Dallas, Round 2...

Wow, it's been a while since the last update.. Roothie and Jer have already covered the trip in great detail. Besides spending time hanging out, catching up with Roothie, and eating lots of food, the highlight of the weekend was the big Texas State Fair! There was an additional array of good eating there:

Corn doggies!


Big turkey legs...


The big star of the show is Big Tex!! He was actually a little anti-climactic


The ferris wheel looked pretty cool, but we didn't have time to go on it


The best part is that I got so excited about being in Dallas that I ended up being there an extra day! Actually, Ruth and I got to the airport like 25 minutes before departure time and apparently they don't let you check-in starting 35 minutes before takeoff. Pretty stupid if you ask me. At any rate, that meant I got spend an extra 10 hours with Roothie!

In other random news, I'm also done with online poker. After doing well for a month or so, I hit a snag where I kept getting beat over the course of a week. I used the frequent player points earlier this week to enter a satellite in the hopes of getting a free entry into a tourney, but then ended up losing. It's probably a good thing since I run out of patience/discipline, just wanting the make a call that's clearly bad in the hopes of winning. Also, if I had won, then I wouldn't be able to play golf on Sunday since it's the same time as the tourney. Now I can look forward to our round at Deep Cliff! Except for the fact that I need to get rid of my inside out swing somehow before then...

Aquarium reborn!

I've spent the last month or so reviving the leftover of my aquarium. The reason I had to restart is that I couldn't get rid of the algae in the original incarnation. It was the combination of being careless in putting in a piece of rock from someone else that had algae on it and not being able to stop its spread. The first steps included:

1) Emptying out the old tank to its bare bones


2) Tossing the existing coral into a holding tank


3) Ordering new live rock to toss into the new tank


At the same time, I was scoping out what the new tank might look like. Was going to start with a real small nano of 10 gallons, but after some reading found this neat Oceanic 30 gallon cube. With the aid of some mixups at Petco, I got a sweet deal on the aquarium and stand:

1) So pretty when it's empty


2) And the initial shot with just the sand and rock!


Now that I've had a few weeks to transfer pieces of my old coral over, the tank looks much more lively. Unfortunately, only the firefish made it during the migration process and I recently picked up a purple firefish to go with it. The rock's also been moved around to create more depth... it was kind of hard to get high quality pics, so these smaller ones will have to suffice for now while I figure out how to improve the shots and then post them into the gallery:

1) Full tank shot in all its glory:


2) Close up of the two fish and a few coral in the background:


3) Close up of the upper half of the tank that's housing some of the coral:


More pics and developments to come in the future, no doubt!

Touched by an Angel

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to go on a team offsite sailing in the Bay and hanging out at Angel Island. It was such a relaxing pause from the daily grind of things to do at work and the first time I've been on a sailboat or visited Angel Island.

The boat itself was pretty neat and I never realized all the complexity involved in sailing, raising and moving the sails around and lining up properly with the wind before doing any of those things. It was certainly a good thing that we could just sit around and watch the crew work it. Here's a pic of the boat:



It was nice to have a combined offsite with a couple of teams so we could grab a bigger boat and meet more people. Here are some of the folks that I work with:



It was fairly cold, windy, and foggy in the morning, so it wasn't lining up to be a nice day. I only brought a windbreaker so was fairly freezing. On the way out, we passed by a couple huge ships that might've been lingering around since Fleet Week was in SF the previous weekend:



Nevertheless, we eventually got there and Angel Island was pretty nice, although somewhat deserted at this time of the year on a weekday:



It was going to take a while to fire up the barbeque, so a group of us decided to go on a short hike to stay warm and to work up an appetite for lunch. It was a fairly tame trail, but a pretty nice view of Marin when we got to a vista point. The sun had also started to break through, so it was getting nice:



After a scrumptuous lunch of bbq chicken and hot links, we lounged around the area, tossing a frisbee and generally just relaxing. When it was time to head back, it was nearly as cold as on the way in and we took a slight detour to swing by a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was still a little foggy out there and it was crazy to see these little sailboats out there against the strong winds:



On the way back in, we got a reasonably nice view of the city skyline which was hidden on the way out:



The pier at which we docked was pretty close to the Bay Bridge, so we got to go under it both ways:



All in all, a fun trip. It's nice to have the opportunity to do something like that and it's pretty amazing how nice the Bay Area can be. This of course also means that there's more work to do this week in a smaller amount of time so it's time to get cracking!

Dallas, Round 1!

Wow, I'm becoming a Texas regular... after two trips to Houston, this past weekend was the first foray into the Big D. The town was... in many ways similar to Houston: sprawling, hot, and flat. But... Roothie was also there for me to visit and we celebrated our 4th dating anniversary. Pretty crazy, huh?

Roothie already blogged about the trip, so I'll just steal some of the pictures and add my own commentary.

I actually planned ahead for once and ordered some flowers ahead of time. Who knew that slickdeals could actually provide some more tips besides just electronics :)



Saturday was pretty action-packed as we started off with the Zoom-Zoom live event. Rooth and I went with her housemates and both of us got schooled in the MX-5 challenge, driving it way off of the target time of 31.5 seconds. I think we were both over 40... I guess we're just safe drivers that way. We also got to mill around in the RX-8, which has now become my new fleeting car of choice if I were to actually upgrade from my sweet Corolla:



The highlight of the event was supposed to be the redesigned MX-5 (aka Miata). It was alright, not as fun to drive as it seems in the commercials, but it was fun nonetheless:



For dinner, we took up Jer's recommendation to check out this fancy restaurant called Nana's. I think we went a little early because it started to get pretty bustling by the time we left. But it was nice to be there before it got too crowded and the food was definitely nice:



Sunday was pretty chill... got to go to the church that Rooth's been attending a few times and then just watched a lot of football. I pretty much anticipate some portion of the weekend of downtime as Ruth catches up on studying, so football season makes it easy to find something to do... just veg in front of Fox and CBS and watch football action. I finally got to watch Peyton Manning do something and help carry my team to victory. It was a good thing he finally brought it because if he had performed a little worse, then Neil Rackers would have been my top scorer of the year!

We grabbed dinner at a nice steakhouse before the weekend quickly came to an end :( I think Roothie was pretty sad too, because she was blogging about the weekend and wasn't too happy when I snapped a pic:



Hahahahha. I crack up every time I see that pic.

It was an awesome weekend, but it went by so quickly! I miss you already, Roothie!