September 28, 2005   Check out my Flickr.   Oh!  Christmas is coming, so please don't forget to plan early.     What I'm listening to right now:  The Cure - Fascination Street       September 25, 2005   Hey hey!  I'm back from Las Vegas.                                          My company had it's annual GM conference at the Mandalay Bay and it was beyond amazing.  Imagine over 5,000 GM's, DOSs (director of sales), owners, and corporate people in a beautiful 1.5 million square-foot ballroom at the Mandalay Bay hotel.  I learned so much great stuff, and, at the same time, was blown away by how awesome my company is.  I am now so amazingly determined to come back from next year's GM conference in Toronto with a handful of awards for my hotel.    Kind of a funny sidenote...my old GM from my last hotel broke her knee while at conference.  I was the lucky one who got to push her around from session to session all week, and since she knows so many people, they'd constantly stop us and ask how she hurt herself.  I felt the need to come up with a different excuse each time, from "She got wasted and jumped from her room on the 19th floor", to the ever popular "One of Sigfried and Roys' tigers bit and dragged her offstage."  The real cause for her injury was...pantyhose.  She was getting ready for an evening reception and was putting on pantyhose, slipped, and fell, knee-first on the corner of her bed's box spring.             So last Friday I went on a little trip, flying from Las Vegas to the Bar 10 Ranch in Arizona where I went on a 15-mile (each way) ATV trip into the Grand Canyon.  Here's a picture of me...                                                                                  And later in the day, when we were waiting for the plane to pick us up, we did some skeet shooting (something I haven't done since 1989).  Kind of weird to be able to say I did that in the Grand Canyon.    I've been bitten by the Flickr bug and it's made me look back at a lot of the pictures I took in Europe and it's brought two powerful feelings to the surface.  First:  I miss Paris like a mofo.  I would give anything to feel the hard cobblestones under my feet...to be sitting at a cafe watching the world go hurriedly by while I sit and sip a hot chocolate and eat the single best tasting piece of bread I've ever had the luxury to put to my lips...to look around and see, touch, and experience the sights that I read about in history class so long ago...to hear such a beautiful language being spoken everywhere around me - swaddling me so comfortably like a blanket on a delightfully cold and snowy evening...wow.  The second is how incredibly lucky I am to have experienced not just one "Trip Of A Lifetime" by spending almost three weeks in Paris, with one of the most freedom-filled moments when I was riding a bike around Paris and Versailles, but also to have been so fortunate to have traveled and experienced so much of this world...from going to Australia when I was 13 for the 16th World Scout Jamboree, to zooming around a river in Northern California on my friends' boat, with Mount Diablo looming in the Background, to last Friday when I was riding an ATV into the Grand Canyon for the view of a lifetime, to driving down into a snowy Yosemite with friends in late December, to riding Category 5 rapids on the Penobscot River, wicked deep in the Northern Maine woods...to so many other things I can't remember at the moment.  I'm to thankful for having seen and done so much in life and with so much more to look forward to.      What I'm listening to right now:  Lincoln - What Up         September 15, 2005   I feel like I've been talking for a while about how I'm starting to write a novel.  I am, but right now I'm in preparation stage of it, where I'm spending more time researching stuff than actually writing.  My outline/raw idea file is about a dozen pages right now and growing pretty quickly.  The big big part is truly the research because I want it to be as factually correct as possible, even thought most of what I'm writing about, I've created in my mind.  I'm sure it'll be years before this is actually published, but I'm still very excited about it.  I have noticed that I've been subconsciously immersing myself in all things to do with the book, from my desktop picture to what my license plate will be (I'm not crazy about the standard Alabama plate, so I'm going to get one of the nicer looking ones, and they come with free personalization) as ways to keep me focused on the book.  Yeah, I could go the instant gratification route and submit one of my quicker, quirkier ideas to something like McSweeney's, but this book really seems to be the way to go for me right now.  I have too many great ideas coming too quickly to ignore all of this.       Oh, we got our free tickets in the mail for this.      What I'm listening to right now:  Depeche Mode - I Feel You       September 13, 2005   So today a huge car-hauler pulled into my hotel's parking lot and dropped off Kari's car.  Yay!  Now I can drive myself to work.    Next week I'll be in Las Vegas at my company's annual convention and this guy is performing at the closing ceremonies.  Never heard of him before, but his music sounds pretty good.  Kind of like a younger and better Harry Connick Jr.  (and I know I'll get my ass kicked by Kari for that...she has a framed publicity photo of Harry signed "To Kari - Love, Harry" from one of the several times she's met him).  I don't gamble at all, but I've always been interested in seeing the sights of Las Vegas, especially the hotels.  Our hotel brand has rented out the House Of Blues for a private party next Tuesday.  We were told "bring your dancin' shoes!"  I haven't been to a House Of Blues since visiting the very first HOB in Cambridge, Massachusetts the week it closed a couple of years ago, so this should be neat.  Since my return flight isn't until 11:58 pm next Friday night, I might take a little trip over to the Hoover Dam.      I realized that I took it for granted that I lived in a state with awesome breweries like New Hampshire.  The only brewery within hundreds of miles is this one, and they suck reallllly bad (kind of a funny sidenote that three of the top five raters of this brewery in Alabama are from New Hampshire [me, my brother, and our friend Mike]).  I really miss Smuttynose (which, btw, was rated the 27th best brewery in the world...saw this on CNN actually).   You know, I really like this apartment a lot.  It's the largest (twice as large as our old apartment in New Hampshire), nicest, and best floor plan of any place I've lived in my adult life.  Not only that, but our stuff looks perfect in here.  Heck, we've covered the annoying-looking metal fuse-box door with our French Magnetic Poetry set.  It's the perfect place for it and it won't get mixed in with the English set on the fridge.  There's so much beautiful wall space so I can hang up all of my framed photographs, Kari can hang up all of her vast artwork collection (she tries to add a few pieces a year to her already huge collection), our concert ticket and autograph collection, and plenty of room to spare...all for hundreds of dollars less than what we paid in New Hampshire.  I can't wait for a chilly night (which will probably never happen here in the "deep south") when we can start the fireplace and spend a nice quiet evening watching Zoe try not to set her tail on fire (I wish I had pictures from the last time she did that - t'was wicked funny).  We spend some time every night just sitting on our outside deck talking and enjoying the cool nights, as well as quality time working on our writing stuff (me in the office, listening to music and working on the outline of my book because I can't be near a TV [I totally zone out and become a mindless zombie when the TV's on], and Kari on the chaise part of the couch watching Law & Order while writing on her iBook [she totally gets consumed by listening to music and can't focus on anything else, so she needs the TV on in the background and can work happily]).    Speaking of Kari, she's getting prepped for her helping out/interning at the Third Coast Audio Festival next month in Chicago.  While she's there, her and her friend Karie will be going to see a taping of Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, the wicked funny and informative show on NPR, as well as hopefully meet her longtime hero and alternate boyfriend, Ira Glass.    This weekend we're going to volunteer to help fix up an old, unused hotel in the area that will house over 500 people left homeless by the hurricane.  I guess the owner of the defunct hotel asked local church groups to fix it up so it can be up to code so people can live in it.  Last weekend alone over 1,500 people showed up to work on it, so we thought we'd pitch in and help.          What I'm listening to right now:  The Dead Milkmen - At The Moment  Whenever I link to the lyrics of a song, I try really hard to find a site that doesn't have pop-ups (I use Mozilla Firebird as my web browser because it blocks all pop-ups), and wow, it's getting really hard lately to find sites that don't use pop-up ads.        September 7, 2005   Howdy hi!    So we now live in Huntsville.  The picture of the rockets doesn't do it justice.  Those things are frickin' huge and I use them as landmarks when I'm lost anywhere in the area.  Good thing they're right near my hotel, otherwise I'd always be lost.    Thanks to all of those who write to see if we were ok last week.  Huntsville is up near the Tennessee border, so by the time the hurricane got up here it wasn't that strong (it only knocked over two chairs out in the grill area at my hotel).  I'm kind of freaked out by the possibility of natural disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes.  Growing up in Massachusetts, the only thing you had to worry about was a big snow storm.  Big deal, you shovel and you're all set.  Not much you can do about a tornado except pray it doesn't land on you.  The night the hurricane passed through, the weather alert radio at the hotel said "Tornado alert number 714 for 2005...".  Geez, that averages out to something like three a day so far this year.    In two weeks I'll be here on a business trip, would you believe.  Every year our hotel company has its annual convention in a different city, and this year it's in Las Vegas.  Pretty darn cool.  I've always wanted to go to Vegas, not to gamble (8 years ago I went to Mohegan Sun, lost $100, and have never had any desire to gamble since) but to see all the neat stuff in the city and take pictures.  Ideally, I'd love to go whitewater rafting in the Grand Canyon, but I know I won't have time for that.    Back to more normal stuff...we're probably half-way unpacked now.  Unpacking has been an emotionally mixed can of nuts.  On one hand, it's like a giant-ass Christmas where each thing you pull out of a box and unwrap from the packing paper is a treasure we haven't seen in weeks...but on the other hand, seeing our things poorly packed, badly scratched, chipped, shattered, missing, or destroyed has been like the most evil Halloween full of awful tricks and no treats.  We haven't had the courage to open the tinkling-sounding crates of heirloom china.  One of the mover guys in Huntsville (different crew than those who packed the stuff up) said it's the worst packing job he's seen in over 20 years in the moving business.  We have to fill out a claim form and wait for someone to come and inspect it all, so we'll see what happens.    Once the price of gas goes down, we're going to start exploring the area.  First on our list is to go to Tennessee, which was absolutely beautiful.    I'll post new pictures later.     What I'm listening to right now:  Buffalo Tom - Summer        September 6, 2005   Yay!  Our internet was hooked up today!    The short story of the past few weeks:  We flew down to Huntsville, found an apartment, flew back to New Hampshire, drove down to Alabama, moved in, the movers "delivered" our stuff (in countless pieces), and here we are, in a half-unpacked apartment.    The long story:  it's too long to type now.  Mebbe tomorrow.   Kari would have updated her website, but our wireless router didn't survive the move (they packed it at the bottom of a box of heavy books).       What I'm listening to right now:  Nothing.  I haven't hooked up my speakers yet.