vlomo | day12 | videoblogging month from Philip Campbell on Vimeo.
in catchup mode with audiogravity and videoblogging month. i have footage on my flip that i am importing and will have to spread out over some days and some i'll just have to mashup older stuff me thinks. i want to get back on track for at least the next few days. i really should get my camera back from emma actually as i do not think we will get any greenbus footage before saturday now.
Colleen visited Wednesday to Thursday, making Wednesday full of fun. After about three hours with my eyes shut, I booked it to Syracuse. There, I got to know the train station and surrounding area by circling for parking while killing time. The adage "Hurry up and wait" resonates only after I reach the destination. With Colleen to entertain -- and the vista's of Alaska of which CNY was to be compared, I set a course for Chittenango Falls. From there we got side-tracked by the wind mills turbines. I'd never been around them in the day. The view over the Oneida valley is impressive. From there we started the return, but were again side tracked, this time by green smelly nuts or maybe fruits. Even mom couldn't identify them, but she'd just gotten out of surgery. She is even more distracted with "good drugs."
After an attempt at napping, Steve called for a ride to a purposed football game. I'd like to think if I'd given Colleen the opportunity to back out, she wouldn't have. At any rate, the game was a lot of fun --more so than I thought it would be-- for me anyway. Steve, Colleen and I stopped at A&W/KFC on the way back. I'd never been before. I ate all the fries, yet bought none. We had a chance at further prolonging sleep from Max, who was willing to entertain company at his home. Colleen and I chose to sleep.
It was again hard to wake up, and both of us hit various snooze buttons. But eventually we found our way to the Utica terminal. With an awkward goodbye, I drove back to bed. And woke up to plead desperate cries for female players. We need at least three to play. While Sarah played, surgery took mom out and the other girl had prior obligations or something. It was the last indoor soccer game of the mini-series. Steve's sister had high school stuff to do and Maria never got back to me. By "allowing" Brad to play and bring him shoes so he didn't have to leave Syracuse, we acquired Meredith. But we still walked on the field one short. Fortunately, I wasn't so creepy as to scare away all of a finishing teams girls. I snagged one of the better girls too! The last game was the first game we didn't lose. We didn't win either. And we only tied on a ricochet off-their-own-teammate ball. Also, with Brad, Meredith, the white team's girl, and some random walk-on Mike, half the team wasn't on the team.
Maybe U16 AYSO was the last time I played real-ish soccer with Brad. It was, like football, a lot of fun, with the notable difference that I expect soccer to be fun.
Friday, Rose and Sarah came home to pick me up. We were off to CT. I spent my waking day baking a cake for Aunt Marnie's birthday (she always does the same for me) and preparing what I'd need to spend the four hour drive productively on the laptop. And then, I stalled our departure moving music around so I wouldn't have to listen to the ruling preference of the majority. Though, it turned out the volume was too high for me to counter. The heat was also set too high. This was my opinion, and I was in the back.
We got in around 11. The three of us slept on the couches. I was the last to fall asleep and used the TV as my vector to it. I would usually have been compelled to avoid inconveniencing anyone trying to sleep, but Sarah's requests to do just that provided too strong a motivation against my inclination. Then again, I did the same thing the next night sleeping on Tom's couch. But I think Tom and I were equally interested in remembering the particulars of the ending to 12 Monkeys.
The next day, the three of us woke up to Aunt Marnie and Jordyn. Then fell back asleep to be woken by sesame street, only to fall back asleep again. When awake, the girls went to the mall. Uncle nick went to the tag sales, dragging me along with the pretense of recovering the shoes I left in the car the girls took. They were needed for Ultimate Frisbee. The frisbee game turned into a football game which turned into a near legitimate rugby game. By the time the transformation completed, only 5 of us were left. I was the oldest. It was a very strange thing to be the strongest in even a makeshift tackle game. As one would expect, I've damaged my ankle. After a short pause, we continued anyway. Today, the ankle is a balloon. A balloon made of an ice pack and ace wrap, but a balloon nonetheless.
Tom and I skipped the karaoke event and saw Where The Wild Things Are. It was a good movie, but held me in a tense mood the entire film. The environment was angry and violently emotional. I didn't like it. From the movie, Tom took me back to 369 Goodwin where the doors were locked. So I imposed on Tom. This was convenient, as I was to meet with his mom about a potential job in the morning. The convenience of location revealed me from being compelled to set an alarm. I over slept by an hour and a half. Fortunetly, she knew I was in her basement, and just didn't want to wake me on such a dreary day. (We hit snow on the way back. Oct 18 -- first day of snow!)
I spent the ride home erecting browsable html/css/js from the "wireframe" provided by Digital Bungalow. These guys spelled Drupal as Droopal and suggest the site use their CMS. Yuk.
This has been a fairly crazy week. My grandma had to go into the hospital and was in intensive care last week, so I booked a quick trip back to Ohio. I had a bit of drama getting out of Vieques due to the weather, but all ended up fine and rest of travel went smoothly. It was good to see grandma and the rest of the family. I know she really appreciated me being there. She’s doing better now and hopefully will be going home in the next couple days.
I’m currently at a hotel in San Juan since my flight got in too late to get back to VQS. I’m flying back a noon. I’ll get off the plane and Chris will immediately get on for its return trip to SJU on his way to San Francisco for his company meeting. Vieques is still without Internet (they claim due to the bad weather earlier in the week) so I may be a bit out of touch for a bit.
Lots more to write about, but need to send this off and get ready to go to the airport.
The sale of the condo closed on Friday! It really feels like casting off an anchor to be rid of that mortgage. But it does seem a bit strange to no longer have that connection to San Francisco. Not that we won’t still be connected to things there. We’re planning to go back for an extended visit with Charlotte from mid-November to mid-December.
We’ve been really lucky with all the storms lately. We got a couple days of thunderstorms off the tail end of Hanna. Winds were strong enough that we put away the outdoor furniture and closed down all the windows. We had lots of leaves and such in the yard, but no real damage.
Our furniture is supposed to arrive on Tuesday. (Fingers crossed!) We’ve been busy getting ready for that and spent much of the weekend painting. Much of the house has yellow floor tile. The previous owner had painted the bedroom walls yellow. And had yellow bedspreads! It was all a bit much. So the bedrooms are now white and feel so much brighter and cleaner.
Things were somewhat busy in Vieques over the labor day weekend. But now things will really slow down for the next couple months. We went to El Quenepo for their last night of the season with Alex and Glenn. I had lobster sushi and orange glazed, quasi-Korean-BBQ hangar steak. Yum!! They’re definitely our favorite restaurant on the island and we’re going to miss them until they reopen in November.
We also had dinner at newly-opened Blue Crab. Since there are no blue crab around here, I’ve been ranting about the name since I heard it. But since they do in fact serve decent crab cakes they are partially forgiven. The service was good; the food was OK. Unlike El Quenepo that puts together a coherent plate, Blue Crab does “pick 2 sides” (garlic potatoes, rice & beans, broccoli, salad). Their menu is pretty eclectic and in some cases these choices don’t match up well at all. Neither rice and beans nor garlic potatoes belong on the same plate with pickled ginger and wasabi!
But the favorite recent dinner would have to be the one at our friend Wico’s house. Wico is about 80, but is more youthful than many people half that age. He literally bounces with enthusiasm. He used to teach Spanish at a university on the east coast and now splits his time between Vieques and San Juan. He made “lasagna”, which was delicious, but was really more like eggplant parmesan with Swiss cheese. Four of the six there were bilingual, so conversation was a mix of Spanish and English and gave me some good listening practice.
I’ve been wanting to post about various things lately that don’t justify a full blog post, but are more than a Twitter. So I’ve decided to save them up and send them as a single weekly catch-up post.
We’re in contract on the condo!!! We went back and forth a couple times on price, and while we’re not getting quite as much as we’d hoped, we’re getting a much better deal than we’d feared given the current market conditions. (And the damn Chronicle printing these sensationalist sky-is-falling type stories.) Getting rid of that huge mortgage and drastically lowering our expenses was a big part of the motivation to move here to Vieques full time, so I’m so happy this was able to happen quickly. We’re set to close in 2 weeks. Hopefully everything will go smoothly.
I just started with a new client, Glenbrook, a small consulting company focused on payments (e.g. credit card processing systems, bank transfers, etc.) They’ve been doing a series of in person seminars and want to turn their content into eLearning content that they can sell via e-commerce or to corporate clients. I’ll be helping them with choosing tools, a delivery platform, creating templates, and helping them to become fairly self-sufficient. Should be a fun project. They’re great to work with so far.
Vieques was without power most of Wednesday. Apparently a garbage truck hit a power pole and took out the electricity for all of Vieques and Culebra. (Not sure how one pole takes out 2 islands.) With the fans off, the house was really hot. And no internet other than on our iPhones. So we really had no choice but to go to the beach. Life’s tough here! The fact that I’ve heard reports of outages in parts of both San Francisco and Orange County in the past couple days has erased any nagging feeling of “this wouldn’t happen if we were still in California.”
[In the interest of full disclosure, these photos were not taken Wednesday. But they are of the beach we went to, Playa la Chiva aka Blue Beach.]
