Washington: Icy Winter's Morn

Is it cold where you are or are you gliding into the dog days of summer? Here, now, it's pretty chilly, with winter's grasp holding firm over the Puget Sound and surrounding regions. Clouds in various shades of grey generally dominate the skyscape, though there are the occasional bursts of blue and hints of the sun's warmth breaking through to remind you it still dances out there, just beyond the blanket of moisture hovering above. While it's generally just shy of cold enough to snow, we still get ample rain that, in the coldest hours of the darkest portions of the evening, can freeze over to a delicate frost decorating the world when we wake. Depending on the morning after, the frost can last for a surprisingly variable window of time before dissolving into steam in the sun's rays. Like I said above, though- it's rarely cold enough to snow, with the chance of it snowing on Christmas day somewhere around 7% or lower. That's generally a good bit more likely than in Vegas, where they average only 2 inches of rain per year (whereas the Seattle area gets an average of about 37.5 inches of rain per year).  I'm no statistician, but even I can see the odds of a white Christmas in Vegas are exceedingly slim- though it has happened, once, in 2008, so it's not an utterly impossible thing, just exceptionally improbable. Not so improbable as to get your ship to the restaurant at the end of the universe, but certainly improbable enough to note. 

Antho and I, of course, have been luxuriating in the cold and ambient moisture in this variable and transforming an environment. Waking to a bright, cloudless morning with our world metamorphized by a glittering profusion of ice droplets is fascinating, and new.  While we slept, a giant came through and dropped fistfuls of glitter, or perhaps a fleet of faeries flew in with an army of bedazzlers and spackled everything they could in shimmer. But again, like most of the magical things in life, this beauty is fleeting and as the rays of sunlight dance across the droplets they begin to lose form and evaporate, disappearing into the ether.  All this hydration means that the plant life, at least that hardy enough to weather the declining temperatures, is still thriving. We were surprised to find these brilliant pink blossoms bursting into abundant bloom after the rains started sweeping the area with more vigorous regularity. We hope you enjoy this glimpse into the fleeting beauty of the beads of ice on this brisk winter's morning!

Seattle: AJ's Day out around Capitol Hill

Capitol Hill is one of the trendier neighborhoods of Seattle, rife with hipsters, indie cafes, local coffee shops, tongue-in-cheek gay bars with outlandish names, a weekly farmer's market, and SO MUCH ART! There's a lot to do around the area, and parking isn't exactly the easiest thing to find, or cheapest if you end up having to opt for one of the long-term parking lots, but there is so much to see and do in the area that it ends up being almost kind of totally worth the exorbitant parking rates depending on what you do or the day you visit. I had a gig to attend to, so I was going to be busy for at least 3 hours, while Antho was free to roam around the area and partake of the local culture. He had a lot of fun and got a ton of awesome photos capturing the colorful vibe and ecclectic nature of the area. 

On our way to get there, we passed this friendly fellow who was happily feeding the gulls. He'd forged a sort of kinship with the birds, and was ensuring they got plenty of snacks on this awkward little bit of corner. We had a nice chat with him before we moved on with the flow of traffic, and I like to think he's carrying on a piece of Ivar's legacy, as the founder of Ivar's was a fan of seagulls, too. 

One of the first things to catch Antho's eye during his explorations were the streetlights and posts, which were predominantly wrapped up in deep layers of flyers. Each proceeding generation of flyer had seemingly just been stapled, spackled, or otherwise smashed on top of the previous generation, causing the heavily trafficked corners to have poles over-stuffed in decaying layers of flapping paper, advertising months, if not years, worth of local events and entertainment. There is no order to the chaos, other than the chronological necessity of the most recent things landing on top of the pile, only to be covered up by the next big thing. 

So it goes. 

Plenty of photos below!

Vegas: The family wheels

upon a time, when I was still just a wee young little version of the human I am today, I lived in my grandpa's house with a few other family members. It was the hub of the relatives, and every holiday season the extended branches would return to the root and have a massive feast together. It was a large family, so there were many different personalities that could lead to arguments over dinner, but for the most part, it was a jovial and merry time... but after my great old grandpa passed on after an extended battle with illness, the siblings devolved into in-fighting and drifted apart with the years. The family house was sold, grandpa's car driven off to another state, and life went on. Given that I spent many of my formative years living in his house, I was quite close to my grandfather and losing him hurt pretty badly. Sure, I was adopted into the family, and always kind of felt a bit like an outsider (I was the only one in the family with both brown hair and brown eyes, so I was the brunette sheep of the clan) but grandpa? He never let that be the case for long. When my parents would fight, he'd let me take shelter in his room and offer me a cream soda from his private stash, and ensure I got a gift at Christmas. He helped me purchase the car I still have to this day. When it came to my education, he was my biggest champion and encouraged me to get good grades and push to learn more. Life isn't perfect, and neither was he, but he left a strong impression on me as a kid and I credit him for inspiring me to achieve some of the more difficult things I've managed in my life. 

Somewhere down the road, quite literally, my grandpa's car found it's way back to me. Unfortunately, after being driven off by my Uncle (who had, at the time, decried me too irresponsible for the vehicle), things had taken a dire turn for the worse. We were given the car for free, which was exceptionally nice of my aunt to do after sinking her own money into trying to get the car operational again, but we quickly found that she was still inoperable. We made it less than a full block before plumes of steam were wafting out from under the hood, and the transmission completely failed to react. I've no clue what exactly happened to the poor old girl, but she had hardly any miles on her. The Volvo I had prior to my grandpa's passing, however, is nearing 200,000 miles on her original transmission and only recently had her first issues, so I'm pleased to know my uncle's appraisal of my vehicular responsibility was incorrect and the judgment misplaced. 

So these photos serve as a bit of a time capsule. My grandfather drove me to eat chicken fried steak for breakfast in this car when I was just an adolescent, and while it hurt to see it go, we couldn't afford to fix the extent of issues she'd developed. We sold her to a mechanic, so hopefully she's been rebuilt and is on the road again, but I'll always have these photos to preserve the memory. 

Thanks for everything, grandpa. 💖

💙

XOXO,

NAU

Washington: Ikea trip!

Ikea is one of those highly envied and much imitated monolithic institutions that have managed to secure one of the rarest and highly desired consumer commodities: trust, familiarity, and a feeling of comfort felt almost unilaterally throughout their diverse consumer base. Is it that unpronounceable word Hygge manifest that makes their stores so deeply loved and universally appealing, or an ingenious marketing schema tailored to the minute details of the consumer cultures each of their stores adopt to? There's a similarity throughout Ikeas worldwide that makes them a comforting, familiar sort of place, whether you're shopping outside of Tokyo, South of Seattle, in Vegas or China... but, naturally, the store does adapt some of its design aesthetics to suit the needs of the particular location's culture and needs. That's just smart marketing and business, right? You probably won't find many Japanese homes with extensive, open design kitchens so there will be little tweaks to their displays to make their designs work in the space given your typical consumer. Even with these little details taken into consideration, there's that ever present familiarity of wandering in a perpetual state of nearly-lost through the winding labyrinth and neon-glow of your local Ikea. Surely the same technology used for the Doctor's TARDIS can account for the immensity of the spaces once you're inside because they never seem quite so big enough to account for it all on the outside.   

Not only are there countless tasteful, or trend-conscious, or outright outlandish, furniture and decoration choices to be found in your local Ikea, but their food counter is legit, too! And, naturally, most of the food available for consumption in their cafeteria is also available to take home to enjoy from their small grocery corner, which, after building up an appetite winding your way through countless displays and mock bedrooms, may end up being all the more appealing. We were hungry upon our arrival, so we opted to grab some food before shopping, which was a good idea, I think. We ended up ordering a lot of stuff, and between the food coma slipping over Antho and my guts deciding to revolt against life, the universe, and everything, it was a shopping trip made more interesting due to digestion. Good stuff. In the end, I did manage to find a desk and a new desk chair, after retiring my much beloved and long-suffering desk and chair from Vegas, which has followed me through multiple residences and been stuffed into multiple vehicles. When it came time to move our lives, and all of our collective STUFF, up to Washington, I was happy to let my old desk and chair go, for free, to a new owner. While we'd been putting a lot of our stuff out on the curb to awake and find it gone, during our last day or two of clearing out we met one of the neighbors who'd gathered most of it and simply gave the rest to him to do with what he pleased. We had old bicycles that needed a little repair to be usable, furniture we wouldn't be taking, all sorts of stuff. Worked out well for us, and for our friendly neighbor! 💗 

As far as our visit to Ikea on this particular day, I managed to find a computer desk that works well for me. While, originally, I'd had my eye on a particular model with an attached shelf, I'm happy with the options I ended up selecting. It was a lot more affordable, thanks to Christina explaining more of the Ikea hacks to me, like selecting your table top and then buying legs of your own choosing. Naturally, I ended up picking out legs that didn't really work with the holes pre-drilled into the desktop I chose, but Antho managed to make it work. A true #Ikeahack! Might make it a little more iffy when we have to move the desk at a later point in time, but, uh, let's save that obstacle for the future for now. As of this moment in time, I have a wonderful desk that serves its purpose with ample space for me to obsessively work at my planner, my morning pages project, our Etsy, my blog, and all the photo-editing and video-editing to come. It's a real workhorse, my desk. 

Vegas: Summertime Fireworks

 What could possibly be a more American way to celebrate our independence and the creation of our nation-state than to get irresponsibly intoxicated and set off explosives in the street? Often there's a ceremonial barbeque involved as well, where slabs of pork, beef or tubular meat-forms are seared and slathered for consumption, though this particular Fourth's festivities were devoid of such sustenance and socializing around carcasses. It was a rather impromptu thing, at least from my perspective, as I kind of crashed the housemate's party while Antho was at work. While there's no shortage of places from whence you can purchase boom-booms in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and configurations, we hadn't gone out and done so due to limited funds. These things, they happen. I wasn't particularly upset about this lack of combustive arsenal, partly due to the fact I'm not exactly 100% comfortable with the combination of booze and explosives in residential areas. I mean, Japan does fireworks, and they do them big and beautiful, so it's not exactly like celebrating with fire flowers is an entirely new phenomenon...  but those shows were generally situated around rivers or water, even in the case of Tokyo Disney's firework shows...

Anyway, when I was able to get over my trepidation at having things exploding several feet away from my vehicle (full of combustible gasoline and such), I was able to capture some pretty fun photos of the fire-flowers in blossom. I know, they're technically called fireworks in English, but I find the Japanese term of "hanabi", or fire-flowers, far more poetic and in-tune with the ephemeral beauty of the bursts. As brilliant and stunning as they are, they only light up the sky for these brief blasts of intense beauty. I'm not familiar with the chemistry involved behind achieving the different colors, or the different shapes, though I know the shape of the tubes themselves can provide some degree of variation in the bursts. That's one of the cool things about life, though, I suppose... you don't have to completely understand the mechanics behind something to appreciate it's beauty. Sometime's it's best to just stop and take it in for what it is before it's gone.

Vegas: Ducks, ducklings and deserts

 

Most things have already been said, in some way, some form, at some point in time, by someone or other. That's just kind of the nature of life- we all like to think that we're these ingenious innovators, creators of the one-true-unique idea to spark in this universe, but alas, such will not be the case for many of us in this lifetime. This may seem like a rather defeatist sort of realization to come upon and could inspire many to throw down their pens or pencils and spit in the direction of any new endeavor, but that, my friends, really would be defeat. It's not so much that there's nothing new to be added, but its the matter in which we tell our unique experiences and tales that brings something special to the table. After all, I'm certainly not the first person to make a blog post about ducks, or birds, or animals, or any such thing, and I'm certainly not the first or only person to ever pontificate on what the city of Las Vegas is or means. Las Vegas means a lot of things to a lot of different people, as do the annual migrations and habits of animals like these pretty little birds. Every year, much like the human visitors to the city, hundreds upon thousands of visitors flock to the city, dipping their feet into the toes of the communal excess and hedonism that the city so desperately tries to provide, before packing it in and moving on. Who knows where they all go? Well, I'm sure in the case of some of the ducks there's probably a geo-tracker tucked along their ankles or clipped to their wings, that allows some curious scientist a rough idea of their migratory pattern, but for the vast majority, their end destinations are as mysterious as their intentions for visiting. A snack, perhaps- but is it food for the soul, or simply a desire to glut themselves silly until their full to the gills? Perhaps it's an excuse to drop their young off at the pool and pretend to be young again themselves before the responsibility of raising a brood was a concern. Whatever their reasons may be, much like our feathered friends, the vast majority of humans visiting Las Vegas only migrate through the city, a brief intermission of sorts, without setting down roots. In a city of transients, being a resident is something strange, and typically worthy of a surprised remark by the few you indulge in the knowledge.  The environment surrounding the city itself, should you ever venture past the oasis of the Strip and its artificial constructs, is thorny and harsh, an unwelcoming wasteland full of poisonous insects, barbed plants, and venomous snakes that begs to reconsider the sanity of those who seek to reside there. I guess that's why the people who stay, who grow up there like dandelions taking root in cracks in the sidewalk, take a perverse sort of pride in it. Living among the desert is unnatural, a fuck-you to nature and its attempts to dissuade fragile human beings from setting up base in this arid and unwelcoming environment, so the people who reside, who remain, must be hewn from a particularly tough, stubborn, or stupid stock. 

So, fly away, little duckies, to greener pastures and cleaner waters. I won't blame you. I tip my hat to those who wish to be in the desert, who ran from inclement weather for the unnaturally predictable weather; hot and sunny. If that's the life for you, power to you. I, however, much like these ducks, have got to get a move on.

Vegas: Sunset drive towards Henderson

Henderson, Nevada, is a city all it's own, but really it's just a suburb of Vegas. The two bleed more or less seamlessly into each other, the edges nearly unintelligible unless you know where to look (like that other "Welcome to Vegas" sign, for example). Somewhere on Boulder highway, to the East of Vegas, seems to be the official line of demarcation, and if you go past Nellis or Russel road you're typically seen as heading into "Hendertucky". Personally, I've got no qualms with Henderson. When I lived in Boulder City, which is another 20-40 minutes down the freeway from Henderson, it provided a nice change of pace, a close escape from home that bled into the city proper. Many of my friends and myself have lived in Henderson over the years and I can't complain about the area too much, though there are some stories I could certainly tell. My experience living on that side of the tracks isn't that different from my experience living anywhere in Vegas, which is generally to say it's been hot, people are frequently assinine, and there are slot machines crammed into any possible corner of any publicly accessible business. Vegas, baby. Where homeless crackheads congregate in the baking sun, shouting their misery at any and all who'll listen. 

On the flip side, we do get some rather stunning sunsets with all that unobstructed desert vista. The roads are rarely steep, unlike Seattle, with more of a smooth hilly gradient if you look for it. There are a few exceptions- Bonanza and Maryland Parkway have a pretty sizeable incline,  and there's another out off of Hollywood road somewhere, where teenagers and daredevils can try their luck on their preferred method of rolling- skateboards, rollerblades, whatever. Mostly, though, it's easy driving. The freeways aren't bad, at least when they aren't blotted in orange cones or clogged to capacity with out of state plates. There's always construction going on, somewhere, to improve the roads, but there are some seriously pot-holed spots- over on Eastern Avenue, by Tropicana and Flamingo area, for example. Maryland parkway in the university district was pretty rough for awhile, too. Our drive on this particular outing didn't take us that way, though. We were picking up our good friend Ceedro from his casa, then heading over towards Henderson to check out an open mic night! 

Vegas: People and pets on the Promenade

Winners and losers love Las Vegas, though for their own entirely different reasons. Those lucky few winners are able to amass gargantuan piles of cash, obscene quantities of paper power filling their happy hands eagerly, while the losers...well, what is life without hope? Without the glimmering of hope at the end of the tunnel life becomes meaningless, but dangle the proverbial carrot a sufficiently tantalizing distance away and that optimism will power a horse (or person) through otherwise insurmountable challenges. The homeless population of Las Vegas has plenty to hope for, in the city of Sin, after all one of our biggest sales points is the fact that you can go from zero to hero with one fortuitous spin of the slot's reels, all it takes is luck! While I, personally, would never wish (or wish for my enemies) to be homeless in this unforgiving desert climate, there are benefits to the near endless parade of sunny days to be sure, namely the constant flow of tourist's foot traffic that means crafty buskers can make a fairly decent chunk of untaxed income, especially when they have an outstanding talent or deformity. There's one fellow you can regularly find in front of the Bellagio's fountains who draws portraits with his mouth, due to his lack of hands. 

It's not just the homeless that are likely to gather in these large public arenas, of course. You will invariably encounter several superheroes in varying stages of accuracy, decency, and dress. These hopefuls will pose with their eager fans for an exchange of currency, so don't try to take their photos without their permission (unless their backs are turned), as you're likely to find yourself in an awkward confrontation with a pissed off Defintely-NOT-Ryan-Reynolds-Deadpool. Like it wasn't bad enough it wasn't the real Ryan Reynolds, but to get hostile too?! Not very X-Force, man. But when you're dealing with money-hungry imposters like this, instead of the anti-heroes themselves, what can you expect?   

But the people watching is something else, that's for sure. 

All photos in this post were kindly provided by Antho Jay, who has been my faithful photographer!

Vegas: People (and pigeons) in the Promenade

Viva Las Vegas, the city of Lost Wages, of Sin and too much of a good thing! This city welcomes one and almost all with open arms, so long as you've got a valid passport and a pocketful of cash (or at least some plastic for the swiping). The booze is ever-flowing, the party ever-pumping... or at least that's the impression the city so sorely and fanatically wants for you to have of it. It's kind of like those raging party girls who, with age, start to be a little less exciting and enticing and more ragged and pathetic as the abuses of excess start to accumulate...like Tara Reid, basically. Vegas certainly lacks no amount of spackle for when it comes to glossing over its age or the fading charms of some of its dingier corridors, and with the constant evolution comes the relentless forward-charge that tries, so desperately, to prevent the ravages of time. For the most part this means Vegas is a glittering, built up mecca to consumption and entertainment, drawing the hordes of eager visitors with the promise of possible riches and a great story to tell the folks back home, if nothing else.

Party hardy.

Whether its a bro-squard in matching Hawaiian/tropics-inspired-print or a drunk and disorderly bachelorette squad in their tiny dresses, heels in hand, Vegas is best enjoyed with other people. Even Hunter S. Thompson brought his trusty attorney to Vegas for his wild drug-binge-ride. It's just one of those things- sometimes you need a friend to rally, or to hold your hair while you get sick, but someone has to help you take photos so it's not just an endless procession of awkward selfies. I've done the solo-travel thing (when I lived in Japan and Korea), and while I'm incredibly grateful for the experience and wouldn't trade it for the world, it also made me acutely aware of how much fun it can be to travel with friends. It's also good to know that you can pack up and go, on your own, and there's a lot of benefits to be had with solo travel... but if I were to be the judge, which I basically am, since this is my little slice of the internet- Vegas is a town best enjoyed with your BFFs or at least a romantic partner. 

Take it from this guy! He gets it.

 Look how happy he is!

Photos in this post were provided by Antho Jay~ 

Vegas: Psychedelic night drive

Who's your favorite superhero? I know superheroes might be a sore topic for some, given the events that unfolded in the Infinity War... I mean, I know that I can speak from personal experience to say that I'm still reeling and feeling a bit traumatized by what we all witnessed, and repeated viewings on Blu-ray haven't helped matters much... but Antho and I, we've been watching The Flash on the CW since it first started airing (four years ago!)... it's been our show. We've grown and evolved as a couple over the years while we watched our favorite hero and his rag-tag group of scientists and alternate-Earth friends grapple to confront the meta-human menace and time-travel-tangled mess they've found themselves in every week. Even when I was off in Korea for six months we managed to synch up and watch the new episodes together, video-chatting with our reactions in real time! It's been a lot of fun, and while the show is currently on hiatus (boo, hiss) we're eager for when it returns to the airwaves in October. Sheesh, October still sounds so far away, but really we're almost through August already... all the little kidlings have gone back to school, and the big yellow buses have resumed roaming the neighborhoods. Time has been flying by, not unlike our favorite Scarlet Speedster, and summer is rapidly coming to its conclusion. Here in Vegas, summer doesn't fade away without a fight- she digs her claws in deep and spews her fiery, arid breath through much of October. Usually by time of All Hallow's Eve we've got enough of a nip that those skimpy insert-blank-here costumes are mildly uncomfortable... at least, for me. Some girls can walk the streets in booty shorts when it's -15 degrees fahrenheit out, and my respects to them, but us desert rats tend to have thin blood. 

I mention the Flash, though, because when doing long-exposures and driving things tend to take on an aspect not unlike that our favorite fast guy gets, with any light source creating streaks that resemble lightning. We do a fair bit of cruising around in that big van of ours and decided one night to experiment with long exposures. This is the result of that. Also, bonus cicada, because it's summer here and I love the little singing bugs. 

Vegas: A den of penultimate horror, aka the Storage Unit (and bonus sunset drive)

Do you want to play a game?

What scares you? Is it cradling your phone close to your face in the deep of night, huddled under your blankets with only the cool electronic glow to stave off the darkness as you read Nosleep or Creepypasta into the early hours? Or do you prefer visceral visual gore, a screen painted in vibrant and guttural shades of red and pink with all the imagination and texture the creation department could muster through gallons of corn syrup and latex? Or are you more into the slow creeping cerebral of psychological horrors? 

I like a fair bit of each, depending on my mood. Sometimes I want a slithering, spine-tingling spectacle that lingers and latches on, like a greasy film from a cheap lotion- the kind of creeping dread that H P. Lovecraft is so adept at crafting. Other days you just want a big absurd splashfest in the vein of Dead Alive by Peter Jackson (yes, the same guy who made Lord of the Rings) where the cringe-inducing pus-squirts and custard incidents, as revolting as they are, are still snuggly-wrapped in their blanket of Kiwi humor. There are even those days (probably more oft than naught) where a mostly-light-hearted rom-zom-comedy like Shaun of the Dead fits the bill best of all. The greatest thing about all these multifaceted horrors is that most can be left behind by simply shutting a book or pressing a button. Slam. Zap. The spookiness is over and mostly gone. Tentacles recoil into the ink stains forming the words on the page, and gnashing teeth fade to black. 

But these horrors are all firmly rooted in fiction, so at the end of the day, no amount of fear or anxiety they induce is based on any real, imminent threats to you. Movies, books, even terrifying-anxiety-inducing-nightmare fests of a game like Dead Space are entertainment, for better or for worse. These are outlets that allow us to confront these things in safety, shouting at the clumsy victim of the moment as they stumble and stagger their way through their scripted slaughter. Reality itself provides no shortage of macabre and mortifying material to contend with, and for me, this often manifests as an overwhelming abundance of stuff. I strive for a minimalist sort of existence and having hopped continents several times now while living out of one or two suitcases found it extremely liberating. Less is more, they say, and whoever they are they've got the right idea. There are few things quite so deeply, unnervingly horrific as the storage unit. A place where your excess stuff goes to be forgotten, locked away in a spare bedroom you pay to forget. It's ridiculous- instead of, say, getting rid of the detritous that ways you down, it accumulates to the point of needing an additional offsite location to put it...so not only are you paying for the house you yourself need space to live in, but a separate home for your stuff. What sense does that make?! It's like the dead coming to life, but it's all your dead stuff that's chasing you down, draining your finances and patience,  hoarding their dust-bunnies and potential spider-nests in wait until the day they can strike you down...

A fucking horror show, I tell you.

Vegas: Living on the street in the city of Sin

This human pictured above, this is Peanut. He's originally from New Mexico, according to a conversation he and Antho had one afternoon. Peanut likes to drink alcohol, like a lot of alcohol, a hobby he's had since he was a wee little baby when his mum would put booze in his bottle to keep him quiet and sleepy. Perhaps this makes it no surprise, then, that Peanut is now a homeless young adult at the ripe old age of 23, and he's right on track for needing a kidney replacement within the next year or risk a more or less certain death. And so it goes, another homeless young American wasting the dwindling days of his short and brutal life here on the streets of Sin City, where he points to tourists and tells them if he thinks they're hot between swigs of malt liquor. I mean, we could wax poetic and try to write an optimistic tale of how his future will invariably be brighter and better than his current lot in life, but for people like Peanut that would be a bold-faced lie. It's highly unlikely that there's any sort of GoFundMe campaign to get Peanut a kidney, because who is worried about a homeless kid like Peanut? At the end of the day, he's just another face blending into the background, another awkward aversion of the eyes for the residents and tourists alike. Homelessness is not an easy thing to fix and there's an incredibly complex web of variables and choices coalescing together to land someone in such an unfortunate position, and how much of that is fated and how much of it is personal manifest destiny is hard to decipher at a quick glimpse. 

It takes a whole lot more than a quick glimpse to work out a solution to the problem of homelessness, and here in the city of sin, it's an especially unfortunate situation to wind up in. Not only is the city itself rather hostile to the homeless, who wind up camped out on the walkways and stoops of downtown, but the environment too is extremely harsh and very dangerous. A lot of our homeless in Las Vegas have taken to hiding underground, making their homes in the drainage tunnels that exist to spare citizens the brunt of the flash flooding, and coincidentally end up drowned when those floods find their way to their intended corridors. It's a lose-lose situation, though some intriguing new ideas have been added to the mix in an effort to help alleviate the issue, or at least divert it to less tourist-prone areas. Whether this is really the right solution is yet to be determined, but again, this isn't an easy issue with a clear solution. Unfortunately for Peanut, it's probably too little, too late.  

Photos in this post provided by Antho Jay...