Vacation, Day ? - Casa Grande and the Tonto (Salada Ruins)

I had meant to blog about the last day of vacation early this morning, but last night around 10:15 my brother called to tell me one of the tenants in Richfield had flooded their basement. They said the washing machine had malfunctioned. But when we got there, it was fairly obvious "malfunctioned" meant they had filled the washing machine to level with the top with clothes (level when wet, so they were actually packed in the machine - they had to have been tamped down), to the extent that it messed up the water sensor, set it to large load, and left the building for eight hours. There was water everywhere - in the laundry room, which is large, out of the laundry room and across every inch of the downstairs living room, and even beyond that into the back bedroom. I had to take the steam vac to the floor for five hours (literally - my back hurts), and we'll still have to go back tomorrow night to do another run once the water has seeped downhill out of the wall and carpet toward the drainward wall. Did I mention all the kitty litter in the drain backing it up? She's not even supposed to have pets.

Anyway, at least waiting until tonight means I get to enjoy blogging on my new 22" Samsung LCD 226BW. Oh yeah...they might not love me at work, but Mom and Dad love me enough to make up for it. So shiny...so big...hoo ah. The pictures of me inappropriately touching animal statues have never looked so fine.

Before the last vacation pics, I also spent several hours mowing up four week old grass and a bunch of dry leaves, and I spent the evening at Sarah and Pete's wedding, held very close to my house at the Tropics Trail at the New Zoo. Being able to sit with a beer on the bench in the aquarium area without any little kids around is exceedingly fun. Michelle, who I used to work with, told me she was from Eagle Grove. I biked within a block of her house when I was on RAGBRAI. If you're not familiar with Eagle Grove, I have video: 1, 2. Kurt, who I also used to work with, told me about his travels to Glendive. He's SEEN Glendisaurus!

On to the last bloggable day of our vacation to Arizona. I leave it to Pooteewheet to blog about almost getting hit in the face with toast. I'm going to show pictures of our trip to the Hohokam ruins at Casa Grande, and then to Tonto National Monument, where there are Salado ruins, way way up on cliff, where it's hard to breath.

Here's the full Casa Grande set.

Here's me, between Casa Grande and Tonto, kissing an owl. He's kind of creepy, like one of those pictures of the young girl and the old girl in the same picture. Is he an owl, or a many toothed monster? I touched both of them inappropriately. You may wonder why I've moved from bad touch to bad kiss. Can't really say. Sometimes the spirit moves you. But I promise I won't ever get (fully) naked.


This is a link, not a picture. It takes you to a close up of a wall at Casa Grande. Most of the ruins are just chicken wire with plaster over the top to replace what's been touched so many times it's no longer original anything, other than dust. And this picture shows why, but you have to view it in close up so you can see the inscription. If your grandparents ever tell you how things used to be much better in their days, as my grandmother was telling me while we were at Casa Grande, you can just point to this graffiti on the wall, written in 1891, and note that vandals have been around since before your grandparents were born. This wasn't even the oldest graffiti - some of it was from the (18)60's.

This is Casa Grande. Big big adobe-type house in the middle of nowhere. The roof is supposed to protect it, but it encourages pigeons and owls and, hence, droppings, so I don't know how much protecting it does. Six of one, half dozen of the other. Anything that looks smooth has been replastered. The graffiti is generally on the inside, before they sealed it off.


A picture from further back, so you can appreciate the gas station-style cover. Maybe Casa Grande was a gas station for Atlantis...who knows? Not me. Not you. Could have been.


Eryn lounging in a door. You might think, "Hey, this is why they need to plaster everything all the time!" And you'd be correct. But as you can tell from the break above the door, she's leaning against new plaster and chicken wire, not centuries-old adobe. The Hohokam got even with us by leaving their dirt all over Eryn's Chococat shirt.


Pooteewheet in adobe jail. I bet she can dig her way out. It looks like they used to pee out this window.


The exhibits claimed this was a petroglyph of some animal that was being hunted. But I've been to (what was formerly) Camp Snoopy, and the only thing missing is a mouth harp. I don't know who the Nostradamus of the Hohokam Indians was who saw this in a dream, but he was spot on.


After we were disappointed with Casa Grande, I noted that one of the exhibits said there were other ruins nearby at Tonto National Monument. My mother said it was indeed close and we should go. But close meant it was almost two hours away over mountains and scary hairpin turns where any sane human - i.e. not from Arizona - would not travel faster than 45 mph. We barely made it in time to sprint up the hideously long and steep stepback to see the Salado ruins at the top, and the trip back to Tucson was up and down over mountains in pitch black night. It all seriously freaked me out.

The Salado ruins. That woman in the picture had her kids up there. Her husband pushed a stroller up to the ruins. Doesn't sound so bad...until you check out the next two pictures.


Eryn, is she tired from going up...or coming down? "Dad, I promise I'll be good, just don't make me go to the f*ing ruins. This is how they died, climbing up and down and up and down and up and down the g*ddamn mountain. If they'd have just built their ruins next to the reservoir, they'd still be alive and driving their cars to the Casa Grande gas station for $2.78/gallon fill ups and sending postcards back to their friends pretending to be Rod Plant. Do you have an oatmeal bar? I'm out of energy."


This isn't meant to show you the pretty reservoir, but rather our cars. In the lower right, that tiny little strip of road...those two little dots are cars. We're parked a little further away from the trail head.


Pooteewheet. She asked me to take this picture, despite being so seriously ill she was going to hurl. Look at her cheeks - death warmed over. Or maybe she's just embarrassed because I asked if she wanted to get jiggy wit it in the Salado storage room. "Let's make the ruins come alive again," didn't work for her. Prude.

She barely made it back down the hill. I think she missed most of Eryn's repeated chanting of "Grandpa grumpa, little dumpa", which doesn't sound particularly funny, but which amused Eryn to no end and made some amusing laughing echoes off the cliff sides. Grandpa didn't like the rhyme as much as she did, basically making it self-fulfilling. Stare at Pooteewheet's chest as much as you want, I do, but you'll find no Snoopy petroglyph adorning her breasts. Commendations to anyone who comes up with a guess as to what her shirt says in ancient Native American. I vote for "I walked and walked up to these ruins and it feels like someone poked me in the butt with a trident."


No...no. I'll be good. I promise. I'll be good, Salado Witch. I'll stand in the corner and count, just like I'm supposed to. Mom...Dad...I'm sorry...I'm so sorry...


Everyone in Arizona is a communist. Don't believe me? Explain this...


The rest of the Tonto National Monument, Salado Ruins, pictures.

Vacation - Interlude - Hot Tub, Multipurpose Tools

There are a bunch of pictures for the inlaws and family right here. Mini golf, carousel rides, train rides, motorcycle rides, new boots, Halloween decorations, et al. Everything we did in Tucson proper that didn't fit into an event category. Over here, we have all of Pooteewheet's pictures from Karchener Caverns. I'd already been without her on a previous trip, so she went alone. You can't take pictures in the caverns, however, so this is more of a study in desert wildlife and fauna. Some very pretty pictures.

I will highlight two pictures from Tucson. One, me in a hot tub examining the "temperature duck" to determine how long my regionally appropriate beer will stay cold. My mother collects rubber ducks and Eryn's hobby is to play with them (although Grandma sent her home with several ducks of her own). Eryn moved a selection of them into the hot tub, presumably so you would all have to be subjected to this picture.



Great Grandma gave Eryn some tape. At first she claimed she had meant to get her scotch tape instead of duct, electricians, and piping tape. Then she claimed it was emergency tape, and she didn't know how it go into the gift bag she bought Eryn. But Eryn was happy and put it to good use taping all of John's tools together. Allison reminisced with me on the phone about how she'd once been duct taped to the tree in our front yard only to have my cousin bang her head into the trunk. Good times. She fully approved and sanctioned Eryn's plan for the duct tape.

Vacation, Day 7 - Chiricahua

I told you I bought a 2 gig camera chip. Did you think it wasn't going to get used? I've been giving it some thought, though. And I think next major picture taking event, I'm only posting a few pictures to Flickr per day. Quality over quantity. The extra 100 pictures or so per event will still exist on my drive, but you won't be subject to 35 pictures of my bald spot from different angles. Don't thank me until after you've been subject to me in a hot tub with rubber ducks.

We stopped early after White Sands, not too far from Tucson, and spent one more night on the road, in Wilcox, Arizona, so we could check out Chiricahua National Monument (nice panoramic picture at Wikipedia at the bottom) the next morning. It's famous for...more rocks! I admit, we may have overdone the rocks on this trip. But it was pretty neat, and next time we go to Arizona, I think Pooteewheet and I may set aside some time to go hiking, even if it means camping out. They have some 13-17 mile hikes that lead from the base of the mountains all the way to the tip top, higher than the area below where Eryn and I are standing.

Climbing up here made me a little nervous, and I'm a guy who slept against a 21 story window drop for two years. I wasn't convinced the cement was sturdy enough. I had more faith in the rock I was standing on.


Another picture of all the pillars. You can climb around down there, although you have to watch out for rattlesnakes. Two little girls who were running around told us to be careful because they had heard one off the trail (they were very earnest).


Pooteewheet on a big rock. It's much higher than it might seem in 300x400 resolution, and she had to shimmy up a little ledge to get up there. I crawled up to get the camera from her so I could take a picture - there was a nice breeze.


I don't know why I'm in this pose in two different locales. But it's very similar to how Eryn poses when someone's taking a picture and she's freeforming. Quit looking up my shorts.


Grandma, sitting where there's no bouldering necessary. When you're 92, bouldering is way way down the list of activities you want to participate in. Underneath that tree smelled like the best pine air freshener ever made...you know, almost like a real pine, but better.


All the Chiricahua pictures.

Vacation, Day 6 - White Sands

Where's Day 5!? Day 5 was a traveling day. We pretty much pushed all the way down to Alamogordo, just shy of White Sands, so we could start at the park in the morning. If I have one important thing to say about day 5, it is this...if you ever find yourself in Las Vegas, New Mexico, stop at Charlie's Spic & Span Bakery and Cafe. It was absolutely delicious. The tortillas were baked fresh, the breakfast was incomparable, and I could buy a cup of Starbuck's to go.

If you're in Alamogordo, don't stop at the Kmart. They'll sell you the wrong sled for cruising down the dunes at White Sands, and their customer base includes this guy who apparently sees belonging to the Confederacy as a heritage issue, even though he's in New Mexico. I guess slavery does involve heritage issues when you consider the split up families and multi-racial children, although I doubt that's his point.


Maybe Heritage Not Hate guy was just sight-seeing like we were. Could be he thought White Sands meant something entirely different.

Eryn and I stopped at White Sands last year when we were taking Grandma south, but it was raining so hard a large part of the park was closed. This year it was all open and we got to go back into the center of the dunes. Looks cold, doesn't it? I kept expecting to slide all over the road while I was driving. It even looks like there's a fish house on the ice.


Here's Eryn fully enjoying riding a sled down the sand. This was the sled we rented from the park. The sled Jen bought at Kmart we gave to my Dad in Tucson. He'll probably have to pull rocks with it, because there's not much snow. There are a few pictures of Pooteewheet tumbling out of the sled if you head over to the Flickr set.


The whole family. Eryn's hot. Little Miss Brown was literally burning, and she was crabby with me for telling her not to jump off the catwalk before I could check for snakes and lizards and spiders that might be lounging in the shade.


Pooteewheet wrote this, not Eryn, but it's a good picture because it shows that they take a snowplow to the area to keep the roads clear, packing the sand up in little walls just like here in Minnesota after a 10" storm.


Grandma and Eryn standing in some ants so we could get a good picture.


SAND FIGHT! Way in the back you can see the crappy red sled Pooteewheet bought at Kmart. Eryn filled it full of sand. Pooteewheet left us out here after we figured out the sled was a bust while she went back to the visitor area to get a different one. It's sort of creepy sitting out in the dunes with no car and no one else around.


Another picture of Eryn with the sun to her back. This one looks very nice close up and cropped.


Tripod prints! It's because we in the White Mountains. I didn't meet any French kids, but there was an Italian couple at the visitor center. She wanted to go to the bathroom, so she dropped her purse on a bench and told him (I assume) to watch her purse. He was filming with a video camera, and smacked the LCD window shut, then made a multi chopping gesture with the hand, while mumbling under his breath in Italian. It was like something out of an old movie that takes place in Rome.


Finally, a picture to make Mean Mr. Mustard sad. After the apocalypse, there will be no one left alive to eat the Red Vines as they're slowly buried beneath the sands of our demise. Should he take a space ship into the future and end up here, chased by ape men and fleshy headed mutants, he will undoubtedly kneel down, head and arms thrust at heaven, Red Vines clutched in his fists, screaming, "Damn you. Damn you all to hell!" He's sort of likely to do something like that in the here and now anyway, so it's not such a stretch.


Here's the rest of the White Sands set.

Rod Plant

An aside on the whole vacation thing. While I was traveling, I took the time to pick up a number of postcards and mail them to Kyle at work. Not because I thought he might enjoy looking at all the pretty pictures, but because it was an opportunity to send him cards with a gay subtext from his friend Rod. My hope was that because they were postcards and fully open to examination, the admin at his office or his local postperson might read them first, noting that despite Kyle having been married, he had still found time to attend and be part of the audience participation for Puppetry of the Penis, had carnal relations with a really old guy in Paris, once engaged in a Mexican meal with 8 cabana boys, reminded Rod of large cacti and cave formations, and decorated his basement as some sort of queer eye styled orgy room. That wasn't the full extent of it, just a few of the highlights, but you get the postcard. While traveling to Tonto National Monument near Globe, Arizona, (where Linda Carter when to high school) we drove past a copper mine and saw a building labeled as the Rod Plant. That's how Rod got his full name.

But the best part is that I pulled the original address for Kyle's workplace off USWestDex, only later finding the real address at his company's website. So several of the early postcards went to the wrong address where his company had previously resided, now occupied by an office for the Catholic Church. It's almost enough to make me believe in divine intervention. They must be absolutely horrified.

Vacation, Day 4 - Garden of the Gods

Day four we pulled into Colorado Springs. It was the only day we stayed at a motel we hadn't set eyes on before getting a room, and it was a close call, just down the road from a few liquor stores and a pawn shop. But the desk guy was great and the rooms were great.

Although it was getting late as we pulled into town, we stopped off at Garden of the Gods to look at the local rock formations and crawl around the boulders, shadowed by the incessant warble of the Questioning Four Year Old, "Why do they call it Garden of the Gods? Why? Why 'the gods'? Why the Garden of the Gods? Why do they call it that?" We explained garden. We explained gods. We explained garden of the gods. We explained it in terms of her rock collection. We explained it in terms of Hercules the Disney movie. It was more tiring than the bouldering.

A basic idea of what to see at Garden of the Gods. Rocks and trees. But very picturesque.


Kissing camels, or a fire-breathing camel, or a camel that's had too much to drink. It all depends on your state of mind.


Eryn and I lending a hand to stabilize the park. All the land at Garden of the Gods was once owned by a guy who would let you see the balancing rocks and would take your picture in front of the best one. When everyone began to have cheap cameras he built a fence around it. His children later made up for it by donating the land to the city and entry is now free. Apparently people cheered when the fence surrounding balancing rock was torn down.


Much better in close up. If I don't use the picture I'll post in the next few days of me in a hot tube with a beer and rubber ducks, I'll use a close up of this one to replace my blog picture. I didn't really have any sort of plan in mind when I did this, other than posing, but it sort of looks like I'm trying to ride a sandworm, ala Dune.


Cute picture of Eryn, who was happy to be out of the car and would have stayed for a full day if she could have. On a rock. Off a rock. On a rock. Off a rock. "Why's it the Garden of the Gods?" On a rock. Off a rock.


An even cuter picture of Eryn in a rock crack. We checked carefully for rattlers first.


Here's the complete photo set with rock climbers, a picture or two of grandma, etc.

Vacation, Day 3 - Little Big Horn

Day 3 was almost day 2 of vacation. When we disembarked from Amtrak, Grandma informed me that my Dad had told her we had to leave directly from Williston as a big snow storm was on the way. It was a little drizzly, but it didn't seem that cold. Of course, that doesn't mean there's no snow in the mountains of Colorado. In the past, that might have been a problem, particularly as my Dad was in Denmark and out of reach, but with my trusty blackberry I could kick up weather.com and peruse the reports. Boulder, 74 degrees. Denver, 76 degrees. Colorado Springs, 74 degrees. "Grandma, there's no snow south of here, it's supposed to be genuinely nice." She replied, "It's going to snow." I said, "No it's not. It's nice, even the seven day forecast is good." She replied, "In Yellowstone! Snow!" "But Grandma, we're not going through Yellowstone." She still wasn't completely convinced until I informed her that regardless of the weather we were not leaving, we were going to our hotel for a good night of rest.

The next day we had a nice breakfast at the Sidney Elks. Then we visited my great uncle, Fred who I guess was in Operation Market Garden. I'd never heard that before, so that was interesting. Grandma didn't say Market Garden, but she did note he'd been in the Netherlands in WWII and Fred had seen a lot of combat, so that's probably where he was. I didn't get a picture of Fred, but I did get a picture of Glendisaurus, the Glendive Triceratops in his home town. This is me giving Glendisaurus a belly kiss.


Proof that he, or she, is really a Glendisaurus and not some other Argentinian flavor of dinosaur. I wish this sign had said why they felt compelled to create a triceratops on the edge of town.


Our touristy stop for the day, on our way to Wyoming, was Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. The last time I had been there it was still Custer National Battlefield. It's nice to see George's pa renamed the place in '91. Interesting fact, all the grave markers are placed where the bodies were initially found after the battle, so they're all over the place and you can see the ebb and flow of the battle across the hills and how soldiers were isolated into pockets by looking for clumps of graves. This one with the black face is where they found Custer.


Later, they put in some markers for where Native American bodies were found as well, as best they could determine from the evidence and where the Native Americans left markers.


None of Custer's troops are actually buried under their markers. They're all buried in a mass grave on the hill under this big marker. Behind the marker, where you can't see it, is the grave for the horses that died. They were used as a wall during the fight to stop the bullets. Eryn was very concerned about all the dead horses.


This one seemed most interesting of the many graves, given the next picture commemorates the children and women who died as well.


Part of the Native American memorial on the site. I believe one of the names on the memorial is "Stabs". And here you can see "Kills Him" and "Plenty Lice." Eryn found the names fascinating. I don't think kids see the attraction in being named "Plenty Lice" or the potential irony of being named "Kills Him".


The Native American memorial. The funding they'd been after for such a long time to build it showed up under GW in 2003 under an interior appropriates bill. It's very pretty - you can see it better if you click through.


The whole thing, end to end.


It was a bit chilly out for snakes, but this sign amused me. As long as you're not on the trail, you should be safe?


You can see the rest of the Little Big Horn Battlefield set here.

Vacation, Day 2 - Sugar Beet Enemas

These are a few pictures from the Sidney, Montana, area proper. Here be beets. Sugar beets. A big freaking pile of the things. There are hundreds of these piles and thousands of weirdly-geodesic beet-filled trucks, some of them kicking up rocks into your window.


This is me doing my best to inappropriately touch a giant sugar beet. In retrospect, I should have stood on that little ledge and bent over in front of it so it would look like it was being rectally inserted, but hey, hindsight is 20/20.


This is my grandma's old house. I spent a lot of time in the very hot upper floor during summers at the farm. She sold it about a year ago, and the first thing the new owners did was to paint it the exact same green and pastel purple as the local movie theater. Grandma hates it. But then, she told my wife and daughter a story about how my parents wanted to have me sent to a special school where they kept kids from growing, and I quote, "freakishly tall." She said I stopped growing just in time to avoid this fate, which must have involved anti-racking, lots of coffee, absurd amounts of weight lifting, computer games, a healthy supply of cocaine and daily beatings. I'm not irritated with her for telling my family the story. I'm irritated with my parents for depriving me of all that fun and her for not applying more pressure to have me sent to said school. Now she has to look at this picture as long as Flickr exists.

Vacation Day 1 - We Amtrak

Taking grandma to Tucson requires making one's way to Sidney, Montana. We couldn't drive, because the point of the exercise was to take grandma and her van to Arizona. That leaves two options. One, fly into the Sidney airport like that idiot teen who wanted to visit his girlfriend in Sydney, Australia, but couldn't spell or figure out where Australia is in relation to Montana. But, despite my many hours in a small engine plane, including solo-ing, I have an unnatural fear of riding in small planes with someone else at the yoke. No damn way. I don't even like to fly commercial without checking to ensure the maximum number of engines possible between source and destination. Option two, the train. Amtrak from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Williston, North Dakota, 11:00 p.m. to 11:00 a.m. Some advice - spring for the sleeper car if you can afford it. I slept like a baby, except when the train would stop. Pooteewheet slept like a baby, only when the train was stopped. Eryn slept all the time. It was sort of like the three bears, except without a cute blonde sneaking into my bunk in the middle of the night and complaining I was too big.

Here's Pooteewheet taking out her lack of sleep on a stuffed dog in the dining car. He's a bomb-sniffing dog from the State Fair, so I don't know what she's trying to cover up - probably an explosive temper.


A light from what are probably Amtrak days gone by. The women's lounge, next to the Lav Area. We still have a breastfeeding room at work, but I don't think this is the same thing. I went in search of it, just in case it was one of those 100-virgin things, and they really meant it was a room full of women for me to peruse (hey...if it really is an Amtrak harem, peruse is the correct word), but all I found were the bathrooms. In defense of Amtrak, the light never lit up, so maybe I just didn't purchase the right level of sleeping berth.


Lots of Flickr photos from the Amtrak ride.

I'm back! Vacation and A Line from a Recent Story

What was that, twelve days without blogging? That may be my longest absence since I started. I did better than that while I was on RAGBRAI. I apologize. The family took grandma (or great-grandma, depending on whether you're GenX or Gen...Z+, to Tucson for her annual snowbirding. I looked at my Blackberry a few times just so I could thank the coworker who was covering for me, and otherwise I avoided the internet with the exception of updating my parents' computer (by the way, f-you Realplayer and your shitty "I don't want to upgrade because you had a previous version and you manually uninstalled it without installing a new version and now I won't play nice except to leave hoofprints all over your registry." And no, it's not Microsoft's fault for having the registry in the first place. Real Player 6 footprints and Real Player 9 and 10's refusal to install if there's a manual uninstall of 6 is utter garbage. One of the stupider things I've ever seen in installation, as well as the refusal to offer a fix even though it's obviously a Real-related problem despite that some users have bemoaned the problem for over a year).

Anyway - I have hundreds of pictures. So, so, so many pictures. I shall subject you to only the more interesting and amusing ones, and just a few scenic ones over the next several days. Why not all at once right now? Because I'm too lazy to upload them all at once, let alone comment on them all at once.

On to the story...I've been writing a short story based on the ride Ming, Kyle and I took through Wisconsin. The characters aren't based on us, but I needed a name for a main character I could wrap my head around easily and he shared a few qualities with Ming, so Ming it was. My favorite line so far..."and Ming wondered if strippers biked."

Appliance Music

I bought a 2 gig san memory card for my camera that was on sale for $21 at Best Buy because I hate hauling the laptop around when I go places. With tax, it came out to be about $1 more than the gift card I had for doing a good job on a faux web site at work (really - it was fake - it was for modeling enterprise data layers features). I went from being able to take around 100 photos, to being able to take almost 1500 photos or 80 minutes of low-end video. I don't know what I'm going to take 1500 photos of before downloading, but I'm tempted to try just to say I did it. Maybe I can take 1500 pictures of Mean Mr. Mustard in his cube.

It's been a long time since I linked to After School Snack, but Matt has a great video up where the Norwegian Group Hurra Torpedo plays "Total Eclipse of the Heart" using kitchen appliances. I can't wait for Erik the Swede to take up deep chest freezer at local bars.

Overheard at the Fall Festival at Eryn's School

Me, volunteering at the bobbing-for-apples station. Little girl approaches to bob.

Mother: "Honey, maybe we shouldn't bob for apples. You're still on antibiotics."

Good Agile, Bad Agile (and other things)

That picture of Britney Spears bears this very very slight resemblance to my sister in law. If she were some sort of panty-less, drunk crack-ho. That's sort of creepy. And if I apologize for that comment, it's to my sister in law, not to Britney Spears - bring it on Chris Crocker (your namesake bought me a sweater in high school - so I'm not scared of you).

Mr. Mustard...the fallacy bit was on purpose. It just seemed so obvious. And Kyle...it took Jeff Sanderson three years to figure out that whenever he had a headache, and someone said, "go sit on a piece of soap" they were referring to "ass burn". Given that attention to detail, no one in the locker room would have noticed my webbed, retracted, prehensile, glittery, tattooed, musical wang, particularly as I attached a tail to it and called it a weasel. But don't think about my wang - think about fashion models in white blouses. Serenity now.

Fimoculous said everyone had seen "I Ran So Far" on Saturday Night Live. Um...not me. Not my friend, Mr. Mustard. Not my friend the Swede. Not anyone I know. But it's funny - damn funny. The Jake Gyllenhaal cameo is extremely funny.

Speaking of videos - both of these Daily Show videos linked by Crooks and Liars are hilarious.

Finally - the title piece. Chris Crowhurst, who is related to a coworker I really like who started the same job I do at the same time, who I was interviewing for my old group on the same day I was interviewing with him to work with his group, which I couldn't work with, because he was going to work with my old group, which I was trying to escape, and whose said relation dated an evangelist (tech kind) who I sat in meetings with because I was on one of the early Biztalk 2004 projects in the Twin Cities, always has some great posts up on Agile development (that was a lot of work for a topic, eh? I'm just trying to point out how my workplace is crazy small sometimes despite the 6500 or so coworkers) and this time is no exception. I was enthralled with his link to Stevey's Blog Rants on Good Agile, Bad Agile (via The Art of Programming with .NET). Why did I find it so interesting? Because on some level, Agile has always bothered me for precisely the reason Steve Yegge says - there are people who are just so damn evangelical about it. And I'm someone who thinks there's something to be gained from almost everything - some small suite of skills that can either benefit a developer, or show them what not to do. And I'm definitely a bit too excited about it now and then. I think the same thing about Agile - I just think people always take it too far. Like Grady Booch said in his talk last week - you can take everything too far, like Microsoft does with their one day builds, and then everyone is scrambling to get something done every day, instead of thinking through what's best. Development is a pendulum, and you have to keep it near the middle. Then again, Grady said Google is a company in need of some sort of serious adult supervision, so I imagine he and Steve have their issues.

So what do I like and not like about Agile? I dislike the idea that all Agile ideas are good for a project to the extent they're sometimes taken to extremes. And by extreme, I mean there are even instances when they're imposed upon groups that already working and producing appropriately. There seems to be this idea that if you have a group (like Stevey claims exists at Google) that functions, and produces, and produces effectively, and makes clients happy, that Agile will still create some sort of benefit over the current state even if it has to be rammed down a throat or two. Automated builds, unit testing - those create benefit. But they're not just Agile - Agile just tends to leverage them and then occasionally insists that they created them. I've seen a number of Agile projects and my personal take on it is that Agile works great when there's a great team who likes to work together. When it's being driven by someone who could care less about the developers and only cares about the code and the end product, I see the same issues that plague any project. Bottom line: if you have an effective team (go read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Pencioni), Agile works, it just further binds a team that's already close and knows each other. If you have an ineffective team that doesn't care about each other, then it doesn't matter - scrum and stories be damned, people will scrape to get by with what they can in the daily meeting and sprints, just like they were doing before. Chris' experiences with Agile always sound so positive - but from what I know of him, he's a great guy, he's excited about technology and his projects, and he hires great people. Agile gives his team a structure, but the core is a culture. From some of the recent posts on his blog, I get the impression that his team may have run headfirst into the wall that is CMMI (or the equivalent in some of our other groups) - and that's got to be a tough spot. I've done both Agile and CMMI (which I've come to think of, in some respects, as waterfall development - not model - in that there's the BDUF and then a bunch of people who may or may not know what the hell is going on pushing toward the same goal, a bunch of them splashing onto the rocks, but the thrust of the damn thing is basically an unstoppable force), and I've seen the benefit to both, but the idea of getting the two to integrate when led by different teams is a frightening prospect.

I tried very ineffectively to explain my programming style to a VP once upon a time while interviewing to be an architect. He said, and this is tight paraphrasing, "You can't be an architect, you walk away from projects." Ouch. I replied that projects matter to me in as much as the people who staff those projects matter to me. In any project I'm on (was in) I know everyone. I know their motivation, I know their skillset, I know their long term goals, I know the politics, I know who's in the way (usually me), and I know how those things interplay with the project to make it succeed or fail. To me, people matter, and when you genuinely care about them (and here I make an important qualification - when you care about the people who want to learn and create successful software), then they come to see that the project matters - not as deadlined, gantted events, but as exciting events with their own momentum and camaraderie. And to take it a step further, when you care about the people you work with, particularly at a large company, then you generate a sort of social-aspect-oriented programming that cuts across projects as people become excited to work with you and the projects you're excited about. They know you're going to get rid of the impediments that keep them from being successful and that you're going to do what it takes to make the project and the people successful. I know, because this is the way I work, and in most of my projects, there's a time to leave, to pick up and move to the next project, no matter how much management wants you to stay in one place and keep things smooth. Because informed change creates opportunity for the developers you want to succeed, because it creates new intellectual and development pathways in the project, and because it's simply the right thing to do to move skills and technologies around the company. I get the impression that when management sees this behavior, and it's not sanctioned, it's "bailing". If they thought of it and approved it as a rotation program, it gets an official acronym.

I think what I'm getting to, bottom line, is that Steve has a very serious point - a company that has a great culture can generate something that puts Agile to shame, hands down. When people really like each other, and like their company, and understand the motivation, and understand the incentives, and have access to the tools they need to succeed (i.e. software, training and people/mentors), they are going to create, and create in a manner that's innovative and inherently agile. That is so cool. I think my favorite example is consulting teams that evaluate the difficulty of a project by basically playing rock-paper-scissors. That's not an Agile methodology - that's developers who have a culture that's allowed them to step up and put their best fist forward. When those things aren't there - Agile can smooth some of the bumps and provide a framework that allows for some great software development, but it's not the silver bullet. It's just another tool in a box that's been evolving for years.

Dear Lissy Jo

I know you taught Eryn one of her favorite poems:

"If it's yellow, let it mellow,
If it's brown, flush it down."

But what if it's green. Or maybe sort of brown and sort of red? Give it up, you're dead?

Postpourri - Dystopias, Man-months and Kibibytes

Quotable Scooter: "I don't have a writer's ego. If I did, I would have been an MFA student."

Rex has a link to the Top 50 Dystopian movies of all time. I agree that a lot of the movies have dystopian tendencies, but I disagree with their ordering and a few choices. Brazil certainly belongs in the top three. But Wings of Desire near the top? That's a great movie, really great, but it's a weird one to even have on the list. And where the hell is A Handmaid's Tale? I pointed out to Pooteewheet that maybe it didn't make the cut because men made the list and didn't feel it was dystopian. And based on some of their choices, I'd offer up A Handful of Dust as a dystopia, at least at the end of the story - a damn sight scarier than many of the others. Idiocracy? I was watching it last night when I read Rex's list. It is dystopic - it actually gave me a headache. But in many respects it's a rip off of Futurama, which is much more clever (though not a movie), and it doesn't belong above Rollerball (the old one) and Stormship Troopers, which has a few clever tonuge-in-cheek bits that are simultaneously dystoptic and mocking of dystopic ideas.

I was reading Wikipedia's entry on The Mythical Man-Month and found myself amused by his formula for group intercommunication: (n − 1) / 2. Digging around for an old script I had - Visual Basic with an error catch that just rolls past duplicate index values - I ran a count versus one of the nine projects I'm currently involved in, but not the biggest:

 InternalArray() = Split(MyItem.To, ";")

      For i = LBound(InternalArray) To UBound(InternalArray)

          A.Add Trim(InternalArray(i)), Trim(InternalArray(i))

      Next

And it came back with a list of approximately 95 distinct emails and email groups, which results in over 18,000 lines of communication. This explains much about my day-to-day confusion.

MNSpeak has a link to Steve Marsh's article on Twin Cities bike culture.

And via Merlin's Rest from a few weeks ago, a link to World Wide Words. I've been reading bits and pieces of it all the time - it's fascinating. At least two co-workers can attest to me using the phrase beanpole family and I'm looking for the opportunity to use kibi-, mebi-, gibi-, and tebi- byte in polite geekversation.

Penis Panic

Kyle told me E!'s The Soup made the same joke about National Alpaca Farm Day that I did. Then he noted that E! is an important source of information for issues like Hidden Penis Syndrome. I had no ideas what this syndrome entailed, so I did some web research. Suspiciously, you don't get webmd or NIMH articles about HPS, you get comics, blogs and Jerry Springer. This leads me to believe the syndrome might be made up - a fallacy - in order to prey upon the insecurities of those who might be hung more like red-bellied short-necked turtles than like snake-necked turtles. I bring up turtles, because there is a mass-hysteria related affliction called Penis Panic that shows up on Wikipedia. In Malaysia, Penis Panic is called Koro, which means "head of a turtle". Penis Panic can involve the belief that Zionists are out to melt your penis by dint of electrical combs and handshakes. If you buy an electrical comb, it probably serves you right.

This fear of losing your pe-nay-nay has parallels in vagina dentata, where individuals fear castration by toothy vaginas. I enjoyed the nod to Pillow Pants, the vagina troll in Clerks II in the popular culture section, although I didn't see a reference to the Bruce Boston story in Locus which I believe I read when I was much younger and involved a dentist. As a disgusting aside, Jaye's Blahg posts a clip from an article about dermoid cysts growing teeth and modblog has a repulsive armpit tattoo, which immediately reminded me of these not-so-safe-for-work (nsfw) tattoos posted by Planet Dan.