Survived! 1789 miles door to door. We got stuck for 2 hours in Las Angeles traffic (in the rain), got pelted with wind, semi-cooked in Inyokern while checking out one of Griffith's crappy trailers (he actually owns this one) and while dad went to get new tires on his bike in Phoenix, I endured NASCAR with the woman. It rained a lot during the NASCAR crap too while we were "shopping" in the trailers and we had to take cover under a semi trailer. You meet the nicest people huddling under a trailer.

Here is the route we ended up taking. We cut the coast run off, we were both tired. We stayed the night in Blythe, Scottsdale, Las Vegas and exciting Bakersfield. The most we paid for gas was $2.98 and that was when we first gassed up in Fremont. Gas in the middle of nowhere was cheaper than at home. :(

Pictures are up on the main page, but here are some highlights. Yes, I did buy beef jerky from the nomad selling it out of his RV exactly 68 miles outside of Vegas. He says he's spent a lot of time out here in the desert around Area 51 (which we're sorta by) and hasn't seen any aliens but he's been talked to by a bunch of guys in air force uniforms driving large blue unmarked suburbans. He says they never buy any jerky either (it's tasty, not sure why they wouldn't). He's gets run off by the cops sometimes, and he's got a permit to sell on Indian lands and has used that against the cops that try to run him off when he's parked by the reservation. He's on good terms with the Indians apparently. His Honda generator uses 1/12 gal per hour to run his fridge, computer, TV, satellite setup and lights. Hmm. Good to know.

Traffic over Hoover Dam was nuts. It took us an hour or more to go 3 miles. There wasn't anything stopping it either, just people gawking I guess. They're building a huge bypass to the dam and I can see why.

And just like the old hermit dude, we didn't see any aliens either. While making a run through some big ass open valley on the west side of the Death Valley park we ran into this guy. He did some low altitude flybys so we could take some pictures (or so it seemed, maybe he was practicing strafing us). Before I got the camera out he flew by close enough for us to see him waving. Very cool (and loud).

I got home today and washed off the 1000 lbs of bugs that were squashed on the bike. While doing that I noticed that the final drive assembly was leaking oil. Uh oh. I called the dealer and they're really busy for the next 2 weeks but if I bring it in tomorrow at 8am they'll tell me if it's safe to ride for the couple of weeks until my appointment. If it's not, I'll see if dad will swap me bikes for the few weeks, he doesn't ride his unless I'm there anyway so he won't mind my leaking bike in his garage for a few weeks. Or maybe he can bring the Suzuki down from the cabin this weekend. I can't imagine having to commute in the Montero. The horrors!!!

The woman found another condo yesterday and went to see it and put an offer in. Now the 1-bedroom places are asking $430k. She thinks this is the last one, after this one sells the next one will be in the $440-450k range and that's way past what she wanted to pay (vs. $430k which is only sorta past where she wanted to pay). It's nuts over there. If this one falls though, she says we'll go on to plan B. I'm not exactly sure what plan B is but I figure she's got something in mind.

I'm leaving Phoenix tomorrow at 7am and will be back on Tuesday. I looked at my vacation days and I don't think they jive. They say I have 5.6 weeks saved up. Seems low.... well maybe not.

Exciting to see that Kenny is getting interviews at least. He hasn't died yet being unemployed so maybe there is hope for me if/when it happens (being unemployed, it's highly unlikely I'll be Kenny any time soon).

Kenny has done an update and I haven't. Holy crap who's the slacker now? Must be me.

Last Thursday and Friday I was in Vegas for the perforce user conference. Nothing exciting there, I was still sick and feeling like death so I didn't really want to go do anything with the free evening I had. I got some chicken noodle soup and an orange for dinner and went and sat in my room and watched TV and read. I'm really digging the book I'm reading now, Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds. I'm trying to "save" it for the trip this weekend but keep sneaking 10-20 pages at a time. There is a 3rd book in the series which I didn't know about but it looks like it's only in hardback. I've started other series like that and never get to finish them because I've forgot about it by the time the paperback version comes out. Perhaps with the library technology I won't have to worry about buying and tossing a hard back book (which just seems to wrong to me).

Hmm... what else. Saturday was nothing in the AM; there was no weekly trip to Santa Cruz. There are no new houses on the market there this week so we didn't have to go through the visit->bid->lose cycle we've done 5 times now. BTW, she lost the bid on the place I took all the photos of last week. That's a bummer because I kinda liked that one.

In the afternoon we went to Eric and Elana's (people I know from psycho class) for a BBQ which was very posh. They have a nice back yard in Alameda and it was all decorated with lights and table cloths and cloth napkins and candles and whatnot like a real, yuppie adult outdoor gathering. I never thought them the type but Eric is a gourmet chef when he's not working or learning to kill people. The food was awesome (some sort of sausages, asparagus and whatnot) and although it got a little cold we managed to stay outside until sundown enjoying the day. The woman and I made "suicide pie" which is this really tasty french silk pie. The raw eggs and risk of salmonella give it it's name, but everyone risked death to try it. We're going to have to have them down to our place again at some time (they came for the open house) but I'm afraid we won't have three types of mustard and the little fancy mustard knives (especially since I don't like mustard).

Sunday I washed and waxed both the Montero and the bike after we got back from Starbucks. We also, uh, did some other stuff which I can't remember. Oh yea, now I remember (must be suppressing), we went to look at rings again. We found one we both really liked, now we just have to find it on-line so we can take a picture of it to the jeweler we're working with. That or have him go to the other jewelery store and check it out. After that we went over to my parents for dinner. Another BBQ, but this time lamb and steak. BBQs sure increase the quality of our diet!

I'm catching the woman's sore throat and it kinda sucks. She's been achy and whatnot for a few days now. She seems to bring home all sorts of stuff, must be all the sick people on BART she sits with twice a day.

Let's see, the weekend in review. Saturday didn't ride (the arena was soaked due to all the rain so they canceled lessons). After sleeping in (finally!) we went to Santa Cruz to look at the Lloyd street place one more time. I took a bunch of pictures (the first is really of the snake that lives in the bushes outside the Milpitas place) and she sat down with the realtor to work on the counter offer. It was all very complicated, and even though she gave in on all the seller's assholian demands, he still snubbed her in the end and went with someone else's offer. Quite annoying, but what can you do it's a sellers market. I guess we'll be going to Santa Cruz a few more times now.

Later on Saturday we went to the jewelery place and she looked at rings. I guess we need to start coming up with ideas and prices and all that. She knows that more ring = less honeymoon and more reception = less honeymoon so she's really not all into the ring. I like that she's not so into the bling of impressing others and/or having to keep up with people. Most her friends are beyond the big ring thing.

Sunday we did the Starbucks thing and read the paper for a while. That afternoon we went with my parents to go get me a new helmet (dad wanted to get me a birthday present), go to Ikea to look for a rug and a lights for the library room, and then on to Nola's for dinner. It was nice to run all the errands in one shot and not have to drive all over the bay chasing stuff down. My parents had never been to Ikea, although dad built the parking lot for them. He's never seen it with cars in it. Mom got some useless crap, like a cheap blanket and pillow, and some 50-cent glasses she found in the discount bin. My mom is strange.

Alles Gute zum Geburtstag zu mir. OK, not really. My birthday was yesterday, I hit the big 33. The woman brought home Chevy's chips and salsa as one of my gifts, and a $1 bag of broken fortune cookies from the fortune cookie factory in Alameda. She knows me so well! I BBQ-ed a pork tenderloin which was tasty, and we watched "MTV cribs" and "pimp my ride" on the replay, then had a sex fest. It was a good birthday.

The spell checker tried to turn the time into "pachysandras", which according to Websters is a form of plant. Go figure on that one.

This weekend was crazy busy. Saturday morning we went and did the horse thing and I got to experience a whole new level of pain and suffering as I crushed my nuts, twice. Part of English riding is being able to "post" which is basically bouncing up and down (sorta) to the beat of the horse's steps. Western style riding doesn't include this, apparently the horses are just trained not to run so funny. Anyway, if you get off rhythm too far you end up going "down" while the saddle is going "up" and you whack your nuts on the edge of the saddle (there isn't a pommel like there is on a western saddle at least). Girls don't suffer from this, but they're aware that when teaching boys it might happen. And it did. Oy, that sucked. It's one of the hardest things to learn and you have to be able to do it pretty much on the 2nd lesson. Or at least start trying. I won't be doing anything else until I learn to do this so I'm envisioning another weekend of nut busting coming up.

After we got home and the swelling went down we went to Santa Cruz for another round of looking at condos. I didn't like any of them... until we got to the last one. It's really "funky", Spanish style in a little complex with lots of trees and decent parking. What's really cool is the unit has a 10'x25' deck that you can see the ocean from. It's a long way off in the distance but you can see some blue. I don't care about the view so much, rather that it's BIG for a deck on a condo and very private. The unit needs about $25k in remodeling work but wasn't too bad compared to some of the crap we've seen. The woman also liked another place that was much newer (built in '95) but I thought it was just too generic and boring. It was also a 1 bedroom place, but had a tiny loft which was just big enough for a queen sized mattress. The whole place stuck of children and urine, there were 4 people living in it. Ick. Oddly, there were also 4 people living in the Spanish style one I liked, but it was vacant and had been cleaned. She's putting offers in on both. I hope she gets the one I like! :) Here is the reality pic of the one with the deck out back. The actual unit is up the stairs and to the right.

Sunday I went with some of the guys from work (and Don who showed up late) to shoot sporting clays. You move from stage to stage shooting clay pigeons shot at various angles, or rolled along the ground. The equipment is very impressive, it's all automatic and keeps track of how many clays you've used and charges you based on that. You carry a little black box you plug into the stages to track your usage. Very impressive setup. I only shot 8 of 16 (or 18?) stages because with 8 of us there it was going too slow and I had told the woman I would be home by 1pm. Next time I'll have to block more time out, as well as get a longer barrel for the shotgun. Most people had 26"-30" barrels on guns with lots of wood and gold. Very fancy. Don and I were using 20" barrels on 8-shot tactical black guns with slings. We had a hard time shooting clays, but man if we had to kick some doors down and SWAT all over someone's ass we would be ready. Funny, there is no door kicking stage in sporting clays.

Sunday night, after finishing my chores, I did a bad thing. I found a copy of Dungeon Siege for $10 at Office Max while shopping for other crap. It's an old game by MSFT and after about an hour of screwing with my machine I got it to run. Apparently there is a problem with NVDA video cards and this game. If I was a gamer I would totally buy ATI stuff. Anyway, I played it for several hours after I got it working. It's fun, and the graphics are good. Or at least I think they're good, I've not played much of anything in the last 4-5 years so I'm sorta out of it. I gotta find a faster video card than my V770, I think the junk cards we put in servers are GeForce2 now at least. Mine is TNT2 based which was hot shit when I started working here 6 years ago. Damn I've been here a long time.

Hey, the GeForce256 card actually works, and it's snappy. The game is smoother and there is more detail. Totally worth the 20 minutes of fiddling it took to make it work.