Category Archives: Trips

New Mexico and cards

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We successfully had a week-long vacation to New Mexico, which included a wedding at the end.
We started by flying into Albuquerque and immediately leaving it, for Santa Fe. We stayed in a small hotel (only about 12 total rooms?) that was really nice and central… around 10 minutes walking distance from the town’s plaza.

We did a lot of exploring around the city, and also did a day trip to Taos to see the pueblo and the Rio Grande gorge.




Then it was off to Albuquerque where we had museums, views and hiking at Sandia peak and more hiking.




Oh, and also a wedding.

The hotel there was the Marriott pyramid hotel, which was really only pyramidal from the front. But it had a awesome view inside, including through the glass backs of the elevators.

Photos of everything can be found at photos.
It was overall a nice trip, and it was good to relax and have time away from work, but I’m very glad to be done with travel for the foreseeable future.

In other, unrelated fun things… I made my largest (in terms of dollars) order of cards yet. A large amount of the cost came from a single item: a case of 10,000 card sleeves ($50)… but now I’m set for life, including all of the deckbuilder games I keep getting. (My only regret here is that I didn’t have the box of sleeves for the Apex deckbuilding game, for which I bought like 8 or 9 packs of sleeves alone.)

The order included a box of LoTR CCG Black Rider starter decks, a box of L5R Seeds of Decay starter decks, a box Megaman TCG Grand Prix starter decks, six boxes of Megaman TCG Grand Prix and Grave booster packs, a box of Star Wars TCG starter decks, a box of Young Jedi starter decks, a box of VS System Fantastic Four starter decks, a Tribbles CCG box, a WoW TCG Icecrown Citadel raid deck, and the box of sleeves. The raid deck I think will be a reasonable thing to take to games night as well, since it plays four (in a 3 vs 1 format).

The order also included two board games, one of which was Machi Koro, and was the entire impetus for the order in the first place. It was on sale for $25 (deluxe version), but the shipping for it by itself was already $14. Given the rarity of my orders from TCG specialty stores, I took advantage of the situation to get a bunch of other stuff I’d had my eye on. Overall shipping on the ~48 pound box was only $20, so it was definitely worthwhile in that respect.

Now to find people to play more defunct TCGs with me…

Travel travel travel

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August is nearly over, and that’s a good thing… it’s been a crazy month. Spent the first half of the month on my own, followed a weekend trip to a wedding in Ohio, then a flight to San Francisco for work, then a flight to Phoenix to see my parents (including a weekend trip up north to Sedona and Page), then a flight home to Pittsburgh. Travel is almost done (still an upcoming flight to Albuquerque for another wedding), but I really wish timing had worked out better or I’d had more advance notice for some of this.

Anyway, yeah. A little more than two weeks ago was Chris’ wedding, and it was pretty. It was held in a small building on an orchard, and had pizza for dinner, and was generally low-key and awesome (thanks in part to the board games in a smaller, quiet room on the side).



Two weeks ago, I flew to San Francisco for work. If the trip had been planned out more than advance, I would have flown straight there from Ohio. Instead, we drove back to Pittsburgh and I got a bit of sleep before waking up early for a Monday morning flight to make it to afternoon work meetings.
It was a nice trip, and I saw a lot of awesome people, but I think I’m getting too old to really do as much stuff with people on trips. There were two dinners with friends, a lot of nice meals with coworkers, and surprisingly many early evenings.





Flew to Phoenix that Friday, and my parents and I made a trip up to Sedona and Page over the weekend. We visited Horseshoe Bend, Antelope Canyon, and the Glen Canyon Dam, and also had a quick stop in Sedona. There were lots of photos and it was generally a nice time. It would be nice to have more time next time and do things like rafting or boat rides down the river as well.




Managed to see a few Phoenix people as well… caught David, Matt, and Jennie for coffee and dinner, and David again for lunch.


Flew home to Pittsburgh yesterday. Things were uneventful, until the Supershuttle started approaching the house, at which point the light rain that had appeared downtown suddenly picked up a lot… and it started hailing. Fortunately I only had a short distance to go from the street to the house, but everything got rather soaked. Fitting, I suppose, for the misery that comes with so much travel.

More photos of everything can be found at photos.

Here’s some random photos of fun things:

My mom got these seatbelt cover things that are remarkably nice during long car trips… you can sleep against the large head part, and it means your head isn’t flopping around everywhere.

Cute.

Ew.

“Not actual size.”

Interesting.

Odd.

Ice cream crane game!

Faces!

Draft beer jelly beans…?

True.

In other, entirely unrelated, news, Rock Band has been coming out with awesome DLC lately, including songs like Uptown Girl, Africa, Heaven is a Place on Earth, Everything You Want, Famous Last Words, and Pompeii. I’ve been going through and watching the music videos for the older songs, and they’re extremely *bizarre*.
I think the current winner for “most bizarre” video goes to Heaven is a Place on Earth, although Uptown Girl is probably a close second, and Africa is a reasonable third.

Life and links

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Life is a thing. The parents came and went, and it was an awesome time, even though we didn’t really have many scheduled activities after the road trip. It was nice just generally having them around, I guess.

The latest house project is the deck. We fell behind on our time estimates (and also the forecast called for rain), so we’re only done with the scrubbing/cleaning part. We still need to sand and stain it at some point, but it needs to be when it’s going to be dry for a while, so we’ll see. It’s funny how much of a difference the cleaner makes.

I’ve had a lot of interesting reads recently, so here’s a dump of links to interesting things.

  • People that disagree with you aren’t necessarily wrong, or stupid – I think this is something that a lot of SJW (and other general) people are bad at recognizing. This is particularly true with things like abortion, LGBTQ rights, and Brexit… the other side has reasons for disagreeing, and digging your heels in is just going to make things worse. This is also why I feel strongly against things like the (successful) campaign to force Brendan Eich to resign over his prop 8 donations… he’s allowed to have opinions, however unpopular, as long as he’s treating people equally in his role as CEO. The fact that people bullied him and tried to force him to change his views to keep his job was completely unacceptable.
  • Inside private prisons – Just generally a super interesting read.
  • What if Harry Potter was a squib? – An awesome alternate reality fanfic. Massive spoilers (obviously), and requires a lot of background knowledge about the series, but this was super enjoyable.
  • What if Harry Potter’s twin was mistakingly thought to be the boy who lived? – Another alternate reality fanfic that is good if you get can get past the multitude of grammatical and spelling errors, run-on paragraphs, and strange writing.
  • Photographing landmark locations without landmarks – Super interesting from many perspectives.
  • San Jose displaces 670 people from rent-controlled apartments – Yay for yet more bay area housing problems. At least they’re doing the right thing by building more high-density apartments, but I wish there was more help in place for people affected by such construction.
  • Thoughts on Brexit and democracy – It’s always interesting to me to read things that argue that mass democracy is problematic… and what’s been happening lately around the world sure supports that. In particular, the leaders in the UK seem to have no idea what to do now that they’ve actually passed their proposal to leave the EU. I stumbled across the wiki page for Germany’s Basic Law recently, and I found it super interesting that they couldn’t remove the Chancellor without a replacement lined up. Seems like a lot of populist movements need better ideas of what to do what happens after they succeed… in the Brexit case, it seems the people in charge were using the situation for political gain without any expectation of actually winning. And now that they have, they are clueless.
  • Fired for a proposal for relaxing the dress code – After my initial impression of “What is wrong with you?”, I actually can understand a lot of why this made sense to the OP. Coming from an academic environment, it isn’t normal to assume that some people are more equal than others, and work is not a democracy. Still, hopefully she (he?) learned a lot of valuable lessons from this. (Also, that entire blog is really interesting and informative to read.) Also I feel bad for the other interns, since it sounded like she was the ringleader, and managed to really screw a lot of other people in the process.
  • Guy functions without most of his brain – Brains are super interesting and crazy adaptive, I guess?

Yay life.

Costa Rica and wedding’d

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We successfully made it to Costa Rica and back, and overall it was a good trip, even if it was entirely less than ideal.

Ever since we started planning this trip out (for Mars’ wedding), we’ve both just been entirely unenthused about going. It lined up terribly with work obligations for both of us, flight times were horrific, and Costa Rica has never been a place that came up on our radars as a place we wanted to go. Also mosquitos and bugs generally love me, and I was not looking forward to dealing with that. So we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how we could make the trip work, and generally being unhappy about even going.

The first two nights were worse than expected: Our flight left at 6 AM, so we went to a hotel by the airport the night before (Tuesday night) to spend the night. But because of the way their airport shuttle worked, we had to catch it at 3:30 AM, which meant we got less than 4 hours of sleep. Then we flew most of Friday, got there, checked in to our room, and were miserable the rest of the day… an attempt at dinner nearly resulted in vomiting in the restaurant (I guess from exhaustion and such), and we probably collapsed into bed around 8 and just slept.
(4 AM airport = sadness.)

The first real day at the resort (Thursday, by this point) was spent not really doing anything, and it was actually perfect that way. The place is situated in the “cloud forest”, which means it’s in the middle of plants and greenery and general naturey awesomeness. We walked the nature trails they had, watched (and photographed) hummingbirds, milked their cows, explored their church and greenhouse, and sat with books on benches overlooking the beautiful views around. It kind of forced us to disconnect from technology and just enjoy where we were, and that’s something I should do more often. Also the forced break from work, with the lack of laptops and cell phone service, was exactly what we needed.





The second day we booked a tour to actually get to see *some* of the country before we left. They took us to a coffee plantation in Naranjo, Sarchi to see them build and maintain the iconic oxcarts, and a farmer’s market in San Ramon. Most of the almost 6 hours was spent driving, and it’s interesting to see how long it takes to get anywhere, even if stuff isn’t really all that far. (For example, from the main road to the resort is 9km, but it takes 30-40 minutes to drive that because of the quality of the road.) But it was a really good tour (particularly the coffee tour), and makes me wish I’d stayed for the longer tour this week. That evening, Keith, Ian, and Al-Tim got in and we met up for dinner.




Saturday was the wedding. We met up with Keith, Ian, and Al-Tim for breakfast and did all the resort stuff again: milked the cows, walked the trails, watched the hummingbirds, and played some pool in the game room.


The wedding itself was in the afternoon, and was beautiful. (Also led by our friend Jason from undergrad, who is now a Catholic priest.) It was the first mass I’ve been to (I guess this was specifically a wedding mass), and it was nice. The reception had tasty food and good company, and the evening generally had fireworks everywhere (some smaller stuff when Mars and Dan exited the chapel and during their first dance, and a full fireworks display at the end of the evening). I guess that’s a Costa Rican thing? The first dance fireworks were probably the most unexpected, but the full display at the end was really long and pretty.




So yeah. In the end, I think I’m really glad I made it out for the wedding, although I still think I would have skipped the trip had it been anything less important. The country is beautiful, but the travel involved around it is hellish. So I’m really wishing I could have made the tour work, because that travel for a week and a half would have been much more worthwhile.

Photos of general things and the wedding are on my photos site, as usual.

Other random awesome things from the trip:
The sun is almost directly overhead a little before noon, resulting in the smallest shadows we’ve ever experienced.

There are beetles that look like they’re made of solid gold. The front desk guys showed us one and we thought they were trying to sell us some jewelry or something at first.

There are bugs everywhere. During the wedding, a cicada flew into the floating candle at our table, snuffed it out, and got trapped in the hardened wax. It was actually rather beautiful (and complimented the table decorations well), but kind of sad. (Keith commented that he kicked a beetle at one point, which is not a comment you’d normally expect to hear until you realize how big they can get here.)

The road to the resort was, as mentioned, almost a dirt road. Also there are remarkably few traffic lights in the cities (although they do seem to like speed bumps, and the drivers take those very seriously). Makes me glad we had chartered vans everywhere. Never try to drive in Costa Rica, I guess?

This is the new year

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It’s 2016! life‘s photojournal and stats pages have both been updated.

Hard to believe that it was an entire year ago that we sat in the living room drinking champagne out of reindeer cups to celebrate the new year. Seems like only a few months ago.

It’s been rather a crazy year. We went to 4 weddings this year, including our own (which we also spent most of the beginning of the year planning) and bought a house, and had various work changes and turmoil. I visited HQ three times (I think a new record for me?), spent an extended period of time with my parents, and bought my first mattress. I was also away from Pittsburgh for nearly all of December, which was its own bit of fun.

I spent the first week of the month in San Francisco for work, followed by a Phoenix trip, which was good. I stayed 2.5 weeks in Phoenix to try and see some high school people before Christmas, and it worked out somewhat? Got to see Pat, Vicki, and David, at least. (Also got to see Jennie and Schmiddy, which was less planned, but still awesome.)








More photos are at photos.

This past week has also been really hectic. We had a car for the week, so we went to all the places we couldn’t normally get to to buy things we couldn’t normally carry. Unfortunately, a lot of stuff didn’t go as expected. Ikea was sold out of the chairs we wanted, and wasn’t going to get more until tomorrow (Saturday), and the car was due back yesterday. Costco also had a couch we wanted, but we’d have no way to get it back other than renting a U-Haul, so we’re looking into other options that include shipping. Also generally we didn’t get as much cleaning done in the house as we would have liked, but that’s the way it goes?

Yesterday evening Akiva hosted a New Year’s party at William’s house (while William was out of town, which was rather amusing). It was nice having people to celebrate with.

The house is nearing move-in condition. We’ve cleaned almost all of the first-floor rooms and will continue trying to find furniture to fill them. We built the Ikea table and Target storage cubes we bought and put them in the appropriate rooms, and it’s nice to start having furniture. I think at this point we just need a bed frame for the mattress, and to clean the kitchen out so it’s usable, and it’s technically ready for us. Woo.