Diary of a Mad Scientist

Eventually everybody from the class drifted away, and even Graydon got up off the floor, regained his senses, cleaned up with me and took all the liquids and the consolidated glop to be disposed of. I had use of the space till that evening, and my brain was in no mood to go anywhere. Again, it just amazes me how tiring it is keeping track of 34 brains and intensely following just who understands what (they must be just as tired following everything I"m saying!), and trying to think on my feet, how I should rephrase it when it doesn’t make sense to them.

After class I enter limbo where I can barely function, the thought of getting up off the floor is agonizing, and the little observer in the back of my head is amazed that I’m still alive when my brain mostly resembles an exhausted blob of Jell-O..

Several cups of caffeine later, I can usually clean up from the class.

After Graydon left and I no longer had to formulate sentences, I came to my senses, mindlessly played with lab supplies for while, spending a couple of hours sorting everything for the New Hampshire class, packed everything up to mail, and was finally out of there 12 hours after class had started.

Then I went to the airport and picked up the boyfriend.

Tom and I had planned a short camping vacation in Utah. This is one of the trips where I had two classes back-to-back on consecutive weekends in opposite sides of the country. Considering how exhausting a day and a half long class was, this wasn’t a terribly good start to this trip.

At this point, I’m so jealous of my time that I prefer to do to cross-country trips on two consecutive weekends, and fly home for three days in between. It’s actually worth my time to do that, rather than spend a week on the road with two classes at either end. When I spend 12 days out to teach two classes, it often feels like the Jell-O brain never goes away the entire time-hotels, airports, waah. waah, waah. It sometimes feels like stepping into some kind of sci-fi alternate universe for while.

But Utah is a world famously gorgeous place, and we wanted to do a brief scouting trip, checking it out for longer future camping expeditions. Tom used to live in Salt Lake when he was a very different person, so we floated around town the next day investigating his memory lane. Just walking around downtown with Tom on Saturday night made me very happy after the Jell-O brain finally went away, as it was finally a break from the class routine. Like, I was not rushing off to Wal-Mart to do something related to supplies for the next class. Again,waah, waah, waah, I can’t really complain about traveling to teach, no one’s holding a gun to my head to do it. I think tons of people would give anything to be me right now and do exactly this for a living.

Our first stop was supposed to be Zion National Park, and we had originally kicked around the idea of doing a tremendous amount of driving for four days, checking out the North Rim of the Grand Canyon for a day, then some other national parks on the way north. The idea had been scouting sites for a camping trip that Tom is gonna do later this summer. Luckily, we came to our senses and nixed several of the destinations before investing too much time on the road.

The whole concept of a vacation is completely bizarre to me. When I was growing up, no one in my family went on vacation.

was a little bit concerned that it wouldn’t feel like a break at all, considering that it’s happening right in the middle of my-traveling job work week, and my traveling job does involve quite a bit of driving around between the classes.. I think I was worried that we’ve spent a lot of time in stores, getting outfitted, and that there’d be too much time on the interstate, or in chain stores, as we were flying in with insufficient supplies for some of what we want to do..

Too many parts of the US no longer have a local flavor- 10 years ago, car traveling involved stopping at flea markets, little tiny local junk shops, eating in little diners and shoot in the bull with the locals (well okay that was the East Coast. They don’t have diners on the West Coast). Local flavor is mostly gone though. I think on this trip I realized, from the lack of junk shops in what would otherwise have been a prime cheap-rent territory for this activity, that the junk shops have all moved to eBay. Granted, that means that I sure enjoy my online time, browsing junk from across the country at 2 a.m. unfortunately, there’s an awful lot of conversation that’s missing with the demise of the flea markets and the goods’ move to the Internet. Not to mention that the prices have gone way up.

I was very pleasantly surprised to the couple of localism experiences in the next day and half. Before we left Salt Lake, we picked up some food at what we thought was going to be a health food store, but which turned out to be a weird gourmet imports store called liberty Heights market. It was amazing. They seemed like they had a direct line to some granny back in the old country (Italy, Spain, etc.). It’s kind of telling that shopping there was what made me finally realize I was on vacation, rather than at work on the trip. This was definitely a place that is not found at a local mall near you. It’s kind of pathetic that my expectations are so low that merely finding a unique local store is enough to make me feel like I"m having a good vacation experience. You know, it’s that lack of social life thing. I don’t even think about actual interesting, human interactions that I might have been having on vacation, having somehow turned into a tourist in the strip malls and big box stores.

Along the same lines, we accidentally stumbled into a really bizarre little motel in a tiny old West town called beaver city. Eagles roost motel was composed of these teeny little casitas which were brought there in the 1930s after the Hoover dam was completed several hundred miles away. They had been housing for the workers at the time. They came equipped with a tiny little garage, which were sized just right for some guests Harley, no way anyone’s truck or SUV could even begin to fit. I wasn’t sure what Tom would think-the place could be viewed as either very charming or really run down. Again, the fact it is not a Styrofoam Motel 6 turned the whole thing into entertainment. It really helps that the proprietor, a biker guy whose wife ran the attached antique store, was exceedingly nice, obviously loved his quirky little business, and was just a downright character. Asked us how long we were staying, and told us that they sometimes have campfires and sit around singing songs with guitars with some of the residents who rent efficiencies there in the summer. And we figured all that out in about 5 minutes while he was showing us around. He initially had walked up to us while we were pointing and laughing at this bizarre messed up electrical situation on the outside of the office-there was basically romex and conduit chasing each other around complete circle, not attached to anything anymore. He used the opportunity to point out the 1930s heritage of the place and tell us the whole story of the Hoover dam workers. It was obvious of the plumbing was put in prior to any concerns about water conservation-it was the a most powerful shower I’ve had in a long time, Kinda like playing in the fire hydrant on a hot day. Anyway, it seems like the perfect place in the middle of nowhere to go spend a few weeks writing.

Well, the rest of the vacation was cut short. We got to Zion, got a campground, went on a great hike. I had a “recovery from Lyme” milestone, on the hike, when I realized that there’s no way I could’ve enjoyed it or even had the energy to do it three weeks earlier, especially obvious when we found ourselves running the last part of the trail Zion is a park, which means that you park outside the place, or get a campground, then write a free shuttle bus from one trailhead to another, with various amenities (this keeps thousands of idling cars out of the park, a very good thing in my opinion). It was a perfect place to go for me, as I’m still very unsure of my energy, and haven’t been able to go camping in two years. We had dinner at the kind of fancy lodge there- and Tom must have somehow picked up food poisoning. Climbing Angels Landing the next day was out of the question, when he unexpectedly started throwing up. He thought he’d be alright, went back to the campground to rest, and sent me on my way to do some of the other trails on my own. By the time I got back to camp three hours later, he’d been unable to keep water down, and was so dehydrated that he couldn’t even move his hands properly anymore from loss of electrolytes. I threw everything in the van and drove to a random town in southern Utah to drag him into the emergency room for rehydration via IV. I’ve never actually seen anyone turned quite that shade of green before.