Year: 2006

Alright, do I have your attention now? Sure, the title might seem just a tad inappropriate – like some attempt at link whoring – but I assure you that anal impaction is what this post is about. So the squeamish might just want to flee right away.

Shadow, my sole remaining guine pigs for those of you with short memories, has been acting odd of late. Alright, he’s always acted oddly, and his behavior wasn’t really anything out of the ordinary except that he wouldn’t stop begging for food and man did he learn how to milk us for treat… but that’s besides the point. He’s always had a tendency to drag his butt while walking and lately he was getting even more sedentary. Late Tuesday night I picked him up, and felt something hard sticking out where nothing hard should be sticking out.

I won’t go into really gross details, but imagine trying to take a crap 10 inches in diameter. That’s about the scale we’re looking at. Fortunately for Shadow, guinea pig tushies are way more stretchable than ours – well, at least from my experience. It took two sessions (I had to finish in the morning because I felt bad for him), and lots of mineral oil and heiny soaks, but I managed to pry the tremendous poopy from the flaccid cheeks of his buttocks. Amazing how much spring that added to his steps – especially considering he was now dragging around his somewhat droopy bottom.

Lisa took the time to point out what a good father I’d make. I feel great being ready for a job that includes cleaning someone else’s ass as a requirement. Sometimes you just have to block those thoughts out of your mind before your can change it…

I just can’t wait to see what kind of searches bring up this post in the future. I’ve got to write something else today pronto so this doesn’t stay at the top too long – aren’t you glad I got this out of the way before describing the rest of Hawai’i?

Sometimes I wonder about New Yorkers.

And I really hope the end results are good enough to warrant a movie.

I don’t read McSweeney’s much, but The Recording Industry Will Destroy You is sheer brilliance. And sadly seems to be accurate as to how the RIAA conducts business.

My home computer had been all wacky for the past… year or so. Not enough to warrant drastic measures such as troubleshooting, but enough to irritate me at times. But because of the sheer volume of data (I download several gigs per day – primarily concerts) the effort to move everything around, coupled with the ensuing downtime, has prevented me from taking matters into my own hand and throwing the POS out the window… I mean re-installing Windows.

The other night I finally got sick of the constant blank screens in the middle of watching videos (for the love of all that is holy I just want to see the damn kitten mew!), and figured some downtime would be a good thing. And midway from point A to point B I also decided it was time to jump back on that beta horse and check out Windows Vista – at least now that it’s hit RC1. So, after a couple of aborted attempts to get everything set, and a trip to CompUSA to replace my now confirmed crappy video card, I am cruisin’ the vistas at home.

It reminds of days of yore. At first I was a little nervous, and then I realized just how late in the game I was. I was telling a co-worker the other day that I never used Windows 95 – I jumped from Windows 3.11 straight to Windows NT 4.0 Beta 2. Once the final release came out I never looked back. With Windows 2000 and Windows XP, I hopped right on Beta 1 and worked my way through all of the bugs until RTM time rolled around. With Vista going gold in a couple months, this baby is ready for primetime.

And while there are certainly some compatibility problems with a few programs and drivers, the system is absolutely gorgeous. There are some things I have to get used to, but overall I really do love the way they’ve changed the interface. For now it looks like my potential fulltime switch to Ubuntu is on hold.

These issues, coupled with lots of work at… work, as well as a switch in my ISP has led to a lot of offline living at home. I just realized that it’s almost halfway through the first month of the rest of my life and I really haven’t said anything here – I’ve also barely been keeping up with my usual reads. Oh well, we all need a break from Internet from time to time…

While many of you may realize that I’ve been hurtling towards my 30s at the speed of… time… most of you don’t know just how quickly that is. That sentence had so much potential that I want to weep at its demise. My point is that I just finished drinking away my 20s last night. Alright, I didn’t actually drink last night, but I did enough of it for the past decade that a night off doesn’t really change the overwhelming effect. As a matter of fact, I’ve already told Lisa that when our kids ask us why we can’t afford fancy things, I’m going to look them straight in the eye and say, “Daddy drank a lot in his 20s.” And if they question my response, I’ll have several years of credit card bills to back me up.

But I digress. I’m not ultra-secretive about my birthday, but being one who has never celebrated them I also don’t make a big deal about it. If you were to ask me when it is, I typically just respond September unless I’m pushed for further detail. In the past, friends find out about the occasion when we happen to be hanging out just after midnight on the 1st of September and I suddenly blurt out something like, “Oh wow, I just turned 24.” Of course I said that once – 6 years ago – but you get the idea.

This year – being the time of the big THREE-OH – I thought about doing something big. By that I mean actually getting some people together. But I am loathe to plan any such gathering, and so this evening approaches rapidly with little fanfare. Instead, Lisa and I will be hitting a furniture store, swinging by Chik-fil-A, and possibly going to see Invincible to get me even more pumped for the coming season. Tomorrow my parents are visiting so that my Mom can finally see our house. Sunday holds other gatherings followed by an empty Labor Day. Sadly, the weekend contains no plans for drunken tomfoolery with friends. If anyone is interested in said tomfoolery, perhaps something can be arranged…

Otherwise, I still hope to have people over for something at our house as some sort of housewarming/wedding/30th/3xth celebration for Lisa and I. Mayhaps October will bear better fruit (or even just later this month). In the meantime… HOLY CRAP, I’M 30! Where the hell did all that time fly?

Two days ago was already the one month anniversary for Lisa and I. Man is this marriage thing going fast. We were so unprepared that the evening consisted of leftover Chinese food and a couple episodes of NewsRadio. Lisa mentioned the frozen top of the cake, but neither of us were in the mood to break it out – we’ll see if it makes it though year one.

But time is most certainly flying by. I can’t believe we’ve been home for almost two weeks, and yet it feels like Hawaii is 2 years in the past. Last night I was talking to one of the VPs here at work as he prepares for his trip out there this winter, and I felt jealous of having that in the future rather than the past. It was a lot easier to leave the islands than it was to deal with it once we got back. While I continue to delay actually writing about the trip, let me share with you some insights I learned while on my honeymoon:

• Hawai’i ain’t the Carribean – Yes, it’s absolutely beautiful and can be very relaxing, but we’re not talking about a place like the Bahamas where everything moves at half speed. There are natives and tourists alike who will get pissed at you doing the speed limit, and there’s plenty of hustle and bustle going on in the towns.
• The water is an angry mistress – You know when you’re at the Jersey shore, and everybody’s “riding the waves”? You know, they jump up when a little swell that’s chest high rolls by so they get lifted? Yeah, on a calm day during the dry season the waves will body slam you on the beach and then drag you, kicking and screaming, back for more. The beaches are beautiful, but scary.
• Natural wonders take effort – People didn’t build roads near blowholes and God didn’t build blowholes nears roads, so get your hiking boots on. I absolutely loved all the hiking we did, but man was it real tough in areas. The long walks through forests were nothing, it’s the 100 yards over battered lava rocks and boulders that’ll get you. We’re probably both in better shape now than we have been in years.
• CHICKENS! – You may not know this, but the most populous wild animals on those islands appear to be chickens. Some hurricane busted them loose years ago and they’ve been taking everything over. It’s really quite amusing, and we actually kind of enjoyed the rooster that woke us up regularly on Kauai, but I get the definite impression that Hawaiians hate them like New Yorkers hate pigeons.
• Kona – That’s really all I need to say. If you love coffee, you will kill for Kona. If you only sorta like coffee, you’ll probably still be willing to commit at least pett theft for Kona. It has a wonderful taste and the low acid and caffeine content means less jitters and stomach woes. We probably brought back at least 3 pounds for ourselves (ok, we’re giving some of it away).
• Luggage expands – Even if we didn’t buy anything to bring back, I swear our clothes gained about 10 pounds on the trip. Then you have the whole frustration of packing all liquids in the big bags because hand cream can take down a Boeing. I swear, bottles of wine must be at least 5 pounds each.
• Made in Taiwan – What’s the point of buying gifts and mementoes of places you visit, unless you actually visit Taiwan? I tried to limit my spending to items made in Hawaii, but that’s much harder than you might think. Souvenirs suck.
• Airports suck – Almost everyone we dealt with at the airports – at ticketing, security, etc. – we’re pleasant and helpful. It still didn’t change the fact that it would take us 4 hours to travel between islands when the flight is half an hour.
• These people know their pig – I had ham, sausage, and bacon all in one sitting. I got to see an entire kaloa roasted pig falling off the bones. Hawaiian cuisine rocks. And while I did eat plenty of seafood (amazingly only had sushi once), beef and pork was a much bigger part of it than I expected.
• Note to self: islanders age well – We met a guy who looked to be in his late 40s (maybe early 50s). He was playing in an over 65 baseball league. This was pretty common out there. Lots of people looked younger than they were.
• Hawaii is owned by ABC – No, not the TV station, the store. It’s a slightly touristy WaWa/7-Eleven type store. Except there’s one every ten feet.
• Hilo Hatties rocks! – While ABC is slightly touristy, Hilo Hattie is the ultimate tourist store. You don’t need to go anywhere else to get your fill of aloha shirts, macademia nuts, tiki gods, or dashboard hula girls. Every exotic destination should have a store like this!

Alright, that wasn’t nearly as funny as I had been hoping. But I just need to get this crap out so I can start posting for real again. Possibly the oddest note about the whole trip was the Internet access. We stayed in a Sheraton, a bed and breakfast, and a studio condo. The Sheraton was the only place that didn’t give you any (at least not for free). My faith in hotels is wavering.

Early this year when I was at a Pearl Jam concert in Camden, I stupidly entered one of those drawings for a car. A Ford Mustang, or some other car I really wouldn’t want. Surprise, surprise, it’s actually just a way for some company to get your information so that they can call you nonstop. In this case I started receiving calls from Dowd Marketing on behalf of Sundance Vacations. From what I have heard, Sundance itself is a decent company, but it doesn’t matter much when you hire a rather unscrupulous firm to handle your marketing.

The first calls were actually back in May. I just ignored them and deleted their messages as I wasn’t interested. After a couple months I listened to one more closely, and found out that they were offering a 3 day/2 night stay at any Marriott along with a $500 shopping spree for coming to their 1 hour sales pitch. I always approach these things with a skeptical mind, but also remember that they can also be worthwhile (my Dad got an incredible deal on a condo rental at Smugglers’ Notch years ago for the entire family, and simply had to spend a couple hours at a dinner listening to their sales pitch). I figured a free weekend somewhere would certainly be nice and $500 is definitely worth an hour of my time.

But wedding and honeymoon plans prevented me from scheduling a meeting, and when they called me two days before we left I had the impression that the promotion would be over by the time we got back. Despite the fact that they had been calling me for months, I was assured that these packages were quite popular. Whatever, Hawaii was far more important. When we got back, I decided I’d give them a call but managed to get another call before I even had a chance. So I made an appointment for Lisa and I to head out to Rockaway the following evening for their sales pitch.

Unfortunately for them, the guy threw out some info at the end that made me realize this probably wasn’t on the very up and up. Suddenly the hotel room couldn’t be used on consecutive nights (which means 3 day/2 nights is an outright lie) and the $500 shopping spree is for a specific website I’d never heard of. So a quick Google led me to a thread on Scam.com about Sundance. There I read other horror stories about dealing with them (mixed in with some good reviews of the company itself, and some probable employees of the marketing company lurking). I’m glad I didn’t waste my time, as you have to jump through hoops to even get the hotel room, and the website sells 5 year old video games for 10 times what you can get them for in stores (plus ridonkulous s&h charges). So we kept our Thursday evening for ourselves.

Now they’ve stepped up the calls, and we’ve received multiple each day for the last few days. Of course I could try to deal with this through proper channels but, instead, I’ve decided to take advantage of technology. This morning I found this neat little option with our Sunrocket account (our VoIP provider). There’s a little button next to the numbers on the caller ID list on the webpage – when you click on it, one of the options is “Block Number.” Buh-bye Dowd. You no welcome here no more.

The moral of this story: Ford cars still suck…

Alrighty, here we go. It’s time to give you guys the lowdown on the honeymoon. Since a full recap would just take way too long to write now, I will instead resort to everybody’s favorite cop-out: an outline. We drove over to Lisa’s parents’ apartment, who then drove us to the airport since they were going to use the minivan while we were away. We got there with plenty of time to shop for extra crap to bring with us on the trip. Oh you marketing geniuses at Newark… excuse me, Liberty International Airport.

This is longer than expected, so I’m actually breaking it up by island… Continue reading “The Honeymoon, part 1 (O’ahu)”

You have to be careful about keeping up with online reading while away, otherwise you might miss a great story like this one. I think I have a new feed to start reading.

(thanks to A Whole Lotta Nothing)

And we’re back. We flew in yesterday around 1 PM, but I barely slept on the plane so I’ve been in a daze for awhile. After driving Lisa’s parents home (they “borrowed” the minivan while we were gone, so they transported us to and from the airport), I crashed on our couch for a little bit until we decided to go to bed. Then, surprisingly, I got a third or fourth wind, and we watched Kyle XY and Eureka until about 1 AM. And that would be why we woke up at noon.

Being home again after a long trip feels pretty strange. This is the first time I’ve been away for more than a week since a two week training trip I took back in 2000, and probably my longest vacation since my family went to Disney World… in 1981!

Last night this barely felt like our home. The way we rushed out last Monday left it in a state of disarray, and the lack of television (more on that later) killed our typical method of chilling at home. There’s also the total lack of goobers – Shadow and Booboo Birdie are currently staying with one of Lisa’s co-workers – which leaves our house too quiet. Kind of like the life is gone out of her.

But now we’re getting back into the swing of things. Amazingly we’ve already started unpacking and cleaning up the house. I’ve got tons to share with you guys, including lots of advice for anyone considering going to Hawaii (number one advice: DO IT!) and a couple thousand photos (obviously I’m going to cut that number down a tad). For now, let me sum up our honeymoon by saying that, no matter what we missed, what we didn’t do the best way, and how much money we obliterated, it was absolutely incredible and satisfying through and through. I am quite content right now, even if I’m stuck back here in Jersey.