Bienvenidos a Guadalupe

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Yesterday I walked out of my office and was reminded of how nice it is to be in Arizona in the late fall. I mean, there are still some hot days (it was in the 90s the other day while I was out working on my yard), but it looks like 80s for the foreseeable future. I’m not saying this to brag in any way, since I have very little to do with the weather (as far as I’m aware) and since some people would actually prefer a real Fall with dead leaves and a chill in the air. I’m just saying that days like these remind me of why I like living here.

While I love the lifestyle, I have said before that Phoenix isn’t a city with a lot of character necessarily. I mean, there really isn’t a downtown in which you’d go hang out unless you were going to a game or your car broke down, and the main hangouts are either a bit too trendy (Scottsdale) or college (Mill Ave) for us to spend too much time there. A lot of the people are from somewhere else, and most cities in the area have basically the same restaurants & stores. Again, the lifestyle is great, but you’re not going to be sending people a lot of postcards from Chandler or Apache Junction or places like that.

Well, that’s what I thought until I discovered a city in the Phoenix area with real character. My hairdresser gave me a recommendation on a Mexican seafood restaurant in the area, so we tried it on Friday night with some mildly shrimp-addicted friends. The food ended up being pretty good (although we thought the mariachi guys singing in the next room sounded a bit sauced), but even better was the location. When I looked up the address on Google Maps, I discovered that the restaurant was nestled in the heard of the town of Guadalupe. I’d seen signs for “Guadalupe” on the I-10 but thought it was basically just a street. No, it turns out that Guadalupe is its own municipality, about 1 sq.-mile in size.

I should have known it would be a cool place when I saw on Google Maps that all of the street names were in Spanish. At first I thought I’d stumbled upon Mapas de Google, but when you scrolled up a bit, there were regular English roads and avenues. Rolling into town, everything was actually in Spanish. I also should have known Guadalupe would be a fun town because there are only three-FAQs on their official website - when the Town Hall is open, where to vote, and how to get a party permit – and the first thing I saw when I walked into the large orange, yellow, and green building in which our restaurant was located was a plethora of piñatas (I’m not joking).

So Phoenix has more character than I thought. It’s possible on a Friday afternoon to meet your friends for dinner in what apparently is actually Mexico and then hit a movie back in the United States 10 minutes later. Now I just have to find the 1-sq.-mile Indian town so I can find some good Tikka Masala.

At Least It's Not an Alligator

Sunday, October 28, 2007

My wife and I are not really pet people. I'm probably slightly more amenable to the idea, having grown up with a cat and a dog, but neither of us are that interested in having anything with four legs running around our little house. To this point, we're been quite content with it being just the three of us and have no plans to add anything non-human to that mix. This being a largely free country (except when it comes to taxes, jury duty, and avoiding Law & Order), no one really forces you to have a pet, so I don't see any reason we won't be able to follow through with that, even in the face of the inevitability of our son wanting a dog at some point (you know he has heard "no" before, because he says it all day).

Well, I thought that was all true until Saturday. I should have known something was amiss when I hooked up my sprinkler system and it all worked without a hitch. Moving a hose to get to some wiring (I didn't electrocute myself, which was a nice bonus), I happened upon a hiding and apparently frightened (or asleep) turtle. Now, after everything I said above, we have thought about getting a desert tortoise or two to roam around in the backyard - I'm sort of intrigued by the idea of a pet that basically does nothing and might outlive me - so at first I wasn't too thrown by this. After noticing his webbed feet and the fact that he ran (?) for water whenever I put him down, I realized that this wasn't the low-maintenance gopherus agassizii I was expecting. Instead, I was standing in my still-barren backyard on a 96-degree day in late October hoping this guy wouldn't die before I figured out what to do with him.

At first I thought I could just put him down and go about my business. I returned 10 minutes later to find that he was nowhere in sight, and I could only follow his tracks in the mud for about 4 inches (I wasn't much of a Boy Scout, but I'm pretty sure this turtle wiped out his tracks with his tail or something on purpose). I then spent the next 30 minutes trying to find him, scared mostly that I would bury him alive later that day as I filled in my sprinkler ditches. I'm glad I looked there, because I finally found him buried at the bottom of one under 6 inches of mud and water. He wasn't moving, so I figured he had drowned (imaging my neighbor popping by to find out whether we'd seen his lost turtle and having to break the bad news that I'd drowned it), but a few sprays brought it back to life and confirmed that it was, in fact, fond of water and most certainly not native to my backyard.

Now we find ourselves involuntarily with a pet. My first instinct was to give it to a pet store, but what if it does, in fact, belong to my neighbor. Maybe the only thing worse than having to tell someone that I drowned their pet would be to tell them that I sold it (for free) into turtle captivity. In the meantime, since my son's old baby bathtub wouldn't hold him, he now lives in my wheelbarrow (good thing I bought that thing - you never know when you'll need one to hold reptiles) while we wait for a response to the "Lose a turtle?" signs I plastered around the neighborhood. Hopefully someone claims him soon, or we'll have to make the tough call of whether to donate "Pete" to Petsmart (how much is a red-eared slider worth when you itemize?) or continue down the slippery slope into pet ownership. Stay tuned.

Wait, What Was I Talking About Again?

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

I don't do that well at multi-tasking, if I'm being honest with myself. For example, I've been thinking lately about trying to pick up the guitar (learning to play it, not just physically picking one up - I've done that a few times), but I'm highly skeptical as to whether I could actually play a guitar and sing at the same time (and fairly certain that no one wants to hear that regardless). I forget to do things moments after saying I need to do them because I get distracted by something else (this drives my wife crazy). I'm guessing that I'm probably not that unique in this respect.

This is my way of telling you why I've had a serious case of writer's block. At work, I've been involved in something absorbing enough to cause me to dream about it at night, something to which I have to put a stop immediately. At home, I've been spending most of my energy on trying to put in a yard. The only other thing that has crept into my psyche lately has been baseball, but the teams I care about are now on vacation, and I've made a pledge to not write about baseball again until at least Spring Training based on feedback from one of my few faithful readers. Basketball is almost here, but I'll stay away from sports-related topics for a few days and hold off on my annual, highly unanticipated NBA preview until Tuesday or so.

Maybe a good start to overcoming my single-mindedness would be to write about multi-tasking itself. I have noticed that not everyone shares my problem (not even most men, as I had supposed), because I do see a lot of multi-tasking going on. My personal favorite right now is texting while driving. The other day I read (again in a safety bulletin) that this is a bad idea - I'm glad they took the time to write up three paragraphs on that one. As I've said before, I'm probably the slowest texter in the world even when that's the only thing on which I'm focused (a person with no fingers could probably out-pace me using their eyebrows), so I'm not that tempted myself, but the other morning while riding along in my vanpool I noticed a guy firing off texts while paying only cursory attention to the 70-mph bumper-to-bumper traffic in which we were traveling. In fairness, he probably hadn't seen the bulletin. I mean, let's be honest - if someone hadn't written up a warning label, you might be blow-drying your hair in the shower every morning.

As dangerous as this kind of activity is, I have to admit that texting/e-mailing while walking bugs me nearly as much. I mean, if you've ever been walking behind someone that's cranking out e-mails on their Blackberry, you know that it's pretty much impossible to get around them with all of the swerving and random stopping going on. I understand, though - sometimes you just have to rely on text and e-mail to communicate when you're on the go because you just can't find a phone.

Well, I must admit, that feels much better. Now that I've laid bare my weakness and vented a bit, I think I'm ready to move on. I'll chime in with a proper post shortly.

Cubs Lose! Cubs Lose!

Sunday, October 07, 2007

The other day I watched a few minutes of Survivor, and I was thinking that hosting that show would probably be the easiest job in the world (relative to the amount of money involved). Yesterday, though, as I watched the Diamondbacks sweep the Cubs in their National League Division Series, I decided that (again, for the money) being a sports analyst might be easier.

I say that because, unlike almost every other job I can think of, these people have very little incentive to be right. I mean, they probably can't lie that much without it impacting their paycheck, but there can't be anything much more meaningless (unless you're a gambler, I guess) than predictions of what is going to happen in a game or a series. I don't fault people for guessing, when asked, what the ultimate outcome will be, but how often to you see the analysts go back and talk about what happened relative to what they stated quite confidently would happen? Usually, it's when they are right, and the few brave ones who do make an accounting of their overall accuracy usually just end up pointing out how off they have been. In both of my two careers so far, I have been an "analyst," and if I was as undisciplined and largely wrong as these people, I'd have been thrown out on the street by now.

Look - I listen to and watch a lot of sports talk, and I respect about 75% of these people. I love watching good pre-game analysis - I just think the predictions (even the educated ones) are completely meaningless. It just became obvious to me over the past week how wrong (and, frankly, sometimes lazy) analysts can collectively be as I listened to very nearly everyone ignore and dismiss the Diamondbacks while treating the Cubs like the second-coming of the 2004 Red Sox rather than the Bad News Bears they were for much of the season.

The DBacks were outscored over the course of the season and had a poor batting average, and since none of these people evidently watched a DBacks game this year, they assumed that having the best record in the National League was a fluke of some kind. They dismissed the fact that the one (and more important) thing the Diamondbacks did better than the Cubs was win baseball games. Even ignoring the fact that the Cubs needed a late-season surge to win a division in which the average record was 77-86, Chicago would have finished a distant fourth in the NL West, where the Diamondbacks play and where only the Giants (sorry, H.I.) had a sub-.500 record and were out of the playoff picture.

So, having seen how mentally tough and team-oriented the DBacks were all year, I wasn't that surprised that they are moving on, despite being told repeatedly all week that the Cubs were the NL favorite and had (I quote) "the clearest path to the World Series." Admittedly, I saw a lot more DBacks games this year than the baseball experts. I didn't see any Phillies games, for example, so it's not like I paid attention to every playoff team. Given limitations of time and money, the average amateur fan can only keep up with their own local team and those with their own dedicated national networks (Cubs [WGN], Braves [TBS], and Yankees/Red Sox [ESPN]). Then again, shouldn't analysts follow a few more teams than that and be a bit less open about the teams they WANT to win? Maybe it's not their fault - maybe their bosses tell them on what they should focus.

Only now am I starting to see some acknowledgment that Arizona deserves a bit of credit; early in the series, it was assumed to be a Cubs collapse instead. I don't know what will happen now against the Rockies, but now at least people will recognize that the experts sometimes are not necessarily experts and may have no idea, either.

[Post-script: A day after I wrote this, I read this gem from Keith Law on ESPN.com about the Rockies-DBacks series coming up:

Although the Diamondbacks had the better record and will have home-field advantage, the Rockies had a much better projected record based on runs scored and allowed.

Maybe in the future they should just stop playing the games at all and just run computer simulations. Admittedly, though, I am a little scared of the Rockies.]