Revival

Time to get this thing going again. I don't know whether anyone will see it, and I don't promise to have all-new material. But this is a good place for thoughts that are a bit longer than a tweet. Here goes.

On May 19th, 2019, John and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary. Over the years, we had celebrated that date several times with trips, including a Las Vegas trip in 2004 for our 25th, when digital photos were stored on floppies and my first blog was still a new thing. Here is a photo from that occasion, when the Las Vegas Hilton still hosted Star Trek: The Experience:

We also went to Disneyland twice on our anniversary, in 2012...

and in 2013, when Cars Land was new at DCA:

I don't think we had done anything much since then. For our 40th, though, I wanted to do something, and John suggested Monument Valley. Monument Valley! I've wanted to see that place with my own eyes since at least 1986, if not long before that, when I still lived Back East. We thought about stopping by on our way back from my dad's funeral in Wilmington NC nearly four years ago, but time and distances would not permit. I was also desperate to go see Doctor Who episodes being filmed in Arizona and Utah during the Eleventh Doctor era, but that didn't pan out, either. 2019 would be different.

John left the arrangements to me. I booked us into a hotel in Sedona, which was sort of on the way up. On the Friday before our anniversary, we drove to Sedona, arriving after dark. In the morning we saw this (click to see it bigger):

Then we went on to the Monument Valley Tribal Park in Utah, arriving in time for our 5 PM "sunset" tour.

We got back well before sunset, which turned out to be good news. We got to see this from the edge of the parking lot.

The next day, we went through Bear's Ears National Monument and Natural Bridges National Monument. The latter is where I saw this:

There was more to this trip, but you get the idea. In short: it was great. John had a great time, too, which hardly ever happens. Because of this, we plan to start doing day trips once a month, and I've also been hacking around the mountains of Tucson, to the point of not working enough hours at one of my jobs this pay period. Oops! So I need to back off a little, but I'm definitely in picture-taking mode right now.

And in video-making mode. This is a little bit of a problem, because I'm putting a lot of effort into my videos, and hardly anyone visits my YouTube channel, ever. If you find this message-in-a-bottle blog post, I hope you'll help me rectify that. Here are my social media links:

https://www.youtube.com/user/Mavarin/

https://twitter.com/mavarin?lang=en

https://www.facebook.com/mavarin

https://www.facebook.com/mavarininfo/ (page for my fiction)

https://www.instagram.com/mavarinkfb/

And some others I'm not currently using. There's a lot of overlap, but Instagram is hopeless with panoramic photos and longer videos, Twitter isn't good with essays, and so on. Facebook tends to have the majority of the content found elsewhere, but I realize some people refuse to use Facebook these days.

I hope you've found this revival of my old blog at least a little engaging. I'll try to do something a bit meatier and more original next time.

Karen

Happy Birthday, Somebody

A Saturday birthday party in the park.

Given the huge number of people in the world (in your country, in your metro area, on my friends list...) and the considerably smaller number of days in the year, it is statistically inevitable that every day is somebody's birthday. Lots of somebodies, in fact. Nearly every evening when I take my dogs to Reid Park, there's at least one obvious birthday party in a ramada area nearby. This is especially true on weekends, of course, and people defer their parties until a day when more people can show up.

A Tuesday birthday party in the park

Growing up, I never had a party in a park. I think I only ever had one birthday party at home that wasn't just my immediate family. It doesn't matter. You can celebrate in a public park, or at Disneyland, or at home, or jumping out of an airplane, or attending a ball game. Whichever celebration you choose, somewhere there are lots of other somebodies doing more or less the same thing.

Eva, turning 103 years old last year.

If you add age into the equation, the calculation changes somewhat. Lots of people turned 16 the same day as you, or 21, or 40 or 50 if you've gotten that far. Not too many people turn 100, though, and the odds drop year by year after that.

Today is my friend Eva's birthday. She is 104 years old today. Her father helped to build the Panama Canal, and her mother wore a whalebone corset. Eva once traveled partway across the Alaska territory by dogsled, while pregnant. She married twice, outlived all but one of her children, and was a nurse until she was in her seventies. My friend Kevin, Father Smith and I are going to see her this afternoon. After all, you're only 104 once!

An April bride in the park, looking like a Faerie Queen

The same sorts of calculations apply to weddings and anniversaries, although a wedding date is subject to considerably more human control than a birthday. Lots of people share even the unlikeliest of wedding and anniversary dates, and lots of people have been married for a year or two, or five, or ten, or even twenty. My own parents made it to 25 years, and broke up shortly thereafter.

A February wedding in the park.

Tomorrow, John and I will have been married for 30 years, which isn't all that much shorter than my parents' and John's parents' marriages combined. My dad's current marriage is longer, since he got the jump on us by two years or so. And I've met people who have been married 40 years or more. But still, 30 years is pretty good, especially when both people are still alive and well, and still getting along with each other!

Luxor and Mandalay Bay Hotels, May 2004.

From the Picasa album Las Vegas 2004

Five years ago, for our 25th anniversary, I talked John into a trip to Las Vegas, the only anniversary trip we've ever made. We had a great time, and took lots of photos with our old Sony Mavica, which stored the images on floppy disks. This year, with me still unemployed, we can't do anything like that. But we will be going to our favorite local restaurant, the midcentury wonder known as Kon Tiki, and two days after that we'll go to our first official Tucson Toros game in over a decade.

And we'll have a good time, even though it won't be our anniversary anymore. It will be somebody's anniversary, and somebody's birthday. We will have been married for 30 years and two days. That's still worth celebrating.

Karen

Ice Break Anniversary

There's a tradition in Tucson that on the first 100 degree day of the year, the ice breaks on the Santa Cruz River (some say the Rillito). I suppose that is a happy circumstance for the legendary sand trout that live in the mostly-dry riverbeds around here; but for those of us to live on land, it is more a matter of perverse pride. This is where we smile grimly, and resign ourselves to the long hot summer ahead. It's our penance for all the gloating we do in the winter, when our friends and relatives Back East are shoveling snow, and we may or may not need a sweater.

When John and I got to town in 1986, KVOA Channel 4 had an Ice Break Contest, presided over by legendary weatherman Michael Goodrich. Whoever guessed the date and time of the first official 100 degree reading would win a prize. (A trip out of Tucson would be an appropriate prize for the time of year, but I don't think they did that.) Nowadays the meteorologist over there is the almost equally legendary Jimmy Stewart - and before you ask, no, he doesn't live in Bedford Falls or have a pooka friend named Harvey. My Googling tonight doesn't lead me to believe the tv station has the contest anymore, but I could easily be wrong.

Anyway, way back in 1986 or 1987 I either entered the contest or considered doing so. The date I chose was May 19th, our wedding anniversary. Why not? It was an historically plausible date, a little early but not by all that much. According to the NWS Tucson site, the earliest 100 degree day since 1894 was April 19th, 1989, the latest first 100 degree day was June 22, 1905 (clearly before global warming took hold!), and the average date is May 26, a week from now.



Well, this year, we don't have another week to wait. The ice break really did come on May 19th. It actually got up to 103 at the airport, 101 at Davis-Monthan, and 105 in my car, assuming you believe my car's digital thermometer. Ah! Here comes summer. Jimmy Stewart says that the fewest 100 degree days on record for Tucson was 21 in 1967. This year, at least one Tucson blogger is predicting 100 of them. I don't know what the recent statistics are on that, but it sounds plausible to me.

The house was...rather warm when I got home, and my laptop wasn't happy. In fact, it was claiming to be rather catastrophically unhappy:

Oh, you hate to see that!

I turned it off and rebooted. It seems to be fine now, but I may have to start shutting down in the daytime.

It being our anniversary, we went out to dinner at Mama Louisa's, and had a fairly modest meal in keeping with my pending unemployment. To commemorate the occasion, I snuck a picture of a tiny portion of the mural that covers the restaurant's walls. John deemed that "pathetic," but it seemed the most interesting way to document a meal out with a man who doesn't want his picture posted in my blog. I'll save the mural shot for the MPS roundup next week.

Karen

Only Partly Scalzi-Centric

Thanks, folks, for all the anniversary wishes. John and I never did make it to a movie, largely due to our mutual lack of serious interest in going to see Spiderman 3 or Shrek 3. The other reason was that we were both busy: me giving blood, successfully (I often get deferred by low iron, or they can't get a needle into my vein), John clearing out the remnants of ruined, irreplaceable clothing and dead bugs he discovered the night I met John Scalzi. We did get out to Fuddruckers for a late lunch, and we watched today's new Doctor Who episode, 42. I gave John three tiki mug shot glasses I found at an antique mall. Then tonight at Target we bought a laundry hamper and plastic storage bins to try to protect the rest of our clothes from the bugs.

Detouring for a burger can be hazardous

The Target John selected for the evening's jaunt is probably the largest in town. That's his theory, anyway. It's one of two "big box" stores erected at El Con Mall in the last several years. It's a bizarre mall. It used to be a reasonably large, fairly standard shopping mall, converted decades ago from an early 1960s shopping center in midtown Tucson. It even had a few locally-owned businesses, such as a barber shop and a shoe repair service. Over the last five or ten years, that's all changed. Stores closed, and entire sections of the mall were closed off and in some cases demolished. The interior of the mall, such as it is, now atands virtually empty. At the same time, though, new buildings have been constructed surrounding the mall proper: the aforementioned Target, a Home Depot, a multiplex theater, a Claim Jumper restaurant, a Krispy Kreme (which was wildly popular when it first opened, but is now dead and closed), a Starbucks and, most recently, Tucson's first In-N-Out burger joint. When it opened about a month ago, it made the local news. A counter clerk at the In-N-Out in Chandler, where I went after the Scalzi appearance, said that the lines in Tucson were said to be four hours long.

Tonight was the first time John and I have been by El Con together since the In-N-Out location opened. We were both a little curious about the status of the fad. John Scalzi's fondness for the chain notwithstanding, the concept of waiting four hours to eat a hamburger is completely alien to John Blocher, and more than a little insane. "I don't even like to wait five minutes," he said. It's not much of an exaggeration; there are many restaurants I can never go with John, because he finds it very stressful and annoying and so-no-worth-it to wait for a table more than a couple of minutes.

Still, I was interested to know whether the lines were still insanely long, about a month after the place opened. Sure enough, as we drove by I saw lots of people inside, and a line of cars wrapped around at least two sides of the building, waiting for the drive-through.

John pulled out onto Broadway, headed for home; but I talked him into going back so I could take pictures. Here's the beginning of the "DRIVE THRU" lane, halfway across the mall parking lot, marked off by traffic cones.

When the cars are still hundreds of feet away from the In-N-Out Burger itself, a few of the location's many employees are there to take orders. At least, that's what I assume they were doing.


John suggested that I take the rest of the shots without flash, but the fact is, I messed up all the pictures. There were two problems:

1. John was feeling pressured by constant traffic behind him (John was not in the drive through lane, and this was after 10 PM!), and therefore didn't stop while I took each shot.
2. I forgot to verify that the dial on top of the camera was on the right setting. It wasn't.

Ah, well.

Aside from the Red Cross blood bank, spending time with John and a lot of watching of Doctor Who, I've put in a little time today on both the reading and writing of fiction. I'm well into John Scalzi's The Last Colony now, and enjoying it a lot.

Spoiler warning: Plot details follow. But not important ones.

AOL's congenial "Journals Editor Joe", Joe Loong, turned up unexpectedly in the book this evening, at least by proxy. His namesake is introduced on page 131, and promptly goes missing. His body is found on page 133. Yow!

Karen

28 Years Later....

Okay, so this photo is from 1978, nor 1979, but that's close enough. Left to right, we have my stepmother Ruth, my Dad (Frank Funk), me, and my friend and college roommate Evelyn. On May 19th, 1979, these four people, plus my mom, my brother Steve, my other best friend "d", soon-to-be-ex priest Ed Van Auken, and most of all, John Blocher (along with his mother and sister) were in St. Patrick's Church in Syracuse, NY. That was was the day I walked down to aisle, accompanied by Mozart, not either of the traditional wedding tunes. Afterward we had our reception at Community House, one of last functions held there before the University sold the place.

The honeymoon consisted of camping our way from New York to Ohio, in an elderly Ford Falcon van, in the rain. A week before, I was finishing up my student years at Syracuse University, my graduation ceremony made a lie by all my incompletes, mostly unwritten English papers. At the end of the honeymoon, I was living in a duplex on 13th Ave in Columbus, Ohio with John and his best friend. Soon after that, John and I were in a little apartment on King Avenue that smelled of cat pee. Imagine my allergies!

I'm not going to recap my whole married life here. The point is simply this: I'm very happy about what happened 28 years ago today. On May 19, 1979, I married this smart, funny, creative, cantankerous man I'd met at the Clarion Writer's Workshop at Michigan State, nearly two years before. It wasn't a lavish wedding; we didn't want that anyway. The honeymoon was a modest one, and so was our life, for years and years. Money problems pretty much always put strain on a marriage, but we got through it all, ran a little store, moved to Tucson and had another twenty-one years of adventures and misadventures. We both went back to school, but not at the same time. We tried to have a kid, but it didn't work. John published books and trading cards (I helped with some of those), and then went to work for others as an editor. I became a travel agent, and then a bookkeeper, and then an accountant. We went to London and Hawaii, Las Vegas and Disneyland, and moved into a fixer-upper house, which still needs plenty of fixer-upping.

28 years later, John and I are still together, and likely to remain so. Today, after I've slept and given blood, we'll go to a movie, and watch Doctor Who together, and maybe go out to dinner. It won't be extravagant, but that's fine. It will be me and my best friend, enjoying each other's company. Happy Anniversary, John!

Karen

Round Robin Themes and Variants

Flower Power / Signs

The Round Robin Photo Challenges are two years old this month, so we thought we'd have an Anniversary Challenge: "Best of Round Robin Photo Challenges". The idea is to pick a past challenge and do it for this time.

I almost never plan these things ahead of time, so it was yesterday, or maybe this morning, that I had my first idea for this challenge - a totally insane idea. As the co-founder of the RRPC, I didn't want to pick just one of the 48 previous challenges, every one of which I did the first time around. No, I wanted to make a grand gesture. I wanted to do all of them again, all in one night!

Well, okay. I'm not quite that obsessive. I'm not going to stay up all night and post 48 photos in this entry. But on the other hand, there is quite a bit of overlap in the Challenge topics, with a number of recurring themes, and enough room for interpretation that a single photo may well be suitable for several topics. Still not quite sure what I was going to do with the results, I pushed around the Challenge topics for an hour or two, reorganizing and reformatting as I went, until I ended up with the following (only without the pictures):

Nature:

Crystal, Silly Animals, New Life, The Animal Inside,
Flower Power, Cold, Nature

Silly Animals/ The Animal Inside:
Tuffy just buried yet another dog biscuit

Self-Examination
Who I am In Black & White, Secrets, Past Vs. Present,
Holy, Free, Personal Challenge

Who I am In Black & White / Secrets / Past Vs. Present / Holy
Ash Wednesday, thinking of what happened long ago

Man-Made
Construction, Mysterious Doorways,
Signs, Transportation, Dream Homes

Mysterious Doorways / Dream Homes:
Even my front door can be dreamy and
mysterious if I put it through enough filters

Visual Arts
Reflections, Red, Obstruction, Wabi-Sabi,
The Creative Side Of You!, Macro

Red / Reflections (also In the Kitchen)
The little vintage barbecue tray reflects the large one

Seasonal
Summer, Halloween Happenings, Summer Gardens,
ABCs of Autumn, Lights Of The Holidays

Summer / Summer Gardens
Palm tree near my office

People
Clichés, Labor, Heroes, Super Model,
The Hand...Untouched!

Clichés, Heroes, Super Model, The Hand...Untouched!
My hero, the Doctor ("Doctor who?" Jackie asks) and my untouched hand

Community
A Special Part Of Your Hometown, Tacky Hometown Souvenirs,
Oasis, Village, Laisser le Bon Temps Rouler (Let The Good Times Roll),
Americana, Ye Ole Watering Hole, In the Kitchen!

A Special Part Of Your Hometown / Tacky Hometown Souvenirs
Souvenirs of the late, great Toros

Psychology
Moods, Emotions, Very Scary, Nostalgia,
What You Are Thankful For, Magic

Magic / Nostalgia / Emotions
Dragon, college texts, childhood snowman, fantasy novels

Okay, I didn't cover all 48, but at almost 3 AM, I think I've given the topic pretty good coverage! Happy Anniversary, Robins!

Karen

Now check out everyone else:


Linking List

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