Welcome to the Hotel California

A black arrow, doused in snake venom, whizzed through the air for fifty meters, then embedded itself in the heart of a mail-clad soldier. His mail armor was weak, and he faltered, then fell off his mount, eyes full of death. The small scout force of humans braced for an attack, but too late. Forty lkaks, creatures distinguished by the smell of rotten eggs about them and three large horns sticking out of their forehead, leapt out of the trees, quickly cutting down the nine remaining humans. In a few short seconds, it was over.

Does that have anything to do with the events of the last two weeks? There's only one way to find out.

We've got fourteen days that need to be accounted for. And no, I don't consider it bad form to end that particular sentence with a preposition. Stuff it.

Don't try to read this in one sitting. It will be physically painful.

We'll start with the day after Rachael's birthday, that is to say two Tuesdays ago. We're starting here because that's the first day since my last real post. On Tuesday nothing of importance happened. The end.

On Wednesday and Thursday I had some fun, a word which here means the opposite of what it means in every other context. I say this because, in a thirty hour period between Wednesday morning and Thursday afternoon that also included sleep, eating, attending class, and track practice, I began, middled, and ended writing three different papers for three different classes. One of them was about the civil wars, largely brought about by religious disagreements, that consumed Britain between 1640 and 1660. One of them was about the significance of Joseph's words to his brothers in the context of the book of Genesis. And one of them was about the differences between Noah from Genesis and Clov from Endgame. And from that experience I learned that I'm taking three different religion classes when in fact I thought I had signed up for only one.

Why, you (probably didn't) ask, did I finish my papers by Thursday afternoon rather than Thursday night? Because Thursday night, my dears, belonged to packing.

At 6:something a.m. on the Friday that, surprise, immediately followed the Thursday of packing, I woke up, consumed a peanut butter-tastic breakfast, found an empty seat near the back of the bus, tried to fall asleep, was greeted with limited success, and eventually found myself at General Edward Lawrence Logan International Airport. That's the one in Boston, by the way. [Note to Jason: Boston is a city in Massachusetts, which is a state (those are the things than make up the United States) on the East (opposite of west, not to be confused with weast) Coast of our country.]

Shortly after my arrival at Logan, the flight directory reflected a significant delay in my upcoming cross country voyage. A while later, my flight was delayed further. Some time after that, my flight was delayed again. After sitting in the terminal for almost 300 minutes, I finally boarded my flight. Now I ought to mention, and indeed I will mention, that I was to reach San Diego via San Francisco, and the plane that was to take me from Boston to San Francisco and the plane that was to take me from San Francisco to San Diego were two different planes. Naturally, the massive delay at Boston cause much worry about what would happen in San Francisco, because my connecting flight, so I thought, was not going to wait for me. After worrying about this for six hours over four time zones thirty thousand feet up, and after enjoying great views of June Mountain and Yosemite Valley, I landed in the Bay Area to news that my connecting flight had also been delayed. Which, in this case, was decidedly good news. It had been delayed enough, in fact, that I had some free time in the terminal, which I used up by buying a copy of The Hunger Games and, rather more importantly, a yogurt parfait.

Upon finally landing in San Diego, an event which occurred a few minutes after Friday had ended, I waltzed (I did not waltz) down to the baggage claim, watched as the carousel made its rounds sans-my bag, waltzed (again, not actually) up to the baggage help desk, discovered that my bag was having a jolly good time in San Francisco, arranged for the bag to be delivered to my hotel as soon as possible (They asked how to get to my hotel from the airport. I hadn't yet been to the hotel. I told them from memory regardless.), caught a ride to the hotel, discovered that it was actually a motel, tried to enter my room and grab some bed without waking up my roommates (all of whom had arrived on time with all of their luggage), was unsuccessful, apologized, fell asleep, woke up, dressed in the same clothes I wore on the plane (Because my luggage was in San Fran. Keep up, guys.), hopped in one of several team vans, headed to Point Loma Nazarene University, borrowed a singlet, racing shorts, and spikes from two teammates,  ran what can best be described as the worst race in my entire life, was miserable about for a good while, returned to my motel, found my bag waiting for me, and fell asleep feeling as though no 48 hours in history had ever tried as hard as those last 48 to piss me off.

That's my rather pessimistic mono-sentence version of Saturday, the 24th of March 2012. I am now going to go back and fill in the parts that didn't suck.
Before the 5k is near the end of the meet, I had a lot of free time to wander around Point Loma before my race. Me being me, I did exactly that. What follows is the result of the combined factors of me having my phone while I was walking around and of me thinking about this blog while I was walking around. Prettyful.

Interesting natural formations.

Interesting man-made design.

I see you, Ulmo.

These be cliffs and things.

Clever caption.

But you didn't honestly think I could go on a walk like this without letting my exploratoritativenessity get the best of me. Ludicrous; perish the thought!
So I'm walking along the top of the cliff, right? And I think I see a way I can get down it, so I turn my back to the waves and descend the rocks in the manner that one descends a ladder. When I get down to beach level, I find a band of sand a few meters wide that runs along the base of the cliff, winding its way back and forth, following the contours of the eroded sandstone. I follow the sand trail north for a minute or two and I find what initially appears to be nothing more than a cleft in the rock wall off to my starboard side. Upon closer examination, however, I discover the cleft to be a very narrow opening. Narrow enough to deter the unexploratory. Of course, you can't really get to this beach if you're completely unexploratory; as I said, I had to climb down a cliff. A small cliff, yes, but still a cliff.
To say it was a tight squeeze would be to forget the scratch marks the rocks left on my stomach and back. Had I a proper camera with a flash, I you'd be viewing at a picture looking into the cave, but alas you must settle with a view from within, looking out to the sea and the sky. Of the cave itself I will only say that it wouldn't be a half bad hiding place for a horcrux.

0.1% of Menegroth. It makes me sad that the only person here who will get this joke is the one person determined not to find it funny because I came up with it.

But you know it could never have been that simple. Derek climbs down to beach, Derek finds cave, Derek climbs back up. No. Far too easy. Let it be known that, after this little adventure by the sea, I checked online to see exactly when high tide had been scheduled for the day, and the website confirmed what I by that time already knew from experience. You see, the narrow beach I had used to access the cave is apparently a low-tide only beach. My only regret is that I didn't have a pair of dry socks waiting for me at the top of the cliff.

After my little outing, I returned to the track, cheered on my teammates, and eventually reacquainted myself with those whose blood is closest to mine. Or, as any normal person would say, my brother, dad (who turned 51 that day), mom, grandpa, grandma, aunt, and cousin drove down to see me race and I was therefore able to do a little catching up. After I ran by absymal 5k, I went out to dinner with the family at a Chinese-ish restaurant, ordered two full-size entrees and finished both of them, not to mention an appetizer and more than half of my mom's entree which she wasn't able to finish. Spicy food, you elude me no longer.

And that was my Saturday. Nine more days to describe. Better get on with it.
Sunday was the first day I had to really absorb the area right around the motel. And absorb it I did, quite literally. As in, I absorbed the local food into my food tank. Just down the street from us we had the gloriously cheap and delicious options of Taco Surf, Pasta Espresso, Jamba Juice and Yogurtland (Does MoLo ever read this?), all three of which I went to twice over the course of the week. Actually, I'm pretty sure I went to Taco Surf thrice. Yep, definitely did that. And Jamba Juice was more like four times, each post-morning run, just like we would do in high school.

The motel didn't have wi-fi and our remote didn't work, which ensure maximum outside-ness on all of our parts. Because, let's face it, if the remote doesn't work, the TV basically doesn't work. If you think it's possible to get out of bed, walk over to the aged machine, physically push a button on the side of it, and walk back, and do all of this every time the channel needs to be changed, well, let's just say YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW. So we didn't do much of that, which suits me anyway.
What Pacific Shores Inn lacks in 21st century-ness (the showers sucked too) it does make up for in location. It's a thirty second walk to the beach if you get lost, shorter if you don't. I bet if you hustle you can make it to the beach faster than you can change the channel.
There's also a pool, where we had a team meeting on that first Saturday, after the race and after dinner. So I guess I wasn't done talking about Saturday. Just one more brief story:

We're having a meeting at the pool because that's where all of us can fit, and it's 9:30 on a Saturday night and apparently Arizona State University's spring break coincides with ours because partway through our meeting an extremely intoxicated girl, stranger to all of us at that point, runs into the pool area, jumps into the none-too-warm water with all of her clothes on, gets out, announces her name ("Micalah!"), her alma mater ("ASU!"), her year ("freshman WOOOOO!"), her present state ("REALLY DRUNK GUYS!"), and finally her room number ("52, see you guys there tonight!"). After we kick her out, we get our meeting going for a few minutes before she climbs over the fence and nearly kills herself trying to gain admittance to our otherwise civilized kumbaya.

Okay. Now we can talk about Sunday. After the 6:something a.m. alarm gets us up, we load ourselves into the vans and mozy on over to Los Penasquitos Canyon where we, you'll never guess, go for a run. For bleedingly obvious reasons I don't bring photograph-conceiving devices with me while I run, but, lucky for you, Google Earthians have provided me with some shots of the canyon. So this is where we ran on Sunday:

Look at those lazy people riding bikes, pshht. (I'm kidding. Rachael, we're riding this summer. Fact.)

I hopped across this creek and finished my run on the opposite side because I'm kind of a badass. My running partner was skeptical (he doesn't know the power of Satterfield Navigation Services), but he followed me and was therefore awesomer.

Where are the hobbit holes?

Ah, the great outdoors. (Digression: Anyone who grew up playing way too much Warcraft III knows that whenever you click on a Dryad they say "Ah, the great outdoors" in a dreamy, annoying voice. Man do I hate Dryads. Druids of the Claw are the way to go once you've built your Ancient of Lore, no question about it. Right, Jack Murphy? I miss playing W3 with that guy. Definitely have to LAN battle him this summer.) But it wasn't all outdoors on Sunday. Nope, that night we had big plans for indoors, which worked out well because it was raining. The doors in question, however, were a couple hours north of San Diego. So we loaded up three vans full and drove to Honda Center in Anaheim to watch a game between the Ducks and the Boston Bruins. Every single person in the Middlebury group that went to the game except for me was rooting for the Bruins. Naturally, I wore my Ducks jersey and singlehandedly matched all of them put together in obnoxious partisan cheering. Unfortunately, the Ducks lost by one goal. Let it be known, and this is important, that had the NHL rulebook been obeyed, the game may well have ended differently. The Ducks did in fact score the tying goal, but it was waved off because, according to an official who apparently knows about as much about hockey as a dead platypus, Cogliano interfered with the Boston goaltender. The video replays clearly shows otherwise, but when you're a big market team like the B's are, I guess sometimes the NHL is willing to ignore its own rules to help you win. Or something like that. Even one of my friends who is a Boston fan admitted that it was a bullshit call. Of course, that has more to do with the fact that he has eyes than anything else.
I could rant about this ad naseum, and perhaps you think I already have, in which case you would be wrong, but I will force myself to move on to Monday.
Oh yeah, one more thing: En route to Anaheim, we all stopped off at an In-n-Out, but there just so happened to be a Del Taco right next to it. And by just so happened, I mean I told the drive to go to this particular In-n-Out instead of a different one precisely because it had Del Taco for a neighbor. So while everybody else had flimsy burgers, I spent slightly less money for a burrito that was, and I do not exaggerate, at least four times as heavy as an In-n-Out burger.

Monday was zoo day. The coolest thing there was definitely the giant snapping turtle, which I didn't get a picture of because I suck. This thing was absolutely massivenormositous, and it could eat you in one bite. Yes. In fact, one of the guys I went to the zoo with (Sam he am) said it was a dinosaur, to which we all murmured assent, except for this little boy who was also looking at it. The kid looks up at Sam and says, "No, it's a turtle." That was really cute. So were the meerkats. Unfortunately, my iPhone camera can't zoom, so even though I took quite a few pictures, they're pretty much all terrible because, you know, zoo animals make a habit out of being as far away from the glass as physically possible. We saw a bunch of awesome animals, like lions, tiger, and bears (OH MY!), and yes we did see those, no I didn't just put them there so I could make that bad joke. We saw monkeys and zebras and elephants and snakes and bird-eating spiders and cheetahs and PANDAS SO CUTE and jaguars and gorillas and whales and -- wait, no, those were just some of the other zoo-goers

Abu?

Llamas without hats.

"Dromedary: a two-hump camel." - Race to Mecca, Granite's 7th grade history class. You remember.

Joshua Giraffe anyone?

Move over lion, there's a new king in town.

He got pretty close to the glass. That was thoughtful of him.

"In the jungle, the mighty jungle . . ."

 Instead of showing you my picture of the gorillas, I'm going to show you wild gorillas. This video is probably the coolest thing you will ever see while looking at a computer screen.

 

After I got back from the zoo, I wrote up that tiny little blog post you may have seen last week. And then I went to bed and then I went to sleep.

At some point in the week I made a fascinating discovery that has completely revolutionized the way I live. It's called Peanut Butter Cheerios. Oh my bejeezus. Further proof (as if I needed any) than anything, literally anything, goes well with peanut butter. I challenge you to find a counterexample.

God may have created the world in six days, but he sure waited a long time to put the jewel in the crown.

MTRP from the perspective of somebody walking through it.

On Tuesday morning (again, alarm at 6:something) we ran a brutal workout on the PLNU track, and the rest of the day has slipped into the abyss of not-remembering-what-happened. I'd put money on at least part of the day being spent at Taco Surf.

MTRP from the perspective of somebody atop Fortuna Summit. We did run through the road below.

Wednesday morning's run took place at the un-ungly Mission Trails Regional Park, which I again did not take any pictures of because I was running through it. Again, let us mine the Google of the Earth for a visual perspective on this San Diego park. On the way back we stopped at Jamba Juice, which makes this run no different than several others we did in that way. Reminded me of the old Saturday 'round-the-bay runs we had in high school that we would invariably follow up with a Jamba run. Love those smoothies, but I also love those waffles. Have you guys had Jamba Juice's waffles? Let me tell you, they are ridiculously good. And I know you're all thinking, "Yeah, well Derek falls in love every time he sees a waffle, so that's not saying much," but hear me out: Jamba Juice's waffles are swirling wonderlands of sparkling pleasure. Let them fill your senses with cascading fluffy pillows of comfort and excitement as you have never felt before. (I may have adapted that line from Patrick Star, but that is not currently relevant.) And yes, I did eat waffles at Jamba before last week. This is not a new discovery. I simply never had the occasion to blog about them. And since I'm making myself hungry, we may as well discuss . . . I had read the first half of The Hunger Games while in the San Fran terminal and on the SF-SD plane, and I read a couple of chapters each day of the trip after that. I finished it at some point during the week, so I can now review it, which I will do very briefly. Everybody I talk to (not just you, Nicole) says it's a good story but poorly written, and people pretend to be ashamed of reading it because of that. Well, I think that's codswallop. Yes, of course it's not brilliant prose. But the story, in my sometimes humble opinion, is very entertaining and for that reason I give it a positive review. Although apparently the end of the third book (which I haven't read yet) is really predictable, because I told two people who had read the whole thing how I thought it's going to end, and one of them said, "Why do you know that?" and the other said, "How do you know that?" The verdict: There are a ton of books that I would recommend before HG (NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW NOTW), but I still think it's worth a read. It's never boring, so it does its job well. One night a few of us were watching Jeopardy! in somebody's room who had a remote. Bastards. Anyway, my teammates were impressed and one of them said he's pick me first if he was making a trivia team. On a related note, I'm having second thoughts about taking the College Jeopardy! test. Doesn't playing College Jeopardy make you ineligible to play real Jeopardy!? And can't you win way more money on real Jeopardy!? The on-track tempo on Thursday morning wasn't more fun than a barrel of monkeys. At least if a monkey bites your throat out you die quickly. I did enjoy myself on Thursday afternoon, however, when we drove through UCSD (Delara was on spring break so I shouldn't feel bad about not dropping by, yes?) to Torrey Pines, where we hiked around for a little bit. I did, by the way, have my phone on me, so the pictures you see are indeed the work of a (the?) true genius.

TP's a nice area. Maybe we can day-trip there this summer. But we must press onwards in our chronicle. As Nicole, thinking herself clever, would say: Onwards? Onwards.

Same pier, same sun, different sunset. From Google Earth. Again.

On Friday we did things. One of them was run. Most of them are lost to me as of now. I do remember what I did after dinner though. A few of us walked out to the pier closest to our motel, which is only a five minute walk south, for the purpose of watching the sunset. Unfortunately, thick clouds to the west obscured most of the horizon from view, so the sunset wasn't all that great. The excursion would be salvaged, however, by a pod of dolphins that swam right by the pier, which brought considerable joy to those among our company who had not ever seen a dolphin, much less several of them out of captivity and without having to pay. Note to Nicole: You can see dolphins all the time from Newport. You should really get out more often. Saturday the 31st was another race day. This time I ran the 3k instead of the 5k. My time was lower. Joking aside, I felt a lot better about that race than I did about the previous week's. Three cheers for that. Don't actually cheer; people will stare.

Eels and _____?

Everybody else on the team took the team vans from the meet to the airport (we showered at the track, don't worry), but I, being the specialness that is me, got a ride from my parents. Why does this matter, you ask? Because between the track meet and the flight back is dinner. And dinner with the team means cheap food. Not bad food -- SoCal in general has great cheap Mexican -- but not top-of-the-line, nice restaurant food. And that's where mom and pops come in. We drove down to the Gaslamp District, which is cool enough for me to propose a day trip there this summer, which I just did, and walked around for a while. We ate at a nice Thai place where I had the last spicy meal before the seven week leave from spicy food that I am currently being

CdM's clock got nuthin.

forced to take. We also spent a few minutes walking around Horton Plaza Mall, which is probably the largest and conglobulation of postmodern architecture that I have ever seen. If there is such a thing as loud architecture, this is its pinnacle. And for the record, I really like it. The pictures, yet again, are Google Earth's. Eventually I find myself at the airport bookstore, buying Catching Fire, which I have since finished. I have yet to get a hold of Book Three, and I will withhold my review of Book Two until I finish the trilogy because it seems like Catching Fire is pretty much just build up to Mockingjay. Viva la Revolucion. I was really hoping to sleep on my flight that took off at about 11:00 p.m. from San Diego and landed in Dulles at 6:20 a.m. But I didn't. I couldn't, really. I don't know why. I did, however, get to see two sunrises in the course of an hour. Up in the air, I saw the sun creep over the horizon, but when we descended and eventually landed in Virginia, the sun disappeared from view because we were too low to see it. Ten minutes later, we could see it from the ground. Thus, two sunrises. I then slept for an hour on the flight from Dulles to Logan, but I didn't sleep at all on the bus ride from Logan to Middlebury. So I slept for one hour on Saturday night, didn't nap at all on Sunday because I was constantly busy, and absolutely collapsed into bed at midnight, eight hours and forty minutes before my first class today, which I woke up at 8:35 for and made it on time. And here I am.  Quiz time!

A

B

C

Oh, and did that first paragraph have anything to do with the rest of the post? Absolutely not. I was simply trying to think of a catchy way to start this post, so I grabbed the first paragraph of a story I wrote in seventh grade and put it up there.