This wasn’t your typical fruit smoothie though. I decided to experiment a little with it. By the time I was done, it included several scoops of vanilla ice cream, one scoop of vanilla-flavored whey protein powder, some half & half, some milk, frozen strawberries, blueberries and blackberries, a teaspoon of blackstrap molasses and two teaspoons of apple cider vinegar.

Both the molasses and vinegar are good for you. The molasses has a lot of minerals that your body doesn’t normally get, and the vinegar is great for digestion problems. It sounds like it would be disgusting, but it turned out to be quite tasty. I put a bit of whipped cream on top and it was as good as any smoothie at a coffee shop.

I’m not sure what I’ll add in my next smoothie, but it’ll be fun to experiment again. Anyone have any suggestions?

While I was playing around with the demo model, I started adding up the cost of owning one. Over the course of the contract, I’d be spending over $2000 for a stupid phone. I already have a basic cellphone that works just fine and is no longer under any contract. So I decided to head down to Bicycle Sport Shop and look at mountain bikes instead.

I’ve been wanting to get a mountain bike for a while, but never got around to looking at them. The guys at Bicycle Sport Shop were very helpful, very knowledgeable and not pushy which was nice. I spent about 15-20 minutes just learning where the mountain bike scene was now since I’ve been out of it for almost a decade. Bikes have become pretty freakin’ nice since then, and some of them are seriously expensive. Like $6000+ expensive, which is ridiculous.

After checking out several bikes I settled on a Gary Fisher Cobia. It has 29” wheels instead of the standard 26”. It makes for a smoother ride over rough terrain. The bike is surprisingly light given the wheel size and handles really well.

I ended up buying the bike and most of the other stuff you need like a helmet, pump, patch kit, etc. I also had to buy a bike mount for my car, which looks quite funny. My car is small so the bike mount and bike look enormous on the back. The upfront cost was considerably higher than an iPhone, but was actually quite a bit cheaper versus the iPhone’s cost counting the two year contract.

I took it for its first ride later in the evening once the weather cooled down a bit. All I can say is I really need to get back in shape! My thighs were already burning a quarter-mile down the trail. I only rode for a couple miles, but it took me almost 10 minutes to catch my breath afterward. Back in the day, I could ride for many, many miles and feel great. I once rode 130 miles on a mountain bike. That was insane now that I think about it, but the point is I was in great shape then. I would love to get back to even half that shape again.

Anyway, I’m excited about the bike and think it’s a much better purchase than an iPhone.

I had already made reservations a few weeks in advance and was chomping at the bit to get down there. It seemed like the day to leave for South Padre would never arrive, but it finally did. The night before we were to leave, I only got one hour of sleep which sucked. My cousin and her husband picked me up at 6 am Thursday morning (which for those who know me was probably the earliest I’ve been awake in a very, very long time). It took several hours to get down there since we stopped a few times to get gas or change my cousin’s newborn daughter’s diapers.

When we finally made it to the island, I rolled my window down so I could smell the ocean again. I love the smell of the ocean. I love the way it sounds, the ocean breeze, the seagulls flying around, the palm trees. There’s something about the ocean that is both calming and exciting for me. I’ll probably end up living on the coast one of these days. Anyway, back to the story…

We drove to our hotel and checked in. I thought I would splurge a little and got a “king suite” which supposedly had a jacuzzi in the room. I figured it was a jacuzzi bathtub, but when I asked the lady at the front desk if it was a real jacuzzi, she assured me it was the real deal. She was lying. It was a freaking jacuzzi tub! And to top it off, my A/C unit sounded like a drill-bit on metal. I had been in several other rooms, and all their A/Cs were nice and quiet. The front desk sent a repairman to my room, and he had the gall to tell me that all the A/Cs sounded like mine! When I practically laughed at him, he admitted they were having some problems with many of them and said he would replace mine with a brand new one within the hour.

Everyone was still settling into their rooms, but I was antsy to get into the water as soon as I could. Since I’ve seen beaches all over the world and lived in Hawaii for a few years, my cousins kept telling me not to expect much with South Padre, so I was expecting the worst. Thankfully it turned out to be quite nice. It’s easily the biggest beach I’ve been to at around 28 miles long. It stretched as far as the eye could see in both directions. The surf was small, but looked like you could still body surf.

I stripped down to my swimsuit and started running out into the water. Three steps in, my right leg fell into a knee-deep hole that had a jagged rock or something on the rim. I gouged the crap out of my shin, but was so excited to be at the beach I didn’t think to look to see what kind of damage was done. A few minutes later I noticed my shin was burning like a mother. When I finally checked it out, I realized I was bleeding and had a four inch wide scrape on my shin. 28 miles of coastline and I find the hole with a sharp rock in it within my first few steps!

Friday we went to another part of the beach further south and rented some surf boards. I was able to get up on the board a couple times, but slipped off after a few seconds. We stayed out there for several hours swimming, surfing and lounging around. When we made it back to the hotel, one of my cousins pointed out the back of my hands which were nearly lobster red. In my haste to get out in the water, I had neglected to put sunscreen on the back of my hands and it showed. By that evening, they were quite painful and were swelling a bit.

Several of us stayed up until midnight hanging out on the sun patio. I had been out in the sun that day longer than I had in many years, so by midnight I was drained and ready to go to bed. All that day, my eyes had been fine, just a little dry-feeling. When I laid down to sleep, my eyes itched, burned and watered for a good hour and a half before they finally calmed down and I could go to sleep. The salt water and sun did a number on them, so I made it a point to buy some sunglasses the next day.

Saturday I practically bathed in sunscreen, but only went to the water’s edge a couple times. If the sun even touched my hands for a second, they burned like hell. I stayed in the shade all day, but still enjoyed myself. That night a bunch of us sat outside our rooms, snacked, drank beer and talked past midnight. We left for Austin early Sunday, stopping several times along the way to eat and stretch.

We’re already thinking about next year’s accommodations, and will be trying to rent a home or a couple condos. And hopefully by that time I’ll have a girlfriend to share the experience with. It was great to be with friends and family, but it would’ve been that much better with a girlfriend or wife.

It was a great trip, but nowhere near long enough for me to unwind and fully relax from work. I found myself dreading Monday and the work that would be coming with it. I’ve been burned out on work for a long, long time now, but that’s for a different post.

Princess (dog)
Duchess (dog)
Iggy (Iguana)
Kelsey (dog)
Tuff (cat)
Junior (cat)
Penny (cat)

And there are a couple other dogs and cats the girls had that I’m forgetting since I was away for several years.

We got her in April 1986, and she quickly became friends with our Scottish Terrier, Princess. They would chase each other all over the house. Oreo would hide under tables and wait for Princess to come trotting by. She’d then pounce on her back and run away with Princess barking right behind her. Princess would hockey check Oreo into walls and doorways while they were chasing each other. It was so funny to watch them play! Princess died in 1993. Oreo never was friendly with any other pets we got after that. She would tolerate them, but wouldn’t play with them. I’m not sure why. I guess she thought she was the queen of the house after Princess died.

When we moved from Austin to Arkansas in 1996, Oreo was put outside more often than she had been in Austin. She was still mostly an indoor cat. When Missy moved away to Kentucky though, Oreo became a full-time outdoor cat and had to compete with our other cats. Despite her being old and having no front claws, she held her ground against the others. They quickly learned she was one bad mama cat and left her alone mostly.

During the last few years, she lost a lot of weight, but would still eat normally and want attention like all the other cats. She wouldn’t (or couldn’t) jump up on the walls anymore, so she hung around in her box and every now and then would wander around the backyard a bit.

She had a stroke about a month ago, which would normally be a quick death sentence for a cat, but she looked like she would pull through it. Apparently she had lost a lot of muscle in her back legs though. So much muscle that she couldn’t walk normally anymore. One leg was nearly useless and the other was barely useful. So Missy took her to the vet and had her put down this morning, then brought her back home and buried her.

It’s always sad to see a family pet die, but Oreo had a long, long life.

I’ve been keeping busy with work. I’ve got a lot of projects I’m working on, almost all of which are ExpressionEngine related. Projects range from simple design conversions to custom modules, extensions and plugins and everything in between. I find I don’t even want to deal with upgrading my own site when work is done for the day. I guess that’s kind of sad, but that’s where I’m at.

Not a whole lot has been happening besides work. I’ve started meeting up with a group of people on Wednesday evenings and have made some new friends, which is always good. I’m not a super outgoing kind of person, but I do need some kind of social interaction or I think I’d go mad.

I also just got back from my unexpectedly long Thanksgiving break yesterday. My car needed some work done on it, and my brother-in-law said he could do all the work it needed for about half the price of any local mechanics. So I drove it up last Tuesday and gave it to him the following Wednesday morning. It was needing the 90k mile checkup and all that involved, a headlight had a short and was constantly burning out bulbs, my ABS light was staying lit, it needed an oil change and I was finally going to deal with the rough idle it’s been having for a couple years now.

My brother-in-law has his own shop and is a certified master mechanic so I wasn’t worried he’d do a shoddy job. He didn’t really get to it until Friday though, and it started throwing him curve balls left and right. He was able to fix the headlight, change the oil and do everything that was needed for the 90k mile checkup (which is a lot), but the idle problem turned into a nightmare. He tried several different things to fix it, and managed to minimize it but not completely fix it. It looks like I’ll be replacing my idle air control valve, which Hondas apparently have problems with.

The ABS problem turned out to be a simple relay. Unfortunately no one carried it in the area, so I decided I’d skip it and fix it in Austin.

On top of that, once he finished putting the engine back together, the harmonic balancer started acting up. It was moving around way too much. If it went out on the trip back, I would be stuck in the middle of BFE with two small dogs to deal with. No one in the area carried the part, so he had it overnighted from Austin (how ironic is that?). So my Thanksgiving holiday was extended by a couple of days which would’ve been kind of nice except I had no car and work was piling up back home.

Once the part came in, he popped it in and everything seemed ready to go. I hopped in the car and drove about half a mile down the road when my check engine light popped on and the engine starting revving wildly. I threw it into neutral and pulled off on a tiny dirt road. Of course, no one was answering their phones for about 10 minutes. I finally got a hold of my dad who got in touch with my brother-in-law. He pulled up a few minutes later and eventually figured out that a wire to my idle air control valve wasn’t completely plugged in. Once that was fixed it ran great.

“Why didn’t you just walk back the half mile, you pansy?” some of you might be asking. I would have except I knew my brother-in-law had just left for town which was several miles down the road.

Later that day, when I went to check out the work he had done on it, I tried to open my door and the freaking door handle broke! This car hasn’t given me any real problems all this time, but now that it’s approaching 100k miles things are starting to happen. The door still worked from both the outside and inside, so I decided I’d drive back to Austin and get it fixed there.

I’m glad to be back home and have started chipping away at the pile of work waiting for me.

I didn’t really do anything special. I ate lunch with my aunt, uncle and a couple cousins. I had planned on going to the lake with a few people, but everyone backed out. So lame. So I ended up watching some TV, taking the dogs for a walk and fixing some things around the house.

When I was a kid, birthdays were like second Christmases (Christmasis? Christmasi?). Presents were to be had, and friends were over to play all day until everyone’s parents came to pick them up. Now birthdays are a minor blip on the calendar. I’m not sure when birthdays became non-events for me, but the last several birthdays have been the same.

Oh well. Here’s hoping that this year is a special one, and that I end up finally meeting someone I can spend the rest of my life with.

Songs are the same price as iTunes, but if a song is in the top 100 most bought, it sells for just $.89. Albums are also the same price as iTunes.

A major plus for Amazon is their music is DRM free and has better encoding than iTunes music. The Flash-based samples you listen to on the site don’t do the actual song any credit, but are good enough for you to figure out if you want it or not.

One thing I don’t like is that in order to download a song, you need to run the Amazon MP3 Downloader app. I don’t know why you can’t just download the MP3 directly, but I’m sure they have their reasons.

Overall, I think the Amazon MP3 store is a good thing. More competition will keep the price down and our options up. I’ll definitely be checking it regularly for new music.

By the way, I discovered Amy Winehouse while browsing through the store. I bought “Rehab” and “Love is a Losing Game”. She has an amazing voice and tons of talent, but like many talented singers before her, seems hellbent on destroying herself. It’s sad. Hopefully she gets her life in order again and continues to release more great music.

They weren’t kidding when they say it’s thin. It almost looks fake it’s so thin. It’s super quiet. They keys are flat, unlike most other keyboards, so it takes a little bit of getting used to. I was a little worried I wouldn’t adjust to it, but I was typing great with it within a couple minutes. I can actually type a bit faster with it now than I could with my old keyboard.

The one problem I’ve had with it is related to Boot Camp. For some reason, the alt key won’t work during the Boot Camp startup, so it’ll automatically boot up into Windoze. I’m not the only one with this problem. I found a couple other threads in Apple’s support forums dealing with the issue. Hopefully it’ll get fixed soon.

Other than that, the keyboard is amazing. I’m very happy with the purchase.

And finally, the iPod Touch, or as I like to call it, the iPod Rushed-To-Production-Major-Letdown. It’s basically a gutted iPhone. It’s ugly. It’s overpriced. Its storage capacity is a joke. It can’t be used with Skype or any other VoIP. It’s a complete and utter letdown for me. There is no way I’m going to be buying one.

Apple also announced that you can make custom ringtones out of music you buy. Oh you thought that would be free? Think again! You’ll have to pay the same price you paid for the song in order to make a 12-20 second ringtone out of it. What a bunch of crap!

The only good announcement made today was the rather large $200 price drop on the 8gb iPhone. It’s more tempting now to get one, but I still hate AT&T too much to make the plunge. Plus, I’d have to pay the $150 early termination fee to Verizon. Ouch.

One more thing… the Starbucks “feature” they’ve got going seems like a major gimmick to me. How often would that really be used?

Band - Song

• Cubismo Grafico - World Is Yours
• Greg Weeks - Made
• The Smiths - How Soon Is Now?
• The Cure - Firday I’m In Love
• Björk - Isobel
• Eva Cassidy - Fields of Gold
• John Prine - Clay Pigeons