Sunday, August 8, 2010

In the beginning there was bukkit...

First off, let me say that I had an awesome weekend, one of the best of my life. It was so awesome in fact that I can't seem to get all of my thoughts together to gel cohesively so I'm going to need a couple of days before I can compile something worth reading. In the meantime, there seems to be some confusion over the title of the Great Bukkit Tour, so I'd like to lay that to rest.

A little history first....When I took up running, I entered a race in May of 2008. It was the Powell Spring 5k. Miranda and Laela participated as well. On the entry form, there was a place to enter a team name so we wanted to come up with one. At the time Miranda was enamored with the Speed Racer cartoon and wanted to name the team Speed Racer. Laela and I didn't think that accurately reflected the family's less than quick style of ambulation so we asked her to come up with something else. Because of my mustache and the lolrus, Miranda chose the name Speed Walrus. We thought it was hilarious and so it stuck.

The 'Lolrus' is an Internet Meme that started in 2007 with the appearance of the images in the above jpeg. You can read a detailed description of it at the following URL: http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/4480801. It is actually a seal not a walrus (but that is beside the point). We had stumbled upon it shortly after I had started cultivating my mustache and found it to be quite humorous. You can see the images here http://icanhascheezburger.com/category/lolrus/. Miranda and I would check it every day to see if there was a new funny walrus picture and somehow, walurs ended up becoming my nickname. So, there became a running joke about me always looking for bucket. The girls went out and bought actual metal pails for trash cans, etc. We had also shared it with our close friends so that everyone in our inner circle was very familiar with the Lolrus. It's not just a running joke within the family but also our close friends.

When we found out about about my condition and decided to take our vacation Laela dubbed it the Great Bukkit Tour of 2010. The idea was that the walrus was looking all over the United States for his bucket. I had no idea that there would be so many people who would be reading about our vacation and just kind of assumed that everyone who would read it knew about the walrus/bucket connections. While yes, a double meaning could be read into the "Bukkit Tour" that it was about kicking the bucket, that was not the intention.

I'm glad that so many people enjoyed reading our travel log. I hope this clears up any misconceptions about the genesis of the Great Bukkit Tour of 2010.