My Hair Loves Arizona

That wonky, wavy thing it does in the back even when I dry it straight? That doesn't happen in Arizona because it's the desert.

Dave and I spent the first three days of this week in Scottsdale. I was working, he was goofing off. This was my first trip to the desert and I really liked it. The weather was beautiful, and once I got past my initial impression that the dirt everywhere looked like a construction zone, I had to admit that the landscape is beautiful, too. I could vacation there, though probably not in the summer when it's 125 degrees, because 95 felt pretty dang hot. "But it's dry heat," Southerners always say. That's true, but it's dry like the inside of a hot oven is dry. Hot. And I fear that living there wouldn't be good for my Chapstick addiction. Also, while the food was fantastic (because I can eat Mexican for breakfast, lunch, and dinner), I'm hard-pressed to survive more than a few days without sweet tea.

Here's an obligatory picture of the clouds from inside the plane. I really took this one for Ella and Luke - both of whom are ready to ride an airplane now.

We had a layover in Vegas and our connecting flight was delayed. Being Vegas, even the airport provides an opportunity for gambling. Dave decided to put a few dollars in the quarter slot machine. He played $3.50 and the machine started dinging. As it went on, I asked him what we were supposed to do next. He said, "We leave," and he cashed out his credits and exchanged his voucher for $406.50. Only he could just walk up to a slot machine in an airport and win $400.

Golf Funds

While we both decided we prefer to have grass, it was really cool to see the mix of palm trees and cacti, flat land and mountains.

I finished up my work stuff around lunchtime on Tuesday, so we did some souvenir shopping. I had a hard time finding a t-shirt small enough for Luke, and we ended up in a sporting goods store, browsing the Arizona athletic paraphernalia when I found this.

I thought we were in Arizona?

Interestingly, we flew back to Birmingham with a group of guys who were from Arizona that were traveling to Tuscaloosa for the game this weekend. I knew college football was king in the South; I just didn't realize other parts of the country thought so, too.

We did find t-shirts and a couple of little prizes for the kids, but we also found these nice scorpion suckers. According to the lady who sold them to us, people have whole farms for raising scorpions for things like this and people actually do eat them. That's just about more than I can wrap my head around. Apparently, Ella and Luke felt the same because after confirming that these were real scorpions and reassuring them that they were dead, Luke instructed me, "Just don't open it, Mama."

They were billed as hot candy.
I assume that means the scorpions are still sting-y?

In other, more general, life observations, I never realized how literally applicable sorority recruitment would be in my real life. I was in Arizona for a big user conference that my company does every year, and in the weeks leading up to it, we had meetings that sounded just like recruitment workshops. In paraphrase: "Know the message, know the people and their interests, and introduce the officers." I found it very interesting. Also, all of that etiquette training? Absolutely applicable down to the formal place settings at the lunch table. Though I still consider myself bad at small talk, I can see how those recruitment experiences prepared me for professional networking.

After giving my presentations, I realized that even the theater classes I took in high school and the group presentations we had to do in business school (that I hated), prepared me to speak in front of crowds of people without throwing up, inadvertently cursing, or falling down (my three big fears when actually standing in front of people to speak). It went well, and I attribute that to practice in my past life as a student. For the first time, I can say that my degree became more than a piece of paper that got me a job and the sorority wasn't just about socializing. That's kind of fulfilling.