Day Nine - S*^#!

These new loafers are flufftastic

Can a dog with no body and just a face run an apartment? In a word, yes. My friend Jaclyn's pomeranian, Rex, is a ball of hair and a face. He's also crazy hyper and his hair is all up on my Nikes!!! I have a hypothesis as to why he's so hyper - I saw a Four Loko in the kitchen. I'm just saying.




Dedicated April 19, 2000

 

There are smaller chairs to symbolize the kdis

In the morning my friend Jaclyn takes me to the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, which honors those lost in the OKC federal building bombing in 1995. The memorial is down the street from her apartment. A reflective pool sits between two large Stonehenge-like structures. The structures are called the "Gates of Time" - one of which has 9:01 chiseled on it, which represents the innocence of the city before the bombing. The other gate states 9:03 and symbolizes all that has changed from the attack. On one side of the pool, there is a field of 168 empty chairs, one for every life lost that day. On the other side is a the Survivor Tree, which withstood the blast and now represents the city's resiliency.



Uncool



After OKC, the trek to Denver was on. I made a quick stop in Wichita to see Chris Frye, an old rival sports guy in Mobile. In the time since I've seen him, he's got two boys. Crazy. So leaving Wichita, I decide to follow Garmin's GPS directions instead of sticking to the main highways. Major mistake. Just outside of this town called Hutchinson, I'm driving down a hill when I see several cars off the side of a two-lane highway. I start to brake, and all hell breaks loose. The road is straight black ice. I spin out, make at least two full revolutions, see an oncoming car heading my direction, struggle to get control, miss the other car, swerve off the road, off the shoulder, down an embankment when finally the car stops. The whole time I was just hoping I didn't flip, because everything I own is in my car with me. When I got out of the car, I saw that both passenger side tires came off the wheels. I can tell you this, when I was spinning in my two-wheel drive 4Runner (the 4 refers to cylinders!) and I saw the oncoming vehicle heading towards me - I thought for a split second - Oh shit, is this how it ends? That would've been super weak, especially since I like to think I defy the stereotype of bad Asian driver. God knows how many jokes my friends would say if a car accident is what did me in.



Really uncool

After waiting for an hour in the snow, a tow-truck came and took my poor car to a local auto shop. Good ol' Keith of Hutchinson, Kansas, fixed up my tires - didn't have to buy new ones, and slapped on some new windshield wipers. Altogether though, I lost about 3.5 hours through this whole process. Then had to get right back on the road to make it to Denver because I had 4 TV station meetings set up. The roads to Denver were all icy, and the most disheartening part of the drive was at about 10pm, when I saw that I still had more than 300 miles to Tebowland. Talk about depressing, especially since the fastest I can go is around 50mph. I ended up making into my buddy Kevin Sullivan's house at 2:30am. Keep in mind, I changed time zones, so it was actually 3:30 for me. At 10:30am, I had to meet with the news director for the Denver CBS affiliate. Brutal.