Amtrak
I bought train tickets through Amtrak for my [possible] train trip to Buffalo in August for Lori Beth’s wedding. If Josh is able to go with his work situation then we’ll take the train otherwise I will fly. I hadn’t realized Amtrak tickets are 100% refundable if canceled up to 7 days in advance (since I’m reserving a sleeper room). I was not so enthused about taking a train at first when thinking about how much faster a plane is to get to Buffalo. But then, I started reading about it more and more and now I really want to take a train! I’d get to see a lot of America I’d probably never see in my lifetime. They even have tour guides hop on the train in the observation car (all glass!) at different stops and tell you about the history of the area, etc.
The train stops in Albuquerque, New Mexico to stop and refuel, etc. for 1 hour where you can get off the train and check out the Native American shops etc. nearby the train station. The train stops at other places too but sometimes it’s 5-10 mins other times int’s 20 mins etc. The layover is in Chicago where we’ll have a 7 hour layover or something where we’ll be downtown Chicago and we can check stuff out for a long while before our changeover to the next train. So, I’m really looking forward to the whole train thing now. I’m not forgetting I’ll need dramamine probably most of the time, but it’s an experience I’d like to have in my life! But Josh tells me not to get my hopes up now… with him losing his job and all, everything is up in the air.
A Busy November!
I just got back from San Francisco. Was stuck in that airport for almost 6 hours because our flight was delayed. Shortest flight I’ve ever taken only 50 minutes and longest delay I’ve ever had. The only people that probably had it worse are the people in the plane that was circling over the SFO airport for over an hour.
Beside the craziness of the flight. Adobe MAX, the purpose of my trip was fantastic.. I’d like to highlight some parts but not sure where to even start. My favorite in the sneak peaks was probably the video searching software. You can select a face in a video and hit search to find the same person in other parts of the video. Your search results are clips of the video starting at the point in the playhead where that same person is. Of course like any search the results aren’t all what you want, you’ll get faces similar to the face you chose.. which could also be good. Another cool feature is it takes the speech and converts it to text, so you can search for a word that was said in the video.. by a person in the video or a narrator anything and it will find other spots in the video where that word was said. I’ve never seen anything like this and never thought about it.. so it was probably the most impressive to me.
My second favorite was an application for testing webpages. It will show how your webpage will be displayed in all browsers, Safari, Firefox for mac, Firefox 2 or 3 for PC, IE 6, 7 or 8. I saw this as a huge time saver because I develop on a mac a lot at home and I have to run Parallels sometimes just to test for PC browsers. There’s even onion skinning to view different versions on top of each other to see the differences.
So yea after 3 days of at least 10 hours of Adobe lecture I was burnt out.. but cool stuff. I gotta go to San Francisco again. I didn’t have time to see everything in daylight, but Paul and Kim were gracious enough to be my tour guides for a few days 
It’s such a beautiful city! I didn’t expect it to be so East coast, old world architecture. Maybe because I’m used to LA and Vegas on the West coast. Josh and I will definitely be back within a year!
Ojai
On Sunday Josh and I went for a drive up to Ojai with Keith and Lauren. Keith bought a new Harley Davidson motorcycle and rode that up there on that with Lauren on the back. We had a nice lunch up there and then headed back home… only about 45 minutes away from us. It’s a cute little area.
Chrissys wedding was fuN
A capital N is appropriate! Had a lot of fun at Chrissy’s wedding and my visit to Buffalo in general as always. It rained just about everyday and was overcast when it wasn’t raining. Thursday was the only exception when it was partly cloudy. It didn’t matter though! I was only visiting for a few days and there were lots of friends in town that I haven’t seen since 2003!! (Chrissy, Joe, Brandon, Lesia, Nick) It was so good to see them all. We’ve kept in touch relatively well to know what’s up in a general sense, but it never compares to chatting and interacting in person. I love my friends from Buffalo, I wish I got to see them more. It’ll be good to visit Philly in November where I can see Tracey, Adam, Maggie, Christine and Jay in one shot. That’s a 5x dose of Buffalo outside of Buffalo
Here are some wedding photos and then a pic from Pasquale’s (for Buffalo style pizza!) for dinner our last night in town.
Chrissy’s getting married…
to Jim on Friday! I’m going to Buffalo on Wednesday afternoon. Tracey’s gonna be there and Chrissy and Joe! I’m excited to see them all. I haven’t seen Chrissy since November 2003 and I haven’t seen Joe since May 2003! It’ll be good times even though Josh isn’t goin. I’ve been instructed to bring back more sponge candy because Josh is still rationing the last bunch he has.
I’ll try to take lots of photos and not get too distracted with all the reunions!
Buffalo visit!
I went home last weekend for Josh’s sister, Rachel’s wedding. It was a short but fun trip! Rachel’s wedding was beautiful. Josh doesn’t fly and he was super busy with work and we have 2 sick dogs at home so the 6 day round trip train ride was out of the question. Josh did the next best thing to being there, he sent a cardboard cut out of himself! See below… you’ll notice fingerprints on him in the photo of him with Rachel… that was the end of the night. He got a lot of action! He was all over the dance floor and the girls were all over him, even his cousin Jeff danced with him.
It was a lot of fun! The rest of the trip I visited with family and friends. It was so nice to see Nicole and Lisa again. We have so much fun doing absolutely nothing but hanging out at the house. We had plans to go to this new fondue place but it had an almost 2 hour wait! So we grabbed take out cheesecake from the cheesecake factory and did dessert night at their new house (which is also way cool with vintage-y urban outfitters style decor!). They have 2 black cats… the male- Batman had a thing for me. Apparantly he doesn’t really like people usually but he posing for my camera.
I posted the rest of the pics in the gallery… see link on the right
Diversity in the workplace!
Because so many of my coworkers are not from the area or state… or country… Simon a cube neighbor of mine and I decided to create a “Where are you from?” map. People can interpret it any way they like… where they live now, where they came from, where they were born… however they like and put pins with their names on the map. It’s a tactile version of Google’s “My Maps” feature.
Our map filled up fast… after one day, we all think India will disappear from the map soon and just be names!
Represent’in Buffalo! Already had 3 people ask if I was Canadian :[
San Francisco plans!
Josh and I are planning a short trip to San Francisco for Memorial Day weekend. We were gonna go Spy Hunter style and take the toy hauler with my Mini Cooper in the back but my Mini was 3 inches too long!! We’re still taking the toy hauler and the dogs and we booked reservations at the San Francisco RV Resort. It looks pretty cool for an RV resort for 3 main reasons… they allow dogs, have free wifi and a store with RV parts… which could come in handy since we tend to always have something go wrong with the trailer 
Oh and it’s right on the ocean which could be nice or could be miserable because ocean usually = fog, clouds, wind & cold! when it’s on the West coast anyway… I like the Great Lakes sort of “ocean” I always thought the ocean would be just like Lake Erie or Lake Ontario…
We don’t have much planned yet.. want to see the Golden Gate Bridge and definitely stopping in Cupertino on the way up to see Apple Campus and the Campus store. It’d be fun to ride a cable car too. I hope Mandy and Damien will be up for the trip… Damien still hasn’t been walking well and has a compromised immune system (ear infection eye infection, you name it!). He has more tests later this week and next week for his intestines… his liver tested fine last week… after that is kidneys. His protein, glucose and cholesterol levels are low which is contributing to a weak immune system. We just want them with us in the trailer for the most part, we’re not planning on dragging them all over and they love the camper and are used to it… so we figure we’ll keep them comfortable for the trip
Holiday glum
Thanksgiving is here! Holidays are kinda sad for Josh and I because we miss family and it’s rather lonely having dinner for 2 on these big holidays. I try to do some kinda dinner thing but it never works out and it’s just not the same (I’d rather work on these holidays to keep my mind off them!).. then I get homesick and Josh and I plan on moving back East. Each year we get more and more itchy about moving. This year is no exception. If only we could decide on a city/state! Any suggestions?
I’m very opposed to the Carolinas and a lot of the South… because of what little I’ve seen/heard in these places.. but still open to convincing… maybe?
In May we’re taking a train back to Buffalo and may look into places to move to. I’d like to live outside of NYC.. but Josh wants to live someplace warm and sunny.
What we love to do in SoCal - and hope to find where we move to…
- Wakeboard/Jetski (basically we need a lake nearby)
- Josh likes his sand/dirty toys - atv, dunebuggy, etc.
- I love a big city nearby for the artsy community, music, etc.
- Liberal cities are a plus because of their open-mindedness
now playing: TV On The Radio - Staring at the Sun
Mexican Riviera!
So I finally had time to write a bit about Mexico. The cruise was fun. It was nice to relax with Josh and have no phone calls and no work interrupting our relaxing! Josh was sick a day or so before we left, but we had 2 sea days where he could rest and get better. Aside from the news about the fires we had fun.
First port was Puerto Vallarta where we took a scenic coastal drive and saw places like Elizabeth Taylor’s former house and Richard Burton’s former house. The coastal areas were beautiful. Small cobble stone streets added to that old Mexico charm. It was really pretty. We also stopped at Our Lady of Guadalupe church and it was beautiful lots of gold leaf and very white inside.
In the afternoon we did the swimming with the dolphins adventures and it was sooo much fun! Definitely the highlight of our trip. We were in a huge salt water pool with the dolphins. They did all sorts of trick… for example the dolphins would give us fish and we’d toss them back to them and feed them. They’d kiss us and we’d hug them. All the while they swam in and out of us upside down at the surface of the water and we’d pet their bellies. They were super cute. They’re much larger than I thought too… like 7 - 8′ long or so. The trainer said the one was 600 lbs! We even got to train baby dolphins. They were 9 and 10 mos old (the adults were 35 or so). The babies were still like 4′ long. The best part was riding the dolphin. We held onto their fins and and they swam upside down across the pool super fast. It was amazing! We were late after the dolphin stuff getting back to the ship, but it didn’t leave without us because it was Princess booked shore excursion. So it was like a bonus, instead of taking the bus back to the port we got to take a small inflatable boat with engine over the to ship. It was a lot of fun
Mazatlan was nice but maybe just the port area wasn’t so nice.. we went into the “Golden Zone” for shopping and stuff and it was a lot of construction. The sales people were very pushy saying “almost free!” CONSTANTLY. It turned us off and we ended up going back to the boat. But the taxi we took back was cool. The driver didn’t speak much English so I brushed up my Spanish and spoke to him in Spanish. We stopped at each monument and he told us a lot about the area. I translated a bit for Josh.
The next stop was Cabo San Lucas. Cabo as by far the best stop! And we were only there for 5 hours 
We only had time for shore excursion, not much to see the area. We went snorkeling in Chileno Bay. A catamaran took us out there… about an hour ride. The water was SUPER salty. You couldn’t sink if you wanted to. We saw lots of colorful fish and coral. After about 30 minutes of snorkeling or so we got back in the boat and has some snacks and drinks and then back to shore to get back on a tender to go back to the cruise ship. There’s no port at Cabo, so the cruise ship anchors and you take tendor boats out to shore. Both Josh and I want to go back to Cabo again and spend more time there. It was so beautiful.
I get motion sick a lot so I took ginger pills and got sick anyway that night so I took dramamine day and night and so did Josh and that was the only way we didn’t get motion sick. It’s almost like a more pronounced movement on the ship would have been better. The subtle swaying was nauseating especially when we weren’t on the upper decks.
I posted lots of photos in the photo album…
now playing: Stars - Bitches in Tokyo
