Things that might be decidedly odd…

Returned

Well, I’m back from my week long Caribbean cruise. It was definitely a good get away, but now I think I need a vacation from my vacation to relax I booked for next year on the ship since it’s cheaper that way, but I still need to decide if I’m going to go or not. I think I have until around August to cancel without penalty.

I had an excellent time on the ship except for a couple bouts of mild queasiness induced by rough seas. Lots of sun, food, drinks, entertainment and parties both official and unofficial. The trip was much more about being on the ship than the destinations. Grand Turk was surprisingly small and uninteresting, although I hear the coral reef was great for those who went snorkeling or diving. I walked around the beach for a little while, but it was a duty free shopping mall more than anything else and I didn’t care to buy any cheap booze. St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands was the next stop. Unfortunately, we didn’t even dock until 2pm and I wasn’t off the ship until at least 3:30. I taxied through the surprisingly horrible traffic to the other side of the island to check out Magen’s Bay and the gay clothing optional beach at one end of the bay (Little Magen’s). It was rather late in the day by the time I got there and the clouds kept blocking out the sun, but it was still a nice time. I chatted with these two nice guys from Boston on the taxi ride back to the ship. Labadee was better than I expected. Sure, it’s essentially a Royal Caribbean Haiti Disneyland but it was nice to get off the ship and spend some time in salt water and a white sand beach.

I didn’t take a whole lot of pictures regularly, mainly because the batteries in my main camera died on the second day and I just got tired of carrying a camera around. However, a bunch from the dog tag tea dance and some other assorted shots are here.

Getting back from Miami was an excruciating ordeal. I don’t even want to go into all the horrible things that happened so I’ll just list them–difficulty finding ground transport to the airport from the cruise terminal, awful counter customer service agent, secondary screening, the contents of my carryon bag spilled all over the ground in security, an angry woman claiming my hoodie which had just spilled out of my bag was hers, screaming children, waiting for 4 hours for my flight since I was so early, smoke wafting in from the outdoor smoking area while listening to announcements about it being a smoke free airport. Let’s just say I never want to fly out of Miami airport again.

My connection in LA was tight and made tighter by a slightly delayed plane. Since I was switching from American to Alaska, I had to run to another terminal on the other side of the airport and go back through security. Fortunately, security was empty at that terminal at that time. The plane was so empty there were half rows that were completely unoccupied. I haven’t seen that happen since before 9/11 when all the airlines began packing their flights fuller.

Unfortunately, my luggage probably didn’t make the connection. It’s still missing in fact, although both Alaska and American say they’re looking for it. Of course, the one time my luggage gets lost, I’m a dumb ass and accidentally pack my house keys in my bag. Doh! Good thing Ben’s never here so he can lend me his keys for a while. The problem was that I sent my two roller bags down as luggage off the ship while carrying my complementary Atlantis bag off the ship packed with my passport, keys, a change of clothes, etc. However, after fetching all my luggage I repacked into just two roller bags–one to check at the airport, one to carry on. I don’t think I took my keys out of the Atlantis bag which was subsequently packed into my checked luggage.

Worst Airport Ever

From Little Magen’s Beach on St. Thomas

On the Boat

As you can see from the pictures I just posted, I’m on the boat. We’re still docked in Miami but will be departing in a few hours. The ship is huge! I just finished taking a nap and partially unpacking. The rest of my luggage will hopefully come soon. I should probably do some more exploring around the ship though.

View out the porthole in my cabin

Waiting to board

Fort Lauderdale

Paid Off

I just paid off my car. Yeah!

I’ve been pretty focused on paying it off since sometime around the middle of last year. It’s all part of my plan to get my financial house in order by minimizing bills. I’m trying to live more frugally and save for a rainy day. It’s my plan to never buy a car on credit again. It just always felt like the debt was hanging unpleasantly over my head.

I’m still permitting myself some luxuries of course, such as going on the cruise which is now only a few days away. Eek, I still haven’t really packed at all.

Speaking of driving, it started snowing quite heavily this evening in Redmond while I was still at work. At first, it wasn’t really sticking to anything so I didn’t pay much attention. However, by the time I left around 8pm, there was quite a bit of accumulation. I almost wasn’t able to make it out of the steep exit of the parking garage! I had originally planned to eat dinner then go swimming but because there was a decent amount of accumulation on the road and because it was still snowing fairly hard, I decided it was probably best just to go home. I did want to get stuck in the snow and somehow end up stranded on the Eastside overnight.

Even at that hour, 520 was jammed up back to 405 so I drove around on 405 to 90 instead. It took a while to get home because I was driving rather slow at first. It became less snowy and more rainy as I got closer to the point that traffic was moving at normal speeds across the floating bridge and into the city. It sometimes surprises me how much more snow can fall in Redmond than in Seattle. I should have taken pictures to prove how treacherous it was, but oh well.

Insomnia and Swimming

I went to bed at about 12:30 but was awoken around 1:30 by loud music coming from upstairs. After I politely asked my neighbors to turn it down (they were really nice and did turn it down right away), I couldn’t get back to sleep. I stayed up until about 5am last night because I got into the zone while coding for work, which probably isn’t helping either.

So I’ve been browsing around online reading up on the cruise I’m going on next week. Actually, I’m flying out Wednesday night to spend a couple days in Fort Lauderdale beforehand. It should be a nice way to relax into the vacation and catch up on sleep from the red eye (I can’t sleep on planes). In the mean time, I still need to make some last minute purchases (luggage, an extension cord, hand sanitizer, a couple pieces of clothing) and pack.

On top of that, I’ve been very busy with work lately trying to get everything done before I leave. There’s a deadline happening while I’m gone, which means I have to get my work into a reasonable state before leaving. It’s been slow because of some build problems, but then somehow Visual Studio got really hosed on my machine the other day. Of course, these sorts of things are inevitable whenever you’re going on vacation :/ After trying to fix it by deleting a bunch of files and registry entries (oh yes, it was that bad) this afternoon, I managed to get it into an even worse state. In the end, I had to pave the thing (format the C partition, reinstall Windows, resetup the build environment). Fortunately, I was able to get my current changes onto my secondary development machine. It’s a slower machine, but at least I was able to continue getting work done while waiting for the install and subsequent setup of my main box.

In other news, I went swimming after work today at the gym again. It was actually pretty busy for so late at night (I didn’t even get in the pool until around 9pm). Anyways, I had planned to just spend maybe an hour swimming, but somehow it turned into swimming without stopping for 1600 yards followed by a couple hundred of easier warm down. I just started swimming and kept going. I’d always wanted to swim a mile non-stop. In fact I was training up to it back when I was still at UNC, but got tired of trying to achieve that goal at some point.

I was hoping to get up to go to Frontrunners this morning at 9am, but who knows if I’ll make it considering how late it is now. Oh well, back to (try to) sleep.

Salon of Shame

This morning, Ben sent around a reminder email that Salon of Shame was happening again tonight at Capitol Hill Arts Center. When he, Dr. Jeff, Marc and I went back in September, we all had a great time. So good of time that the four of us went again tonight. It was a sold out house with all the seats filled. This time it was also in the larger upstairs room.

For those unfamiliar, the Salon of Shame is a bimonthly event where volunteers appear before a crowd to read cringeworthy writing from their teen and pre-teen years. Yes, it’s embarrassing for the writers, but it’s certainly more “laughing with you” than “laughing at you”.

There was, however, one surprising turn of events this evening. Sometime after the intermission, the MC called out Marc’s name. Ben, Dr. Jeff and I were all a little bit shocked as Marc made his way up to the stage.

He read a couple of passages from a diary his mother had given him as a child. The first was in fact the first entry of the diary and mainly discussed the awesomeness of a day of sledding when he was 9 years old. The second entry was the more juicy one, having been written when he was in high school. The part he read concerned some sort of chorus trip through Minnesota and Manitoba. The focus was on the other kids on the trip, especially one girl who was obviously flirting with him and one boy who he was clearly lusting after. The funny part was that this was written before he even realized he was gay. In fact, when he found the old diary and read the entry, he was pretty shocked about how blatant and obvious it all seemed now even though he didn’t recall writing these sorts of details.

The audience was in stitches, particularly after he read a line which mentioned how the guy had the sexiest ass in school (or something along those lines)! Beyond the material itself, Marc did a really good job of reading it too. He definitely hammed it up on stage, much to the audience’s enjoyment.

After his reading, several people actually gave him a standing ovation which is not something I saw happen for any of the other readers that night or the last time we went. After the whole event was over, several people congratulated him on his reading. It was quite the coup and I’m sure many people are hoping he’ll return next time to read more.