Here’s an update on my last 2 days of travel on the coast to coast. Sunday I drove to Vegas after packing (which was not fun, naturally, the packing that is) and picked up Bill Sr. from the airport. Yesterday we did Vegas to Albuquerque. Here’s the map of that part.
This post comes from Albuquerque, New Mexico, right next to the Rio Grande river. Lately my allergies have been annoying, and my sinuses are the first thing to go when that happens. Parts of the drive today climbed up to just over 5,000 feet of elevation. As we climbed these hills, I noticed my sinus pressure started increasing and my eyes got a little blurry from the water starting to well up. Really weird, but once we got down lower, the atmosphere must have pushed them back down to size, because I was fine, very strange.
Anyway, we took a look down at the power plant in the Hoover Dam and found a huge crater made by a meteor in North East Arizona, just East of Flagstaff. It’s pretty cool. It’s 4,000 feet across and 700 feet deep. Anyway, good drive so far. Oh, one real bad thing happened. We stayed at a friend’s place last night, and apparently today when he came home, his apartment had been broken into and his Air Jordans were stolen along with some other things. So that really sucks for him, he’s the biggest Jordan fan I’ve met.
So good trip to this point, hopefully it will keep up.
This next week I’ll be trekking across the country to my new home in Clermont, FL. Being so close to the Atlantic coast, I figured I should probably make it a coast-to-coast road trip. So I went to Lincoln City, OR with the family over Thanksgiving. I frolicked around in the Pacific Ocean waters and had a jolly old time.
I’m using this week to get all my stuff packed up and clear out my condo so I can sell it, then I’m off again. So here’s a map of where I’ve driven so far. I’ve got 1,207 miles out of the way, it’ll be well over 3,000 when I’m all done!
It’s been a while since I’ve done anything on here. I’ve really got no good excuse, but right now I’ve got a bit of a cold, so I’m mostly spacing out. Anyway, for the wordpress users out there, I ran across a splendid idea today. By default, WordPress adds a nofollow attribute to the author’s links in the comments. This was started to discourage spammers, yeah right. Anyway, I found a little plugin to disable that, and have it active now. Just for the good feeling of friendly SEO stuff.
I haven’t been posting much lately due to my travels. First I went to Lake Powell for a few days, then to Oregon for a few more days, and tomorrow I’ll be headed to Vegas for another few days.
Powell was fun. Stayed on a houseboat with around 10 people. The water wasn’t too keen for wakeboarding, so we rode some doubles. That’s always fun because of the cool angle you get to see stuff from, but it’s tiring due to edging out more than normal.
One super neato thing that happened was this shooting star I saw. Being out in Powell, the view of the stars is incredible. There aren’t any big cities anywhere near where we were, so it was nice and dark and the sky was totally flooded with stars. There were a bunch of shooting stars, but one stood out. I had my eyes closed while on top of the houseboat when I saw a flash. I opened my eyes and straight above us was a very bright orange streak in the sky. It stayed bright for a good 5 seconds, then took another 10 seconds to totally fade away. I’ve never seen anything like it before.
The Oregon trip was just to visit my family. All of us but my older sister were there. We went to the Enchanted Forest, which is always awesome. Then we visited my Grandparents. They’re pretty sharp for their age. My Grandpa Rupo (Rupert) turns 90 on Sept 11 and he was telling us about his service in World War II with great detail. We hung out with them and even had dinner at their new rest home, good stuff.
We went to good old Lake Billy Chinook the next day. It being a Saturday, I didn’t wakeboard (bad water). We just went up one of the arms and hung out on the boat. It was pretty cool, a big crane was hanging out on the shore. It was quiet enough to hear the wings move through the air when it flew from one side of the water to the other.
Nothing much more than that happened. My parents still have this cat we got when I was in Jr. High I think; it just won’t die. I’m allergic to cats, always have been, and we’ve always had them in our house, nice. My throat got so closed up and scratchy this time, I decided to resort to wearing a face mask in the house. That’s right, I was rocking the surgery style breathing mask thinger in my own parents’ house. It worked great too! Now that cat just needs to kick the bucket.
Oh, the Vegas trip will have a couple cool things. First, Bill Sr. and I are headed to the Grand Canyon Skywalk. Then we’ll go watch Team USA take on Team Canada in the FIBA tournament to try to qualify for the 2008 Olympics. Good times!
I have a couple of friends who greet me the same every time they call me on the phone. “What are you doing?” And they don’t just say it without paying attention to what they just asked, like most greetings like “what’s up,” “how’s it going,” and others like that. They will sit there and wait for me to answer. I can’t stand it!
I started going with the “nothing much” answer, then sometimes they will ask a follow up question. Now I appreciate awkwardness, but when that happens every time I talk to a certain person, that’s just too much. So then I started making stuff up like “running a marathon” or “taking a shower” or something like that. Then they just get kind of confused and it throws the whole pending conversation off too much.
I don’t know the best way to handle it. I’m considering going with Ace Ventura’s classic answer to Dan Marino’s inquiry as to find out if Ace had any more gum: “That’s none of your damned business and I’ll thank you to stay out of my personal affairs!”
Yep, another post about eggs, weird! Well, not really, but kind of sort of and stuff. My days at Boulevard Home Furnishings are numbered. Finally! That number is 7 at the moment. As in after 7 more days of work, I’ll be done there. I’ve been hoping to get out of there for about 6 months now, so it’s about due time.
I’m now putting all my hopes of earning enough money to pay the bills into my new little venture with mortgages. I’ve got a small taste of what it’s like to get a loan done, and it feels pretty good. At the moment, I’m hoping I’ll be able to do alright without being a schmoozing schmuck, since I’m not really into that sort of thing. I am okay with the fact that I will probably be playing more golf however. Golf is fun, and if I don’t get any better at it over the next decade or so, that’s fine; I’ll need something to do when I’m old.
Anyway, just thought I’d let my huge fan base (huge, like slowly approaching the tens!) know what little ol’ Billy is up to these days.