Category: travel

Posted on

thanksmas2007 redux

I am sleepy and sated, product of a good family gathering. This weekend has stretched into long-ish memories, globular gelatin-like happy oblong memories… of card games and movie watching, catching-up and conversation. Thanksgiving among mine is a time for family.

In contrast or contradiction, it seems that once again time has passed in an eyeblink and I feel some small amazement that tomorrow florence and I will already be driving back to minnesota. Where does life go once you have lived it?

I was thinking a bit today about my poor memory in the context of how bad I am about remembering jokes, and I would like to think that I’m a product of a rich and varied present. I cannot live outside the moment, because the moment is too powerful, too compelling.

Posted on

Athens

Florence and I are in Athens, we’ve had a really wonderful time until… about fifteen minutes ago. We just had pretty much the only negative part of the trip happen… a cab driver just ripped us off to the tune of about 40 euros. :(

Athens is a pretty grungy city, but aside from the asshole cab driver, we haven’t really had any other problems. (Although walking at night in the neighborhood of our hotel is also totally sketchy.) I don’t have all that much internet time left, but Santorini was really really gorgeous, and well worth the trip.

Today we saw the Akropolis, and various other historical tourist traps. I’m sure anyone who is curious will hear all about it later. Hopefully I can sneak a few photos onto flickr before my time is up.

Posted on

nothing posting

So I finished The Amber Spyglass, and now I’m reading Stardust, by Neil Gaiman, rather than Thirteen, which I’d said I was going to start next. Stardust is shorter, and I started it on the plane to Chicago, thinking I’d get to return it to Florence’s sister Susie while we were there, rather than bring it back on the plane with us because I hadn’t finished it, which is of course what happened instead. There is also a connection between the two, as both the Phillip Pullman books and Stardust are on my “to read” pile for the same reason — I wanted to finish them before their movie counterparts are released.

I just got done uploading a few pictures from the trip to flickr, and realized they were all of people, but that we hadn’t taken any with Susie (Florence’s sister, who we spent most of Saturday visiting). I did also meet Florence’s father on Saturday too, (that was the main purpose of the trip), and that meeting went well.

We stayed with my Aunt Maureen and Uncle Michael, and my cousin Patrick, who I discovered shares my love for “casual” (mostly web-based) video games. We took turns showing each other games we like on Kongregate, and I’ll admit he took way more turns than I did. He also showed an interest in Flash game development. Too bad the program is so expensive, or I’d get him a copy for his birthday or something.

Posted on

it’s back

livingtech is back.

I’m posting this from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I’m sitting propped up on a hotel bed, surrounded by fluffy pillows. From here, I have a nice view to my right out the sliding glass door of the beach and ocean stretching to infinity on the horizon. (Check out my flickr stream for some photos from the beach.)

I have tons of actual work to do, (I’m not on vacation, just piggybacking on Florence’s work travel), so I’m going to keep this short. Astute readers will have noticed I’ve switched from MT to WP, and moved the old homepage out of the way. No more hiding the blog behind a /blog/ subdirectory. I’ve still got lots of minor formatting changes I want to make to the stylesheet, and I want to do some pruning of useless old pages too.

So much to write about. So little time!

Posted on

travel and blog catchup

The trip to japan was awesome. Photos here. Florence and I are still doing great. I’m sure Nate thinks I’ve abandoned him. I can’t even remember the last time I slept at the house. Last night Florence and I saw KR’s show in the fringe, and ran into Nate outside afterwards. It felt like the first time I’d seen him in weeks.

Last weekend Florence and I went down to visit her sister in Chicago. We went to Wizard’s World on Saturday, this giant comic convention, and it was pretty great. I’ve really been reading a lot of comics lately, Runaways and Young Avengers, and Futurama, and Girls… with some x-men thrown in there for good measure. It started with some graphic novels, V for Vendetta and The Watchmen. Florence’s sister Susie has tons of comics, and it was fun looking through her collection. (Mike also has a nice collection, and I haven’t taken nearly enough advantage of it — although I did borrow The Watchmen from him, and some of those x-men.)

On Sunday night, as we were driving back, we got off the freeway at the Wisconsin dells, and decided spontaneously to stay at Kalahari, this water park that I’d heard about because my brother John went there recently. Now I feel bad I didn’t go with him, because it was AWESOME. Florence and I had a really wonderful time going on all the rides together, and it really made the trip something memorable.

I’m reading The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. It’s super good, chalk full of literary goodness. Also reading Game Plan, The Game Inventor’s Handbook, which is about what it sounds like, although it’s more about publishing games and getting them published than the actual act of inventing them. I’ve been playing a lot of games again, and have come up with this abstract strategy game that uses a bunch of dice in a non-random way. We’ve played it a few times, and it’s gotten some decent comments from everybody. I’ve decided I’m going to get a set of large (1″) dice to play with just for parties and stuff. Email me if you’re interested in the rules. As soon as I think of a decent name for it, I’ll probably post them to board game geek or something. I had this idea that I’d be coming up with new games to use the same dice, and selling a handbook full of them, and I still might do that, but I want to at least give one set of rules away. Plus, none of the other games are as far along in terms of rules and thinking them out as this one. There is one other one that I’d like to try out in the near future… I’ve just got to find time to do it.

Posted on

Mondo recap

Mondo came and went last weekend, and it was great. Not quite as great, however, as the last madfest. Of course, Madfest is in madison, and much harder to drive to. I have plans to go to another juggling convention in two weeks, the one down in illinois.

I don’t know how I suddenly got “back into” juggling, or even if I ever was “out” of it, but this time of year just happens to be a busy one for juggling conventions, at least in the midwest. (Which seems odd, you’d think we’d want to have them in the summer or something.)

Anyway, I’ve been picking up a few new skills, and my five clubs has improved immensely. I’m also getting pretty close to level five on the unicycle.

One reason mondo may not have felt quite as fun as mad fest was the fact that I was probably coming down with something the whole weekend. This week my body has been drained of all energy, and I’ve mostly just sat around like a lump of fat. Most days it’s all I can do to force myself to eat sometime in the afternoon before laura gets home from work. As a result though, I have been plowing through the sandman comic series, which I borrowed from Delobius’s wife.

Now because I’ve been sick all week, my sleep schedule is all f’d up. For instance, I slept till 1pm today. If I do feel well enough to go into work tomorrow, (I felt a little better today, like maybe the worst of it is behind me) …you can bet I’ll be in late. At least I’ve got forgiving coworkers (who are probably reading this right now wondering if I’m full of shit).

I’m going to upload some new pictures to the TCUC gallery before I got to bed, I think.

(And this is a particularly lame entry, I think… Where are all the big ideas? I watched “No Maps for These Planes” this afternoon, a documentary on William Gibson. It was quite interesting. The part that probably struck me the hardest was how he had at one time been inspired to take all the psychedelic drugs he could get his hands on. I guess I’d never thought of him as all that “out there” or surreal, but his better stuff definitely is, which is probably why I like it so much. That and the sandman comics have definitely put me in a strange sort of introspective mood.)