And don't forget the camera...

My friend Amber forwarded me an interesting article the other day. It was about “tourist traps” and how we, as travelers, have gotten a little hung up on avoiding them. It seems like there’s been this movement toward “blending in with the locals” when traveling to a new place, and anything else is a less-than-optimal experience. We’re made to feel that if we’re herded around on a bus with 50 other tourists, we’re not seeing the “real” (insert name of exotic destination here). And the author of the article had to ask – why? Why can’t a “tourist trap” also be a great vacation experience? Why can’t an organized, planned foray into a city with dozens of other tourists be a memorable, amazing part of your vacation? Why can’t the most popular restaurant in town have better food than where the “locals” eat?

Now, I definitely have a few great “off the beaten path” memories from my travels. Like Crazy Estonian Tour Guide Guy and our unique walking tour of Tallinn. Or Alex and Carlos, the two little kids who accosted us in Costa Rica and convinced us they knew of all the cool places to see (they DID show us some very “local” neighborhoods…) Or like the time we were in Gdansk, Poland and got into a taxi with a driver who only spoke Polish and German. My dad and I used our limited knowledge of German to effectively communicate with him. It was so interesting to see how we were all able to laugh and talk and have fun and understand each other – even though we were from different parts of the world and barely spoke a dozen comprehensible sentences between us. Then there was the time when Rick and I were very “local” and took the train into Yankee Stadium, crushed up against all the other “locals.” Fun? Maybe that isn’t the right word. A worthy experience? Definitely.

But for all those “local” experiences I’ve had, there’ve been many more “touristy” experiences. And who’s to say that acting like a tourist isn’t just as much fun as blending in with the locals? If I hadn’t been acting like a “tourist,” I never would’ve seen luaus in Hawaii… I never would’ve learned all kinds of interesting things about Pompeii… I never would’ve seen HALF the amazing churches and cathedrals I’ve seen in Europe… I wouldn’t have seen the Eiffel Tower or the Brandenburg Gate or the Panama Canal… And Dad never would’ve discovered that there IS, in fact, cheese so tasteless even HE can eat it – in Sardinia.

Being a tourist can be fun closer to home, too. I LIVE in Austin, but I had a great time the night we went on the bat bridge boat tour with Jen and Jason and the kids. When Rick and I were in San Francisco a few years ago, we spent a day at Fisherman’s Wharf – you can’t get much more touristy than food, shopping and sea lions… but so what? We had fun, and that’s all that matters. And every time we’re in Chicago we make it a point to head over to Ghirardelli’s for hot fudge sundaes. And just about every tourist in the city has the same idea – but when you have sundaes as good as what they serve at Ghirardelli’s, you’ll brave hoards of tourists and sub-zero temperatures to get to them.

So why should it matter what a few pretentious travel writers say about “tourist traps”? Why should we avoid getting on a bus with 50 other tourists and allowing ourselves to be delivered to places we wouldn’t see otherwise? Sure, it’s fun to wander off the well-worn paths now and then… but usually there’s a REASON those paths are so well-worn. So as long as your travels bring you happiness, joy, a sense of wonder, or a bit of enlightenment about something new, there’s really no need to worry about falling into a “tourist trap.” Returning from a trip with fond memories is a great way to break the fall... :)

Yes, it's another cat post...

This is the silly poem I wrote yesterday, when I saw a spider in the bathtub… I’d also seen it a couple days earlier, down by the drain. So I have to assume it was just kind of hanging out in the drain. (Not a very big spider, by the way… otherwise I wouldn’t have taken the time to write a poem about it before running from the room for a can of Raid…)

There is the spider who lives in the drain.

Should I send him back from whence he came?

Or allow him to live, although he’s so scary,

With his eight creepy legs and his back so hairy?

Should I turn on the water and watch him swim?

Or watch as he walks away at his whim?

That’s it, I want him gone – I really hate him.

Whoops, too late – Piva just ate him.

Piva is great – she’s like a furry little exterminator. (And then, later on, she licks me with her little sandpapery tongue and I try not to think about how she eats spiders…) :)

Someone deserves a whole can of tuna...

So Wednesday night I watched the season premiere of Lost (it’s back! Finally! After eight long months of Lost silence, we were FINALLY given some new episodes!), and then instant messaged Rick up in Chicago for a little while. And just when I was thinking about heading off to bed, I noticed Allegro standing over in the hallway. But there was something weird about the way she was standing – her back was sort of arched over, and she looked like she was hesitating about what to do next. And then she started walking – a strange, wobbly, uncoordinated walk. THAT was not right. I picked her up and put her next to me on the couch, and she attempted to jump from the couch to the coffee table – a small jump she’s executed many times before. But this time, she clumsily missed the coffee table and fell to the floor. By this time I was quite worried. I told Rick what was going on, and he wondered if I wanted to take her to the 24-hour emergency vet a few miles away. I picked her back up and put her on the couch, and this time she awkwardly arranged herself until she was comfortable, and then stayed there in listless contentment…

Now, Allegro is 17 years old, which is quite the feline senior citizen. So I’ve been preparing myself for a while for an inevitable decline in her sprightly health. It’s not something I like to think about – that this friend who has been with me for 16 of her 17 years will not be with me much longer. And I think that at this point in her life, the most important thing is that she’s happy and comfortable. So since she didn’t appear to be in any pain, I decided to just wait and see how she would do overnight.

I put her favorite blanket in a spot on the floor that gets lots of sunlight, and when I got up in the morning, that’s where she was. She was still acting rather lethargic – she wouldn’t even raise her head to look at me when I walked by. But the one bit of encouragement I had was that she still wanted to eat – I put a few of her favorite treats in front of her, and she gobbled them up quite happily. She also lapped up a saucer of milk I placed next to her nose. By the afternoon, she was picking herself up and wobbly walking to the laundry room to eat her usual food. Rick got home from Chicago in the afternoon, and we decided to go ahead and take her in to the vet's office just to see what their opinion was. After thoroughly annoying Allegro (she was NOT happy…) the vet gave us the two most probable diagnoses – either she’d had a stroke (which was my first thought when I saw her walking so unsteadily), or she had a tumor somewhere on her spine that was causing neurological problems. In the latter case, we would have to expect her to steadily get worse as the tumor grew bigger.

However, in the case of a stroke, cats tend to recover rather quickly. So I was quite pleased when I woke up this morning and Allegro was acting much more alert and more like her normal self. Yesterday, even when she was lying down, it seemed like she couldn’t figure out how to arrange her legs in such a way as to be comfortable. But today, she’s curled up on her blanket just like she usually likes to curl up. And she’s walking MUCH more steadily now. So I think we can be fairly certain that she had a stroke – which isn’t a great thing, of course, but it’s preferable to a tumor on her spine.

It seems unfair, sometimes, that these pets of ours woof and purr their way into our hearts, even when we KNOW we’ll be forced to say good-bye one day. And they always, no matter what, display examples of unconditional love – even when we humans don’t always deserve it. I know many people who couldn’t care less about cats or dogs, or any animals for that matter. And I feel rather sorry for them. Because they’re missing out on some very profound lessons – if only they’d be willing to learn.

So for now, it looks like Allegro will be with us for a little while longer. And she’ll be getting extra scratches behind the ears, and extra pats on the head, and extra kitty treats, and extra licks of my bowl after I’ve eaten ice cream, and extra nibbles of chicken when I’m eating dinner – because as long as she’s here in my life, I want her to know that she’s still the Queen of the House…

Allegro, Protector of the Sandals, roaring like the little lion she is...

Random stuff...

Well, this is it – happy Rainbows in the Sky Free Puppies for Everyone No More Mortgages Zero Air Pollution Happy Joy World Peace Day!! And that’s all I’m gonna say about that… :)

Ugh, cedar season has definitely begun. If I go outside for more than five or ten minutes, I get all sneezy and itchy and my head gets stuffy and my nose runs. I think I have some pretty good air filters in this house, because there is a noticeable difference between how I feel when I’m out running around and how I feel when I just stay put. I think I may have to stay put for the rest of the day. I’m trying Zyrtec today, which I’ve never tried before – I usually make do with Benadryl, which works pretty well, but also puts me to sleep. I’m a little worried about the Zyrtec, because not only does the package say “may cause drowsiness,” but it’s also a 24-hour pill. So if I get all itchy and sneezy again in 12 hours, I have to just deal with it. The package is very clear about NOT taking more than one pill in 24 hours… like “don’t even THINK about taking more than one of these within a 24 hour span of time. Don’t do it. Just don’t.” So here’s hoping it works well…

So I’ve been using my new Brookstone sound machine every night when I sleep, and I have to give this thing rave reviews. I LOVE it. I usually turn on the “rain” sound and I fall asleep within a few minutes. It’s awesome. I must recommend it to anyone who ever has trouble sleeping. And even when Rick is here, I like to set it to “ocean waves” and put the timer on for an hour, just so I can fall asleep to the sound of crashing waves. It’s like sleeping on the beach in Hawaii… without all the sand in your pajamas…

Our good friends Eric and Debbie gave us some really cool Chicago books for Christmas. One is a Fodor’s guide, one is “Chicago for Dummies” (are you guys trying to tell us something??? :)) and the last one is called “Weird Illinois,” and it’s full of all kinds of interesting stories about UFOs and ghosts and creepy roads and strange houses in Illinois. And after reading some of it, I’ve decided I shouldn’t move to Chicago. (Just kidding!! I don’t care if the whole city IS haunted… I still want to move…) One thing I’ve been doing is perusing the guide books for restaurants near Rick’s hotel. And thanks to these books, Rick has FINALLY found a barbecue place up north that he likes. And last night, he and Eric tried a place called Wildfire that they really liked. Of course, I’m a little jealous that Rick and Eric are the only people benefitting from my Chicago restaurant research… I need to get up there again soon…

Well, that’s about all the random stuff I can manage today. Hope everyone had a great weekend!

Brush and floss... and maybe try boxers next time...

So I had a dentist appointment this morning, to get a crown fitted for one of my night-grinding fractured molars. (Seriously, I think I grind my teeth more when I’m stressed, and it stresses me out to know I’m grinding my teeth – it’s a horrible cycle…) What a lot of fun THAT was. Actually, my dentist has iPod movies that you can watch on these little movie goggles, which is a nice distraction when you have fifteen pairs of hands in your mouth. Although honestly, really not ENOUGH of a distraction…

There were only about two dozen movies to choose from, and before he started, the dentist asked me which movie I was going to watch. “C’mon, you chose a chick flick, right?” he joked. I then held up the iPod to show my chosen movie – Live Free or Die Hard. The dentist was impressed with my departure from the girly entertainment that (apparently) most of his female patients choose. But I chose that movie for two reasons – one, because I’ve seen it before and I knew I wouldn’t be there long enough to watch an entire movie; and two, because action movies really don’t require much concentration. You don’t have to pay attention to an action movie so much as just watch it and think, “ooooo… cool…” when something explodes. Because while I may have been “watching a movie,” I was still much too concerned about what was going on in my mouth to really CARE about it.

But I survived (albeit with a very numb face… and while I’m grateful for Novocain when it’s needed, it gets a bit annoying after you’ve been home for three hours and just want to EAT like a normal person…). And the assistant at the dentist’s office always gives you flowers after they’ve spent an hour tormenting you. Which is a nice touch, even if it doesn’t bring the feeling back into my face…

When I first arrived at the office this morning, I took a seat in the waiting area and glanced over at the front desk, where a man was standing and talking to the office manager. I didn’t pay that much attention to him… but I did notice he was wearing a black leather jacket and a pair of black jeans. And then something between the jacket and the jeans caught my eye – he was wearing (and, unfortunately, displaying for all to see) a pair of Calvin Klein thong underwear. The waistband (with its prominent “Calvin Klein” logo) was a good two inches above the waist of his jeans, and the jacket wasn’t long enough to cover it. And I did what anyone would do when they noticed a guy wearing an obvious pair of thong underwear – I started laughing. I then had to cover my mouth and busy myself with my cell phone, in an attempt to appear amused by something completely unrelated to Thong Underwear Guy. But dude, seriously – if you’re gonna leave the house in a pair of thong underwear, please either a) wear pants that sufficiently cover all traces of thong fabric; or b) wear a shirt that is long enough to cover said fabric. For your sake AND the sake of those around you…

So I am now going to go drink the cappuccino my mom was nice enough to bring me… and hopefully my mouth has regained enough feeling so I can actually DRINK it…

The loot...

Now how do I decide what to eat first???

Tea with your sister (or brother...)

I have to give a shout out to my new friend Amber, who recently discovered my blog and has been reading it when she’s supposed to be working. (Which I think is pretty much what EVERYONE who reads my blog does… get back to work, people…) I “met” Amber on Facebook, and as soon as I found out she loved M. Night Shyamalan’s “Lady in the Water,” I knew I’d discovered a kindred spirit. I mean, apparently you have to be some kind of really bizarre, unique person to appreciate Lady in the Water… there aren’t a lot of us LITW fans out there. LITW bashers outnumber LITW fans by about 99 to 1… (Hey, I’ve never been one to follow the crowd…) Anyway, thanks for all the nice compliments about my blog, Amber! :)

Speaking of people getting back to work (I’m serious, stop reading – you have stuff to do…) – I recently finished a project I was working on for Jen’s company up in Chicago. They have a line of perpetual calendars – you know, those flip-book type calendars that have a different picture or saying or puzzle or piece of trivia on each page. So you flip the page to the next date every day, and there’s something new to read or look at. This particular project I was working on was a “sister” calendar. So every day when you flip the page, there’s a new quote or saying about sisters. Things like, “sisters are great!” or “sisters are the best!” – but perhaps a bit more eloquent. Now, 315 of those pages were already taken care of – either by other present-day writers, or possibly by DEAD writers who already wrote things about sisters and can’t complain about anyone using their words. (Ha! That’s right, Benjamin Franklin – there’s not a thing you can do about it, is there?)

So that left 50 empty pages in need of sayings about sisters. And that task fell to yours truly. Now, when I first started to write these things, I had the idea that it would be a pretty simple project. After all, I was basically just writing 50 different sentences. How hard can it be to write 50 sentences? But somewhere between the twentieth and twenty-fifth saying, it hit me that I was only about half finished… and what’s more, those first 20 or 25 sayings had been much more difficult to write than I’d anticipated. Once you get past “sisters are great!” and “sisters are the best!” it starts to become a lot more complicated. There’s only so much you can SAY about a sister (actually, I guess there are 365 things you can say about a sister… but I could only manage 50…).

But I was determined to submit my 50 sayings at the beginning of the year (because they’d told me the deadline was the beginning of the year and I like to be punctual…). While we were in Chicago, we liked to walk over to the Argo Tea Shop in the freezing cold every morning, and hang out around a table clutching warm beverages. And what better place for creative inspiration than a shop that sells “teapuccinos” and “maté latés.” So I bummed a pen off my dad and some post-it notes off my mom and started brainstorming. This particular version of “brainstorming” consisted of asking everyone else if they had any thoughts about sisters, and listening to the barrage of comments that ensued. Since Eric was with us, things never really took a turn toward “serious” suggestions – instead, the object of the game seemed to be “who can make up the funniest saying about sisters.” At one point, Rick did attempt to offer a genuine idea, proposing “sisters are inseparable.” This, however, evolved into “sisters are inseparable if they’re joined at the head or share major organs… otherwise, surgery may be possible.” And I’m just not sure that’s the direction they wanted to go with the calendar…

Needless to say, I didn’t use any of the “suggestions” my family threw out. However, just sitting around the table talking and laughing and enjoying the warmth of a tea shop was enough to inspire me – I wrote about fifteen (serious) sayings in that shop. And I wrote the remainder on my flight back to Austin, so I was able to turn in all 50 sayings on time. It’s funny how something as simple as drinking tea on a cold day with your family can be such a fun experience… I hope I need that kind of “inspiration” again someday soon… :)

New year, new Tootsie Rolls...

So we’re back in Austin (well, some of us – Rick is still in Chicago… and Eric is still in Chicago, too… but Eric is always in Chicago, so he doesn’t really count). We had a great time and really enjoyed walking blocks and blocks in the freezing cold weather – seriously, it was a rather refreshing change from the 60- and 70-degree weather we’re used to. And we had the good fortune of having some calm winds most of the time we were there, which made the cold much easier to bear. The only day it was really COLD in the city was Saturday, when the wind picked up. That also happened to be the day we decided to try a new restaurant that was a dozen or so blocks from the hotel, and eschewed the idea of a taxi. About halfway there, as the wind whipped around our faces and I could no longer tell if my nose was actually still on my face, we began to ask each other whose idea it was to walk. (I think we finally decided to blame dad… :))

But the cold (and a few Christmas gift cards) gave me an excuse to buy some new cold weather wear. (Incidentally, I really don’t highly recommend shopping on Michigan Avenue on a Saturday afternoon shortly after the holiday season. But I’ve never been a fan of crushing throngs of people. If you happen to be a fan of crushing throngs of people, go for it…) I got a new scarf, gloves and a hat that were all much warmer than the previous scarves, gloves and hats I’d been wearing. Always great to have a legitimate excuse to go shopping…

Well, now that the holidays are over, it’s time to get back on track with eating well and exercising on a regular basis. I always let things slide during the holiday season – there’s always so much to do, and everywhere you look some kind of horrible (but delicious) treat is staring back, daring you not to eat it. The peppermint mochas at Starbucks alone must’ve added a couple thousand calories a week to my usual intake. So now that they’ve been removed from the menu, I’ll no longer have that temptation staring me in the face every time I walk into a Starbucks. Back to plain old cappuccinos. But off course no resolve to eat better comes without a challenge or two – no sooner did I start writing this post than Rick called to tell me about the meeting he had with the Tootsie Roll corporation this morning. And those Tootsie Roll employees are very generous people – they gave Rick all kinds of free candy. So now he’ll be bringing home who-knows-how-many Tootsie Roll products (he described it as something like, “this must be every kind of candy they make”). And I have to be sure to ration said candy in a reasonable way, so I’m not ODing on sugar and calories…

But the pedometer is back on (over 5000 steps so far today) and I went grocery shopping last night and bought all kinds of healthy food, so hopefully I’ll be back on track in no time. (And a little Tootsie Roll now and then never hurt anyone… :))

A few pics from Chicago:

Kiko seems very happy at Eric's place...


Eric's new carpet... pretty nice, right? (I helped pick it out... :))


Me and Rick at the Argo Tea Shop


This is like the best picture anyone has ever taken of me...


Me and... uh... Pancho Villa?