Uppercase Woman

Home, Home, Home

I swear, when I got off the plane, and saw the duct tape holding together the banister on the ramp leading out of our gate (ah, my ramshackle city), I was never so happy to be back in Philadelphia.

God, what a long trip.

I had no idea what I was getting us into when we scheduled a vacation for over two weeks. I really just thought to myself, "Oh, it will be wonderful, and we won't have to limit ourselves at any location!"

I was an idiot.

Ten days is nice, and leaves you wanting a bit more. Two weeks is plenty, and leaves you feeling grateful to be home. Two weeks plus five days leaves you shaking, weak in the knees, mildly insane, and seriously considering leaping out the plane window on the way home to see if that will make the plane ride end faster.

The last five days was like traveling, as Charlie says, with a two-foot tall rather adorable mental patient. Tori has hit the terrible twos a bit early and has become rather unpredictable. For instance, she will frequently ask for Elmo--at top volume, over and over--and we, being the loving and highly accommodating parents that we are (also parents who desperately want the shrieks of MOMO MOMO MOMO to please for the love of all that is holy STOP) will obligingly crawl under the crib and find said Elmo and offer it to Tori, quite pleased with ourselves for meeting her needs so squarely, and she will look at the doll as if we have offered her a shovel with a heaping, steaming pile of dog shit on it and scream at the top of her lungs, "NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!" until we remove the offending Elmo far, far away--and then console her accordingly. This goes on with about 50% of what she asks for, so we feel a bit as if we are rats in a science experiment--sometimes we get a nice piece of cheese (a happy baby), and sometimes we get electrical shocks (a screaming, crying, insane baby).

She's been exhibiting this behavior for the whole trip, but it ramped up while we were away and is now in full swing. Charlie and I are rather shell shocked--as I imagine most parents are when they hit this stage in toddlerdom. Tori has always been a remarkably easy going kid with very easy-to-satisfy needs, and now to have her suddenly become impossible to please is just, frankly, fucking awful. Plus, we've gone from being those smug parents with the perfect child in public to being those parents everyone ignores in public with the screaming kid who has to be removed from the restaurant, or who screams at top volume on the plane, or, say, who cries for 45 minutes straight while waiting to pass through security at the airport (at the Phoenix airport at 9:30am yesterday? yep, that was us).

I have NEVER been so happy to see her go to morning care as I was this morning. And I do not feel the least bit guilty about it. I caught up on all my work emails (I thought I'd be able to work on this trip! ha!), I copied all my trip photos to my home hard drive, I am writing this blog entry, all without any small fingers trying to get the keyboard or grabbing my leg or... sigh. It's heaven.

Other than trips to the bathroom, I have been in the same room as my daughter for the last twenty days. For the last week, until last night, we were in the same bed. I love her--insanely, and beyond reason--but GOOD LORD I NEEDED A BREAK.

Tell me this: is there ever a time--EVER--that children begin to respond to verbal commands of "NO" and "STOP" and "DON'T"? And, if so, how do you make that happen? Because Tori is so extraordinarily talented at finding exactly the best way to injure herself or damage something important to us these days and we simply cannot make her stop without physically grabbing her--and then coping with the ensuing tantrum. We can't ever stop watching her for a second--not to eat, or talk to someone, or breathe, or sneeze-- without her climbing something, grabbing something, or breaking something. She does NOT respond to any verbal cues at all except occasionally a very loud "eh-eh-eh-eh" noise that I make. EVER. It's gotten no better with time. I feel very hopeless about it, honestly.

OK. I'm done now. I swear. No more complaining about my trip or my daughter because I know that there are at least a dozen people composing anonymous emails right now saying, "At least you have a daughter" or "At least you got a vacation." YOU ARE RIGHT. I AM AN ASSHOLE. I have always been an asshole, there is no denying that. When I have two more nights of sleep, I promise to keep my assholiness inside my own head and not share it with the world anymore. M'kay?

So--what did I miss? Other than the incredibly fabulousness of Akeeyu having her TWIN GIRLS? Remind me when I'm less fried to tell you all about other things like how Obama has gotten my vote (I know!), and other topical goings-on after I catch up on all the other news (I've been in a near news black out too). OK? God, it's good to be home.

Day 4,843: Northern New Mexico and Arizona & Why the Fuck Did I Take This Long A Vacation Again?

OK, so it's really Day 14 (late in the day), but seriously. If I ever decide taking a two-week + vacation is a good idea again, please find something heavy and whack me in the head with it. Repeatedly. Until I remember this trip and how hard it is to be confined in small hotel rooms with your dearest family members endlessly, eating only road food, and having to be at the mercy of hotel internet service. Because right now, my dear blog readers, I'm stuck in the lobby of the Grand Canyon Railroad Hotel listening to some horrible 50's music because their internet signal doesn't reach our room FIFTY FUCKING FEET down the hall. And there are a lot of people with REALLY BIG HAIR sitting near me. Hold me.

We've hit a bit of rough patch. A few nights ago Tori had a terrible nightmare and refused to return to her crib (she clung to me tighter than I had imagined was possible) and ended up spending the night in bed with me (the rooms have all had two small beds so Charlie and I are pretending we're from 50's sitcoms and have been sleeping in separate beds), and now Tori is waking up halfway through each night and insisting on sleeping with me, which is great for her, and not so great for me. She KICKS. We've also spent too many days in the car; our Jemez mountains trip turned into a nine-hour car cruise, which would have been fine without a toddler (although we did break down and buy an in-car DVD player--oh, the joy) following too many nights with me not getting enough sleep, so I haven't been a happy woman.

Add in the fact that it turns out that both northern New Mexico and northern Arizona have--what do you know--WINTER, you have two cold and cranky adults, and one cold and yet still wildly energetic toddler.

In other words, it's been a BLAST (actually, literally--today the wind gusts nearly carried Tori away).

But, the beauty continues to knock us out, and we are still blown away by the area. So, now that the bitching is done, the photos! First up, the Jemez mountains.

The Jemez Mountains are west and north of Albuquerque, and I spent a great deal of time camping in them as a kid with my local girl scout troop. I have such great memories of my time there, and I love that little corner of the earth almost more than any other. Not only are there the glorious pine trees near the peaks, but the amazing red rock formations near the Jemez pueblo.

Plus, when you're driving through the Jemez mountains you can just randomly come across a vista like this.

The Jemez are also full of hot springs, much to the chagrin of my former girl scout troop leader's husband, since we (the girl scout troop) would be often doing winter hikes and come across a hot spring and promptly all strip naked and swim in the spring while surrounded by six inches of snow. The springs are full of minerals, and these minerals have created the very interesting feature visible right on highway 4 in the Jemez called the Soda Dam.

The next day was a travel day. We drove from Albuquerque to Williams, Arizona (near Flagstaff). I, stupidly, thought several erroneous things about the Flagstaff area. For instance, I would have sworn that Flagstaff was a desert town. Silly me. I could not be more wrong. Not only is it NOT a desert town, it's a mountain town, surrounded by one of the most impressive mountain ranges I've seen outside of the Alps. Plus, it's DAMN COLD. Also, it's much farther away than we expected. So it took all day to travel.

We arrived in time, however, to take Tori to the lovely indoor pool at the Grand Canyon Railway Hotel (and in time for all the adult at the pool to determinedly ignore us when we tried to speak to them--I forget sometimes how much the tattoos freak people out). Tori LOVED the pool and learned to jump from the side into my arms in the water and didn't want to leave even though she was stumbling with weariness.

Then this morning we got up and went to the Grand Canyon.

It's hard to talk about the Grand Canyon. I don't know how to talk about it without sounding stupid and trite. The first vista was super crowded, and we had a really weird moment when some Japanese tourists began taking pictures of Tori (really, they posed with her), but later I got five minutes alone at a vista and I just burst into tears. It's just crazy and amazing and huge and too much. You can't really bend your mind around it.

The weather wasn't great; we had almost no sun, it was super windy and very cold. The photos don't do it justice. I'll just post one here, and then I'll post some others later at the Flickr account. This is the best one I took, I think. But trust me--if you haven't been here yet, you have to see it. Photos just don't cut it.

Tomorrow we go back to Tucson. Wednesday we fly home. Thank god. You may not hear from me again until I'm back in Philly. Whew. I can't wait.

Day 11: Petroglyphs & Belen

Today was supposed to be snowy and/or rainy, so we fully expected to spend the day at either the aquarium or at one of the other indoor offerings here in Albuquerque. But while it did snow overnight, the morning was merely a bit overcast, so after breakfast we decided to venture not too far and visit the Petroglyph site which used to be located a fair bit outside of Albuquerque back when I was a kid. Now, very east coast style developments literally  surround this national park site, with a Sonic Burger just a few blocks away. I was shocked. This was a frequent class trip when I was a kid, and it really was in the middle of nowhere back then. Sheesh.

Anyway, we had a very nice time until Tori had a bit of meltdown that we couldn't figure out--that is, until we got in the car and she ate nearly an entire 99 cent bag of potato chips (I'm a bad mom, sue me) because she didn't have enough breakfast (we both realized we thought she'd eaten more--in other words, we each thought the other parent had fed her more). But we got some nice photos. Oh, and we heard a coyote howl, which was cool, except later Tori said, "Bubba! Bubba!" which she always says when she sees a dog. Which was a tad worrisome.

You like that new poncho? Don't ask me how much I paid for it. I bought it in Santa Fe, and it cost way more than it should have, but seriously--how could I have NOT bought it?

While the Sandia Mountains lie east of Albuquerque, dormant volcanoes lie west, and that's where these petroglyphs are carved--into volcanic rock. We had the most amazing sky today, even with the dire weather predictions, and it made for some great photography (Charlie has some up too at his blog--he's also blogging the trip and at his flickr site, and more are at my flickr site too).

After an awesome lunch where I finally got me some sopapillas (big puffy fried pastries that are served warm that you then squeeze honey into--yummy!) and Tori ate approximately her weight in beans and rice, we all came back to the hotel for naps. Yes, all three of us. Then we got back in the car again and headed down the back roads for Belen, New Mexico. Why? Well, why not?

Actually, we went to Belen for two reasons: trains (apparently the east-west trains don't make it up to Albuquerque--they route through Belen), and to see the Belen Hotel. My grandfather was raised there and it's a big part of my family folklore. I'd actually hoped to see inside, but it's now a private residence. Charlie got some great train shots and I got to take photos of the hotel.

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped again to photograph the new commuter train that runs from Albuquerque to Belen, and we got the chance to photograph more amazing sky. I always forget that one of the great things about New Mexico is that you get the chance to SEE great weather without actually being IN the weather. Seem odd? Here's proof:

Rain and/or snow in the distance.

Rain or snow in the sun.

Snow in the mountains at sunset.

See? And we never had to put on our wipers.

You can see the mountains doing their dramatic red thing at sunset here, although it's not a great shot. If the weather is better tomorrow I will try to get a better example, I promise.

All in all, it was a lovely day. Tomorrow is our last day here, and I'm planning to visit the Jemez mountains, which might just be my favorite place on the planet. The forestry roads are all closed, sadly, so my dream of hearing the wind in the pines might not happen but I will get to put Tori's hand in a hot spring--that much I'm sure of. It's going to be hard to leave...but hell, next up is the Grand Canyon. That's gotta be impressive, right?

Day 10: The Sandias

Just a short post today while Tori naps. Today we took the tram to the top of the Sandia Mountains. I grew up with the massive 10,000 foot tall Sandia Mountains in my backyard, the very definition of "purple mountain majesty."

One of the first poems I ever wrote was about these mountains when I was eight years old. They are, in a word, glorious. I've never seen them from the tram's point of view, although I've hiked the trail beneath the tram (OK, once, when I was 12) so it was really cool to ride it up there.

Speaking of cool, it was COLD up at the crest. We took a few photos and quickly ran into the restaurant on the peak to eat lunch (New Mexico green Chile stew; yummy--they put green chilies in everything here. Last night I had them in chicken tortellini at an Italian restaurant) where I filmed a short video for Sarah because she's jonesing for some Tori footage. Enjoy. Oh, and by the way, more photos are available both at my flickr site and at Charlie's.

Days 8 & 9: Santa Fe, Family, & Tent Rocks

So Monday morning we woke up bright and early in our even more luxurious hotel room and realized one major problem: my sister had accidentally given me her wrong phone number. Oops! After a bit of frantic running about, we finally managed to connect and meet up in Santa Fe, and Didi and her 15 year old daughter Nat met us and agreed to be our tour guides through the tourist trap that is the center of Santa Fe. It was lovely to see them again--I haven't seen them since my Dad's funeral--and they both look much more relaxed and happy (especially Nat, who has really blossomed into a lovely and confident young woman; I unwittingly scored points with her by wearing a pair of cool sunglasses that I'd picked up in Tucson because I'd foolishly let Tori play with--and break--my other pair; apparently the ones I'd grabbed at some hipster shop there were THE ones to have).

The plaza is much as I remembered it; overpriced chic shops preying on folks from New York and LA. But I have to say the Native Americans selling stuff on the street have also wised up too--they are NOT the downtrodden Indians of my youth. They are wily artisans making good money and charging above average rates for their wares now. I paid more than I expected for some gifts. Tori loved walking around and petting dogs and chasing pigeons, and of course, swinging with Daddy.

We had a nice lunch, and got coffee, where I got some nice shots of Didi and Nat, and Nat took a nice shot of me. Gee, you see any family resemblance? First, Didi, then Nat, then me.

Nope, we don't look alike at ALL.

We also visited the miracle staircase at the Loretto Chapel (built without a central support and from one piece of wood). Photos don't do it justice; it's really quite beautiful. The wood is stunning, and I can't believe anyone can walk on it without bringing it down.

Then we took a very cranky baby for a pointless drive so she could nap and eventually back to Didi's for some green chili enchiladas that were amazingly yummy. Eventually, it was back to the hotel for a great nights sleep, made even better by the fact that while Tori woke up at 6am this morning, she got in bed with me and stayed asleep until 8:30am. Let me repeat that; EIGHTY FUCKING THIRTY AM.

Heaven.

Eventually, we got out of the hotel and into the car and set out vaguely north in the hopes of visiting the Jemez mountains, but decided instead to visit the Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument. It offered a nice, short loop hike that the baby could do with us (and my still crappy lungs could handle). It was a bit overcast today, which was actually nice (didn't need to worry too much about sunscreen) since it was quite bright at the Tent Rocks (the sand is all white around there). These rocks are all from volcanic deposits, and the formations are caused by boulders protecting areas and causing cones to form looking like tee-pees. Very cool. Tori thought that the steep and sandy trails were slides and spent much of the time on her butt sliding down them saying "Whee!"

Tonight my brother brought his family into the city to have dinner with us and Didi and her daughter and boyfriend and we had a nice family reunion (again, first time since the funeral!). It really was lovely; I can't believe how big the kids have gotten. It's the biggest group of people that Tori's ever been around that she's related to since she's been born. It was really, really cool. This photo, sadly, came out kind of badly. But I'll share it anyway. Then I'm off to bed. Tomorrow, we're riding the tram--something I never did as a kid since my mom was terrified of heights. Heh. Also, I think we might add a night to our stay here. I'm feeling reluctant to leave...

Days 6 & 7: Roller Derby and Driving To Albuquerque

Rock and Roll hipsters--women all--have revived the art of flat track roller derby competitions. Now in nearly every city across the country, crazy tattooed babes don helmets and knee pads and knock each other around while they have wheels strapped to their feet. My friend Dave's awesome girlfriend Deni is one of these crazy women, and is a team member of the Tucson Saddle Tramps. Sadly, she hurt her knee recently and couldn't actually play at the game we went to on Saturday, but it was a blast to watch anyway. Dave is an announcer, and he's awesome, and his band the Bricktops played the half-time show (I took Tori over to watch Dave play and she kept pointing at him behind his drum kit and saying "Dave! Dave! Dave!" It was very cute.).

We made just to the end of half-time before Tori began rubbing her eyes and we headed back to the hotel. We had a great time, one made better by the fact that I am starting to feeling slightly better with the help of the drugs (thank God). We all hit the sack and got up in time to meet Dave for breakfast and take Tori to the playground before packing her into the car for the long drive to Albuquerque.

I've been so excited about coming back to the city of my birth. Tucson, as beautiful as it is, made me miss it more, oddly enough. Being in a desert that's not, you know, MY desert, felt so odd. Tucson's color palette is just so different. It's basically all khaki--green and tan--which is why, I think, the sun is so much brighter there. It's all so reflective. In New Mexico, everything is just a bit darker, and reflects just a bit less.

As we headed out of Tucson, the landscape started changing immediately. Literally ten miles out of the city, the Saguaros (and the palm trees) disappeared completely and were replaced by dried grasses and other cacti. The further east we went, the more color began creeping in to the desert, and by the time we stopped for lunch in Lordsburg, New Mexico (where I had the best chili I've had in, oh, forever) the hues I'd longed for in the mountains and deserts of Arizona were finally beginning to appear; the gold of the plants, the purple-gray of the stone, the blue-gray of the sage, but mostly what I'd been missing was the red clay. The red that is so definitive of New Mexico--ranging in shade from pale peach to salmon to pastel pink to brick red to bright orange--it appears and disappears on nearly every hillside, and it is what makes New Mexico beautiful. When I spotted the first patch of deep red clay slowly appearing along side the highway, my teeth literally ached with the beauty of it. To some people it's just a patch of dirt, but to me it's the color of my blood.

I am finally back home.

We decided to take a, ahem, shortcut--a side road to skip going south to Las Cruces and wound up taking a beautiful detour through the Gila National Forest. The road looked direct on our crap-ass map, but turned out to be treacherous and windy, and often required speeds of less than ten miles an hour to navigate hairpin turns with terrifying guard-rail free sides with deep, deep drops. It was truly breathtaking, and it reminded me of how beautiful the New Mexico mountains are (and how deeply forested they are too), but Charlie was a bit white knuckled by the time we finally spotted the interstate again (he kept asking if I could see anything over the side, like, oh, say a Denny's; as an East Coast boy, he's not used to such long stretches of no signs of civilization).

By the time we stopped for dinner it was already getting dark, so we arrived in Albuquerque in darkness, so I will not get to see my beloved Sandia Mountains until morning. I may not be able to sleep.

Tori was wonderful in the car, especially considering it was nearly seven hours that she was stuck. She took two naps and is now sleeping peacefully in our stunningly lovely hotel suite (oh, the joy of having two rooms!). Tomorrow we head up to Santa Fe to hook up with my sister and her daughter, and have a little family reunion. I'm so excited! Tori gets to meet her family! Photos will abound.

Tucson, Days Three & Four: Mountains and Urgent Care

On Day Three, I woke up feeling pretty awful. So I stayed in bed late while Charlie took Tori back to the playground for a couple of hours. It helped, and I was able to roust myself enough to pull my ass out of bed and agree to get lunch and go for a drive. Tori's been avoiding naps except in the car, so we decided a nice long drive up Mt. Lemmon which has a handy-dandy windy road to the peak (which is actually a ski resort) would be just the ticket. So we left the sunny (ok, it was actually beginning to get cloudy) valley to drive to the snowy peaks and it was quite lovely. Tori got a nap for a little over an hour, and once she woke up we stopped at several vistas and took some very short walks to various views along the way. It was extremely windy up there, so it wasn't really safe for toddlers to be walking, as you can see.

God, how I love that photo. The rock formations on the mountain are amazing, and they really took my breath away.

Several folks have asked about the "old timey" look to some of these photos; it because I'm doing something called shooting "through the viewfinder." I'm actually using my digital camera and shooting through the viewfinder of an old Argus 75 camera (with a cardboard tube taped to it to keep light out). That way you get the effect of film without actually using film. Sarah is much better at this than I am, which you would know if you look at her photos online at all (here are her "TTV" shots, and here are her TTV self portraits).  It's really quite fun and makes me feel like quite the  art-eest.

Anyway, the day went swimmingly, until we foolishly went to the bookstore BEFORE dinner (I needed a book, what can I say) and she melted down again at the restaurant. So we took the food to go, and went back to the room. I'm sad to say I actually lost my shit a bit at Tori because when she started standing in the car seat and screaming and refusing to sit down (this is after I left Charlie at the restaurant to bring the food back to the hotel, which is located dangerously across six lanes of careening traffic) and I was just so hungry and frustrated that I said, "You better sit the fuck down right now, missy, or ELSE."

God forgive me, she DID. SO not the parent I want to be. Sigh.

Anyway. Ahem. Last night I was up all night coughing. This morning my chest was so tight that walking to the bathroom (you know, six feet from the bed) caused me to be out of breath. I tried to just wait it out, but then I realized I was being stupid. Tucson has an abundance of Urgent Care centers, so we packed up and took my ass to one. A short wait and quick exam later, I got a script for steroids and antibiotics and GOD WILLING by tomorrow night I'll feel better. We managed to salvage the end of the day (even though the weather was terrible--we brought our Pennsylvania cold, rainy weather with us, apparently) with a little shopping and a nice dinner out and a quick visit to a friend's rather insane art opening, but I'm ready for bed now. I'll end this post with a nice shot of me at the urgent care place, and a very sweet shot of Tori trying to comfort me as I hacked my lungs out.

Tucson, Day Two: Sickness & Meltdowns

So today I'm sick, and Tori melted down.

I woke up after a night of bad sleep feeling tight in the chest; tight enough to call my doctor's office in Philly and ask them to call in a script for a rescue inhaler (I'm technically asthmatic, although I no longer need medication for it) to a local pharmacy (I would have brought one from home, but mine were all expired). Now I'm coughing up a storm and feel kind of run down and while I'm putting on a good face and trying to hide it, it ain't really working. I'm not surprised; I've felt like I was fighting something off for more than a week. But still. Ug.

Add to that the fact that Tori refused to nap today... until we drove to dinner. Oy. Major meltdown at dinner. Her first public meltdown (other than the plane trip out here). She wouldn't eat, she wouldn't drink milk, she wouldn't take a binky, she wouldn't look at the photos of dogs on the wall, she knew the photo of the brunette woman on the wall wasn't Sarah. It was rough. She cleared out the little Mexican place we were eating dinner in. We were supposed to go watch our friend Denni practice for her Roller Derby bout on Saturday (seriously, I know the coolest fucking people) and I thought Tori would be into it, but alas--no.

So I'm going to go take some more cough syrup and lay down. Here's a couple of photos for ya. More are here, of course. Check there throughout the trip.

Yes, those are cupcakes on her butt. They make me squeal.

Gates Pass.

Tucson, Day One

Tucson looks both deeply familiar yet completely alien to me. Because I grew up in the desert in New Mexico (in Albuquerque), I keep looking at everything around Tucson--the mountains, the plant life, even the rocks and the color of the dirt--and feeling like I'm wearing a pair of glasses with the prescription just slightly off. Everything is just a bit wrong. The mountains aren't quite craggy enough, and they are too brown and not purple. The dirt is too pale; not red enough. And it's way, way, way too green.

And then there are the Saguaros.

Standing up everywhere, arms either upwards in prayer or downwards in a beseeching beg, they are so compelling, so incredibly intense, and yet so bizarrely comical that I just can't reconcile them with my memories of the desert (they do not grow in New Mexico, at least not around Albuquerque). They seem like some kind of army of crazed sentinels, perhaps slightly disapproving grandparents watching the approaching development with dismay.

There is so much sun here! I felt drunk with it today by the time we finished breakfast, and after our little hike in the afternoon I felt like I did back in the day when I had the spins and I needed to lie down for a while after boozing it up for hours. I was delirious. I don't remember being able to tolerate so much constant and unrelenting white spectrum light. I've grown accustomed to the softer golden light of Pennsylvania, and I felt like I was being bludgeoned by the sun here, even in sunglasses. I'm sure I'll become used to it by the end of the week--and I shouldn't complain since back home they are in the midst of an ice storm and misery--but it's just so damn BRIGHT. My eyeballs are scalded.

We managed to all avoid sunburn, however, even in t-shirts in direct, unforgiving sun thanks to careful application of sunscreen.

Tori has adjusted brilliantly to the time change, and is sleeping (with a bit of help from melatonin) with ease in the amazingly luxurious hotel we're in. Eating Mexican food that doesn't blow is awesome, I have to say--I'd forgotten what real burritos taste like. I like the car we've rented. But the best part of the trip by far is of course seeing our friends. Seeing Dave is one of the best things that can happen to anyone, and I'm really happy that right now it's happening to us. He's one of my spiritual touchstones, and the first person I've been able to make a long distance friendship work with, and it so easy and awesome hanging out with him. I can't wait to see what he has us do tomorrow.

Arrival

So...

It turns out that it is NOT fun to fly for six hours (strong head winds) with a toddler who decides the benadryl makes her angry and confused and she screams for about two thirds of the flight.

Not at all.

But we are in the hotel now, safe and sound. Thank the gods.