Mileage milestone

Had to snap a picture last night on my way home from work:

Its not every day you see something like that and I figured I ought to catch it.
I've put about 28,000 miles on the Jetta now in 1 1/2 years. I've got maybe $4000 in the car total right now which includes buying the car so from a financial perspective I'm doing pretty good. My '83 240D went 25,000 miles for about $2,500 which is the gold standard for me at $.10/mi, so at under $0.20/mi with Jetta I'm doing pretty well.

Vacation!

Like I mentioned yesterday we recently went on a cruise:

Sadly I don't have any of the pictures from the cruise with me right now (or I don't think I do) but I've got some from just before the cruise which is a good story too so let me talk about that now.

Our cruise left from San Juan, Puerto Rico on a Saturday so we flew down the day before. I'd waited until late to book the hotel and couldn't get into a Holiday Inn property on points (my normal preference) so we looked around Priceline for awhile and found the "Hotel Miramar" for a decent price. It had really good reviews so I took a chance.

The ride from the airport to the hotel was pretty much terrifying. One of the nice things about San Juan is that the pricing for most taxi rides is fixed by zone so if you know what zone you're in and what zone you're going to you won't be massively scammed like you can be in other big cities. Our taxi driver was an older lady who was overly cautious and several times almost got into accidents because she wouldn't just GO. San Juan is a Boston like city, drive fast, ignore others. Anyway she got us there without killing us but I think I got a couple extra grey hairs.

At first look the Hotel Miramar isn't much to look at. Its in the Miramar neighborhood of San Juan which sits across a lagoon from Condado which is a more ritzy tourist area. I suspect Miramar is where the people who work in Condado live. Its run down and dirty but the Hotel Miramar is excellent. We were on the 8th floor which is clearly the "executive level" you have to use your key car just to get the elevator to go there and theres no door handle on the door from the stairway (easily fixed by pulling on the door closing mechanism) so the rabble can't get in.

Our room, number 802 is really 801 and 802 combined, its HUGE. Easily 700 square feet, bigger than our first apartment.

This view is half of the balcony, to the right of the picture is the bedroom, where I'm standing the balcony is twice as wide and opens into the sitting room and kitchen. For what I paid this room is LUXURY.

We had dinner at Pizza e Birra Miramar. My Spanish isn't good but even I know pizza and beer. Angie doesn't drink beer so we had their house made sangria instead which was fantastic. The pizza was good but nothing special.

Next morning we went to a little local place for breakfast. When we went in we were the only English speaking people in the joint. I've been through that before in Argentina but I think it was a first for Angie and one which she handled really well. Not many folks working there spoke any English at all but surprisingly they had an English menu. I was glad for that but we'd have worked it out anyway "sin queso por favor".  Breakfast was great and I really like latin coffee which comes with milk already added. The orange juice was fresh squeezed, like when I asked for a cup they squeezed it right then.

Then we made our first mistake, we walked around the lagoon. Don't get me wrong the lagoon is beautiful and going around takes you through Condado but, one of the annoying things about cruises is you can't get on the ship until 1pm at the earliest while you need to check out of your hotel at either 11am (in the US) or 12pm in PR. This means you've got a couple hours to kill. What we should have done was go back to the hotel and hang out until we had to check out. Instead we wore out our feet early.

Anyway for mistake number 2 we didn't pack towels. There is a really nice beach at the north west end of the lagoon. If we'd had towels I'd have just gone there and hung out for a couple hours. As it was we decided to check out the section just north of Condado which turned out to have nothing going on. Hilton has some villas there but they're total blandsville and it looks like maybe not done yet so theres just nothing to do. We started to walk into old San Juan got called a "Stupid gringo" by an old guy and decided it wasn't worth it, we've done old San Juan before and figured once we got there it'd be time to go home.

I think this is my favorite picture of the whole trip

We did stop and get a coconut which is something I'd never done before. They lop off a little chunk and give you a straw. After we drain the milk I slammed the body against a bridge abutment (nice new bridge with sharp corners) until we could get inside and get the meat. You'll notice that the coconut has a green husk, this is normal and how they come off the tree. Before they get to the store they pull all that husk off. I seem to remember a Sesame Street clip showing somebody pulling the husk off the coconut. Oh wait, here it is. Angie's grandfather looked at this picture and didn't know what it was, I'll have to show him the video...

I was slightly nervous of the coconut, you know, fresh natural product, far from home, strange tropical diseases but in the end it all worked out just fine. Fresh coconut is much softer than the older stuff that makes it to the states. We took a tour in St. Kitts and somebody bought a coconut and had the same reaction I did.

One more highlight of Puerto Rico was mofongo which is fried plantain which is crushed into a pulp and then formed into kind of a volcano shape and has meat and sauce in it. Mine had steak which was really good but filling and hard on my stomach. Angie got fajitas which was silly, it was 2pm and we should have shared one meal. Anyway, mofongo is a Puerto Rican speciality which I'll be looking to try again soon.

Okay so thats it for the pre-vacation vacation. I'll find the actual cruise pictures and next time I'll tell you about St. Thomas.

Back on track

Calling myself out yesterday seems to have done a world of good for me. I spent a bunch of time today thinking about writing. Maybe if I call myself out for being a lazy bastard that will help too. Honestly I've become very lazy, this morning it was a big deal to drag my butt out of bed. I've been blaming that on lack of sleep and blaming lack of sleep on the cruise and trip to Vegas but since I've been home I've been binge sleeping, for instance last night I got a solid 11 hours which means over the last 5 nights I've averaged 8 hours. They say you can't make up sleep debt that way but I feel like I've done a good job catching up. Unfortunately sleeping late is hell for getting back on the east coast schedule.

My other problem is really an addiction to YouTube. Even if I'm not watching anything that good sometimes I'll suddenly realize I've lost several hours watching videos. I need to break that habit, I've got a ton of projects that each need "just a little more time" that I haven't been giving them. For instance I started the winter strong working on snowmobiles but then that petered out and neither the Wankel Panther nor the Pantera have had anything done to them in months.

I did manage to make some movement on one project yesterday. Back at Thanksgiving Angie's uncle John gave me his Coleman 200A single mantle lantern. He'd had it since the '60s but it fell into disrepair with a bad pump leather and he hasn't used it in years. I found a replacement pump and got it all cleaned up and nice but due to the cold I'd never tested it. This weekend is John's birthday so I really want to have it ready for him so last night I got it out, fueled it and got it lit. It flared a lot more than I like but did finally settle down into a pretty good burn although it flickers. The question is why the flicker, is it because of the FA tube or the generator? It also stinks pretty bad, I don't remember putting muffler mender which means I probably didn't. So I need to pull it back apart, try a new generator (or better yet a known good generator) and goop up the U tube joint so it doesn't leak. I don't think John plans on using this much, his idea of roughing it is when room service closes at midnight, but I like knowing it COULD work if it was needed.

Not doing a good job on my resolutions

I wish I could say I had an awesome excuse for missing out on writing things but I really don't. After a good start to the year I've slid badly.
Its not like I don't have a bunch of things to tell you about, we went on a cruise, I took a work trip to Las Vegas, a work trip to NYC, a work trip to Burbank. It even looks like I might have a couple really cool work trips coming up.

For now I'll keep it simple:

Thats me on the floor of the UN General Assembly. Yeah, its a weird face, I over thought it. I was teaching there about a month ago and got to take a walk around. The thing to know about the UN is that its big, really big. Look it up on Google Earth: and notice that the main building is about a block long and half or a third of a block wide, then notice the other buildings around it. Lotsa people and lots of stuff going on.

Anyway I was fighting a cold I'd picked up in California which dogged me until pretty much yesterday, today I seem to finally be free of the lingering cough, so I wasn't really at my best. I did meet up with a friend from high school while I was there.

This is kind of a weird story. Rachel's brother was my best friend from grade 1 until I was in college. At some point we drifted apart and I lost track of him. I've sort of caught up with him on Facebook in that impersonal way Facebook "brings people together" without actually bringing anybody together. Anyway Rachel and I were never close but then I saw her at out twentieth high school reunion last summer. The following week I had to go to LA for work and who else shows up in LA? This is where I give Facebook some props, I'd never have known she was in LA without it. Hilarity ensues where my class makes fun of me for going on a "date" which isn't a date and my new phone fails to get texts which are strangely going to my old phone and we didn't meet up. Then in March I go to NYC for work and while I'm getting on the train I notice Rachel has posted pictures of Times Square. So we manage to meet up for drinks. Very strange that we hadn't seen each other for 20 years and now we've seen each other twice in less than a year...

Finally it wouldn't be a trip to NYC if I didn't have pizza:

The normal looking slice is sausage, the one in the back is calimari. This is by far the weirdest pizza I've ever had, it had a spicy kind of sauce which also had a barbeque undertone and all in all I wasn't a big fan. The crust was excellent though...

How much is enough?

Let me tell you about a friend of mine. He grew up in LA and has honestly done really well for himself, he's a couple years younger than me and runs a the news organization for a  TV station in Chicago. Before he started in his current job he was a specialist for one of the big networks traveling all over the world to all the big hot spots, Iraq, Afghanistan, Japan for the Fukushima nuclear disaster where he actually heard the reactor go. Considering the kid of jobs he's had it shouldn't be any surprise that he makes considerably more money than me. I don't know for sure but I'd guess double or nearly double anyway.

It got me thinking, some years ago I was offered the opportunity to move to LA and I turned it down. I wasn't ready to move that far away from my family and the life I had known. These days I might consider moving but we're totally locked into where we are. We owe more than our house is worth and Angie's business is doing well, it'd be a really big deal to leave. Even if we left now it would be a couple years before the money made it to the point where it'd really be worth all the hassle although by about the ten year point I think I'd end up considerably ahead. I suspect that by that time we could move back here and I'd be considerably ahead of where I'll be in ten years if we don't leave.

I remember my dad telling me that if he'd moved away from Maine he could have made a ton more money and had a lot more options. The thing I find funny about it now is that when he was talking about moving away he meant Massachusetts which is where I live now. I'm sure that I make more money now than I would have if I didn't move away but thats not why I did it.

I've been telling this story to people trying to work it up into a bit and I've been disappointed that people don't laugh when I say that he would have moved *all the way to Massachusetts* and then I have to explain that we're talking moving 400 miles where if I was going to LA it'd be 2500 miles. This of course ruins the joke. I need to figure out a way to explain it without actually explaining.

Anyway it all got me thinking that I really like my life. I like my little house, my ridiculous girl car (come on, a white A3 Jetta is totally a girl car), my dog, snowmobiles and such. I married the right woman whom I couldn't love more. I love going to camp, I love the travel that I get to do both for work and for pleasure. All in all I'm pretty much satisfied.

Are there things about my life I'd change? Sure, I'd like to lose some weight, get a new snowmobile, the house needs a new roof and I'd like to have a 2 car garage but really thats all window dressing, my fundamentals are good.

I don't know who said it but happiness is not about having what you want, its about wanting what you have. There is ALWAYS some other thing or some hot woman or job with some fancy title. While that stuff is cool and all I'm just not that excited about it. To the people who want to go out and chase that dream, rock on! I'll be here keeping the beer cold for you when you get back.

I didn't win but...

I buy a lot of my VW parts from IDparts.com which is located right here in MA which makes for quick shipping for me.
Recently they had a cold start contest where folks were challenged to start their car in the cold and make a video, the prize was a $200 gift certificate so of course I entered:

and while I didn't win I had a good time making the video. It reminded me of the days spent working on the cooking challenges and made me realize that something like a cooking challenge was a really good way to get motivated to actually do something. I guess I need to spend some time researching other video challenges.

Now is the winter of our discount tent.

With apologies to Red Green.

I haven't been keeping up on my writing very well. I was very proud of myself for writing a couple little poems in my Pizza John notebook but I let that go to my head, so back to the grindstone.

A couple weeks ago my neighbor Bill's water froze up. Sadly for him it froze up in the street. He badgered the town and they finally sent somebody to free it up. He had water for a couple days and the dammed thing froze up again. Whats happening is that since the town plows the street theres no insulating snow over that area so the cold goes really deep into the ground. In both cases the freezeup is starting somewhere right around where Bill's branch line comes off the main pipe. The only real way to prevent this problem is to use more water, moving water is much harder to freeze than stuff that sits still. We've been lucky that I've been home a lot and Angie and I stagger our day pretty well anyway so our water gets used during the day. Also out water pipe into the house is much lower than Bill's is which hopefully (for us) means that our hookup is lower too. After the first freeze up bill left his water on a trickle but apparently it wasn't enough. The guy from the town said it had to be "a pencil width".

This time the town said no-way no-how they aren't fixing it. They contend that Bill's responsibility starts at the joint where his pipe comes off the main line. I think this is complete BS, every other water district I can find information for says the resident's responsibility starts at the shutoff which is also called the "curb stop". Since Bill's line was frozen beyond the curb stop it should be the town's responsibility.

Anyway yesterday Bill hired John, a local plumber, to come and check it out. John got some thin hose and pumped water into the hose so he could shoot it at the ice in the pipe:

The water of course drains back out of the pipe, in this case it falls into the red tub where John has his pump which shoots it back into the pipe.

Every minute or so John pushes the hose a little farther into the pipe. This worked but was slow, eventually the pump got moved into a metal pot on a propane burner to keep the water hot. That worked well enough and eventually John got the hose some 40 feet from Bill's cellar into the street. At that point he could go no farther and quit for the night.

Today he got the guy from the town to loan him the pump they use and their special, even smaller hose and within a couple minutes finally had things flowing. I wish I'd been around for the success because the water must have come shooting out of the pipe into the basement. We'd set up a plastic table to divert the water since Bill's furnace is right in line with the pipe.

Anyway its good to see our neighbor with water again. I'd told him that if John couldn't get the water going we'd help him out. We could run a garden hose from our house to his but it would have been a mega PITA to keep it going, we'd have had to cut a trench in the snow and insulated the hose to keep it from freezing. Even so we'd have had to bring it in most of the time since its been so cold. Today was actually above freezing but they're saying we'll see -3 before the week is out...