HOV equals... (drum roll)

Sorry, I won't tell. That would be cheating. :p

Actually, if you haven't found out by now, HOV lane means High-Occupancy Vehicle lane -- a fancy-shmancy way of saying carpool lane basically. I'm glad to hear you had a good trip to Texas, Annex, and a road trip at that -- no better way to see as much as possible of a state this size. I'll check out your site next; I'm sure there will be plenty of great pics.

You got me thinking of places I might like to go one of these days.

A road trip might do me good too. Don't get me wrong -- I'm at home at home -- but it would be nice for me to get away from the HOV lanes for awhile. Vegas wasn't much of a getaway from the big city. Afterall, we never left the city. Hell, we never the casinoes! There is some shame to be had in missing out on experiencing the Nevada terrain. Hang your head, ruby! ;)

I always thought I might like to go out west to Arizona or New Mexico and just bum around the desert for a few days, clear my head. There is an austere beauty out there that I dig. It's like a vast emptiness, but in a very good way. The expanses seem to make for almost a spiritual connection between the sky and the land.

I would love to go out there and check out some monumental land art that I'm keen on. A renowned light artist, James Turrell, has been constructing a naked-eye observatory there for years now out of an extinct cinder volcano, Roden Crater. The link might only pique your interest. No more info has come out of that splash screen for years literally. It's like the Wonka chocolate factory of the southwest. I feel like little Charlie Bucket: "But Grandpa, someone must be helping Mr. Turrell work the crater." Grandpa: "Thousands must be helping him."

Turrell really invokes the power of light. You can view some of his images on the web. They seem to tap into a primitive power and collective unconcious that connects us all to our very begins. He contributed a "skyspace" to a Quaker meeting house in the Houston area as well. I've actually had a chance to experience this one, a very meditative space though the website shows nothing of the actual installation.

There is also Walter De Maria's Lighting Field. It's an enormous grid-like array of lighting rods erected in southwest New Mexico. Viewing them in actions seems to be as much an act of God and nature as good timing on the visitor's part. I think you have to schedule in advance and have the schedule coincide with a thunderstorm to be so lucky as to experience the full effect. However, their website does contain the rather cryptic qualifier, "It is important to note that as a work of art, The Lightning Field does not depend upon the occurrence of lightning but responds to many more subtle conditions of its environment." Hmm, maybe they know something we don't, or maybe they've resorted to mechanical means to get the buzz going, so to speak. Still, I'd love to view it one day.

And then there is the Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson, the only caveat being that it's in Utah of all places. I might have to be accompanied by two wives to actually view it! Oh, I kid. The name pretty much says it all. It's a large man-made jetty that spirals in on itself to a foregone conclusion.

I guess I've always liked that idea of art the can be experienced across the fourth dimension, Time. Artistically speaking, it is the best way, I think, to incorporate Change, one of the overarcing constants of the human experience. This type of art must respond to and co-exist with it's environment. It cannot be sheltered from it nor is it impervious to the ravages of time. Also, land art has a monumentality to its scale that can make the individual shed the world-weariness and stolidity of adulthood and re-acquaint ourselves with a childlike sense of smallness and wonder. It's something we lose if we don't view things that transcend our human scale.

But I feel I've gone off on a tangent. The Nazca lines in Peru are another example of this type of art. And though we might probably be less apt to actually call him a land artist, Richard Serra's massive steel sculptures are another of those that I feel allow the viewer to participate in the childlike act of discovery and exploration.

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As a sidenote: In the last week I've been in a wreck, worked 32 hours worth of overtime, and caught a nasty stomach bug and/or ate something untoward that has given my tummy untold grief for the past two days. So, there :p

You might say I've had a bit of a "stomachache". Someone I once knew would have said that. Except that he didn't pronounce it as in "stomach-ache" as it should be. When he read it for presumably the first time, it came out "Sto-ma-cha-chi". As in... !!!??? :)

Atlanta? ...more like Mylanta

Who was it that said you have to be "better off in a pine box on a slow train bound for Georgia"? I took a plane and got there in under two hours... and alive!

Picture it: my very first business trip, me in a suit, buttoned-down and het up, fingernails dug an inch deep into the roof of the fuselage and hanging on for dear life until... I fell asleep. How very narcoleptic of me. Disrespectful, too. Insolence in the face of eminent death is usually punishable, surprisingly, by a long and uneventful life. :p

Getting on the plane and just going must be getting too stale and boring these days, and it wouldn't be dramatic enough to have just delayed the flight. The gimmick is to zip that sardine can up, gas up, and get us in the hotseat before packing it in like a belated April Fool's Day sucker punch. Yes, indeed, we were on the tarmac before we got the go code to turn our asses around and go home. Seems there was a storm a-brewing in Atlanta, and rather than keep us pent up on the plane indefinitely, they allowed us to offload into the terminal indefinitely.

Another associate accompanied me on the trip. Upon being delayed ("groundstopped" in industry jargon), he phoned his wife, and she was able to relay the conditions at Atlanta's airport. I remember hearing something to the affect of "nickel-sized hail". I felt like Dirty Harry when I scoffed, "It's only nickel-sized." :D

I was up at 3 a.m., and the plane was due to depart at six on the nose. Punctuality, in a legal sense, is evidently solely the obligation of the ticket holder and not necessarily reciprocated (as you'll see a little further down) . Under the circumstances, leaving two and half hours late seemed like sweet charity compared to, ironically, being held hostage by the airline itself.

Back on the plane after being shat out at the terminal, we finally departed. As we taxied onto the runway, I was happy to inform the flight attendant that the carry-on bag beside me had misplaced it's owner, a kindly African-American allergy-case of an older lady who disembarked roughshod like the rest of us and was last seen sneezing, hacking, and futilely hailing some unidentified airplane down the length of an unidentified runway on an unidentified major news channel. Man, she was fast. ;) I can just see their reasoning from the last paragraph: you can wait for us but we sure as shit ain't waiting for you. I only hope her and the bag she sent ahead to scout out the situation were finally reunited.

We arrived to little, er... make that no fanfare save the gymnastics of my stomach turning somersaults in disapproval of my hyperbolic flight-mode demeanor. In fairness to me, it was like old-hat on the return flight and me doing the crossword puzzle the whole way in Continental's in-flight magazine. But getting there was a bitch, and it elicited my titular observation as I was en route to the jobsite: "Atlanta? ...more like Mylanta."

The delay itself only lasted long enough to push my return flight back by 20 hours. I had actually been instructed to return to Planet Houston the very same day, but Mother Nature can be a mother... nature, I guess. No matter. My co-worker was slated to stay the night anyway. As long as I didn't mind wearing the same suit two days in a row, we were able to negotiate a hotel room with two beds. (I tried to talk him out it, but you know, he's married. Aren't they all? :p )

The hotel itself was pricey and billable to the client, methinks. Yeah! I'm not gonna name names, but this was no normal hotel. It wasn't the Waldorf-Astoria, but beggers can't be choosers, you know. I guess providing architectural services for lawyers has it perks -- pitfalls, too, perhaps.

Our only outing into the city itself came that night when we wandered down the street to a middle-of-the-road steakhouse and grill. It made a decent oak-grilled steak that it was passing off for prime rib. Very tricky and tasty at the same time.

We were both beat from hoofing it all day, and though I like the nightlife, I can't divulge this to people who can divulge this to people, if you know what I mean. We settled for returning to the one-room penthouse and crashing out. We still had several hours of work to wake up for anyhow and a three o'clock plane flight to catch back to the Bayou City.

I can delve further into the excruciating minutia upon request. Let me know if you've ever been to the state and what you thought. I personally liked what little I got to see. From my co-workers assessment, the best peaches he's ever tasted came from right across the border from Georgia. Ouch! How'd we ever get out of there alive. ;)