Imation? Imazing!

This weekend I needed to pull some information off of my thumb drive (aka, my lifeline). I save everything to my thumb drive. ...I am even learning to keep a backup of my thumb drive, although I haven't backed it up since about six months ago when I thought I had lost it and spent three hours frantically ripping apart my house until I found it buried under a stack of papers on my desk. That's usually when I back things up--right after a big scare. (And I know I'm not the only one who waits until a near-loss experience to back up their stuff.)

During the six months since my last backup I have produced hundreds of files filled with bits and bytes of this and that: pictures, resumes, ebooks, articles I may never have a chance to read, passwords, plans, ideas, favorite links, and page after page of writing that may or may not ever see a publishing house.

I had the best intentions of backing up those newly minted documents just as soon as I got around to it. In fact, I considered doing it this weekend about 2 seconds after I realized that I could not remember where I had last plugged in that elusive thumb drive. After searching every USB port in my house, I determined that I must have left it plugged into my computer at work.

This morning as soon as I got to work I inspected my work laptop and docking station. No thumb drive. I scavenged through my drawers, under my desk, behind piles of books, in cabinets. No thumb drive.

A mental list of all the files stored on the thumb drive began forming in my head. Aaagh! Too many files. After a few minutes of contemplating all the many ways I could have dropped it between work and the parking lot or the parking lot and home, I shoved my hands into my jacket pockets and resigned myself to moving on.

That's when I felt it. Something in my pocket brushed against my fingers. I grasped on. It felt like a small piece of plastic, or metal, or... my thumb drive! I yanked it out of my pocket and sure enough, there it was in all of its silver glory.

My elation was brief, for I realized something almost as immediately as I pulled it from my jacket pocket--the very same pocket attached to the jacket that I had only hours earlier pulled from the dryer!

My jacket had spent the weekend soaking in the washer and tumbling through the dryer. Could it have survived? Certainly not. All of those delicate circuits and gizmos that make up the inner workings of the drive would surely have shorted out. With an attitude of defeat I slipped the thumb drive into the USB port on the side of my docking station prepared to confirm the worst.

Silent. Then, a flickering blue light on the thumb drive. My breathe caught as I looked at the screen. Up popped a menu. I scanned the menu. The tension in my shoulders released and my breathing resumed as all of my lost files stared back at me from the monitor, waiting anxiously for me to continue feeding them with bytes of this and bits of that.

I leaned in to read the brand etched on my thumb drive--Imation.

No, I am not getting paid to endorse Imation but kudos to them for a drive well done!

What kind of person?

What kind of person steals a pink breast cancer awareness ribbon off a car?

What kind of person steals a pink breast cancer awareness ribbon off the car of a breast cancer survivor?

What kind of idiotic person steals a pink breast cancer awareness ribbon off the car of a breast cancer survivor who also happens to be a coworker and the car is parked in front of their office building?

I don't know, but I'm just waiting for said idiot to display the pink ribbon on their car and then drive back into our parking lot. I'm disheartened to know that instead of representing the fight of breast cancer survivors the world over, that particular pink ribbon will be a mobile advertisement of stupidity.

Shoo Bee Dhoop

Last night Mom and I treated ourselves to a little Pasand--one of my favorite restaurants here in the valley of the fiery furnace of death. It's a small little Indian restaurant hidden in the corner of a strip mall behind a decrepit gas station. But, the food is great and the people who work there are very nice.

On the other side of the strip mall, somewhere between B&B Pool Supply and the dry cleaners is Little India--very Little India. It's an Indian grocery store and we stopped on the way home from dinner to hunt down some curry that mom could take with her back to Wisconsin. In Wisconsin you can get Cornish pasties to your heart's content, but break from European cuisine and you're outta luck.

Without being able to read most of the labels we managed to find what appeared to be curry. We also stocked up on a few other powders and potions that were not nearly as identifiable, but they looked tasty.

In the corner of the store, behind all of the flours and tapioca pearls I noticed some soap and incense. I snagged a box of incense because I'm a sandalwood addict. After we checked out and were walking to the car I started examining my box of incense a little closer. While there was a picture of burning incense on the front of the box, I realized that nowhere on the label did it actually say it was incense. In fact, the only English on the label was this: Hari Darshan De-luxe Dhoop luxuriantly perfumed made with pure ghee & herbs.

De-luxe dhoop? What's dhoop? I opened the box, which smelled terrifically of incense, and inside were long sticks of a brown, sticky sort of paste. Hmmm.... Was it really incense? If so, how do you burn sticky paste?



As soon as we got home, mom took to the internet and sure enough, we had found incense. In all my incense-burning years I guess I never realized that incense came in sticky forms as well as dry. But according to wikipedia, the most trusted resource on the Internet (yikes!), dhoop is "an extruded incense, lacking a core bamboo stick. Many dhoops have very concentrated scents and put out a lot of smoke when burned."

So, I broke off a piece of my dhoop, rolled it into a cone shape, and set it on fire. Sure enough, burned just like incense should and it put off a great smell without the extra woody burn that comes from stick or cone incense. I think I like it.

Mom liked it too, although the incense might have made us a both little dhoopy while we were working on my latest crochet project...

Rat Race Revisited

Who remembers the movie Rat Race (the semi-remake of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World)? You know, it’s the one where a casino owner sends a bunch of gamblers on a race from Las Vegas, Nevada to Silver City, New Mexico. The owner puts 2 million dollars in a train station locker, then hands each of the gamblers a key to the locker and whoever gets to the train station locker first gets to keep the money.

In the movie they all eventually make it to the train station. In real life, they would have spent the rest of their lives wandering aimlessly around the Silver City desert because, as I recently discovered, there is no train station in Silver City.

Mom has been in town visiting for the past week and taking care of me while I recover from my car accident. We decided to take a road trip this past weekend to escape the blazing heat of summer. We’ve been to every possible destination in Arizona, so we set our sights on our long-forgotten neighbor to the east: New Mexico. Silver City is about 4 hours from Mesa, so it seemed ideal for an overnight road trip. Not to mention, it was basically the nearest town to the east. (Living in Arizona is a lot like being stranded in the desert with 6 million other strandees.)

On our way out of town we stopped at our favorite book store, Changing Hands, to pick up some quick reads for the trip. I’m still on crutches (big surprise there) so a lot of reading and a little hiking was the order of the day.

Our friendly bookstore guide suggested that we read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. It was a quick teen read and she said it would have is in stitches laughing. As she was the book expert, we took her up on her suggestion and bought the book. We read half on the way to Silver City and half on the way home. It was a pretty funny book, and its setting was a reservation town which was very fitting as most of our drive was through reservation country. We did find ourselves “yadda, yadda, yadda-ing” our way through quite a few pages of the book in order to keep it G-rated, so I won’t be sending the book on to my nephew to read.

After hours of driving o’er hill and dale and desert we rolled into Silver City, New Mexico. The hustle and bustle of city life was stark change from the long, drawn-out desert drive. Ha ha! Not really. There was no change and there was definitely no hustle or bustle to be found. Like many of the mining towns that dot the landscape, most of the downtown buildings were boarded up, dilapidated, old-timey storefronts that likely hadn’t seen customers since the gold rushes of the 1800s.

We were in the market for a quaint little Bed and Breakfast somewhere on the edge of town. After a long day of internet searching, the closest we came to a B&B was a quaint little KOA Kabin in a Kampground outside of town.

After settling in we drove out to a place called City of Rocks. We drove for miles across rolling hills covered in sagebrush, then out of the middle of nowhere appeared a hill covered in boulders the size of houses. They looked like they had rolled off a mountain or broken from a cliff, except there were no mountains or cliffs around them. It was like a little New Mexican Stonehenge. We drove around the alien rock features and spied in at the little campsites that were nestled between the rocks.

Later that night we thought we’d find a granny-style café for dinner. I pulled up my GPS and within seconds we had a long list of cafes. We picked the first one on the list and drove to the coordinates. It wasn’t there. Never fear, we had our list so off we went to find the second café. It was closed. Number 3: boarded up. Number 4: Not there.... We ditched the GPS and started looking for buildings with lights on in the windows.

We finally found something open… well, I think they were ready to close when we showed up. After all, it was 8:00 on a Saturday night. But, they were hospitable and served us our meatloaf and mashed ‘taters as the scurried around folding up tablecloths and putting the lights out in the rest of the building.

We kozied up in our kamp kabin for the night and listened to the rain plink, plinking on the roof while we watched Rat Race on the laptop.

The next morning we drove up to the Gila Cliff Dwellings, nestled inconveniently in the middle of Gila National Forest. I’ve never been on a more winding road. It was definitely not overdeveloped. Poor mom drove all the way to and from the ruins and I think our two greatest feats that day were 1) We didn’t vomit on the drive, and 2) We managed to climb down a ladder on a cliff, each carrying a crutch in one hand. Why I didn’t bring my camera, I don’t know. It was hilarious and I’m sure we had all of the other hikers at the edge of their seats just waiting for us to topple off the ladder...

...never fear. We made it down the ladder, wound our way back down the cliffs, then down the twisting, turning road, o'er hill and dale and desert, and back home to the blazing inferno of Arizona.

It's supposed to be 105 degrees today.

I hate that commercial!

So, there is some commercial on right now where Stacy London (from What Not to Wear) goes on and on about how hair is "the most important finishing touch". That commercial makes me want to rip out my hair every time I see it... well, if I had hair! It's a very insensitive commercial, and so I say to chemo patients the world over: BOYCOTT PANTENE.

Alright, so we don't have hair and don't use shampoo so a boycott isn't going to do much but I still cringe a little every time I see the commercial.

I've had a bunch of folks ask to see pix of my hair so below is the chronology of my hair loss and gain. What's worse: hair suddenly all dropping off or waiting for it to grow? Waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting for it to grow back!

What's worse? Coming or going?