Tuesday, October 23, 2007
What's all this dust?
I never watch the news on TV, so the only current events I ever know about are the ones I hear on the radio in between song sets and from other people. This past weekend was just another relaxing, normal weekend for me, spent mostly inside the house. Imagine my surprise Monday morning when I went to my car to go to work and found it covered in a thick layer of dust (kinda like this blog sometimes, heh). I had just washed it a few days ago. It wasn’t until I heard mention of the wildfires on the radio that I realized where all that dust came from. That wasn’t just dust, that was ash. I didn’t realize the severity of it all until I looked it up online. There are like 12 different fires going on all throughout Southern California!
Lucky for me I haven’t been affected other than the extra-dusty air. Those hot winds blowing in from the east are making the fires a lot harder to contain, and are also causing a brown haze to form in the sky. (Here’s a satellite photo of only one small section of the fires.) Last night as I was walking the dogs around the block, I could smell the smoke. Not sure if it was a fireplace or someone barbecuing, but I don’t think so. Who lights up their fireplace when it’s 70 degrees outside at night, and who barbecues on a Monday night?
I was just reading that over 500,000 people have been evacuated. Wow. I never realized how many people live in the sticks.
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Geeky Dragon Girl on 10/23 at 11:21 AM
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Monday, October 15, 2007
Everything I know about golf I learned from my Wii
Golf has always been one of those esoteric yet boring sports, somewhat like pool in that you hit some balls into some holes with a stick, but with a lot of strange terminology like “par” and “birdie”. Whenever I encountered it on TV I’d roll my eyes, wonder who the hell watches this stuff, and immediately change the channel.
Well last week we decided to buy one of those highly sought-after Nintendo Wii consoles. Because it was cool and everyone else wants one? Nah. I’ve never been one to follow trends. In fact, I resist crazy thoughtless trends. In this case I decided to go get one despite the trend. Here’s why…
The weekends are usually the time my sweety and I get to relax and spend time with each other. Typically a lot of time is spent catching up with our Tivo recordings and watching movie rentals. This is very relaxing, however sometimes you get a little bored sitting on the couch in front of the TV all day long. Sometimes we want to do something different, but there aren’t a whole lot of alternatives. Going to the mall means having to get out of PJs and leaving the house, and then risk buying things you don’t really need. Going to the movies is spending quite a lot of money doing something we could easily do at home. So one solution I thought of was video games. My sweety isn’t into the whole run around and shoot things kind of games. She actually doesn’t play much at all, just some puzzle games on the computer. The only time she’s ever touched my Xbox controller is to move it off the bed.
The Wii seemed very different. The games are much simpler, and best of all were the wireless remotes. The Wii ships with a compilation called Wii Sports, which is suprisingly fun. When I first saw the commercials, I was grossly underwhelmed by the simplistic, cartoony graphics. But it’s the engrossing gameplay that’s the fun part. You really get into it! To the point where you can actually get some sore muscles.
Back to the golf thing. We tried all the sports games, golf being last because, come on, it’s golf. At first I was a little ambivalent about it, especially since it was throwing words like “triple bogey” at us without explaining what they meant. After awhile, I started to get the hang of it and enjoyed it a lot more. It’s an excellent activity to do with my sweety, and it definitely gets us off our butts. Will I watch golf on TV now? Hell no! But if I’m stuck at the dentist’s office with that on TV, maybe I can at least follow what’s going on. Actually not really. I’d read a magazine instead.
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The game of golf has been right on the top in the past two decades. The interesting feature of this game is that it has the maximum flexibility regarding the age and physical fitness of the golfers. Sky rocketing repute of the game has given a unique promotion of the accessories involved in the game. For example the golf shoes the golf sticks and the golf bags have surmounted over all the other sports being played today.
Monday, October 01, 2007
Cancun Day 6: Where I finally get a bit of a tan
Okay, back to my vacation… The day after our exhausting trip to Xcaret we were scheduled for a boat ride to Isla Mujeres. This was another of the little trip packages we “earned” for putting up with the timeshare people bending our ears. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Spanish, Isla Mujeres means Island of Women. Sounds promising right? Funny thing is, all the tour guides and locals like to joke that it’s a place where you can find everything… except women. One guy we were talking to, who was a charming and funny salesguy, said, “So Isla Mujeres is Island of Women, right? Well, the funny thing is, there are no women… I looked!”
There were two kinds of boats you could take for this trip to the island. There’s the noisy and fume-belching ferry, and there are the quiet and sleek catamarands. We were lucky enough to be booked for a catamarand ride. The crew liked to call it the party boat because of the nonstop reggae music and the free-flowing drinks. There were about three boats that left around the same time. We were the second to launch.
Some people have commented that it looks like we were on some sort of drug bust, but that DEA shirt actually has small print at the bottom that says “Drink Every Afternoon” (Click for bigger view)
The crew was a funny bunch. They told us all the different alcoholic drinks we could order, and when they asked me what I wanted to drink, I said orange juice. You should’ve seen the man’s eyes roll around. Free-flowing tequila shots and I wanted plain ol’ juice. Next they took my sweety’s drink order. It went something like this:
Her: What are the available drinks again?
Crewman: Coronas, Rum and punch, Tequila Sunrise, and Sex on the Beach.
Her: I’ll have sex on the boat!
Crewman: *laughs his ass off* Wherever you want baby!
My baby is so cute when she flirts. With her charm she could have just about anyone she wants, but she wants me and only me. Maybe I am awkward, goofy and a bit socially inept, but she chose me, y’all! With her I always feel like I just won the lottery.
Anyway, it was a great boat ride, especially since we were able to sit in the shade of the sail. The wind felt good and the sound of the water whooshing by the boat was relaxing. The water was amazing, just look for yourself:
Yeah yeah I’m still a blinding white ghost at this point. Just look at the water dammit. Isn’t it pretty? It was five miles from Cancun to the island, and the trip was about 45 minutes on the boat. I enjoyed it a lot, can you tell?
When we got there we had about an hour to roam around the shops. The prices were still not as good as you would expect in Mexico, since they know a tourist trap when they see one. But the worst thing was the heat. It was so. hot. We kept going into the upscale jewelery stores because they were the only shops with air conditioning.
Afterwards we got back on the boat to be taken to a different part of the island where they had a buffet lunch set up on the beach. There were beach chairs, hammocks and everthing. The stupid part was finding out you had to pay for drinks… including water! WTF? Thus far everything has been all-inclusive and now we have to pay for water? I was quite miffed and decided to just drink the warm water in my water bottle. Screw them.
Some people ask about hurricane damage and luckily for us we saw none. The last hurricane to really tear into Cancun was hurricane Wilma two years ago, where the storm blew to Cancun, then sat there crunching on it for three days before moving on. The only sign I saw of that were these shipwreck that we passed by on the way to the island:
(Click for bigger view)
The ride back wasn’t quite as fun. There was no shade this time, and they started passing tequila shots around to everyone. They had some folks chug from the bottle, much like they do at those bars near the border. Then they started the dancing on the deck. This madee for some interesting people watching for me, but I ended up being completely annoyed by the drunk idiot who decided to dance directly behind me. He stepped on my drink (the dumass didn’t even feel it!), kicked me in the back, and kneed me in the side. I hate drunk people. I wanted to grab his foot and pull it right out from under him. The fool probably wouldn’t even feel that either. But no, I moved off to the side and let the asshole have his dance floor. At that point I was getting way too much sun, noise and idiots in my space. I like relaxing, not “partying”. Getting drunk off your ass is not my idea of fun, ever. I just wanted to get off the boat.
When we got back to the hotel later, I found all the places where I had missed with the sunblock. I had some patchy sunburns here and there, but a light tan in other places. Those patchy burns soon turned into patchy brown spots, which made me look kinda dirty. No really, I did shower! Overall it was a good trip, but would have been made much better if we had more shade and fewer idiots.
