System Restart

So when blogging from das iPad, it it doesn't like to allow text in the compose field, so welcome to HTML zone.

I didn't go to work today because I didn't really have to. I worked ten hours on Monday and about eleven hours yesterday, so it left me pretty close to forty for the week without going in. I was planning on spending at least a few hours there this morning, but then decided against it because sleep was just too awesome. That seems to be the trend of my weeks as of late. Instead of saying, "I could easily get overtime today," I say, "close enough." That, and I've been dealing with some other stuff today.

Don't get me wrong: I've got a great job and I work for a great company. I enjoy what I do and I wish I could be there longer than just the summer. I mean, they're giving all of the employees iPads, just for being awesome. I shall sell mine to recoup the costs of Master Control. Everything went better than expected.

What's that? You want to know the nomenclature of my electronics? Well then, here you go...

1. 80 gb iPod: îPod (named this because I had recently returned from my mission where the I-hat is used all the time)
2. MacBook: Mactop (Mac + laptop)
3. iPod touch: (-1)^(1/2)Pod (the square root of -1 is i, I was spending a lot of time in school at the time)
4. Nexus One: GLaDOS (you get it or you don't)
5. iPad: Master Control (this was after I decided that all future electronics with names are denoted by robots and AI from movies and games)
6. Netbook: HAL-9000 (same as above)

By the way, this is front porch bloggery. As I've told many folks , you don't know what you'd do with an iPad until you have it. Then you don't know what you did without it. I am hoping that the AYCJ comes back into existence again this year and I can take it with me on my journeys.

This just in: cream soda looks like beer.

Cindy speeds down the road in the neighborhood. Just saw it with my own eyes. No pics, although it did happen.

Despite having not finished my regular season shows, I am excited for summer season. Mostly for Burn Notice, but whatever.

Just a quick thanks to everybody who helped me deal with my crap last week. You all know who you are, even if you don't know exactly what you did.

Flight 25: jfk-...home

So I'm sitting here in JFK, waiting for my last flight. It has been intense this last month, but I'm glad I dropped the $700 and decided to do this. I got to go places and do things that I likely never would have done if I was buying individual tickets. The pass kinda forced us to get creative in our destinations and amusements. I don't know when the last post was, or even what I posted, so here is a synopsis of our weekend travels.
1. Puerto Rico: very physically taxing. It was a really good way to kick off the whole thing. Derek and I rented a car and pretty much just drove it around the island. We spent a lot of time on the beach swimming and peeing into the Caribbean,obtaining coconuts and getting caught in a torrential downpour. It was really fun. We special t the night in the car since we had a way early flight and didn't want to deal with sleeping for like two hours and trying to make it to the plane. Derek slept, but I didn't. It was a little sketched by the thought of being attacked by wild Puerto Ricans in our sleep. We had a total of about 35 hours in the air for 19 hours in Puerto Rico. Worth it though.
2. Orlando: much less taxing than Puerto Rico. We got a Disney hotel so that they would pick us up from the airport and take us back the next day. It was only $70 or so for the whole thing. I got to meet Derek's cousin Jeniece, who basically did everything you could ask for to accommodate us. She got us free park tickets and we went to three of the four parks. Animal kingdom, magic kingdom and Epcot. We really didn't get to do a whole lot at all the parks, but we knew that coming into it. Time constraint were our biggest downfall on all of our trips. Anyway, we also went to downtown Disney before heading back to the hotel and dying.
3. New York: way fun. We went to 30 Rock and we were gonna get some standby tickets to snl, but we never would have gotten in with how high our numbers would have been. We went to the MET, which was amazing and got lunch at a Romanian restaurant. We went up to Yankee stadium but didn't get in. I however could see the huge TV through the columns at the entrance, so I saw a game at Yankee stadium, right? Time square yielded a new Ferris wheel picture and then little Italy. It was a really fun trip, but there was a lot of foot traveling involved.
4: Orlando again: this time we went to a Universal park, which wasn't as good as any of the Disney parks, with the exception of the Harry Potter land. It was incredibly well done, with one of the best conceived theme park attractions I've ever encountered in my life. The food was good at "the three broomsticks" and butterbeer is glorified cream soda. We still spent loads of money on it though. Gotta live it up while you can. Jeniece was again an amazing host to the state of Florida and even put us up at her apartment in addition to being airport transportation. By the time we got back to her apartment, we were ready to die. We crashed for the night and now I'm on my way home and Derek is headed to Boston tomorrow.
I've punched all of this out on my phone so excuse all the grammar errors and typos.

Ginger Ale and Cranberry Juice

Derek and I are sitting in the Long Beach Airport. It is the sixth time I've been in this airport this week.

We just saw some kids doing some lewd things. They need to be punished.

Anyway, so we're in the LGB airport just waiting for our flight home. We have been flying and waiting in airports all day. We left Aguadilla this morning at 4:00 (their time) and we will be getting home around 23:00 (Utah time). So do your own math if you care how much time it was in the air.

We somehow missed the fact that if we had been willing to wait in JFK for another 2 hours, we could have gone directly from New York to SLC instead of coming through Long Beach. We don't know why this happened like it did. I am pretty sure that I just thought that since we had to go through California to get to Puerto Rico, we would have to come back through it to get home. Dumb move. We'd be home about now. Its all good though; we had some awesome mexicano food here since we had a chance to leave the airport.

I am trying to upload a picture from Los Puerto Ricos right now, but my phone is stuck at 47%. I'll post if it eventually succeeds.

Here is a bit of a rundown of all the events of our glorious trip.

Yesterday when we landed, we rented a car. We were expecting some sort of a POS, but we got a Lancer instead. It was actually really nice. It got great gas mileage and had some good acceleration to it as well.

We drove down through the main part of Aguadilla and down by the beach. We stopped in a little sandwich shop and had some lunch. There was a crazy man (Franky) there who tried to rent us a room for the night. We chatted with him for a bit until he left. It was enjoyable and the food was really, really good. I got a Monte Cristo and Derek got a Cubano. We're not entirely sure what is in them, but that is what we ate.

We decided to go check out the mall. Neither of us took any flip-flops, since we were just planning on buying some there. Neither of us bought any. The mall was pretty american, just low-class american. The main store was K Mart. Not even Sh0pKo. They went with K Mart. I suppose it is okay when you are planning on selling more horchata than mountain dew.

We went to the beach next. We had pretty much the entire beach to ourselves. We were gonna try to build a Bear Grylls raft, but got tired of it after we collected all of the wood. We found a bit of rope to use, but then never ended up using it. We occupied our time there trying to get coconuts out of a tree. We tried to throw some boomerang-shaped sticks at them, but they remained unaffected in the tree. We went back into the Caribbean to hang out for a while, and we saw a native headed for the same tree. He had much more success than we did. Needless to say, after he left, we took another shot at the tree. I climbed an adjacent tree and used a long bamboo chute to poke the coconuts enough to cause them to fall. We used a board with a nail in it (which was just laying on our forsaken beach) and punctured the coconuts to drink their precious juices. Having just come from the tree, it was somewhat bitter, but better than the juice that we got on the flight. We had a coconut that had already fallen to the ground, and we punctured that to drink as well. There was a capri sun that somebody had left on the beach which provided the straw for our tropical beverage. Gross, but we just kept thinking, "What would Bear do?" He'd use the straw. We cleaned it out with some ocean water first... After emptying the coconut, we broke it open and ate some of the horrible meat inside. It was a long time on the beach, and we're both sunburned, but it was awesome.

After leaving the beach, we got some street vendor food. Kabobs to be more exact. Derek got chicken, but I was more adventurous and went for pork. Right as we bought them, a torrential downpour started and we made a beeline back to the car. We were still soaked from the 100 yard journey, so we tried to dry off a bit in the car. It was mostly unsuccessful. We got sand everywhere and had to drive around looking for a gas station with a vacuum so we could clean it up a little bit.

We took an hour nap in the car and decided to drive around the island for a bit. We drove for a few hours and it was spectacular. As the windows were down, it sounded like the jungle cruise from Disneyland/world. Driving through the winding roads of Puerto Rico was pretty awesome. It was the best part of the trip. It was somewhat surreal to be in a place that was so drastically different from the mountains that we are accustomed to. We may have driven around 150 miles or more. It was great. We just kept going and going, and were never disappointed.

We eventually just parked the car in a close proximity to the airport and tried to sleep for a few hours. I couldn't. There is something about trying to sleep in a car in the middle of Puerto Rico that prohibited me from relaxing enough to sleep.

We returned the car and went to the airport. I had trouble printing my ticket for my LGB-SLC flight so I called JetBlue to resolve it. There were a bunch of dumb excuses as to why I couldn't do it, so I just took care of it when we went to JFK. We Pictochatted in the airpot and just hung out until we could get on the plane, which was spewing a strange mist in the cabin when we boarded.

The flight up to JFK wasn't bad. The layover wasn't pleasant though. Derek took a nap on the floor and I did some homework. That was pretty much it.

We got into LGB and walked about a mile to get some mexican food. Yup, it was good. We're now just here in the airport waiting for the last flight, which is where we started. So here is a picture:

From Travels

This is just a pic I snapped as we drove down the Puerto Rican cost. There were better pictures, I just didn't take them with my phone. Battery life wasn't great and Derek had 3G versus my edge. He provided maps, so I didn't have much time with a living battery.

Thank You For Using Long Beach Airport

So I'm in Long Beach, and I'm sick of homework. I'm just sitting here, enjoying the ocean and having never been more pleased in a single purchase of a plane ticket. Granted, it was a massive, all encompassing plane ticket, but still... just one... kinda.

Tomorrow Derek and I are going to Puerto Rico. We won't actually be there until Saturday morning, and we'll be leaving at the break of dawn on Sunday morning. I am way excited. I am still debating as to whether or not I am going to be taking much homework with me. I might just take my laptop and call it good. It depends on how much homework I have to get done by Monday. I may be up for a while tonight trying to get everything done that I need to.

So, I am at the airport now. They have free wifi here in Long Beach, so I'm pleased. Everything else was done by phone tethering, which has all but killed my battery. I quit the battery hogging and killed all my apps so that I could use my maps to make it back to the airport. It must have worked because I made it here.

I was going to upload an image from today, but we're in EDGE country here, so here is one from yesterday.

From Travels

It was taco Tuesday, so it was only appropriate.

I'm exhausted.