moodboom

The family made another trek to Florida for a long weekend of fun.
The plan was to fly into Tampa Thursday night, get a hotel, and hit Busch Gardens Africa all day Friday. Instead, it was heavy rain that hit BG all day Friday, not us. We had already paid for the hotel so we stayed there Thursday night. We had booked “blind” via hotwire.com, and ended up at a Hyatt, not bad. It was a nice little suite room with an HDTV.
Dan and Bailey came to pick us up Friday morning, and I talked everyone into a lunch adventure. The iPhone is great when it comes to exploring new places, and I had dialed up an interesting-sounding “raw and vegan” restaurant for us to try that was only 4 miles away. It was called the Grass Root. The menu was overwhelming, and I was feeling like having some fun, so we ordered a little bit of everything. We chose the “Peace za Pi” as our raw-food adventure, and it was a great call. The cheese-like base of blended cashews was delicious under a bed of garlic, avacado, red peppers, and some very yummy green goodness. We also ordered a BBQ unsteak sandwich, sprout subs and rollups, a garlic noodle dish, and guac and tortilla. Dan loved the dried vegetables and ordered extra to go. All in all, delish!
After eating we headed down to Fort Myers, where Val was having trouble with some plumbing. She had installed a new faucet in the kitchen, and it was leaking all over. She couldn’t get to the shutoff valve in the garage without stepping away from the faucet – it wasn’t a one-man job. We helped her tighten things up, and headed to Ma and Pa’s, where (as usual) Ma was waiting with food for us. Some yummy lentil burgers, to be exact.
Over the weekend, we managed to get in…

• shopping for Ma for some small rugs for her high-traffic areas
• an excellent 75th birthday party for Ma hosted by Tammy and Di – Ma and Pa, Phyllis Schultz, the Behrns-Millers, the Millers, Niki, Bobby, Corey and his girlfriend Aleea, Tam & Di, Roger and Toni… Maui, Di’s adorable dog, provided entertainment, swimming, doing laps around the house, and showing off commands like “left”, “right”, “through” (she weaved between Di’s legs while Di walked), “peek”, etc. etc… ONE SMART DOG! :>
• Pie Theft II – The Second Generation – imported into iMovie, edited, muted, titles added, background music added, sound effects added, exported to DVD and YouTube – Wren Bailey and Reiley did all the heavy lifting, nice job girls!
• Installed Ma’s less-old washing machine, replacing her leaking old washing machine, but couldn’t convince her to throw the old one out, *sigh*
• Dinner at Ma’s of a delicious Thai soup that she and Val spent hours prepping; and her famous apple pie, too!
• Saw “Percy Jackson – The Lightning Thief” (which we all agreed was a letdown)
• At various points, picked up Moe’s and groceries for spaghetti for the gang – man Fort Myers is congested this time of year!
• Dan drove us by our old house, honking to annoy and embarrass me
• Wren and I had a (quick!) swim in the 60-degree pool

Most excellent!

UPDATE: WE HAVE A WINNER!

Best choice of winners goes to… Larry, with only 2 team changes and 3 stage wins, barely beating out Jane, Wren, Reiley and Nick by one stage win, and tying me (but I’m disqualified since I’m the scorekeeper!).

Best choice of losers goes to… Larry by a landslide, with 5 correct eliminations!

I’m heading over to deliver Larry’s prizes now….  :>

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Trying to get everyone hooked into an Amazing Race contest…

• Pick the team you think will win, and pick the team you think will be eliminated next.
• If your winning team is eliminated, you have to pick another. Least picks wins!
• If your losing team is eliminated, you score, and get to pick another. Most scores wins!

Hopefully simple enough, here we go!

WINNER PICKS

ELIMINATION PICKS

Keith went for his 2nd-degree (or was it 3rd?) blackbelt test in Hapkido last month, and he gave me a ticket to get in to the 4-hour extravaganza. He looks great!  They had to run hundreds of miles to prep for the test over the last few months.  There was a veteran master that flew in from Korea, and other judges from far and wide. The most fun was watching Keith’s “skit”, which involved, among other things, joint locks and tumbles, a rubber-chicken nunchuk (no lie) and a beautiful two-footed chest attack that had him flying sideways like a backwards Superman – good thing Hapkido techniques involve learning how to fall without getting hurt! Although I am sure Keith was sore the next day. They served up dinner afterwards, including some nice spicy Kimchee. A great event, tons of fun. Too bad he has to wait 6 months for the results!

Had a great weekend, starting a little early on Thursday with dinner with Sammy at the Raleigh Times. A great veggie burger with great toppings (avacado, grilled mushrooms and onions, lettuce, tomato, ketchup and mustard, mmm), and the beer list is to die for. I had a Belgian triple – three times the hops and barley of a normal brew. It was delicious and effective, one beer was plenty. Then we went to Escazu, the chocolatier I’ve been obsessing over for a year or more. They have the best bars at Whole Foods (out of 200 or so, it seems), and the actual shop, on Glenwood Avenue, is adorable – a converted house with a display case full of painstakingly handcrafted chocolate delights. Then it was time for Halloween, and we partied like twentysomethings. You’ll have to hook up on Facebook to see all the good semi-clean fun we had. :> Except for this one blurry picture I found on my iPhone…

Wrenny and I spent Sunday afternoon at the local coffeehouse. We had a great time drinking a “frappé” (latte blended with ice) spiked with chocolate syrup, yum… Kept us fuelled up for a nice long game of Elfenland. In the end it was a dead even tie, broken by Wrenny smashing my remaining pieces before I could get hers.
We also played Bluetooth games across the iPhone and iPod touch. Whee!

PAX 2009 flew by like a sonic jet. Dan and I met out in Seattle again this year (we did it once before in 2007) for the Penny Arcade Gaming Expo. In my quest to find work, I picked up a pretty nice Macbook Pro so I can do iPhone development. It turns out that it has a nice dedicated GPU, can boot into Windows, and with the latest Bootcamp set of Windows drivers that came with the latest OS X (10.6 aka Snow Leopard), it fully supports Windows 7 RC, to the point where I was ripping it up with all the latest games. What a deal! Dan kept the party rolling with a new laptop purchase in the 11th hour, so that by the time the games began on Friday morning, we had covered half of Seattle on foot but managed to be fully geared up.

On Friday we spent a lot of time in BYOC setting up the shiny new rigs. Saturday was a full day of joyous fun, from 10am ’til 2am (that’s 5am EST, for those keeping score). We played Legions on a local instantaction.com server (I was happy to place in the middle of the pack in the deathmatch tourney), a 100+-player Trackmania Nations Forever contest, Call of Juarez, Fallout 3, Eve Online, Marble Madness, board games including Puerto Rico, and most of the PAX 10, including Tag, Osmos, Puzzlebloom, etc. And we caught a minute here and there of the excellent panels, incliding watching Gabe and Tycho put together the strip for that day. Sunday we kept plugging away while managing to collect over a dozen t-shirts – LOTS of Tribes loot! On Monday we gamed the most, with our homebrew LAN-out-of-a-suitcase setup in the hotel, shooting each other endlessly in Juarez, and still managed to get to the mall to buy the wives something. And there was so much good food… Red Fin tempura, Cheesecake Factory, cyber-dogs… the Teriyaki rage of 2007 has been replaced by Pho on every corner (HOT hot salty yummy soup). When you get it to go, you get a vat of hot water and all the ingredients to build it yourself. And of course, literally, Starbucks on every corner. In central Seattle I had a triple-shot latte that made my day. Too much fun. Thanks Danno!!

This is what I’ve been missing out on while nursing my wounds. Just by being so suave, you guys are my personal motivators. HBD Keith.

Our trip to Busch Gardens Europe (aka Williamsburg) over the weekend was a total success. We had great weather on the long Memorial Day weekend – going in, we thought we made a bad call because we were afraid the park would be packed – but we had beautiful sunshine, a cool-enough breeze, and almost no lines at all. We drove up Friday, hitting some traffic – apparently an overturned 18-wheeler – but we had enough time in the schedule to absorb it. We hit our traditional eatery, a nice Mexican restaurant at just about the halfway mark, and the kids collected some great custom ballons from visiting clowns – weirdness! We got in to our nifty little Econolodge in time to hit the sack, after a quick trip to Food Lion and Wawa to pick up park entry coupons – $10 off the $60 admission, the best deal around. The next day everyone was pumped up and we hit the road at 8:30am. We were at the park by 9am, in the first row of parking, whoop! They opened up Scotland at 9am, which let gave us time to pack our stuff in a locker (no bags on rides any more), ride Loch Ness Monster and get in line to storm the rest of the park. Then we hit the Griffon, and were screaming down the 200+-foot-freefall by 10am. What a start! Everyone’s heart was pumping after that, and we basically didn’t stop until 10pm that night. We crawled home and fell asleep. After a nice jump in the cool pool the next morning (with Wrenny jumping in without testing the water haha!), we headed home for some well-deserved rest. Wahoo!! Good job to the whole crew, everybody did their best to have a blast. :>

At 24 miles one-way, it was a good ride! There’s something extra fun about seeing skyscrapers appear on the horizon, then biking into their shadows. Ricardo and Jim joined up there. And there was swag to be had! Water bottles, leg bands, lights, and the Red Bull girls handing out free ice-cold energy in a can, whoop. I’m logging my miles here now, check the top right for the latest summary. I’ll try to add some more fun graphs soon…

Andrea and I braved the rain to see another awesome production with my buddy Ryan, this time by the justice theater project, with his pals Byron and Dave, playing three hostages imprisoned and chained in a windowless single room. Ryan played the Englishman, Byron the American, and Dave the Irishman – sounds like a cheap joke. But their plight, and willingness to find ways to support each other, draws you into an intense couple of hours. Once again, it’s theater like this that gives you more than any other form of culture.