A Belated Birthday Present For John

John, because you're so far away, we couldn't really send you anything but our best wishes for your birthday. But then we went to Vegas Sunday to return library books and get Darcy out among people after being cooped up for most of the week with a cold. She gets to choose the park if we go to town without too many errands and this time, she chose the "cake shop park", which is a small, but very nice playground in the middle of an outdoor mall that pretends to be a town center.

Along with a few cute buildings with kitchens, a cake shop, and other furnished rooms, it has a astroturf-walled maze, and a splash pad. The municipal parks in Las Vegas all turn their splash pads off at the end of September and I assumed this one would be off, too. It was when we first got there. And then, it wasn't. I usually have a back-up outfit for Darcy when we go to town, so we didn't fight too hard when she made a bee-line for the water. She had a lot of fun and got SOAKED. But that's not your present, John. I'm just stalling for dramatic purposes. The playground is near the (also astro-turfed) town square where they have live music and other events. Yesterday morning, the event led us to think of a new career path for you.

Whenever you've talked about yoga, the first thing that stands right out is just how darn competitive yoga is. You're always talking about trying to out-yoga all the other yoga-people you know. (Or wait ... is it that I've never heard you talk about yoga as competition?? That would really kill this whole gift-idea.)

The event taking place was the Nevada Regional competition for the USA Yoga Championships. Yes! It was competitive yoga! Yoga as an athletic sport, brought to you by the people who are petitioning for yoga to be added to the Olympics in 2016. So we figured that if the whole travel-the-world-teaching-yoga business dries up, maybe you could start competing to represent our nation at the Olympics. I guess there must not be any prize money involved if they're calling it an amateur sport, but otherwise, I was thinking that it could finance your travels for a while, too.

The people under the red tent were the judges. Each competitor had to do a set series of poses following their introduction. In between the men's and women's competition they had a yoga fashion show. It was all very commercial; again, just what I think of when you talk about your yoga experiences.

According to their rules, you apparently have to do yoga half-naked, which I've never noticed you doing in the photos of your classes. In fact, the more I think about it, maybe this isn't the perfect career for you after all. I guess I'm going to lose the "which sister-in-law got you the best birthday present" competition, huh?





(Too bad, 'cause from what I saw, you could kick their tushies. Then I could brag that my brother-in-law was the USA yoga champion!)

Bye-Bye, Las Vegas!

With our move (in theory) approaching in two weeks and our schedule between now and then pretty packed, we realized that our trip to Las Vegas on Friday might well be our last as a family. Darcy and I will make it in at least once for grocery shopping and to return our library books, but Michael probably won't be back unless we find a time to reschedule the tapas night out originally scheduled for Friday.

So it seemed fitting that we should drive the extra mile north on Las Vegas Boulevard from our library to pay homage to the oh-so-famous Las Vegas sign. For all those people (and there are lots -- I've seen long lines of people waiting their turn for pictures, whole wedding parties, wedding parties with an Elvis impersonator along for the ride) who want this classic snapshot, Las Vegas provides handy-dandy drive in/drive out parking. Very convenient!

Most people want the view featured in the first photo. We (ok, maybe I, because Michael seemed surprised when we got there) wanted the other side. The side that you see as you are leaving Las Vegas. Because that's pretty much what we'll be doing soon. We might not live in Las Vegas, but a lot of our public lives center on that city. Virtually all of our shopping and errands happen there. We use the Las Vegas parks and libraries. Darcy has play dates there. And all that is coming to an end. I don't mind that it's coming to an end; it's a long and not particularly exciting drive from Cima to Las Vegas. But it did seem fitting to mark the end of our odd relationship with Sin City. So here we are, with the sun in absolutely the wrong place, being wished Happy Trails by Las Vegas.


On the book front, I've now finished the heartbreaking, but beautifully written Grapes of Wrath. I knew most of the story from the movie, but it didn't stop me from having heart ache, both for the fictional Joads and for the hundreds of thousands of people who lived through many of the same things the Joads experienced. Ah, greed! What could our world be without your presence?

I'm taking a break from the more reading-list-like books for my next book. I've just started The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. It's a fairly light-hearted (at least so far) mystery narrated by a young man with autism.