This Was on the Sidewalk and BoyJake is Thirty-One Years Old

Anna and I were walking downtown on Friday to get me a birthday haircut (I turned thirty-one and I have noticed recently that I've been looking a bit more like a roadie for Lynard Skynard than I would have liked) and we saw an old-fashioned fifties era chair hair dryer like the type that Lucille Ball would sit under after getting her roots dyed and a permanent wave. I thought that was absolutely fantastic and had to photograph it.

I had the best birthday ever. My hair is now in a more mid-nineties Johnny Depp place -- the sort of thing you might expect to see on a pretentious coffehouse poet, but not really so MySpace emo that I can't stand myself. I actually dig it quite a bit.
Anna took me to breakfast after the haircut and I ate a big ham & cheese omelet with yummy fried potatoes and wheat toast. I washed it down with highly caffeinated Earl Grey tea from a cute little copper pot.

After breakfast, Anna went to school and I went back to the apartment to wash dishes and read (no work for me that day, thank you very much) until it was time to go bicycle shopping with Vic (I need a bicycle as the new place we're moving into is much too far from our coffeehouse to make morning visits on foot feasible). I called Vic at the appointed time and it turned out that he was ill and would have to give re-schedule at a later date.
I called Soundbomb to see if he wanted to get tea at the place near our office and he said yes, so I wandered over there for a pleasant bit of tea-drinking and people watching.

Later Anna came home and gave me my gifts: a wonderful bottle of Rosenblum Zinfandel (Carla's Vineyard from the SF Bay - we drank it last night - YUMMY) and a beautiful burgundy steel Cross pen. It takes smooth writing rollerball refills that glide across the page and it feels awesome in my hand. I wrote ten pages with it last night. I can't remember the last time I sat down and filled ten pages.

After the gift giving, Anna took me to a local German themed restaurant for sausage and beer. Words fail me.

So yeah, I had the best birthday ever. Life is good. I am lucky.

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This Bull Makes Me Sad

Junior will likely live out the bulk of his life in a dusty little pen outside of a cowboy-themed steakhouse on a big resort in Tucson, Arizona with only a red rubber tetherball for amusement. Junior should bust out of that pen and try out those horns. That's what I think anyway.

My grandfather is a cattle man in Northwest Arkansas and his bulls have lots of green pasture to roam around on, big ponds to soak in, and a bunch of cows to shag. I bet Junior would like it there.

So yeah, much like Junior I'm stuck on this resort for a work trip without a car and very little to amuse myself but television, alcohol and the book I brought with me. The good news is that I get to leave on Thursday and I don't have big horns.

Anna and I found out yesterday that we get to move into the apartment we want on 12.29, so we'll ring in the new year in our new place. I'll be the father of three felines. Life is good.

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Catching Up Part 4

The Target Chicken

Anna and I recently went on a little shopping trip to Target in the nearby farm town that actually has a Target (our liberal little college down has a thing against large discount retailers). We were driving through the parking lot, congested with holiday shopping traffic, looking for a space when we saw a chicken. I do not usually see chickens in the parking lots of large discount retailer stores, but Anna confirmed that yes, she saw it too. Either we were sharing identical hallucinations, or there was, in fact, a chicken in the Target parking lot. We laughed as we found this funny and decided that it must be photographed. I parked the car and retrieved the camera from my man purse. We headed off to find the chicken in the next lane over where we had last seen it.

A woman in a large sport utility vehicle stopped next to us. "Are you gonna catch that chicken?"

I didn't take my eyes off the chicken -- it was moving away from us and I didn't want to lose it -- I found it difficult to line up a shot on a moving chicken, but I'm not the most experienced photographer in the world. "No, but I'm going to photograph it." I replied out of the side of my mouth.

"There's a chicken over there!" The woman replied.

I'm not sure where this woman learned to communicate, but I'm led to believe that she could have been taught better. Let's review the exchange:

1) The woman inquired as to whether we were going to attempt to capture the chicken
2) I replied that no, we were not going to attempt to capture the chicken, but rather to photograph it -- nowhere during this exchange did I say "What chicken?" or anything else to indicate that I was not aware of the presence of the chicken.
3) Despite providing the woman with serious reason to believe that I was aware of the presence of the chicken she still cries out: "There's a chicken over there!"

My goodness.

That is all.

Thanks for playing.