High Plains Panhandler

Christmas Eve

As is tradition, we met up with some friends at the China Star Chinese food buffet tonight. We do this every year on Christmas Eve. This year the kids have renamed it The Pig Out Buffet.

Even though the dumplings were questionable, and the tea refills came sporadically, we had a great time mixing and matching food. Alex, in particular, looked like he was having fun mixing and matching ice cream and broccoli and then trying to convince the other kids to eat it. This compelled me to tell the story of how, in high school, a few of us replaced the cream in our Twinkies with mayonnaise to thwart an obnoxious Twinkie thief. Ha ha! Oh, Twinkie Mayo barf in the cafeteria! Good times. 

At dinner, the kids (there were seven kids in all) tried out some Christmas carols, which would have been obnoxious if the restaurant were filled. But since we were the only table on our side of the entire place, it was hard to tell them to stop the cheer.

Afterward, while we were checking out, I tried to impress the China Star owner by saying Merry Christmas in Mandarin. It sounds something like shen-dan-qwy-luh, and I'm sure I slaughtered it since she immediately corrected my pronunciation. At the same time though, her eyes and smile grew wide and she said thank you in Chinese. I could understand that one!

With my Chinese mastery under my belt, we headed home to take care of thre other traditional things: get the cookies and milk out for Santa, toss out some reindeer food on the lawn, and read "The Polar Express" with everyone huddled around right before bed.

And then, our outside landing lights still on but our indoor lights off, the kids shuffled off to bed, whispering among themselves about their wake-up plan for the morning (Megan wanted to set her alarm, but we told her she wouldn't have to worry about that). 

Silent and still, we waited for the magic. 

聖誕快樂!

Alex Turns Nine

For Alex's ninth birthday we had a house full of boy power, which we've found usually manifests itself in lightsaber battles, loud discussions about lightsabers, or very greasy gaseous emissions.

This year, after a jungle gym party complete with Yoda cake, Alex invited a few friends to spent the night. My job was to set up a tent in the house (it was a little too brisk outside) where they'd sleep. Once the boys finished a marathon Wii session and mandatory lightsaber duels, they decked the tent out in glow sticks so they could, ostensibly, read a few books. I, ever vigilant, kept my eye on them from the other room while also trying to justify watching Stargate Universe.

 

Electric Lights

Friday night, in the chin numbing chill, we huddled together near our favorite spot downtown and took in the sights of the annual Amarillo Electric Light Parade. The parade lacked previous year's floats carrying bloody crucifixes bathed in creepy red lights but made up for it with cloggers, shriners, an assorted collection of candy throwers, and legions of pickup trucks.

As is tradition, the float people showered us with candy, one Almond Joy mini bar hitting me squarely in the forehead. Alex and Megan were quick to scoop up candy that littered the street, and they came up with quite the collection, helped in large part by the lack of any competition. (After all, what parents in their right mind would bring children out on a cold night like this and make them stand around waving at the local weather guy and other celebrities from such far flung float sponsors such as United Pump Supply and Two Men And A Trailer moving company?)

All Region Orchestra

Here we are, waiting patiently for the start of the All Region Orchestra. Colleen's on cello. Megan, obscured by the conductor, is on violin.

The Coffee Crawl

I need to catch up, so I’ll start from here and work my way back. 

This past Saturday, a warm spring day at the end of November (good preparation for the dumping of snow the next day), Suzanne and I hopped on our bikes and joined the C3 Coffee Crawl, during which I had one quarter of a leftover donut, one bottle of water, a cup of too-sweet Chai, and a glass of iced tea.

The Coffee Crawl, similar to pub crawls of olde only with pedaling instead of staggering, was a fundraiser for the High Plains Food Bank and, I think, was the first of its kind in our Fair City. We started downtown, on the first floor of the Chase bank building (for Amarillo, a skyscraper of many floors and more than four elevators), and after a few rousing speeches outside the sponsor of our ride, the Ground Cafe coffee shop, our gaggle of cyclists mushed onward, hogging two otherwise empty lanes of the road. 

I have to say, this was quite fun. All sorts of shapes and sizes of bikes came out for the ride. Some Seussian in height and style, some old, some wide, some frighteningly expensive. It was great to be part of a massive group of plain, happy riders, not hammerheads trying to make 100k in under six minutes. Goose horns honked and little bells dinged as we rode  . . . well, cheerfully. That’s a good word to describe it.

Our first stop was a new bike shop in town called BikeLife, a small but very bike savvy place. I had no idea they were even there, so it was great piece of PR on their part to introduce them to slackers like me who, apparently, need to keep up more with local biking news. They were not, of course, a coffee shop, but they did have tiny cups you could fill from a push top coffee dispenser. The size of the cups forced people to drink delicately, pinkies extended.

This is where I first noticed the Woman With Dog. I’m not sure what kind of dog it was. I’ll call it the Small White breed. While riding she kept it attached to her body in some kind of sling. When we stopped, she let it walk around, but it toddled frantically as if the batteries inside of it were slightly too powerful. Or maybe it was the coffee.

Our second stop was Hastings, the mothership of a chain of entertainment stores that carries books, music, video games, movies, and gum. The coffee shop area here, although feeling slightly corporate, was pretty nice. I skipped getting a drink because they use Chai-In-A-Box, which actually I think everyone uses, but some shops are just trickier about hiding it.

Stop three was at  Shawn Martin’s Art Cafe, a local art-slash-coffee bar. Suzanne and I settled here for a bit with the group (now about half our original touring size), and enjoyed some tasty beverages. On the table next to us was a interrupted game of Lord of the Rings Risk, which I had a fleeting selfish thought to join.

Our final stop was an coffee shop on Historic Route 66 (this is a fragment of the famous road that used to stretch from Chicago to LA). This place was called the 806, which is the area code for Amarillo. 806 also spells Fuzzy Shoe if you use the Harry Lorayne Memory Technique.

We took a long break here, talking with our friend Jennifer whose husband is a Merchant Marine and knows a thing or two about pirates. We sat on some old furniture circa College Dorm Room Age and lazed about until it was time to go. The bike group, now a loose collection, was supposed to move on back to the Ground Cafe a bit further downtown, but Suzanne and I ended our tour at the 806. By now it was close to noon, and the kids had had the run of the house for about three hours, so it was time to get back.

And what do you know? When we got back the house was tidy and the kids were happily reading. Those sneaky kids!

Video is here! Picts of the coffee crawl are here. They’re on the inexcusably horrible Amarillo Globe News website. Just focus your eyes on the five centimeter square content box and you’ll be fine. Otherwise the flashing, shiny ads will drive you insane.

It's Stingray City, Sweetheart

Our second cruise excursion was to Grand Cayman Island where we were going to see stingrays.

Unlike Jamaica, here our giant cruise ship was too big for the dock so we had to take a tender, a small shuttle boat from our ship to the shore. Under instructions from our tour guide, we hopped on the first tender and got to shore quickly, which gave us plenty of time for early morning photos of our group with our ship in the background looking oddly surreal in the early light.

Dexter from Fantaseatours was our tour guide. After digging around for a while on the web, I decided on him because I found this article about Dexter's campaign against stingray injury from incautious boat captains. Plus he runs a 38 foot trimaran that he said he'd put under full sail if the wind was right. It sounded great, so I chartered the boat just for our group (23 of us were going on this trip, the maximum Dexter could carry). 

We met Dexter at the dock, a large outdoor square surrounded by shops and pavilions. In the square's shadeless center was a line of tour guides holding up signs for their various trips, most having to do with stingrays, and as the guides saw the cruise ship people start trickling in, they began pitching their services: "Stingray tours here!", "Sail the pirate ship!", "Snorkling!"

Dexter had to drive us to his dock, but since we had too many people for his van, we split into two vehicles. The drive to the dock was quick, less than fifteen minutes, although Dexter asked us a few times if we wanted him to swing by the grocery store for snacks (Dexter only had water and soft drinks on board), but we wanted to beat the other tour guides to the stingrays. Any distractions would have slowed us down.

The trip out to Stingray City, a shallow sandbar where stingrays have been congregating for years now (for the free food) took about 45 minutes. We all lounged on the front of Dexter's boat, the kids particularly liked hanging out on the nets near the front of the boat, dangling their feet into the water below. A rainstorm opened up on top of us and kept us nice and drenched for a third of the trip. When I asked Dexter how long the rain would last, he pointed at the clouds, the horizon, the water and then made a twisty motion with his hand. "Not long," he said. "It goes away soon. No worries."

He had a preternatural knowledge of the weather because, a few minutes later, the rain stopped as if on his delayed command.

Except for a few rubber motor boats that raced us and then beat us to the stingrays, we were the first boat out there, but it took Dexter a little while to anchor so some other boats showed up while we were parallel parking. Now I have to say I quite appreciated how careful and sensitive Dexter was to the stingray environment, especially watching how the other, much larger boats (they're called cattle boats - large boats filled with cruise ship passengers that appear like an invading Spanish Armada) simply plow into the middle of everything, drop anchor, and disgorge person after person after person into the water, as if shooing off paratroopers over Normandy.

We did get some good chances at petting and holding stingrays (these, by the by, are friendly, non-aggressive stingrays; they've been fed by local fishermen and now tourists for the past 35 years so there wasn't anything to worry about although we were given a lecture about being calm and not kicking up the sand on the ocean bottom - stingrays, apparently, do not appreciate these kinds of things). A large stingray, easily six feet wide, wrapped itself around me like a bath towel.

Some of the kids, of course, had to panic and kick sand and do the things we were instructed not to do, but I think the stingrays understood that the small humans always did this, and the stingrays, for the most part, paid them no attention, targeting instead Dexter, who had a baggie of tiny squid and was generously distributing them among the stingrays.

Once the other boats began invading, we sailed off to a spot for some snorkling, and once there we could easily see the new floating marina that had developed around the once lonely Stingray City. Snorkling was great although I had to compensate several times for a few ocean swells that filled my snorkling tube with salt water. Megan and I were partners, and I tried to keep close to her, one time panicking when I thought I lost her and whacking my leg against a stump of coral. I hated to do that, but I hated even more the stinging three inch cut on my leg, spilling blood that I knew would instantly attract all kinds of snaggletoothed sharks. That's when I grabbed Megan (who had been right next to me the entire time) and gurgled, "Groog goob karakb." Although sounding like Klingon this was salt water talk for, "Let's go back to the boat."

We made out way back under full sail, a nice and leisurely ride and then we opted for lunch back on the giant cruise ship. While we ate on one of the top decks, we saw the tourist pirate boat sail far below us, it's Jolly Roger flying threateningly. That ship was so very tiny compared to us, and I wondered what would happen if we could take our cruise ship back in time 250 years or so.

We would be the new pirates of the Caribbean, only dressed in tuxes and t-shirts. We'd put all the other pirates to shame.

And based on my observations around the Lido deck, we'd have more tattoos as well, although most would be of the butterfly-on-the-lower-back variety.

Dunn's River Falls

As part of my narrative catch up, today I venture to Jamaica, the first stop of our Carnival Conquest cruise ship.

When a cruise ship docks for its nine or so hours of island fun, most people on the ship use the ship's own excursion desk to find interesting zipliningsnorkelbeach trips, but experience has taught us that if you can find a great local tour guide and book it yourself, you'll have a more interesting trip. So I did some digging and calling and e-mailing and ended up booking a family trip to Dunn's River Falls, a 600 foot waterfall that you can climb.

The trick with this tour was that we were docking in Montego Bay and the falls were in Ocho Rios, a good hour forty-five away, but I noticed that the cruise itself was offering an excursion to the falls so I figured we could do it too.

I hunted around for awhile and talked to quite a few friends who've been to Jamaica many, many times, and they all told me we had to climb the falls. So I ended up talking to Richie at Moby Dick Tours about their tour package. Unfortunately, the tour they give started in Ocho Rios, but Richie was very helpful, waved his hands magically, and conjured a bus and driver named Vivian who would meet us at the dock in Montego Bay, take us to the falls, take us to lunch, and then bring us back to the ship.

The day we docked in Jamaica, we met Vivian as quickly as we could (this was at the cruise terminal; he was holding up a blue Moby Dick Tours sign) and began the long bus ride. Along the way we learned a few helpful Jamaican phrases (in particular: 'Yah mahn," and "It's irie," which means everything's good or okay), learned some about the Jamaican landscape and the road to Ocho Rios, and discovered that Columbus landed in a Jamaican cove that is right next to a giant Bauxite mining operation.

Vivian parked our bus in a narrow spot (well, all spots were narrow) in the official parking lot for the falls and then gave us the rundown of how things worked there. Then he walked us up to the ticket counter, got tickets for the group (this was all part of our tour fee), and told us he'd be waiting for us in the bus when we were done. And he made sure to tell us to take the path back to the parking lot at the top of the falls and to avoid the other path through the small shop area where, according to everyone, you get berated and abused by some high pressure sales people.

We followed a large paved path to the bottom of the beach, which is where you begin your hike up the falls (the falls themselves are not Niagra-like; they're gentle and shallow, perfectly climbable), and once there we were accosted by the tremendous number of people following our very same plan. There were people everywhere, and most were holding hands, forming long chains of slow-moving - creeping actually - lines of bathing suit-clad humans inching up the rocks. 

I wasn't quite sure how to begin, so we all made our own family chain and I marched forward, squeezing in between a man with a bathing suit two sizes too small and a woman who has financed quite a few plastic surgeons' Mercedes.

Clamoring over rocks while holding hands wasn't that tricky. The tricky part was the 10,000 other people doing the same thing. And the double-tricky part was dealing with the 'guides.'

You could hire your own guide to take you up the falls, and these guys were aggressive and unforgiving. They'd grab your hand when you didn't need help. They'd yell and scream and whistle quite loudly. They'd shout for their group to stick together and then guide them right through the center of our own line of people. So we had to push back, just to make it 10 feet up the falls. The guides (well, the ones who didn't think we were part of their own group - some thought we belonged to them) would get frantically angry and shout and scream and use all sorts of non-relaxing, non-irie language.

But we preserved, scraping our legs and knees and toes. Toward the middle of the climb I noticed my swim shoes had tears at the top of the big toes from all my slight whacks with rock bottoms. Suzanne got caught in a collision with three other people and got her foot lodged under a large rock. Later, under x-ray, we learned that she broke her foot on the rocks and is now, as of August, confined to a massive Herman Munster-style ski boot that is, ideally, supposed to ward off any threat of a cast. I'll have more on this later.

Most of the huge crowd on the falls dissipated after the first third of the climb, and by the end most had given up so the last part of the climb was pain and shout-free. At the top we avoided the aggressive shopkeepers (although we did run into one woman who kept insisting she could weave the greatest hair beads in the entire universe). 

Vivian, as promised, was waiting patiently for us to finish our hike, and once we were aboard the bus, he took us a slight distance toward Ocho Rios for lunch. This was a semi-relaxing lunch - well, semi for me because I was a little stressed about getting back before the boat left. The boat waits for no one (except people on official cruise line expeditions). If we missed it, we'd be sunk.

Lunch was very nice. We sat indoors, close by a waterfall, and had our choice of an extensive buffet including (and I was quite excited about this) sugar Coca Cola - no high fructose corn syrup here!

The ride back was quite nice. Vivian was a very safe and careful driver. He told us a few riddles and then played some reggae while most of us snoozed. 

He got us back to the dock in plenty of time, and as we boarded we were serenaded by a Jamaican military band marching by the boat. Clearing customs was simple, although one of the customs officials goosed me as he was patting me down.

My response: "Dat no irie, mahn!" Even the dour government workers who were shiny with sweat laughed at that.

Eating Across the Sea

Not to generalize, but most people understand that the primary mission of a cruise ship is to provide enough food that, in case there’s a zombie apocalypse back home, passengers will have enough to eat for the next 28 years. Give or take.

In no particular order, there were the usual suspects: breakfast (full of salmon and bagels, hot chocolate, Eggs Benedict, cereal, fancily cut bananas, some weird kind of oatmeal mush, bacon, pastries, more bacon, juices, and all sorts of whatever else the menu commanded us to eat), a breakfast buffet a few stories up, lunchtime dining, lunchtime buffet, lunchtime dessert, tea time (with exotic teas from the country of Lipton and a multi-level tray of desserts rolled about by a waiter), pizza time, burger time, ice cream time, sandwich time (I did, alas, have a pastrami on rye one night at 11:00 because I had slept through Fancy Dinner that night - Fancy Dinner, also known as Elegant Night, is when everyone dresses up, gets pictures taken, and then has a very full meal of lobstersteakfish. There were two Elegant Nights on our cruise, and I, unfortunately, was inelegant for both), dinner time and the mysterious midnight buffet.

The food was generally quite good, although I didn’t care for the half-slice of pizza I had the first night, and the pastrami gave me dreams of taking dolphins. But rather than spend too much time reviewing each meal, let me simply mention one of the desserts: the melted chocolate cake goo brownie fudge surprise in a cup. Of course, this is not it’s real name. It’s called something much more mundane, but that doesn’t do it justice.

The waiters presented it unceremoniously. On a plate were two white ceramic cups. The larger cup, about three inches tall, contained a tiny chocolate cake topped with a dusting of powered sugar. The small, shorter white cup held a scoop of vanilla ice cream, a thin slab of chocolate jutting from the top like a flag. Superficially, it was innocuous, but once I dug my spoon into the cake I began to understand. Beneath the top layer of baked cake was unadulterated melted chocolate fudge. That’s it. A lot of chocolate, a lot of fudge, a lot of ice cream. 

And if I happen to mention to the waiter I like it, he brings me another one! Or one with three ice cream scoops instead of one. It’s sugar insanity, dessert hedonism.

The first time this chocolate goo faced me, I finished it quickly - this after a full meal of salad, fruit, something fried, something heavy, and something in a fancy sauce (there were veggies in there too someplace). A few seconds later, I realized I had overdone it. 

I had completely, utterly, miserably overdone it, and now my veins were filled with the slow-moving (but delicious!) melted chocolate.

The next morning I unpleasantly woke to a stomach in full rebellion.

“I think,” I said to Suzanne, clutching my pillow as if it were a life preserver, “I just threw up in my mouth.”

Please do not take from this that I did not learn my lesson. I certainly did. The next night at dinner I avoided the melted chocolate altogether, pleased at my self-control.

Instead I had two pieces of apple pie and three scoops of ice cream.

I showed them!

Karaoke on the High Seas

Our cruise ship karaoke was the magical concoction of an empty stage, a crazed Ukrainian announcer, and a thick book of songs ready for butchery. I say this because I know what damage I would do to both a song and the surrounding five square miles if I picked up a microphone and starting caterwauling, my banshee-like wails doubtlessly raising an army of pirate undead from the floor of the Caribbean. 

The rest of the gang had no such apprehension and took to the stage with gusto. Joseph, my nephew who's seven, gave the audience a big treat with his passionate and enthusiastic rendition of "Hit Me With Your Best Shot."

The most compelling character during our karaoke evenings, though, had to be the Ukrainian DJ. During songs, during breaks, during whenever it tickled him, he'd shout out "Woo hoo!" and "Va-kay-shun!" It was as if he had karaoke tourettes.

He matched his enthusiastic shouting with whatever song was being sung. In one case, an husband and wife were celebrating their 40th anniversary, and so the husband was performing a very moving rendition of a slow, romantic song in which, at the instrumental break, our DJ whispered very a low and somewhat menacing "va-kay-shun" into his microphone.

Although he pronounced names bizarrely, a tribute to his Eastern European heritage, he annunciated quite clear when exhorting us to get some "woo hoo juice" from the bar. He usually followed this with a quick peppering of "VA-KAY-SHUN!" and a few "woo hoos" for good measure. Between songs he'd often command us to, "Sing along, dance along," (then here he'd lower his voice) "drink along."

He was the Boss of Karaoke, more than likely resenting us for being on va-ca-shun while he had to load song after song into his karaoke system and smile nicely at all the well-meaning but tin-eared and well lubricated singers who, just for two minutes and ten seconds, simply wanted their time in the spotlight.

Woo hoo!

That's a Big Boat

I used to think the Galactic Empire Executor class starship was big, and in comparison to everything else in the mythology of floating space plastic, it's fairly heavy duty.

But this was before I boarded the Carnival Conquest, and now I know what a big ship really is.

This was our second family trip of the summer: a western Caribbean cruise with Suzanne's intimidatingly large family to celebrate her parents' 50th anniversary (I say intimidatingly large because the looks people gave us as we moved en mass around the boat were the same kinds of looks people must have given Billy the Kid as he rode into town - achtung family: that's a reference to Frank "Windy" Cahill; I'm just too lazy to footnote it.)

The Panamanian-registered Carnival Conquest is a beast of a boat, with 13 decks, glass elevators, escalators, pools, hot tubs, jogging track, casino, waterslide, and a 22 foot wide LED screen near the top deck that plays music videos and movies. The documentary about the ship I watched in our cabin said the ship carries a crew of more than 1,100 people and can generate 62 megawatts of power. 62 megawatts! According to the U.S. Department of Energy that's enough to power 46,000 homes (it's also 6.2% of the energy needed to power the flux capacitor of a DeLorean time machine - thank you, Wolfram Alpha).

Our six-point-two percent of time travel energy pushed us off from Galveston, Texas on a rainy Sunday afternoon and far out into the Gulf of Mexico. But even far after sunset, I could still see oil platform after platform glowing steadily in the inky night, and even through most of the next day I caught oil tankers here or there as they made their way to the coast. It wasn't until our second Fun Day At Sea (thusly named by the cruise line) that we seemed to be all alone in the great expanse of bluish-green water.

But let me back up, back to the waiter with a towel draped over his arm.

We were supposed to board the boat around 1:00, give or take, so our plan was to eat lunch as soon as we were on board (this was because we knew cruise ships were floating buffets and any hunger would be sated by a quick four foot walk to the nearest food line). Unfortunately, rain and computer problems delayed our boarding time, and so by the time we found our rooms and dropped off our carry-on bags (the big luggage would mysteriously appear outside our cabin door later), we were forced to take part in the compulsory life boat drill, which wasn't too bad. Yet they didn't feed us there, so afterward we began hunting a snack in earnest - not wanting to eat too much because dinner was lurking behind a corner.

(Eeating too little is a theme of cruise ship life, and it's a difficult one to master.)

So up on deck something-or-other - Lido I think (although it should be named the Speedo Deck for obvious reasons) a smiling waiter, sporting the above mentioned towel, and carrying a hubcap-sized tray on which were five tall, skinny plastic cups, a few decorated with tiny paper umbrellas and orange slices, glided right to us and handed me on of the cups. He did the same for Suzanne and then softly asked where we were from and if he could see my card.

The card in question was our Sail and Sign Card, a magical piece of plastic with a magnetic strip that acts as your room key, lets you on and off the ship (no passport required!), and allows you to charge anything and everything on the ship to  your account. No one on the ship takes cash - well, maybe the casino, but I didn't go there - so this is a very dangerous card.

Within seconds, our smiling waiter had taken my card, charged my account, and handed me a receipt. And half a second later I noticed that these two drinks, potent in their mixture,  just cost me sixteen dollars. 

And all I really wanted was the tiny orange slice for a snack.