It's like that.

When I'm not feeling particular well, I tend to imagine that this is the source of my problems:

I love the internet.

It's a bit quiet around here

I've been hemming and hawing all week about doing a proper blog post. If I had actually gotten out of bed at 10:30 PM last Sunday night, you'd be pleased, as I had a fantastic post all laid out in my head. But I didn't and now it's gone and all I have to give you now are these amusing pictures of last weekend. Semi-amusing....to me.

We have a Memorial Day BBQ planned for this weekend so as long as I can hold off this cold that I feel building in my chest, I'll have something better for you next week.

Mari and Gu hanging out watching Patrick's band play. Gu is number 1. Or he has to go number 1. Or he's checking for wind. It's hard to tell with Germans.

Evidence of why you don't ask drunk people to take a photo of you when using the crappy un-flashed camera on an iPhone.

I have a soft spot for Gu when he's in this state. I think we should give him a constant IV of Bass Ale.

Sweet Paradox

This morning I stopped at Ralph’s to get some food for breakfast. Once in the store I realized that I already had quite a few things at work already so I just picked a Fiji apple and went to check out. The cashier lady looked at my purchase and said, “Just a single apple today?” Which I replied, “Yeah, I don’t even know why I’m here.”

I’m not sure how buying a piece of fruit turned into an existential crisis, but there you go.

 But what does it all mean Mr. Apple?

Floating Happy Hour. Awesome.

This past Saturday Andy and I brushed the cobwebs off the bikes and rode down to Balboa Peninsula. It was a lovely, sunny, 80 degree day. We stopped at Cabo Cantina and got accosted by Brian and Dana who just happened to be already there. What was intended to be a quick pit stop dragged on for a bit. There might have been a few of these:

We managed to break away finally and headed over to the Balboa Saloon to get a few rounds of pool in. Before we step foot in the door, we got accosted by a lovely lady wearing nautical gear. She asked us if we'd be interested in a free cruise around the harbor for their floating happy hour. Cheap beer and $2 tacos. They had me at "free cruise around the harbor" but it really was topped by the singing Captain:

We never did make it back to the Saloon.

Why bother?

(Side note for Andy: Phesh! Ha ha ha!)

Verruca and the Yacht

So last week my tendinitis in my left foot was acting up so I went to a new podiatrist that was near to the house. He was a nice guy, albeit one that appeared to have a slight foot fetish, and very sympathetic to my foot woes. After the very painful cortisone shot he gave me, my left foot is feeling much better; however since he had me walk around barefoot to admire my extreme high arch (fetish!) I ended up getting a very large and very painful verruca on my right foot. A verruca is a planter’s wart for my American readers (most of you) but since ‘verruca’ sounds 100 times better than planter’s wart (mainly because it leaves out the wart part), I’m going with it. Besides, if you recognize the name, Verruca was a character in ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’. If I close my eyes, I can imagine there’s a lovely piece of dark Belgium hanging off my foot rather than an ugly black wart. I much rather have Andy say to me, “Please get that foot off me lest the chocolate melts on my pants” than the “get your nasty ass warty-wart foot off me!” like he has. I would like to point out that he seems to be rather excited for the point in time when the verruca turns green and falls off. Must be a cultural thing.

My verruca kinds of feels like this actually.

The day after discovering my new foot addition, Andy and I were invited by Patrick and Michele to come down to the Balboa Yacht Club for Opening Day. (How’s that for a transition in topics?) Patrick and Michele bought a boat earlier this year calling it ‘Soiscoisisouuucchlkjljkldsfjalkdsadksfja’. OK, that’s not exactly what they call it, but it’s an Irish word that I can’t pronounce even after they have told me a gazillion times. As a dyslexic, I struggle pronouncing the English language so attempting to say this Irish name or slightly remember how it’s spelled (I would like to mention here that if it wasn’t for spell check ‘dyslexic’ would have been ‘dislexsic’ because that’s how bad it is) is impossible. I’m sorry Patrick and Michele. Your boat is lovely. Forgive me if I just call it ‘Bob’ for now.

So yes, Opening Day at the yacht club… sounds posh, huh? It’s not really (we got in remember), but it is loads of fun. All the members of the yacht club tie their boats to the dock and there’s an open house on any one of them. You simply have to request permission to come aboard. There’s food and snacks and music and did I mention that that there was booze? There was a lot of booze. I would also like to mention that there’s a wobbly dock. One of the first questions I had to ask someone who had been to Opening Day before was if anyone had fallen in on previous Opening Days. “Oh yes, “ they said, “usually more than one person ends up falling in.” Brilliant. I made a conscious choice that that person would not be me, and then proceeded to have a shot of whiskey.

Without further ado, the pictorial highlights:

Here are all the boats tied up together on the dock. They are not tied up by the flags, that's just a bonus. I was told each flag means something. I'm sure that's true but it's too complicated so I will state that they all mean "pretty boat".

Andy, Mari, Gunter and I request to come aboard 'Bob'.

Did I mention that every boat\yacht was having an open house? Of course the only yacht that Andy and I decided to check out was the big massive one that had four bedrooms, a kitchen bigger than my own, and more technology than NASA. Here's Andy at one of the control centers.  I may have told him to "stuck it in" so I could get more of the jazzy features in. 

Mari and Andy show off back at 'Bob'. Notice the cocktails? They had waitresses coming around with drinks. You had to pay for these drinks of course but if you bought four, you got a free seal hat. Who wouldn't want a free seal hat?

'Bob' won best boat for it's class! You seriously couldn't wipe the smile off of Patrick's face even if you had a Mr. Clean magic eraser.

Not the best picture in the world, but I had to prove I was actually there. Nice seal hat Andy.

Did I mention that there was booze? I absolutely love this picture. Classic Andy puts on duck face while wearing seal hat while Gunter pretends he didn't get a rash from drinking tequila.

My classy friends at the end of the day. Marilyn tries to pull of a double bird with drink which is a very difficult maneuver not to be tried by amateurs and monkeys in seal hats.

For Patrick, who gets giddy when he has a new post to read.

Taken from the website of the very talented and funny Sarah Brown - who I have never met but if I did, I'm sure we would get along famously. Unless of course she is the type to get mad for someone stealing her shit and posting it on their own site, which in case, I'm screwed.

Bloody Badgers

A badger ends up at a post office and people are wondering what he's doing there? Like, duh. There would have been more bodies if he had remembered to bring his knife.



Related article here.

Chasing boredom with a splash of vino

So I’ve been a bit bored recently. This isn’t anybody’s fault; it’s just a general affliction that I get from time to time. Of course, as I have stated before, I’m also inheritably lazy. I very often find myself in a predicament where I’m completely bored but have no motivation to do anything about it. I like to state for the record that I also like complaining. These three things combined leave us with the following conversation that I have had pretty much my entire life:

ME: I’m bored. Like really really bored.
PERSON WHO IS TRYING TO BE HELPFUL: Why don’t you (insert some activity here, usually one that involves exercise or signing up for a pottery class)?
ME: Nah, I don’t feel like it.
PERSON WHO IS TRYING TO BE HELPFUL: Well, you could always do (insert another activity that still involves exercise of some sort).
ME: Good idea, but (insert some bodily injury that I’ve just made up and\or am exaggerating).
PERSON WHO IS TRYING TO BE HELPFUL: Well, you could always read.
ME: BOOOOORRRRRRRIIIIIIIINNNNNNNG.
PERSON WHO IS TRYING TO BE HELPFUL: Well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out. I’m going to go over here now to get the hell away from you.

I’m honestly not sure what I’m looking for when I get to that level of boredom. No, scratch that, I do. I’m looking for the person to say to me, “Let’s get dressed up in penguin costumes and drive to this hour away place and stand on a street corner there soliciting people for popsicles and then when we are bored with that we’ll go to a bar and sing Johnny Cash songs at the top of our lungs.” No one ever says that though, which is a shame because it seems like it would be a really fun time.

What that huge introduction is for is to tell you that because I’ve been so bored recently and Andy doesn’t like to see me bored (because I get annoying) (though to be fair, he has a boredom syndrome of his own) we decided on a whim to go wine tasting in Temecula this past weekend.

Driving through Cleveland National Forest where Andy will go very fast as he states he knows, "this road like the back of my hand." This knowledge will not stop you from peeing yourself around a particularly tight corner.

Andy had never been wine tasting before. I was a bit nervous about taking him as wine tasting is high on the list of Things I Like To Do When I’m Bored Like That and if he didn’t like it, I knew that it would be awhile until I did wine tasting again. I needn’t have worried as wine tasting is fucking awesome and of course he enjoyed himself.

The thing I love best about wine tasting is not actually tasting the wine. I really don’t know too much about wine, really, the best I can manage is “that’s dry”, “that’s spicy”, “that’s sweet”, and “that tastes like poo”. I can pretend though, and usually go through the motions of swirling my glass and smelling the wine and smacking my lips. I’m sure I look like a knob. No, what I love about wine tasting is the people. Wine tasting is one of those few events that really brings people together. You talk to the bartender, sure, but a lot of times you get in a conversation with the people doing the tasting with you. This past weekend Andy and I got in conversations with people ranging from base jumping in New Zealand to 1980’s skater clothing lines. It’s awesome.

Andy and I got to Temecula a bit late on Saturday afternoon. We hit 2 of the mainstream wineries before veering down a side road where we hit 3 more. One of the wineries, which turned out to be our favorite, was Vindemia. They are a new winery so they don’t actually have a building set up for the tasting; it was just a big tent. We had a short conversation with the owner of the winery but ended up talking for almost an hour with this couple from San Diego. The husband was a 6’5” tall African American man, and he and his wife have been pretty much all around the world. The husband was saying that due to his size and color that in most foreign countries they go to, the people will accost him asking for pictures thinking that he’s famous. It might have been the wine talking, but when we were leaving, I accosted them both asking for pictures. What? It was funny.


Andy contemplating the oaky finish at Vindemia.


What?! It was funny!

On Sunday we ended up going to 3 more wineries before heading home. Here are some pictorial highlights from the trip.

At the first winery, Weins, where Andy shows off...well, I guess that's it. He just shows off.


Andy isn't feeling faint from the wine, he's feeling faint from the smell of horse manure.


Well HELLO. I was absolutely amazed at this though when I showed the picture to our more horse educated friends later on they said this size is pretty normal. I am personally giving a bit more respect to those ladies who do donkey shows in Tijuana.


Later on in the evening before we both got a debilitating case of heartburn.


Long horn steers! I suppose this isn't so exciting, but I thought it was by the way I squealed when we drove past them.


Andy showing off a sampling of grapes before he imbibes their crushed up version in a glass.

I have no idea what he is doing here but I think it has something to do with that horse.

Yet I still pay $42 a month for the Y

Phrases from Chris Freytag I cringe at when doing the Chris Freytag Workout Video:

"It's that little flap of skin that waves when you do."

At minute 12 of weight training: "You should start to feel a bit of burn..."

"Pretend you are holding a grapefruit under your chin."

"Pretend you are holding a pencil between your shoulders."

"Pretend that you dusting a shelf."

"Pretend you are making contact with something heavy."

"Pretend you aren't a big fat butthead that spent $15 on my video so that you didn't have drive all the way to the gym to do a real workout."

Phrases I have said to Chris Freytag while doing the Chris Freytag Workout video that I wish she could hear:

"Shut up, shut up, shut up!"

"Those spandex pants give you camel toe."

Yeah, I'm talking to you Chris Freytag.