BRog

Classy Drunken Roasted Poblano Sparerib Chili

2012-02-06T19:36:00.006-05:00

It is superbowl tradition among my friends to pair the "big game" with a chili cookoff. A winning tradition indeed. I am generally good at improvising a dish that pleases the palette and so I trusted my instinct as I walked around the grocery store, inventing my chili based on what was on sale and whatever inspirations I had along the way. The dish was started yesterday morning and I regrettably didnt write anything down, so I am going to give it a try from memory, I am not even going to try to remember amounts of spices.

MEAT

1/2 rack pork spare ribs
1/2 lb ground angus beef
1 lb thick cut bacon

Liquidity

8 oz tomato paste
12 oz Brawlings Brewery Pilsner (or some other lesser beer)
1c water
1/8 c vermouth, maybe less
several healthy dashes of Braggs liquid aminos (great stuff, you should get it if you dont have it)
Worcestershire sauce
Hot sauce
white wine vinegar
juice of 1/2 lime

Spices

Tons of salt, I like using kosher salt
bunch of pepper
some cumin
a little more coriander
1/8 c fresh chopped cilantro
1 poblano pepper, roasted with the ribs
ground cayenne pepper
oregano
chili powder
paprika
medium onion
5 gloves of garlic
a drip of liquid smoke
For the bacon: brown sugar

Other Stuff

1 can dark red kidney beans
sprinkeling of corn meal.
1 can diced tomatoes
Tomato slices, parmesean and cheddar cheese
for the ribs: a little teriyaki, a little bbq sauce (Stubbs "Texas Butter", good stuff...), rosemary, oregano, salt

Start by cooking the ribs, I put the little bit of teriyaki and bbq sauce on them, and a dash of worcestershire, basically a dry rub though, rosemary and oregano, salt salt salt, pepper. Baked at 300 for 2.5 hours, I put the poblano in for about 2 hours with it, rotating it every now and then, letting it roast in the juices.

This is the second time I have mentioned brown sugar candied bacon in my blog, if you didnt take my advice before, well, you must give it a try. A mix of brown sugar, paprika, and cayenne pepper sprinkled generously over bacon and fried makes an irresistibly delicious plate of smokey candied bacon, and also makes a perfect topping for some chili.

Chop the onion and garlic (yes, chop the garlic, no need to dice) and saute it in the leftover deliciousness from the bacon that you have already eaten half of. Brown that beef after the onions are done, drain out as much or as little of the bacon fat before cooking as you see suitable, and you may want to consider leaving in some of the drippings in after it is browned to add to the chili, throw some spices in with it if youd like, definitely salt. When the ribs are done get all the meat off the bone, take out any gristle and give it a rough chop. The poblano should be ready to go too, chop it up pretty fine, take the seeds with it if you want to add spice, the heat from a poblano is a dull, smokey, kind of back of the tongue heat, or if you dont want any extra spice, the roasted pepper itself hardly has any spice to it without the seeds but still adds some great flavor.

Now, take all those other liquidities (the vinegar, worcestershire, hot sauce and stuff... use your judgement) and add 'em to a pot, medium low heat. The beans. The diced tomatoes. Drain them. Or dont. The spices are a free for all, a few dashes here and there of each, dont be shy with the salt, do be shy with the liquid smoke, really just a drop, give it a solid few tablespoons of chili powder. Destem and chop the cilantro. Add the beef and rib meat, the poblano. Sprinkle in some corn meal if it is too runny, skip it if you like the consistency, remember it will thicken as it simmers.

Simmer till the party, coming back and adding random crap every time you pass the pot. Like Vermouth... I really liked that addition though, it really went with the flavors.

To top the chili, we have already made the candied bacon, one of the greatest flavors known to man, chop that into little delicious bacon bits. I wanted to add another flavor that is definitely in the top 10 flavors of all time. Toasted cheese. That little bit of cheddar that oozes out of a grilled cheese sandwich and fries on the pan and makes the little pedestal of accidental deliciousness? You can do that on purpose. In an ungreased nonstick pan, cover tomato slices in a mixture of grated cheddar and parmesan (real parmesan), maybe a little salt and chili powder on there, and go cheese down onto the already hot pan. Let them fry until the edges get brown, almost burnt, and flip them onto a plate. I found it easier to do a bunch at once, let the pan cool, and then take them off after things had hardened up a bit.

Delicious chili topped with candied bacon and a toasted cheese encrusted tomato slice. Ladies and gentleman, you have yourselves an award winning bowl of chili. Just last night, as the winner of the 3rd Annual Denver Orphans Superbowl Chili Cookoff, I personally won a chance to win a quarter million dollars! For a bowl of chili! Turns out the scratch off won $10, but still... pretty sweet. Let me know how it goes.

Punta Kinda

2011-10-11T00:03:00.002-04:00

Sitting in the airport with nothing better to do, I decide I need to write something. Perhaps I should give writing more priority, these days I feel like I always have something to do, but

writing should be more important. I am returning from Punta Cana, Dominican Republic where Kari and I went to see our friends get married. By all means it was an irresponsible decision, at a point where both of us should be pinchin pennies, but man was it a great time. For like $140 a
night we got all the delicious food we could eat, drinks we could dream up, room service, massages, we could have done horseback riding, snorkeling, just endless awesomeness. I say "could have" because we only spent $400 of our $1500 resort credit, so we had $1100 worth of hotel services left unused. Every time we sat down with someone to spend credits they would say things like "you have to be there by..." or "make sure you remember to..." and, well, we were just not willing to commit to anything, so there they remain, unspent, and were forced to spend our time lounging on the beach, winning (ya, i said it) money in the casino, attending wedding functions, and exploring the places, foods and beverages that the resort had to offer. 5 days spent within the walls of the Hard Rock and not an inkling of a desire to go anywhere else. Especially not home...

It feels totally out of character for me to have stayed in the same place for so long, not once venturing out to see the country which would have been so much different from anywhere I had been before. It was like travelling from the US to a secluded mini-US where the people spoke english funny, with a terrifying dash through the Dominican Republic in between. The taxi ride from the airport to the hotel was 40 minutes of furious traffic/pedestrian/donkey dodging and was the only indication that the place where we stayed for a week was not totally populated by happy colorful english speaking folk carrying around frozen Pina Coladas. That and the subtle suggestion of the resort's perimeter fence, electrified and topped with razor wire. I wish I were joking.

It was great to see our friends get married, two of our closest friends here in Denver, we have only ever known them together so it just seemed right. We have found ourselves quite a posse out here, and almost the whole group was able to make it out to the wedding. I don't care how irresponsible it was, you can't put a price on memories like that. Still got an hour or so till the flight leaves... now what do I write about? I haven't written a good rant in forever...

Forever

2011-10-10T23:52:00.004-04:00

I was thinking about forever. Like, the longest time imaginable, the longest time unimaginable. FOREVER. The only way that forever can exist is in metaphore, fairy tales, abstraction. The world wont last forever, the sun wont, the universe wont even last forever. You, however, can exist foever in the arms of Yaweh in endless bliss and happiness and it will be super awesome. Forever. All you have to do is praise him for the 70 years you spend on the practically nonexistent dot in the middle of the solar system that is a non existent dot in the middle of the galaxy that is the non existent dot in the middle of the universe. No, none of them in the middle, somewhere insignificant off to the side. This 70 years you spend on Earth, this planet so beautifully governed by science and physics and with all those twinkeling stars to look at, these years determine whether you are going to spend FOREVER in agony and torture if you do not praise Yaweh, or heaven FOREVER if you do praise him. I know, time, space, existence wont be the same once St. Peter admits you through the pearly gates, but in a jesusmillion heavenyears, imagine you and your cool black friend you always wanted are sitting on the lesbian cloud (not a cloud full of lesbians mind you, they are not allowed in heaven, but an actual female cloud who likes other female clouds, its just a cool place to hang out) when one of you remembers Earth.

Remember Earth??

Ya! Kind of... What was up with that...?

And then you would spend the rest of forever in endless awesomeness. I, however, will still be suffering in the lakes of fire at the hands of satan because I did not choose to recognize Yaweh as my lord and savior. Alongside the Dalai Lama, Ghandi, 95% of China (as of 2008 says Wikipedia), and, purely based on the fact that they worship the wrong deity, a great majority of the worlds population, who are FOREVER going to be subjected to the unending wrath of satan. FOREVER. Please dont let my repeated use of that word decrease its significance. FOREVER. Never ending unimaginable agony. After another jesusmillion years, 70 years is nothing, your time on earth ceases to exist. Heaven or hell becomes your entire existence. Most of us spend our entire existence and forever after that in hell. If there is true bliss in heaven, the idea of hell must be totally wiped out, because I know lots of people who would be pained with the knowledge of the tortured souls, friends, family, who are to spend their entire existence in hell. Heaven does not exist.

I have recently come into contact with two people who are devout christians, literal interpreters of the bible (which I think if you are really going to call yourself a christian, you should be). The first fought with me and asserted her belief and did her best to defend the bible and says I am going to hell for not praising her god. It was at a fondue party with the family. True story. The second, with the same belief system, couldnt give a rats ass about what I think, tells stories about her gay friends, and when I asked her if it bothers her that they are destined for eternal damnation, she says she just doesnt really think about that. If you actually think that the people around you are headed towards an eternity of torture in the fires of hell, wouldnt any good person do everything they can to stop that from happening? The fondue party lady, while much more difficult to be in a room with, deserves far more respect than contestant #2, who is either just a terrible person, or doesnt actually believe in the bible. I would like to think it is the latter because most christians are much more like #2. Idly sit by and leave my soul to eternal damnation or argue with me at a fondue party. Who has time for the unpleasantness?

Heaven does not exist. Hell does not exist. Yaweh, Buddah, Vishnu, Allah, Amun Ra, Hephaestus do not exist. I exist, humanity exists, goodness exists and it is not because of any great deity, evil exists too, and it is not because of any talking snake apples. It all exists within humanity and it takes a whole lot of faith to look at yourself and the world and believe that we can take that burden and move in the right direction on our own. But we have done that. Don't thank god for it, and dont thank god for that scholarship you got or the goal you scored, thank your teachers, your coaches, your parents, yourself. Getting through that accident, that break-up, that family members death, that was you and those around you, thank them. I can look at the goodness in humanity or the simple elegance and perfection in nature and have a religious experience that I can see right in front of my eyes. I absolutely know what I believe and I dont hate anyone because of it, I have no enemies, nobody is going to spend their existence in hell. There is no forever, there is no god, there is your lifetime, which is as close to forever as you will ever see, and there is a burden on you as part of humanity to spend your forever moving that burden in the right direction in whatever way you are able. Because you are able. Not for eternal reward or for fear of eternal punishment. We have the capacity to do good and so we have the responsibility.

Beer Label Template

2011-02-11T11:25:00.007-05:00

As I prepare to brew my first batch of beer one of the essential steps is, of course, designing the label. After searching for available label sizes to order, I found that the easiest way to do it is a perfect circle, I ordered 3.33" circles. I searched around for ideas and perhaps a good template for photoshop but could not find any. So I decided to make my own. I was first inspired by the website http://www.beerlabelizer.com/ which can create a really nice looking label, but I wanted more customization and so created a photoshop template. I seperated out all of the colored rings into layers, the text is all in editable text layers, and the images separate layers. My first test was the Brawlings Dunkel which was pretty satisfactory, and then I made the Humpback Ale for this post in just a few minutes, inspired by the whale that came up when I googled "funny clipart", ha, Humpback Ale, get it? So here it is, the photoshop file, a couple test runs, and a sample of what the circle labels looks like on the bottle.

Download the photoshop file here:http://www.mediafire.com/?16o4mlx29xbf8bj

And My Feet are Longfellows

2011-01-28T01:15:00.012-05:00

I have always had the propensity to write my way through life. It is definitely my favorite form of communication and I think I represent myself best through words. I'm good at 'em. The popularity of AIM through my childhood was probably the reason for a few girls crushing on me (I mean, there were so many), I wooed them with words. It is so easy to type your feelings, backspace, revise. You can be quick witted without being that quick, it's nice. I came across a document of haikus that I wrote in boredom some yawny highschool afternoon and it inspired me to try to make a collection of some of my poetry. Speaking of yawny. Here it is.

This poem was a little contract piece I did on short notice back in '97, April 9th to be exact. A news crew decided to come to Castle Elementary to cover our observance of Arbor Day and two gifted young handsome good looking funny talented awesome students were selected to write a piece about arbor day to be read on the news. Crystal Winters (what a name right? Ya, we dated, no big deal) wrote something that was probably pretty good, considering the 20 minutes we had to complete it, and I popped out this little rhyme like some kind of Arbor Day free stylin 6th grader. I had to memorize it to read it on the news and somehow it stuck, it is amazing the things I forget, but I still know that poem.

Arbor Day, people say "What is it for"?
I tell them "The oaks, the poplars and all of the more"
They give everyone life, yes, you and me!
That's why we celebrate this day for the tree.
It's not just because they give us our wood,
It's because they breath in bad air, and exhale good.
So next time you cut down a tree that we need,
Don't walk away, make life with a seed.

Heres a few mushy ones. What better inspiration than love. I should send this first one to Hallmark.

My hands miss your graze,
My ears your tone.
My eyes miss your gaze,
My lips your own.

And this one I wrote while away on the boat for 8 months. I had a lot of free time to write, I even pieced together some driftwood and painted a picture to accompany the poem.

Living on a boat, I have come to know,
What I need to keep, and what can go.
Life on the sea makes me realize,
What I need in a life cut down to size.
First, of course, everyone needs them,
Three meals a day, just to feed them.
And it's a basic fact that once you're fed,
You need a place to lay your head.
A good night's sleep, wake up and then,
The next day do it all again.
To eat and sleep, thats technically,
All you need to live, biologically.
But to stay alive day to day,
Living life in such a way,
A trite existence this life would give,
Because "to stay alive" is not "to live".
So what is it I think is giving,
Meaning to make my life worth living?
None of that stuff you have on land,
The cars, the bars, the dates, the plans.
The toilets that flush with a lever,
Internet that doesn't take forever.
They are all just extra, superfluous,
But still there is something that I miss.
I've got a bed, and lots of food,
The thing that I'm missing is you.
I realize without you, I'm alone,
You are my life, my love , my home.
So after letting this issue seep,
Into my mind and thinking deep,
I realize all I need to keep,
Is you, food, and a place to sleep.
I realize all I need to keep,
Is you, food, and a place to sleep.

These are what I can remember from one of the early days with Kari, it was the night we decided that we would be the King and Empress of the world.

As King of the World I foresee an issue,
It might not be okay to kiss you.
The Earth will shudder, shake and twirl,
Cause when we kiss, you rock my world.

It was also the first meal she cooked for me.

Because you've got the brains and looks,
I'll get over the fact that you cant cook.

These are the haikus that I found, pretty weird...

--------------sleep-------------

In daylight hours,
My Lifeforce driven along,
Sleepiness ensues.

-------------misunderstood kid--

They dont understand
I am dying on the inside
dark makeup reaveals.

------------cool kid-----------
You all know I'm cool
See all them with white Nikes?
My Nikes are blue.

-----Vacation-------

Driving in the car
Passenger glued to window
line line line line line

-----------------------

entropy, can't, stuck,
gesticular, bottlecap,
first place, canvas, sat

-----murderer------------

he opened the door
common gentleman gesture
she killed his father

--------oops----------

deep penetration
get caught up in the moment
Morning after pill

--------sommelier------

sip lightly, tasting
swish, gargle, head falls backwards
slight hint of poison

---------dna-------

gracefully winding
sugar phosphate and a base
encoding our lives

Deoxyribo
sugar phosphate and a base
nucleic acid

Ok, that is enough for now, just a random smattering of what I could remember or easily find, maybe I will come across more some day.

Today, Friday January 28, the high in Denver is 62. I <3 global warming. jj.

Berlin- Awesome and Terrible

2010-12-31T14:42:00.002-05:00

I never recounted my experiences from my last 2 weeks in Europe, I am disappointed I didnt put my thoughts in writing while they were fresh, my mind is constantly running at top speed (not going anywhere, top speed in circles) and I cant even remember my thoughts from 5 minutes ago, 5 weeks ago is long gone. On that note, I have tried keeping a journal of sorts with me at all times so that I can write down thoughts I have or interesting things I see or hear, I will often think, "na, I dont need to write that down, I can remember that," and so it is gone forever, or sometimes I will write like a little reminder, just a code word to start the thought process in my mind again, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt. And sometimes I will use the person I am with as a notepad and present my thought to them and then I can ask them later what it was, or the conversation that proceeds makes it a significant enough event that I remember it later. Kari is lucky enough to be my notepad pretty often, and every now and then after some capricious cerebration comes to to surface she asks where it came from and it is quite fun sometimes to trace back my string of thoughts to something real that triggered it all. I will try to write it down next time something like that happens.

I was talking about Europe, and how I should have put my experiences to paper sooner. I met a guy named Ryan, the coolest Pirate in Santa Cruz, who sold me a beautiful old Raleigh bike and from my email he clicked the link to this blog, I saw him a couple times after that and every time he encouraged me "keep documenting your life man." I try, Ryan. My return from Europe has been full. Full of travels, decisions, people, adventures... wait... I didnt talk about my final days in Europe. Berlin! This city was awesome and terrible, awesome because of its history and terrible because of its history. We happened to be there during the celebration for the 20th anniversary of German reunification which filled the streets with carnival rides, food vendors, and thousands of people. We went down the Unter den Linden on our Fat Tire bike tour (we did one in Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, annnd London) early in the day and saw the stage and vendors and things being prepared among the Brandenburg Gate. Now that is no ordinary piece or architecture right there. As one of the first places we stopped in Berlin, I was amazed to hear the history of this one spot. The gate served as the entrance to the city since the 1700s and during the war it was one of the Berlin Wall crossings, right on the line. But before that, a couple hundered years ago when NAPOLEON and the French took over Berlin, he stole the horse and chariot and took it to Paris. NAPOLEON! Of course the French were defeated 10 or so years later and the chariot was restored. How cool is that? We went on exploring and the amazing history never ceased thoughout the city. The Berlin Wall, an event that will be remembered forever, it happened in my lifetime, and there it was right in front of my eyes. There are so many interesting things to say about all of this I cant go into it all, theres a story behind the rounded top on the wall, half a mile down the road is "Checkpoint Charlie", directly behind me is the only remaining Nazi building in Berlin (which remains despised as it houses the German equivalent of the IRS), there is just so much history everywhere, and amazing architecture. We saw and learned about historic churches, palaces, parks, we saw bullet holes from WWII battles, and numerous remnants of the destruction caused in the war. WWII was obviously a prevalent part of the experience, it was amazing to see how huge of an impact the war had, and still has on the culture. Sure the US was in it, but in Europe they were IN it, and throughout my entire trip the war would come up in conversation and explanation.

Berlin is home to one of the worlds prominent Universities, Humboldt University, which sits in the heart of the city. Educated here were impressive names like Max Plank, Karl Marx, and a guy named Alfred Einschteim that seemed to impress people. In from of the university was a square that held two identical churches with an interesting history of their own, but in the middle of that square was a reminder that even an institution of education such as this with such a proud history has dark marks which must also be remembered. A plate of glass stands out in the middle of a cobble stone square and under the glass there are white shelves lining an otherwise empty room. A nearby plaque offers a brief explanation and a quote. "That was merely a prelude. Wherever they burn books, eventually they will burn people too." -Heinrich Heine, 1820. This was the site where on May 10, 1933 Nazi students took 20,000 books from the university that were not in compliance with Nazi teachings and burned then in a pile in the square. The white shelves in the inaccessible room are big enough for 20,000 books as a memorial to the burnings. They acknowledge the history that has passed through the town, the good and the bad... and the absolutely terrible.

We experienced the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, when I say terrible, this is what I mean. The memorial is housed under ground, and above it is a field of 2,700 stele, which are huge concrete slabs, covering 4 acres. The slabs stand on rolling little hills and vary in height across the field so that when walking through you will at one moment be looking out over the stele and the next be standing in the dark with concrete towering 10 feet over your head. Below, in the memorial, the information is presented as a continuation of the stele above, sometimes as a hanging continuation of the stele containing information about a person or family and their struggle for survival in concentration camps or in hiding. One room was nothing but glass rectangles on the ground reflecting the stele above them, back lit to show letters from Jews being taken to camps, being held in camps, or desperate attempts to reach people who were already in camps. It was... well you can imagine. It was interesting to think how other people were experiencing the information, some people walking through crying, did they have some tie to those lost in the Holocaust? Maybe it was out of shame? How did the Japanese tourists take it in? Are they taught the history as freely as we are in the US? Standing there next to an Asian couple in my head for a second I felt like a local and that I was standing next to tourists and felt slightly ashamed of what we were looking at, then I remembered I wasnt at home, the US helped stop all this, I felt much better after that, that is not to say that I think Germans should feel personally ashamed of what happened, it was just a weird experience.

Oh goodness, by brief write ups never end up very brief do they. Quickly, the reunification celebration was great to be a part of, the kind of local cuisine is Mediterranean, like baba ganoush and falafel and stuff, weird, and the German public transportation system is the best in the world. Next, I am off to Barcelona.

The Unfamous Rawlings Christmas Letter

2010-12-26T23:25:00.007-05:00

For those of you not fortunate enough to be part of the Rawlings Family Holiday Card Mailing List, we have kept up the classically tacky tradition of writing a letter to summarize our lives since our previous installment. Yes, we know it is a Holiday faux pas, in fact we embrace that fact, and our loyal following insists that they enjoy receiving it every year, and so it comes without fail, on fancy paper, joined by a family picture and postmarked from Santa Claus, Indiana. And now you have the privilege of reading it as well, and though you are not quite getting the full experience, I hope you enjoy.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rawlings Family Christmas 2010

Hey everbuddy! Hope this letter finds you all happy, healthy, and omnipotent. It has been another big year for the Rawlings, and an interesting one for me. Most of the year has been the same ol stuff. Lots of soccer, playing and reffing still. I started doing High School games this year, which has been an interesting experience. The big exception was a change in jobs. My KY work visa ran out, so I took the Operations Manager position at a new company, QTR Inc, in Evansville. It was a gut wrenching decision to leave my friends at Custom Resins, and a challenging start at QTR, but it is a great company with solid growth and potential. Well, we’ve still been able to get the boys to write their updates, so as long as you haven’t grown tired of the endless stream of family and friend’s newsletters, read on!

Becky: I lead a pretty mundane life compared to everyone else in the family. I am still working my school nurse job at Bosse High School and my admission nurse job at St. Mary’s Hospital. I spent a lot of my summer break in West Virginia and Pennsylvania helping and visiting family. I doubled my garden space this year but the bugs got most of my squash. Seems squash bugs are are most prevalent in this area of the midwest. We are still eating fresh tomatoes from the garden though. My new project is finding a good, used car before the end of the year. Hope you have a wonderful holiday. rawlingsbl@gmail.com

Mark - The year started off with nothing but photography: photography jobs, photography classes (my first!), work at the studio... what else are you going to do when it’s cold?! Speaking of cold, during Pittsbrugh’s snowmegeddon I did a photo project on Pittsburgh parking chairs that got some local attention and is now featured on the wikipedia page for parking chairs! Then my class ended, my photo jobs dried up, and I was jobless. Taking advantage of this joblessness I visited Brendon out in Santa Cruz for a week of west coast debauchery and succeeded admirably. Lucky for me I immediately found a good paying dream job leading bike tours in and around Pittsburgh. This included things as small as leading groups of summer camp kids around the trails of Pittsburgh on day trips, to 350 mile journeys between Pittsburgh and Washington DC (I did this trip many times over the summer) and everything in between. In between bike tours I worked on two farms, one 70 miles outside Pittsburgh (quite a ride), and one about 8 miles outside the city. I did mostly infrastructure work on both of these including building a large greenhouse out of most recycled wood and quite a few rock paths and patios. As summer faded I spent more and more time at the farms and less time on the trails, and I also moved into a nice old house on Polish Hill in Pittsburgh overlooking downtown and the surrounding hills. As soon as the bike tours ended I joined an old friend Phil on a cross country adventure that took us from west to eat by way of Salt Lake, Yellowstone, Badlands, Minnesota State Fair, Apostle Islands, Sleeping Bear Dunes, Lake Erie sailing on Gottalife, and a visit to the farm Gillian was working on for our one year anniversary. It was a pretty spectacular way to cross the country (8 National Parks AND we skipped the great plains). To finish up the year I made another boat delivery down to the Bahamas, we saw lots of whales, a Great White Shark do a full breach, and all kinds of other exciting things like a spinnaker explode, sonic booms, and 40 ft seas. Due to breaking too many sails we had to make a three day pit stop, and to brighten spirits after beating the snot out of ourselves in 7 days of upwind sailing (gentlemen never sail to weather!) my girlfriend came down and brought good weather with her. She joined us on a beautiful gulfstream crossing and we cruised through the rest of the Bahamas at our leisure. This brought us back to a cold wintry Pittsburgh just before Thanksgiving where I plan to start hibernation soon. With no winter jobs and plenty of money saved from the summer I’ll be taking time off in the winter to catch up on photography projects and learn a couple new skills (welding and woodturning are at the top of the list). Another winter project is remodeling my website phot.ogrpahy.org, which I expect to be getting up and running around February. You can reach me as always at thebestrawlingsson@ography.org OR theworstrawlingsson@ography.org or just mark@ography.org if either of those don’t sit right in your stomach.

BRENDON- It’s a frosty Philadelphia fall morning. Six AM and I’m returning from a grueling shift of toy sorting at “R Us”. Unable to sleep I sit and think about the big decisions I have ahead of me. A glimmering white angel pops up on my shoulder. I am not getting enough sleep. “Do the sensible thing,” She says, “Make yourself a home, find a real job, you have had your adventures, now settle down and make a life for yourself.” As I ponder her immaculate wisdom I am joined by a writhing mass of pasta and meatballs levitating over my other shoulder. “Forget that sparkly chick!” The Flying Spaghetti Monster proclaims, “Go have some fun, follow your wonderful girlfriend around the country, she will be done with school in a year, have fun while you can. Besides, you have a letter to write for the Holidays, what would you say?!” It is hard to disagree with that logic, but I am still torn. As I think, the FSM extends his noodly appendage and strangles the angel on my other shoulder. That settles that, I am going on an adventure.

And so it was. I finished my time in Philly (and at Toys R Us, whew) and continued across the state to Pittsburgh, where Kari had her first placement. Kari had two three month internships left to graduate with her Masters in Occupational Therapy. It turns out it is tough to get a good job for 3 months, so I wound up stuffing papers in envelopes and filling ink cartridges, it wasn't so bad though, I love that city and being with my friends and family. Our cross country drive was next on the agenda, and when April came around we set off with a car full of junk and a mind full of California dreams. Through Dallas, Albuquerque, the Grand Canyon, and Las Vegas, we made our way to home in Santa Cruz with our 3 new housemates we found on Craigslist, luckily they turned out to be 3 of the awesomest dudes you'd ever hope to meet. There is nowhere in the country like SC, with a general laid back attitude and a trust and respect present through the community, it was great to be a part of it for what time we had there. I immediately bought a board and got into surfing, SC has the best surfing in the country and I loved it, I finally got a hang of it... just before I left. The job search was brutal, after giving up on anything biology I landed a job in tech services at the Beach Boardwalk amusement park, working on anything with a computer involved, CCTV, audio, telephones, so much more... it was pretty crazy, and I loved it, working on the beach all day with a great group of guys around people that were just there to have fun. I ended up spending 6 months there, staying to finish the season at my carnie job while Kari finished her last 6 weeks of school in Philly. The people I met and experiences I had in Santa Cruz I know will stay with me for a long time, but my time there had to come to an end. The adventure continued as I left SC for a backpacking tour of Europe. My two friends and I left in the middle of September for Europe where we traveled for 2 weeks, and on the day my friends flew home Kari flew in and the two of us continued for another 2 weeks. Ready? Amsterdam and the bicycles, bustling streets, “coffee” shops, canals, street performers, and women in windows with red lights... The Swiss Alps and snowboarding on a glacier in 50 degree weather, and the little ski village and the parties they throw, Milan and the best pizza I ever hope to eat, Rome and the immensely impressive architecture, Vatican City (I saw the pope!), and everything is so old! Munich and Oktoberfest, and the beer, the trip to the Monastery, and the beer, the beer, and the beer, and Kari! Prague and the castles, the clubs, the museums, and the astronomical clock, Berlin and the history! the Wall, and the 20th anniversary of German reunification, Barcelona, the beaches, the Spanish Inquisition, and Montjuic, Paris, the Eiffel Tower, the French Revolution, the art, the bridges, the buildings, London, the people, the Palace, the buses, the markets, the airport... home... I'll just keep it going, Kari and I took a little trip when we got back to check out possible places to live, so, LA, the sprawling extravagance, the peeeeople, Santa Cruz, the friends, the citywide Halloween party, Denver, the mountains, the city, the job opportunities... the Uhaul, the drive, the apartment, the new home. What better place to be for the holiday season than nestled in the Rockies. We are just getting moved in and are finally settling down for a while, it is nice to have a home, and I am sure that sparkly chick is happy too. So, I am a Denverite (Yes, still a Steelers fan) and we have a two bedroom apartment, the 2nd is for you when you come out to hit the ski resorts. As always, you can fill in the gaps by reading my blog at blrownsu.blogspot.com, or email me at Brawlings@gmail.com. Happy Holidays!

Alan: Welcome back everyone to the wonderful world of Mark and Brendon showing off. I left you guys last year in the magical location of Clearfield, PA, the home of my lovely almost 1 year girlfriend. This 2 lettered young lady and I went into our previous semester with a new wind, and it was flipping freezing man. It was a pretty tough semester, my favorite class of course was biochemistry.. Bet you don't know how your body digests food, how does that make you feel? But in all seriousness it was my second semester of humanities with an amazing professor. The beginning of the semester was coupled by one of the most snowful winters EVER. With that, I took all my friends to Seven Springs to ski with Brendon.. I guess we are but a smidge compared to european vacations and international shenanigans. Our other fun trip was a weekend in our wonderful nation’s capital. We stayed at my friends Aunt’s house just outside the city and rode the metro into the city, I felt so.. urban! Of course we toured all the monuments, and i elbowed the President in a game of basketball. No pain no game Prez! I woke up in a strange room with a single hanging light and a horrible headache, the last thing I remembered was black suit yelling THE PACKAGE IS DOWN! What is with him being called “The Package” anyway? I digress, we went through a couple museums and saw a thrilling documentary of the life of Sardines.. What exactly counts as an “Ocean Adventure” to those people is beyond me.. that's false advertising in my book. We had a fabulous time in D.C. the highlight of which was the Spy museum I think. Once I apologized at the YooHoo Summit and was pardoned, we thanked my friends family and were on our way back to school. The semester flew by and in the end, to keep the metaphor going, I had the wind at my back and it was smooth sailing. Did I mention I was on the Dean’s List Sea? Summer was upon us, and parting was such sweet sorrow as I bid farewell to Mo-town and my fair maiden. I traveled to the mysterious flats of Indiana with the hopes of finding a new summer job. As fate would have it, a technician at my Dad’s plant just had knee surgery so i was called upon to fill the void. It just so happened that the void was from 6 PM to 6 AM. So this summer i transformed from Alan to OWLan. The nocturnal lifestyle isn’t all that bad once you live it for a week or so. Our vacation was going to California to visit Brendon and Kari in Santa Cruz. This was the first time I had ever seen the west coast. No one told me that the water was coming from frickin Alaska though! I had to at least get one body surf in before I was thawed 500 years in the future, yes there are jetpacks, but no cute trash compacting robots! It was exciting to see San Fran and drive “The One.” The coast was amazing. Not to mention I got to see the origins of the Olson twins when they were still innocent little girls. We even tested the cars power steering down Lombard Street. Our other tangent was a trip to Monterrey where we lived it up in the city and toured a very interesting aquarium. This time I’m not being sarcastic. It was a very cool place. Sadly our visit had to end and it was back to the nightly grind. It wasn’t long before I returned to WV and moved into my new place here to live with my cousin Tim. Before school started I made a couple trips to see old friends in Pittsburgh and up to Clearfield once more. Before I knew it, Chemistry was upon me, and it was back with a vengeance. It’s like it is gunna be my job or something, you know what I mean? This semester has been another tough one, only a couple weeks left, and I eagerly await the results. I look forward to this break and seeing everyone again. Happy Holidays everyone! May the Noodle be with you!

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Now wasnt that beautiful? And keeping in the spirit, I thought I would share with you the tree topper I created after a jolt of inspiration by a pasta colored length of garland hanging in the store.

Take a moment to appreciate His Noodly Appendage as it gracefully dances with the boughs.Happy Holiday everyone!

Pa Pa l'Americano

2010-11-04T16:49:00.003-04:00

I wrote a couple entries during our travels, but lacked the time to complete them and the internets to post them. So now after a whirlwind of activity on our return from Europe I have had a chance to get them online. Here is a semi complete post I wrote on the way from Barcelona to Paris.

10/6/10, tenth month. October is the tenth month. Gotta get that through my head. For the past few months I have been writing the wrong number for the month, like all of the backup batteries throughout the entire boardwalk key scan system have the wrong month on them, I signed numerous checks, various forms and papers with the wrong month, and I also booked a flight from Barcelona to Paris with the wrong month. Good thing flights are so cheap here, it was a $20 flight and we rebooked for the same price, but seriously, how stupid. It has been a while since I updated, Kari and I have been going nonstop since she flew in last Sunday. We left the day after Kari got there so we had to cram in the munich experience as well as we could. It was basically straight from the airport to Oktoberfest, beer, went to Hofbrauhaus, beer, saw the glockenspeil, beer, delicious rotissery chicken, sleep. Great day. It really is a gross display of drunkeness at oktoberfest, as we walked down the hill before even entering the grounds we were greeted by a little brawl being broken up by cops treating the kids in ways that would make national news in the US, and after we walked by they took off right by us to stop another totally unrelated fight that started just 50 feet in front of us. Navigating the tents was the next challenge, you have to be at a table to get beer, and if you get there any time after 11am there are no tables, so after scouring 3 tents for an empty spot I devised a strategy, just look for a beer maid going down a row, stand next to a table in the row, and when she comes by just pretend you belong. "swei bier bitte". Those women are impressive, holding 4 one liter mugs with one balanced on top in each hand. 10 liters of beer at once, pretty intense. We did eventually find a table with some friendly germans and stood on the tables singing along to songs, some in english (sweet caroline, YMCA, and the like), some in german, it didnt matter, we were just having a good time.

Our next stop was Prague. The Czech Republic. It sounds so foreign. It was, of course, and loaded with history and impressive gothic relics. The biggest castle in the world, buildings from the BCs, an intricate astronomical clock. I wish I had more history on these places, we took a bike tour to learn what we could, but it turned into a pretty terrible experience. City Bike tours in Prague, what a sham. Well first of all, the Czech is not part of the European Union, so we had to get Czech Crown, which is about 20/1 with the US dollar, so when I got money out i got a single 2000 crown bill. Well the stinkin tour cost us 500 crown apiece, 5 of us followed Nikolai as he flew through the Prague streets without even a glance behind him to make sure we made it, somehow we all did, bounding over curbs, carrying our bikes up steep muddy hills, and swerving through traffic. His broken english and limited knowledge made for a pretty pathetic tour, and what he did tell us about I am fairly certain was made up on the spot. We did make it to some pretty awesome places on the journey though, it is a beautiful city. That night we experienced what FHM magazine said was one of the top 10 adventures in the world, the Prague Underground bar crawl. A young chick from louisiana started it 5 years ago, she and about 30 others met at the first bar, we drank free for 2 hours, played some foosball (or kicker as some here call it), and the rest of the night was a jumble of clubs, drinks and dancing, we met some germans, some aussies, brazilians, it was a pretty great time, though i wouldnt even give it top 10 adventures of my life, Im not sure what FHM was thinking.

It seemed kindof inapproriate to me to go to a natural history museum while on vacation, rocks being rocks and animals being animals wherever you are, but the National Museum in Prague was incredible. We walked in unaware of what we were getting into and ended up spending more than 4 hours wandering the exhibits. Thousands of specimens of rocks and minerals were enough to occupy and amaze you all day, but it led into thousands more of fossils, huge rooms full of taxidermied animals and skeletons, specemins like a stuffed giraffe and an entire whale skeleton, anthropological exhibits of the culture of prehistoric man and human evolution in the area with rooms full of artifacts and bones. I loved it, and Kari did a great job of pretending to. Just outside of the museum we had Italian food better than any I had in Rome, in Prague, weird. I am going to just have to do a whole seperate write up of the culinary experiences, that is an adventure in itself.

Oktoberfest is in Tents

2010-09-25T03:07:00.003-04:00

I am now in Munich Germany looking at the glow of Oktoberfest from our platinum club hotel room a few blocks away from the park where it is held. Freakin nice. I have 2 more days here in Munich with the guys and then they leave and Kari flies in, it has just been a whole mess of awesome and it is not going to stop. Switzerland was a blast, the high points all being because of a little snowboard shop called Popcorn. I demoed a Burton board from the shop and it was awesome, it was a $1500 board, so it better be, and it did not dissapoint. we took the half hour gondola ride up to the glacier in the morning and rode until the slopes closed at 2, they close it early because the afternoon sun melts the snow and makes for bad conditions, but while we were out there it was great. I was surfing the snow all day, i felt invincible on this board, it carved like a dream, was responsive, light, fast and nimble, and it was all great until I went for a jump in the snowboard park, i tried a few times and the park was just way too big for me to handle. I hit it, biffed the landing, and it was fine, but then when i got up and was boarding down the icy landing ramp I caught an edge on my nice new sharp edged snowboard and next thing i knew i was lying in thge snow and couldnt breath. Really it was no big deal, I fell unexpectedly and a hard sunglasses case in my pocket jammed into my chest and knocked the wind out of me, but then i was sitting there and couldnt breath and i kind of freaked out a little bit. I am a pretty level headed person, reasonable, unflappable you might say. Well that flapped me. I think that somewhere in the back of my head I was having some kind of post traumatic episode, lying on the ground unable to breath I thought maybe my lung collapsed again, maybe thats something that if it happens once it is easier to happen again, so i am contemplating the fact that i am dying right now, rocking back and forth trying to make something happen and I finally ghet one big breath in, that felt so good, but if you have ever had the breath knowcked out of you you know what it is like after that, you cant breath back out and when you finally do it comes out in a terrible groan, so i sat there struggling to breath in and then groaning out as i rock back and forth for a little while. I finally got back to normal and boarded back to the bottom and sat there for a minute trying to figure out what just happened to me, both physically and mentally. I was really freaking out, like i was scared to go down thge slope again, but i wasnt about to let myself get in my own way... so I went and booked it down the next slope and it was fantastic and i was fine. But man was that a weird experience, i wasnt quite right for the rest of the day. The night before we hit the slopes we went to the "discotech" that we heard was world famous for its parties. It was at Popcorn, the snowboard shop, which turned into a rockin dance party at night with a full bar and a DJ. We partied all night with mostly locals, we were the only americans in the whole place, which made us instantly awesome, and we knew every song they played because they played the exact same music you would hear at a club in the states, and we had a great time.

Heely segway shoes, they have a wheel in the heel like heelys and the mechanics of a segway.

The train ride to Rome was interesting, we spent most of the trip trying to converse with 2 Italian women and a German couple and learnig what we could of the italian language, it was pretty fun. We stopped in Milan and explored the city a bit, got some pizza at a little cafe and it was magnificent, I ate pizza at least 6 times in Italy and none of it even came close to the caliber of the Milan pizza. Our waitress didnt, or wouldnt, speak english so ordering was a bit difficult, I saw what I figured would be sausage pizza and went for that, Jon took a shot in the dark at a Napoli pizza, and when it came to Zack he looked up wide eyed in shock and pointed to Jon and said same as him. Our pizzas came out, my delicious sausage pizza, and... I kid you not... it turns out Jon and Zack both ordered sardine pizzas. It was salty and fishy and really not very good, edible, but definitely a mistake, a ridiculous hilarious mistake. So all in all great dining experience for me, not so much for the others, and we went on to Rome. Our hostel was great, one of our rommates joined us for the evening, he was from a navy ship not much smaller than an aircraft carrier that stays out at sea almost all the time and just sits, loaded with weapons and vehicles, to act as a first response should quick action be needed in the area. That night I put my Vibram 5 fingers on for the first time and the response was unexpectedly insane. They are shoes that have toes, like toe socks with soles basically, and people freaked out about them. I talked about them in the hostel bar till it closed, went around the corner to a bar and the manager sat down with us and we had little bargaining war as he tried to buy them from me, he was ready to take my offer of 60 euroes and the sandals he was wearing, but he decided he would see what he could find online first making me promise to come back the next day. I didnt, i bet he was pissed.

Dang is the Colleseum big! That was impressive. The city was full of historic sites that even today were incredible to see, to imagine what it must have been like when it was built to see such incresdible feats of architecture is mind boggling, no wonder Rome was so powerful. A full days walk got us around to most of the main points in the city, and on day 2 we went to the Vatican City. People... I saw the pope. not a picture, not even through glass, just me lookin at the freakin pope. There was a ceremony on the vatican grounds and he was there in front of thousands of people, including me. I snuck my new swiss army knife past the guards. The Vatican museum started with an extensive display of egyptian art, which totally blew my mind. I thought it was going to be entirely devoted to catholicism and its history but the first 3 or 4 rooms were all egyptian artifacs and information about their culture and religion. The rest consisted of a ridiculous amount of roman sculptures, some out of place modern art, some truely impressive paintings, a couple hundred gift shops, and last but not least, the sistene chapel. The effort put into every detail in the chapel made it an incredible sight to behold, that guy was good.

After another train ride and talking the night away with a new friend from Berlin we are now in Munich enjoying Oktoberfest. They serve beer in liters here. A liter is a lot of beer. A lot of good beer. One thing i was not expecting was the rides. There are more, bigger, better rides here than at the amusement park I have been working at for the past few months, it is insane, we rode a roller coaster that just flings you through the 5 olympic rings, got flipped and turned and flug on other rides, then went and ate a delicious bratwurst and got a liter of beer, standing on tables and clanking sloshing cheers with random passersby as we do our best to sing along with thousands of others crowding the massive tents, what a crazy place to be! The famous Munich glockenspeil. Dissapointment. Traditional German clothing. Awesome. There are more people walking around in lederhosen and dimdl than not. I feel out of place without leather pants and suspenders on. Who ever thought that would happen. The guys kind of look ridiculous, and the girls, well, i dont look, but i have heard that they look pretttty good, with their shirts all down to there and skirts up to here. Thats what they tell me.

We are now getting ready for the monastary, if i survived the vatican in the presence of the pope, i am pretty sure i can get through this without any smiting. we will see. Pictures will come once i get home and get the time.

Eurotrip

2010-09-19T10:07:00.000-04:00

9/14 over the atlantic- I did not expect to be this excuited to be llanding in Europe. I think "giddy" is appropriate. But lets not get ahead of ourselves, most importantly on the agenda, get a load of this, you may remember my last home in Pennsylvania before moving to California was on California Ave, and then my last home in California before moving to Pennsylvania? Pennsylvania Ave. **Cue Twilight Zone music** Crazy right? I am going to have to find a Hawaii Ave. And speaking of a place to live, I dont have one! After legitimately trying to get a job for the last few months, I have absolutely nothing to show for it, not even a phone call. The closest I have come to getting an interview is the first sentenceof the 3 rejection emails I have received. Thank you for your interest in a position with our company, after reviewing your application... bla bla bla. At least some real person looked at my resume, I am probably more excited about those rejection letters than I should be. My resume was recently reviewed by someone at Pioneer for a job working with corn hybrid crops, i know that because of the rejection letter, but at least I know that.

9/18 On the train to Saas Fee Switzerland- There is nowhere in the US that is anything like Amsterdam, though I think Santa Cruz is one of the closest. The architecture is amazing, all of the buildings have an aire of importance, maybe arrogance in their old age. I suppose I am just not used to seeing such old buildings and the architecture that goes with it, I have only been exposed to it in history books and movies, so to see it in real life it just seemed important. We made friends with a couple on the train earlier today and they live in a building that was built in the 1500s, I cant even begin to appreciate the history that their one building has been through, but it isd all like that, this whole freakin continent. Its so old. Beautiful buildings, the city is right on the water, parks throughout the city, a canal system throughout the city, it was awesome. Of course, that is what they made it for, to look so great, it is one gigantic tourist trap, we literally met 2 actual Dutch people the whole time, one of which on the train out. We were in a crowd of about 150 people watching a street performer and he was desperately trying to get someone to say the Dutch word for torch, but literally nobody within earshot of this poor screaming man knew the answer. All tourists. We had an opportunity to see the real Holland with a Dutch girl we met through our hostel mates, but my travel buddies had other plans, we rented bikes and toured the city, which was a great experience. The streets are packed with bikes and vespas, the occasional car honks its way through the crowd, but bikes rule the road my a great majority, you are free to go anywhere and park your bike any time without worry. WWII is a much bigger deal here. Everyone in Amsterdam speaks perfect english. There are Swiss Army men everywhere in Switzerland. You get weird looks when you go into a coffee shop and only get a coffee. Shared hostels = no sleep.

We have checked in to our bed and breakfast in Saas Fee, it is nice here at the resort, but we can see the glacier and the peaks 10,000 feet up covered in snow and people walking around with ski equipment, its weird. The bus ride up was incredible, winding through the valleys of the alps, through tunnels and over bridges, surrounded by centuries old villages, mountain streams and waterfalls. This is gonna be good.

9/19 It was good. More on this later.

Why My Mom Didn't Know About My Stitches Until the Rest of the Internet

2010-07-27T15:35:00.002-04:00

I'll keep this short. I was in an awkward position at the top of a ladder, I cut a zip-tie and the knife continued through and grazed, GRAZED, my knuckle. I put a bandaid on it, it was fine, continued with my day for a couple hours but my swampy hands wouldnt allow a bandaid to stay on for long and i had to go to the nurse to get some tape. I tried to get the tape without showing her the cut, but my boss happened to be in the nurses office when i walked in. So she saw it, and she freaked out. This 20 year old nurse was freaking out like my finger was about to fall off and insisted I go to the ER, and my boss had to agree with her. She started filling out paperwork, recording that the cut was 1/4 inch deep... a security guard that was in there who was an EMS corrected her estimation, he said 1 mm, that was more like it. A paper cut. I protested as much as i could, insisting i would sign any paperwork to absolve them of responsibility, asking if I could wait till tomorrow to see how it looks... just really trying not to make my supervisor drive me to the ER at 8 pm. It didnt work. So I went, all of it workers comp of course, got the stupid stitches in my paper cut, and that was that. Then when it came time to get them out, all of the nurses at the boardwalk either said that they legally couldnt, or had never seen stitches like that and didnt know how to take them out, and I couldnt find on google how to properly take them out, so I made the mistake of going back to the ER, and you know what happened then.

Dominican Hospital Disappointment

2010-07-20T03:58:00.008-04:00

I am pissed. It is 1 am, I just got back from the hospital, Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, CA, where I went for the minor procedure of getting 3 stitches removed, it was the worst experience I have ever had in a hospital. I died in one once. This was worse.

I showed up about 11:30, I went late to avoid the more crowded daytime hours thinking the wait would be minimal, it wasnt, though I cannot hold that against Dominican, thats just how it happens in the ER. I give my basic info to the first receptionist and was almost immediately called to receptionist number 2, "wow, that was fast" I said with a look of hope on my face "Oh," says receptionist #1 "Dont let that fool you, we are really slow here." Awesome. After receptionist number 2 I take my seat in the waiting room and inhale the stale hospital scent mixed with the stagnant aroma of multiple cups of old coffee left on the table next to me. As I sit amongst fellow patients and the friends and family of those who have already been admitted, I am inevitably drawn to the television. Dominicans waiting room television policy: think of the kind of television that would be least appropriate for a hospital waiting room, turn that on and turn the volume up. We are watching a show based on hurting people, how funny it is, and being rewarded for it, MTV's Silent Library. In the hospital waiting room. My head is buried in my hands, the only man more miserable than me is being rolled by on a stretcher, a punk kid fights to stay quiet as he gets whipped by a jumprope in the whirling hands of a boxer, I have been here for 12 minutes.

The wait continues in a similar fashion, the occasional stretcher, the moments of hope when a receptionist starts calling names, the fat man with nipple clamps attached to RC cars. I try to zone out, slip away from the waiting room. "Jackass up next." You've got to be kidding me. Back to back episodes opening with Johnny Knoxville getting kicked in the balls by kindergartners. An hour goes by. Finally the moment of hope turns into actual progress as my name is called. I get up, walk with the nurse and I swear I did this, she asked me how I was, and, im serious, I smiled. I looked into her eyes, smiled and said I was doin alright. Somebody saint me. Get the pope. Damnit St. Brendon is already taken.

So I am finally getting somewhere as I follow the doughy figure adorned in urban camo scrubs to my room. She gets her suture removal kit and starts poking at my stitches, apparently the doctor put them in very tight and she will have to do some digging to get under the stitch. Great, fine, please, I told her "dig to your hearts desire, I can handle it". So she starts digging, and no, no iodine, no alcohol, not a single sterile wipe or even a request to wash my straight-from-work hands. I had three of these funky stitches that are only showing the knot on one side, as my skin had grown over the tight loop on the other side. She successfully got her snips under the knot, a quick snip and... wait, no I dont think you quite got it, you just snipped the ends of the knot off, I can see the knot still there in my skin, you see there are only two tiny pieces of the suture in the tray, oh you are moving on to the second one, okay. She snipped the second one successfully and to my surprise it pulled all the way around the other side with no trouble. On to stitch three and she snips it fine, just has to pull the remaining piece, and... she cuts it right off, leaving every bit of suture in my skin that was already in there. She continued to suggest that she had taken out the sutures and I would question her every time. When I point at the black knot still clearly in my skin on the first stitch she said it often will look black at first. When I ask if it is okay that some of the suture is left inside, she tells me she thinks we are lookin great. She is wearing urban camo scrubs. I am confused and full of suture bits. Nobody is looking great. She leaves to get the doctor, telling him "Room 20 needs a final look, I just took his sutures out."

I am sitting there looking at my hand that still had the majority of the stitches left in it when the doctor comes in, a red headed dude with a mustache, he looks like the MAD magazine kid 30 years later. A quick glance at the job and he turns into a fountain of "It looks like we are going to be fine." About three of those and he heads for the door, it was no longer than 10 seconds he was in the room before he starts to leave. I ask him to wait, ask him whether some of the suture could stay in, show him the knot still in my skin, show him the few bits of suture in the tray, tell him that only one came out. The fountain starts again, 7 more "It looks like we are going to be fine." Though apparently I am convincing enough for a second look and after taking an actual look at me, he does see the knot still in my skin! After acknowledging that I was right, he wants to just leave it in, but I insist he could do whatever it would take to get it. Camo pops around the corner "He has been so brave!" With little effort Dr MAD fishes it out, cuts it and pulls it through, painless, simple. Again he tries to leave. Again I stop him. There is still another stitch, the third one. He takes a look. "It looks like we are going to be fine." The stitch is in there, just like the first one was. Is that okay? "It looks like we are going to be fine." I sit, mouth gaped, as he walks out the door. Camo nurse comes back in and I continue my protest with her, and I start to get an attitude. I never ever get to that point with people, especially strangers, I was being totally dismissed and it was getting to me. I ask her how it was okay to leave the stitch in there, which she insists was normal. Why did I have to come in to get it removed if you were just going to leave it in? I thought you would clean it and take all the stitches out, how am I done here? I ask her all of this in an uncharacteristically rude tone and she dismisses it all. I sign some pink piece of paper in a huff, though I shouldnt have, and storm out the door.

I don't know what I can do about it, but I feel like I should do something. I know that removing sutures is not the most important thing on the doctors plate, but to address my concerns like they did, and for the nurse to insist that she had completed a procedure that she clearly hadnt, the doctor to completely fail in his faux check up if not for my insistence that he do something, it was horrifying, degrading, seemingly unsterile, and definitely a waste of my time, I am 100% certain that I could have treated myself better at home with a swiss army knife, with just the scissors.

What can I do?

Navi Boobs

2010-07-05T15:22:00.003-04:00

When I watched Avatar for the first time I was amazed, along with the rest of the audience, by the fantastical world that was created on the screen. I saw it twice, and both times after the show I said something about how ridiculously far fetched it was for life to come about in a way so similar to our own, most notably I laughed out loud when the first navi woman came on screen and she had breasts, wearing a bra. But when I expressed my amusement at this fact afterward, both times I saw the movie, I got the same response- "Well of course they would have boobs, why wouldnt they?" Well why would they? Breasts are for mammals, they are mammary glands, so you are telling me that life formed totally separate from ours, evolution followed the same path through random mutations to the genetic code and ended up with virtually the same creature, only blue, that feeds its young through 2 mammary glands on its chest. Well of course, right? Evolution creates the perfect organism through its workings, so ending up like a human is the only way to go, humans are the pinnacle of evolutionary perfection right? Right? NO WAY! Evolution is far far far from perfect, and I dont think I am disagreeing with anyone when I say that humans are also quite far from perfect (except the millions who believe that we are created in the image of god and we are actually what perfection looks like... what a disappointment). Evolution does not always give you the best possible outcome, it can only do so much to make progress. One good example is a nerve in the giraffe, the laryngeal which travels from the brain, all the way down its neck to the heart, around an artery, and then all the way back up the neck to connect to the larynx, without serving a single function anywhere besides the start in the brain and the end at the larynx. This pathway works perfectly fine for our distant ancestors, but the wasted energy and space that the mammalian neck, especially the giraffe, exhibits is an astounding example of the imperfection of evolution. For the record I tried to see if James Cameron, the director of Avatar, had anything to say on the subject, and when he was asked why the Navi had boobs, he said it was because it will be humans that are watching the movie and thats what humans want to see. I am so glad he didnt try to justify it any further than that.

Now I dont want to go on too long about that, I think everyone knows that Avatar was far fetched, I wont even get into the fact that they were relying on the DNA of the Navi to be of the same construction as our own, you know, our inefficient system of ATGC, all coding the same proteins through the same mechanisms... just ridiculous... so ya, I wont get into that. But this did lead me into a more interesting train of thought. When contemplating the imperfection/incompletion of human evolution, I tried to think of a way that the human population was still evolving. My brother said that he thought there was much evolution to still occur, that we will soon overpopulate the planet and bring ourselves to a point where we will be competing for resources and there will actually be a fitness curve for various traits allowing success in such a society. I disagree, first I think that humans posses the intelligence to keep ourselves from getting to that point, and even if we were to reach that point, I think that genetic traits would have nothing to do with our ability to survive. With human politics and such advanced social networks, it is the situation that one is born into that often has the most to do with how their life is lived. Just because one boy is born in a third world country and another is born to an upper class family, does not mean that the genetics of the upper class boy are more "fit" but he will have a better chance at survival.

Could we still be evolving? When looking at the evolutionary fitness of a human individual, ultimately it is the rate of reproduction which determines fitness. You only have to look at: can they have lots of babies. And tell me in todays society who cannot have babies... everyones doin it. I thought for a while trying to think of a trait that still could be evolving, its not like people who are taller reproduce more, or smarter, or better vision, or better athletes, or have better backs... We have all kinds of problems that seem like they would be selected against in a primal kind of society, but with the complex society that we have developed, well, everybody is having babies, we have reached what seems to be a self imposed evolutionary standstill.

There is one factor that I think may be acting on the human population today. Going as much as I can to the heart if the matter, I think there may be one trait that would lead to a better reproduction rate for humans, and that is the ability to reproduce later in life. The human population has extended its lifetime well beyond what we are made to live, like I said, evolutionary standstill, we were made to die in what we now call our middle aged years, and yet the life expectancy is on a constant rise. This changes the oh-so-important reproductive habits as well, as we are now educating ourselves and being taught abstinence and birth control all through high school and college, which, physically, are really our prime baby makin years. The social norm for having children has been climbing right along with the age expectancy as the human body's age of fertility stays relatively even. Now improved health definitely plays a factor in how old a man or woman maintain fertility, but there has got to be a genetic factor as well. This trait, I think, would be selected for in todays society. If one woman can have a child at 47 and the next at 48, it may be a small difference, but thats all it takes to change the presence of a trait in a population, and I think that is a conceivable possibility. So, I guess it doesnt look like anything is going to happen with our not quite fully evolved bipedal anatomy, male pattern baldness is not going anywhere, we are not evolving into a super intelligent race, and sadly the women of the world are not evolving into (i dont know where this idea just came from, but its awesome) a perfect blend of the Jessicas (You know-Alba, Simpson, Biel(,Rabbit?)), but hey, in the future, women could be popping babies out when they are 70 years old, so there is that to look forward to. You know, by that time we will probably be artificially altering the human genome so maybe all of those things can happen... and you know what that means- Jessicas everywhere.

Keepin California

2010-07-02T13:51:00.002-04:00

The plan was to drive across the country with Kari, have my fun in the California sun, and then drive back with her, right now, in the end of June. It will come as no surprise that I have decided to stick around California for a bit longer than planned.

I landed a pretty awesome job at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, and after the... less than awesome... temporary jobs I have been grappling with over the past year, I figured that staying in California to finish with a fun exciting job would be a good idea. I walked into the HR department at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk as I spied it while biking by one day about a month ago, and the lady behind the counter told me I would be perfect for their tech services job, she wouldnt even let me apply for the other jobs. Well I applied, I interviewed, I second interviewed, and I was accepted. After learning the start date, I told my future boss that I would have to take a week and a half off to drive my girlfriend home, this after being told I would have a tough time getting more than 3 days off in a row, and to my surprise he said that would be fine. I started working 3 weeks ago and I have loved every minute of it.

The first 2 weeks of my employment were spent assembling the bandstand on the beach for the free concerts that we put on every friday during the summer, we have bands like Herman's Hermits, Blue Oyster Cult, Eddie Money, Spin Doctors, and I cant forget Cory Feldman's band, singing about global warming and saving the environment. I am not allowed to publish some stories I have on the internet, but be sure to ask me if you get the chance, good stuff. So, days are spent erecting trusses for all of our equipment, raising and positioning speakers, lights, cables, monitors. I spend almost all day playing in the sand, working on the beach, and climbing around 25 feet up in the trusses. All of this interspersed with calls into the tech services department about problems with various rides in the park, so I would have to stop playing in the sand and go flip a switch at one of our rides and then give it a couple test runs. I love my job.

I am currently fulfilling my duty to drive Kari back home to finish school, it has been a great adventure on the way back, taking the northerly route, through Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois. I will post later about our experiences on the trip.

I have a personal little game I play sometimes, it is played at stoplights when there is someone behind you, the objective is to have the person behind you take their foot off the brake and scooch forward a little bit and you get higher points by making them move with the least movement yourself. You have to decide between moving quickly but not very far to give a sudden dramatic movement that will cause the driver behind you to take their foot off the brake, or making a slow lengthened movement that would travel about the same distance as the quick movement but take longer to do so, therefore giving more time to catch the attention of the driver behind you and getting the nudge forward. You may also then notice trends in car/personality types, equating type As with BMWs and the like, impatient, in a hurry, more likely to make the nudge. Motorcycles are resistant to the nudge. Vespas however are quite willing to nudge. Youll see.

Next time you make bacon, dont just make bacon, add some flavor. Maybe dump some brown sugar and ground red pepper into the frying pan... delicious. Then the next time, if you can resist the brown sugar again, pick out your favorite seasoning blend or a barbecue dry rub and sprinkle them on, the possibilities are endless and almost always turn out well.

Santa Cruzin

2010-04-15T12:56:00.005-04:00

Santa Cruz, California. It consumes you.

I decided after the last couple posts of pointless drivel just regurgitating what I was doing with my life I would only post when I had something interesting, thought provoking, constructive to say along with the status updates, or at least a good story. Turns out I dont have that many thought provoking things to say these days, or maybe just not the time and motivation to put it to words. Santa Cruz has a way of taking up your time, what with things like surfing, biking, climbing, beaching, etc all at your immediate disposal, or really just sitting outside enjoying the sun is a common time taker.

Constructive thought for the post: I have started drinking dirty martinis and when I couldnt find a way to make your own olive juice, I decided to make it up. 8 olives and a small garlic clove, mush 'em, put them in a sauce pan with 2ish cups of water, add a splash of vinegar (I used balsamic, red wine vinegar might have been a better choice, or maybe just red wine for that matter...), add a bunch of salt, like 5 tablespoons, just do it to taste, bring to a boil and simmer for half an hour. I put it in a jar unfiltered, just made me a test tini and its pretty good. Really though, I have no idea what Im talking about, I mean, I have consumed like 8 martinis, but I know what tastes good to me, it feels good to order a martini and know what you want. Dirty, extra dry.

Whew, being constructive is difficult, anyway, back to me. Santa Cruz has just been a whirlwind of awesome, it is going to take much longer than the three months I planned on being here to really get a good grasp on the area. So... Im staying until September. I got a job at the Boardwalk, a seasonal deal, the summer season ending in September, so I am going to drive Kari back home and fly back out here. I applied for a few jobs out here, the ice cream shop didnt hire me, the tourist trap candy store didnt, the coffee shop didnt, so I changed something, I figure it was the degree in bio, why would a bio grad keep such a menial job for any significant length of time? For my application to a grunt job at a photo lab I tried to think of the most boring, useless degree possible, so I could just tell them I didnt like the possibilities in my field. Communications. I told them I was a communications major, and it was an easy task convincing them I would rather handle hot metal photo plates all day than do any job that a communications major would do. They were looking for a longer than September commitment though, and I couldnt convince them that I would stay for as long as they wanted me. Maybe even a communications degree was too much. I didnt tell the Boardwalk that I have a college degree at all. The Boardwalk hired me. Not only did they hire me, but after telling me that I probably would not be able to take off more than 4 days in a row, I explained that I would need to take 12 days to drive home with Kari, after a couple days deliberation, my future boss, who interviewed me, said that it would be ok... I guess I made a good impression. An intelligent, motivated worker without the worries of a college graduate, what more could you want? It looks like I am going to be the first line of defense for the tech services team at the boardwalk, troubleshooting sound, electrical, computer problems in the park. Seems like it will be an interesting job and the timing is great, I will finish up the job and head to Europe.

So now, after the first wave of guests have come through, my brother will be here soon, Karis friend, thencmy friends, then my family... then we drive back. We have a pretty full schedule for the next month, but a good kind of full. The best kind of full.

Topics to address in the future: West coast people, blood type diet, Na'vi boobs. Stay tuned.

XC

2010-03-30T12:09:00.002-04:00

California here we come

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Evansville, Indiana; Dallas, Texas; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Mathers, Grand Canyon, Arizona; Las Vegas, Nevada; Santa Cruz, California.

We have made it to Albuquerque and it has been amazing. We did lots of planning for things to do as we are bored out of minds driving through the deserts, the monotonous expanses of nothing. We have not needed any of it, sitting in the seat for hours and hours straight takes a bit of a toll, but it is endless entertainment watching the world change outside the window, that might change as the states get more square, but I dont think so, I am loving it.

Going through Tennessee, Arkansas, Kansas, it was not much different than the northeaster travels I am used to. I was hoping that would change as we entered Texas, but not a single tumbleweed crossed our path between us and Dallas, slightly disappointed, but it was still Texas. Our wonderful hosts took us through Dallas/Fort Worth, sampling the cuisine, buying souvenirs, attending the dog show, the usual. We went with Mick to scope out the huskys at a dog show in Forth Worth and had a hell of a time really just mocking the whole situation. The range of crazy you can find in a place like that is phenomenal, watching the people prance around with their little dogs, pampering them, cuddling them, it was just ridiculous. They had professional photographers going around to get pictures of owners and their dogs, so Mick and I got pictures with ours, they even put us up on their website (be sure to browse through the other photos, noticing how many of them are just people), I think ours deserved best in show, dont you?

So now we are at a hotel in Albuquerque preparing for our trip to the grand canyon where we will be camping for 2 days before heading to Las Vegas. I thought $15 a night for a camping spot at the canyon was pretty decent, and then I booked a hotel on the Vegas strip for the same amount... oh well. There are lots more things to talk about and pictures to share, but we are on the move, so we gotta get movin. Come back soon for some hopefully spectacular views of the Grand Canyon.

High up in the hills of California... Avenue.

2010-01-14T12:05:00.008-05:00

Hey internet, been a while since I updated, I started writing this like a month ago and just didn't finish, so, here goes.

Well, I have made the move to the other end of the Pennsylvania turnpike, made another visit out to Indiana's early morning dew, and prematurely fulfilled my calling to "high up in the hills of California". Ironically Kari and I have rented an apartment at the tippy top of a hill... on California Ave. Ha! We still have plans to move to Santa Cruz in April, into the bottom apartment in her grandmother's duplex. It looks like it will be amazing, the house is at the top of a hill and the beach is at the bottom (This just in, might actually be too good to be true, the owners are looking to sell the place thinking they can get over a million for it... more on this later). The past month has been full of hustle and bustle. Moving to Pittsburgh, touring this half of the country for family time over the holidays, a trip to Vegas, I have literally only spent a week of the last month at my own apartment. It was great to see all the family, the gathering are starting to grow, with cousins getting married and having babies and all that junk. There were 32 Aunts Uncles and cousins at the Rawlings gathering, and that wasnt even everyone. So many Rawlingses.
Right, so since I started writing that, our California accommodations have changed a bit. Kari's grandma let us know that the landlords are kicking her out and selling the place cause they think they can get like a mil for it. And she has to be out in a month, after living there for 13 years... something tells me there is more to this story that she isnt telling us. So we have been looking online for places to live and it looks like we will be able to find something for a reasonable price, or maybe we will just have to live out of the car, whatever, itll be good. We already have loads of people that are going to come out to visit, so I guess we will have to get a place. And hey, if you wanna experience the west coast with a free place to stay, come on over.

My employment status has elevated to "occasionally" with a trip to a temp agency Staffmark. I worked 4 days last week stuffing tax audit booklets into envelopes for the state of WV, and I just accepted a job sorting through Netflix returns from 3am to 8am tomorrow. It is simple, mindless work, and though even the simplest task takes its toll after 5100 repetitions (about how many times I figure I repeated the same arm motion when stuffing envelopes), the hardest part about it is the mental agony I go through just sitting there without a single mental stimulation all day. I think about lots of things, sometimes thinking that I should write the idea in my blog. That got me thinking about how long it has been since I updated last, though I have been unemployed for most of the time between posts. I realize that I always have something to do while I am sitting at home, something to occupy my mind. I play Nintendo, read articles, look for jobs, Stumble, my mind is too busy with other things to think my own thoughts through. It is a good reminder that I need to give my mind time to do its own thing. I am still as forgetful as ever, so i dont remember most of the things that I thought "hey, I should remember this", which is why I started carrying around a memo pad, though they dont give you breaks of any sort with the work I am doing, which im pretty sure is illegal, no 15 minute breaks, 8-4:30 with just a 30 minute unpaid lunch.

I didnt know what to expect when I started this envelope stuffing job, for some reason I was expecting some kind of slave labor set up with a bunch of sad old women sitting at cold metal tables in a room full of printers supplying them with an endless pile to work on. I show up to "Triangle Systems", enter the room in the back of a business park, turn the corner, lo and behold, there are 10 tables lined up in 3 rows and beyond that the whirring and clunking of 3 huge printers spitting out the 8000 booklets we are to stuff today. An old lady comes in and sits down next to me. We go through the procedures, the strategies for moistening the envelope glue (luckily we dont have to lick every one, not after what happened to George Costanza's fiance), and she avoids me for the rest of the day, like I was trying to talk to her about her kids and stuff and getting one word answers. Worst old lady ever. She has been stuffing envelopes for 8 years and you can tell. In my boredom I counted how many envelopes I do in a day, around 1600, and figured out I make about 4.5 cents per envelope completed.
I also completed a research study with UPMC, they are doing studies on brain injury patients. I went in and did a little memory test, she started by reading a list of numbers and asking me to repeat them, adding more as she went. I think I got up to a list of ten for that. Then she went on to letters, same drill. Then the tough part. She read a list of letters and numbers mixed together and I had to go and pick out the numbers and give them back in numerical order, then the letters in alphabetical order, I got up to 9 but couldnt handle the list of 10. She said that I was doing so well that she was having trouble keeping up herself as she wasnt used to going that far with it. I dont know if i was actually that good or if she was just used to working with more serious brain injuries... ha, but i think i did well. They then took me through some memory drills on a laptop which were fairly simple, one had to do with letters, like, is this the same as the letter we showed two letters ago, and one was spacial, like, is the dot in the same box as two boxes ago. The laptop exercises were repeated while I was getting an fMRI, so I layed in the scanner for about an hour, clicking buttons on a glove in response to the exercises, it was kind of a crazy experience being in there. It is freakin loud, and not like mechanical noises, but highly variable notes that sounded like they were coming from speakers. I dont know if it is the different magnetic resonances that make different notes, but whatever it was it was really distracting, I started getting into the rhythm and I started to make music out of the noises, haha, and kept losing my concentration on the test. I am going to try to get my results, could be interesting. They referred me to another test that is testing acetylcholine medication on TBI patients, so I am going to start that one soon as well, the first payed 100, this one will pay 250, maybe I will just do this for a living, professional guinea pig.

Ah I didnt even touch on Vegas (click that blurry picture, its a pan of the strip I took, its not actually blurry), admittedly it wasnt as exciting as my last trip, but as always it was a rockin time, did a lot of gambling, saw Cirque Du Soliel's Ka, caused some trouble, good time had by all. I also have to mention our adventure at seven springs last friday, we got 27 inches the night we decided to go, the boarding was awesome, it is not often you get to snow in serious powder like that in PA, but needless to say we were not going home in that. We sat at the bar well into the night, found ourselves in that state of special sleepyness that comes after a night at the bar, and slept on the floor in a meeting room at the hotel. So, I am finally settled in the burgh, its good to be back with all my friends and closer to all my family, and I am looking forward to the next couple months before the Californiadventure begins. Life is good.

Oh the Weather Outsides Delicious.

2009-12-20T09:01:00.005-05:00

Philadelphia is seeing the second largest snowfall in December ever recorded, look at the table on our back porch, that is a good 18 inches of snow, its up over my knees walking around out there. It has been a couple years since I have been in the snow, and I am loving it. The first thing I did when it started piling high was whip up a batch of some good ol' snow ice cream. Heres how:

You will need
-4 cups snow
-4 Tablespoons milk
-1/4 teaspoon vanilla
-3 Tablespoons sugar

Go get 4 heapin cups of the good powdery stuff right off the top of the snow in a nice big bowl. Add the vanilla, sugar, and lastly the milk. Good substitutions for the milk would be egg nog, which I just tried- delicious, some baileys irish cream perhaps, or an creamy variation you can think of. After all the ingredients are added the powdery snow reacts strangely like flour, it kind of turns into a loose doughy mixture. Just mix it up well and youre done, eat it quick because the integrity deteriorates quickly, though the last few bites when it is just the right amount of melty are always the best. Dont be afraid to experiment, add some cinnamon, chocolate powder, fruit, go crazy. Enjoy.

Trans-Siberian Orchestra LIVE!

2009-12-18T06:53:00.000-05:00

I am sure that many of you know what the Trans-Siberian Orchestra is and what they are all about. Making Christmas songs rock. Now, this initially seems like a pretty difficult task, one which I thought, in my limited exposure to Trans-Siberian, that they had managed to pull off. They go on a yearly tour around Christmas time, and Philadelphia was lucky enough to be pretty early on the list, just early enough to get your christmas music in before Thanksgiving (woo hoo!). Kari wanted to see them, and I thought it could be good, so I bought 2 tickets and was genuinely excited to go. The day of the concert arrives, and after driving to the Wachovia Center (I wont even say how much I paid for tickets and parking) we walk across the lot and through the crowd adorned in christmas hats and reindeer antlers I realize that I didnt really think about this at all. Did I really do all of this for Christmas music? In general I dont even like christmas music, let alone in the middle of November. I try to keep my hopes up as we take our seats, Kari and I entertained with people watching in the very diverse crowd. The people around us range from 3 to 172 years old and we have fun just observing while Ricky from Better Off Dead (great movie btw) goes up and down the stairs multiple times looking for his seat. The clamor of the crowd is full of excitement as the stage lights up and the emcee walks up on stage to a grateful roar of applause. We are told how the night is going to unfold, with a narrator telling us a christmas story interjected with the rockin Trans Siberian Orchestra. Sweet, lets do this. The narrator comes on, an old black man with a weathered tone and an audible grin, and sets the scene of some stranger going into a bar on a cold winter night. TSO starts into their first song, starting quiet and then... getting louder... and... and... and... oh... thats as loud as it gets. I thought the first two songs were some sort of joke before the concert would actually begin and they were going to wow us with their incredible sound system, but that never happened. Kari and I could carry out a conversation in normal speaking voices for the entire concert, babies 5 rows behind us were drowning out the music when they cried (cant blame them, I was pretty upset too), it was pathetic.

The rest of the concert/story played out with the man in the bar befriending a santa like character that sat by him and following the story that said santa man told. He would tell part of the story, I don't even remember what it was about now, and the last word in a section would be snow, so they would break into "Let It Snow" TSO style. Or something like that. The songs all ended up being the some over done mediocre music played by a bunch of showboating guitar heros headbanging with their long flowing hair, and the rockin violinist doing the same bend over and headbang for 4 seconds then fling hair back and run/dance for 10 seconds, all while "playing" the violin, often over her head or behind her back. The only people with hair less than a foot long on stage were the actual string section, which turned out to be a minor after thought in the concert. Yes, the string section, in the "TSOrchestra", was hardly even acknowledged, they went around to all the guitarists, narrator, pianists, back up singers, lead violinist, all by name and listing accomplishments, pause for applause for each, and then oh, ya, and the 5 members of phillys local orchestra in the dark corner in the back of the stage.

To make up for the less than exciting music, they had the previously mentioned guitar heros and violinist flailing on stage, but also featured dancing backup singers which were also a sad attempt at eye candy, and the most impressive part of the show which was the laser and light display (An interesting side note- they aimed the high powered lasers at the small sections between the sections where nobody would be blinded by them) and the pyrotechnics. The dancers ended up being an exciting repetition of- swing right arm down, swing left arm down, swing right arm out, swing left arm out, even when they were in the lime light center stage. Every song was the same desperate attempts at excitement, and for me just about every attempt was in vain, there were a couple songs that were genuinely exciting, like their best known rendition of Carol of the Bells, complete with fire shooting up with the beat, as well as the demonic sounding O' Fortuna with the entire auditorium lit up with red flames, both real and videos on every screen available. If the entire concert was carried out with the bravado of these few songs, I would have gotten more than I expected, but the few good bits were interlaced with an over hyped plethora of power chords, terrible acoustic originals from the creator of the TSO that put you to sleep (more than one with a Pachelbelian tune), ridiculous stunts (like the mini stage set up in the middle of the audience they were on for 10 minutes and it lifted up into the air and then sat back down)and a sad attempt at a story to give meaning to the whole thing. I think the show was summed up quite well by the character in the story when the old man had finished relating his fantastical tale (whatever it was). The old man asked "Well, did my story entertain you?" and after this story which fueled the whole show and they tried to inject with such excitement, you were expecting the character to say how great and entertaining the story was, however the response came... "It had its charms" and this is how the story was closed. So, was it worth the ticket price? Did it get me into the christmas spirit like it promised it would? Did the concert wow me with its rocking christmas tunes?... It had its charms.

Million Dollar Idea

2009-12-01T14:02:00.003-05:00

Everyone has one of those great million dollar ideas. Like the guy who made the pet rock? The guy made a million dollars. Or the "Jump to Conclusions" mat? pure genius! Well we all have these ideas, which inevitably end up just that, an idea. It is rare that... wait... I am sitting in the car with my parents and I just told them what I was writing about, my dad is relating his idea right now: Personal bobble heads. He has a couple different ideas, use a stereo lithography 3D printer to make exact bobbling replicas and hand paint them, or have a stock of general faces and you could personalize the painting. So that is just another example of those ideas that we all have, you are thinking of your million dollar idea right now aren't you? Well, as I was saying, it is rare that anyone actually brings this idea to fruition, and even then the attempts are often swiftly beaten down by the reality of the consumer market.

Every now and then the right idea will surface in the right persons head and they will be one of the rare few who actually tries to make that idea a reality. I am fortunate enough to have one of those few as one of my best friends, and a rare breed they are. It takes a special bit of ingenuity, a gamblers spirit, and a touch of crazy to take that leap. My friend fits that mold, he is actually embarking on a business venture right now, investing thousands of dollars and countless hours into his idea, and I am amazed that he is actually doing it. I know I am not one of those people, I'm never going to do anything with my ideas, so here it is, you knew it was coming, my million dollar ideas.

Just a couple days ago I had this idea, which is what gave me the idea for this post. I was thinking about a friend we met in the Bahamas, Dick from the boat Rio Dulce, and the fact that I owe that man a drink, but how could I buy him one? This led me to my million dollar idea. The Webar (thats web/bar... mixed together... ok the name isnt important). Set up a streaming high quality video of the patrons sitting at the bar and create a color code or something visible to the camera that distinguishes each seat. Allow users to go online and view the streaming images and, heres the kicker, buy drinks for anyone sitting at the bar. They could buy with a credit card from an online menu and specify who it is to be sent to with the color coding, send the drink and a message to go along with it, like, maybe your phone number, maybe your name, the possibilities are endless. You can scout out the scene before you show up to the bar, buy a couple drinks and drop your name with the men/women of your choice and by the time you get there half the work is already done, you already broke the ice, thats the hardest part! Ladies would get all hussied up and show off for the camera to get free drinks, and who knows what else people would do. The bar top could be interactive, enter your name so those online can see, it will tell you when someone bought you a drink, oh man there is so much you could do with it, I'm just thinking up more as I go. You could link up to your Twitter and Facebook and all that crap! And be like, hey, im at the Webar, buy me a drink! It almost seems practical in todays techno driven world, and if nothing else the novelty would be enough to make it a success. And... I could buy a drink for someone no matter how far away they are. The Webar.

This idea is not nearly as exciting, but it is something that I think would be very useful, in fact I would be surprised if it dosnt already exist, though it didnt turn up in a quick google search. Liquid screen protector. A slightly viscous liquid you could apply to your cell phone or ipod screen or whatever that would set and harden into a clear protector over your screen, and if it gets too scratched up and worn out, a special solvent would harmlessly take of the protector completely, leaving you reapply a fresh coat or do whatever you please with your still perfect screen. It would be a simple, universally applicable product with an ever widening market. There would be problems to overcome of course, like getting the product to set without compromising screen clarity, touch screen response, that kind of thing, but things that could be overcome. I know I would buy it.

I have more ideas, but I know I have gone on too long already, if you really want to know, email me, or call my google voice!

haha, and I will be glad to discuss my ideas and yours, maybe we can have an inspiring conversation that will turn us into one of those rare few.

Peters Township HS Reunion

2009-11-30T14:00:00.005-05:00

I'm writing this for all the fellow alum who joined me at the PTHS reunion on Saturday. Done in true Peters Township style at the Diesel night club, I wasn't sure how excited I was to attend... heck I wasn't even sure if I was attending, but I ended up going and I really am glad I did.

After graduation we set out to experience the real world and the people who inhabit it. At the time, I thought my graduating class was just your average bunch of kids, we had the go-getters and the lazy, the nerds, the jocks, the bandies, Mike Puchi... And everyone would go out and do their thing, some would succeed, some would fail, we would all just fade into the rest of the world and become just another part of the whole. That's not how it is though. And I didn't realize that until Saturday night. I have experienced the people in the real world, their work ethic, their intelligence, their personal hygiene habits, and I just went with it, its the real world, that is just how people are. But this Saturday I realized that is not just how people are, that's how the average person is, but the people I saw that night are not average. I walked into a room of good people who are ambitious and successful, and I was a little surprised at how glad I was to be there among them. I found myself talking to people that I hadn't spoken a word to since high school, as I am sure many people did, and I actually cared, I wanted to hear what they have done in the last 5 years and it is because they are good people who actually have something say, I want to hear what they are doing because they are actually doing something. Had they changed since graduation? No, not a bit, I just didn't appreciate it until it was put into perspective by reality.

There is nothing more that can be asked of you than to do something with the lives you have been given, and you are doing it, so, here's to you, PTHS class of '04, keep doing it.

Bad and Awesome

2009-11-17T07:24:00.007-05:00

I started my last post with disappointing news that I would not be going on the sailing trip. A fact that is even more depressing as I follow my brothers progress with the boat he is crewing on and the amazing experiences he is having, like this nonsensical awesomeness... he got pictures of sharks jumping out of the water... I didnt even know awesome got that awesome. I regret that I have even more disappointments this time as well. I have been planning on moving to San Diego with Kari where she got placement for fieldwork for three months, there were contracts signed, plans were made, and then last week they called and told her that they cannot afford to take her in as a (non-paid)student... so after all of her classmates have all of their placements figured out, she is back out again looking for somewhere that will take her in. There are prospects in Texas, Arizona, Boston, Virginia, all over the place, but... who knows what will happen. I am definitely moving back to Pittsburgh in December, though even that has been tainted with a bit of misfortune. I was supposed to be moving into a house with a few of my friends when a current resident moved to Colorado, but turns out the guy decided to be all ambitious and go to medical school instead of taking the nursing job in Colorado. So we have no room at the house and are mow looking for apartments around the area. It wont be too hard to find something, and it will be nice to live without roommates, Kari wasn't too excited about living with 5 other guys anyway.

The last few weeks I have been transforming into a nocturnal creature due to my work schedule, and it is great. We have started to work overnights in preparation for the biggest day of the year, Black Friday, or as it is officially called by Toys-R-Us, Green Friday, because they make so much money. My work nights are 10pm to 6am and I try to keep a similar sleep schedule when I am not working also, so I am up till at least 6 every day. A lot of people would look at this as a big pain, but i actually kinda like it, plus I get a whopping $1 an hour extra. I get up some time between 12 and 4, so I have time to do all the stuff that has to be done during the day, but then most of my waking hours are during the night. They say that nothing good happens after midnight, but I beg to differ. I have always been most productive after the rest of the world is asleep, I have written about that before. The things to do at night are far fewer, and therefor produce fewer distractions, I have nothing better to do than work on my resume (click that link there and not only can you see my resume, but you can edit it! Ah the power and wisdom of google), or do some dishes, or maybe write a blog.

OK, so I just got back from work, and another benefit of being out late, you get to experience all the crazys that inhabit the night. For example. I went out for food during our "lunch" break (interestingly they call it a lunch break no matter when you are working, in this case the break is at 2am) and when I came back, my coworker and I were walking through the parking lot when the sound of screeching tires caught our attention. We look over to see a car 30 feet away, maybe a Dodge Stratus, careening over the curb of the street that goes by the store at a good 40 mph. It was airborne as it flew over the 20 feet of grassy hill between the street and the parking lot, landing in a spray of shrubbery and dirt as it landed in the landscaping around the parking lot, crunched over the concrete barriers at the front of the parking spaces, its tires flattened by now it went sideways across the lot, hitting off the barriers in the spaces opposite, almost running into the building, at this point I expected things to stop, a driver who had been sleeping at the wheel to get out shaken... but they kept going, burning metal as the rims spun on the pavement, thankfully headed away from us towards the back of the store, they slid around the back and out of sight just as we heard another set of screeching tires, this time accompanied by a siren. The cop ripped through the side lot (opting to take the entrance to the lot that was 10 feet before the spot where the chasee had decided he wanted to go through) after the guy, and I hurried over to the other side of the store to see the rear entrance where they would have exited the lot, I got there in time to see that the car had lost control when it tried to make the turn out of the lot on flat tires and wound up nose hard into the embankment across the street. The cop was out, gun drawn, yelling at people to get on the ground and a woman was screaming, and then... I went back in to the store eat the panini I just bought. After relating the story to the rest of the crew in the break room, they went out to have a look at the damage done, mostly just to the shrubs that were now scattered on the lot, and watch the arrests, there were swarms of cops cars within a few minutes patrolling the area, which must have meant that someone got away, so I made sure I locked my car. I will be checking the news to figure out what the deal was, but for me that made for the most exciting night of work at Toys-R-Us I will ever have.

Well that was fun.

Google Voice

2009-11-06T19:42:00.004-05:00

Hey internet, look at this, Google voice, you link your phone numbers to a google number you pick and google works their magic to make stuff awesome, but really what you need to know is that you pick your own phone number, and the good ones will go fast. I got 754 BRENDOR, so... mines awesome, but act now if you want a good one. http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html

So you will go request an invite if you want to keep up your intercred, and if you need me, you can get me at 754 brendor.

I'm All Over It

2009-10-29T13:15:00.003-04:00

Okay, so the boat thing didnt happen. The frog said he wanted to leave this week, I told him I would look into travel options and whatnot and call him monday, it actually seemed like it was going to happen, and... his number was out of service. Must have gone back to frogland. Oh well.

The point of this post is really to express my admiration for the musical genius that is Jamie Cullum. A friend introduced me to him in high school after his first US release- Twentysomething. I was instantly enamored with his sound, he showed songs that I already knew from a totally different angle, and his originals sucked me in with their catchy melodies and jazzy beats. He does covers that you would never expect, like Pharell's rap crappin hip hoppin "Frontin", and totally spins it, jazzes it up, and turns it into something that is good, no, great. Twentysomething contains covers of some songs of today, like the aforementioned "Frontin" and Radiohead's "High and Dry", but also adds a little pop to some songs from the past, like Frank Sinatra's "I Get a Kick Out of You" and the classic "Singin' in the Rain". Twentysomething is not even why I am writing this, I should move on.

A couple of years after Twentysomething's release, the pending release of his second album "Catching Tales" got me excited, though I was skeptical that it could get any better than Twentysomething. The release of the first single "London Skies" fueled my concern that I would be dissapointed my the album, and upon its full release my concern was confirmed. Now dont get me wrong, the music is great, I still love it and many say it was an improvement, it just wasn't for me, didnt suck me in, lost some of the jazz i think. Just after the release I went to see Jamie play to a sold out Byham Theatre in Pittsburgh and he was incredible, full of energy, it was amazing to see the genius just oozing out of him on stage. Any doubt I had was gone. Then there was nothing for 4 years except little updates that he was working on some things, a rogue show now and then, some radio interviews, and a pretty sweet collaboration with Clint Eastwood on Gran Torino which got him a Golden Gldobe nomination for best original composition. He finally announced the release of his new album "The Pursuit" and went on tour, one stop being New York's Carnegie Hall, which I attended and it was awesome, just got me more excited for the new album.

Afraid that Jamie's music was headed in the wrong direction for me, The Pursuit had potential to turn me into one of those snooty "I like his old stuff" people. The first single "I'm All Over It" was released a couple weeks ago... I am so happy. It brought back all the excitement and drew me in just like Twentysomething did. He released the video which is crazy cool, and then, in accordance with his obsession with twitter, did a live video broadcast for his twitter followers. The broadcast is probably the best example of just how good he is at what he does. When an album is released it could be the product of so many alterations and polishing that it sounds nothing like the original recording. Jamie doesn't need polishing, and he proves it. Twentysomething was recorded and mixed on analog tape, meaning almost straight from the instruments and his voice to print, and this live twitter show is another example. Jamie sets up a mic and a webcam in his kitchen, and in perhaps the most informal situation possible, cranks out some damn good music, this might be more impressive than anything else I could show you, a recording some girl from Singapore did of her laptop playing the show Jamie did in his kitchen, broadcasting over twitter, watch it, really. In the broadcast he asked for requests, saying that he is sure that some people have gotten ahold of the new album even though it is not to be released until next year... which fueled me in a search through the dark alleys of the internet, which turned out to be pretty easy, and I am now listening to the full album. In all of its glory. Jamie has done it again, injected the new and old with his jazzy flavor while continuing to progress his style, produced some originals that will be played over and over, and created an album that could appeal to you, your grandma, the stinky guy at work, and most importantly, me. Thanks Jamie. You rule.

Stumbling Along

2009-10-08T20:24:00.003-04:00

Still in philly. Working at Toys-R-Us. It isn't exactly exciting, but it is satisfying to be working again, no matter what it is. I am enjoying my time, and in an attempt to take advantage of my current situation I am in contact with a guy who just bought a boat and needs it delivered to Florida from Connecticut. This might be the only job I will ever have that I can go up to the store manager and ask for a month off so I can go sail a boat to Florida and get a "yes" without hesitation. He did say he would really rather I didnt go, but thats as much resistance as I have seen. A while back I posted my profile on a crew finder website, not really thinking anything would come of it, as there are thousands of profiles on there. I had forgotten about it until about a month ago when I got a message from a guy who just bought a boat in Connecticut and needs it delivered to Florida. He lives in France and makes a living as a chef on yachts. It sounds great and he seemed like he had at least a basic knowledge of cruising and would kind of know what is going on. He is clueless...

I have talked on the phone with him a few times and he just gets more and more confused every time. We were originally supposed to leave on the 15th, but after his arrival in the US on the 2nd I guess he realized he had much more to do than he thought, and every call after that he has become more and more hopeless, to the point that I think that if I dont take it upon myself and go up and take the boat out of the slip myself, he might just stall until its too late. Everyone keeps telling me this is a bad idea... I am going to end up sodomized and finely chopped into chum by a crazy french chef... whatever, I miss the ocean, and I think he seems ok. It is kind of serving as a justification to me that I can go off sailing and it dosnt really affect anyone (except the less than thrilled Kari), makes my less than ideal situation worth it, in my head.

So other than that, theres not a lot going on in my life, not a lot to write about. Work is fairly routine, the most interesting about it is the people, the guys that work in the storeroom with me are pretty cool, but there is of course the requisite crazy. Unloading the truck one day I found myself in a conversation with one of the requisites about the reptilian overlords, the boy of wonder, Friday night mudwrestling and Saturday night monster trucks. After a contemplative silence, me going back over the absurd stream of consciousness pouring from this mans mouth, him, brewing his next profound insight, he lifts a box, looks at me and pauses as it clunks onto the rollers, our eyes locked "How well do you think the average human can handle the truth?", and goes on with his business, leaving me to marinade a bit in the broth of that insight. Thats pretty much how every interaction goes with him, lots of questions about the establishment, whether they care, why you care, if anyone cares, "do you consider yourself a good person" "sometimes I dont know if i am a person at all", "Good morning" "thats what they want you to think".

I would like to take this time to do a little spot for something that has taken up a lot of my time the past few years. A program called StumbleUpon (I just got lost for a good 20 minutes just by going to the page to get the link). They have over 8.5 million subscribers, so I am sure that some of you are already stumbling away your time like me, but for those who have not discovered StumbleUpon, tread carefully. This is no joke, you will waste time, it is an absolute guarantee, if you are have an addictive personality, very little free time, no self restraint, cataracts, back problems, are or may become pregnant, well then this is not for you. StumbleUpon is a simple idea, you supply them with interests, a quick selection of the columns of my interests gives : Archaeology Astrology Astronomy Gambling Genetics Geography Geoscience Psychics Puzzles Quizzes Racquetball. And after you supply them with a list of interests, they supply you with a button. And when you click that button a website comes up that others in the 8 million subscribers thought was interesting and that you would be interested in it as well. Its that simple. They of course go far beyond that by giving you a thumbs up and thumbs down button, giving you suggested interests to expand into depending on what thumbs you give, allowing you to network with other users, etc. etc. I have given a thumbs up to 351 sites and they can all be seen in my profile, I have worked long and hard on that list. So if you are a stumbler, add me as a friend, maybe i will share things with you, and if you are not, join us in our time wasting ventures into the interwebs.

Another amazing program. Picasa. Have you seen the new facial recognition feature? You give it one sample of a persons face and it goes off and finds more pictures of them, its incredible, I have tagged hundreds of pictures with peoples faces with hardly any effort, and it is remarkably accurate, in 100 suggestions of myself, the only inaccuracy was that in one picture it thought that Alan was me, a very forgivable offense. It tags them in sync with your google address book, and I dont even know what it can do from there. Google, you amaze me.

To a tree, who in the proper conditions could live an infinite amount of years, struggling with disease and damage day after day towards infinity, the agony of death must be just that much more devastating with so much unrealized potential.

Random Bag of Crap. Woot!

2009-09-25T19:03:00.002-04:00

Now, I feel a little strange about posting this on here, just because I don't know if all of you really appreciate the magnitude of this accomplishment, or at least the significance it has for me. Some of my closest friends and family know how much this means to me, and I know you are all happy for me and I thank you. So anyway, you must be wondering what is such a big deal. It is a Random Bag of Crap (or BOC, as we Wooters call it (or Bandolier of Carrots, Bulgarian Olympic Committee, Blinged-Out Cabbage, etc (you get it))). Now that doesn't sound exciting, and they make every effort at woot.com to make it unexciting, but the orders flood in at an incredible pace. Wooters wait for this item, hitting the refresh page over and over when a new item is about to arrive, and when one of these babys pop up, it is a scramble to get through the ordering process before the servers go down and/or all of the BOCs are sold. They sell around 2000 every time, and it is near impossible to click your way into getting one, as evidenced by the stats they put out after every woot item, here showing a blistering .089 seconds between orders. So why this fervor for a box of self-proclaimed "crap". Well woot has a new deal on something every day, they buy out excess and refurbs and things like that from other wholesalers for cheap and then put it on woot.com for a great price, this leaves them with some spare items sitting around, either too few to list, too damaged to sell, to crappy to put a price on, or who knows what else, and all of this randomness culminates in the BOC. BOCs have been known to house Nintendo Wiis, Xboxes, SLR digital cameras... or broken RC cars, obscure action figures, loads of cheap random cases, useless gadgets, anything imaginable really, and for $8 shipped, it is well wirth the gamble. I have been trying for years, literally years, to get one, and the last wootoff, on September 25th, was finally my time.

Order pace: 0m 0.089s

Woot wage: $122,049.53

Woots sold: 1499

I resisted the urge to post about this as soon as I got it, because I know the biggest question would be, well, what is in it. So I waited, and just a few minutes ago the mailman buzzed my apartment and I knew what was in store for me, so I bounded down the stairs and gazed with delight upon the hefty box that awaited. After a quick pic to text to friends and family, I opened her up and was shocked by the quantity of crap that stared back at me from inside the box. I started digging.

2 Smith and Wesson Galaxy 3 LED flashlights, with blue LEDs
1 Xpal iPower Power on the Go for the iPhone
1 Thermor wireless indoor/outdoor weather station with forecasting technology
1 DXG digital camcorder with MP3 player and 5.1MP digital camera capabilities
1 set of Sansa earbuds (as well as one pair with the camcorder)
2 EzyFlare emergency electronic flares
1 Energizer Energi To Go iPod spare battery pack
1 white cheese grater thing that I have not figured out yet
5 Excalibur vinyl bags roughly 18x12 inches with picture of scary red horse head
3 Daiwa bags, roughly 9x12 inches with a clip, a pouch, and a single pen pocket
1 horribly cheap looking air pressure gauge with pocket clip

So there it all is, it holds true to its name, and it was everything I had hoped and dreamed about and more. I will go online and try to figure out the value of my crap when I get back from work, but I think everyone can agree it was worth the $8 and the effort. Right?

Next to a Dream, Be a Laugher

2009-09-18T11:26:00.004-04:00

Last night I lay in bed restless, as inevitably happens because I try to get to bed reasonably early but sleep in every morning unreasonably late. This attempt to force sleep sometimes brings on a state of mind with which I am sure a lot of you are familiar. You lay there thinking about all kinds of random things, you try to stop thinking and get to sleep but your mind goes on without your permission anyway. And then, once your mind starts to give in to the siren song of sleep just a little, your normal thoughts start to meld into the fantasism of the dream world and your rational thoughts turn into completely irrational situations. The worst (best) time for this to occur is when you start to travel to the Land of Nod in the middle of a lecture. You still hear what is going on but it gets transformed somewhere in your half dream state and you get the urge to yell out ridiculous things that make so much sense but then when you jolt into full awakeness because you are about to yell out this packet of brilliance you realize the insanity that was about to sprout from your mouth and catch yourself just in time to not make more of a fool of yourself, though everyone is already looking at you because you just had a miniature seizure when you landed back on earth, probably for the 15th (and not the last) time that class. I have found myself in this situation just a few times, and have never given in to the urges of the dream world, but you have all either seen or heard of it happening. The poor kid who spouts out something about Macbeth being a fish or some such nonsense. Or maybe that just happens in movies.
Ok, I didnt plan on going there at all, that just kind of came out, what I was planning on writing about was laughing, because in my thoughts, for some reason, I thought about the tent we borrowed from Kari's Pap. I was thinking I hoped I got it dry enough the keep stored away and hoped her Pap wouldnt be put out by my packing job or something. And when I thought of him, the thought that came to mind was him laughing. For some reason that intrigued me... I intrigued myself I guess... so I thought on it more. I thought of my own Grandad, he was laughing. Papa was laughing. My brother was laughing, my friends were laughing. Maybe it is just me, but I realize that when I am mentally recalling someone, their laugh is the clearest image in my head, maybe its because it is linked with a strong emotion, a good emotion, and always has a distinctive sound, it seems like a laugh would be the best way to remember someone, maybe we are programmed to remember like that. I think you can tell a lot from someones laugh, whether it is genuine or forced, outgoing or reserved, whether it goes on just a little to long, or I guess whether it exists at all. While writing this I have been thinking about people, and I dont have a laugh on file for everyone. Maybe I just forget, or maybe some people are just better remembered otherwise, maybe I dont remember those forced, reserved laughs, or maybe some people just dont laugh enough.

In this world I have just created where people are split into being remembered with a laugh or without, I think I surround myself with laughers, and I think I am myself a laugher for most people. It is important to me to be a laugher and its something everyone could strive for. Be genuine, be happy, let it out, and thats how you will be remembered. Be a laugher.

Ungainfully Employed: Toys-R-Me

2009-09-14T15:18:00.002-04:00

So, I am currently in the car on my way to Pittsburgh, my third trip in three weeks to get out of philly. My philly getaway last week was a camping trip to Chincoteague Island in Virginia. My friends Jon, Julie, Steve and Jess joined Kari and I for Labor day. Camping and beachin with a good group of friends. Hard to beat that. I need to make some friends in philly, I am at a point at my new place that I am getting bored with just me and my roommates, but I am not motivated enough to go out and actively try to make some new friends since I will only be here a few months. I talked to a guy about a weekly poker game at the apartment complex I am in and it sounds like a handful of old guys that sit around and play 7 card stud for quarters. So thats pretty awesome, I will be there next week. Maybe I will make some money... a call from my lawyer last week made me think that money might be a more pressing issue than I had thought. Apparently they didnt forget about the 75,000 dollars in hospital bills floating around. I cant believe this crap is still going on. Just leave me alone with my money. Well... their money. Just leave me alone.

And also on that note, I got me a job! At Toys-R-Us! I had to pull some strings, but I got an interview. I showed up and was directed to the break room, where 4 others were waiting for the group interview also. So it was me, Brian, an 18 year old kid who dropped out of school when he was 13, "was not good with people" and usually slept in till 5 or 6 pm, and told this all to our interviewer, Emily, a 16 year old cheerleader who needs more spending money, Rebecca, a 19 year old mother of one who said nothing but "I don't know" the entire interview, and Caitlin a 20 year old girl who just started school at a local university. Spoiler alert: if you are planning on interviewing at Toys R Us in the near future, this may ruin the experience for you, and it is definitely cheating.

They start off by having everyone say their name and describe themselves with an adjective that starts with the same letter as their name. I started off with a moment of brilliance (oh brilliant would have been good too) with the word benevolent. after another minute or so of pondering, nobody else could think of anything for themselves, finally Caitlin chimed in with Cute Caitlin, and nobody else came up with anything for a while, the interviewer started asking for anything that started with their middle or last name letters too and brian finally came up with Fun from his last name, and then after a few more minutes he helped out the other two speechless girls with Joyful and Righteous. Off to a good start. For the next exercise they brought in 5 random toys and had us stand up and sell them to the group. I got Call of Duty: World of War. Brian was pissed I got the easy one. After a good deal of mumbling and "I dont knows" from the others when the interviewer asked such difficult questions as "Would you recommend the slingshot spongebob for my one year old?" (which brian insisted would be fine) we were ready to move on to the final exercise. We were paired up and found out about our partners and then tried to convince the interviewer to hire them. Another bombardment of "I dont know"s, though I think I did Cute Caitlin justice. For the finale we were given a "trophy" which was a bop-it game, and gave an acceptance speech for the job pretending we got it. I stood up with a pained expression, some sniffles and an embarrassed look away from the crowd and confessed "I promised myself I wouldnt cry", but I pulled it together long enough to thank my fellow interviewees and interviewers (working in that my interviewer Ilene's name was beautiful and is my grandmothers name also) and some other junk. This reminds me of another momentof interview brilliance I forgot to mention before. At my Cutco interview we were asked to give 3 words to describe ourselves, I said Intelligent, Modest, and AWESOME. She didnt get my joke and wrote it down, I let it go. We were then called into another room individually and told if we got the job. Brian came out and gave us a thumbs down and a raspberry and I didnt see the other three, I was the last one in and correctly guessed that they hired me, caitlin, and cheerleader. So I start within the week, unloading trucks, working the cashier, the sales floor, look out Toys R Us, here I come...

Some random thoughts: Lime Gatoraid Rain tastes like melted green ice pops, it is delicious. A real man always has extra room in his luggage. I just held my breath through both Blue Mountain tunnels in a row. whew. almost passed out. A law abiding citizen always uses turn signals. Nobody is going to steal your shopping cart.

You wish you lived in Pennsylvania

2009-08-12T11:43:00.003-04:00

Well, good news, I am officially a PA resident once again. I have moved into a new apartment in Bensalem, in northeast philly. I have been keeping myself busy looking for a job the past couple weeks, with depressingly poor results. I have applied to a ridiculous amount of jobs, finding them on craigslist, the paper, roaming the streets. I have only gotten 3 calls from all those applications, one was from a "balloon artist", seriously, I applied to be a balloon artist, and at $10 an hour I got that nonsense out of the way, another call back was from Vector Marketing. There are probably some of you out there who know what that means already, well, I didnt know what that meant, all I knew was that I got a call back from a marketing firm to do customer service work and she told me to dress nice for the interview. I show up to a little office complex and enter a room with 8 other people sitting clueless at a table making small talk. Two of them were driven there by their parents. The rest were a mish-mash of ethnicity, age, and sanity. I got practically laughed at when I said I had a college degree. She started giving a presentation about the job and I was already feeling out of place... then I saw the word Cutco. It all went downhill from there. After sitting through almost an hour about how to sell knives and how their pyramid scheme was your chance for great success, I left with my head held low. I was one of the lucky 2 people to get a call back later that day, and I had to respectfully decline. I thought about it though. Thats how desperate I am. I considered selling Cutco and being a balloon artist. I currently have a pretty promising prospect at a valeting job, going back for interview #2 today, and a friend on my new soccer team said his wife can get me a job at toys-r-us. So, still slightly depressing, but hey, its work. And I recently put out some applications for some research positions, so hopefully those will play out.

And on a happier note, and one of the reasons I need that job, I just bought my first car and dang is she a beaut. It is a 2003 Jetta, charcoal grey, with black Motegi 17" spoke rims, and it is immaculate. The guy who sold it took care of it with an intensity that it will never experience again in the hands of its new owner, and it shows, without a flaw on the interior or exterior. All I have is the picture from the ad, but I will put some more up in the near future.

The move to a new apartment has gone pretty well, the only downside to the whole thing is... we are living in a den. After much debating and deal making, we decided that we would move into Brooke's second bedroom until December when we go back to Pittsburgh. Turns out that she lost the 2 bedroom she wanted and all that was left was a one bedroom with a den, which we agreed to stay in, maybe ignorantly. So Kari and I now live in Brooke's 8x9 foot den, and it is working out quite well. Somehow. The complex owns a marina and I had hoped to bring my dinghy up to keep there, but the guy told me I have to pay $60/foot even for a 7 foot tender... so sadly the dinghy remains in Grandad's garage in NC. I guess that the boater hospitality I had experienced in my previous journeys doesnt exist everywhere.

So, other than job searching and car buying, I joined a soccer team. Spruce Goose FC! And we just started practice, it seems like it will be a good time. And hey, thanks for the compliments on my guacamole recipe, with such a positive response, it is good incentive to get some more recipes up, so look for some in the future.

Avocado, to some people you are holy.

2009-07-23T20:03:00.008-04:00

Many of you who know me know that I enjoy a little adventure, and that the adventure does not stop in the kitchen. When I cook, I have fun with it, and over the years I have learned to turn that fun into something palatable, even delicious. When I cook I do it different every time. I have developed some vague guidelines, and developed some skill in getting things to turn out like I want them, like sauces, marinades and whatnot. Many of my dishes have been met with great accolades from my guinea pigs, and of them all, I dont think any have been accepted as unanimously as a good batch of guacamole. Over the past year, guacamole has been a common feature in my creations, it was a pleasant surprise when I found all of the essential ingredients in the market in the Bahamas, so it was often on the menu. The key to good guacamole is to pick the right avocados and to use them at the peak of their ripeness, just the right amount of squish. I like to use hass variety. The second most important ingredient is the cilantro, use fresh stuff and de-stem it as best you can, if you are going to use dried cilantro, you might as well use dried avocado, and they dont even make that, so just stop. Here is the recipe:

2 large hass (3 might be necessary) ~~or 1 large Florida avocado~~ (see below, the big smooth skinned ones... no good)
3 T lime juice, or half a lime
1/2 t chili pepper
1/8 t cumin
dash of parika
1/4 c fresh cilantro chopped (I love cilantro, you may want to use a little less)
1/4 c chopped onion
1/3 t seasoned salt
1/2 t salt, preferrably kosher or sea salt
1/4 t fresh cracked pepper
1 small tomato, seeded, chopped
some hot pepper, see below

Optional but highly recommended additions
1/4 t cayenne pepper
1/8 c banana pepper diced
splash of EVOO
splash of Tabasco sauce
dash of garlic powder or a minced garlic clove

For the hot pepper, use 1 jalapeno for some kick, some seeded pablano for the weak of tongue, or for some extra kick, a habanero will do the trick, or the Bahamian goat pepper will spice up the guac with a mere square centimeter of the insanely spicey fruit. And the banana pepper adds some great flavor, once you use it you will be missing it every time you have bananaless guac after that. If I get a particularly good avocado, I like to chop it pretty rough, if the flavor can hold strong with a big chunk of pure avocado goodness, you have to embrace that, you can make a sort of guacasalsa with nice rough cut on the tomato and onion as well. Of course, all of this is subject to your own tastes, and actually I totally guessed on all of it, having just made it in a kitchen with absolutely no real measuring devices, I will probably come back and tweak the recipe here and there later. Good luck, I will leave you with a little ditty, original artist unknown, popularized my my father in the produce section of every supermarket he has ever entered.

Avocado, to some people you are holy, but you're just guacamole to me.

Edit: A few people have made the recipe and said it is great, thanks! I just wanted to add a couple comments. I forgot to stress the importance of letting the finished guac sit for a while before consumption, an hour or so at least, it helps to let the flavors meld. Also, when storing it, use saran wrap and press it so it is actually touching the top of the guac, removing all air, this keeps it from oxidizing and browning. And I just made a batch with a florida avocado which didnt turn out as well as it had in the past, but the only time I had ever used it before was when I bought it at a little street side produce vendor actually in Florida, so I may be spoiled. The one I bought here was strangely sweet and too watery, I think that I will only recommend the larger florida avocado if you are actually in Florida.

One Billion Animal Crackers

2009-07-17T10:13:00.002-04:00

Our days in Vegas got my friends and I on a constant gambling rush. To fill in the gaps between stints at the tables, we played a game taught to us by Chris. The rules of the game: One person is asked a question that has a numerical answer, one that the answer is not definitely known and preferably that cannot be estimated with great accuracy. For instance, we asked questions like how many gallons are in the pool at the Paris, how many grams does a Ford Focus weigh, things like that. The estimator writes down the answer and his work is done. The others in the group then begin bidding on the number they think the estimator estimated. Bidding starts at, say, 10,000 gallons, if someone else thinks the number is higher, they up the bid, 20,000 gallons, 25, 30, 40, and it keeps going up until nobody wants to go any higher. At this point the real number is revealed and if it is indeed higher than the highest bidders number, then everyone owes that person (we played $1), if the actual number is lower than the highest bidders number, then the high bidder owes everyone else.
We chose zack to be our estimator, just because we knew he would give us some interesting answers. We were not dissapointed.

The Eiffel Tower is 7,500 feet tall
There are 23 million platypuses in the world
There are less than a million white people in Africa
There are 1 billion animal crackers eaten every day

So, ya the game is a good time, have fun with it.

Viva

2009-07-13T16:07:00.004-04:00

I sat with a man named Bill on the flight out of Pittsburgh, it was his first time flying on an airplane. He is 68 years old. Bill works in the oil fields and was sent out of Oklahoma to Fayetteville PA to check out some work going on there. What do you call a funeral in Oklahoma? Karaoke. Frightened by his fathers bout with Alzheimer's, he finds comfort in the fact that he has a great memory, especially for some things, like jokes. He can remember any joke with detail, where he heard it, who told it to him, so well even that a few times he has told a friend a joke that he heard from them and they will laugh like they never heard it and ask where he learned that one. His brother told him the Karaoke joke. His oldest son died in a car accident in '91, his wife died of cancer in '99, his youngest hung himself in March. He still has 6 surviving sons and a daughter. He had lots more jokes. I wish I had the memory for them that he does.

Dallas to Vegas. I sat next to the reason so many people hate America. She was the incarnation of what I imagine maybe your typical European would think about when you say American housewife. Overweight with a pink frilly blouse on, a handbag that was probably a top of the line knock off bought by her also overweight husband, who looked like he was terrible at golf even though he plays a lot. I really am not a judgemental person usually, but I hated these people after seeing them for 4 seconds. She ordered a bottle of Aquafina soon after sitting down, not just water, but Aquafina, but she supposed it would be allright if they brought her another kind. Even after proving their imminent mundaneity, I put the bait out for a conversation by making a comment about the circular crops that she seemed so interested in and kept leaning over to see. She broke into a conversation about her facebook farmland and my brian turned off. I have no idea what happened for the next half hour or so, but I am fairly certain she kept talking about facebook. The rest of the trip was full of insightful comments like "there is another plane down there", "oh we are in the dessert now", "oh I can see cars ("honey you cant see cars from up here") oh, no those arent cars", and as we descend in altitude and are obviously flying over houses in the Vegas suburbs "those must be houses!" "I can see cars now!". It only made landing in Vegas that much sweeter.

On the trip in, my friend Chris asked if I would back him, giving 10% of his $1000 tournament buy in in exchange for 10% of the winnings. The kid is the best tournament poker player I know, so I went for it. He was playing in the tournament when we landed and Zack and I went to see him, which left me in the poker room with Zack and we both sat at a $1-3 table. The poker room in Ceaser's is possibly the toughest in the strip, maybe with the exception of the Rio, which is full of spillover from the WSOP main event, and I was sitting down at a real poker table for the first time in a lonnnnng time. I lost $500 my first 5 hours in Vegas. And then Chris tanked his well earned above average stack of 400,000 on an epic bluff, the same way I lost most of my money, so I certainly cannot get mad, he played well. So 4 hours at a poker table and I did not see a single hand better than 2 pair. I was not playing my best poker ever, but my aggressive style requires that I actually make a hand every now and then. If I make a big bluff and get caught in it, I can make that pay off later when a player makes a loose call thinking that I am bluffing. Well I can't capitalize on those loose calls if I dont have a hand that can beat anyone. To give you an idea of the crap for cards I was getting, I lost $400 in two hands, the two times I got 2 pair all day, the first I looked at K 10, both spades, the best hand I had seen all day, and it checks around the table so I check in late position hoping for big things on the flop. flop comes A K 10 rainbow and I am loving it. nobody raised preflop so I cant be facing any pocket pairs hitting trips or AK, maybe I should be scared of A 10. I raise, he reraises, I go all in, he shows AK. Whatever. And I lost a couple other big bluffs, and like I said I never got a chance to get paid from them. Well after that disaster I wasnt sure what I was going to do for the rest of the trip if gambling was going to treat me like that. Luckily I found my calling in a little game called War. What is it good for? Making lots of money.

We saw the table in the Paris hotel where we were staying, a big bright sign saying Casino War, and we had to figure out if they were actually playing the ol' classic for money. Turns out they are serious. I sat with $20 or so, a $5 minimum bet, the dealer doles out a card face up to each player, and, perhaps with a little dramatic flourish, he flips his own card. His is higher he takes your money, yours is higher you double up. For serious. And if you go to war, you match your bet and each gets another card, if you win, you win your original bet, if you tie again, you get double! And that is how I turned my luck around. for the first 2 days we sat at the war table for a bit every time we went through the casino and I didnt lose a single time for 2 days. It made no sense. I finally lost when I ventured out of the Paris and played at O'sheas, I lost $100, put up another $100 and lost 90 of it, I must have been off my game. I recalculated my strategies and turned my $10 back into 150, and when i stood up with that 150 I saw the roulette table had a streak of 7 reds in a row, surely it would hit black next time right? Apparently I was not the only one thinking this, because as I go to put down 50, there is a rush to the table, people putting everything they have on black. The little 8x3 inch black square was packed full of $5 $25 $100 dollar chips, and spirits were high as everyone was confident that black was sure to hit. She flicks the ball and gives the wheel a spin... a bit too hard... the ball was bouncing around on the wheel for something like 17 years and finally it tinkers to a hault. On red. The dejected gamblers sulk away, having put everything on the table. I however, am determined to get my $50 back. $100 more on black. Again she spins that wheel just a little too fast and just after my 60th birthday, the ball rests. On red. The rest of the tenacious who were smart enough to keep some of their bankroll in their pocket slink into the forest of slot machines. I am not losing my money. $200 on black. Red has now hit 9 times in a row. It can't hit 10 can it? Is that even possible? After the pit boss tells her to slow down the wheel, she flicks the ball into motion, and as it orbits the wheel, I realize it is possible, that ball does not know where it landed last time, I just put $200 on a 49% chance of winning. Again the ball rests. Of the original ambitious group, I alone remain, and along with a few newcomers, we watch as the wheel spins around, bringing that ivory little ball into view, resting in a bed of black. With a smile I took my 400 and walked.

A friend who was watching the roulette game play out told me I have great affects. That might be the best compliment I have ever received, she is a psychologist. I do not want to talk too much about gambling, but it is kind of the main reason for going to Vegas, the main reason Vegas exists really, so I have just a little more to say. I tried my luck at the poker table a few more times, probably spending another 4 hours or so playing, and in my entire time at the table i still saw nothing better than 2 pair. I was able to bluff my way into a profit once and I walked away even after about an hour of play another time, and I dropped 100 one night when everyone else was dancing at a club, though I don't consider that a loss really, I think it is worth $100 to get out of dancing. After such terrible luck, I swore off poker for a couple days and it wasnt until the last day that I sat back down at the table. I saw off Chris and Zack to their plane at 1 pm and had 12 hours till mine left, so I thought I would take another crack at the poker table. I sat at the Flamingo and play was going pretty well, I even hit better than two pair! Twice! It was great! until one hand... I was up about $50 to $250 and had A 10 to give me top pair, top kicker on a 10 7 4 flop. This old guy who had been trying to bully me around all night raised the flop 15, I doubled his raise, and he went all in on top of me, he had me covered so it put me in for around $230. After little deliberation I called, the guy showed his bluff, flipping KQ, and I was comfortable with my 10s. Flop came a K, I am now beat. River blanked and there goes my money. And just to add insult to the gross display of luck, the dealer pushed all the chips my way, thinking somehow that I had a pair of aces, so I got a good look at what was rightfully mine before her evil mistake was pointed out by everyone at the table. I was playing some good poker, and I was not ready to call it quits, so I put another 200 down at the table. I immediately started rakeing in the pots. There was an obnoxious lady at the table who would not stop giving me her money. It was all little 30, 40 dollar pots, but it was adding up, and her hatred for me culminated in one hand where her pocket Qs met my pocket Ks and I took her for all she was worth. It wasnt luck, she was just a bad poker player and I was on my game, the board was all low- 73427, she could have easily gotten away from pocket queens there, and I garnered a call there with the loose play I had been displaying. I sat for about an hour and a half with my second $200 and turned it into $700 before standing up, finally a triumph at the poker table, and 2 hours before I had to go to the airport. I needed that.

So all in all my vegas gambling experience went quite well, and my Vegas experience otherwise was even better. The Paris hotel we stayed in was wonderful and thanks to a little schmoozing, which Chris picked up while living in Vegas for a month, we got a nice room with a great view, overlooking the pool and the Bellagio fountain. It was a great place to crash after a long day at the tables or in the sun, and to wake up in the morning and head down to the huge pool we were overlooking. I would reccommend the Paris, but of course the only comparison I have is the Imperial Palace, which is well known to be one of the lowest quality hotels on the strip. We of course had our voyage downtown with a couple we met at the pool, that was a good time. Downtown seems like the most Vegasy part of Vegas to me, it is the epitome of the bright lights and over the top everything that makes Vegas what it is. And on my last day I headed over to the Rio to check out the WSOP main event, maybe that is what gave me inspiration for my successful run at the poker table later that day. It was cool to watch the best in the business do their thing, but I only recognized a single face in the crowd, though one of those people will soon be the recipient of the most prestigious title in the poker world.

And now I am back in the burgh, staying at Jon's for the next couple days and then flying back out to Philly just in time to start moving stuff from Jersey over to PA northeast of Philly. It will feel good to live in PA again. Even if it is Philadelphia.

Jersey June

2009-07-01T22:38:00.001-04:00

The past few weeks I have really been trying to find the finer points of the state of New Jersey and Philadelpha. Can't go wrong with a trip to the beach right? Or shore as they call it around here, which I think is because a beach implies sand, and the Jersey shore seems to be lined with dirt rather than sand, so "beach" might be inappropriate. My home for the rest of the last year has been, well:And now the closest I get is:
But hey, its better than nothing. Other than a trip to the shore, Kari and I also went to a jazz concert at the winery we visited a couple weeks ago, about 300 people showed up, and let me tell you, an odd crowd comes out of the woodwork in Jersey for a jazz concert. We were fortunate enough to put our lawn chairs next to a man who seemed to be posing for a photoshoot during the concert, I took it upon myself to capture a few of the good ones. With my new Nikon P6000 by the way!
So we enjoyed the jazz and wine, munching on some grub we got at a place called The Grilled Cheese and Crab Cake Co. We got... a grilled cheese and a crab cake, both delish, and of course went to visit our friend Giorgio at his restaurant. It was a good day in the dirty Jers.

Another adventure worth noting was our trip to the Mutter Museum. It is run by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and used to be open only to teachers and students for educational purposes. It houses all kinds of specimens exhibiting every medical anomaly you would ever wish to know existed. With siamese twin fetuses preserved in jars, well over 100 human skulls with holes eaten away by syphilis or chopped with an ax, tape worms, tumors, skeltons, every body part preserved in a jar, books bound in human leather, the famous "Soap Lady", well it was enough to make your skin crawl for days, and enough to satisfy even the most disturbed minds.

So, I have been having my fun, and now it is time for even more. With the 4th of July approaching, this is the time of year that my pyromaniacle disposition is most acceptable. It is liberating. I am headed back to Pittsburgh today to spend the 4th and on the 8th I will be flying out to Vegas with my friends Zack and Jon to meet up with our friend Chris who will have been out there for 41 Days and 40 Nights. And itisnow time to go pack andmake important decisions like whether I am going to bring my Heeleys or not, check back later for updates on how much money I have won.

Ice Cream, Wine, Jazz, Poker. Life Is Good.

2009-06-18T23:06:00.008-04:00

The month started off with a wedding, A fairly standard affair, outdoor, had the ceremony in the same spot as the reception, which is a great idea, had a splendid time with the family, and the occasion was ended properly with a supremely trashed automobile for the new bride and groom. The culprits are still at large.

June 11th brought something amazing. The Scooper Bowl. It is an ice cream festival held in Boston, and Kari, the wonderful person she is, took me there as a late birthday present. Ice cream. Everywhere. There were 9 vendors touting about 50 flavors of ice cream, each had 3 out at a time in little cups, I guessed them to be around 4 ounces. Haagen, Ben, Jerry, Breyer, Robbin! They were all there! And they were all showcasing their finest flavors. Maine Lobster Tracks, delicious, nothing to do with lobster. Zesty Lemon Sorbet, I heard from multiple people walking away from the stand "Wow! that really is zesty!". And it was. Rock n' Pop swirl! It popped in your mouth! Bailey's Irish Cream, tasted like the real deal, it seemed illegal they were giving it to kids. But the best flavor, without question, Ben and Jerry's Oatmeal Cookie Chunk. They held a contest for the best flavor, and after all the votes, on all 50 flavors, Oatmeal Cookie Chunk won with a full 25% of the vote. It is that good. I ended up eating 25 cups of ice cream, that was one of each flavor that each stand had up (skipping a couple boring repeats like chocolate), and at 4 oz. a cup, thats almost a full gallon of ice cream. That is a lot of ice cream. Enough to make even the most lactosetolerant person become intolerant... hah, dang that was good though. The trip also introduced me to New England for the first time, with the drive up to Boston, a stop in Providence, and a day walking around Boston, I was really impressed. Boston is a beautiful city, not too big, clean as can be, good food, I give it an A. Makes me appreciate some things about Pittsburgh, spending so much time in other big citys, like in Pittsburgh there is not an obsession with tourism being beaten into your head around every corner, you dont have to pay $50 to park for a day, you can find comfortable little places to stop that arent one of a thousand exactly like it in the world. But it was a great city, it really was. Plus, there is ice cream everywhere.

Back in Jersey, we were looking for something to do, and it may surprise you, but South Jersey is a certified wine region, there are lots of vineyards in the area. We went and tasted wine, schmoozing with the other clientele, ended up chatting with the chief of police (there for his monthly "inspection"), his father, and a local italian restaurant owner. I will say at this point, it is great to go out with two young attractive ladies, Kari and her friend, you seem to get lots of free stuff from guys. The Italian restaurant owner, Giorgio, invited us to his place, and when we showed up he took a seat with us, gave us an appetizer and a bottle of merlot from the local vineyard, then a "real bottle of wine" from his home town in Italy, then one of the cooks came out and gave us a bottle of his home made wine. After giving us dessert and shots of espresso and sambuca at the end of the meal, I went over to say by goodbye and thanks and got sucked into conversation with he and a friend at the bar. We ended up staying another few hours at the bar chatting with Giorgio and his friends. We had a good time, and I feel like I must reccommend, not only because of the hospitality but because the food was incredible, that you must go there if you are ever in the unfortunate predicament of being in South Jersey, it will be a cherry on your hot sludge sunday.

Like I said before, I caught the New York Fever when Kari's parents took us last month, so I was back last weekend to see Jamie Cullum play Carnegie Hall. We bought a $1 bus ticket that got us in at 9 from philly, and spent the day walking around the city, had lunch at S'MAC which only serves variations of mac n cheese, toured the Metropolitan Museum of art, walked through Central Park, took some busses, took the subway, and after walking something like 10 miles we took our seats in Carnegie Hall to watch the jazz genious unfold on stage. When we got to our seat, we were in the second to last row in the highest balcony in the whole theatre, so we... upgraded, a fairly simple process, you just scan out some empty seat and look like you know where you are going, nobody asks questions. We ended up right down on the rail on the third balcony, pretty close to the action. The show was incredible, with a modern jazz opener that had a great techno twist, and Jamie took the stage with a storm with his piano acrobats, some wicked improv, he took the stand up bass, trumpet and the drummer with a snare out into the audience and set up a little jam session in the middle of the aisle, just flowin for 10 minutes or so, it was groovy. Truely an amazing concert, the only bad part was at the end, the audience gave him a screaming loud standing ovation for something like 10 minutes after he left the stage and he didnt come back out for another song. After I got home I looked on his twitter and he apologized for not coming back out, saying that they would absolutely not let him. Stupid. Still. Awesome.

I am just starting to come off my high from the concert and just getting pumped for my trip to Vegas in a couple weeks, the excitement just keeps comin. Other than that, I signed up for a soccer tournament in July and I am trying to get myself in suitable shape to step onto a soccer field, I put an add trying to sell myself on craigslist, that hasnt panned out, so I sit around a lot, doing things like writing blog posts, looking for what might be a real job sometime in the distant future, creating sweet buisiness cards! check these bad boys out! I printed a few out and dang they are sweet. If you want me to make one for you I will, you can even pick your card of choice, what else do I have to do?

The Evolutionary Explanation for Altruism

2009-06-07T21:38:00.003-04:00

In a previous blog post I addressed the topic of altruism and devised a hypothetical mechanism for its evolution through Darwinian theory. The subject of evolution and more specifically the philosophy of altruism and how it came to be really intrigues me, as is evident from that post. Mark sent me a couple links to articles that address the issue and I was amazed by how similar the arguments presented were to my own, particularly in the first article "An Evolutionary Explanation for Altruism". They talk about insects primarily and get into the necessity for a complex social structure, taking a similar path to their conclusion. The second article talks about this transition to a society that interacts on a level that allows the benefits of altruism to be seen, which is a potentially problematic phenomena, and I think he tackles it with grace. The third article builds further on this idea, focusing on the human race and offering a real life scenario for the theory to play out.

My previous post on the matter

1. An Evolutionary Explanation for Altruism

2. Competition, Loss of Selfishness Mark Shift to Supersociety

3. Altruism's Bloody Roots

Let me know what you think!

They call me the rambler

2009-06-07T21:32:00.002-04:00

It seems that evolution would have led to a population that was predominantly female. If there were a population of 10 humans, 5 female, 5 male, then only 5 offspring could be produced in any single reproductive cycle, but if it were, say, 9 women and me, then there would be 9 offspring every reproductive cycle, and if those progeny were again 90% female, the cycle would continue with reproduction at a much greater rate. Now these days, with over population, such an increase in the growth of population would be undesirable, but i'm talkin back in the days of nomadic tribes and whatnot. And this does happen in a lot of populations, a greater ratio of females to males, for the aforementioned reasons of the increased reproductive efficiency, however, humans do not experience this, leading to the conclusion that males are essential in the fitness of the species. It is easy to see why this might be in said nomadic tribal days, what with the males hunting and gathering, it was a full time job that a group of 9 pregnant females and me would not be able to fulfill. Things have changed though, and females are able to raise children on their own, all they need from a male is some... "seed". I don't think that the day is far away that we will be able to control the sex of our children, and when that day comes, I feel this could be the end of a paternal era. I am not necessarily saying this is a bad thing though, in a world where there are 9 females for every male, well, I think a lot of problems would be solved. I don't really know, but it seems like 99% of sex crimes are committed by males, but in such a world, with such ratios, I think that just about any guy could find someone. Wars would change drastically, with countries not willing to sacrifice their males, the lines would be saturated with women, and the squabbles would be over totally different things, like which country gets to have the pink flag with a purple heart on it and a little kitten in the middle of the heart, or they would just start whining about random stuff that happened years ago once a month for no reason. With such a high density of estrogen operating together on a day to day basis, entire continents would experience the sorority house effect, you know what I am talking about, leading to mass chaos once a month, maybe it would just be a national holiday, maybe it would unite the countries and serve as a platform for world peace. Males would be reduced to nothing, like the little spiders that mate and then get eaten by the female, but the human race would go on without us.

I am not sure what that was all about, I am currently in the car on my way to my cousins wedding, I just started writing, but really guys, now that I think about it, just keep that in the back of your mind. So, I took up a new hobby a couple years ago, it is a rare one, but not unheard of. I try to actually dry my hands in the air dryers in bathrooms. It is a time consuming hobby, but it has its rewards. While spending time at the dryer, you get to read the clever bits of wisdom that people leave etched into the metal. Place hands on butt. Rub vigorously. Tops all. They get all that just by erasing letters! how clever! Or my personal favorite. Push button. Get bacon. It is because the red wavy lines in the picture coming out of the dryer look like bacon. And then sometimes, you get to experience exciting advances in hand dryer technology. If you find yourself near the MOMA in New York, it is worth a stop in to use their hand dryers. The Dyson Air Blade. Instead of a leisurely 15 or 20 minute zephyr that you get at a normal hand dryer, it is an exhilarating 10 second gale force blast, wicking the moisture away from your hands.

In other news, I read this morning that you are supposed to use "at least an inch long strip" of toothpaste when brushing your teeth, I read it on the tube of my Crest Pro-Health toothpaste. What happened to "use a pea sized amount", that is what it always used to be. I think the toothpaste people are just trying to get a little more turnover in their product, with an "inch long strip" being an estimated 4 times the volume of "a pea sized amount". Crafty. So, they say to contact a doctor if you ingest more that the amount used for brushing, but the amount is now significantly more, so the amount used for brushing is more than the old amount used for brushing, so I foresee lots of accidents with people using the "pea sized" toothpaste, but using an inch long strip of it, and then if they swallow some, they wont be worried because it is the amount used for brushing, but really it is 4 times the amount used for brushing, so they will end up dying.

New York

2009-05-29T14:08:00.004-04:00

Although I have lived my entire life in the eastern US, I have never traveled to our nations capital, New York City. I know, right? I felt so ignorant, I never got to see the Empire State Building where the president lives, the washington monument proudly holding up the torch as he crosses the Delaware, the eiffel tower, which is the tallest building in the world! All of this was practically right in my back yard and I never experienced it. Until now.

Turns out there was a lot of disappointment on the trip. George Washington looks an awful lot like a girl, turns out the president moved to washington somewhere, probably seattle, and the eiffel tower... well it looks like someone played a game of Jenga with it. No but really, I was shocked by the condition of ground zero at the WTC, there is still substantial structure from the foundation of the towers that is still standing, they block off any view of the site as best as they can, maybe because they dont want people to witness the lack of progress, it was really rather disheartening. I thought we would get the rebuilding underway as fast as possible, just to show we can bounce back, show our tenacity, our strength... but... apparently not.

Okay, well other than that, my trip to New York was pretty darn awesome. I went with Kari and her parents, who were attending a furniture convention in Manhattan, because that is her dad's business, and we were invited along, how could I pass up a furniture convention?? I know you are thinking that sounds supremely boring, but it was actually really interesting. Every booth had their one big idea, their niche in the market, some of which were... a little over the top, but some of them were really cool. I am not sure that I would be able to furnish a house with satisfaction out of the entire thousands of pieces in there, but it was pretty cool to see. Some of my favorites were a chair that was like a weeble wobble, you could swing around on it, windows that had a crystal layer inside that would be completely opaque until you ran an electric current through them, then they were crystal clear, and a chair that had arm rests that kind of went backwards behind the back, so you leaned back and out your elbows on them, kind of forcing you into a reclined position that just made you feel cool. Plus, in addition to all this excitement, we also got to visit the other convention going on at the time, and for those of you who are thinking that the furniture convention sounds like the epitome of bore, I give you: the stationary convention. Stationary. Like paper. 1000 exhibits of paper. Kari and I walked through 5 different stands and that was more birthday cards and frilly paper than anyone should ever have any interest in seeing.

But really the convention was just a small part of the trip, we did our touristy rounds. Mr. Evans had a few places he wanted to go, from previous trips to the city or advice from friends, and we spent one evening cruising the city finding these places, with a little help from Goog411. The trip getting there were usually as interesting as the destination itself, with so much to see, even just people watching would be enough to stay occupied. My favorite stop was a little bar called McSorley's that had been open for 155 years. They brew their own beer, light and dark, and thats all you can get, and thats all they need. The place was packed, we waited in a line to get in, and there was only scrunched standing room once we finally did get in. The beer was good, not great, the best part about it was the atmosphere, when you walk in, guys walking around with 6 mugs in each hand, pushing their way through the crowds, you have to fight your way to the bar, a little scared that you will order wrong and get thrown out like the soup nazi, well when you get your beer, you enjoy it. And we did. We also found a noodle place called Momofuku that was recommended and looked pretty good, but like the rest of the city... way too crowded. We went to Madame Tussaud's wax museum, which I was not expecting much out of, the idea of seeing a likeness of J-lo and george clooney was kind of lost on me, my disinterest was made apparent when, in the first big room of wax celebs, I was leaning against a counter, zoning out like I have been known to do sometimes, and a couple guys stopped to look at me, then waved their hands in my face to see if I was real, haha, I tried to keep in motion after that. Further into the museum they displayed historic figures, like Louis Armstrong, Napoleon Bonaparte, George Washington, that was pretty cool to see, also the skyscraper that is the 7'6" Yao Ming, the rather unimposing 6'4" Michael Jordan, the tiny little jockey man Bill Shoemaker things like that were interesting, plus at the end I bought a little bag that looks exactly like a piece of pizza for a friend (Stofko, you know its you), so it was a good stop. We went to see the Blue Man Group, which was an impressive show, and really funny. And Kari and I also went to a comedy show in Times Square to escape the rain that decided to spoil our explorations. A high school prom party went to the show also, and therefore became the brunt of most of the jokes for the evening, it was a good time.
So, all in all New York was an amazing place, Mr. and Mrs. Evans, thank you for that experience. That is a whole lot of city, and I can't wait to get back there to experience more of it, I actually just bought tickets to see Jamie Cullum play Carnegie Hall on June 20th, I guess I caught the NYC fever.

Home

2009-05-28T18:17:00.002-04:00

I have been spending the last few weeks in Philadelphia at Kari and Brooke's apartment, and have just been sitting around enjoying life, far too busy doing nothing to do anything, like updating the brog. I was not sure how I felt about getting back into the world, out of the excitement of life on the boat, I didnt know whether I would be changed somehow, unsatisfied, unstimulated by everyday life back how it used to be. I am the type of person who has always needed a bit more to keep my brain satiated, and I have been dealing with it my whole life, so sure, sitting in an apartment all day isnt quite as exciting as sailing the Bahamas, but I am back in America, a land practically made for ADD, and I am stumbling and video gaming my way through it.
As I wrote about before, I cooked up a feast for my temporary roommates a few days after I got there. After a $100 trip to Wegman's, which is a pretty awesome grocery store, I had all I needed to create my masterpiece, which I thought up while sailing one day, using my salt water spotted notes to guide me. The word of the night was sushi, and if you know the people I was cooking for, you would say I am crazy, they will never eat sushi, but just read on. I bought 2 nice cuts of strip steak, some nice colorful peppers, onions, tortillas, and of course some sushi rice. These were the main ingredients in my steak sushi roll. Instead of nori (seaweed) I used the tortilla shell, layed in the steak and veggies, and once rolled and cut the results were delicious and a good looking dish. The next dish was in the same vane, a sushi roll made with grilled chicken and steamed broccoli, with a 4 cheese sauce for dipping. I also made a steak sauce like the white sauce you always see in Japanese steak houses, and it was pretty delicious with the steak roll. I got some tuna and salmon as well and made some more traditional rolls, my favorite of which was the roll I made last with all the leftovers, consisting of salmon, tuna, red peppers, cucumbers, and avocado, though the others I made which were different combinations of the aforementioned ingredients were all pretty delicious. I am still planning on doing a write up at some point about cooking, maybe I will get into specifics there if anyone is interested.
So I have all this stuff. My stuff. The stuff I own. All of it. Most of it is in Indiana at my parents house right now, some of it scattered around at various houses of family/friends, and all of it is right where it belongs. I think I heard the definition of home as “a place to put your stuff”, which is really a joke, but I think there is some truth to it, which I suppose also defines me as “homeless”. Now that does not mean that I wouldn't have a home if I wanted one, because I know there are many places I could go to put my stuff, but that takes such a commitment to a single place, a commitment that I am really not able to make. Over the next year I will be living in California, Indiana, Pittsburgh, and New Jersey, which means that I will be living out of a suitcase again for another year, and really I am ok with that, but I have stuff somewhere, stuff that is just sitting there, and I feel like it should be being used... but that requires a home. So, I am not going to have a home for a while, and my stuff will have to deal with it.

Land Ho!

2009-05-05T09:38:00.004-04:00

Sandpiper and her crew have made it back to port in one piece, well, a few scratches and dents (on the crew not the boat) but we made it, and dang it feels good. After Charleston we kicked it into high gear, doing at least 50 miles every day, passing through the South Carolina swamps, the fried seafood capitol of the US- Calabash, NC, the war zone that is Camp Lejeune, a night in bustling Wrightsville Beach, a final stop in the quaint little town of Swansbro, and then a magnificent sail on our last day, doing a good 7-8 knots down the Neuse River in the 25 mph winds, and now it just a matter of cleaning out the boat and getting out of here.
The Carolinas on the ICW really are beautiful, with the marshes, the gnarly trees covered in spanish moss.
We have also been seeing lots of dolphin, and of course the plethora of water fowl that lines the channel. Going through Camp Lejeune we saw in the distance a group of somethings spraying up big jets of water and couldnt figure out what was going on, until they went right past us, a group of 15 or so amphibious tank looking things, each of them spraying up 2 huge jets of water, with 3 camo clad folk poking their heads out of the hatches. Mark was of course taking pictures, and as one of the tanks passed by, one of the soldiers took out his little digital camera and started taking pictures of us too as we passed. A little further down the channel we saw a huge Splash Mountain of a spray up ahead and realized it was coming from the tanks charging into the water at 30 mph from a dirt road leading into the channel. It was pretty cool. We made the entire trip home on the ICW without a single grounding, a task which many say is impossible, though it is much easier when you are following someone with a draft 6 inches more than yours. Brian went aground every day for 5 days straight, and we just scooted by him every time.
So now we are back on land, a little more cleaning, maybe some time to get reacquainted with the real world, and I will be ready to go. Kari is coming down on Thursday to get me and I will be spending some time in Philly as I adjust to life on land again. I am pretty excited to cook in a real kitchen again, I have been dreaming up some dishes I am going to cook once I get the chance. I think I might write up something about cooking on the boat, maybe post a few of my more popular recipes. Macaroni stuffing casserole, mango salsa snapper, spam sauerkraut stew, lime in the coconut crusted grouper, maybe I will write a boat cook book.

Scootin Along

2009-04-30T09:09:00.000-04:00

We are really making some headway on the way north, we hopped out for a 24 hour leg on the ocean from Fernandina Beach, FL to Charleston, SC, skipping Georgia entirely in the process. The ICW winds so much through Georgia, we more than halved the distance traveled by going out, and made better speed while doing it, so we are making great time. We visited Cumberland Island, which used to be the getaway spot for the Carnegie family, there remains the skeleton of the mansion they built, as well as all the servants quarters, a graveyard full of Carnegies who died in Pittsburgh, and a population of wild horses still flourishes on the island, it is a beautiful island with expanses of forest, salt marshes, and a beach along the whole eastern side, it was easy to see why they chose it. The jaunt outside was a little crappy just cause we didnt get much real sailing in, with the wind just off our bow we were close hauled the whole time and didnt get much push out of it, but it wasnt so bad, and it got us some distance. The coolest part about the sail was the dolphins that played in our bow wave a couple times, there were 10 or so and they stuck with us for 15 minutes on two seperate occasions, it is amazing to see them flitting around under the boat, obviously doing it just for the fun of it. They will even roll on their side sometimes right on the surface and look up at you, and both times they stayed with us until I left the bow to check on the navigation, I went back up and they were gone, I really think they are interested to see us up there. Once we got into Charleston we met up with our friends from More Cowbell and had a great time exploring the city with them, it is a beautiful old city. The guys split up with the girls at one point and we went to a cigar and wine shop while they went shopping, I sat down and played some chess with Dave, a nice maduro in one hand and a glass of wine in front of me, I was livin large, it was great, and then the girls came back before I finished the cigar and I have not heard the end of it since, I dont think Erin will ever talk to me again. Sorry Erin.
We will probably be in New Bern around the 7th of May or so, but its hard to speculate, we never really know what we are doing. Once we get back we will be doing a little work on the boat, probably on the house, and then heading out into the world, who knows where. I will get some pictures up soon.

Made it

2009-04-22T01:26:00.002-04:00

Sandpiper has returned. After leaving Great Sale Cay at 9 am on Sunday, we arrived in Cape Canaveral around 9 am on Monday. The crossing was great, we couldnt have asked for better, we sailed for the majority of the trip, the winds were great, the seas were as calm as could be expected in the middle of the ocean. Mark wasnt feeling well so I took the majority of the watch and I enjoyed every minute of it, I had Sandpiper wing and wing for a couple hours when we first got in the stream, and had her sitting around 9 knots for a good while with the current behind us and a steady 15 knot wind. It was a pretty uneventful crossing, which left a lot of time for my mind to wander, Alan told me he misses my random thoughts, so this is a brief view into what goes on when my mind was idle sitting at the helm.
I remember once Alan was in 4th grade, and I was making fun of him for not knowing what some word meant, and when I did I said something about his vocabulary being so small, and he didnt know what vocabulary meant. I thought that was pretty ironic.
Of all the neighboring letters in the alphabet, I think G and F would get along the worst, B and C are the cool kids, not like the jerk ones, but the ones that all the other letters look up to and wish they could be like. M and L are totally hooking up.
I posted a video a while ago of a ridiculous Saturday Night Live song called I'm on a Boat (again dont click if you are offended by bad music and/or language), I couldnt get it out of my head while we were sailing so I started thinking up a new version about Sandpiper's return to the US, and it started getting pretty good, so I thought I would share it here. It doesn't quite fit the song perfectly, but I thought it was worth a share, we are thinking about recording it, we need a stand in for T-Pain though.

Woah, a boat ride for three. Now who should I take?
Mark.
and.... Grandad
"Cool"

This is it, get the sails ready
It's about to go down
Everybody in the place get up on deck
But dont stub your cleat catchin toes.
We sailin this, lets go.

Im on a boat, on a sail boat
Everybody look at me cause I'm sailin on a boat.
I'm on a boat, on a sail boat
Take a good hard look at my mother's father's boat.

I'm on a boat with my brother, take a look at me
Straight travlin the Bahamas as slow as can be
We bustin five knots on full sail, it aint no joke
You can't stop me and my brother, cause we're on a boat

I'm tyin bowlines, and hitches on cleats
I'm eatin oatmeal and spam be cause its so cheap
But I eat in high style, when I spear a fish
Too bad the ciguatera makes my hands and feet itch.

I'm goin back to the burgh, lookin for jobs n'at
And errbodys sayin "ya, good luck with that"
But I got my college degree
And that will come in handy
When im workin at McDees
Makin quarter pounders with cheese

I'm on a boat and
It's goin slow and
Im wrapped up in my grandmother's homemade afghan
Ya my sails aren't fast
Thats ok with me
Give you time to work on that
US economy.

Look at me I'm on a boat with my brother,
A 36 sloop with a red sail cover,
Hey, there goes a whale, and there goes another,
When the wind opposes the current, the sea gets rougher.

Hey ma if you could see me now
I call the right side the starboard and the front the bow
Gonna sail this boat to New Bern somehow,
If we can do that, anything is possible.

Ya, I never thought I would be on a boat,
And I really dont mean to gloat,
But the Bahamas sure were sweet.
No, I never thought I'd see the day,
With the east coast comin my way
Believe me when I say, that days a good day.

I'm on a boat, on a sail boat
Take a good hard look at my mother's father's boat.
I'm on a boat, on a sail boat
Take a good hard look at my mother's father's boat.

I hope I have some big names in the music industry in my expansive reader base, I 'm thinkin this could get pretty big. I wrote some of that after being up for a long time on the crossing, you may be able to guess which ones, hah.

So that is the kind of stuff I think about when my mind is free to wander, and I could go on for ages longer if I listed all the crap that goes through my head. So other than zoning out, I mostly just enjoyed the ocean and the sky around me. On the way out of the islands, a couple porpoise were playing on our bow, doing flips and zig zaggin around on our bow wave, it was pretty awesome, they stuck around for a good 15 minutes. And I am relatively certian that I almost witnessed the end of the world in the middle of the night. I was watching the night sky, which is absolutely spectacular when you are in the middle of the ocean, and watching the satelites go by, the occasional shooting star. And then I saw a particularly bright shooting star, and it got brighter, and brighter, and then grew to an intense bright white streak and exploded with a burst of light that filled up the night sky like a supercharged bolt of lightening, it was such an impressive sight that I stood up and gawked, noticing that there was a white smokey streak left in the sky where it had been. It was a little scary. But we made it, cleared customs, and are now chilling out enjoying the American soil with a trip to the Kennedy Space Center and Wal Mart to renew our pride in our nation. It should just be 3 weeks or so now till we are back in New Bern, feel free to give me a call any time, its good to be back and I would love to chat.

2009-04-21T08:28:00.000-04:00

Sandpiper going wing and wing into her last Bahamian sunset

Our escort out of the islands.

The sun sets on the Bahamas...

And rises on the United States.

Back in the US?

2009-04-21T08:21:00.000-04:00

Well dont I feel dumb, I am now in the northern cays of the Abacos, and again, I thought I was going to get a chance to post on here before we left Green Turtle Cay, but their entire internet was down and a little after we left the entire island lost power, alas, that is how it goes in the Bahamas. So I guess we are going to have to do the crossing by ourselves since I didnt get that last post out in time, I am sure a lot of you are disappointed you missed that opportunity... Anyway, we are sitting in Angelfish Point right now to wait out a front, and it just passed right over us. The lightening was amazing, that was one thing that I really missed down here, we never had any thunderstorms since I got down here, and tonight was the first lightening I had seen in months and it sure came in strong, when I was out watching there was not a single moment for the entire time that the sky was not lit up somewhere by a lightening strike. Sitting in a little secluded spot with a 50 foot metal pole just asking to be hit is a little disconcerting, but the storm was pretty incredible. I take back what I said about the Abacos, I really just wanted to say "Abacos shmabacos" they really were never bad, and they only got better as we went along. Hopetown and Man-O-War were especially nice.
So, by the time I get this on my blog I will probably be back in the US, how exciting is that? Feel free to give me a call, right now, because I am in the United States of America and would be thrilled to talk to you! Ok, I am not really. Not right now. But it feels good to say it, and when you read this I will be... so... I guess I can say that. Allright, we head out to Great Sale in the morning, the last stop in our journey home!

It's Dive O'clock Somewhere

2009-04-21T08:20:00.000-04:00

Well, I thought I was sill going to be in Man-O-War Cay for the 10th and I would be able to post my last entry before we left, but we decided to head out to Hopetown in the morning. The trip was only about 5 miles, but it was directly upwind, and with such a short sail and great weather, Mark and I decided to tack our way upwind under only sail. We about doubled the time and distance of the trip, but it was satisfying, we sailed right up onto our anchor without running the motor at all. Once in Hopetown we did a little exploring, it is a typical Abacos town, with brightly colored houses, a beautiful pink sandy beach on the ocean side, little shops on every corner. A unique aspect of the town was the lighthouse which it operates. It is a 100 year old lighthouse, and it still runs the way it did the day it was built.We asked the keeper if we could come at dusk to help (read: hinder) him when he lights it, and he was glad to have us. So that made 4 little girls and 7 adults, everyone from Sandpiper, Gottalife, Bird, and Casa Mare, crowded into the little light room at the top of the lighthouse. The light is powered by kerosene and can be seen from 17 miles away, I was expecting some grand torchy gizmo that would impress and amaze me, but when we got up there... it was just a... kerosene lamp, just like a coleman lantern, a little wire mesh bubble where the gas burns, which amazed and impressed me in the opposite fashion that I was hoping for. The light is concentrated by Freznel lenses, made by Freznel himself I believe, and there were 5 sections, like gigantic magnifying glasses, on a track that goes around the light. The keeper lit the kerosene, and we then took turns turning the handle that lifts a 1200 lb weight, which turns the lenses as it lowers. It was pretty amazing to see, and then to go back to the boat and watch the beams of light that we just helped create.
    The 10th of April was also my deathday, and in honor of that, I bought everyone ice cream cones and made a delightful hogfish dinner from the fish I caught the day before, and a strawberry cake with fudge icing. It was a good deathday. Geneva informed me that one of the ghosts in Harry Potter also celebrates his death day, so I think that is enough to legitimize its celebration.
    We are now in Green Turtle Cay, and we are mere days away from making the crossing to the states. We are going to be hopping from Great Sail to Cape Canaveral, it will be somewhere around a 36 hour sail, and with just Mark and I on board it wont exactly be fun, we will handle it just fine, just not fun. So... if you want to fly to the Bahamas for a thrilling sailing experience, and you know how to read a compass, you are welcome on Sandpiper, just be here by Thursday, we will have you back in the states (you too can feel cool by calling it "the states" while you are here) by Sunday. The closer we get, the more excited I am to get home, just the fact that I will be able to talk on my cell phones is enough. We are currently waiting for a little front to blow through, and after that we have a small window on Thursday, hopefully big enough, though we might have to wait till Sunday, but regardless, we will be back soon, and after that we will be making pretty god time on the way home. On the way down we were traveling in the winter so the days were shorter, now the days are getting longer and we have more travel time, which is all that really limits us when we are going up the ICW. We will also hopefully be making some hops on the outside, the Gulf stream goes north, so we can go out and ride that to get over some of the bad spots in the ICW, like the bridge filled Florida and the endless winding in Georgia. We should be back in a month or so from our start on the ICW, so sometime mid to late May, depending on when we get our weather window.
    I will be getting around the country quite a bit when we get back, and I am thinking about buying a car, though I have not put much thought into it yet, but if anyone has a car they are thinking about selling, or knows anyone who is, or just has some general advice about buying a car these days, you should let me know. I dont know if the crap going on with GM will lead to some good deals or if it would be bad to buy from them? Maybe I will just hitchhike to get around. Anyone going to be in the North Carolina area around the middle of May? Hah, if so, maybe I will catch a ride with you wherever you are going.

Abacos Shmabacos

2009-04-21T07:04:00.000-04:00

We have made our way up to the Abacos Islands, our final destination before we make the crossing back to the US. We have been to a few spots through the islands, and it is all beautiful, but we have heard so many good things about it and I have to say, I am disappointed. The Exumas exemplified what I was expecting in the Bahamas very closely, and after that, the Abacos are a little disappointing. It is very built up here, this is a popular destination for yachts to come, being so close to the US. Don't get me wrong, the islands are beautiful, but we have not yet found a place to go get lost in the wilderness without the invasion of civilization. A good example of this fact is that I am sitting out anchored in the middle of a bay off of Man-O-War Cay, and I get a random wi fi signal that I can connect to. This isnt all bad though, we just experienced the world famous cinnamon rolls in Treasure Cay, we had them for breakfast 2 days in a row, and today we went into town after dinner for an ice cream dessert, so civilization has its plusses.

    The diving here is beautiful, we had a great day when anchored at Royal Island and came back with a boat full of fish, notably 2 big hog fish and a tiger grouper. The hog fish are touted as some of the best tasting in the Bahamas, and it certainly was delicious. We even used its reputation to our advantage, scoring a shooter for the spear I found as a trade for a hogfish fillet, and someone else let us borrow a spear, they called us the next day saying the lionfish and hogfish we gave them was the best fish they have had yet in the Bahamas. But dont tell anyone, it is illegal to buy sell or trade goods or services in the Bahamas without paying proper duties, we have heard that about 1000 times. One bad thing about the reefs being so full of life is that the prolific life brings prolific predators. At the reefs we dove today, I had to abandon a grouper I shot and was trying to pry out of his hole because a shark came snooping, and later a couple baracuda chasing after me turned into 6, then 8, then 14, then 17 barracuda faces looking in at me from all directions, it was pretty intimidating, and when I gave up on the hunting because of them and headed back to the boat, a big ol shark came moseying by as well. With just one day left until I make it to one entire year of being alive, I decided to play it safe and call it a day.

    Today is April 10th, on this day last year I got into a car accident that nearly took my life, or rather, very briefly did take my life, and here I am a year later living the good life in the Bahamas with nothing but a couple scars and a deeper appreciation for my friends and family to remind me of it. So I decided that I would call today my deathday, just a couple weeks after my birthday, and instead of getting things from people, today I would give to people, just because so many people helped me on this day last year, and hey, I got some money out of the whole deal, what better way to spend it. So, if you would like, come on down to the Bahamas and I will buy you a drink and make you a delicious hogfish dinner.

    Turns out we are going to be back in the states sooner than we thought, we are planning on crossing some time after the 15th of April, and will be back in New Bern a month after we cross, that is unless we just decide to hop on a plane as soon as we get to Florida and leave Sandpiper on a mooring somewhere. It is crazy how many derelict boats you see, there are some in just about every mooring field we come across, I want to know what the deal is with that, when can you legally just take one of those boats? Now that we are sailing again, I have a lot of free time, I mean, not that I didnt have free time before, I guess my mind has a lot of free time now, the task of sitting behind the helm not being very mentally taxing, anyway, I have been using that time to do important things like memorize the phonetic alphabet, write sappy poetry, I am sure that my posts will involve a lot more random stuff, like I wrote a remake of the I'm on a Boat song, look for that later

William Trubridge

2009-04-02T22:24:00.004-04:00

Sitting here in Nassau affords me the ability to do things like watch videos online. I met this guy William in Long Island, I actually went to the blue hole where he is diving with him and talked to him about it a little bit. He set the world record free dive, and he told me to watch his youtube video, and it is pretty cool, so here it is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGy4BUg0_Fw.

3-30 Manana Iguana

2009-04-02T16:21:00.001-04:00

We have made our way up to Allens Cay, one of the places I was most looking forward to visiting from the beginning. Before we got here we stopped in Norman's Cay, which used to be a stronghold for drug trafficking, but now is known mostly for the one bar on the island, Macduffs. It was less cool than I was hoping, but the diving around the Cay was great, Mark even got a grouper and 3 lobster, his first real kills of the trip. We are trying to keep our seafood intake down because of the ciguatera, but it is tough when that is your only source of meat aside from canned hamburger that looks like it is from 1846. Wherever we go, when people hear that we have ciguatera, we are instantly the topic of conversation, like at Macduffs, we got all kinds of questions and advice, like "dude, that sucks, you know you have that for life right? that sucks", and lots of helpful stuff like that. So we give most of the fish to Gottalife, its hard to resist a few bites when its sitting in front of you though, and we decided that lobster is ok to eat... and its pretty much gone anyway, might as well live it up right?
We are now at Allens, after a day of all motor and no sails due to an uncharacteristic day of no wind. The thing that makes Allens famous is that the islands are inhabited by iguanas, hundreds of iguanas. Tourists always feed them, so when you go to the beach they come pouring out of the woods, right up to you. It is a little intimidating, especially after hearing stories of people being bit and how aggressive they are. I cut up some Siggy meat to feed then and they were all about it, I started a few fights which is always fun, a hoard of iguanas would scurry and fight trying to get to the meat whenever I threw it. But when I ran out they were unhappy, I was sitting on the beach, having what I thought was a polite conversation with one of them when he decided that my toe might be a tasty treat and he gave me a little nibble. It was an interesting experience.

3-28 I've Got a Fever

2009-04-02T16:05:00.002-04:00

Now on our way back up the Exuma chain, we get to go through all the spots where we just passed through a couple weeks ago, which means that everyone already has an impression of us, which is usually a good thing, but sometimes... its a bad thing, like in the particular anchorage in which we are currently anchored. There is a boat that stays on a mooring and coordinates the anchorage, and we came in and were about to anchor and she gets on and starts telling us we cant drop anchor there and starts telling us to go to the left of the anchorage, we insist on cardinal directions, and we finally get to a place she was ok with. Right after all this Priority calls us on the radio just to bust our chops about the transaction we just had, during which I called the lady "the mooring Nazi", and it turns out she was listening... and then a couple days later, completely unexpectedly, the park volunteer guy takes us back to the boat on his dinghy after a hard days work and a few room temperature beers, and he picks up who else but the mooring nazis, so I was profusely apologizing, it was just the kind of situation that leaves you never wanting to have to face the people again, and, well, here I am. I called them on my way in to make sure there were no hard feelings, jokingly... kind of...
I got in the water again for the first time since the day I got Siggy (thats what we named the monster amberjack that gave us ciguatera), and it was kind of crazy having that tingling sensation all over, but it wasnt bad, and I speared 3 decent snapper, so its all good. We also went to Rachael's bubble bath, which is a kind of pond in Compass Cay that is right by the shore but totally protected except one cut in the rock where the waves are funneled through and 15 foot surges come crashing into the pond, causing a wave to go through the whole thing and filling it with bubbles, its kind of like a wavepool with bubbles, it was pretty cool.
Ok, this post has been kind of boring, I will throw some sharks in to spice things up now. We went down to Pipe Cay again, which we touted as the best diving we had seen when we went before, and it held up to our standards, we came back with a bucket full of 6 fish, one of them a good 12 pound snapper Brian bagged. So we were all sitting around in the dinghys preparing to fillet our fish, not getting anything in the water, and sharks start circling, I have no idea how they knew, but they did. We started into the fish, cleaning fish goo off our hands in the water and things like that, and the sharks come up right underneath us, skimming the surface, there are 3 of them, a couple around 6 feet and one good 9 footer, lemon sharks I think. So I start taunting them, holding my hand in the water until the last second, so they surface right next to the dinghy and at first I wanted to touch one, which I did, but then I decided I want to grab one, and one of them came after my hand, and when it got close, I grabbed its dorsal fin and lifted it up out of the water and it started thrashing, it didnt like that very much, and then shot off when I let go, it was pretty awesome. My next goal was to hug one, but regrettably we were done with the fish and had to quit, so I never accomplished that goal.
We obviously see a lot of boats down here, so we try to find the best names that we can, and try to think of new ones. Sometimes a key part of a boat name is what you could name your dinghy, something that goes well with the boats name, that would sound good when you are calling it over the radio, for instance, our friends on More Cowbell named their dinghy Tink, so they would be on the radio saying "Tink Tink Tink, More Cowbell". Well the name I thought has the most potential for a spectacular dinghy name is a boat called "Thats What She Said", but I have not thought of a suitable dinghy name for it yet, so you all should try to think of a good dinghy name for a boat called Thats What She Said. I will send the winning entry an awesome Bahamian Prize, and if its good enough, maybe I will use the name for my first boat, which I guess I plan on doing some time, buying a boat, its an intriguing lifestyle, and plus when I get older there is a summer camp just for old people with boats.

Atlantis

2009-04-02T09:18:00.002-04:00

I am sitting at a public computer at the Atlantis resort in Nassau, just thought I would put up a quick update. This place is absolutely gorgeous, every nook and cranny has some bit of extravagance built in. We spent yesterday in the waterpark, where they do things like take a crazy waterslide and then send it through a shark tank just to give it that touch of extraordinary, although you are going so fast you cant even see the sharks as you fly through. We spent the evening perusing the shops and restaurants around the resort, I splurged on some Ben and Jerrys, it was worth every penny.... $10 for an ice cream cone, ridiculous. I am staying in the Atlantis marina with Gottalife, and we are preparing for todays resort adventures, I will hopefully be back later with a couple posts I have written.

3-24 oldies

2009-03-24T16:24:00.000-04:00

After actually being able to spend some time on the internet that kind of worked, I went to some of the links that my friends have sent me, and there is one that I must share with the masses, which was sent independently by two of my friends, and a warning, this is not for kids, or those offended by horrible (but hilarious) music and course language, I got less than a minute of it loaded, but I could already tell it makes a pretty good theme song, thanks Chris and Kaity. I'm on a boat. And if I see that crazy fish Brooke, I will let you know how it tastes.

This whole ciguatera thing is pretty insane. Whenever I get wet, it makes a crazy sensation, like burning, but not painful, its crazy, and I live on a boat, so I get wet a lot. Luckily we have avoided the whole gastrointestinal side of things, we are just getting a little of the neurological effects, which is pretty interesting, but I hope it goes away soon.

Now that we have started to go backwards, we are running into a lot of people who we didnt expect to see after we left Georgetown. We keep getting calls from people who hear us on the radio to say hey, and we will probably end up picking up a few in our convoy north... if we do ever end up going north. We are trying to convince my uncle, or rather my aunt really, to stay for the family island regatta in Georgetown, we heard that it is a really crazy time, the town transforms into a bustling city of shacks and vendors and theres music and boat racing and apparently the flood of prostitutes that pours in from Nassau is quite a sight, hah. The boats they race look like they would be insane, they are definitely meant for speed and nothing else. The boats are sloop style, something like 18 feet long, with 26 foot booms that hang way over the stern, and a 39 foot mast, which makes for a sail that looks ridiculously huge for the boats, and in order to keep the boat from foundering under the huge force of the sail, they use a prize, which is just a little board that goes off the side of the boat and they load people out onto it to counterweight the sail. They get anybody they can to come on board and act as crew, usually to run around and be weights on the prize, and we were told we would be able to get on one of the racing sloops if we wanted, which in itself would be worth the trip back down to Georgetown I think. Now I am not saying I dont want to come home, cause I am really looking forward to returning, we would speed up our return if we went back for the regatta, but man it sounds awesome.

As I said before I left a few things I had written on my Grandad's computer when he left, and my mom emailed them to me just a few days ago, so I am just gonna put them up now, even though its old news

VHF

In the boater community the main form of boat to boat communication is the VHF radio, right after semaphore. In the US it is highly regulated and as we cruised down the ICW it was used for things like hailing marinas, talking to boats passing you or that you are passing, as well as simple communication. You would hail the ship you want to talk to on 16 and then switch to a working channel, we always use 72, where you would talk about important things such as a shallow spot in the waterway, or that tree we just passed that looks like a deer. That is how things went in the US, but down here in the Bahamas the radio is not regulated by anyone but the cruisers and it becomes the inter harbor telephone. Everyone in the harbor stays tuned to 68, and boats are hailing other boats all day, you get to know peoples voices before ever meeting them. People hail other boats and then switch to a different channel, and you can almost always count on it that someone will be following you to the channel you pick to eavesdrop on your conversation, everyone ends up knowing everything that’s going on with everyone. It is really great to have that means of mass communication with all your neighbors, I wish something like that existed in the cities at home. At any time you can go on the radio and ask any question and usually someone will get back to you.
Every morning at 8 o’clock is the Georgetown cruisers net on channel 72, the net consists of the business section, during which local businesses will come on and do a little advertisement, usually 3 or 4, then the regatta, during which the cruising regatta events are discussed, community announcements, during which people announce things like my poker clinics I have been holding, and then boaters general, during which people do everything from offer free old dinghies to ask for people to join them in a discussion of quantum physics after the net on channel 73. If you need something that you think may be sitting idle on someone’s boat, just go on the net, want to find a boat to take you on as crew to Long Island, just go on the net, need some help with your refrigerator, your engine, your bocce ball game, just go on the net, it is like the internet and the telephone combined, and everyone is listening, it is great.
It is pretty amusing to listen to some people on the radio, you begin to hear tendencies go around, like some people say “over” after everything they say, some people say “come back” some say “out” at the end some say “clear” some say “roger” to indicate they heard something, some even “roger roger”, others “copy”, others “10-4”. You pick up a little French here and there, with the French Canadians everywhere. I now know all my French numbers. What a hideous language French is, I feel like that will hurt a lot of peoples feelings, but geez, its so mumbly and nasaly and gross. Maybe you have to learn it to appreciate it? And I have been told that it may just be The French Canadian accent. When people want to switch to channel one one (that’s how you say numbers, one by one, there is no 12, no 67, it is six seven) but when they say 11 in French it just sound like someone is choking or something. Anyway, that only adds to the character of the whole thing, it may be one of my favorite things about the cruising community. The closest thing I can think to this that exists in the states is Craigslist, but there is only a select group of people that ever go on there and the feedback is not nearly as immediate. I am really surprised that more people don’t get little handheld VHF radios, they can transmit for miles, and even in places like the city the traffic would be minimal. Sure you get a few radio Nazis, demanding proper protocol on the radio, and the jerks who use it for means other than those intended (though it is usually for the sake of humor), but as a whole I think it is great to be able to instantly communicate with everyone around you, I think I am going to start a movement for a VHF radio enabled community wherever it is I end up living.

Edit: After I wrote this post I did the "Fish Net" parody that we presented at the No Talent Show for the cruising regatta, which I wrote about a few posts ago, this give a little taste of the fodder for my fish net.

2-18 This is what I was expecting.

Another adventure into the out islands this last week was really incredible, this is what I was expecting when I came down here, and it is awesome that it is finally happening. When Grandad made it clear that he wasn’t moving from Georgetown I was pretty bummed and thought I would be stuck here for the duration, but Mark and I have found plenty of opportunities to get out and explore the Bahamas and it is great. Rio Dulce, friends of Brian’s that have been traveling with us for a while, invited us to go along with them to Conception island one morning, and at a couple hours notice we were ready to go and out of there. So we headed out on Rio Dulce in the morning and got into Conception island that evening, traveling with two other sailboats Priority and Zola. Priority is a couple with two kids and they are an awesome family, the parents were a lot of fun to hang out with and the kids were really cool. Zola was a newlywed couple, just married in Vero Beach Florida, and they are out cruising for their honeymoon, a wonderful young couple and also a lot of fun. Rio Dulce is a family of 5 who have been cruising their entire lives, the boat is a 47 foot Catana catamaran and it is beautiful, we were really privileged to be able to sail on her. It seems everyone I meet out here I would be content sitting down for hours and talking about their lives, there is always something interesting, and these families were no exception, though I guess that’s what you get when you are meeting people who are cruising the Caribbean. On the sail to Conception we were cruising along with Zola and Priority probably half a mile off our beam and we kept hearing them on the radio talking about all the fish they keep catching on their trolling lines, we were trolling lines, but not getting as much as a bite. Dick, who owns Rio Dulce, was just flipping out every time they came on the radio, it was pretty hilarious, and no matter how many lines we put out, we got nothin. So we got to Conception fishless, but with friends who caught loads of mahi and tuna, so we invited them over and they brought over the freshly caught and prepared fish and damn was it delicious.
In the morning we all went diving on the reefs around the island, the staghorn corals were absolutely beautiful and the immensity of the reefs was really impressive. After a while fishing on the reefs we got a couple grouper, lobster (a huuge one from Zola), snapper, margate. The island also has mangrove creeks winding through it that we explored a bit, the creeks are a breeding ground for lots of sea life and we saw some sea turtles flitting around, nurse sharks, and various other fishies. There is nothing like eating lunch, and being hungry because you were diving all morning fishing for the fish that you are eating. It’s a good way to live. Priority introduced us to the “slingshot” that afternoon, which is a crazy contraption, born of the mind of Dwane on Zola, which uses a dinghy and a halyard to send you launching through the air at high speeds, I think only a picture will do to describe it. Diving the next day was even more fruitful, Zola again caught the biggest lobster any of us had ever seen, I wont even do Dwayne the injustice of reproducing his daring feat of underwater lobster wrangling here, it was incredible though, and he and his wife Kim got 4 more lobster that day, it was enough to feed the two of them for a month I think.
Priority had a brilliant plan of drifting the mangrove creeks and we all set out, along with another boat, Wild Wind, and us 4 dinghys went way up into the creek, tied together and waited for the tide to go out, and drifted down the creeks with the current back to the entrance. We must have been quite a sight, Priority had a big umbrella up on their dinghy and we were just lounging along, every one layin around. A helicopter flew over and then circled back to get a closer view, buzzing us at 30 feet, it was sweet. Sitting there drifting along in great company through the mangrove creeks of Conception Island in the Bahamas, it cant get any better right? Then Dick hands me a Yeungling. I almost cried.
We set off for Georgetown the next morning, and in a quick mid trip decision decided to change our route to go to Long Island with Priority and Zola. On the way we stopped at a nice reef to do a little diving and we got enough fish to feed us for a couple days, I got my biggest jack yet. On the way we were trolling again, and we caught two barracuda, which was pretty awesome, but they are not edible, so it was less awesome. They eat all the little coral eating fish which get ciguatera from eating coral so they also have ciguatera, no barracuda meat for us. After making it to Thompson Bay for the night, the first thing I did was go into the Long Island Breeze resort and use Dick’s skype to call Kari and try to justify not talking to her for 2 weeks including Valentines day and our 1 year anniversary… so back me up here, the Bahamian Valentines day is a week after the American… right guys? So, later Mark and I took the other boats on a little cave tour in the caves we explored when we were on the island before and it was incredible all over again. The next day was an awesome adventure, Mark and I hitchhiked down the Dean’s Blue Hole after hearing from many people that we had to see it. After a few minutes walking down the road we get picked up by a big ol’ white Escalade and find ourselves in the company of three 50somethings, two guys and a girl, who when I asked them what they do there, they said they do what Michael Phelps does, swim and… well that other thing he is famous for doing these days, which they obviously did a lot of. And a little down the road, we stop in at a little dive shop and picked up William. William as it turns out, holds the record for free diving, a record which he set last year, in Dean’s blue hole, the very place to which we were en route. I chatted with William on the way, he trains free diving every day, with multiple sponsorships that is how he makes a living, and does spear fishing in his free time, or I guess probably both at the same time really. Once a year he attempts the record dive, he set it two years ago and broke his own record last year with a dive of 285 feet. Inconceivable. So they took us to the blue hole, got out and chatted a bit with us, and then left Mark and I to explore it. The hole is surrounded by cliffs, with parts you can jump off of that are something like 40 feet high. We sat around and marveled at the hole, 50ish feet in diameter and plummeting down into darkness to 600 feet deep. Both Mark and I then took the 40 foot plunge off the cliff into the hole, hopefully you see those pictures. We hitchhiked back, making a stop at Max’s Conch Bar, which had the best conch salad on the island and the best drink I had ever had- coconut water and gin. Man it was good. The next ride was Cecelia, homemade banana bread, took us back.
On our way back into Georgetown we ran up the spinnaker sail on Rio Dulce, a brightly colored giant of a sail, and show boated our way through the harbor and back to hamburger beach. I got back just in time to do my poker clinic at 3, the family was all over joyed to see us back, and now it is back to the good ol’ life in Georgetown. It is also worth mentioning a bit of excitement that occurred a couple days ago. I was planning on buying Kari tickets to come down to see me over spring break as a valentines gift, and when I tell her this on Monday… she tells me she already bought tickets and was going to surprise me, holy crap is that girl awesome, I gotta say I am a bit disappointed I ruined the surprise though. So now I have that to look forward to, Brian has volunteered as the chairman of Kids Day in the upcoming cruising regatta, so Mark and I will no doubt play a large part in that, so that will be interesting, and the cold fronts have finally decided to stop blasting us with 20 knot winds and chilling us to the bone with 65 degree weather every day, so we will be able to do some good diving over the next few days, so things are looking good around here in Georgetown, now lets see what happening, in your neck of the woods.

Big Fish got the Last Laugh

2009-03-24T13:17:00.000-04:00

So, there is a problem with some bigger fish down here in the Bahamas, they eat smaller reef eating fish, which feed on coral, some of which contains a poison called ciguatoxin, which I have read is 1000 times more potent per volume than arsenic, so pretty nasty stuff. Well the bigger a fish gets, the more reef eaters it consumes, and the more toxin accumulates in its blood, so bigger fish can have harmful doses of the stuff. And I killed... a huge fish. We even pulled a reef eater out of its mouth when we were filleting it. So now it seems that Mark and I are suffering from a mild case of ciguatera, and if you google it, just about every site describes amberjacks as a likely species to carry the toxin. Its not so bad, just a little tingly in the extremeties, and that is even subsiding already, the best part is the reversal of hot/cold sensations, its kind of cool. So, nothing to worry about really, and even though I thought I won the battle, and had a hell of a time doing it, that fish definatly did get the last laugh.

Big Fishy Birthday

2009-03-23T15:46:00.002-04:00

Hokay, so, we are making our way north again... kind of. We made it as north as Shroud Cay, and then we were invited to partake in birthday celebrations for one of the kids on Priority, which also happened to be my birthday as well (he is exactly 10 years younger than me- March 22 1996, how scary is that, 1996, seems like he should still be a baby), so we came all the way back down to Staniel Cay where we had been 4 days previous. Further south, woe is me, that means more time in the Bahamas, oh bother. We have been having a spectacular time in our journeys, the sailing has been magnificent, the weather has been great, and the fishing, oh the fishing has been outstanding.
Making our way up through the Exuma islands we base much of our decision of where to anchor on what good dive spots are around the area, and we have been finding some really great spots. I know I go on and on about the places we dive, so I wont get into it really, but we have been seeing some breathtaking wildlife. Eight foot stingrays, eagle rays, huge nurse sharks, bull sharks, outstanding coral growth, and through all of it I have been getting some great catches, a lot of which I put up pictures of. One day I was peeking in a hole and saw what I thought was a lobster tail hanging down, I speared it, pulled it out, and there was some cockroach/lobster looking mutant on my spear and I had no idea what I had just killed, take a look at the pictures of it in the Conception album. Turns out it was a spanish lobster and they are a rarely seen species of lobster down here and actually taste really good, better than the spiny lobster I usually get. I also got a couple rock crab, you have to look at the picture, in the Pipe Cay album, of one of them, the thing had claws so massive I kept diving down trying to figure out what species of animal I was looking at and after 3 dives down I realized I was just looking at a claw attached to a big freaking crab, so then we had a delicious crab dinner. Ok, and if you are tired of hearing fish stories, just hang on to your seat for one more, this one is a doozie. Just yesterday I was diving the rocks right here in Staniel Cay where we are anchored, same rocks we dove when we were here 4 days ago, and when we were here before, Mark told me about these gigantic fish he saw that scared the crap out if him when they went swimming by they were so big, and we identified them as greater amberjacks. Then Duane speared a monster snapper, and sharks were on the scene before he even got the thing out of the water, so there is a lot of big life on these rocks. So we are scouting the area, and Mark grabs my fin and points frantically at two huge fish that just swam by, the same two amberjack he saw last time we were here. We both just gawked for a bit, they were some of the biggest fish we had seen, and they were darting around in front of us at incredible speed, and then when we got back to the dinghy after a while we were taking about them and I thought about it and decided that if I got a shot on one, I would take it, hoping for the off chance that it didnt just run off with my spear and I actually bagged the thing. So we move up the reef a bit, get back in the water, I am swimming around, and there it is, one of the amberjack is circling a little coral head in front of me. So I approach it, expecting the thing to take off at any moment, but it just keeps circling, I get closer, it circles again, closer, still circling. So I have already made the decision that I am going to shoot the thing if I get a good shot, and in about 3 seconds he is going to circle right under me, so he comes by, 15 feet below me, I cock back the spear as far as it will go, and I take the shot. Nail him in the head, perfect shot right behind the skull and it penetrates all the way through his gills, and he is not happy. I now have this 4 foot mass of muscle flailing around under me, slamming into the ground trying to get my spear out of his head and he wont let me near him, so I chase and I chase and I chase, never quite getting ahold of the spear and barely keeping up with the fish, all the while trying to scream to Mark through my snorkel because I didnt want to take my eyes off the fish, and I knew I was going to need some help finishing it off. After chasing it for a few minutes I got it cornered against a rock and got the end of the spear, I got a fist on the spear on either end of the fish and led his frantic attempts at escape to shore, practically being dragged the whole way. His flailing is now spilling huge pools of blood into the water as we move along and I remember the sharks that Duane encountered in the same spot. I get to a shallow coral head and climb on top, and standing in waist deep water, I hoist the thing out of the water. It is still flailing on the spear, blood is pouring down my arms, the water is saturated with blood around me, and I am weighing my options, the thought of sharks circling becoming more and more real in my head as the water gets a deeper and deeper red. There is a rocky shore 30 yards one way and the dinghy 50 yards another way, both of which require me to let the fish back into the water where it might wrestle off the spear, or might just take me for a ride. I look around, no sign of Mark, I give a couple shouts, and nothing, so I start heading for shore. I realize quickly thats not happening, I am keeping that thing and its blood out of the water as best as I can, so I get back up on the coral head and just keep shouting for Mark. He finally rounds the corner and I hold the behemoth up above my head to let him see what is going on, and he books it to the dinghy, starts over, and when he gets about 10 feet away, I realize its all good, I got the fish, I havnt been attacked by sharks, so I think about what just happened, and just break up laughing, I must have been quite a sight. I hoisted the thing in the dinghy, clambered in myself, and we both laughed and gawked in disbelief at the size of the fish that was taking up the entire bottom of our dinghy. So we then went on our show off rounds, going to all the other boats we were diving with, all of our friends on sailboats, and then got back to the boat and started on the monumental task of cleaning the thing. When all was said and done, we filled 4 ziplock 1 gallon bags full of meat, the fillets were 4 inches thick and we didnt leave an ounce of meat on the fish, we measured it at 42". After the filleting was done, and we had been tossing skin and scraps over, I actually dove in the water to clean off, Mark and I keeping an eye out for approaching dark spots, and then I saw one coming, I scurried to the boat and out of the water, and an at least 8 foot shark skimmed the surface right where I was just swimming right when I got out. After that we took the carcass and hung it over the side with a line, the resulting pictures of us teasing the sharks with it are pretty awesome, its the same shark that just about got a taste of me. So in the end I am left with something like 20 lbs of meat, a majorly bent spear, and a really good fish story.

Ok, so that last one was worth a read right? We are going to be holed up in Staniel for a couple more days waiting out this cold front before we start north again, and we will be heading up the Exuma chain, to Nassau, and then through the Abacos and from there we will set off for the east coast, probably some time at the end of April, and start up the ICW. But for now, its my birthday, and all the boaters we are with made it great, I was treated to birthday songs from Gottalife and Priority this morning, Bird on a Wire made some bread and cake which are sitting in the galley waiting to be devoured, I got some nice home made bling from the girls on Gottalife and Bird on a Wire, Mark bought me a delicious lunch at the yacht club when we went in to town to talk to mothers and girlfriends, and we had a grown-up (Ya, thats me now, I am old) movie night and all watched Office Space to close the evening. It was a good day, plus that present from Poseidon yesterday, I think I could do a birthday like this every year.

Regatta

2009-03-15T12:55:00.000-04:00

The Georgetown Cruising Regatta is the apex of the Georgetown cruiser experience. All of the cruisers come together to create this 2 week long celebration, and the ridiculousness of the cruising community is made readily apparent as the days of the regatta unfold. To begin with, in a normal regatta, the races play a pretty large part in the whole thing, and in the races the point is to sail the course the fastest. In this regatta the races are just another event, playing second fiddle to the coconut harvest and maybe the scavenger hunt, and the main focus is not on going fast, they give the best prizes to the people who take the best pictures, cook the best desserts underway, and catch the biggest fish, and the prizes are usually rum or some type of alcoholic beverage. The whole regatta is carried out in this sort of fashion.
Opening night is host to the "No Talent Show" which was a spectacle of folks with seemingly no self restraint going up and making fools out of themselves, from the 70 year old french lady Nicole (the same one who took me out in poker 2 weeks in a row) who is about 100 pounds over weight and has a bust that weighs as much as me going up to do a belly dance in a sheer pink tutu get up with the town madman Hanz in a similar outfit behind her trying to mimic her (surprisingly graceful) moves, to the family of 5 trying to do the evolution of dance, the loads of karaoke, broadway songs, songs with sailing lyrics added, the "Booze Brothers", The California Rasins, the old fat chick who just went up and downed some wine on stage while "Red Red Wine" played, the French guys and their crossdressing, and the parents covering eyes of children when some guy (french of course) wound up in a banana hammock, but, there was one act that displayed an incredible amount of talent. I wrote up a spoof to the cruisers net that goes on every morning in Gtown while I was in Conception, it was the underwater fishing net, hosted by Mike Mahi, with the water (instead of weather) from Franz and his pet catfish whisker 5 (instead of Hanz on his boat whisper 5), a sea dance party from rock fish Ron (instead of Rockin Ron, who throws all the dance parties in Gtown) and it went on like that poking fun at all of the Gtown celebrities, even Mayor Bill on "Rosanante" (in teh fishing net he was Mayor Krill on the shell of loggerhead turtle "Oceanante", daringly casted by Dick of Rio Dulce). Well from the first time we gave our mini presentation in Conception over the radio, the ideas came pouring in from the kids and adults alike for additions to the fishing net. We signed up for the No Talent Show and had a little meeting where everyone presented their ideas and we put them all together with the original script and set up a skit where all the kids and adults on our little group of boats had a part to play. We got up on stage with everyone hiding behind a sheet and me acting as the narrator as they all popped out and made their fishing net announcements, Kari even played an important role as general eye candy/sheet holder, and we closed with the thought for the day from Barnacle Brian: "A wise fish once said: I've got a fever. And the only prescription... is more conch horn" and the famous conch horn orchestra that was lining up to come on after us all blew their horns in salute, it was awesome. The kids had a blast and everyone was in tears laughing by the end of it, it really went over well, people were coming up to me every day afterwards to say how great it was, and insist that we had far too much talent for the no talent show, a couple of the A-list celebs even asked for the script.
So after a smashing opening night the excitement continued with the coconut harvest. They let go 700 coconuts on the other side of the little hole one anchorage and 100 people in teams of 4 raced to their dingheys and using flippers on their hands as oars, paddled across and collected as many coconuts as possible, drenching other boats with buckets, stealing/defending collected coconuts, cheating as much as possible. Me, Kari, Mark, and Gregg, a local kid from St. Francis, ended up in a three way tie for 2nd place and in a tense tie breaker where we tossed coconuts over a volleyball net into circles on the other side, I failed our team miserably and we wound up in a pathetic fourth place. After that madness we went to the Texas Hold'em poker tournament, which I dealt in, and we all got out pretty early, though I did have two students in the top 4 who came to my clinic two days before, and I actually won the week before, a $100 prize, so I was allright with the loss. A bonfire on the beach with a bottle of wine given to me by Fred (which he won for getting the first full house at the table) was a nice way to end the day.
A scavenger hunt the next day with Dwayne and Kim from Zola, Mark, Kari, and a kid J who we just met, was fun, but the ridiculous list of all red items (to fit the Red Hot Nights theme of the regatta) was pretty impossible to fill, most of the items we got were a result of a little creativity and a lot of red sharpie. The winning team was Gregg who lives there, one of his friends, and Whistling Winds (a couple of the A-celebs in the harbor), they won for the 4th year in a row, dang cheaters.
We also helped run the children's day, which my Uncle volunteered bravely to be the chairman of, and we had fun doing a bunch of activities with the (mostly bratty) cruiser kids and the (mostly awesome) local kids from the nearby primary school. We ran around and did relay races and obstacle courses and all kinds of fun stuff, and Cory, who I hear is a mad sick rapper, made us a cheer "We are the orange team, everywhere we go you can hear us scream..." to the tune of Iron Man.
Well after all that madness we were looking to get out of town, start heading home. Kari went to the airport and we were getting ready to go, I was actually cleaning Fred's hull, and he said he heard someone calling me on the radio and it sounded like they said Kari. Turns out she was calling me from a taxi on her way back from the airport because her plane was leaking fuel and her flight was cancelled, so she had to stay another day, poor girl, and we delayed our departure one day. She started on her journey home Tuesday and we got out on Wednesday, though we will be taking a bit longer than her. We will be heading up the ICW by mid April, and if anyone has nothing to do for a month or so, we could use some crew (Alan? eh? summer break? All of you looking for jobs? Nobody is going to hire you, get over it... nawww jj ((that means "just joshing", I kind of like the phrase "just joshing" better than "just kidding" (((jk))) and I think that this whole jj thing could really catch on if it is given the right exposure, my widely read blog is a good start, though it will inevitably be misinterpreted to mean "just joking", which I still like better than "just kidding", but I think that "just joshing" has a more distant interpretation than "just joking" from "just kidding" and is therefore a more necessary addition to the online lingo lexicon))), though I guess you all have lives to live up there in the real world. So, Kari brought me down a laptop, and with a puter of my very own I will be able to email and whatnot more readily, so I hope to hear from you people soon. Have a wonnnnderful day.

On the move again

2009-03-15T12:52:00.000-04:00

The last 2 weeks have been a slur of activities, and it has been awesome. The Georgetown cruising regatta started on the 6th and there was tons to do with that going on. Kari came down the 26th and I hitchhiked out to meet her at the airport. Sitting there waiting for her I talked with some of the taxi drivers and watched them playy dominoes. They play while waiting for planes/customers arrive at a little table by the lot where they park their cars and they go around the table so fast you can hardly catch what is going on. They slam the dominoes on the table for absolutely no reason and chit chat in their hardly discernable bahaman accents the whole time. It is quite a spectacle to behold, especially since it goes on all day every day.
Diving has been going well lately, I have decided that every guy should learn how to spearfish some time in his life, it is quite satisfying to know that you can go out at any time and spear a freakin fish for dinner. I have been getting a lot of fish when I go out, except one day the fish were all in hiding or something and nobody on our boat had hit a thing. I was desperate to get a fish and I spotted a big trigger fish, which are edible, but they are big beautiful fish, it was all black with bright blue accents, and I approached it with my spear cocked ready to fire when I decided it was just too dang pretty and I would let it go, and then when I surfaced, Gottalife's dinghy was coming right past me, so if I hit the thing I would have come up to the girls screaming in terror at the huge beautiful fish hanging on my spear... good thing I didnt get it. I ended up with a lil grunt that day, the only catch of any of the 5 guys in our dinghy. One of the guys was Charlie off a 40 foot catana catamaran "Kaya". He was a silver medalist in the 2004 olympics and is a pretty awesome dude, he actually left Mark in charge of his boat while he flew home for a couple weeks to sail in a race, and man is it a gorgeous boat, if anyone is planning on dropping a million on a yacht, the catana is a pretty good option.
Nassau grouper season started on March 1st, which was a pretty big deal, cause you would see huge nassaus before and they would just sit there and look at you, they are so cocky that you can literally whack them with your spear and they just twitch a little bit and grunt, which I am convinced is just them laughing because you couldnt shot them. But now... we can spear the dang things. We went out at 7 am on the 1st to get an early start on the season, Kari's second day in the Bahamas, she wasnt thrilled to be dragged out to jump in the water that early, but she did it with a smile on her face with romise of good fish for dinner. And nothing. I have not had a day that I came back with nothing for a long time, not even a freakin grunt. Nothing. And with Kari on the boat it was that much more embarassing. After that frustrating morning, Mark and I went out to out secret dive spot to try to get us some dinner. I got a superb shot on a really nice sized snapper, must have been a 15 foot shot and I had to chase the sucker around, he was big enough he took off with my spear through his side and led me on a chase for a while, but I got him. Still desperate to get one of those Nassaus, Mark and I stuck around for a while and he pointed out a hole where he saw one hiding. I came over the ridge above the hole and just before the grouper made his escape I nailed him right behind the gills dead center, knocked him out cold. I also speared a huuuuge margate that day, fought with it for a couple minutes on my spear, he got off, I chased him through a cave, got all bloodied up and stung by fire coral, speared it again in the cave, he got off again, and then dissapeared forever. I still think of that fish every day. The one that got away.
Ah well we are heading back to sea son, I am at Black Point on my way up the Exumas Chain and we are heading in for bread and internet, you know, the essentials, we will probably be exploring the exumas and the Abacos for about a month and then we will be back in the states and homeward bound, I will try to get on as often as possible.

Alas

2009-03-07T20:41:00.004-05:00

So, I fail at this whole blogging thing, I have good intentions, and they just never play out.

My grandmother's health has worsened so that she had to fly home a week ago, they are not sure what the problem is, but she is currently on her way home and on the mend. Mark and I are left on Sandpiper and we will be heading out of Georgetown in the next week, hopefully I will be able to get a more detailed update on here before we leave, all of the updates I had written on my Grandad's computer and all the pictures I had left with my grandparents, so... that wont be on here for a while. Kari is down here and the cruising regatta is going on, so we are nice and busy for now, and we will be underway in just a few days, so hopefully I find some time for this somewhere in there.

This is the Bahamas

2009-02-19T15:14:00.002-05:00

This is what I was expecting.

Another adventure into the out islands this last week was really incredible, this is what I was expecting when I came down here, and it is awesome that it is finally happening. When Grandad made it clear that he wasn’t moving from Georgetown I was pretty bummed and thought I would be stuck here for the duration, but Mark and I have found plenty of opportunities to get out and explore the Bahamas and it is great. Rio Dulce, friends of Brian’s that have been traveling with us for a while, invited us to go along with them to Conception island one morning, and at a couple hours notice we were ready to go and out of there. So we headed out on Rio Dulce in the morning and got into Conception island that evening, traveling with two other sailboats Priority and Zola. Priority is a couple with two kids and they are an awesome family, the parents were a lot of fun to hang out with and the kids were really cool. Zola was a newlywed couple, just married in Vero Beach Florida, and they are out cruising for their honeymoon, a wonderful young couple and also a lot of fun. Rio Dulce is a family of 5 who have been cruising their entire lives, the boat is a 47 foot Catana catamaran and it is beautiful, we were really privileged to be able to sail on her. It seems everyone I meet out here I would be content sitting down for hours and talking about their lives, there is always something interesting, and these families were no exception, though I guess that’s what you get when you are meeting people who are cruising the Caribbean. On the sail to Conception we were cruising along with Zola and Priority probably half a mile off our beam and we kept hearing them on the radio talking about all the fish they keep catching on their trolling lines, we were trolling lines, but not getting as much as a bite. Dick, who owns Rio Dulce, was just flipping out every time they came on the radio, it was pretty hilarious, and no matter how many lines we put out, we got nothin. So we got to Conception fishless, but with friends who caught loads of mahi and tuna, so we invited them over and they brought over the freshly caught and prepared fish and damn was it delicious. In the morning we all went diving on the reefs around the island, the staghorn corals were absolutely beautiful and the immensity of the reefs was really impressive. After a while fishing on the reefs we got a couple grouper, lobster (a huuge one from Zola), snapper, margate. The island also has mangrove creeks winding through it that we explored a bit, the creeks are a breeding ground for lots of sea life and we saw some sea turtles flitting around, nurse sharks, and various other fishies. There is nothing like eating lunch, and being hungry because you were diving all morning fishing for the fish that you are eating. It’s a good way to live. Priority introduced us to the “slingshot” that afternoon, which is a crazy contraption, born of the mind of Dwane on Zola, which uses a dinghy and a halyard to send you launching through the air at high speeds, I think only a picture will do to describe it. Diving the next day was even more fruitful, Zola again caught the biggest lobster any of us had ever seen, I wont even do Dwayne the injustice of reproducing his daring feat of underwater lobster wrangling here, it was incredible though, and he and his wife Kim got 4 more lobster that day, it was enough to feed the two of them for a month I think.
Priority had a brilliant plan of drifting the mangrove creeks and we all set out, along with another boat, Wild Wind, and us 4 dinghys went way up into the creek, tied together and waited for the tide to go out, and drifted down the creeks with the current back to the entrance. We must have been quite a sight, Priority had a big umbrella up on their dinghy and we were just lounging along, every one layin around. A helicopter flew over and then circled back to get a closer view, buzzing us at 30 feet, it was sweet. Sitting there drifting along in great company through the mangrove creeks of Conception Island in the Bahamas, it cant get any better right? Then Dick hands me a Yeungling. I almost cried.
We set off for Georgetown the next morning, and in a quick mid trip decision decided to change our route to go to Long Island with Priority and Zola. On the way we stopped at a nice reef to do a little diving and we got enough fish to feed us for a couple days, I got my biggest jack yet. On the way we were trolling again, and we caught two barracuda, which was pretty awesome, but they are not edible, so it was less awesome. They eat all the little coral eating fish which get ciguatera from eating coral so they also have ciguatera, no barracuda meat for us. After making it to Thompson Bay for the night, the first thing I did was go into the Long Island Breeze resort and use Dick’s skype to call Kari and try to justify not talking to her for 2 weeks including Valentines day and our 1 year anniversary… so back me up here, the Bahamian Valentines day is a week after the American… right guys? So, later Mark and I took the other boats on a little cave tour in the caves we explored when we were on the island before and it was incredible all over again. The next day was an awesome adventure, Mark and I hitchhiked down the Dean’s Blue Hole after hearing from many people that we had to see it. After a few minutes walking down the road we get picked up by a big ol’ white Escalade and find ourselves in the company of three 50somethings, two guys and a girl, who when I asked them what they do there, they said they do what Michael Phelps does, swim and… well that other thing he is famous for doing these days, which they obviously did a lot of. And a little down the road, we stop in at a little dive shop and picked up William. William as it turns out, holds the record for free diving, a record which he set last year, in Dean’s blue hole, the very place to which we were en route. I chatted with William on the way, he trains free diving every day, with multiple sponsorships that is how he makes a living, and does spear fishing in his free time, or I guess probably both at the same time really. Once a year he attempts the record dive, he set it two years ago and broke his own record last year with a dive of 285 feet. Inconceivable. So they took us to the blue hole, got out and chatted a bit with us, and then left Mark and I to explore it. The hole is surrounded by cliffs, with parts you can jump off of that are something like 40 feet high. We sat around and marveled at the hole, 50ish feet in diameter and plummeting down into darkness to 600 feet deep. Both Mark and I then took the 40 foot plunge off the cliff into the hole, hopefully you see those pictures. We hitchhiked back, making a stop at Max’s Conch Bar, which had the best conch salad on the island and the best drink I had ever had- coconut water and gin. Man it was good. The next ride was Cecelia, we stopped for some homemade banana bread, and she took us back.
On our way back into Georgetown we ran up the spinnaker sail on Rio Dulce, a brightly colored giant of a sail, and show boated our way through the harbor and back to hamburger beach. I got back just in time to do my poker clinic at 3, the family was all over joyed to see us back, and now it is back to the good ol’ life in Georgetown. It is also worth mentioning a bit of excitement that occurred a couple days ago. I was planning on buying Kari tickets to come down to see me over spring break as a valentines gift, and when I tell her this on Monday… she tells me she already bought tickets and was going to surprise me, holy crap is that girl awesome, I gotta say I am a bit disappointed I ruined the surprise though. So now I have that to look forward to, Brian has volunteered as the chairman of Kids Day in the upcoming cruising regatta, so Mark and I will no doubt play a large part in that, so that will be interesting, and the cold fronts have finally decided to stop blasting us with 20 knot winds and chilling us to the bone with 65 degree weather every day, so we will be able to do some good diving over the next few days, so things are looking good around here in Georgetown, now lets see what happening, in your neck of the woods.

out and about

2009-02-19T15:12:00.000-05:00

Those of you who have been checking on my spot know by now that I had a bit of a foray into the world outside of Georgetown a few days ago. I got on the morning cruisers net and asked if any of the boats that are participating in the upcoming race from Georgetown to Long Island would like crew. Fred on Casa Maré took us on, he is a single hander, probably in his mid 60s, and he took on both me and Mark for the trip. He was on an Irwin 35, which turned out to be a pretty nice boat, the build quality wasn’t great, but it was laid out nicely and sailed great. We made the 37 mile course in 5 hours and 42 minutes on the way there and 4 hours 51 minutes coming back, averaging a respective 6.5 and 7.3 knots, so it was pretty quick sailing, winds were around 20 knots and with a following sea on the way home, seems like we were cruising at hull speed the whole way. The hull speed of the boat is the max speed at which it can travel efficiently, above it the bow wave is too big or something like that and it takes much more energy to get more speed, the equation for monohulls is something like the square root of the boats length at waterline times 1.7, which turns out to be 9.3, so I guess we weren’t doing quite hull speed, but we were doin a steady 8 knots for a while, which is cookin for a 35 footer. Out of the around 35 boats in the race we got 13th, better than I was expecting, and once we got there, they had all kinds of activities lined up for us and the other racers. Thursday night we had a dinner at Club Thompson Bay, and the owner, Trifina, cooked up one heck of a meal. Grouper, conch fritters, potato salad, cole-slaw, rice n peas, wings, ribs, mac n cheese, all washed down with some Kalik. We stuffed ourselves to the gills and the three of us waddled back to the dinghy and made our way back to Casa Mare. The next day we went with friends of Fred’s to explore the cave we kept hearing about on the island. It turns out that there is a huge cave in a lady’s backyard just down the beach from where we were anchored. We walked down her driveway and she gave us permission to go check out the cave, so we walked down to the little beach in her backyard and spotted a little sign that said Cave next to a path going into the woods. A couple hundred feet down the path and it took you into a huge room with sun pouring in through holes in the top and roots from trees reaching down the 15 foot drop to find the ground, it was pretty spectacular. Continuing on, as the light became thinner and thinner, the sound of bats became more and more dense. The ceiling never got lower than 12 feet in the middle of the cave, and there were caverns going off to the left and right everywhere as we walked. One tunnel going off to the side of our original path really shocked me with its size, the beam of our flashlights was just swallowed by its depth. We spent an hour or so that day and all day the next day exploring the cave and taking pictures, hopefully I get the pictures up, it is difficult to get good pictures in a zero light environment, we sat the camera down and walked around lighting up the cave with our flashlights while the shutter was open. There were some crazy crabs we found too, bodies about the size of your hand, and bright blue and red… for whatever reason, you couldn’t see the color without a flashlight. After cave exploring we went to the local grocery store and bought pints of ice cream and sat on the deck at Long Island Breeze next to the pool overlooking the bay, it dosnt get much better than that. Ok, so then Friday night, after gorging ourselves Thursday night, the cruisers had a potluck dinner at the Long Island Breeze, and we again stuffed ourselves silly on all the casseroles and pasta and various goodness and desserts we could get our hands on. Fred got an award that night for hospitality in picking up two hitchhikers (me and Mark), which was a pink neck warmer someone brought as a gift, and he wore it as a hat for the rest of the night. Stylin.
Saturday on Long Island, Mark and I decided to go on a bit of an adventure. We hitchhiked the 50 miles or so to the bottom of the island, just happening to get our last ride from the guy who lived at the very last house on the road. We walked on from where the road ended, rounded the tip of the island, which was lined with huge white cliffs and stretched of untouched beaches. There was lots of flotsam, wrecked boats, seaweed, shells. It was insane the amount of shoes that are washed up on the beach there, where do all those shoes come from? Hundreds, literally hundreds of shoes every ¼ mile. A big thing to do on the island is to find sea beans, which are seeds from plants in Africa that float all the way across the ocean and wind up on the beaches here. There is one bean that looks like a mini hamburger, so our goal for the day was to find as many of those as we could, I found 7 all day I think. We walked the shore all the way across the island, scaling cliffs and navigating thick brush and jagged iron rock, both in the light and dark. We walked somewhere between 15 and 700 miles, and after our 9 am start, we finally got back to the road around 8 pm. The kid that picked us up was only going 10 miles or so down the road, but he said that he decided to just take us the whole way, going probably an hour and a half out of his way to take us back to the Breeze, and that is no surprise down here, you see that kind of stuff happen all the time, after we got back, we were sitting by the road because the Breeze was closed, trying to figure out how to get ahold of Fred, when a car stopped cause we were just sitting there, brought us to his house down the road, called Fred on his VHF, and dropped us off at a dock for Fred to dinghy over and get us. They are a different breed down here, the rest of the world could use a little Bahamizing.
When we got back to Georgetown, Grandmother and Grandad were in great spirits, Brian had been serving on them hand and foot, they hadn’t even gotten into our dinghy the entire time we were gone, Brian did it al for them. So, Grandads blood pressure is at a record low, but we are back now so it is starting to rise. They could hardly contain their… excitement… that we were back. So we are back in Georgetown now, the internet hast been working on Stocking for the past few days, but hopefully I will get this up soon, I am also mailing a few things out, some of the cool shells I found, a lucky few might get some hamburger beans, maybe a dead baby shark. Anybody want a conch horn? I have made a few, everyone plays their horn at sundown in the harbor, it is pretty cool, they can also be a great way to wake up roommates/siblings, but ya, just say the word and I will ship you a conch horn. Oh, and also, I have been trying to find someone who has a spare laptop they would be willing to sell me down here with no luck, does anyone have or know someone who has a laptop sitting around they would be willing to sell? That would be great, let me know if you know anything. That’s all for now folks, have a wonnnnderful day.

Long Island

2009-02-17T15:21:00.002-05:00

Dang, so I am at the Long Island Breeze, where I posted my last post from, and in between then and now Mark and I took an awesome trip down the Island and back. We met the world record holder for freediving, he took us to Deans Blue hole, a 600 foot deep blue hole where he set the world record last year. We went there with another diver Charlie, a guy Tim and his wife Rebecca (I am typing this as much to remember the names for myself as anything) and he brought us to the hole, taked with us there and a bit on the way, and then afterwards we randomly ran into them at Max's conch bar, delicious conch salad. Best drink ever: coconut water and gin. Dosnt sound very good I know, but it is, trust me. Uh, so we got a ride with this awesome old lady who has been camping on Long islands for the winter every year for 15 years, she lives in northern Canada, Got some awesome home made banana bread, man that was a great day. Again, I will be back with a bigger update later, I hope you are all well.

Hitchhikin

2009-02-17T09:55:00.000-05:00

I have been out and about a lot the past few weeks, lots of the time spent in the middle of nowhere, and the time i spent in Georgetown they didnt have functioning internet, so I have been a little out of touch. I am in Long Island right now after spending a few days in Conception, I was so far from anywhere I even missed Valentines day... oops. I will be back in the big city soon, I will fill in the blanks a bit more then.

Nina

2009-01-29T18:01:00.004-05:00

Nina cruising through the harbor.
Monica on the bow sprit
content with my volleyball on volleyball beach
Jib, staysail, fisherman, and main sail, all looking pretty
Heelin aong
Captain David.
Thomas doin his thing
Chillin with the kids
Approaching the anchorage in elizabeth harbor, with the video chase dinghy behind us

I have a few pics from our voyage on Nina, as you see. And by the by, Mark is back and so is Gottalife, I am no longer stranded. I think the grandparents and I had a good week. Hopefully things will be good now that everyone is back together. Grandad and I had a talk about how altruism dosn't exist and he has to realize that, and he agreed that he would try to do a little more for the people that do things for us, and that might help relieve some of the tension around here. Lets hope.

1/26/09

2009-01-27T13:19:00.002-05:00

1-25

Its been a good few days, lots of adventure. I went out roaming on Stocking Island, just seeing what I could see, its really is a beautiful island. I met up on my journey with Monica from Nina, and she is a wild one, she sure loves an adventure. We army crawled through the underbrush, exploring a waterhole and cave, getting all scratched and bruised, saw a coconut tree in the distance and decided to go straight for it, and when we got there I climbed straight up the thing and grabbed 2 coconuts. They were deeeeelicious. When you newbies back in the states eat coconut you usually get it when the meat is dry, but here they eat it when the husk is still green and the meat on the inside is like jelly, it makes for a nice refreshing snack. I got myself a nice machete to get into those coconuts. When we broke open the coconuts we met some kids, 2 from Alaska and one from Canada, apparently having a machete is illegal in Canada and the one kid spent a night in jail for carrying one just like the one I have.
The next day I pleaded with Grandad to be able to do a favor for Nina, they were rowing 3 guests and luggage across the harbor in high wind because they had a hole in their dinghy, but I ended up helping them and even bringing them cookies and as a thank you they invited me to join them on a sail yesterday. Nina is a 70 foot schooner built in 1928 and was the fist American schooner to win the trans-Atlantic race, she won 2 fastnet races I think, and is one hell of a boat. She is 18 feet at the beam, and has a good 10 foot bow sprit, just being on deck is quite impressive. We sailed off the anchor and got all 4 sails up once we were underway, She has a jib, a staysail, a mainsail, and a fisherman, the fisherman is definitely the most impressive sail, flying above the staysail in between the main mast and the mizzen. Maybe you should just google it. Actually Google Nina, I am sure you can find something out there about her. So we went out and under full sail we slalomed the boats anchored off of volleyball beach. It was completely unnecessary and totally awesome, just showing off, making a good 7 knots, hiking so the leeward deck was dipping in the water, 16 hands on deck, and coming within mere feet of the boats at anchor. The captain gave everyone a job when they came on board, he really knew what he was doing, played the role of captain to a T, it was impressive. I was in charge of the starboard forward back stay. Basically the wire that holds the mast up. So we took a few trips up and down the harbor, Rosemary, the captain’s wife, made us a wonderful lunch and dinner, and I ended up staying on board overnight, playing poker with the kids, hanging out with the other crew, it was a great time.
Yesterday I explored the rest of Stocking Island, walking up over the northern tip, a brutal trip to make barefoot… but I did it. On the way back we came upon a little beach shack, very well kept up, called John’s Flip Flop Shop, and we later found out that it is the local nude beach. Luckily it was uninhabited when we found it, we saw names written in the benches of lots of the… older folks around the harbor like Hanz Solo and Mayor Bill… That would have been upsetting. But the island was beautiful, we found lots of little isolated beaches hidden in the rocky cliffs, a few caves cut into the walls, and I even found a sandal my size to finish the journey in! One thing that has been disappointing about the beaches around here is the lack of shells that are worth picking up. I was hoping to find all kinds of interesting things, but it is relatively barren, oh well.
Mark is still out in the ocean, incommunicado except for his spot, so if you are reading this Mark, you should drop me an email. And as for the rest of you, you should drop me an email too, I have been spending some time writing people here and there, like some of the stuff I am posting on the blog today, but if you email me, I will write up a reply over the next week or so and send you a reply the next time I am online. Hope all is well, and GOOOO STEELERRRRRRRS.

Iz Da Bahamas Mon!

2009-01-27T13:19:00.001-05:00

I would like to take a moment to tell you about the Bahamian folk who we meet around here. The first time I ever really sat and talked to a local was when I was looking at the shops around town and got to talking to the cashier at one of the 3 gift shops in Georgetown. She started talking about how cold the weather was, I was walking around in my short sleeves and shorts because it was 73 degrees outside, and it made me take notice at the attire of all the locals. Just about everyone was wearing hoodies and long pants, and it was freaking 75 degrees outside! It is funny that they think of that as cold, but I suppose for them it is, I mean, it get up to a whopping... 85 degrees in the summer... they are just spoiled.
One notable characteristic of the Bahamians is their unwavering kindness. Every encounter I have had with a local, they have done everything they can to be helpful and pleasant, and it is really refreshing to interact with them, to go through life like that. Everyone says hi to everyone, if you look like you could use some help, there are loads of offers to give it. My uncle and I were just out in the middle of the harbor cleaning fish and lobster, we have to get out away from the anchorage as to keep from attracting sharks, and we sit there drifting with our motor off filleting the fish. While we are sitting there a guy comes out to us, a ¼ mile dinghy trip, which is pretty substantial, and asks if we need help. We decline, show him our fish carcasses, and he goes allll the way back. Then 5 minutes later another boat comes by to ask if we need anything, we show the carcasses, they give the thumbs up and go on their way, we were out there for like 15 minutes and had two people go way out of their way to check on us.
The taxi driver who I always call, his name is Forrester Rolle, is always around town, we always see each other and talk about the Lakers, the Steelers, beer, whatever, and he knows evvvveryone in town. We go to the airport and he gets behind the bar and gives me a beer, cause he is friends with the owner, I randomly see him in the liquor store and he tells the cashier to treat me good, he beeps and waves at like half the cars we pass on the road. I though it was just him for a while, but as I spend more time here I realize, it is everyone, everyone knows everyone, and everyone is that friendly, and it is awesome. Kari and I decided to hitchhike out of town a ways and I didn't stick my thumb up at 3 cars before a guy stops and picks us up, we go a mile and he stops to let the other girl in the car out at a hotel and it turns out she was hitchhiking too, and on our way back again the 3rd or 4th car picked us up and brought us right where we wanted to go.
We go to volleyball beach almost everyday, and the owner of the “Chat and Chill”, which is the little burger shack/bar on the beach, she has a 6 year old boy who just runs around the beach making new friends everyday, and he is an awesome little character, his name is Kenneth, and he lets you know right when he meets you, its Kenneth, not Ken. He has made friends with me and my cousins and all the cruiser kids that hang out on the beach every day, and if they ever ask him for fries or a smoothie or something, he goes and tells his mom he wants one and then comes back and gives it to whoever asked, its pretty funny. Well Kenneth has a babysitter on Saturdays, every other day of the week he just roams free, but this kid, the babysitter, Alex, I think he is a freshman in highschool, I said hi to him a couple weeks ago, chatted for a second, and didn't see him again until today. My cousins and the other kids decided that all the guys and girls were going to get “married” so they all chose husbands and wives and played that game all day. I was sitting there watching the old fogies play volleyball and he said something behind me, I hardly heard him and then he said my name, I turned around and he was watching the other kids play their marriage game he looked back at me and said “Brendon, do they know nothing about love?” The genuine tone in his voice and the look of concern on his face really shocked me coming from a 14 year old kid who had only barely met me once before, but it was amazing, and I think it shows something, one of the few things, that they actually are serious about down here. And it is quite important indeed.
The Bahamian lifestyle is so laid back and carefree, you cant help but get into the mood a little bit yourself when you are here for a while. If you know me, you know that I already operate in that sort of manner, so I am loving it down here. I was always looking to excuse or legitimize my laziness, procrastination, and perhaps some overoptimism, I just never knew the proper way to do so. But now I know. One simple phrase- “Iz da Bahamas Mon!” What does it matter? Get over it! Enjoy your life! Life is good! Wanna have some rum with your coffee in the morning? Worried about what you are going to wear anywhere at any time? Wondering how can that possibly be legal? Waitress short you a dollar in change? Wondering why every car is covered in dents? Getting impatient that your food is taking too long? “IZ DA BAHAMAS MON!” That is their anthem down here, the philosophy by which they live. And live they do.

1/21/09

2009-01-27T13:18:00.000-05:00

1-21

Well, Mark is out on some boat, probably getting the crap beat out of him by this weather on the way to the Virgin Islands. My uncle is planning a trip to Long Island with Rio Dulce and a couple other boats. And I am here with my Grandparents who refuse to budge from our current spot. We actually, instead of moving to a calmer anchorage, put down a third anchor yesterday when the wind started to pick up. So now where there used to be about 40 boats in our little anchorage, there are more like 15, and they are almost all crazy Canadians. 5 of the 7 I can see are flying a Canadian flag. I don’t know what it is, there are so many Canadians down here, they are all French Canadian, and they are all nuts. Apparently no more nuts than us though I suppose.
I cooked up all the fish I caught on the 18th, I made some kind of butter cilantro garlic potato lime concoction that I used as breading and fried them in. It was quite delicious, and along with some sautéed veggies and fresh guacamole it made for a nice meal. Once again, it really satisfies some innate primordial desire when you sit down to a meal you hunted, killed, and prepared yourself, especially when that meal is particularly delicious.
With Mark gone, things have actually settled down quite a bit here on Sandpiper. Tensions were getting high just before he left, due to... conflicting personalities/intrests? But they really seem to be in a better mood lately, a little less stressed. Me however, I am going just a little bit more crazy, and I am not sure how long I will last, and that is just sitting here at anchor, I am glad we are not going to be underway anytime soon, that wouldn’t be fun. Last night I heard the local hotel going over the VHF radio calling Gottalife, and I responded to see if they needed anything. They said that my Aunt Susan had called and wanted someone to contact her because there was an emergency. I got Brian on the Radio and he called Susan on his cell phone. Now we are all quite worried at this point, for someone to go to such extreme measures as to look up the closest hotel and have them go out on the radio to get someone to call them, well that seems like it is a pretty serious situation. Brain calls to find out it was my mom, and she was worried because Mark’s GPS Spot showed a blip going way further south than we are supposed to be. So, for those of you who watch the Spot, our boat was not stolen, nobody is floating around in the ocean, everything is fine, Mark just decided to jump ship, so that is no longer my spot, it is Mark’s. At this rate you can just assume my spot will only vary 50 feet as we swing around our now 3 anchors we have down in Elizabeth harbor. Oh well, I guess I will have to live with it here in Georgetown, I am going to go play some volleyball on the beach and hit Grandad up for that hamburger and Kalik he owes me. Oh ya, and I named my Dinghy: PITTSBURGH’S GOIN’ TO THE SUPER BOWL. So now when people call me, they have to hail me by that name. Its pretty awesome.

PITTSBURGH’S GOIN’ TO THE SUPERBOWLLLLLL. over.

1/18/09

2009-01-27T13:05:00.001-05:00

1/18/09
Hello and welcome back to another edition of “LIFE IS GOOOOOD!!!” Here is your host Bill Lumberg, in for Brendon Rawlings while he is in the Bahamas. “Yeaaa Hiiii, Yeaaaaa, hiiiiiii, yeaaaa, yeaaaaaa, hiiiii, its Bill Lumberg, thaaaanks, yeaaaa, thats greaaaaat, yeaaaaa.”

...Anyway, while I am on great moments in comedy, there is a boat here called More Cowbell, and people get on the radio all the time and spurt out little bits of the SNL skit, it is pretty awesome. One of the things I miss most about being on the boat- No Youtube. I have been jonesing some Christopher Walken brilliance for weeks! Some Don't Fear The Reaper? Maybe a little Weapon of Choice? Aw man, I didn't even think of weapon of choice until just now. Please do me and yourself a favor, and look up the Weapon of Choice music video, it will make your day, or at least your hour. If that doesn't make your hour, I want to be living your life, well at least for an hour, cause that would mean that you are doing things better than watch Christopher Walken effortlessly glide in rhythm with the heavens as he tangos with perfection, and flies with the grace an angel.

OK, so probably the best thing that has happened over the past week is that I secured for us a new dinghy, for free, that is even registered in PA. That means I can legally take it home and dinghy to
Southside instead of drive whenever I am feeling nautical. Awesome. Other than that, it has been a pretty awesome week. I gave a poker clinic on Tuesday, teaching all the newbie cruisers how to play the game so that they will come to the tournaments that are held every Monday and Thursday. Like 13 people showed up and it went really well. Now, if you have ever taught someone to play poker, you know that sometimes there are those who just don't get it. Especially if you are teaching a group of 13 people of the age range of 50-75, then there are a lot of those people who just don't get it. Well of the 13 I taught, only one made it to the real tournament on Thursday, and she happened to be sitting at my table. She was one of those who didn't quite get it. She was the first one out at the table. I am the one who took her out... woops. She even said she was trying to use one of my tactics when she went out to me, so she pretty much hates me now I think.

We have been going diving as often as possible lately, Mark and I found a secret diving spot with Kari, and we have been trying to get back there. Wed. we went to the secret spot with a girl from a sweet 70 foot schooner that is circumnavigating and she caught 2 conch and a lobster, and that was without any real intent to catch anything. Thursday we go out with my Uncle Brian and Dick and Barnacle from Rio Dulce. I make the first kill of the day with a lobster, then Dick came up with a Margate, then I get another lobster, and then I hear Brian yelling about something. I swim over and he points down into a tunnel in the reef, out of which is poking the end of his spear. I swim down to see what was going on down there and the entire spear disappears. I looked up to see my uncle with his hand over his face in disappointment, thinking he has lost his spear for good. We look around a little and I see what we are looking for, the face of a huuuge grouper poking out from a nearby hole. Dick comes over and spears the thing a second time, and the two of them yank it out of the hole, Brian's spear still lodged in its head, and they triumphantly carry the 25 pound tiger grouper by two spears back to the dinghy. We all go back and marveled at the fish, and when we jump back in, a good 5 foot reef shark makes a beeline right for us. It slows down and circles while everyone jumps back up into the dinghy, but I stick around in the water for a little to see what his intentions are. He glides along the bottom right towards me, and I just lay there in the water next to the dinghy watching, he keeps coming, keeps coming, and then... keeps going, right underneath me, 15 feet down. That was kind of intense. I assume it was attracted by all of the blood and commotion we had been causing with our kills, but that is where we decided to call it a day. We went back, cleaned the fish and lobster, and made plans for a fish fry the next day.
Rio Dulce is a 47 foot catamaran, a Catana 471, and man she is a beauty, the Costigans, who own Rio Dulce, invited over Me, Mark, Grandmother and Grandad, Uncle Brian, Aunt Sheryl, Erin, Geneva, 3 people from vessel 3 at Sea, and 3 from Nina. That made for 19 people, all of whom brought over dessert, fish, lobster, appetizers, rum, wine, all kinds of goodness. 3 at Sea brought some amazing homemade mango salsa and some delicious gooey brownies. Nina brought conch fritters made from the conch caught Wed. I caught 2 lobsters which Brian steamed, and he made pasta salad, I made some guacamole, sautéed veggies, and vermicelli, Rio Dulce made cilantro lime cole slaw that went perfectly with the fish, some seasoned rice, and they prepared the grouper that Brian caught by breading it with cornmeal and ritz crackers and frying it. The 20 of us gorged on as much lobster and grouper as we could eat, mixing it with the veggies, rice, pasta, salsa, butter, all kind of endless deliciousness. Even after we were all totally satiated and more, that grouper was not even close to gone, it must have given 15 lbs of meat, and it just kept going and going. It was amazing.

Today Brian, Dick, Barnacle and I went out diving again and I had a great day fishing. I had never shot a fish before, and today I went for it. Barnacle pointed out a nice size red snapper in the distance, about 25 feet down, so I went for it. I came up slowly, spear cocked, and just when it started to decide it was going to get out of there I let it rip and got him right in the head, he thrashed around a bit, so I caught up to him, grabbed the spear, and jammed it down into the sandy bottom, right through his skull. Everyone has told me that red snapper is some of the best fish you can get, so I am quite happy with that as my first kill. I tend to do that, the first time I do something, I do it to the max. My first beer was a Guiness, my first cigar a Cuban, my first shot of liquor was 151, and my first shot on a fish fish- a big ol' red snapper, ha. And after the snapper I got a good shot on a blue runner, and then a rock hind grouper, all of a pretty decent size, not too bad for my first fishies. The rock hind grouper was a particularly interesting shot. Every now and then when diving you will come across a little cleaning station where gobies and wrasses eat away at the akin and mouth of bigger fish, it is a pretty amazing phenomenon, especially to see it in action, the trust that is understood, like when a big rock hind grouper lets a little fish into his mouth to clean, but dosn't eat it, for whatever reason, and everyone knows that is how it goes. Well, I violated that trust. I saw that grouper laying there on a rock in the reef with a gobie in his mouth and two wrasses cleaning his scales, I dove down and got closer and closer, and the poor sap didnt even think about moving from his little day spa. Nailed him right in the head. Ya, I felt kinda bad, but man did he taste good. So ya, it was a good day fishing, my uncle got a lobster too, so we will be eating pretty well the next few days.

So, aside from fish stories (which, as far as fish stories go, were pretty truthful), I have just been hanging out, meeting people. There was a bonfire some young folk were having after poker one day, my brother and I went down, and they were all ridiculous. Two chicks who were way too proud to be from Jersey, Monica, the chick from Nina, who has had her eyes on Mark and was... tipsy, some racist dude from South Carolina playing Jack Johnson songs interspersed with impromptu songs about Obama, the best one of which was titled I think: Obama Bahama, Obama Loves the Conch. Or something like that. It was pretty hilarious though, he was good. And then we realized that Monica's dinghy had blown away across the harbor, and she was passed out cold in the sand, not even able to stand up, which ended up in a fiasco of my grandparents not willing to help for some reason, us disobeying them to get the poor girl to her boat, and my Uncle helping Mark find the dinghy in the morning, so it was a night of excitement and drama that turned out fine in the end. Mark is now crewing for a ship on its way to the Virgin Islands and should be back in a couple weeks, the guy is flying Mark back when he gets there. I could have gone too, the guy needed more crew, but I have to stay here with the Grandparents, we might be going to Long Island Tuesday, so that is exciting, Mark said I could go next time...

Well, I hope that you are all enjoying the snow, we still haven't seen any down here yet, drop me an email and let me know how you are, I'll respond as quickly as I can, I promise, but hey, iz da Bahamas mon, it might be a while. Ha! I love being able to say that!

I am still in Georgetown

2009-01-26T21:23:00.002-05:00

Just to avoid any confusion, Mark jumped ship and is on another boat in the BVI, I am still in georgetown, more on this story later.

Put da sting in yah ting

2009-01-12T14:18:00.002-05:00

For the first time in a long time, I am coming to you from the same place as my last update! Sounds boring I suppose, but when that place is Georgetown, Bahamas I assure you it is far from boring. The previous weeks have been filled with family and friends, my parents and Alan came down for New Years, Kari also was down for a couple weeks, and Kari was the last one to go on the 9th . It was awesome having everyone here, and I hope some more of you find your way down.

With all the family here we filled our days with lunches on hamburger beach and at the Chat and Chill, enjoying Kalik on the beach, taking the Hobie cat out for short sails, making fools out of ourselves on the volleyball court (although the Rawlings team whooped up on Hanz Solo and his cronies), and generally exploring the island. The cruisers around here form an amazingly eclectic group, consisting of retired doctors on million dollar yachts, old salties who have been living on their tiny boats for decades, you have the organizers, the moochers, the fishermen, the divers... it is a crazy mix of people. There are an amazing amount of Canadians in the harbor, I still haven't quite figured out why yet, but I do know that every one of them has a few screws loose upstairs, perhaps even more than most cruisers, which is saying a lot. It appears that the group which we came into the Bahamas with was a great group to get in with. Hanz is widely known as the crazy creepy old man in town, and is always doing crazy stuff just for a laugh, yesterday morning he came over the radio saying he had a small child's life jacket and invited any “young mothers” to come to his boat to claim it, he has a fishy conversation every morning on his “secret channel”with a fellow Canadian about going on “hikes” before volleyball, and saying hike with the kind of emphasis that lets you know that they intend to do nothing of the sort... we all know what goes on. And Whistling Winds, who also came in with us, are the organizers of all the cool stuff that goes on. Willis hosts the poker tournament every Monday and Thursday, Kathy just had a Trivia night that we kicked butt in last night, they have run the morning announcements every morning. They are like microcosmic celebrities out here, and I am in the entourage.

Christmas was spent with family, we had a lovely dinner in my Aunt and Uncle's condo, my mom brought something like 24 dozen cookies, there was a Christmas eve show on volleyball beach, the highlight of which was our own Geneva and Erin along with the kids from Rio Dulce doing boating-modified carols on stage. It was best in show for sure. Down here in the Bahamas they have a celebration called Junkanoo on the night of Christmas day, the festivities don't really get going until 3 am, so my dad, Alan and I got up at 4 and walked into town where we walked into the back of a parade group, bass drums pounding, 10 foot headdresses flowing, whistles blowing, trumpets blaring, everyone dancing, it was a pretty amazing spectacle. They have 7 groups which compete, each group parading down the mile of road that is the heart of Georgetown twice throughout the night. It was really cool to walk around and see everyone so into the music and in the mood of the night, it made me feel like such a tourist because I really didn't understand the intent, it didn't have meaning to me, at least not nearly to the extent that it did to the locals, it was certainly a sight to see though.

When Kari came in I took a taxi out to the airport and made friends with the taxi driver, Forrester Rolle, taxi 24, he bought me a beer at the bar while we waited for Kari. It was great to see her after being apart for so long, I wish I had a picture of the 2 foot wide grin on her face as she rounded the corner, I know I had one on too. Over the next few days we went on many adventures through town and on the islands, having a lunch in the park one day that consisted of chex mix, ice cream, and a bottle of rum, now that is livin it up Bahamian style. New Years was quite uneventful, we skipped the New Years Junkanoo due to a downpour, but we stayed up for a New Years toast and then hit the hay. A couple nights later there was a meteor shower, Kari and I saw 50 meteorites in 20 minutes, and in the star saturated skies over the ocean, it was an amazing sight to see.

We went snorkeling one day on the outer reefs of stocking island, it was a great day and I speared a nice sized lobster which we later whipped up into a scrumpdelicious lobster alfredo. That was good eatin. The most exciting part of the snorkeling experience, however, was when I glanced over to see a good 7 foot bull shark gliding past the reef. I wasn't too worried until I pointed it out to Kari, and right when I did it took a sharp turn right for us, it approached until it was probably about 20 feet away and then turned again to continue on its way. That was awesome. We also saw another smaller one the next time we went snorkelsploring, and I grabbed the tail of a huge stingray thinking it was a piece of metal poking out of the sand... oops... apparently I have better dodging skills than Steve Irwin.

A few days ago I sent Kari off, it was a pretty heart wrenching moment to send her though those gates, good thing Forrester was there to buy me a Kalik before we headed back. So now with nobody around but the ol' grandparents and Mark, I have time to do things such as sit around and type up blogs, write letters, go on shell finding expeditions, so if you haven't yet, send me your address so I can mail you random crap. Zack, you should brace yourself for what I sent you back with Kari... well... its a baby shark. Its dead. Note: I will not (necessarily) send you a baby shark if you give me your address.

GO STEELERRSSSSS WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! There is a bar down here where we can watch the games and it is awesome. Proud to be a Pittsburgher.

And I have successfully written another ridiculously long blog, again I apologize. And the pictures are coming, I swear. I have a few more underwaters I didnt get up before of Thunderball cave and whatnot, there are some more amazing photos waiting. So, until next time... make good decisions.

SANDPIPER OUT

I GRADUATED!!

2008-12-23T12:03:00.000-05:00

I FREAKING GRADUATED! WOO!!!!! HA!! YESSSSSSSSSS!

Final Destination

2008-12-23T11:52:00.003-05:00

Here I sit in Georgetown, at the bottom of the Exuma Cays in the Bahamas. It has been quite a journey through the islands getting here, every stop we have made in the Bahamas has been an amazing experience. It is nice to be settled down in one place for a while though. It is especially great that we get to see the people who are coming in for the holiday season to enjoy the beautiful Bahamian weather. My Aunt, Uncle and 3 cousins are here now, my Mom Dad and brother are coming in on Christmas eve, and Kariiiiiii is coming on the 29^th! Woo!

After a beautiful gulf stream crossing and our stay at the Barry Islands Club, we began our journey through the islands to make our way to Georgetown. The Barry Islands Club was a perfect way to start the journey, it was just a little house where two guys lived and ran the joint, and ran it quite well, it was a nice little place. Our first day there we had to check in at the airport, we are illegal aliens, not allowed to touch the shore until we check in. Grandad wasn’t feeling well on the day we checked in, so I had to go to shore and act as “master” of the boat and do the loads fo paperwork for everyone aboard. We were walking to the airport when we were offered a ride by a dude passing in a golf cart. Myself and 4 other guys from the various boats we had met climbed into the golf cart, and on the way, as I sat in the back bed of the cart screaming down a dirt road, kicking up dust on our way to a ¾ mile stretch of concrete they call an airport… I knew this trip was going to be even more awesome than I imagined.

After waiting out the weather on a mooring ball at the club, a mooring ball is basically a permanent anchor with a line attached to a float that you just grab and hook onto instead of putting down your own anchor, in true Bahamian fashion, the mooring balls at the Barry Islands club were attached to trucks, cranes, and huge diesel generators that had been blown into the bay by a hurricane 30 years ago, so they were plenty secure to hold us through some wind. Well after waiting out some nasty weather, which they call a norther, which is just when we get a little taste of the crappy weather you all are experiencing up north, we headed out to Nassau. Coming into Nassau we were greeted by the towering behemoths that are the cruise liners in Nassau harbor. Getting through the harbor was quite an experience, dodging jet skis on one side and huge freighters on the other, it was a bustle of activity. We chose to go on past Nassau to Rose Island. This was my first experience navigating shallow coral head infested waters. With Mark on watch for patches of coral, and Gottalife leading the way, we made it to the anchorage without any trouble, though Gottalife did kind of slam into a nice chunk of coral on the way in. I actually went back to the spot and dove down to inspect the keel sized slice taken out of the coral, it was pretty impressive. As we sat in the anchorage by the island we saw quite a few tourist boats come in, we imagine they were showing the tourists the remote uninhabited islands, which my brother and I were roaming. We were the uncivilized natives that day I think. After exploring the islands we made our way into the city and got ourselves a new 15 hp Yamaha for the dinghy, which is awesome.

We made the crossing from Nassau to the Exumas, stopping into Shroud Cay, the first big island in the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park. This place is very well protected and is held with a sense of pride for many Bahamians. It was absolutely beautiful. There were mangrove rivers lacing the island, we took the dinghy down through the creeks, enjoying the landscapes along the way, saw a couple rays and loads of fish, and we came out on the opposite shore at an unbelievably beautiful beach. We hung around the beach, having a lot of fun in the wicked current that whipped out of the inlet to the creek, lounging on the finest whitest sand you can imagine, and climbing the surrounding rock cliffs to dive into the water or go to the top to see the breathtaking view.

Making our way to Warderick Wells, the main headquarters for the park, we took a mooring and we had talked to a park ranger about doing some volunteer work for the park. Lion fish are a recent invasive species to the Bahamas and they are doing whatever they can to keep them out of the park. We talked to the ranger about going out on a lion hunting safari, and he was definitely into it, regrettably that didn’t end up happening though, but I did spear one earlier today. Warderick Wells was a continuation of the beauty that we had experienced in Shroud Cay. There were blow holes that the waves crashing on the rock cliffs caused a jet of air to come screaming up through the hole and sent the waves shooting 50 feet up over the cliff. I of course climbed down to get right down in the turmoil, the sheer force of those waves was just astounding. Spotting the island were natural fresh water wells that were supposedly used by pirates when they needed a spot to hide out for a while. I climbed down in one of the holes and tasted the water. It was salty. I’m skeptical about this whole pirate business. We saw sharks, rays, the sunrise over the cliffs, pirate hide aways, crashing waves… it was an amazing place.

I feel like a broken record… but the next place we went… was amazing. Thunderball cave in Staniel Cay. It is the site of a famous scene in a Bond movie, I have never seen it, but apparently it is a big deal. We were wading around the outside of what is seemingly just a rocky island, and you go underwater and see holes in the side of the rocks. Diving down through the hole brings you up into a vast cavern with a 10 foot hole at the top streaming light down onto the water, giving it a glowing blue color. Silhouetted in the light are hundreds of fish, circling the cave, which is protected from fishing, without a care in the world about how close you get to them. The wildlife around the cave was the most impressive yet, and seeing it all in the hollow island was just spectacular. Mark decided that he would survey the top of the island, eventually finding the hole that opens into the caverns underneath. We all went into the cave and cheered him on, and he leaped down into the water, a 30 foot drop. It was pretty awesome.

After Thunderball we made our final sail down to Georgetown, it was a gorgeous day and a great sail. A group of dolphin joined us after a while, and 8 or so played with Mark and I on the bow for a good 45 minutes, they were skimming right on the top of the water, almost touching the bow of the ship, turning and twisting, and at times they would swim sideways and just look up at you for a while, you can just see how intelligent they are. I have a thing about touching… animals? I guess? And I was determined to touch one of the dolphins, I reached down over the bow and they were so close that I brushed one of their dorsal fins. It was pretty awesome. I don’t know why I do that, but I always get the urge to touch an animal that I probably shouldn’t, a stingray earlier today, that dolphin, I tried to get that barracuda, lizards, crabs, fish, urchins… I am going to end up hurting myself, hah.

So, now I am in Georgetown hanging out with the Kilanskis, and we are having a great time. Hopefully I will find a place I can get on here and update more often, and sorry for this lengthy post, there was a lot to cover. There is tons to do around here, volleyball every day on volleyball beach, hamburgers and beer on hamburger beach, a poker game with the old sailor men every Monday, Georgetown a short dinghy trip away… I think I am going to like it here.

Ooooh. Baracuda.

2008-12-23T11:42:00.002-05:00

Well, since I didnt get the pictures up last time, I now have a decent connection and figured I would put them up since they are still on my flash drive, however i didnt put new ones on there, but rest assured there are some amazing pictures to come.

From the Bahamas!

2008-12-11T17:51:00.002-05:00

Hello! I am sitting at the Barry Islands Club, mooching a laptop and the internet, so I will be breif. Our crossing was pretty smooth as far as gulf stream crossings go, it is quite amazing to be out in the middle of nowhere without a spit of land to see, we made it into the islands without any problems and now we are waiting for this cold front to get out of here to cross to Nassau. The only pictures i had access to are from our diving experiences today, a nice 6 foot baracuda was probably the highlight. And the connection wont even let me upload the images, so just imagine some sweet underwater shots of fish and whatnot. Diving is really great, I speared the lobster we had for dinner a couple days ago, it is quite fulfilling to chow down on the days fresh kill. The following days will consist of crossings through Nassau to the Exumas and we will make our way down the Exumas chain to Georgetown where we will anchor for a while, I look forward to seeing family and friends who are flying down to see us there, you should do what you can to be one of those people. We are waiting in a little Cay with white sandy beaches and turquoise waters, and they say it will only get better from here. I cant wait. Well actually I can. Life is good.

Bahamas Bound

2008-12-05T22:01:00.002-05:00

We set sail in the morning, Making our way across the Gulf stream into the Bahamas. It has already been a great experience so far, and I expect it will only get better from here. Ill miss all of you freezing up north, wish me luck, and hopefully I will find a way to keep in touch. Bon Voyage!

We wait.

2008-12-03T23:17:00.004-05:00

We have been sitting in Ft. Lauderdale for a few days now waiting for an opening in the weather that will allow us to cross the Gulf stream into the Bahamas. We came through Palm Beach, which was an impressive assembly of massive hotels, it was really cool to anchor in 12 feet of water and to be able to see the anchor crystal clear right to the bottom, we had not seen water that clear before, and have not seen it since, I guess Palm Beach is popular for a reason. Brian caught up with us for a bridge filled day on the waterway. Going through southern Florida is truely an amazing spectacle of gratuitous wealth. The houses lining the ICW are incredible, many of them with 100+ foot yachts parked on a dock in their yard. We saw a small nice looking house get demolished so that a bigger house could take its place, the tiny, maybe 1/4 acre lot alone cost 1.2 million dollars. The question of where all this money comes from is popular these days. The girls were fishing for coconuts, grabbing any they saw floating along with a net, we later cracked them open and ate them, quite delicious.

We met a crazy couple that sold everything they own and set out on a boating adventure from South Dakota on our way to Ft. Lauderdale. The day was full of excitement, with a 35 knot gusting wind and sttrong currents on your bow all day with 20 drawbridges to go through, that calls for a lonnnnng day. We got through it without getting into any bad situations... until we were docking. Going off the waterway onto the New River was a nice jaunt through luxurious neighborhoods, that turned into gigantic condos in the downtown area where we docked. The river was about 100 feet wide, with multi million dollar yachts lining the sides, a lack of communication left me sitting in the middle of the channel, in a quarter mile section with closed drawbridges on either end, a tide that was going out at a few knots, and a 30 knot gusting wind coming the same direction as the current. And I had to turn the 39 foot boat around in this narrow channel lined with yachts, I get it turned around, gettin close enough to the edge for Mark to push off the side to get our bow turned around. We are going with the current now, movin along, and I realize, this is going to be impossible. I see our spot, in between INXS, a 106 foot behemoth of a boat which I just found out is probably the boat that the producer that tried to sell Paris Hilton's voice sold when he realized she is a waste of life, well, in between that and another huge yacht, and i come barrelling in with the current and the wind whipping me along, stick my nose in, bring the stern around, it comes whipping around towards INXS, I am gunning the throttle, epic failure seems imminent, all 6 tons of the boat comes crashing towards the dock, and... nothing... I got it in position, under control, and she rested, two feet from the dock, didnt even rub a rail... woo! A video can be found here. It was essentially just like that, haha.

So here we remain, docked in the midst of multiple high rise buildings, in a channel s aturated with wealth, there is literally a Rolls Royce parked a few yards from our boat, next to a line of a whole bunch of other luxury cars, people walking their little yap dogs down the dock all day, with the occasional 120 foot yacht being towed through the channel next to us. It is pretty awesome. We went grocery shopping, that is always quite an experience, filling two shopping carts so high you can barely see over them, and then getting that back to the boat. We had lunch at the grocery store, and as we sat there, this guy came sprinting past us, a bag in each hand, and right behind him was the cop that was standing at the door. All the people that were standing on the corner started shouting GET 'IM GET 'IM, and all went OOOOOO when he did, it was awesome. I was trying to decide whether I would trip the guy if I saw it coming, I think that I would. What could he have been stealing anyway? saffron? Anyway, no pictures for now, I will get some more up before we leave the states, which is looking to be Saturday at the earliest, so after that I will be basically out of contact until May, so if you wanna talk to me, do it before then! Also, more people should give me their address so I can send something from the Bahamas. send it to BRawlings@gmail.com if you want something cool from the Bahamas.

Happy Thanksgiving

2008-11-27T19:41:00.002-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving! We are currently anchored at Conch Bar, not too far from Palm Beach, not the nicest place, but we will make Thanksgiving the best that we can. The weather is getting better every day, and it has been smooth sailing, we are really having a great time.

Mark and I decided to go back to the shore on the morning of the 21st, and we were met by a guy who told us that we are trespassing on NASA territory, pointed to a camera on a telephone pole, and said… they are watchinggg youuuuu. The pictures Mark took when I emerged from the brush with the American Yacht ensign were pretty cool.

After leaving NASA turf, we made our way down the channel to Melbourne. There we met Brian and Linda, who are friends of my aunt and uncle. They came and got us in car loads, and all 14 of us went to Texas Roadhouse for dinner, it was fun, though Mark and I got stuck at the kids table with the 4 little Hanna Montana girls. I ended up in the first car load back to the boats with 3 of the girls… we listened to Radio Disney and my fingernails ended up sparkly pink and purple by the time the rest of the crew showed up, so that was fun… The next day Brian took us to the zoo near their house, it was a really nice zoo, not too big, but they really did it well. There was a big cage full of parrots, you walk in and they flock to you if you buy cups of nectar. I just stood around and made a couple winged friends, one bird just sat on my head almost the whole time, it was pretty cool, made for some funny pictures too. Brian and Linda took us back to their house, where they had prepared an entire delicious Thanksgiving dinner for all of us, I am talking turkey, potatoes, cranberry sauce, the whole bit. They had a gorgeous house and the food was incredible, they are some awesome people. We spent the 22nd in Melbourne, fixing the dinghy engine and things like that. I made spaghetti squash and guacamole from a huge Florida avocado for dinner, it was delish. The next day we took a much needed Wal Mart and grocery run, it is stressful buying groceries with grandmother, she gets so depressed spending money, even if it is well needed. We took a short sail to our anchorage for the evening, and for the first time we put up both sails and turned off the motor (and we beat Brian to it). Standing behind the wheel of a boat under full sail, gliding noiselessly through the water, good music on the stereo, this is what it is all about.

The next morning leaving the anchorage, after our keel had a little scuffle with the and on the bottom, we made our way down to Fort Pierce. Gottalife and Bird on a Wire stayed back at the inlet to Okeechobee, Bird on a Wire is parting from us, it was nice to have them around, they were fun people, they are going to tour the Floridian west coast and meet up with us later in the Bahamas. We on the Sandpiper are out on our own now, we met old friends of my grandparents in Fort Pierce, Daren and Harry Lamb, they took us to their house and made us some really good food, they were really interesting people, she had written a few books, they lived in Singapore and Saudi Arabia, he was still building race car engines in his garage, they lived right next to a beach, and had an awesome dog and a macaw. We spent almost the entire next day at their house, Mark and I checked out the beach, it was empty, we found some cool things walking around, like a crazy stick bug and some battling tortoises. We went to dinner with the Lambs and they brought along Rita, a 90 year old lady they know and take care of. Rita was really awesome, she was sharp as a tack, it was really refreshing to see someone who has aged as well as she has, I can only hope I am as able as her when I am even close to that age.

We made our way out to Jensen Beach, it was a short way, so we went under full sail again, making an easy 5 knots under only sail in a light wind. Leaving the dock, Grandad insisted that he drive due to the difficult conditions, and he kind of made a mess of the job, Mark and I were busy bumpers on the other boats and pilings on the way out of the slip. I think I am officially the helmsman for good now. When in Jensen Beach, Mark and I took the dinghy to shore and I tried my luck with the casting net, I ended up getting quite a few little bait fish, and even caught 3 puffer fish, one of which was around 8 inches long, it was pretty cool. I cause a catfish using one of our little baitfish, we decided not to eat it, Im not sure how good bottom feeders are to eat, but we did cut it up and use it as bait, it disturbed me a little bit to kill him, but I am going to have to get over that, there is going to be a lot more of it on this trip.

And today, we are on our own after a nice short sail we are anchored at mile 1001 on the ICW, mile 1000 was a monumental occasion. We are now settling down for some thanksgiving dinner, probably spam and macaroni or something like that. I hope you all are well, and that maybe you have a little more luxurious menu than we do. Happy Thanksgiving.

Quick photo op

2008-11-22T00:47:00.003-05:00

We made it to Melbourne, where Brian has some friends who are carting us around. I have had some free time and internet access, so I thought I would get on here and put up some pictures, I added a slide show on the right there. We have been getting some things done, fixed the sail, working on the engine, things like that. We even went to the zoo, which I will be sure to post pictures of later, it was pretty cool. We will be sitting around here for another day, maybe ill post some more tomorrow.

Freezing in Florida

2008-11-19T20:38:00.001-05:00

The past few days have really been great. Well, much like the days before them. We have been staying at more docks lately, due to some foul weather, and just cause it is easier. We crossed the border into Florida on the 16th, warm sunny Florida... the temperature was 45 when we crossed the border, and the low last night was 26. I think Mark and I are bringing down the Pittsburgh weather with us. We stayed in Fernandina Beach, a nice quaint little town, we got a mooring at the city marina, you just sail up to a float and put a line through it, much easier than setting your own anchor. Going into town for dinner, we met this guy who was just walking around with his 4 year old daughter, basically showing her off, she was pretty awesome, it was a little creepy, but funny. They took us to a pizza shop that was absolutely delicious, always good to ask the locals. And. I finished my paper for phage genomics lab. Last paper. Ever. That felt great.

The 17th we got out with the sunrise, slipped the line from the mooring and were on our way. We kept hearing the coast guard come on the radio "Secuuritay securitay securitay, there is power line maintainence at mile marker 740" ("security" being the lowest level of urgency for an announcement, "pan" is the next, and then "mayday") We just kind of brushed it off as nothing, until we come to 740... I see a helicopter, something is hanging from the bottom of it as it flies around the high power lines... what is it? no... it couldnt be... what??? ya, thats a guy, on a 100 foot line, dangling from the bottom of a helicopter, flying at ridiculous speeds, around high power lines. It was insaaane. They must get paid tonnns of money. We have also been seeing lots of porpoise lately, they get in these huge battles and there is just crazy turbulence in the water, tails and fins flying. Must be mating season.

The 18th we had an easy day of sailing, still pretty cold, but our final destination was Daytona Beach, and we still went and got our feet wet. My cousins and the girl from Bird on a Wire went straight into the water, I was tempted to, but when everyone started making fun of the girls, I figured I would hold back, hah. We stayed in a dock that only charged 80 cents a foot for docking, so we were all over that. I actually steered the boat into a slip for the first time, and I did quite well, Brian even said I did better than him and our other boat partners, well at least thats what he said in front of Grandad, It took a little convincing to get him to let me do it, but he was happy with my landing, so that was good.

Today we are on our way to Titusville and are going through the Kennedy Space Center. Probably because of the protected grounds, the wildlife here is amazing. We have been seeing lots of falcons, heron, huge pelicans, more dolphin battles, we saw some flamingos, and on our way through a cut there was a bobcat striding across the rocks. Pretty amazing. When either Mark or I are below deck, we are inevitably called frantically to the cockpit to see some craziness going on, it was in the middle of writing about the helicopter that I was called up to see an island covered in birds, and then we saw the bobcat. It is awesome. Looking around now we can see the vehicular assembly building and the launch pads, they are impressively huge even from this distance, I have seen some of it up close, which just adds to the effect.

We are now at our anchoring for tonight, Mark and I went to the shore, a ruddy looking shoreline by a railroad track. It was a nice section of beach completely untouched before we got there, that is the kind of place I am looking forward to finding on this trip. There were really cool shells all around and these funky crabs in every shell I overturned, I found a yacht American flag thing and a puffer fish. So cool. Well, time to cook up something for dinner, it is tough to come up with my usual creations with such a limited selection, I do what I can. Thats it for now, goodnight.

On our way

2008-11-15T17:50:00.010-05:00

It has been far to long since my last post, I am going to try to cut that down in the future, it is only good news since then. We are really getting in the swing of things with the boat, I have been doing a lot of the steering and I think I feel more comfortable now steering myself than letting my grandad steer. It has been a difficult journey getting him to really trust us with the boat, and we still have some things to learn, but I feel like Mark and I could handle the boat just fine if we were to take it out. We have been doing a lot more work with the sails, and we even put up a reefed main sail for just a little bit a couple days ago. We have been cutting across a few sounds giving us basically open water on which to sail, and we have been snaking our way through tiny cuts where every wrong turn sets you aground. Snow cut, Hells Gate, Rock Pile, Cape Fear, Mud River... We have made our way through some treacherous stretches, and I am proud to say that even though I do most of the steering, I am the only one who has touched the wheel who hasnt gone aground. They say that anyone who has never gone aground on the ICW has never been on the ICW, or they are a liar, I hope to be an exception to that rule.

We are looking at going out onto the open ocean for a stint tomorrow, I am really looking forward to it, getting under full sail, and letting the wind take us away. We are currently on Jekyll Island, Georgia and at a marina for the fist time this trip. I just took a real shower, and it was awwwwesome. On the boat, showers consist of a five second run of lukewarm water, scrub scrub scrub, 5 seconds of water to rinse. I think I normally use more water to wash my hands. So a real shower was a treat.

As we made our way into Georgia, the landscape changed dramatically. The waterway has been surrounded by vast marshes, it is just a field of golden grasses as far as the eye can see. When you get deeper into the swamp there were gnarly trees covered in spanish moss, it was pretty eerie at times, we even saw a few alligators to add to the effect. We have seen lots of wildlife that just blows my mind. I generally like to know what is going on when I make my way through the woods, and in the north east I am pretty good, but down here I am totally clueless, it kind of bothers me, but it is also really exciting. The birds on the ICW are really cool, watching the pelicans, sea gulls, and herons fish, and seeing all the different kind of interesting birds every now and then. Mark and I go out into the wild as often as we get a chance to. We anchored near St. Cathrine Island two nights ago, the island has isolated beaches covered in driftwood, and the interior was a protected endangered species rehabilitation area, apparently a zoo breeds zebras on the island, regrettably we didnt see any. As we tromped through the forest it was really incredible to see all the wildlife around, the exotic trees covered in moss, the birds, the lizards, the crabs. All that exotic foliage had its bad points though, the ground was thick with "saw palmettos" which just tore into your skin if you brushed it wrong, so I came out of the forest a smiling bloody mess. I found some marshes near the forest that I went tromping through, not able to see through the brush where i was stepping, joking that I was going to run into an alligator, and then I found a deer carcass dragged up on the bank... so I got out of the water. I did however keep the deer head, scraped off the remaining skin, and mounted it under our bow sprit. It cant be seen from the deck, and the grandparents will prolly be a little peeved when they finally see that it is there, hah.

We were in Beaufort, SC for Veterans Day, the parade was pretty funny, almost all high schools, which were all 80% percussion, and military units marching. There was also some dude pulling his motorboat on a trailer and a random city bus that I think just got lost. We also went into Savanna and Mark and I walked around town for 6 hours. Mark's friend picked us up and brought us into town and the two of us just walked around, it was much smaller than I thought it would be, and it pandered very much to the touristy, historic aspect of the whole thing, I dont think there was a single building that had been built in the last 100 years. We had to walk through a gated community to get to the river where our boat was anchored, and when we got back to the gate at 1 am, the security guard called the cops after he let us in, and 3 cop cars showed up to escort us to our dinghy, they were cool about it, they gave us a ride and we talked to the dude, it was a bit ridiculous though. We were on Herb River. Thanks Herb.

We woke up to a dense fog a couple days ago, it delayed us a bit in the morning, but we made good time after we set out. It is pretty amazing how much effect the wind and current effect our time. Currents can change your speed by 6 knots, depending on whether the tide is coming in or out. If you hit the currents right you can make 8 knots all day, hit them wrong and you struggle to make 4 knots.

Mark has been taking hundreds of pictures along our journey, I try to take the wheel whenever there is a good opportunity to take pictures, I get ahold of the camera every now and then too, there is so much to see. There should shortly be pictures of just about everything I have mentioned in the blog, enjoy the pictures and let me know what you think.

Cruising the ICW

2008-11-04T19:20:00.002-05:00

I am currently anchored in Mile Hammock Bay, it has been awesome on the way down so far, we only ran aground once, and Mark was driving, so I still have a perfect record. Sunday I spent all day behind the wheel in the cold rain and I loved every minute of it. It is an interesting experience navigating the ICW, dealing with all the other boat traffic, the draw bridges and swing bridges, the anchorages and dockings. Its really cool. We have seen a few groups (schools) of porpoises on the ICW, they surface right at our bow, quite a sight. Speaking of our bow, I still feel awkward using sailing terms, like bow, stern, port, starboard, aft, fore, and all that jazz. Hopefully by the time i get back i will be rambling off that crap like a sesoned sailor. We have only been making like 20 miles a day, I am itching to get out of here, but obviously our boating partners have different plans. We are planning on getting out of Miami by Dec. 1st at the latest, gotta get down to Georgetown by the time people start coming in. One of our Spots is out of comission, you can follow our progress on the one below. I have only gotten one request for a shipment from the bahamas, yall need to give me some addresses. The lil cousins (Cuz cuz supreme and extreme) need their computer back, leave me something to read when i get back on here.

http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0vRIce9fQLbigbsBespGiqesTXboO6kmO

Bahamas Bound

2008-10-31T20:09:00.006-04:00

Tomorrow, we set sail.

We have GPS devices that upload our location to a website so that we can be tracked. Mark already had one for his train travels across the nation, and I will be using one from my Aunt, here are the sites.

My Spot

Mark's Spot

They just have a button to update our location and say that we are ok, which is currently the house in New Bern, one to say we need help, and one to call emergency people to our location, and they work anywhere because they work from GPS satellites, pretty sweet. So if you see the "help" signal... well thats not good. But that wont happen, we are prepared for anything the ocean can throw at us. I am looking forward to a successful adventure, and we start tomorrow, wish us luck, Ill miss you all.

Oh ya, and good luck with those elections. Too bad I wont be around for that. We will have internet access on the way down the ICW, so hopefully I will update you on the journey.

Get Real

2008-10-26T00:47:00.007-04:00

I am going to be gone for a long time, and I will miss a lot of you people back home. In an effort to do something for you while I am gone, I thought maybe I could send something by mail. Maybe a postcard and a poem, maybe a seashell, maybe a solid gold pirate coin recovered from the depths, or maybe a vial containing insects carrying deadly exotic diseases. Depending on how much I like you. Also, depending on how much is costs to mail stuff out of the Bahamas. Send me your address if you want me to send you something BRawlings@gmail.com , or just leave a comment on here. Seriously do it, I don't care if I have never met you before, give me your address and I will mail you something cool from the Bahamas, ya, you, do it, please. Im going to have a lot of free time down there.

We set sail on Saturday. My Grandad, Grandmother, Brother Mark, Aunt Sheryl, Uncle Brian, and their daughters Erin and Geneva (12 and 13) have been working all week to get the boats ready, the excitement is really all we need to keep us going. My grandparents are really great people, and really are fun and very interesting, my Aunt and Uncle are as cool as they come, it will be great to hang out with them, and my cousins are both bright young ladies and they are quite entertaining. Perhaps the hardest part of all the preparations is getting rid of the stuff on my grandparents boat that has accumulated over the past years. They have not done a serious cleaning for a long time, and we need all the storage we can get. The past few days ave been spent taking every last thing off of the boat, and sorting through it in the garage, trying to get rid of everything that is not "mission critical". The most difficult part of this is convincing the grandparents that a lot of the stuff is not mission critical, it takes a heartless soul I do not posess to say no to some of these things. My Aunt Sheryl is particularly good at it. So now we have loads of food and all the equipment we need on board, the engine and sails are all working smoothly, and basically we just have to get ourselves on the boat and get out of here.
There were all kind of skeptics that we would be ready, that the boat would be ready, that the grandparents would be ready on time. Well we made it, there is nothing to stop us now. I hear all the time that when I am assessing a situation that I am suuuch an optimist. But some way or another it usually ends up happening just the way I said it would. The right way, the good way. So does that make me an optimist? I dont think so, I think it makes me a realist. If you go into a situation and you are confident in your goal and your abilities to get there, that really does a lot to make it happen. Worrying just wastes time that could be spent improving your situation. Does that mean I dont prepare for the worst? No, I'm not stupid, I know it is a possibility, just not one that deserves any more thought than making sure it does not happen. So here is to all you pessimists out there. Quit it. Cheer up. Stop thinking about the bad things happening in the here and now and think about the future, what possibilities it holds, and what you can do to make it happen. And don't lay your worries on other people, I dont mean never complain, I mean dont give out the execrable balls of gunk that enter your head every time you use it. If you think there is a 50% chance that we will not end up making the trip to the Bahamas, keep it to yourself, there are realists out there, and we need to keep hope that positive things will happen so that we can help make them happen. You can continue to float through life with that evil monkey camping in the back of your brain. Just get rid of those execrable balls of junk all together, they are not helping you, and they are certainly not helping anyone else. You need to get something out? Tell me, I am glad to listen. And you know what Ill do? I will tell you to cheer up, and that things will get better, and if you believe me, then maybe that is the first step towards making it happen. Im not trying to say that I never have pessimistic thought, I just dont let it control my actions. My grandad by chance today went on a binge calling himself an Eyore, and Mark and myself Tiggers, he says we are unflappable.

I am currently writing the last few words of my college career, and I set sail for the Bahamas on Saturday. Nobody can flap me now, life is good.