Number 1: If you find yourself in Scottsdale, check out the coffee shop whose name I can’t quite remember. Pegasus? Psygnosis? Pergola? Anyway, it’s way up north on Scottsdale Road, north of the 101. In a strip mall with a Walgreens. It’s family-owned, has good coffee, and wifi.

Number 2: On the other hand, Tempe seems to be rather lacking in good options. Google pointed me to one place that was out of business and in a strip mall that seemed to have lost favor to its larger, newer, shiner, down-the-road cousins. I had to retreat to Barnes and Noble.

Number 3: Back in Flagstaff. The upside is that every coffee shop I frequent here now offers free wifi.* The downside is that the one where I am currently sitting has a table undergoing repair, complete with power tools, hammering, and sawdust. Is it that imperative to get the thing fixed before the evening rush? The intermittent power saw is a wee bit distracting.

* In descending order of personal preference: Late for the Train, Macy’s, Campus Coffee Bean.

DSCF2995 Hosted on Zooomr

From this weekend’s trip to Colorado. Posted now to take advantage of Zooomr’s offer to give free accounts to bloggers. Well, sign me up.

Kieran picked up on the redesign of the New York Times website and points to some thoughts of the always interesting John Gruber. I like that the old lines that separate boxes or categories are fainter and less distracting—the page seems more whole without them. But it’s crowded, yes.

What attracted me first was the photo leading to this story on visiting Monument Valley, which was prominent on the front page of the site last night. A few nice photos and tips for seeing the valley, one of those iconic Western landscapes that I still haven’t made it to see yet. It’s on my list, along with the now record-low Lake Powell, where the Cathedral in the Desert has been uncovered for the first time since the reservoir filled.

There’s one odd bit to the story, and that’s this line: “One night, I stayed in the secular setting of Kanab, Utah, where I drank Polygamy Porter — a fine beer — over dinner with a man who told me he used to have three wives.” While I quite agree that Polygamy Porter is a fine beer (as are all the beers from Wasatch Brewing), what does the author have in mind when he writes the secular setting of Kanab? Could he mean this Kanab?

The picturesque community of Kanab threw itself into the national spotlight early in 2006 when the city council unanimously passed a non-binding resolution that endorses what it calls a “natural family,” defines marriage between a man and woman as “ordained of God,” and sees homes as “open to a full quiver of children.” Critics say the resolution is anti-gay and critical of single people and even married couples who choose to not have children, while proponents say the purpose of the resolution is to affirm marriage and family and show that Kanab is a good, wholesome place to live. Early reports indicate that some potential visitors to the tourist community planned to stay away to protest the resolution, but it is also expected that others may specifically choose Kanab as a vacation destination because they approve of the sentiments expressed in the resolution.

Kanab is just a stone’s throw from what the author calls the “scary polygamous compound of Colorado City on the Arizona-Utah border,” and while it has come to accept its role in the tourist trade of Southern Utah—after noisily and vehemently protesting the designation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument—that doesn’t exactly make it secular, fine regional microbrewing or not.

My parents graciously agreed to dog-sit while we went to Seattle. The fact that they reside in Utah meant that our itinerary took us by car to their house before we could go by plane to Seattle, which was fine by us: We got to spend a few days in Northern Utah, got in a couple of really good ski days (a spring lightening storm put an end to one; when you feel your hair raise up on your head, hear a buzzing, and then lightening flashes all around, you’re in the cloud and are too close to the weather), and wore ourselves out showshoeing. On our last snowshoe excursion, a grumpy character growled at us as we passed him at the trailhead. One of the trailhead’s resident dogs, who had followed us on our entire trek, expressed disapproval for the man’s attitude by, ah, pimping his ride just a bit. Being where we were, this might be one of the few Hummers that gets real use—but they’re so ostentatious and unnecessary, even in the snow, that I was quite happy to capture the moment.

In town for a friend’s wedding, I had a whole list of touristy things I wanted to do in Seattle. Instead, I promptly got sick and spent two days snacking on Tylenol, sleeping, and catching up on my HBO. I also learned that there’s a whole cable channel devoted to video games and that, yes, that does get boring pretty quickly. On the subject of being hotel-bound, the Silver Cloud Inn is a nice place to stay under the covers: Lots of pillows, a fireplace, and a kitchenette to store your apple juice and soup cups.

My fever withdrew in time for me to scurry out for a couple of hours the evening before the wedding to catch the obligatory night-time shot at the Pike Place Market. At the Sea-Tac security check, they inspect your camera to make sure you’ve taken one of these. If you haven’t, you’re forced to buy a Seahawks parka in the gift shop before you’re allowed on the plane.

The day of the wedding, while the ladies were off doing their froofy hair and makeup, I got the chance to check one item off my Seattle to-do list, and managed to find a sushi place (Blue C) that was actually open on a Sunday at noon. The rest of my list will have to wait—hopefully, not too long. It had been quite a while since I spent any time up there, and it was a welcome change. We even got a few unobstructed views of the Cascades and the Olympics. Back in Flagstaff, it’s raining hard today, which makes for a nice transition.

By the way, Washington has a new state motto: “SayWA.” That’s not gonna go over well. I can’t read “SayWA” without hearing Fred Willard saying “Wha’ happened?”

Trips to the cross-country ski park: 3
Miles of groomed trail: 15
Dogs that love snow: 2

Trips to the Basin: 1
Price in dollars of an adult day pass: 58
Sticker shock: +1

Inches of fresh powder last Tuesday: 12
Sidecut, in mm, of the K2 Super Stinx: 16
Sweet tele turns made: Lots
Days of aching, crippled quadriceps: 4

Inches of snow in Flagstaff: 0

Been away for a little while, from the blog, at least. It’s a busy season, and I’m off getting work done. Unrelated to work, however, I recently took a quick road trip back to northern Utah to celebrate my mom’s 60th birthday. We had planned a weekend in southern Utah, poking around some canyons somewhere—Escalante, maybe Vermillion Cliffs or Grand Staircase—but various forces conspired against us, so we ended up staying in our little corner of the Wasatch for the weekend.

Before heading for home I helped put some trees in the ground, ahead of the oncoming wintery weather. My mom snapped a few photos of me at the controls of the tractor. Kubota: How I roll.

My mom was literally from the wrong side of the tracks. Her father, Tom, worked for the railroad in San Jose, Calf., and he was adamant that his children would go to college. After the took these photos she told me what Grandpa Tom used to say to them: “You’ll graduate from college and that’s that,” he told them. “You may end up a ditchdigger, but by god you’ll know what kind of dirt to dig!”

With the arrival yesterday of Riding Giants¹, my once-extensive Netflix queue is whittled down to just one or two films. So it’s time to wander through my recommendations and fill up the list again. I took a list at the current queue for my parents and noticed a Netflix feature I hadn’t seen before: “Local Favorites.” Enter a city and Netflix shows the top 25 movies that people in that city are renting more than people elsewhere. This means that most new releases are excluded from the list, because everybody is renting those; instead, the list suggests how local rental habits are different from those in most other places. Neat!

So what’s more popular in Flagstaff than in most other locations? Here’s the top five: Adventure, crime, western, romance, and really crappy Will Ferrell flick.

1. Touching the Void
2. The Sopranos: Season 3 (4-Disc Series)
3. Deadwood: Season 1 (6-Disc Series)
4. Love Actually
5. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

Compare to Tucson, which I would have hoped to be better than renting Ace Venture excessively. Is Dolores Claiborne a desperate cry for help, a pining for frosty New England?

1. Monty Python’s And Now for Something Completely Different
2. Quills
3. Twice in a Lifetime
4. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
5. Dolores Claiborne

And see how cosmo Sundance home Park City (In Good Company, The Sea Inside, Million Dollar Baby, Collateral, De-Lovely) differs from my, well, less cosmo hometown of Ogden (The Work and the Glory, I Am Sam, Roman Holiday, In Good Company, I Am David).

Due to structural equivalence, I’ll promptly add the films I haven’t seen from the Flagstaff list to my own queue. Any other recommendations?

¹ By the way, Riding Giants is really enjoyable. It’s from Stacey Peralta, who also made Downtown and Z-Boys, which tended to feel sort of smug, too skateboarder-triumphalist or something, but which had plenty of cool footage. Riding Giants is a few steps away from Peralta’s own legacy in skateboarding, so it feels like a more balanced documentary of big wave surfing. The vintage and contemporary footage is great (sometimes awesome), and the spliced-in interviews are good (much better than in Dogtown).

The Salt Lake Valley, that is. I’m visiting my parents for a couple of days, a trip entirely orchestrated so that I could go to the dentist.

It’s nice up here, but the valley sure has changed. Utah, it seems, hasn’t really grown up but out, as evidenced by the new subdivisions between Salt Lake and Ogden. Just when I thought they were out of room, somebody managed to fit a few more neighborhoods in between the Great Salt Lake and the mountains. This isn’t neccessarily a bad thing in a fundamental way—people need places to live—but city planners here have never really been any good at, well, city planning. Ogden, where I grew up, has had trouble developing any sense of urban community. While its downtown has been partly revitalized—back when Ogden was Hub City, a key stop for the railroad, it had a booming downtown—it remains too far from where most people live, and with new freeways in and out of town, it’s no longer a pass-through point for local traffic or out of town travelers. (For example, the new highway to Snowbasin, the ski resort right over the hill, entirely skips Ogden. Way to go, planners!) To compound matters, rather than do practical things like improve bus routes and foster small business (the floundering mall was torn down years ago and is now an empty lot), the mayor is on a multi-year crusade to build an aerial tram to downtown, a plan that has been shot down every year since before I was in high school as constituting one form or another of fiscal insanity or physical implausibility. But Utah government—at all levels—has never been particularly captive to either of those constraints, so when the current mayor came to office he promptly restarted the project, and after a string of failed partnerships with numerous development projects, downtown is still a large hole in the earth and the mayor still dreams of a tram.

I don’t mean to be entirely critical: Downtown has several clubs and restaraunts that are very worth visiting (Rooster’s brewery, in particular, regularly wins awards for its food and, seriously, its excellent beer). But downtown isn’t a place one goes to hang out. This may change; there is some optimism that condo lofts above the shops will invigorate foot traffic and build a more lived-in downtown, but so far those lofts have been hard to sell.

Why all this talk about downtown? Partly because every time I come up here I get into another back-in-the-day state of mind. It’s not always a nice experience to see the place you grew up through adult eyes. Ogden’s experience also seems really instructive, especially when compared to places like Flagstaff and Salt Lake City, both of which have neighborhoods that successfully combine living and commercial space (which isn’t to say that both cities don’t have their particular problems). I have the sense that many of the same things that contribute to successful, livable downtowns also contribute to viable local economies—and by extension, the possibility for local currencies. It’s certainly not a one-to-one, but the kind of downtown that fosters walking, browsing, and meeting seems like the sort of place that might also foster other kinds of community development. The question that goes beyond grassroots things like local currency, of course, is the interaction between high-level development agencies and local culture. There’s probably an argument to be made that all the grassroots moving and shaking in the world won’t amount to much if the dirty downtown brick facades aren’t cleaned up and the pedestrian crosswalks re-painted. Likewise, building a tram doesn’t mean that people will come to it.

Something’s different this morning. The air, it smells … piney.

Developing… More later.

Moving is always something of an adventure, and this weekend was no different. After packing for what seems like weeks—the packing, at some point, became indistinguishable from the repairing, cleaning, and moving of piles of crap from one location to another that were all involved with the house-selling process—we relocated Heather to her new location at Schussman North. A few notes about the process:

• Go ahead, make a reservation with U-Haul. It won’t matter. They’ll reserve you a truck at a location 37 miles away, and when you convince them to find you something just a bit closer, that location will lose all record of the reservation by the next morning. While you’re in the lobby of the U-Haul center, nobody will offer to help you find your reservation, but they will let you borrow their phone to call customer service. This is in the lobby of the large building with the “U-Haul” sign, yes. They’ll let you use their phone to call U-Haul. Thanks, guys. Your reservation is now at a location 40 miles away.

• Phoenix, when judgement day does come, will be eradicated from human memory. It, like my U-Haul reservation, will simply never have existed at all. That’s what it gets for having highway planners who closed not one, but two northbound freeways this weekend. They didn’t just close a couple of lanes; that’s a hassle, but manageable. Instead, they closed the entire highway. And just when I thought I was back on the road again, with nothing between my 24-foot truck and parts north, they did it again. I’m telling you, nagivating a detour on Phoenix surface streets in a mobile blind spot is no fun.

• We have a great, fantastic, lovely little place to live on the outskirts of Phoenix. It’s up in the pines, a block away from National Forest. There is much to be said for advances in design made since 1947—the master electric box is a wonder to behold. Unfortunately, I don’t get to live there until sometime in May. In the meantime, I’m holding down a skeleton house here in Tucson. I have a plate, a spoon, and an insulated mug. It would be a lot like camping, except I don’t have a sleeping bag; that’s in Flagstaff. It’s really quite empty around here.

So what’s next? I have a bit more than a month until the end of the semester. There’s grading and teaching to finish, and several weeks of dissertation tasks to complete. When all that is done, I’ll make one more move, to join Heather and the dogs up there in the higher country.

Coming up tonight on the news:

You think gas prices are high here in Tucson? Wait until we show you how high they are in Flagstaff!

Oh, ha-hah, we all laughed and laughed at those poor suckers, until I remembered that I’m moving to Flagstaff.

Kodachrome Basin is a great place from which to launch an exploration of Southern Utah’s canyon country, but it’s somewhat remote, and it’s certainly not on the way to anywhere—except for the spectacular remoteness of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Just south of Kodachrome Basin is Cottonwood Road, a path that takes drivers right across the center of the Monument. It’s a dirt road, very rough in some places and covered in thick redrock sand in others—not the kind of place you want to drive in wet weather. Halfway along the road lies a gorgeous slot canyon that is completely hidden from the road; walk one minute downhill, however, and you’ll find yourself in the right in the middle of it.

The bad news for winter-time travelers is that Expedia seems to think that this road is just the perfect way to get from Salt Lake City to Phoenix. In good weather, expect it to take two hours to drive the road’s 40 miles, but in wet weather, the road is a bog, fully unpassable. So pay attention to those road-closed signs, seriously, and why are you using Expedia for directions, anyway?

To be entirely truthful, spring break still has another day or so remaining, but now that I’m back in town, it feels pretty much over. Last Friday we made the long drive to northern Utah with the intention of taking a few days off.

Here’s approximately how it went:

• Drive 14 hours one way.
• Release the hounds: Chaos ensues and my parents immediately regret having invited us
• Sleep a bit
• Coffee
• Check voice mail. No offers on house.
• Coffee
• Walk dogs; they love it up there in the Utahoo wilds.
• Check voice mail. No offers on house.
• Go skiing
• Overeat
• Sleep a bit
• Coffee
• Curse the real estate industry
• Ski
• Dogs
• Sleep
• Eat

You get the idea. We had a great time and relaxed quite a bit, but anxiety about selling—or not selling—the house remained pretty constant nonetheless. Right up until the middle of the week:

• Curse real estate
• Ski
• Check voice mail: Got an offer on the house!
• Wildly fax documents back and forth
• Drive 14 hours home

There’s all sorts of anxiety as a consequence of getting an offer, of course, but since the house is in fine condition we’re not too worried about the inspection as much as we’re daunted by the raw logistics of organizing a move while still getting some work done. When I suggest that I have a tendency to fixate, I mean that I have a tendency to fixate on things not the dissertation, so I’m aware that moving could become the perfect excuse to lose another month of my life. But I’m determined to avoid this loss.

Okay, vacation photos:

We skied at Snowbasin (a Sun Valley Resort, you are reminded endlessly), where I learned to ski way back in the day. The resort has changed a great deal: The first photo is the new main area at the bottom of the resort, a location that used to be the lower parking lot—where latecomers were relegated to park on the weekends, and the bathrooms were in a trailer, next to a hot dog stand that was usually closed. Now it’s a plaza ringed by opulent lodges for the ski school and ski patrol, and Earl’s Lodge—named for Earl Holding, owner of Sun Valley, Snowbasin, Sinclair Oil, and Little America. If Earl gets his way, Snowbasin’s base area will eventually be filled out with condos and golf courses. The giant bronze moose in the center of the plaza is really something. It wasn’t until later that we saw the giant bronze moose penis (hi, Google) in our photo. Note that we’re holding our skis vertically; that’s so our sponsors get their money’s worth.

Heated high-speed gondolas take skiers to the top of the mountain in just seven minutes; this used to be a slow ride on multiple chairlifts, numbingly cold some days. Today, a final tram ride takes skiers (or curious visitors) to the saddle just beneath the peak of Mt. Ogden, where they can peer over the precipice that marks the beginning of the Super-G and downhill race course. Some of us old timers remember that there was a time when you had to hike up there; there wasn’t a lodge at the top, either, or a helipad that Earl himself recently used to reach the top to hold court for a while. You know, back in the day. The racecourses built for the Olympics a couple of years ago are still impressive, the downhill in particular. Olympic downhill racers can reach 80 miles an hour on pitches of 35 degrees. Hard-core.

I hadn’t intended to get all nostalgic, but I really did grow up at Snowbasin in a pretty significant way, thanks to the season passes that came from having a family member on the ski patrol. Paying $90 for two half-day lift tickets was sort of shocking, though I know it’s still a bargain when compared to some ski resorts. Though the mountain has changed, going back to Snowbasin was a little like coming home—I could point out to Heather my favorite runs, most of which are still approximately where they used to be, and the Becker chairlift still threatens to give you a kneecapping, just like I remember.

Recall that our last house-hunting trip to Flagstaff was, in general, a miserable disaster. After a discouraging weekend, we thought we finally had found a place to live, but upon consultation found that the neighborhood of our rental-to-be is part of a Department of Justice-initiated rejuvination program. Now, rejuvination is without a doubt something positive, but we had to ask ourselves: Do we want to chose to live in the middle of it? Our unease was compounded by the unfortunate name of the DOJ project: “Weed and Seed.” Seriously, the DOJ’s flagship community involvement effort turns out to share a name with a mixed-quality dime bag. The neighborhood is, in fact, marked at every intersection with special Weed and Seed street signs.

We couldn’t do it, so we turned down the rental, and returned to the stress of looking for a home from four hours away, and this weekend we made another trip to town. What a difference a couple of weeks makes. First off, we met my double-secret cousin (not really a secret at all, but our relation is muddied enough that its precise nature remains a little mysterious; it’s clear that we’re somehow related, however, because her toddler son and I share the Estruth Legacy Chin). We dropped off the dogs to run themselves in circles in her backyard, and trooped off for what we hoped would be a better experience. And holy cow, everything was better: We looked at two houses and two townhouses, and could have very happily lived in three of them; the second townhouse was a bit less our speed, but would have done in a pinch, unlike anything from the last expedition. They were all clean, well-maintained (even brand new in one case), and we could imagine ourselves in every one. Unbelievable. Not a single landlord suggested that we should buy a lawnmower to take care of his yard.

The house we picked seemed charmed. Its location isn’t as ideal as the first house we visited (instead of a ten minute bike ride to downtown, it’s a ten minute drive away from Flagstaff, just a few miles outside of town), but it’s just right for us: Part of a little mountain community, it sits right next to the national forest and is cozy in none of the horrifying ways I outlined last time. So we’re in, and we can now focus on finishing our Tucson work and making the transition. Much still to do, but finding a place to live that we think we’ll really enjoy has lifted a tremendous mental burden.

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