gone crazy. back later.

Anna, who is now almost 13 years old, visibly winced last time I used the term "cray cray." She probably has a point.

For the last several years, the advent of spring has meant two things in my little world: wildflowers, of which I get to be the Voice of the Official Report, unless I'm out of the office. In that case, it's Joe. Joe is not flowery by nature. Joe reads the script like a broken man. "It looks to be a wonderful year for wildflowers," he reads, miserably. "Vibrant displays carpet the slopes of the Central Texas Hill Country."

You can totally hear how badly he wants a riding lawnmower.

And of course the other harbinger of spring is my descent into madness as I put the finishing details on our annual travel conference. In a former life as a corporate meeting planner, I worked with mostly stationary targets: hotels and conference centers, caterers and audiovisual contractors, and attendees who tended to sit quietly in the same spot for 8 hours a day. But "tourism boot camp," as one of my regular attendees calls our conference, is a little different: 12-hour days on three buses, sweeping through a region with choreographed precision; discharging 100 participants for a sampler-platter taste of museums, restaurants, parks, restaurants, educational exhibits, and historic sites; splitting up and rotating to fit in the smaller-capacity attractions; meeting up at the next appointed time without missing a beat - usually staying 25 minutes, tops, at each stop.

Since everything is planned to the minute, the slightest delay or mishap can cause the whole carefully crafted schedule to come crashing down, which is why I get a little hostile if anyone requests a bathroom break.

However, since it's apparently still winter, I slipped away for a long weekend to visit my aunt Barbara, who lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and see a concert given by my sister Jessie from Brooklyn and her little violinist friend, and catch up with my cousin Gwen, who is very awesome. When she was 16 and I was 12, Gwen was the coolest human being on the face of the earth on account of having permed hair and driving an MG Midget. But it turns out she's still cool without those things. If you get a chance, ask her for some pointers on pool.

Plus I got the opportunity to explore Charleston by rental bicycle, which is a good idea if you're going to subsist on shrimp and grits and drink as much wine as my aunt and cousin do. (My aunt is widowed now, but was married to an Italian, and drinks accordingly.) It's bike-friendlier than I anticipated, though there aren't many dedicated bike lanes. There are a lot of cyclists, few helmets, and plenty of bike traffic on both sidewalks and streets.

And there's a separate pathway, with clear delineation for bikes and pedestrians, that runs across the high Arthur Ravenel Jr. bridge over the Cooper River, which is a shipping lane. It's almost the only climb Charleston offers as the land between the Cooper and the Ashley is completely flat. On the other side, Mount Pleasant offers a park, pier, and gift shop, where you can't buy your daughter a model ship even though she'd totally love it because it would get crushed in your backpack on the way home.

I think this year I'll put my attendees on 100 bikes and see how that works out. It'll be cray cray.

"Wintry Mix:" May Contain Raccoons

In Syracuse, where my parents live, they get snow. They get a fair amount of snow. When they are done getting snow, they get some more snow. Then the weather rolls up its sleeves, flexes its elbows, and gets down to some serious snowing. Upstate New York is like that.

Here in Texas, we get something called "wintry mix." It's kind of like trail mix, only not as tasty. It's made of fairly unpleasant ingredients, like snow, freezing rain, sleet, and bewildered Texas drivers.*

Adverse weather events mean emergency operations and extra hours in the office, unfortunately, though it would be much more pleasant to stay home, huddle under the covers, and warm myself with cats and possibly the odd raccoon (though Dave hasn't come banging on the locked cat door for many a night now). So, because I have committed to a car-free lifestyle, my boyfriend will come and pick up Anna and me in his Jeep Liberty and drive us to school and work.

It's easy to commit to a car-free lifestyle when you have someone who will drive you anywhere you want.

Like happy hour, for which it will hopefully be warm enough on Friday. We should go to Deep Eddy Cabaret, because it may be our last chance. Deep Eddy Cabaret is one of those grand Austin traditions of which I don't have much experience - I think I've even been to the Poodle Dog Lounge more often. Trophy's was another; I went two, or maybe three times with my sister Margie, when she had a friend working the bar who would give us free Lone Stars. Even though it's just about half a mile from my house, I hadn't seen Trophy's since they started working it over, so was a little shocked to see it looking lit up and shiny a couple of nights ago, with red and white striped awnings. Awnings! It makes me sad to think of all the displaced cockroaches - probably hanging out with Dave behind the dumpster, licking a scant sustenance out of discarded Lone Star bottles.

Deep Eddy, though, is the last place I ever got carded. It was a few years ago - I might even have been on the right side of 40 - but still, being asked for ID was enough to get me all tingly. I handed the bartender my license. He squinted at it in the low light of the bar.

"Hold on, let me get my glasses," he said. "I can't see for shit."

An experience like that is well worth braving a little wintry mix.


-----------------------------
*From California

Watch It!

Recently, my employer implemented a new policy where all employees are required to have a spotter when backing agency vehicles.

There's a logic to this: namely, that some employees (like most human beings) are not actually competent to operate heavy equipment, and have been running over things that were left in their path that were not easily seen when backing up. Material piles, I'm guessing. Coworkers. Things like that.

The thing is, this blanket policy makes sense for employees whose job involves operating heavy equipment, but perhaps not so much for desk-job employees whose interaction with fleet vehicles never goes beyond taking a trip in a Toyota Prius.

Nothing inspires public confidence in an agency like the sight of an employee using a professional flagger to back a sub-compact out of a gas station parking lot.

Another method of putting greater ownership on employees has been the implementation of an inspection sheet, similar to the ones that you ignore from the rental car company, which come back to bite you in the ass when it turns out your Taurus had chocolate sauce stains in the glove compartment.

I resent these. We pick up an agency car from the agency shop, which, as I understand it, is almost entirely staffed by mechanics. So I fail to see why I have to test the horn, lights, brakes, and fluid levels. On my most recent trip to South Padre Island, I walked back into the shop as soon as I started up the engine. "The 'low tire pressure' warning light is on," I told them.

"Do the tires actually look low?" they asked me.

"I'm not really sure," I said. I mean, they didn't look flat. But what do I know?

They sighed. "It's cold out, that's all," they told me. "Once you start driving and the tires warm up, the light will go off. Of course, we can take a look at it, if you're really worried."

They looked at me. They were eating lunch. "I guess it will be fine," I said.

It never did go off, but at least I made it to South Padre and back without a blowout.

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Our Team

Are you a sports fan? Apparently nobody isn't these days.

My boyfriend insists on watching football. He cooks, so I put up with it. And, since I fell in love with Seattle when we went to visit Margie last month, I was pleased that the Seattle Seahawks won their game against whoever it was they were playing. "Hey, they won," I said at the end of the game. "Isn't that nice."

Fans don't get much more die-hard than that.

I wasn't in Seattle this past week, but might as well have been:

Tuesday night it was a business dinner followed by a panel discussion at an industry meeting in San Antonio on Wednesday, and from there my favorite photographer Kevin and I drove down to South Padre Island to conduct a site visit for our April conference.

This is what winter in South Padre looks like. It's almost never really cold, but the weekend and much of the week were damp, gray, and chilly. The Winter Texans are pissed. They didn't schlep a fifth wheel all the way down from Manitoba for this crap.

The weather was no problem for us; it was 12 degrees in Austin the morning we left, and frankly, walking along the beach is monotonous under the best of circumstances.

It was much colder in San Antonio on Tuesday night. Dining at a restaurant where the 6-ounce filet costs about what I spend on a weeks' groceries with my boss' boss' boss and a handful of high-ranking strangers (our panelists) made me feel like a kid permitted to sit at the grown-ups' table.

And unfortunately, the conversation neatly sidestepped any mention of topics about which I am knowledgeable - say, tourism, or opera, or (if you want to be naughty) salacious gossip about people who work in tourism or opera - and focused almost entirely on two areas where I can't say anything at all: 1, football, about which I understand nothing whatsoever; and 2, politics, about which I have opinions I won't air in mixed company. I think I was the odd man out on both fronts.

So aside from a few pleasantries with my boss' boss' boss (whom I really like a lot, and who had brought me along with her to help with planning the logistics for the panel session), I had nothing at all to say during dinner, and got the distinct feeling that my only function was to be needlessly expensive, kind of like government relief programs, but not at all like Mack Brown or whoever that other guy is they got in to replace him.

I wonder if I could find a tourism job in Seattle?

Cubicle with a View

Money is the only thing that has value. Consequently, only things that yield immediate monetary gain are important. The more immediate, the more important.

Don't worry about the long term, baby. We'll be halfway to Buenos Aires by then.

We were watching "Antiques Roadshow" tonight. How many items that were picked up for $25, $50 have come to be worth tens of thousands of dollars, now that the artistic merit of their creator has finally (many years after burial in a pauper's grave, of course) come to be fully recognized? And why is it that serious material benefit only shows up once the actual creator of the work is long gone?

It pays to be an artist, eventually, but it pays someone else. Not you.

My sisters are artists. Jessie, a concert pianist in Brooklyn, actually manages to scrape out a sparse living at it. Margie, a free spirit in Seattle? Not so much. Jessie is a brilliant musician. And Margie is just a genius: she composes, plays piano and cello beautifully, sketches, paints... and works in a pizza parlor, if she can get work.

I'm the least talented of the three of us by far. And I'm also easily the best off: I have a very comfortable middle-class job with a retirement plan and good health insurance. I guess contentment with mediocrity is more valuable than genius.

My staid government agency employer has recently become a vehicle for a handful of brilliant career climbers, rocketing through on their way to bigger and greater things, leaving decades of bureaucracy swirling in tumult like jetstream in their wake. Our new executive director has recently announced his departure for the next big thing.

He brought an entire new upper-managementourage with him, when he arrived about two years ago, and has fundamentally shaken our tired old agency structure to its roots. This is not necessarily a bad thing. But, having wrenched us off the deeply rutted old path, it seems unfair to leave the people who were contentedly trudging along it to figure out how to convert the maelstroms of change he's stirred up into a productive route forward. What do we do? Hire a batch of new, dynamic visionaries who will rile things up a bit more along the same lines, then probably follow in this guy's footsteps? Or try to forget, try to get back to the way things used to be?

Because the thing is, all the cronies he brought with him, who understand this way of doing things, are all going out with him. It's just like when the Enterprise makes unauthorized first contact with a Stone Age culture because Kirk just HAS to bone the girl in the leopardskin bikini and tosses everything they've come to believe about the universe on its ear, when suddenly the Fleet Admiral is all like "JAMES TIBERIUS KIRK YOU GET BACK TO STARBASE RIGHT NOW" and just like that, poof! they're gone.

And the Stone Age culture is all like, well, shit. Now what?

I was talking about this to my boyfriend tonight, since he also works for the same agency. He was inclined to be hopeful. He suggested that one of the old guard who had not been run off might take back over as the new executive director.

"At least he's an engineer," he said.

Were sadder words ever spoken?

Mind you, I've put in my time with soulless marketing types. When I first started working for this agency (eight years ago (TODAY!)) I looked around me at the freak show of decaying, defective career government employees. I looked at the old-timey phones with the blinking red "hold" lights. I saw the DOS-based mainframe applications. I smelled the cigarette smoke, the microwave popcorn, the Phantom Pharts in cubicle-land. And I said, "Well, you know, at least they aren't soulless marketing types."

What goes around comes around, I guess.

I Just Work Here

"CLEARANCE ON HIGHWAY BRIDGE OVER [redacted] RIVER FROM [redacted town] TO [redacted neighboring state town]," read the full text of a customer's email, submitted through our agency's website, that came to me for handling yesterday.

Any worthwhile job involves a little detective work.

So, first thing, I pulled up our agency's maps, Google Maps, Bing Maps, whatever, of the bridge in question. There are no overpasses within that expanse. So, I reasoned, the customer must be inquiring about clearance over the roadways spanned by the roadway specified. But there aren't any, no grade-separated crossings, none. The highway neither crosses, nor is crossed by, any other highway between the two towns mentioned.

In fact the only thing it does cross is the river mentioned in the customer's email, a dammed-off reservoir in popular use as a recreational boating and fishing facility. And since the customer lives in a coastal city, and gives an address whose street name has a nautical theme, this must be a boating question. Right?

Well, my employer doesn't handle boating, unless you're talking about commercial shipping. Which this clearly is not. Still, first rule of my job is IT'S YOUR JOB. Kind of like Fight Club, only it's Tourism Club and there is no right answer because whatever, I get to punch you. Bwah!

I spent a lot of time doing research yesterday afternoon. I looked up boating charts from the U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard. I checked in with Texas Parks & Wildlife. I made phone calls to the local area office. I looked up information from private marinas in the area. I thought about calling a local fishing charter service incognito, pretending to be a tourist.

Finally, from a river basin water authority (Stephen the water management specialist is my new BFF, by the way), I was able to obtain the required information. I sent it to the customer. I felt like a god. Who's your mama? I. I am your straight-up resourceful-as-shit mama, beeyotches. Bow down to the master!

This morning I got in to find a response from the customer. "Actually, I was looking for information on transporting my motor home," he wrote. "We figured it out. But thanks for the info!"

Hey. Any time.

Stick With "Workplace: Mission Zero" and Nobody Gets Hurt

As I was walking out of the building where our safety meeting was held this morning, I caught my high heel on a water hose snaking across the landscaping, and nearly tripped and fell. Driving out of the parking lot a few seconds later, I saw my former boss doing the same thing.

Safety, they keep telling us, comes first. Then they prove incontrovertibly otherwise by their official actions. Yet it is not malice that does this, or shoddy work practices, or cutting corners. It just seems to me that reality keeps rearing its undeniable head and making a neat mess of all the plans, policies, programs, and lofty intentions we keep implementing to deny it.

However, I don't mean this bitterly. Our senior management is deeply serious about the issue of workplace safety, to the point where they happily spend a full day with us in an overcooled classroom, participating with joyless loyalty in roundtables, telling tear-jerking stories, trying to discover... what? Why does the workplace, despite the brightly-colored ideals of unrestrained capitalism, fail to conform to the brightly-colored ideals of a workplace Utopia?

They are genuinely sincere. And we want to be safe... right? I mean, every employee, on a personal level, values his or her own personal ability to go home at the end of the day and do whatever he or she does best - be it hug the kids or go out on a massive happy-hour-instigated bender - to at least the point at which he or she would not, by any means, find it a matter of indifference to determine whether said employee might just as well be wiped out by a stray cement mixer.

Are you with me? (As one of our facilitators kept saying this morning.)

Well, we went through exercises and brainstorming, and determined (over the protests of one of our participants, who I'm sorry to report I thought was not nearly as bright as she should have been) that the most important element in incentivizing* employees to implement safety initiatives was to give them ownership.**

So, while accountability is important, said most of us in our group, the most important element is to personalize and internalize the concept of safety, to where the reason people look out for it is because they want to and believe in it, not because you'll get in trouble if someone gets hurt. Right?

But one woman in my group had a lot of trouble with this concept, and kept arguing it. "I'm sorry, you guys, I'm just not getting it," she said. "You have to have accountability. Why are you all arguing with this? It's got to be the top priority!" Others tried to explain the carrot vs. stick concept to her, all with varying degrees of failure; then time was up, and we submitted our inconclusive results with the rest.

More troubling to me, really, was the beginning of the day's exercises. This is a government agency I work for, and the initiatives we implement today ought to be not merely for the good of employees, but for the general public. So I was deeply troubled when an official representative of the meeting organizer stood up and began our day with an official prayer, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the success of our endeavors today.

Yahweh, Ashtoreth, fickle Fate, lucky chance, or whoever assist us, please, in the preservation of human and animal lives to their full and healthy span. But ordering a roomful of employees, of whatever religion or lack thereof, to bow their heads and participate in a sacred convocation in the name of a particular deity whom many do not observe, upset me a lot. Keeping everyone I work with, including the public, is sacred to me. But invoking a prayer as an opening ceremony which excludes many of us from the get-go is a very bad, bad thing indeed, and I hope to get this addressed by the appropriate, responsible parties.

I've been away for umpteen months, so you shouldn't expect this to be funny. However, if it's any consolation, I'd like to point out that at least we didn't have to watch "Highway to Certain Death," largely concerned with the individual employee's responsibility for avoiding the blind spot of a cement mixer, today or at any threatened point in the immediate future.

Peace, blessings, and workplace safety to all.

------
*You will never be able to pay enough to earn what it actually cost me, on a personal level, to get me to use that word... never.
**This also once meant something.

Embrace Your Inner Turnip

Here I sit, sipping a glass of wine (against orders) to wash down the green salad I had for dinner (against orders), waiting for my heart to stop racing from the day's events, not to mention the Coke I had at lunch (against orders).

They don't tell you never to watch a Quentin Tarantino movie before giving blood, though. I did keep my bandage on for four hours (per orders). Indeed, it's still on now. At this point I'm pretty sure that when I take it off, a literal geyser of gore will splatter-paint my bedroom walls with crimson.

For one thing, my room is done in burgundy and cream, so bright red would totally not work. For another, splatter-painting is SO '90s. Kind of like, you know, those convertible shorts pants with the zip-off legs that nobody wears anymore. Nobody.

I had lots of time to get phriendly with my phlebotomist today; she was so methodical and careful in her choice of which vein to tap. She called one of the others over to consult with him. "This one right here, I see where it is, it shouldn't be hard to hit," she said, tapping on a vein in my right arm. "But I don't know. I really like this one," indicating my left arm. "It's a side vein, and it runs along the muscle, but it's so nice and plump and bouncy."

"I won't tell you which vein to tap," the other, presumably more experienced phlebotomist said. "You're the one doing it, so it's your call."

They are artists, these people.

Did you know that the veins that run along the side of your forearms, while closer to the surface, tend to shift around when you flex your muscles? They're easier to find, but also easy to lose, or to close off with incautious poking or taping. The vein in my right arm is a safe bet - it's anchored firmly in the comfortable hollow of my inner elbow - but the one on the left, if you hit it just right, will pay off big time. You can drain me in five minutes flat. It's really quite spectacular.

All this talk was, perhaps, more informative than reassuring. However, once she had determined her plan of attack, the insertion of the needle was painless and the blood flowed easily. I was relieved enough to join gigglingly into their conversation, which had turned to the best place to get a good deal on the latest fashions in surgical scrubs. "Do you think," the girl asked, "they had bell-bottomed scrubs back in the '70s?"

"Oh my gosh," I said. "Do you remember those convertible-shorts, zip-off-leg pants everybody was wearing in the '90s?" They did. "Well, just a couple of years ago, I used to work with a guy who wore those, still. Every. Single. Day."

I looked a little nervously over my shoulder after mentioning this, but then I thought, come on. As if Coworker-You-Idiot would ever give blood. Would he? At any rate, he was nowhere in sight. For heaven's sake, I hadn't even thought of the man in I don't know how long.

His name shall never again pass between us.

Five minutes later I was sent to the "canteen" (really, just a handful of chairs set up in a loose semicircle around a table with Oreos, Nutter Butters, Fig Newtons, Sprite, and Gatorade) with instructions to spend at least 10 minutes to recover. In a randomly unrelated instance, a photographer from our agency's employee newsletter had shown up, just as I was finished, to take a few promotional photos of the blood drive. I drained for an extra two minutes or so as a result. Considering the masterful way that phlebotomist tapped my fat, succulent vein, who knows how much extra blood I lost?

I sat down in the canteen. I opened a mini-pack of Fig Newtons. I took a bite.

"Well, hello there!" A new arrival rose from the waiting chairs near the entrance and dropped into the seat next to me, taking my hand. "Elizabeth! How have you been?"

I was a little dazed. "Oh my gosh, how are you?" I said, with unfeigned amazement - since, as I mentioned, I hadn't even thought of him since I don't know when.

"Great! Great!" he enthused. "And you, how are you liking it over in your new division?"

"Oh, I love it," I said; "actually, you know, I work with your boss, Bill's, cousin now..."

"Great!" he said. "Bill went over to Travel too, didn't he?"

I was puzzled. The Bill I was talking about is C-Y-I's boss; and while I've seen firsthand the kind of cognitive limitations C-Y-I may be working under, I guess I still expect him to know, at least roughly, what division his boss works in. But he went on. "Bill, the little guy, the one with the... you know... (he gestured vaguely with one hand)..."

Oh, THAT Bill. "No, he went to a different division," I said. "It was good, he seemed to like it there."

"I was happy to get out of our old office myself," he said. "But I'm really glad I was able to finish up that last big project I had. Man, you helped so much with that. You probably 10-keyed about eight times as much as everybody else who was doing it. You were so good at it."

I felt unprepared to respond to this gallantry. "Ahahaha," I said.

"So, your name changed," he continued, "you got divorced? So you're single now! Seeing anyone?"

And this is the other thing they don't tell you when you give blood: that the recovery canteen makes great hunting grounds for state employees who might prefer a woman a little on the woozy side.

I left, actually - in fact I told him I am dating his boss' cousin (this is true), so he took his leave, and I smiled and waved and left without finishing my Fig Newton.

But I did notice, woozing gently out the door, that he was wearing normal pants. I'm sure there's some kind of significance to this fact. Maybe after a couple more glasses of wine, it will all make sense.

April Fool's!

Did you know how there's this trend where Japanese guys are dating pillows with a girl's anime face and figure imprinted on them? Did you know how there's now a trend where some of these guys are marrying their Japanese pillow girlfriends? Well, it's true. I read it on the internet.

I did lunch coverage at our visitor center downtown today. This is lots of fun because all kinds of people come in and ask interesting questions. I've done lunch and part-day coverage so many times now that I'm actually almost passable at it - I mean, very few of my visitors get arrested for following my recommendations anymore - but I certainly don't have the kind of stories that the regular staff have. One of my dear friends there sent me a list of some of the particularly notable things she's heard.

"How do I become a senator? I want to become a senator so I can represent my people. My people need and deserve representation! My people, well... they’re gypsies."

"I understand that drag queens have to pee too, I just don't think they should do it in the ladies' room."

"I guess some people don’t know any better because no one’s ever died for Iowa."

The thing is, our visitor center staff are held to very high standards of customer service. We love our traveling public, we really do. And while we hear some doozies now and again, we're polite and respectful, and try never to let our customers know that any boneheaded thing they might come up with could end up being blog fodder. Because nobody wants to be blog fodder. Nobody.

Across the room from our travel information desk is the visitor information desk for the particular historic site where the visitor center is located. It's staffed by a different agency, and I'm sorry to have to break the news that this agency's customer service standards are not quite as high as ours. Let me give you an example. Take Dwight... please.

Dwight works at the other desk; right across the room from ours, he's naturally friendly, and regards me as something of a comrade-in-arms against that greatest of all natural enemies, The Public. "Don't you let them push you around," he tells me, quite loudly, in our large and echoey chamber which is open to the rest of the rooms on the floor, including exhibits and a gift shop. "You've got to stand up to these people. If you're too nice to them, they'll just walk all over you."

He then proceeds to tell stories about how he's told this visitor what's what or shown that other visitor who's boss. He speaks loudly - our desks are about 20 feet apart - and he has a high-pitched cackle which he airs freely when he feels he's said something particularly witty. Which is more often than you might think. I glance nervously towards the open stone arch doorway, because, you know, the public is right there. They can hear you.

Last week he came over and showed me an iPhone app that displays pictures of different guns and knives and makes the sound of them being fired or drawn when you tap on the screen. "See, now, this is how you deal with unruly tourists," he told me. He cackled.

One of my coworkers, who works the lunch shift at least as often as I do, has never experienced many of this, the confidences, the cackling, or the iPhone apps. "I think Dwight has a little crush on you," he told me.

"Dwight is married," I told him; "he doesn't wear a ring, so I didn't know until recently; but last week he mentioned his wife - said his house was being remodeled and that he and his wife were butting heads over it."

My friend and I arrived, I'm sorry to report at almost the same moment, at the startling conclusion that Dwight's wife is actually a Japanese pillow girlfriend.

In further news, I intend to continue blogging if I can still get anybody to read the darn thing.

Will Wonders Never Cease

About two weeks ago, my state agency received an email through our website inquiring when the best time to see Texas wildflowers is.

Emails from the public are a mixed bag, of course. Human nature being what it is, people don't usually write to a faceless bureaucratic entity unless they're het up about something. A not-insignificant portion of my job involves answering hate mail.

I love it. Not the hate mail itself, but the whole process of coming to understand the other person's point of view; of moving through commingled frustration, annoyance, and compassion; of trying to figure out what can be done either to help the person, or at least to help him or her understand. Forging connections is amazing. The best thing in the world is when you write back to someone who's very angry - with or without good cause - and feel that you've made sense, that you've cleared things up, that the person received at least some sort of satisfaction from your answer. You've made a change in the world, and in someone else, and in yourself - just the littlest tiniest bit, but it's such a good thing.

Usually that's the end of it, but every so often someone writes back to me. Often they thank me. Many times they're surprised to have received a thoughtful response from a faceless, monolithic government entity at which they were, after all, only venting a little spleen. Sometimes they want to continue the discussion further. Obviously I can't answer everything - I mean, I personally sure as heck don't agree 100% with everything my employer does - but on balance, I love the process, and the contact and the interaction with these strangers seeking any acknowledgement whatsoever of their point of view, and get it. It's tremendously rewarding, really.

But this wildflower question just made me completely happy. Of course the inquirer wasn't upset; she wanted to know when the peak of wildflower season is, and where the best part of the state to visit is, and whether we're going to have a good wildflower season this year.

Well, on the last one, who knows. It's looking a heck of a lot better than last year. We had some good rain in the fall, and only one hard freeze so far this winter (till tomorrow and Saturday night, anyway), and it looks like we'll get some nice fields of bluebonnets, come late March to mid-April. Somewhere. You can generally count on east Texas, anyway.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote back to this nice British nature photographer and said that, while it's too early to determine how colorful the show of wildflowers will be this year, there is a fair prospect of a good season; I sent a few links, and had a shipment of Texas travel literature sent off to her, along with last year's wildflower driving tour issue of the travel magazine, whose editor is a friend of mine. She wrote back and thanked me right away.

And today she wrote the friendliest note to say that she'd received all the literature in the mail, thanked me again for being helpful, and promised to send me photographs after her trip.

Do you remember before there was an internet? Can you imagine life without it? I do, and I can't. At this point I'm kind of wishing she'd look me up when she's in town. People are quite lovely, you know. Aren't I lucky to have a job where I get to be friends with so many of them?

Did You Know?

Purebred horses don't have sex.

Well, thoroughbred racehorses do. This is euphemistically referred to as "live cover," but of course what it really means is that the boy horse gets on top of the girl horse and cheesy 70's guitar riffs play and 11 months later there's a little baby horsey that makes everybody say "awwwww" and then goes on to win a whole bunch of races.

But there are different breeds of horses for far more purposes than simply racing, although I feel I'm using the term "purpose" rather loosely here. There are cutting horses, reining horses, halter horses, etc.; horses which are very specifically and carefully bred to a number of different disciplines that don't really serve any practical use or even entertainment value on any large scale - just hobbies, really, for a small, closed circle of extremely wealthy individuals. It does seem to be a fairly comfortable life for the horses at least. If you don't mind celibacy.

We had a tour Thursday of a reining-horse ranch, given by the ranch's breeding manager, a calm, competent professional whose job I rather emphatically would not want. However, as it turned out later, her job is not quite as dirty as I first thought it was, when she talked about how the stallions do not "live cover" the mares, but that, um, "collections" are taken, and the mares are artificially inseminated. And since the mares whose genes are most desirable are show mares, to be kept in prime condition, the embryos are flushed out after a couple of weeks and implanted in some lesser, sucky mares that nobody cares about.

She led us at last into the breeding barn, with foaling stalls, rows of stalls for the babies (who are born in spring, so these were empty now) and a large, barrel-shaped object on poles. "What I do," she told us, "is, every other day, January through July, lead the stud stallion around through the mares to get him all warmed up and ready to go; then he gets up on this thing here" (indicating the barrel-shaped object) "and it has a receptacle for collecting the semen."

That's right, folks - at its last stop before disbanding and returning home, my tour group was looking at a sex doll for horses. And it struck me as a very great pity that we were visiting out of season, because if we'd gotten to see a demonstration, we could have said our tour had a happy ending!!!

This wildly inappropriate observation was kept to myself, but judging from the snickers and giggles among my group, I wasn't the only one thinking along those lines. It had been a very long week. We were tired.

I drove back to Austin with my friend and coworker Mary, who is one of the staff at our visitor center in Austin - one of the people for whom I occasionally fill in at lunchtime. Mary is possibly the funniest person I've ever met - joyful, sweet, outgoing, and full of hilarious stories she's picked up over the years. It is of course inevitable that two women in a car for three and a half hours will talk about sex - especially considering what we'd just seen.

"I used to work with this guy named Bill who was gay," Mary told me, "several years ago. Well, we had a little limited storage space for travel literature in a funny little closet under the stairs on the bottom floor of the headquarters building downtown. We kept the literature on a few shelves right in the front part of the closet, but if you shined a flashlight in there, you could see the space went back, around the corner, to who-knows-where. It was dark and really creepy. We called it Spider Corner. One time I noticed a box sort of around the corner, just the edge of it in sight, and I took a broom handle and pulled it out and found a whole bunch of copies of this cookbook from 1968, wrapped in plastic. Everybody in the building was all excited and they just went like hotcakes - man, I wish I'd kept one! And who knows what else might be back there? But nobody would ever go in, it was much too scary.

"Well, our boss at the time, he didn't know Bill was gay, and he was always asking him, 'Why don't you have a girlfriend? You seem like a guy with a lot on the ball. Why don't you get married?' So finally, to get him to stop, I told him, 'You know, Bill is gay,' but he turned out to be kind of homophobic and that really bothered him, so he decided he was going to 'cure' Bill. 'Look at that girl, she's awfully pretty,' he'd say. 'You should ask her out, she'd get you set up!'"

"Wow. He sure wouldn't be able to get away with that now," I remarked.

"I know, right?!" said Mary. "Talk about inappropriate! The boss really thought if Bill met the right girl, that he'd turn straight! So he kept trying to get him to date girls.

"So one day after one of these conversations, Bill comes up to me," she went on, "and he said, 'A vagina... a vagina, Mary...'" (in a horrified tone), "'oh, my God, Mary, a vagina... That's just like Spider Corner!!!'"

The only drawback of driving back to Austin for three and a half hours with Mary is that your sides and your throat hurt from laughing so much.

But it sure is educational!

So Many Pictures, No Camera Cord

Under most circumstances, getting escorted out of town by the cops is not the best way to start a day.

In my job, it's awesome!

Today is day 3 of our north Texas tour, and I'm taking advantage of a rare break to type up a quick post from my hotel room in Wichita Falls, where I have not yet, I'm pleased to announce, quite worn out my welcome. But then, we only got in an hour ago.

Any self-respecting hotel ought to be prepared to issue each guest a cat upon check-in. Who knows - this might not be too far off. Only ten years ago, even high-end hotels routinely furnished their rooms with mattresses made of repurposed drywall. The idea of putting comfortable beds in rooms intended for sleeping is rather a recent one.

Even moderate-class hotels now have plush mattresses, soft, plentiful pillows, attractive furnishings and drapes, and luxurious bathroom fittings. The little things really do add up. Wireless internet is fairly standard too, which means that, in my case anyway, the flat-panel TV never gets turned on. You get shampoo, conditioner, and body lotion. Maybe even mouthwash. Shoe polish, you get. Such extravagance!

So cats, that's where they really need to go next. And actual cream for your coffee. I still can't comprehend how that weird powdery stuff might be considered an adequate substitute.

I'm going to make myself Google-able here, I know it, but have to say that the highlight so far - for me - has been Chandor Gardens in Weatherford. With an intelligent, funny, offbeat horticulturist acting as guide, the setting was beyond beautiful, and the weather's been perfect. Our guide pointed out the bride's cottage located on the grounds. "There are a couple of advantages to this," he remarked. "One is that some guest who hasn't seen the bride since they were in sixth grade is going to want to catch up on everything that's happened over all those years - an hour before the wedding. So the guest will be looking all over the house for her, while she's holed up in the cottage drinking champagne."

He paused, then added, "Plus it's right next to the parking lot, so if she comes to her senses she can make a quick getaway."

Then again, getting a police escort out of Granbury might have been the highlight. That's hard to beat. Or getting to drink actual honest-to-goodness Crazy Water.

The whole trip so far has been wonderful, maybe not quite so much if you don't care for live music revue performed by slightly overenthusiastic Christians, which is not my thing, but everybody else loved it. And I've been happy as a good-sized pile of clams over everything else. I love my job, so much so in fact that I might almost go on Oprah and jump up and down on the couch about it, except that Oprah ranks slightly lower on the Things That Beth Likes scale than even the perkiest Christian musical revue, so forget I mentioned it.

It would be pretty cool if we got to attend a theatrical performance put on by a group of Flying Spaghetti Monster devotees for noble pastafarian causes. Have you been touched by His Noodly Appendage?

I have so many pictures, but I left my camera cord at home - you always have to forget something. Leave it to me to forget one of very few items your modern hotel won't provide.

Maybe tomorrow morning I'll get run out of town on a rail!

An Offer You Must Refuse

Weird thing about working in government #746: Your negotiation skills will be put to the test in ways you never could have imagined - unless, of course, you were batshit crazy to begin with, which given your choice of vocation is perhaps not completely out of the question.

Situation: I have a fam tour coming up next week for a group of our employees. All of the events, meals, and accommodations on the tour are sponsored, donated by the participating chambers of commerce, museums, restaurants, hotels, etc. All I have to do (aside from prepare the extensive and complicated legal paperwork allowing us to accept the donations, coordinate the myriad travel arrangements of all our attendees, research and prepare educational materials on all the attractions we'll be visiting, make binders, enforce guidelines, answer questions, and forcefully wrest from the tour coordinator as many of the details as I can get him to share with me in case, oh I don't know, some emergency arises, and he has to leave early on in the tour, and I end up in the middle of nowhere with a tour bus full of information center staff, armed with nothing more potent than a few of his notes scribbled on scrap paper, JUST LIKE WHAT HAPPENED LAST YEAR, thankyouverymuch) is show up and enjoy the ride.

And I can't wait! I'll be bringing my laptop. I will blog. It's super fun!

But the travel arrangements get a little complicated. One of our attendees hails from a city with no nearby airport, so she has to drive; but it's too far to travel in one day, so she'll arrive the day before the tour begins on Sunday. Well and good. I asked the tour coordinator if he could get us a room for her at "state rate"* Saturday night.

He responded to me a couple of days later. "No problem!" he said. "The Sunday night host hotel will be happy to provide her a comp room for Saturday night as well."

Ah, but you see, the donation approval we received was only for the dates of the tour, beginning Sunday. If they give us a freebie on Saturday, it's a gift, and that's unethical. So I have to decline. "I expect they'll think I'm completely off my rocker," I wrote back to him, "but can they just give her the room at $85?"

"No problem!" he said; but another week later, when he sent me the confirmation number for my attendee, he once more mentioned that the hotel had comped the room.

I hesitate to call them to straighten it out, because I think our conversation will go something like this:

***

HOTEL CLERK: Hello and thank you for calling the Hotel Espada! How may I help you?

ME: Hi, I'm calling on behalf of Mary Ingalls, regarding confirmation number 8675309.

HOTEL CLERK (checking his computer): Yes ma'am, I have a reservation here for Ms. Ingalls checking in on Saturday and checking out on Monday, two nights, and it's our pleasure to offer the room complimentary as part of your tour group!

ME: Thank you so much! Actually, the thing is, I'm calling because actually she'll need to pay for Saturday.

HOTEL CLERK (confused): No, ma'am, I have your group down for complimentary rooms.

ME: Yes, thank you, that's right, except only that one.

HOTEL CLERK (still more confused): So, only Ms. Ingalls is paying? Isn't she part of the tour? And you are...?

ME: I'm the planner. See, the tour doesn't begin till Sunday, and we have special permission from our governing board to accept the donation of the room-nights, so...

HOTEL CLERK: She needs to pay for both nights?

ME: No, you see, she only pays for the first night. The second night, she's part of the whole comped-room tour group deal.

HOTEL CLERK (a little snippy): It's actually more work for us to do it this way. Why don't we just comp her room for both nights?

ME: I know, but we can't because we don't have directorial approval for the first night. Look, I know it doesn't make sense, but can you please just go ahead and charge her for one night?

HOTEL CLERK (annoyed): All right, then, if you say so. (Checks computer) That'll be $149 plus tax -

ME: Oh wait, sorry, no. We can't pay more than $85.

HOTEL CLERK (slightly incredulous): The government rate is $149, ma'am.

ME: I know, but our travel budget has been cut and our agency's policy doesn't allow us to spend more than $85 on lodging.

HOTEL CLERK: If you're hard up, you know, I did offer the room for free just a few minutes ago.

ME: No, you see, we're not allowed to accept free stuff without directorial approval. She absolutely has to pay for Saturday. Just not more than $85.

HOTEL CLERK: Are you allowed to pay less than $85??

ME: Of course - I mean, that's just the cap; it's the most we can pay; if some place offers a room for less then we pay less.

HOTEL CLERK: Okay. How about $0?

ME: Nonono! Look - please can you just give her the room for one night for $85, please!

HOTEL CLERK: I really don't see why this is necessary.

ME: It's policy! Without directorial approval, we can't accept anything over $25 in value!

HOTEL CLERK: Oh, really? Have you subtracted $85 from $149 lately?

ME: That's different! That's not the same! We're negotiating!! I'm a tour planner!!!

HOTEL CLERK: You certainly could have fooled me.

***

The thing is, I figure, after fifteen or twenty years of working in the government sector, all of this might begin to make real sense.

And at that point, I really hope somebody goes transportational and shoots me.

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*Long story. Love your legislature!

You Heartless Bastard.

In January 2007, a division of the agency where I work published a calendar whose cover photo was a (ahem) husky man lying on his stomach, only the pants of his jeans and his boots visible, investigating a hole in the ground. I was trying to describe this calendar to some coworkers of mine today.

"Oh wait," piped up one, who by God would be three-martini break group material if there still were a three-martini break group, "are you talking about 'the butt calendar'?"

I was.

"It totally reminded me of someone I used to work with!" I exclaimed, getting a few funny looks; so I had to go on and tell the story of the man who fell asleep in high-level meetings, as well as on the floor of his cubicle and in communal work spaces; whose snoring echoed throughout the entire section; who once playfully sneaked up on me in the kitchenette but had dozed off by the time I finished washing my dishes and turned around to find him standing eighteen inches behind me; who finally had to bring in a doctor's note, excusing this and other behavior, on the grounds of sleep apnea.

The thing is, when you work among more or less normal people, it's no longer quite nice to talk about people like this one - who was after all fairly typical for the setting. Try telling straights the quasi-comical horror stories you used to hoot over with like-minded inmates on break, and next thing you know they're glazing at you, smiles politely frozen on their faces, heads slightly tilted. And you realize you've become someone who makes fun of the differently-abled. And you feel like an asshole.

Do you wonder why I never blog anymore?

I recommend not lying around with your head stuck down in a hole in the ground. It limits your options like you wouldn't believe. And it's bad karma to make fun of TPPeople.

The Five-Thing Day

Six things, if you count going on break.

A friend of mine posted this video on her Facebook page yesterday:

Its message reminds me of the 1981 film Looker. This classic sci-fi thriller features beautiful models who have their features fine-tuned by a plastic surgeon in order to reach market-researched commercial-appeal perfection, after which the marketing firm digitally scans them, and can then project their 3-D digitized images onto studio sets, performing exactly as programmed, so that the actresses themselves become superfluous and can simply be bumped off. Haven't I always told you marketers were evil?

And way to not think outside the box, people. You have the technology to reproduce a living being in faultless holography, and program the reproduction to behave in any way you like, but the concept of photoshop is totally beyond you?

Engaging in lengthy, profound conversation about this movie with a coworker does not count as one of the five (or six) things I did today.

I did even less yesterday, but at least I provided lunch relief for our visitor center staff. This is a task I find a little intimidating, because while I like people on general principle, people who ask you questions - and expect you to know the answers, yet - those people frighten me.

"What's the coolest thing to do in Austin?" a guy asked me. A plethora of wonderful activities - exploring the Zilker Botanical Gardens and swimming in Barton Springs, two-stepping at the Broken Spoke, shopping for Halloween costumes at Electric Ladyland, cruising through downtown on the Dillo, checking out the view from Mount Bonnell, eating a spinach omelet at Magnolia, having your picture taken with Leslie, going on a coffeehouse crawl, sipping a Bellini on the patio at Romeo's, taking in an indie film at the Alamo, catching a set at Continental Club or Saxon Pub or, I don't know, anywhere in town, including the steps of City Hall on Friday afternoons - completely failed to come into my head. "Um," I said.

"Okay," he said good-naturedly (he seemed to think I was cute), "what's your favorite thing to do?"

I like to go to Robbie's, eat cheese and crackers, watch a couple Tivo'd episodes of "The Office," and drink cheap wine. But I suspected this was not what he had in mind. Besides, Robbie probably wouldn't let me invite him.

I ended up recommending either the Austin Overtures very comprehensive, informative 90-minute tour or the fun Austin Ducks amphibious tour - both of which I've done, and both of which are great - but when my visitor eventually left, I believe he was planning to do a self-guided tour of Memorial Stadium. I hope I'm not held responsible when the travelers I assist get arrested.

Today began auspiciously, because I saw a rainbow on my bike ride in to work. The weather is lovely and cool, after our long and wearying summer. I sent an email with some paperwork formalizing an agreement between a local government and my agency. I returned a phone call about a hotel contract. I sent another email with suggestions on the redesign for our tourism website. I provided a coworker with some GIS data. Four things.

Then I went walking at lunch, and saw someone in serious medical distress of some kind on the hike-and-bike trail just below the Four Seasons. Paramedics were at the scene, loading the victim onto a stretcher, so there was nothing to do but walk by quickly and not stare. But a bicyclist coming the other direction shouted "Good Lord!" as he passed me, so I assume it was pretty bad. I hope everyone was okay.

I got back to work and Robbie called, on his way downtown for a meeting, and actually running early. Could he stop by?

He could! So I brought him up to my office and introduced him to all my work peeps. Then we went on break with the remnants of the people we knew at our old job for about half an hour, in the Three-Martini Break Group spot, and it was wonderful.

Back at work I was actually called upon to do another thing before I could go home for the day, and had to write up and send out a set of guidelines for our upcoming fam tour of the Fort Worth area. Five things! Six, if you count break. Not bad for government work.

Tomorrow I'm doing lunch coverage at the visitor center again. With luck, I'll get a bit better at it, the more practice I get. Otherwise, Robbie better stock up on cheese.

But What Price Victory?

Software approval WIN! I finally got ArcMap installed on my work computer!

ArcMap is great for many purposes related to travel and tourism. It’s rather a pity, then, that after a year and a half of making logical, convincing, nay, even impassioned arguments for approval to get it installed, I can’t remember much about how to use it, have no clue how to connect to the geodatabase(s) I need, and months ago suffered an epic friendship fail with the GIS analyst who was going to help me out.

In contrast, you get all the Novell products you could ever want* just by showing up to work – at least in theory. “You’ll have to call me when it’s ready,” my cube neighbor told someone over the phone yesterday, “my GroupWise is down. Again.”

There was a pause. “That’s our email system,” she explained.

Early in my career at Sematech – which was federally funded at the time – we had something called cc:Mail. What a baffling name for an email client. “I’ll send you a cc:Mail,” people in the office would say blithely to outsiders, who no doubt wondered why the sender wouldn’t simply address it to them directly? Perhaps if you worked for the CIA, you had bcc:Mail.

Before that we had – and I can’t believe I’ve never killed off the brain cells that remember this, while the neurons that know how to use Arc have gone to the big happy cerebral cortex in the sky – an email program in VAX/VMS, displayed in white dots on a screen the shade of blue now reserved for letting you know you should’ve bought a Mac.

GroupWise may be an improvement over cc:Mail, but that’s only because it’s fifteen years newer. It seems to be the system of choice for government agencies. Which makes sense: it’s slightly outdated and sluggish, with a stodgy, joyless interface; it may also have something to do with the state mainframe, which is housed (unless someone in my old division accidentally vaporized it by hitting the F12 key) in San Angelo. What does a mainframe even look like? I picture a dark, massive, Nixon-era hulk with lots of switches and random blinking lights, crouched ominously on the grounds of San Angelo State University, rumbling low in its bowels, occasionally belching out bursts of steam. There might be punch cards involved. I bet it eats microwave popcorn, too.

About a hundred yards to the west-northwest of where I work now is my old building, chock full of people who remember punch cards, eat microwave popcorn, and have a rudimentary understanding of Arc, but – how shall I put this – whose collective work ethic might not always be said to include a strong predilection for service to others. My remaining GIS-using friends have scattered to the four corners of the globe.** ArcGIS is only used by one other person in our division, so our IT guy can’t really help me out; and my pushing so hard for Arc kind of trod on that other person’s territory, so I hesitate to approach him. I find myself therefore unsupported, not to mention insupportable.

But dammit! I got the software!

-----------------
*Assuming you had taken such complete leave of your senses that you wanted any Novell products
**A globe doesn’t even HAVE corners. And they call themselves geographers!

They Won't Stop

New employee orientation doesn't typically cover the issue of whether you should bring wild animals to the workplace.

Now that I think about it, this might make a certain degree of sense - at least vis-a-vis some divisions of my current employer, where many of the staff might be classified as wild animals - if not for their qualities of ferocity, or survivalism, or adaptation to the world around them, then at least for their smell.

I still should probably have known better than to bring a turtle to work on Monday.

But it had to be done. There he was (or she!), barely larger than a quarter, tucked tightly into himself in the middle of a 20-foot-wide gravel swath of downtown hike-and-bike. To my left, a 10-foot drop led to the lake; to my right, meticulously mowed lawns spread out as far as the eye could see - or to Cesar Chavez, which is over the top of the slope, so it's pretty much the same thing. Clearly this was no place for a naive reptile. So I brought him back to my office.

Not having an aquarium, and feeling somewhat uncertain of my coworkers' reaction were I to co-opt the office coffeemaker carafe for this purpose, I put the little guy in a potted aloe on my desk. The aloe is the only plant in a large, wide pot, the sides of which rise more than four inches from the surface of the soil. It seemed like a safe enough place to put a baby turtle. I gave him some iceberg lettuce, sprinkled with fish flakes, and left for the day.

But yesterday morning? No turtle. I freaked. Within five minutes, everyone in my office knew that a turtle was running amok in cubicle-land, and it goes without saying that everyone knew who was responsible. We had a staff meeting yesterday from 8:30-11; and while not on the agenda, the issue of unrestrained reptiles took up a good chunk of the proceedings.

The funny thing is, after our staff meeting was over and I got back to my desk, the turtle was right there in the potted plant where I'd left him (or her). It turns out turtles burrow. Who knew?! Well, I told everyone of course, and I took the turtle home yesterday, and gave him to a turtle-aquarium-keeping friend today. No one is the worse for wear. Only my professional reputation is slightly besmirched, though not really in a bad way - only an odd, vaguely age-inappropriate one - as if I had a smiley "Good Job!" star affixed to my business card.

New employee orientation did not prepare me for this at all.

So it's fortuitous that I received an email today from a speaker mill with whom my boss and I have worked, in the past, to hire trainers for our big annual conference. Apparently "new employee orientation" is out. You know how brown is the new black, and 50 is the new 30, and chopped liver is the new caviar? Well, the latest and greatest thing in corporate new-employee training, my friends, is "onboarding."

Since you're not subversive pinko commie scum, I'm sure that term didn't immediately bring associations of "waterboarding" to mind, much less cause you to reflect that - though not at all inhumane when you consider the depths to which any organization's treatment of its subject creatures has been known to descend - new employee orientation cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered pleasant; and that while new employees from the dawn of time have been aware of this, new employers have been historically (not to mention indulgently) regarded as being innocently, if perhaps rather obliviously, unaware of this fact, which is somewhat endearing if not necessarily prone to engender respect; and that therefore it is insensitive at best, and sadistic at worst, for management organizations to adopt a term so immediately evocative of the most shameful violations of human rights in the civilized world during the last 50 years at least.

Subclauses get me excited sometimes. Corporate marketing people are complete morons, that's all I'm trying to say here.

Read for yourself:

Start your new employees off on the right track so they stay around for the long haul.

You invest tons of time and money recruiting and hiring the best. Why waste it all on ineffective orientation practices? Keep your new employees around for the long haul by giving them the best start possible — a personalized onboarding experience.

What's wrong with just letting your new employees - the best and brightest minds available, apparently - pick up the corporate culture and expectations from their supervisors and coworkers? Unless there's something wrong with the existing corporate culture. Do you have something to hide? More importantly, do you actually believe that what you present to new employees during training will override their own observations of the way things are done at your organization? Hah!

Onboarding is a new approach to employee orientation that goes beyond just settling your employees in. It engages, integrates, and gets your new hires productive quicker — directly improving retention rates and the overall success of your organization.

You know, there are lots of turtles around the hike-and-bike trail. There are also squirrels, grackles, mourning doves, the occasional snake, pigeons, and a naked cyclist.

Guess what I'm keeping in my potted aloe next?

Non, je ne regrette rien

Your average normal human being has roughly seven different options when it comes to a choice:

I have to
I ought to
I want to
I could
I'd rather not
I shouldn't
I can't

(We'll leave aside, for the moment, such irrational permutations as "I can't but I'll try anyway" and "I really should but dammit I don't wanna," which render our otherwise peaceable lives such an engaging mess.)

When you work in government - as a faceless bureaucrat, I mean, not a politician - most politicians aren't really in government anyway, they're in politics, which is a wholly unrelated field* - things are much simpler, because there are only two options:

I have to
I can't

Or "everything not forbidden is compulsory," as Wart's ants tell us in "The Once and Future King." T.H. White didn't work in government, but he attended post-Victorian English colleges - probably much the same thing.

The rule simplifies matters, but it's kind of a shame when there's something you feel you ought to do and you'd like to and you could but you don't have to so you can't. Coulda, woulda, shoulda just don't enter into it. But I suppose an aspiring career bureaucrat can't complain.

------------
*Watch a few episodes of "Yes, Minister" and you get the idea.

New Frontiers

It's a really good thing the Ford Escapes in the state fleet have an auxiliary jack you can plug your iPod into. Otherwise I would have had to sing a capella.

I would also otherwise have had Barry Manilow stuck in my head for 723 miles. Or, say, 690 miles - because somewhere between Dripping Springs and Fredericksburg, I passed a sign for a ranch advertising "Showgoats." Some people are just sick.

This week's was my first solo outing for the state: my boss, who was supposed to accompany me, had something come up at the last minute. So I headed out to inspect the visitor center in Langtry all by myself. It's a long way, but a wonderful drive if you enjoy that sort of thing (what luck - I do!). I took the scenic route to Langtry: out 290 through Fredericksburg to I-10 to Junction, where I got lost. First of all, the exit sign for US 377 just says "North" - I guess on the grounds that nobody really wants to go south anyway. So I kept driving west, assuming that the southbound exit came later.

But it was soon apparent - luckily soon, because otherwise I'd have found myself in Sonora - that this was not the case, so I exited, turned around, backtracked, exited again in Junction, headed south on 377, and found a gas station, where I discovered that I don't know how to use the state card provided with the vehicle. (I've always gassed up at a District office.) Ten hilarious minutes during which I thought I'd be stranded forever in Kimble County, an amused convenience store clerk, and a few panicked phone calls later, I got it figured out, but this only enabled me to get lost some more. You have to make a right turn in Junction to stay on 377, otherwise you end up on Loop 481 which eventually deposits you, wailing curses, right back onto I-10 heading east. So be careful!

Eventually I found my highway. US 377 south of Junction looks like an FM (that's Farm-to-Market road, for you non-Texans) - a little two-lane affair with a yellow stripe down the middle and narrow shoulders. The speed limit is 75. Way too fast, way too fast for this road! I thought. An hour later I found myself doing ninety.

When you reach US 90, you turn left to go to Del Rio - and you're pretty much there, just on the west side of town - but you turn right to go to Langtry. Langtry is unincorporated. Although the 2000 census gave its population as 150, it's declined in recent years; and one of my coworkers in the visitor center guessed the current population is around 19.

"What do you do for entertainment way out here?" another coworker said she was asked by a visitor. She laughed. "Heck, when you're my age, a muumuu and an easy chair are all the entertainment you need!"

The US 90 drive from Del Rio to Langtry takes you across the Amistad Reservoir - blue and beautiful in a stark landscape of scrubby brownish-green - through Comstock (don't blink!), and a border control checkpoint (I wasn't the droids they were looking for, and was immediately waved along), through large, lumpy hills with a sparse growth of brush, and across Seminole Canyon and the Pecos River - the US 90 span across it is the tallest bridge in Texas, and the third highest in the United States.

Langtry is on the west side of the Pecos, as anyone familiar with Judge Roy Bean will be aware. The scenery is breathtaking and desolate, not readily captured with the least expensive digital camera money could buy, and the road was virtually empty except for the occasional 18-wheeler, border patrols, and vultures swooping down to pick at the pulped remains of a skunk on the pavement, identiable only by the smell - waiting until the last instant to wing out of the way of the speeding car, flapping away within inches of my windshield. If you don't set your cruise control, you glance down and realize you're doing 100.

Del Rio was not much of an adventure, since (1) I was incredibly tired by the time I got to my hotel room, and (2) going out on the (border) town alone might not be the best idea for a woman in my, um, position. So I picked up dinner, took it to my room, and slept until 5:30 - needing to be back in Langtry by 8am to finish the inspection, wrap up, and make it to Austin for Diane's retirement reception back at work. I drove like - like a state employee out of Langtry. And I made it in time, too.

I love my job. And I love, love, love my iPod!

Click here for photos.

West Texas: It's Pretty Big

Today I drove from Austin through Fredericksburg to Junction to Del Rio through Comstock to Langtry, worked for four hours, and then drove another hour back to Del Rio where I'm spending the night before following roughly the same schedule in reverse tomorrow. I got to see some things I don't often get to see, like 80mph speed limit signs, and a scorpion on the wall.

I'm too tired to blog about it. At some point I may post pictures. It's starkly beautiful out here, but the tap water tastes like ass.