Back on the wagon (or off the wagon?)

Sorry for the delay again to the one to two people that might actually check this, but I've been all over the place. Last week was California where I claimed the Pacific as my own.

I drove around a whole bunch and saw San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Silicon Valley, and a nice long stretch of Pacific Coast Highway (even if the last 50 miles or so was at almost 100mph racing back to the airport...) and now I'm back. It was a really worthwhile trip, too, because I got some serious knowledge dropped on me, and now my research is picking up like crazy. CRAZY.

On a slight downer, today did kinda suck because it looks like we're going to have to find some new funding for our research, which means writing a ton of proposals, but it might wind up being a blessing in disguise if I can get to work on what I really want to do. It's also really funny to me that the government will invest $300k into a project and then completely abandon it, but that's another story. How soon will the Army need a bailout?

So now that I've run out of things to say off the top of my head, I guess it's back to grading papers and watching the Bourne trilogy. If anyone's around whenever the rest of this Phils game actually goes down, come on down to Broad St. and get a little weird.

NL CHAMPS (and a new laptop...)

So I guess I've officially jumped ship, I bought a MacBook today. It's one of the sexy new aluminum ones and I really can't be happier with it after a day's use. Now that I'm running hacked OSX on my PC and this thing, I'm just about Windows free (minus my work computer since I need to run some things on there). I don't know what else to say.

Ok, so here's the part where I talk about how great it is to be living on Broad St. in a time like this. The Phils are in the World Series and the second that last ball dropped the fireworks started going off. Cars started honking, people started piling up in the streets, and the city just plain exploded. On top of that we shot mortars and bottle rockets from our back deck onto Broad, saw some cute girl hanging out of a car window flash us, and...well there's just too much. What a night. I'll never, ever forget this - and it's not even the real deal yet.

Also, one more day until I hit the West coast. Hoo ha.

Almost ready, already.

Only a few short days until I'm in San Jose in the heart of technological Mecca. I booked my hotel today at "The Domain" hotel, which looks insane (http://www.jdvhotels.com/domain/). Now I just have to call them up and see if they'll let me send myself a package, since I don't need to bring some unidentifiable vials of fluid on the plane with me. I can't even imagine the severe legal and physical beatings that would ensue if I even tried.

Other than that, I'm still sore as hell from riding to Valley Forge yesterday - especially after not really riding much in the past month after hurting my ankle and then getting sick. I guess I'm "on the come up". Time to relax and get a couple of things taken care of...check back soon.

I've been lazy lately

I haven't been keeping up with this as much as I'd like to, and I think it has less to do with not having anything to say and more to do with trying not to say the wrong things - which is pretty much the exact opposite aim I had for this thing in the first place.

In any case, a short re-cap of the weekend. Friday night I went to my cousin's 30th birthday party in North Jersey. It was a really nice dinner party, some great Italian food (big surprise there) and even a few 'memorable' moments from a certain Aunt of ours. After dinner, we wound up at a place called Lee's for what was called "Lee's Super Chow Hawaiian Karaoke". If you can't tell by the name, it's a Hawaiian themed bar run by tiny Asian men who can barely speak English but try to belt out Flashdance. Wow. So after that we wound up at our cousins' friends' house, where we were asked if we wanted to strip down to our underwear, get in the hot tub, and 'get weird'. I opted to build a fire in the fire pit and relax, then I finally started driving home. As I was driving past Giants' Stadium at 4am, I was wondering if it was a good idea to leave so late and not to just crash somewhere, but I was able to push my car up to 105mph before I got paranoid enough to slow down (it had plenty more in reserve too...) and I finally made it back to the city.

After one hell of a Friday night (and still being sick at that) I pretty much slept all day Saturday. I wound up at the bar with Roadknight for a little bit, but that's really the end of that story. Sunday I took a trip to NJ for Mom's birthday dinner, and then on my way back I stopped at a nice little backyard fire in Blackwood. Two fires in one weekend can't be a bad thing.

So now here we are back into the swing of things. I was able to get some health insurance subsidy from Drexel which is pretty sweet, seeing as that's a ton of cash I don't have to drop at the end of the month now. Tomorrow is the weekly day in Camden, followed by teaching at night and who knows what else. I was trying to mess around with writing/recording a song tonight but the 9V battery in my distortion pedal is on its way out, AND the one in my bass is totally dead. A few weeks/months ago I definitely had 2 full packs of them sitting in my desk and/or in my living room...now they're nowhere to be found. I'll have to see what I can come up with.