home again home again jiggity jig

We did a monumental all-day drive yesterday to get from Telluride to home. Piper was very glad to see us, although we could tell that our next door neighbor Kyle, who was cat- and house-sitting for us the second week of vacation, had done his job well. His instructions included coming over and playing video games and watching movies to let Piper hang out with him. We think he did this admirably, as the set-up Rock Band drums and mic, Wendy's wrappers in the trash, and reasonably mellow Piper attest. He's probably sad we're home.

The drive home went well. We split it up a lot between us to avoid fatigue. The coolest thing we saw along the way was a really long train with a bunch of different army vehicles and tanks on it. They were pretty small on the back of the train, but as we got closer to the front engine, the tanks got bigger and more serious until they were the huge ones with the gigantic guns.

The last few days in Telluride were nice and relaxing. We did a great hike in Ouray on Wednesday while Susie shopped in town. On Friday we visited the farmers market again and made some purchases - for me, that included some amazing cherries and apricots.

Pictures will be forthcoming. Our camera finally kicked the bucket, and all we have is the first day of Mesa Verde (the second day had appeared to be on the compact flash card, until we tried to suck the pictures onto Luke's computer). All the other pictures will be compliments of Susie and I'll have to get them via burned CD from her.

I read eight books on vacation and they were all interesting in their own way...

1. Kushiel's Scion by Jacqueline Carey
2. Kushiel's Justice by Jacqueline Carey
3. Kushiel's Mercy by Jacqueline Carey
4. Time Bandit: Two Brothers, the Bering Sea, and One of the World's Deadliest Jobs by Andy and Johnathan Hillstrand
5. Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder
6. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
7. After the War by Tim Lebbon
8. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company by David A. Price

I'd read the first two Kushiel's books before, and was excited about reading the final member of the trilogy that had come out in June. It didn't disappoint. The Time Bandit book was one I'd seen in the library right before we left for Colorado. As a loyal fan of the TV show The Deadliest Catch, I enjoyed the book, especially since I particularly love the Hillstrand brothers. However, from a literary standpoint, the book kinda sucked. Mountains Beyond Mountains was, I believe, a gift from Leslie. It is a non-fiction offering that details the work of Dr. Paul Farmer, who is basically trying to save the poor from infectious disease. His first and greatest success was treatment of TB in the central plateau of Haiti. The Glass Castle is a memoir and one that was highly recommended to me by Mom and Leslie. Turns out Susie has read it too and also threw in her vote of excellence. It was indeed a great book, and I wanted to slap the author's parents around like mad the whole time. After the War contains two novellas set in the same world as Dusk and Dawn, fantasy books by Tim Lebbon. I had read and enjoyed those before vacation, despite them being very dark, and so I picked up After the War. It was well-done, but perhaps even more disturbing than the original two novels. Finally, my read in the car ride home, the Pixar book. It was an extremely interesting look into the history of the company and how it got to where it is today. I particularly enjoyed the chapters in which the author described the creative process for each movie. For example, two artists actually climbed into a dead gray whale to help them understand what whales look like on the inside for the whale scene in Finding Nemo. They had all sorts of experts come in and talk to them about aquatic life, and a group was sent to scuba dive in Hawaii. For Cars, they went on a road trip down Route 66 (including a stop to eat the 72 oz steak at the Big Texan in Amarillo). A couple people apprenticed at a French restaurant for Ratatouille.