How green was my valley

Today Cardgrrl and I drove 30 miles or so outside of Asheville to Chimney Rock State Park. It was kinda pretty. (Right-click/open in new tab to see full size shots.)

If this last picture looks out of place with the rest, it is. This was some asshat not just carving his name into the wooden railing, but carefully teaching his two sons that this is how one should behave in a public park. Because, after all, what people really come here to see isn't the gorgeous view, but YOUR NAME scratched into the fence. Idiot. I wanted to push him over, let him ponder his vanity and vandalism on the way down.

Leaving

Everything has been shipped or packed into my car, except the two items (suitcase and computer case) that I'll be living out of until I get settled in my Asheville apartment. I expect to turn in my keys and hit the road in about two hours, arriving at my new home sometime Monday--which, by happy coincidence, will be the fourth anniversary of the day I first met Cardgrrl, in the poker room at Harrah's. (I think if you go back and reread the post I wrote about that first meeting, you'll see that I liked her right off the bat.) My goal is to have a home office setup sufficient to allow me to resume work by Friday, a week from today.

Cardgrrl's house, meanwhile, is showing real progress. The foundation is nearly finished, despite lousy weather for construction through most of January. Three or four more months, and it will be ready for her. Then we'll both be settled in our new places, and poised to see what we can make of our lives in North Carolina. (We're not quite ready to actually share the same zip code--that would be too scary--but we will move to the next level of relationship, which is adjacent zip codes.) You can, as always, follow both her house progress and her photographic adventures in her blog, "Something Beautiful."

I am equal parts sad, nervous, and excited about this transition. This past 6 1/2 years has been fun and challenging, and I've learned a lot about myself and the world. I've grown in important, interesting, and unexpected ways. It's time to see if Asheville can reshape me as profoundly as Las Vegas has.

I am immensely grateful that so many people have found my meandering thoughts worth reading. Your enthusiastic reception has made the hours of writing and rewriting a rewarding pursuit. I cannot sufficiently thank you for your support.

I'm sure I'll pipe up here once in a while with a thought, rant, story, or joke. Plus, I expect that occasional trips back to the Land of Many Poker Rooms are inevitable, and you'll read all about them right here.

But for now, take good care of yourselves, play good poker, and don't be grumpy. That's my job.

Photo credit: Terry Hassan

Gone to Carolina in my mind

Early Friday morning I'm flying to North Carolina, which is where Cardgrrl is living these days, for a week of slightly belated holiday celebration.

I wish I were there already.



For your pleasure, two exceptionally lovely renditions of the obvious song choice:

Red Rock Canyon

This morning I went for a hike in Red Rock Canyon with my friend Claudia, who is at the tail end of several weeks in town to deal for the World Series of Poker. We chose the trail to "Ice Box Canyon." We didn't get all the way to the end. We're both old farts and I, for one, am hardly in tiptop physical condition. Young whippersnappers were passing us as if we were standing still. Which, admittedly, we were quite a bit. Gotta rest a lot when you're decrepit. The roughly four miles we trekked was plenty, especially since at least a third of the distance was climbing over rocks rather than flat hiking in the usual Boy Scout sense. In fact, Claudia certified me as having done at least a week's worth of exercise, giving me permission to vegetate for the next seven days. So I've got that going for me, which is nice.

There simply does not exist nicer weather in Vegas in July than we hit today, and if there is more spectacular scenery anywhere within an hour of the city, I don't know what it could possibly be. We chose well.

I'm afraid I may have annoyed her with my frequent stops to take pictures. I was captivated by both the grand vistas and the small details. But I was simultaneously frustrated in advance, knowing that nobody short of Ansel Adams could do justice to the beauty surrounding us. Well, I tried.

We saw lots of lizards. I kinda like lizards. I think they're cute. Most were smaller than this sunbather. (For all photos, click to see somewhat bigger. Right click and select "open link in new tab" for the full-size shot.)

When I saw this shrub, I thought it was one of a kind. It's hard to tell what's happening, but it looks like the dead part of the plant sort of erupted out of the skin of the living part. I had never seen anything like it. But a short distance later, there was another just like it, then another and another. We passed dozens of them, all looking like the careful branch-by-branch fusion of a living brush and its dead predecessor. If anybody understands this odd botanical phenomenon, please enlighten me.

I think this is my favorite shot of the bunch. I looked back at one point and saw this lone, dead tree standing out in contrast to the sky and mountain ridge behind, and it bowled me over with its stark beauty. I had to leave Claudia for a few minutes and backtrack to find the best vantage point to capture it. I guess you could say I experienced an aesthetic emergency that could be addressed only by pressing a shutter release a few times. I'm afraid the result isn't as grand as what my visual cortex recorded. You'll just have to go find the spot yourself to see what I mean.

I think I was even less successful here. Maybe I'm weird to think that dead trees are lovely, but I do. The charring of this one, and the strange geometry created when it fell over, made it even more so, in my view. But again I don't think I managed to convey that adequately in the final shot. I was going for a 3-D-ish effect, with the near end of the tree coming right into the viewer's face. It seemed cool at the time, but when I see it on my computer screen--eh, not so much.

Your humble scribe:

And his lovely companion for the day:

And now this blog is pleased to present to you an assortment of the pretty rocks and mountains we saw, without further comment:

Vanishing act

I'm going away again, this time to Salt Lake City for some family time. As John Denver famously sang, "Don't know when I'll be back again." Maybe a week, maybe more, maybe less. Events will dictate.

Sunset, Sandia Peak

Having a pleasant and productive time in New Mexico. Cardgrrl wanted to revisit Sandia Peak via the tram. We were there in February, 2010, my first time to Albuquerque, but mid-winter and mid-day. This time we went in time for a short hike to be followed by watching the sunset, which seems to be quite a popular activity around here, judging from the crowds and the cameras. It's a pretty nice view, not done justice by my little point-and-shoot Nikon. (Right-click "open picture in new tab" to see it full size.)

Back in a couple of days.

Away again

Just over 24 hours from now, I'll be flying to Albuquerque for a few days with Cardgrrl and her sister, who lives there. Will be back at the grind by next weekend, though.

Arlington day

Cardgrrl and I spent the afternoon hiking through Potomac Overlook Regional Park, which had lovely scenery like this:

Then we went to dinner at Cassatt's Kiwi Cafe, followed by dessert at Pastries by Randolph, which had lovely scenery like this:

Away

I'm leaving tomorrow for a week in D.C. visiting Cardgrrl. Take care of the place while I'm gone.

Up, up, and away

I'm off to visit the family in Salt Lake City for a few days.

Other sights in Albuquerque

Today I finally had some time to sort through the rest of the hundreds of pictures I took during my recent week there with Cardgrrl. Though I had a wonderful time, the photographic record of it is pretty paltry, once you narrow it down to the shots that look halfway competent.

One afternoon we spent at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. Like the zoo, this surprised me for being a well-done place, given the small population it serves. What I especially liked about it was that they tried wherever possible to illustrate the principle or time period under consideration by using New Mexico specimens, whether geologic strata or fossils or whatever. There's lots of stuff there besides dinosaurs, but nothing cooler. I mean, how could anything be cooler than dinosaurs, right? So the only interesting pictures are of....

I've already mentioned our day at the zoo. After taking a lot of time with the gorilla photos Saturday, today I sorted through the remaining shots and found only a handful that even show decently what was being photographed, and trashed the rest. None of them will have the editors of National Geographic frantically searching for my phone number to offer me a job.

That same evening, we strolled through the adjacent Botanic Garden for its annual "River of Lights" exhibit. They have hundreds of arrangements of Christmas lights like the ones that follow. All very pretty, but extremely hard to photograph well.

Gorillas in our midst (no poker content)

As I mentioned last week, Cardgrrl and I spent an afternoon at the Albuquerque Zoo, which is surprisingly large and nice for such a small city. (Albuquerque proper is about 500,000 people, with a metropolitan area of only about 900,000.) I think we lingered at the gorilla exhibit for nearly an hour, mesmerized by these amazing animals.

I highly recommend visiting Cardgrrl's photo essay on the experience. Her words and photos do much better at capturing the feeling than mine will. Her final photo, in particular, just slayed me when I first saw it; the distant shot is a worth-a-thousand-words indictment of putting these animals into pens on the other side of the world from their rightful homes. This particular enclosure is among the nicer ones, as zoos go, but it's still a prison built for our purposes, not theirs, its inmates wholly innocent of any crime.

I found myself spending most of my gorilla-watching time trying to decipher their emotions. I don't think it's easy. Consider this female.

Is she feeling sad?

Confrontational?

Contemplative?

Annoyed?

These shots were taken with only a few seconds elapsing between them, so it's unlikely that she was actually going through that range of emotions in so short a time, even though those labels are what get immediately conveyed to me by the images. I don't think our experience correlating human faces and emotions serves us well to interpret other species, even one as closely related as these primates.

I'll bet, however, that they have no such difficulty reading each other. Why else would they have such expressive faces, if not to communicate to other members of their tribes? The next pictures are of this troop's dominant male. Look at how his face changes, again over the course of just a matter of seconds in this series:

The entire dimensions of his face undergo transformation. Lots of other mammals have some range of facial expressions, but offhand I can't think of any non-primates that invest this much in making their faces so enormously flexible. It takes a lot of muscles and bony attachments--plus the neural wiring and brain mapping--to generate this variation. From an evolutionary perspective, that expenditure can only be justified if such communication is tremendously important to their survival. I wish I were in on the code.

I think both Cardgrrl and I were most taken with one female who tended to sit off by herself, not interacting much with the rest of the group. I know I took more pictures of her than any of her friends. I think I felt some sympathy with her, knowing well what it's like to be sitting alone in the corner of the playground while everybody else is interacting easily. Maybe she's on the outs socially. Maybe she's in some sort of pain. Maybe she was just having a bad day. Again, though we're naturally quick to interpret body language and facial appearance by experiences with our own kind, I doubt that the correlation to the apparent equivalents in gorillas is as close as we tend to assume. But what do I know?

Another of the band's females was obviously in late-stage pregnancy. If I saw this expression and posture in a woman of equivalently impending delivery, I'd probably be inclined to think she was contemplating the birth of her child, perhaps wondering what kind of personality he or she would develop.

But I confess that I have no idea to what extent a gravid gorilla's brain is capable of understanding what is happening to her, or what is about to happen, which in turn makes me interpret what I'm seeing with much more curiosity than certainty.

Here is a final olio of gorilla snapshots for you to ponder over. What are they thinking and/or feeling? Were I in their situation, it would be nothing but "How can I get out of here?" until I finally gave in to the futility of such efforts and surrendered myself to my fate, at which time my escape anxiety would be replaced with a crushing and unending sense of helplessness. Is that what these magnificent creatures are feeling? I don't pretend to know. But if the answer is yes, shame on us for inflicting that on them.

Addendum

I originally wasn't going to include this video, because it's already in Cardgrrl's post, but I just can't resist. I've watched it several times and love it too much to leave it out.

The babies are adorable, obviously, but I'm most impressed by the silverback. You don't need any imagination to see the immense power of his musculature. He could toss around the NFL's biggest linebacker like a rag doll. But it's entirely contained and restrained, like a Ferrari engine at idle. He gently nudges his child away from the man at one point, then just sits and watches, like a patient dad tending his children at the playground. Maybe the little ones are so relaxed and bold in their exploring because they know they've got the biggest bad-ass in the jungle behind them, ready to rip apart anything or anyone that might threaten them. When it's time to move on, he just gives a little "follow me" grunt and saunters off. Amazing film.