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Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Bowled over

Please don't take this post as me re-entering the blogosphere. It ain't happenin'. Generally, I don't bother with something if I can't say it in 140 characters or less. Anything more and I get winded. But I'd just like to gloat over the fact that I scored a 203 game in bowling this past weekend.

That's right. 2 - 0 - 3.

Suck on that, Donny Kerabatsos.

Brian's 203 game

Not bad for someone who bowls once every two years or so.

And for those interested, "Z" is Sharon and "D" is her boyfriend David. "CF" is Debz. Anyone care to guess the abbreviation?

Friday, February 13, 2009

Temporarily offline

I've taken most of my site down for now because I've grown uncomfortable with having much information about me and especially my friends and family out for the public to view.

I've been thinking about taking most of this down for awhile, but I've recently encountered an unpleasant individual through my job as a blog and forum administrator who seems to have done a fair amount of research into my personal life. While I don't think this guy is going to show up at anyone's door with a chainsaw, it was the tipping point. So all that's left are some travel posts and a few random posts that make me chuckle.

Besides, I haven't really written anything new recently, and my site has become static and outdated. I do plan to rejuvenate it relatively soon. As what, I don't really know, but I have some ideas.

I'm on Facebook so you can find me there if you haven't already.

B-dogg out.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Joshua Tree in winter

Hey, looky here! Two posts in the same month!

It was impossible to resist the lure of Joshua Tree National Park after a foot of snow.

Joshua Tree National Park in winter
Joshua Tree National Park in winter
Joshua Tree National Park in winter
Joshua Tree National Park in winter

I love this place. If the commute to Palm Springs wasn't so far, I'd live in the high desert. More photos - some with snow, some without - from Joshua Tree here.

Saturday, December 6, 2008

Costa Rica

We made it back despite having two flights making the news.

Despite our adventures in the sky, we had a great time:

Costa Rica
Costa Rica
Costa Rica

More photos here.

Monday, August 4, 2008

At least I've never been jabbed with a pen

Deborah pointed me toward notalwaysright.com, a site that gathers often-hilarious, sometimes baffling accounts of customer service attempts gone wrong. So far, this one's my favorite.

My best personal WTF customer service account came when I was working as the online editor at The Island Packet. The newspaper printed a opinion piece by Andy Rooney from a wire service. This is a condensed paraphrase of an e-mail exchange between myself and a reader:

Reader: Please send me Andy Rooney's e-mail address.

Me: You can contact Mr. Rooney via the "60 Minutes" section of the CBS web site.

Reader: No, it will be answered by a secretary, and he'll never see it. Give me his personal e-mail address, the one he checks at home.

Me: Sorry, but we don't have that. We just pulled one of his columns from the wire to fill space.

Reader: Don't give me that crap. Andy Rooney's column was in your paper. It didn't just magically appear there. I'm sure you got it from him over e-mail. I need his e-mail address.

Me: Sir, we're a tiny little paper in South Carolina, 1500 miles away from New York, Mr. Rooney's column came over a wire service we subscribe to. One of the editors saw it and used it. We never contacted Mr. Rooney during any of this so I don't know what his e-mail address is.

Reader: That's bullshit! Give me Andy Rooney's personal e-mail address RIGHT NOW or I will call your boss!

Me: andyrooney@hotmail.com

Reader: THANK YOU! Now was that so hard?

Friday, June 27, 2008

Is that where that goes? Part II

As I'm sure none of you remember, I blogged many moons ago about the most common phrase uttered in our household: "Is that where that goes?"

Yesterday, I learned another lesson: My full cereal bowl does not go on the bed where the cat makes his usually graceful landing when leaping up from the floor.

Cereal Explosion

Friday, February 22, 2008

Wake-up call

If you do not have cats, you can probably skip this one. If you do share your household with one or more of these furry manipulators, enjoy.

This is the reason we stopped feeding the cats in the morning.

Sunday, November 4, 2007

No worries

Lake Wakatipu

I could write a long-winded travelogue about the trip to New Zealand, but it would take a long time and none of you probably would read the whole thing. Plus, I'm lazy. Looky! Here's a picture instead: It's Lake Wakatipu and the Remarkables range near Queenstown.

But here, in convenient bulleted form, is what we did - and didn't - do in the land of the Kiwi.

DID:

• Hike 82 kilometers in less than four days on the Heaphy Track with 14 kilograms of pack on my back. In American, that's 51 miles and 31 pounds.

• Get several dated pop songs stuck in my head on the hike: "Livin' on a Prayer" (mostly the line "Who-oa, we're halfway there" whenever I thought we reached the halfway point to the next milestone), "Purple Rain" (it rained a lot), "500 Miles" by The Proclaimers (that chick really better be worth the blisters, sore feet and destroyed knees) and "Get Out of My Dreams, Get Into My Car" (this one kind of defies explanation).

• Visit four national parks: Kahurangi, Paparoa, Fiordland and Abel Tasman.

• Visit five airports (these were less inspiring): Auckland, Nelson, Christchurch, Hokitika and Queenstown.

• Kayak three days, two in Doubtful Sound and one in Abel Tasman National Park.

• Eat very well, including some New Zealand specialties: lamb, venison, blue cod. Yum.

• Spend a lot of money. This is easy because New Zealand notes are colorful and there are birds on them so they don't look like real money.

• See two Maori shows and learn to pronounce correctly the Maori geographical names of the places we visited.

• Enjoy the hilarity of "Flight of the Conchords."

• Learn that Kiwis are not as uptight as Americans. This was confirmed by the Auckland airport's televisions all being tuned to "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," f-bombs, boobs and all.

• Feed eels at the National Kiwi Centre in Hokitika, a facility of such renowned international fame that its operators do not even deem it necessary to have a web site.

• Discuss U.S. politics with several Kiwis who were very well-educated about such matters. It seems they don't much care for the current administration. None of them, however, could remember Rudy Giuliani's name; he was just "the 9/11 guy from New York."

• Take a bunch of photos, most of which do not do justice but will be posted at some point anyway.

• Decide to adopt the New Zealand national motto: No worries.

DID NOT:

• Eat chutney, vegemite, haggis or any of the other nasty-ass "food" the Brits imported into New Zealand.

• Touch a computer the entire time I was in the country (save for two minutes in Auckland to make a bank transfer).

• Know whether the Bears won or lost their last two games. I did, however, watch South Africa destroy England for the rugby World Cup championship. It was 15-6 for those of you scoring at home.

• Tip at restaurants. It's not the custom because wait staff actually gets paid a decent wage. This, unfortunately, is reflected in the food prices.

• Shave. But I did that once I got home so I no longer look like I just got voted off "Survivor."

• Think about work.

• Drive. Although I wanted to take a crack at that drive-on-the-left concept.

• Have any exposure to news, except for two newspaper clippings of most of southern California on fire and the last couple of innings of the Red Sox knocking off the Rockies in Game 4 (sorry, Morgan).

• Kayak in Milford Sound. Unfortunately, an avalanche closed the road that leads there.

• Kill anything, despite a sign at a youth outdoor camp in Fiordland that taught us "Conservation in New Zealand is about killing things." (For the record, I did not put my hand in the trap.)

• Succumb to the urge to skip the return flight. This was a struggle.