus was that we would be fine.

Continuing to get numb in various parts of my body and panting from the exertion of diving out of the way of the shrapnel-like results of the stacking, we rolled on.

To be continued….