Two Days in Prescott Valley, AZ

People hear “Arizona” and they automatically think broken wagon wheel in the middle of nowhere, complete with a lot of tumble weeds and unbroken miles of desert in every direction. While the seven to eight-hour drive from So Cal to PV is filled with lots and lots of nothing, PV or Prescott proper is more small town “Mayberry” complete with historical courthouse and park in the literal center of town than a single-street Tombstone-type “community” that spilled out into the desert at either end of the street. There’s no way that mom would have left idyllic Carlsbad for that. Besides they have a Costco and In-n-Out Burger only a few miles away, what else does anyone need?

So driving in from Vegas where the average travel speed was about 80 mph, I had to continuously “reduce speed” to the point where the last 20 miles of the trip, I crawled into town at about 20 mph, with lots of stops due to construction and traffic. Being from So Cal I know how to live with traffic (just turn up the tunes or call someone to while away the hours), but I found this traffic didn’t speak well of those who came to PV to get away from all the So Cal hustle and bustle. Ha! But sure enough, definitely by the second day I started getting into the slow pace. Get one thing done then take a nap until it’s time for an early dinner, TV and the day is done. That was a “full day.” Hmmm, provided I have a good fast Internet connection, I could probably handle this. Now that’s scary.

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30 Years Later…

MVHS 30th reunion for the class of 1976… 30 years later and still smiling… mostly… click on the photo to go to additional reunion pix from my flickr collection. jbb

Smiles

It should go without saying but, well, I can be a bit moody sometimes. And one thing that has tended to add to my moodiness is the unfortunate combination of Friday nights and being alone. Duh. Add to that I tend to continually vent such feelings in my writing… ack. Well, I just want to say that there is another side to all of this bitching and moaning and most of the time all it takes is a conversation with the woman of my desires. And when that happens, life is good.

All it takes is a couple of minutes, connecting with her long enough, to see things from her side and I’m back to being the stupid smiling guy that I am with her. It is unfortunate that much of what my friends and family know of this relationship is not this wonderful state of bliss that I get from just touching base with my best friend and love. Love, especially for me, can be a complicated, difficult thing. But all I have to do is hear her wonderful laugh, even if we’re on the phone, hearing her laugh is like feeling her hand slip into mine. I love that about communicating with her. * smiles * jbb

10 Year Anniversary of 1st Network Tech Show: “The Site”

This is the 10-Year Anniversary of Leo Laporte’s debut on a network TV show called The Site, as a computer animated character named DevNull. MSNBC executives said the computer-generated character was needed because Laporte had the perfect face for radio. The Site lasted a little over a year. Following the demise of The Site Laporte did some TV on this cable TV network called ZDTV which later became TechTV. Currently he’s trying to steal all of the bandwidth from US Senators with his pod-casts and video-casts hosted at TWIT.tv. Oh yeah, The Site was also host by a human named Soledad O’Brien.

Family Traditions

“Bless us, O Lord,
For these, thy gifts,
Which we are about to receive,
Through Thy bounty,
Through Christ, our Lord,
Amen”

I watched a family having lunch the other day, a young mom with a baby in a stroller and a three or four-year-old trying to help out, mom’s sister on a cell phone and grandpa. When the baby woke up they sat him up and set about to entertain him with a little music player. The baby’s and grandpa’s eyes seemed to light up to equal intensity. For some reason watching this family reminded me of the importance of family and my own experiences around the dinner table when we were growing up.

Being the oldest boy (though the third child) it somehow fell to me to say the prayer before dinner every night (yes, for the most part for most of our lives growing up we all had dinner together every night). I don’t remember how old I was when this tradition began, but I’m guessing that it might have been around the time of my first communion (around 2nd grade?). But as far back as I can remember if I was there at dinner time, I said the prayer.

Looking at the words of the prayer now, I can only imagine that as a six- or seven-year-old I learned to mouth the words like a teenager in Tokyo learns to sing an American pop song: I learned to make the sounds and can still remember the rhythm of the words…

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It’s How the Race Was Run…

I’ve dabbled at running off and on since high school. Never being tall enough or lean enough to ever really get past the punishment aspect of the sport to the endorphin pay-off part. I remember running (jogging really) the streets of Fullerton one evening 20-years ago and getting just far enough to develop a sharp pain behind one of my knees and both calfs. Thank God, my ex- took me to an aerobic class or I would have completely sat out the whole decade of the 80s. In 95, when I started teaching 6th graders I stopped teaching aerobics. It was a move to reduce the strain on my voice from talking over 35 6th graders every day and then yelling over my loud music four times a week (there was also the drive back and forth from Long Beach to Anaheim for aerobic classes of waning attendance..). And that pretty much ended my physical fitness efforts, except for a rare visit to my local 24-Hour Fitness whenever a new relationship loomed on the horizon (like maybe twice from ‘95 to 2003). Let’s just say that I never was able to display “washboard” abs, even when I was teaching high-impact aerobics four times a week. By 2003 my ever-so-sensitive students would often ask when the baby was due. Children can be so… supportive.

So what changed my disposition about physical fitness and running, in particular? Well, what else… a relationship… or rather, the potential of a relationship. I mean, what can motivate better than wanting to be in the best shape possible for ones lover. She had been a college girl-friend and when I saw her again… oh my God, what the heck was this beautiful woman doing hanging around with me? She later admitted that she wanted to be at her absolute best and she very much hit the mark for me. And all the more endearing was that she accepted me even though I was almost twice the man I was twenty-years ago (and not in a good way). So back to the gym I went. But no matter what I couldn’t quite get the weight off. Damn.

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NECC Conference Observation: Negroponte Rocks!

Second day of the NECC conference and “Wired” founder, Nicholas Negroponte, rocked the attendees during his keynote, commenting regarding continued criticism received from Bill Gates and Intel about his “One Laptop per Child” program must mean that he’s doing something right. Click here for my full report on Negroponte’s keynote. Click here for my flickr pix of the keynote. Additional flickr pix of the conference are here. JBB