Far South of I-10

We're homeless again, our apartment that we've bought is still undergoing a makeover, and the owner of the apartment that we were renting finally noticed we were renting a nice apartment with no rental agreement, and at half the price they should be asking just because they are nice. Niceness apparently ended this week, they dumped a 20 page rental agreement with price hike and lease on on us, and we decided to take a hike and stay with friends for a week or two until the floor is done in the new place. One result of that is that I can't watch CNN or fox or bbc, because they only seem to be talking about Saddam, and a video of saddam's tongue sticking out as he's hanged isn't something our host's little boys need to see at their age. They can read about him in 10 years in their history books, as a great leader who sponsored national kite flying contests, and the imperialist americans removed him from power because he wouldn't sign our haliburton contra...

Kottke.org links to a meme about listing the cities you've visited this year. Since I did quite a bit of traveling this year I thought I'd give it a try: New Orleans, LA* Baton Rouge, LA Picayune, MS* Lafayette, LA* Anchorage, Alaska* Liberal, KS Oklahoma City, OK Tulsa, OK Cameron, LA Los angeles,CA Long Beach, CA* Bakersfield,CA Denver,Co* Airdrie, Canada Banff, Canada Calgary, Canada* Villahermosa, MX Coatzacoalcos, MX Agua Dulce, MX Mexico City, MX Edmonton,Ca Austin, TX Miami, Fla Paris Milan Venice Florence Rome Seattle Salt Lake City Lima, Peru* Quito, Ecuador* Bogota,Colombia* Paipa, Colombia Chia, Colombia* That's 11 States and 6 foreign countries. I'm glad to have seen most of those places, but Liberal, Kansas I could have done without. I probably spent the most time in Calgary, Quito & Anchorage apart from Bogota and Houston where we lived this year. My favorite place was Paris, maybe florence too, but those were on vacation. I can't picture hav...

One of my cowworkers had vacation scheduled over christmas so I had to come over to quito to relieve him, which meant canceling our weekend trip to visit the inlaws. (oh the pain). Quito isn't a bad tourist city, it's got the 'mitad del mundo' museum where we saw the effects of the coriolis force with water swirling counterclockwise on one side of the equator, and clockwise on the southern side. Then I balanced an egg on the end of a nail, and shot a blowgun at a cactus. All pretty entertaining stuff for a 12 year olds. These events took place on the actual equator, instead of the pretend where the mitad del mundo monument sits. For Christmas, south americans celebrate on christmas eve, with a late dinner, then opening presents at midnight. Since we couldn't eat until 10pm we needed a way to spend a couple My wife and I took a tour around Quito's churches, and we also went up to see the statue of the Virgin, which for christmas became part of what must be ...

We stayed up watching Titanic last night on Fox. My wife couldn't sleep so she watched it to try and fall asleep, I stayed up watching it initially to see if they'd show breastage on Fox in south america(they did), but since I really can't go to sleep in mid sinking, I stayed up until 3:30 too to watch Leo float away. I'm paying for it now though. I wonder what the locals here think of that movie and the class structure it shows from England and even America at that time. Class still applies in the US, on airplanes, getting into good universities, gated communities, etc, but no upper-class person would ever say that to a lower class person, they'd probably get punched in the face at best, more likely a 9mm gat would be pushed down their throat. Here in colombia it's very different, rich people here seem to assume that the poor will kowtow down, tug a forelock, say "si jefe", to every stupid comment. On sundays I'm typically out and about wearing ...

I stayed up to watch the Saints win last night, and since Colombia is on eastern standard time I was torn between wanting the Saints to score more points against Dallas, or taking a knee like they did so that the game would end and I could go to sleep before midnight. The game was on ESPN here, but the announcers overdub in Spanish and they never sound very excited, much the same way announcers in english call a game of soccer. [The simpson's episode where springfield has a boring soccer game that ends in a riot showed that best, "he kicks the ball...then the other guy kicks the ball...then the third guy kicks the ball, etc"] I tried picking the game up on internet radio, the announcers on WWL don't make any pretence of partiality and it's pretty traditional to turn off the idiots on national tv and turn up Jim Henderson & Archie Manning on WWL. (maybe it's Hokie Gajan now?) Apparently licensing restrictions prevent internet radio outside the US. Suc...