His ego goes up to eleven

Today I left work shortly after I got there.  I received a brief and shaky call from Murray saying her mom had passed away.  It worked out well that we car pooled today.  It gave me a chance to drive her home.  I suspect most people, but especially Murray, appreciate having someone else who can take charge and deal with details at difficult times.  So I got the flights for us and her sister, got a rental car lined up, got the luggage out of the attic so we could pack and drove us to the airport. 

As I was planning things, it became apparent that the service would be on Sunday.  Sunday I was supposed to fly to Cabo San Lucas for a reservation on a boat to dive for a week.  I offered to cancel.  She said that her mom wouldn’t have wanted that.  Which was true.  So I am flying down to drive the newly orphaned sisters from Atlanta to the GA/FL line where they are from.  I will spend Saturday with them and then drive 4 hours back to Atlanta to catch a flight to Dallas to intercept my Baja arrangements. 

I do things like this because I care about Murray, and in turn it causes Murray to believe I am the greatest thing since sliced bread.  This in turn keeps the pressure up on my over-inflated ego.  Sometimes I wonder if there is an objective measure of ego.   What would the units for such a measurement be?  Egons?   I suppose somewhere in some psychology PhD thesis there is a survey for quantifying ego with questions like “How many years has it been since someone made a comment about you that hurt your feelings?” or “What percentage of your friends are smarter than you are?”

Murray sometimes seems in need of a larger ego.  Perhaps someday they will have a pharmaceutical enhancer like Viagra for your ego.  Or perhaps that is what cocaine is.  I suppose there are pros and cons of having a large ego.

PROS                                                                    

Your best friend is always with you.        

You are never “really” wrong                     

You may succeed at things others won’t attempt

You don’t often suffer hurt feelings                                                       

CONS

You may get tired of being with yourself and not have many options

It is possible that you are a horrible person and don’t know it

You may kill or otherwise ruin yourself attempting normal people know you shouldn’t

Others get put off when you wear a large ego in public, like wearing a paisley or a merkin to event that doesn’t call for it.

Perhaps the upside of ego isn’t as good relative to the downside.  Perhaps that is why you don’t have guys in the locker room bragging about the size of their ego.  Perhaps it is best that one keep it in their shorts…

Bed, Breakfast, Wildlife, and Cousins

Murray and I took a long weekend in Yellowstone.  We flew into Bozeman and stayed at the Voss Inn Friday night.  We toured the strip in Bozeman.  Everyone says it is like Boulder used to be 20 years ago and I can see that.  The most memorable part of the evening was at the adult toy store.  There are completely pedestrian reasons that Isaac and Murray might find themselves in such an establishment after the local Walgreens has closed.  Even if I am not at liberty to disclose such boring details. 

What we found that we weren’t looking for was hand blown glass dildos.  Murray had a glass blowing studio for a while.  I helped her build it and knew something about glass blowing so I was curious if they used normal techniques that leave punte marks on the bottom.  When you are blowing glass, you transfer from the blow pipe to a punte to shape the blown end of the final product.  It leaves a separation mark on the bottom.  Most glass you buy at Wal-Mart isn’t hand blown and lacks this little imperfection on the bottom. 

Apparently the dildo selection wasn’t made in large enough quantities to warrant full mechanized production techniques and did have punte marks.  Murray couldn’t imagine anyone putting something glass, that might crack, in their… crack.  The woman at the counter told us they were pyrex to reduce the risk.  Pyrex uses somewhat different processes.  As we went around the corner of the display case, we found they had hand blown butt plugs as well.  It is funny you add hand blown to the phrase and it actually sounds less lewd. 

We were curious about the prices.  Apparently these were objects de’ art and came with commensurate prices.  Things got exceptionally surreal, like a scene from the book Bonk, as Murray and the woman at the counter got into a discussion about whether you would actually spend that kind of money on a toy and then just leave it on the shelf as a display item.  Their consensus was that this was functional art.  I suppose there is wildlife all the way from Bozeman to Yellowstone… 

The husband that made breakfast for us, had grown up in what was then Rhodesia now Zimbabwe.  It was interesting to hear firsthand about things I only read of in the Economist.  He had worked as a tour guide in Zimbabwe and then Botswana after his family was forced off their farm.  He met his wife when she came out on a trip.  I have actually known a couple other people that have met spouses while being a tour guide.  I suppose being a young guy in a position of authority in a fun environment goes a long ways.  I hadn’t really considered that there is more than just the mating ritual of the Rhinoceros going on in such tours.

We also met another traveler at the table.  Murray asked him what he did for a living.  When he said “Solid State Physicist” she replied “Well that kind of ends a conversation.”  The old gent nodded and then he and I talked for 20 minutes about solid state physics while Murray pretended to listen.  He was working with halfnium at a Penn State lab and was in Bozeman to give a lecture. 

So the Voss Inn of Bozeman was good, but we liked the uncluttered clean feel of the West Yellowstone Bed and Breakfast.  We arrived during Sky’s 7^th birthday party.  We headed off four our afternoon guided kayak tour.  My cousin arrived while we were out with her boyfriend and teenage son.  We went for dinner and back to the B+B and discussed schools, spirituality, relationships and family.  She is a new grade school principal which comes with its own book of drama that can be entertaining.

The next day the five of us piled into the suburban we rented and went through the lower loop of the park.  Our guide Dave from Yellowstone Alpen Guides was great, literally a fountain of information (pun intended). 

I think the only wildlife in the park we didn’t see were bobcat, moose and lynx.  We saw coyote, grizzly, wolf attacking bison, eagles, duck, swan, elk and on and on.  But the image of boiling pits of acidic gray mud gurgling out of the rock with plumes of sulfur steam in the air at dragon’s mouth will probably stay with me longer.  I should have saved the Hades references I used on the Teatro Colon for the thermal activity in Yellowstone.  I don’t know how many hellish things I can see that are so cool.  My sense is that if I see something hellish in Guatemala it won’t be nearly so good.  Something to look forward to I suppose. 

Yellowstone

We saw an amazing array of animals this trip.

Travis, Scotty, Heidi, Murray, Isaac, taking in the sulphur air

The one pic where we were caught laughing and it is out of focus.  Oh well, Murray likes "soft"focus.

It is hard to see, but this is a grizzly bear picking through the plants.

This is a wolf stalking a sick bison.  It was amazing the large amount of sitting time, and the small amounts of fighting.  This nature program needed some editing.  But it was a spectacular thing to see!

Progress

Just to recap the adventure so far.

8-21 to 8-29  Biking UT to CO

9-3 to 9-6 Caving in UT

9-8 to 9-30 Spanish School in Argentina

10-1 to 10-4 Fly Fishing MT

10-8 to 10-11 Yellowstone

10-17 to 10-24 Scuba in Baja

10-28 to 11-19 Spanish School in Guatemala

11-19 to 11-27 Costa Rica

Back in town

It is amazing what you can get done when you have a weekday all to yourself.  I renewed my driver’s license.  The wait wasn't actually that long but I still found myself thinking as I sat there-  "What do I really need a drivers license for?".  I don't drink.

I went by the park and took my leftover coins from Argentina and put them in the sand box and tapped them under the surface.  I recall how cool it was to find coins as a small child.  When you are 11 you are just bummed that you can’t spend an Argentine coin, but when you are 6, finding a coin from half way around the world is pretty cool.  So I figure that crowd is likely the sandbox crowd.

Fly fishing

Well, I got wiped out the second night of poker.  I got more interested in playing than winning.  You have to sit out a lot to win.  But I am still well ahead for the weekend.  It was kind of a bummer not to be able to clean and eat any of my own fish.  The Madison River is all catch and release.  Scott, the chef, did get some farm raised trout from down the road, but it isn't quite the same.

They say that stereotypes come into being typically based on some grain of truth.  I think there is more than a grain of truth to the stereotypes about salespeople’s personalities.   I know there is a significant statistical trend for Engineer’s personality traits.  I must say, sales guys are fun.  I also should say that I am glad I hang out with the sales guys on this trip once a year and work with engineers every day.

This trip was strange, my voice started going hoarse and then just about disappeared the second day.  It has been getting steadily better since.  I didn’t have swollen tonsils or aches or soreness or anything else other than my normal allergies to make me think I was sick.  It would be strange if allergies causing me to breathe through my nose at night were enough to make me that hoarse.

I would try to talk and sometimes wind up sounding like the Elk outside, just not as loud.  This actually happened to Murray when she and I went to her high school reunion a couple years ago.  I suppose I am not allowed to say which high school reunion.   Perhaps it is some perverse punishment not being able to talk when you get up with people you haven’t seen in a long time.  I suppose she and I might have been terrible listeners in a past life.

One guy brought his dad who had been a narcotics officer in NYC for 20 years before moving on to open a store.  I asked him if we had a shot at winning the war on drugs.  Very quickly he said no.  He mentioned it pained him to say that after all that work, but that he thought the only way to get rid of the crime was to legalize it.  One more data point I can use to further entrench myself in the Libertarian echo chamber.

Oh yes, and I suppose I should mention fishing.  I caught a 19” brown trout on the second day.  One day I caught 13 fish: rainbows, browns, and whitefish.  This is my best haul yet.  I would like to think I am getting better, but I doubt it.  I also caught a lot of bottom.  This is fly fisher slang for snagging.  Normally I dig a bit bottom, but on the river it just meant lots of sitting waiting for the guide to put a new fly on my line.

How to be a winner

I actually managed to squeeze a few hours in at the office Thursday afternoon and Friday morning in the 24 hours I was in Denver before heading to Montana for fly fishing.  The Madison Valley Ranch is a great place.  The food is gourmet and the accommodations are deluxe for fly fishing.  The food is prepared for everyone in a real time complex staging process by the chef, so you can’t get desert first.  You can’t win em all.  But here, I can win at poker.  I just play conservatively and spend some brain power thinking about odds calculations.  Perhaps that is unfair amongst a bunch of guys that are just having fun.  But I only play once a year, with them.