davethegrinch.net

Dave Says:

I have a suntan. I also haven’t shaved for nearly two weeks. Both feel good although the former didn’t feel quite so good at first and the latter is starting to itch so probably won’t feel quite so good for much longer. We leave tomorrow. No doubt my skin is looking forward to that more than the rest of my body. I can hear and see the surf from our little caravan situated in the garden of the hostel we’re staying at in Opotiki. Our friends from Seattle, Kurt and Lisa have joined us. They are on the start of a seven month sabbatical in NZ and coincidences in this small world being what they insist on being, we were able to meet up and enjoy a few days together. They are settling in well to their new adventure and I have stopped baby-sitting them. They didn’t really need me to do that but I can’t help myself. I’m always meddling in other people’s ability to think for themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Says:

It’s been too long since my fingers put those two words and one punctuation character together. This is a macro blog of a micro trip. But we are back. Back on the road, back in hostels and back in New Zealand. Things are different. Not NZ, that appears to be pretty much intact. But we’re different – circumstances are different. For the record, for posterity and to clear the air of any pretense, I’m here in NZ sucking on the teat of corporate America; sent down under (almost) to sell my company’s wares to corporate New Zealand. In return for the subsidized pleasures of an industrialized road warrior, I/we get a subsidized vacation back to a country we love. I refuse to bore you with the economics of this trip – suffice to say that it actually saved us no money at all but rather financed a luxury beyond a point we would have spent anyway. A last minute plane ticket for Sarah equals the price of two reasonably advanced bookings and three nights of expense account excesses in a major metropolitan city would have been beyond the depth of my wallet or indeed, the willingness of my thrifty fingers to delve in anywhere near to it. To atone for these sins, I sit writing this in our sparse, non-en-suite room in the Raglan Backpacker’s Hostel (albeit on a rather nice MacBook Pro). Read the rest of this entry »

Dave says:

I suspect that I will not be the lone voice in the blogsphere this week. Tomorrow stands as a great test of many people, one person and approximately the whole internet. As the great empowerer (I literally reference the internet and figuratively the president-elect), thousands of people will flood its being with the thoughtful and the thoughtless. I write this on Monday January 19th 2009 for no other reason than should tomorrow the internet crumble under the weight of the inane, insane and inspired, my ramblings will have made it out there as a monument to nothing but my own musings.

My daily observation, (a resolution I made at the beginning of the year along with my desire to decrease my dogged overuse of parenthesizes to communicate a side thought) was marshaled from two segments of seemingly unconnected radio both over employing either the preposition or the concept of the word “like”. The first radio report was an interesting, if not slightly over patriotic piece on NPR: a compilation of inaugural speech snippets from President Coolidge to President G.W. Bush. Each president was telling the expectant masses they are great but could be greater and each, even the last, sounded inspiring and confident. However, the hidden subtext to these sermons from the political pulpit was the desire of each new president to be ‘like’ a predecessor. Quote: as Jefferson said, as Lincoln said, as Roosevelt said, as Kennedy said and, surprisingly, as Reagan said are all really to be interpreted as ‘As I Said’.  It is fair to say we all wish Obama to be ‘like’ these presidents also. If you take a bushel of American presidents and thrash out the chaff, you are left with a great man. It is not that we wish Obama to be ‘like’ this great man, we insist he actually become it. Nothing less will suffice and nothing more can be achieved. Obama is about to become America, a metamorphosis that even the most of American of presidents, George Washington, could not achieve. Washington was elected by the small self-appointed American Congress before there was even a government to speak of, to lead a population of mostly illiterate peasants – the unwashed masses. His greatness of office was mainly defined by just being George Washington. Obama’s greatness of office has already occurred: he is the first African American president. He must do more than be ‘like’ his heroes, he must be a hero if he is to eclipse that greatness already achieved. Read the rest of this entry »

Dave says:

And so, first, an apology. What a way to leave our loyal readers. After all we’ve been through together, the ups and downs, highs and lows, ins and outs and I (we) leave you hanging somewhere in New Jersey lamenting dead relatives. That was not the way we intended to honor you and for that we beg your forgiveness. There is/was a method to the madness however. I wanted the last entry in this travel collective to be the denouement, drawing together the sights and smells of our adventures into a neat little package with a pretty bow on top. But this task caused great consternation and ultimately frustrated failure. Perhaps you could draw your own conclusions but, apart from that being disrespectful to you, we just didn’t think you could do it. It’s not that we underestimate your capacity for understanding and reason, it is that we have come to note that our travels are just too big for encapsulation. We have not come to terms with the shear width and breadth of them ourselves yet, so to expect our family, friends and casual voyeurs to formulate a precis of our voyages goes beyond the reasonable. Nevertheless, we live in a summarized society so, with apologies proffered but no retractions offered, here is the superlative list we all crave: Read the rest of this entry »

Sarah says: 

My paternal grandfather was a huge Hungarian man whose skin turned a deep leather red in the summer. He had a deep, bellowing laugh and was the life and fun of every party. He would yell out “Buffongoola” and called his mates “Mongolian porkchops” – whatever any of that meant. Everyone knew and loved Al, he was extremely popular in the Hungarian and eastern European communities of New Brunswick, New Jersey and was one of the boys in clubs like the Eagles and Knights of Columbus. He was an extremely hard worker, was smart with his money and provided well for his family. My grandparents had a little bungalow on the Jersey shore where I spent all my summers growing up. Their back patio was the best patio of all because the party was always happening there. Beers were always in the cooler, something was always on the grill and at the center of it all was my grandfather. Read the rest of this entry »

Dave says:

Consider this: the United States of America is a giant restaurant bill. You know, the piece of paper the server puts face down on your table at the end of your meal, and as she does so she performs that neat little trick where she puts a crease along the middle of the bill so it has a handy little ridge by which to pick it up. Am making any sense here? Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Says:
The Great Plains run from the north of Wyoming to the south of Texas, some 500 miles wide and 2000 miles long. The majestic and vast arid prairies and steppe were once home to over 30 million buffalo and were the legendary hunting grounds of the nomadic American Indians – they are the stuff of American legends. As we left the corn belt of Iowa, drove through the Badlands and crested the Black Hills of South Dakota the prospect of actually seeing the Great Plains with my own eyes became ever more real and ever more essential in understanding what it is to be American. For my whole life they were nothing more than a movie set or a Boys Own comic book strip, cowboys and Indians, good versus bad – pioneering Americans in a time and a place that never seemed real. As I grew older my understanding of this part of American history mirrored the shift in popular culture as fanciful soap operas such as Gunsmoke and Bonanza had to give way to the harsh realities of Dances With Wolves, Unforgiven and A Man Called Horse. The Great Plains serve as both the backdrop and stage to the greatest of the American morality plays, even greater than the Civil rights movement. As we looked over the last peak of the Black Hills, some 2000 feet below across this vastness of the American West, I realized that I was looking at the freedom promised by the Bill of Rights, freedoms granted, freedoms taken away and the freedoms we have today. Read the rest of this entry »