Hey all!
Long time no read eh? Yah. We’ve been busy.
We just got back from a week in Peru which was amazing! I will post pictures on face book today. We spent most of the week in Cusco just wandering around. Its such a beautiful old city and so amazingly cheap. The expensive tourist restaurants were typically $10-15 per entrée (we didn’t go to any of those). The mid-range ones were $5 for a full 5 course meal. And were really good. Needless to say most of the trip we spent eating. And taking pictures.
I will shortly be writing up some articles on the trip for travelmaharishi, and probably AC as well.
So look for those and forward them to all your friends!
By the way, I’m still in the front running for the May Sponsored Traveler thing at http://travelmaharishi.com/sponsored-traveler/sponsored-traveler-submission/ so go vote! It appears now that you can vote several times a day from the same computer (a few hours between votes, not sure how many exactly, but at least 3 times a day). So vote vote vote! Thank you.
Maria (if that is indeed your real name) and I are going to be getting the Subway website up real soon here. Hopefully within the next 5 minutes. Just kidding. If we are lucky it will be by the end of the week. Maybe sooner if I actually do something about it.
I have finally come to admit fully to myself that I am lazy. Though “lazy” isn’t the right term, and neither is “unmotivated”, because I will work extremely hard at times as well as be incredibly excited and motivated about things. Its just that the drive rarely lasts, as long as its merely self-driven anyways. Which is why, I have come to decide, I seriously need external motivation! Yay for external motivation!
Which is why I joined New York Cycling club this week. Its only $22 bucks for a whole friggin year! So anybody in NYC area that likes to ride, should definitely consider it. They have organized rides just about every day, of varying lengths and difficulty, but they visit some really cool places. A great deal of them start in NYC proper and then head out to destinations outside the city, to return later in the day. Others stay within the city. Next Saturday they have ride starting in the Upper West side, heading down to Battery Park, and then across the ferry to Governors Island! Which is the opening day for Governors island this year.
I’ve signed up for that one cuz I have really wanted to do that ride, but keep “not getting around to it.” Sigh.
Oh, and I also signed up for a wine club with a local wine shop! Its stupidly cheap and they have multiple classes for club members every week, plus free tastings every week, plus a discount on wine. Now I know what some of you are going to say: “Lance, do you really need external motivation to drink?” Obviously I don’t. That one I’ve got covered pretty well. But, I do need external motivation to go do things like wine classes and wine tastings. That may give you an idea of the extreme nature of my lack of inner-motivation, if I need an external motivation to attend an event with free booze.
Seriously, that’s how bad it is. But now that I am putting it out there, shining a light on it so to speak, and not letting myself off the hook (wait, what is that? Is that internal motivation? WTF?), I will be able to fully realize my maximum potential. Or at least part of my full potential. Which would be partial potential. Uhh, maybe that’s not the best way to look at it. Whatever.
The point is we live in an amazing city with an abundance of opportunities. Especially for those of us who have scads of time (remember scads?) as well as those who have the foresight to arrange external motivators to ensure reaching their maximum (or partial, however you wanna look at it) potential.
Oh, I forgot to mention: I plan to enroll in an online writing class through a writing school here in NY. It costs a bit though, so I am taking donations (especially from you Mom). Though if you guys vote for me on that travel page, that’s almost the same thing!
Am I rambling now? I feel like I’m rambling.
I trust you guys will let me know if I get too far off base. I’m only on my first pot of coffee, so I’m not yet up to my full focused rampage yet. Soon though. Very soon.
I should probably sign off now before it gets too ugly.
Okay bye.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Time flies when youre having rum
As most of you know by now, I took advantage of a $20 round trip ticket offer from Jet Blue to go to the Bahamas for a single over night earlier this week. If any of you are still doubting, I have the sunburns to prove it.
I woke up at 3:30am on Tuesday, took a cab to JFK, and within hours was wandering stupidly around Nassau town.
I had some good food, some good drinks, really good cigars, got offered cocaine (declined), heroin (also declined), and hair braiding (enthusiastically accepted!). I learned that corn-rows are not so much my style.
I enjoyed exploring, but in general Nassau is not a place I can say that I would recommend to others. It is very expensive, seems pretty run down, and really doesn’t have that many points of interest. I’m sure there are more interesting parts of the island, I just didn’t see them. Nassau does have a cool little down-town commercial area with lots of restaurants and cool shops though. It also has a pirate museum to which my attempts to visit were thwarted. Argh.
Beautiful beaches and turquoise water, its definitely tropical and I had a rather blissful time sitting on the beach enjoying a daiquiri made by “Uncle Steve” while enjoying a Cuban Monte Cristo. I will post pictures of Uncle Steve later. He was an interesting guy and very excited for me to take pictures of him and put him "up on the Facebook.” He apparently doesn’t have a website or an email address however. At least he has electricity, which allowed him to blast a series of cheesy 80’s pop songs. Including several numbers by that guy who does “Wooooh, think twice. Blah blah something just another day in Paradise”. In fact he played that very song, I suspect twice. Did I mention the daiquiri was really strong? I discovered (after uploading my photos today) that I began taking pictures of various women’s behinds on the beach at one point. I am embarrassed to admit that, but I figure you all deserve to be wholly informed. Luckily for me, none of them noticed.
Anyways. Nothing too note-worthy happened.
The US customs guy gave me grief about having Cuban cigars though. Guess I should of lied about that. He didn’t take them however, just made me remove the bands from them so I can’t complain too much. But still, it strikes me as absurdly stupid to still be enforcing the embargo. I thought we elected a communist president? That’s what I keep hearing anyways. Something doesn’t add up. But either way, its not like the Cubans are going to rise up and overthrown communism simply because I can’t buy cigars. And besides, what does it matter now anyways? Isn’t the cold war over? I vaguely remember something about that, but I could be wrong. I am about most things that rely on accurate recollection, after all.
So there you have it.
True, I went to the Bahamas.
True, I took candid photos of bikinis bottoms on the beach.
True, I had some sketchy guy serve up lines of white powder for me which I declined.
False, I brought home a monkey. I didn’t see even a single monkey, damn it.
Someday I will however, and some day soon after that, I will have a small primate trained to open beer bottles, cut and light cigars, and untie bikini bottoms.
Someday.
I woke up at 3:30am on Tuesday, took a cab to JFK, and within hours was wandering stupidly around Nassau town.
I had some good food, some good drinks, really good cigars, got offered cocaine (declined), heroin (also declined), and hair braiding (enthusiastically accepted!). I learned that corn-rows are not so much my style.
I enjoyed exploring, but in general Nassau is not a place I can say that I would recommend to others. It is very expensive, seems pretty run down, and really doesn’t have that many points of interest. I’m sure there are more interesting parts of the island, I just didn’t see them. Nassau does have a cool little down-town commercial area with lots of restaurants and cool shops though. It also has a pirate museum to which my attempts to visit were thwarted. Argh.
Beautiful beaches and turquoise water, its definitely tropical and I had a rather blissful time sitting on the beach enjoying a daiquiri made by “Uncle Steve” while enjoying a Cuban Monte Cristo. I will post pictures of Uncle Steve later. He was an interesting guy and very excited for me to take pictures of him and put him "up on the Facebook.” He apparently doesn’t have a website or an email address however. At least he has electricity, which allowed him to blast a series of cheesy 80’s pop songs. Including several numbers by that guy who does “Wooooh, think twice. Blah blah something just another day in Paradise”. In fact he played that very song, I suspect twice. Did I mention the daiquiri was really strong? I discovered (after uploading my photos today) that I began taking pictures of various women’s behinds on the beach at one point. I am embarrassed to admit that, but I figure you all deserve to be wholly informed. Luckily for me, none of them noticed.
Anyways. Nothing too note-worthy happened.
The US customs guy gave me grief about having Cuban cigars though. Guess I should of lied about that. He didn’t take them however, just made me remove the bands from them so I can’t complain too much. But still, it strikes me as absurdly stupid to still be enforcing the embargo. I thought we elected a communist president? That’s what I keep hearing anyways. Something doesn’t add up. But either way, its not like the Cubans are going to rise up and overthrown communism simply because I can’t buy cigars. And besides, what does it matter now anyways? Isn’t the cold war over? I vaguely remember something about that, but I could be wrong. I am about most things that rely on accurate recollection, after all.
So there you have it.
True, I went to the Bahamas.
True, I took candid photos of bikinis bottoms on the beach.
True, I had some sketchy guy serve up lines of white powder for me which I declined.
False, I brought home a monkey. I didn’t see even a single monkey, damn it.
Someday I will however, and some day soon after that, I will have a small primate trained to open beer bottles, cut and light cigars, and untie bikini bottoms.
Someday.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Man vs. Booze (and Dave)
As most of you know, Wifie and I recently took a trip from New York to New York with a quick layover in Seattle. During that lay over we were lucky enough to be able to attend a wedding and crash a party at Chad and Christina’s place.
I suspect I had a fair amount to drink because the whole lay over is somewhat hazy, although that in itself doesn’t mean much because yesterday is pretty hazy to me now and I didn’t have anything to drink. That’s just the nature of my life.
What makes me suspect I consumed alcohol, is a story I shall relate to you that occurred to me while sitting in the Washington/Dulles airport waiting on standby.
Though to be fully accurate, the story begins on the tarmac at Sea-tac the prior evening, approx 11pm, waiting waiting waiting to taxi to the runway and take off. But alas, this simple procedure was not to be executed as planned. Instead, there was some sort of “security breach” and much to my surprise it was not I who they pulled off the plane, as when there is a “security breach” it is usually I who has done something stupid to violate somebody else’s security. Usually by accident. Usually.
So I’m sitting there in seat 15B, beginning to unbuckle my seatbelt and getting ready to block Wifie’s wild punches as I awake her so that I can stand up to greet the SPD officer who is sauntering up the aisle, when lo! the officer saunters on by row 15, not even glancing at the astonished occupant of 15B half-standing with arms outstretched as if fending of a cloud of hornets (you try waking Wifie up some time, I dare you). It was not my fate to be detained this day, no Dear Readers, it was a young Ethiopian family of 3 that was yanked from this aircraft this day. They looked harmless enough, complete with irritated toddler in arms. Who knows whose security they breached. It was never fully explained to us, ignorant irritated passengers.
This really isn’t important though. I mean, it’s the beginning of the story, true, but its totally irrelevant. The point is that we were delayed from leaving Seattle by over an hour and as a result missed our connecting flight in DC, even though we were standing at the departing gate in DC a full ten minutes before the plane was scheduled to depart. The plane was sitting there too, twiddling its thumbs or whatever planes do when they wait at departing gates. But still, they would not allow us to board.
Woe is we. Very very woe.
So now we wait in line at the Uni-Ted customer “service” desk along with approx 40 other people who have been summarily dismissed from various departure gates as a result of delays, waiting patiently (at 7am, everybody looked more like zombies than functioning human beings) to meet with the one and only person behind the “service” desk. So after about another hour we finally talk to this customer “service” representative and are put on Standby. Yay. Did I mention the flight from Seattle was a red-eye? Yah, at this point we were so tired and out of it we basically couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for anger.
Now we are sitting in the really nice comfortable airport seating area and I am watching TV when I see this show come on that’s called “Man Vs. Food” and I’m thinking, “what the hell is this?” I have heard of food fights in which people fight each other by flinging food similar to the way apes fling feces, but I’ve never heard of a food fight in which food is the enemy to be vanquished. Can overpowering your entrée really be so challenging as to warrant a TV show? Standards for TV must have gone way down since I last subscribed to cable.
But it is at this moment in the story that I finally get to the whole purpose of this story: I suddenly have an epiphany, a realization, a memory comes back to me. I think “oh my gosh, that’s me! On the show! That was me this weekend, except I wasn’t battling victuals, I was exchanging blows with booze!” My show, of course, would have been entitled “Man vs. Booze.” and I have to add the “(and Dave)” because the moment Dave arrived at the party on Friday evening he said something like “Lance! you can’t drink. I’m going to out drink your sorry ass and make fun of you until you cry like a little baby. Hahahaaaaa” and then slapped me with a white glove he keeps in his pocket for occasions such as these.
Well, anybody who knows me knows that I do not take kindly to insults and I never back down from a duel. So I readily accepted his challenge and immediately passed out. That’s my recollection of the evening anyways, which came to me after suddenly gaining full consciousness for the first time that weekend while on standby at DC.
But please do not have pity on me Dear Readers. While I may have lost the good fight against booze that evening, I was told I did in fact defeat Dave. Okay nobody told me that, I’m just saying that. I have no idea who “won” and I suspect that we both may have lost something that evening. Perhaps our innocence. Maybe our integrity. Or maybe just the contents of Dave’s stomach (I didn’t evacuate my innards, I am certain of this. Not so certain about Dave however). But no mater, it was an evening not-to-be remembered except in the photographs that while likely start turning up on face book and add to the mountains of black-mail material that will prevent me from ever running for any kind of office.
The final score for this trip is in, and the winner is….
Booze (Dave) - 1
Lance - 0
Woe is me.
I suspect I had a fair amount to drink because the whole lay over is somewhat hazy, although that in itself doesn’t mean much because yesterday is pretty hazy to me now and I didn’t have anything to drink. That’s just the nature of my life.
What makes me suspect I consumed alcohol, is a story I shall relate to you that occurred to me while sitting in the Washington/Dulles airport waiting on standby.
Though to be fully accurate, the story begins on the tarmac at Sea-tac the prior evening, approx 11pm, waiting waiting waiting to taxi to the runway and take off. But alas, this simple procedure was not to be executed as planned. Instead, there was some sort of “security breach” and much to my surprise it was not I who they pulled off the plane, as when there is a “security breach” it is usually I who has done something stupid to violate somebody else’s security. Usually by accident. Usually.
So I’m sitting there in seat 15B, beginning to unbuckle my seatbelt and getting ready to block Wifie’s wild punches as I awake her so that I can stand up to greet the SPD officer who is sauntering up the aisle, when lo! the officer saunters on by row 15, not even glancing at the astonished occupant of 15B half-standing with arms outstretched as if fending of a cloud of hornets (you try waking Wifie up some time, I dare you). It was not my fate to be detained this day, no Dear Readers, it was a young Ethiopian family of 3 that was yanked from this aircraft this day. They looked harmless enough, complete with irritated toddler in arms. Who knows whose security they breached. It was never fully explained to us, ignorant irritated passengers.
This really isn’t important though. I mean, it’s the beginning of the story, true, but its totally irrelevant. The point is that we were delayed from leaving Seattle by over an hour and as a result missed our connecting flight in DC, even though we were standing at the departing gate in DC a full ten minutes before the plane was scheduled to depart. The plane was sitting there too, twiddling its thumbs or whatever planes do when they wait at departing gates. But still, they would not allow us to board.
Woe is we. Very very woe.
So now we wait in line at the Uni-Ted customer “service” desk along with approx 40 other people who have been summarily dismissed from various departure gates as a result of delays, waiting patiently (at 7am, everybody looked more like zombies than functioning human beings) to meet with the one and only person behind the “service” desk. So after about another hour we finally talk to this customer “service” representative and are put on Standby. Yay. Did I mention the flight from Seattle was a red-eye? Yah, at this point we were so tired and out of it we basically couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for anger.
Now we are sitting in the really nice comfortable airport seating area and I am watching TV when I see this show come on that’s called “Man Vs. Food” and I’m thinking, “what the hell is this?” I have heard of food fights in which people fight each other by flinging food similar to the way apes fling feces, but I’ve never heard of a food fight in which food is the enemy to be vanquished. Can overpowering your entrée really be so challenging as to warrant a TV show? Standards for TV must have gone way down since I last subscribed to cable.
But it is at this moment in the story that I finally get to the whole purpose of this story: I suddenly have an epiphany, a realization, a memory comes back to me. I think “oh my gosh, that’s me! On the show! That was me this weekend, except I wasn’t battling victuals, I was exchanging blows with booze!” My show, of course, would have been entitled “Man vs. Booze.” and I have to add the “(and Dave)” because the moment Dave arrived at the party on Friday evening he said something like “Lance! you can’t drink. I’m going to out drink your sorry ass and make fun of you until you cry like a little baby. Hahahaaaaa” and then slapped me with a white glove he keeps in his pocket for occasions such as these.
Well, anybody who knows me knows that I do not take kindly to insults and I never back down from a duel. So I readily accepted his challenge and immediately passed out. That’s my recollection of the evening anyways, which came to me after suddenly gaining full consciousness for the first time that weekend while on standby at DC.
But please do not have pity on me Dear Readers. While I may have lost the good fight against booze that evening, I was told I did in fact defeat Dave. Okay nobody told me that, I’m just saying that. I have no idea who “won” and I suspect that we both may have lost something that evening. Perhaps our innocence. Maybe our integrity. Or maybe just the contents of Dave’s stomach (I didn’t evacuate my innards, I am certain of this. Not so certain about Dave however). But no mater, it was an evening not-to-be remembered except in the photographs that while likely start turning up on face book and add to the mountains of black-mail material that will prevent me from ever running for any kind of office.
The final score for this trip is in, and the winner is….
Booze (Dave) - 1
Lance - 0
Woe is me.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Get your vote on
Im posting this so I can enter it into the photocontest on travelmaharishi.com
Feel free to go to this site and vote for me! http://travelmaharishi.com/?page_id=3
It should be up real soon.
It was taken up by Mount Baker during the summer a few years ago. I always liked this one.
Im gonna keep this post short. Just wanted to get the photo up mainly.
Had a long grueling travel weekend and am still recovering. My mom is visiting now too so we are running around a bunch too. Recovery is taking a back seat. As is writing.
So thats it for today, but I'll be back real soon folks, and until then, Cheers!
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