Wow that's a long long time between posts.

Well, I figure I should start this one slow and easy. With topics that are in my comfort zone like books.

I'm currently reading Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley. And Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts. I'm on chapter one of both books so I'm not sure I can comment with any authority. Genome is written in Matt Ridley's usual easy to understand and yet gripping style (See The Red Queen.) Shantaram is an interesting beast. The descriptions of Mumbai are familiar and nostalgic (especially when he reaches Colaba. I lived there for quite a while,) but his prose is slightly flowery so the book might start to feel heavy in my hands soon. (It is a heavy book. 994 pages!) Interesting both books also have subtitles. I've never quite understood subtitling. Must be a publisher driven trend.

In vacation news, I've been traveling all over the place. Let's write about the involuntary vacations first. A trip to Menominee that involved some driving, some bad driver/dongle issues and an almost-bought pasty from Schloegels. This was followed by two consecutive trips to Philadelphia. Both involved 12 hour work days and mysterious driver problems. (Stupid multicore processors and stupider driver developers who can't handle multi-threaded programming.)

The voluntary vacations were many but all restricted to Wisconsin. There was a trip to Wisconsin Dells and Lake Delton. This involved time spent at the Mt. Olympus water park, a drive-in theater, sushi and four missed exits on the way back home! (Four!) And a week or so later, Lake Delton disappeared. No kidding!

This was followed by a camping trip to Kohler-Andrae State Park. The water at Lake Michigan is freezing! But the dunes cord-walk was awesome and so were some of the pictures I was able to take of a red-winged blackbird.

After that was a nice long trip to Door County. This probably needs a post by itself. It was very eventful and involved trips to Potawatomi State Park, Peninsula State Park, Washington Island (where the wheat for Capital Island Wheat is grown!) Cana Island Light and Whitefish Dunes State Park. (The water at Whitefish Dunes wasn't that cold!) Lot's of pictures of gulls and terns.

Finally, there was some impromptu camping this weekend too at Governer Dodge State Park. We were pretty underprepared for this one as we weren't expecting to actually get a spot. So underprepared that we didn't even carry a flashlight! Of course, smart as we were we ended up purchasing a hand-crank lantern from Walgreens instead. It was ridiculous the amount of cranking we had to do for a small amount of light. Overall, apart from a spider-bite sustained by Red K it was fun. (At least we think it was a spider-bite. If she starts sticking to walls we will know for sure.) We also stopped by at the House on the Rock and the Frank Lloyd Wright visitor center but didn't take the tours (of the House and Taliesin) as they were prohibitively expensive. (Thanks to Red K for being my fellow traveler and navigator.)

What has happened since Feb 1.
Birthday. Flu. Emotional hijinks. Travel. More travel. Some more travel. Car wash. DJ Rekha. Spring. Rain.

Sentences. The next post, which won't take two whole months to produce, will consist of sentences and paragraphs.

Oh widdle bloggy-woggy have I been neglecting you? It's because I've been sleep-deprived and drunk.

After I got back from Amsterdam, that week was spent recovering from jet-lag. This activity involves struggling to wake up, having many, many cups of coffee all day, and then struggling to fall asleep at night. It's a lot of fun.

Just when I thought I had succeeded in bringing my biorhythms in sync with the other residents of Madison, a week was up and Commodore's Cup had begun.

Commodore's Cup is the Hoofer Sailing Club's annual competition. It's a week long event, with about a dozen teams competing against each other. The competitions include sailing, windsurfing, and non-sailing stuff like flip-cup and a talent competition. My team was the Redneck Yacht Club. It involved dressing up like a redneck all week. Wifebeaters, gas-station hats, everything! Mid-week was toga night so I found old sheets and slung 'em around me and hey voila, I'm a Roman. And then a bunch of us in togas decided we had to go to a bar, so we walk all the way to the Plaza in the middle of State Street in our togas. Did I mention that there was free beer every day during Commodore's Cup?

At the end of the week was the Commodore's Ball. A formal affair that began with a pre-party at a friend's house. The night progressed to ballroom dancing, (my taking Ballroom 101 in Summer 2003 helped a little bit!) This was followed by the usual going to bars in tuxedos and gowns. We Hoofer members aren't afraid of attention.

The week after Commodore's Cup I traveled to Charleston, WV again for the same customer. They seem to have cleaned up their act though 'cause I didn't see cigarettes next to candy in the vending machines again. Instead I saw Kashi snack bars! I was flying back on Thursday. Of course the city of Detroit loves me, so my flight into Madison got canceled and I spent the night in Detroit.

Friday it was back to the Terrace for a Hoofer's social and playing the game of Wait-I-remember-your-name-just-give-me-a-second. Saturday was the Simpson's movie with nerd-or-geek J, JJs going-away party and dinner with Wendell and Domestic Nemesis at the Maharaja! It was fun to meet Wendell and talk about capybaras.

Multi-parter coming up.

Part 1: Cairo, GA
I reached Tallahassee on Tuesday. The drive to Cairo took half an hour longer than expected (Damn you, bad-directions-Enterprise-car-rental) and spent most of the day working. Wednesday. Work. Thursday we went to Crystal Seafood for some much needed dead animals and I ate like a king. A very hungry king. Alligator tails. Lobster tails. Shrimp. Baked potatoes. Hushpuppies. Cheese grits. Corn-on-the-cob. A very hungry king indeed! And to top it all I spent the rest of the day at the bar of my hotel where they were having karaoke night. Small town (Pop. 9,239) bars are fun! Everyone knows everyone else. Except you! And you spend all night making new friends.

The journey back was interesting. I was on four flights! Tallahassee - Orlando, Orlando - Greenville, Greenville - Cincinnati, Cincinnati - Madison. Sadly, only on the Tallahassee - Orlando leg did I have any company in the plane - C! I got home at 10:30 in the night. Said hi to Katie who was staying over at Ms. Non Sequitur's and plopped into a deep slumber in bed.

Part 2: Six pubs. No idea how we got there.
Saturday. Me, Ms Non Sequitur, Katie - go! Stadium Bar? Church Key, Paul's Club, Piano Bar, Paradise, Madisons.

Part 3: A surfeit of Y.
Sunday was spent lazily. I got Katie and Ms. Non Sequitur hooked on Y: The Last Man. New converts to the graphic novel club! Ice cream at Micheal's for dinner!

Part 4: Bonus Monday!
It began nice and lazy with phone calls to desh. And a lot of Chuzzle. (Warning: Do not click on that last link unless you want to be horribly addicted. I dream of Chuzzles and it is not funny!)

Then it was me and Ms. Non Sequitur. Lunch at Noodles. 28 Weeks Later at the Orpheum. Half-price Margaritas at Frida's. Knocking on Cousin Qs door! (There's a story here ;) Renting Little Miss Sunshine. Becks, where Cousin Q and BF N joined us. Becks has the most awesome jukebox ever. I just walk over and there are free credits in there! I love drunk jukebox patrons!!

I was in West Virginia over the weekend for work. Here's the story...

WV was just so ... boring. The only exciting thing on the whole trip was the first day when I was driving from the Charleston airport to this factory in Sissonville which is about 15 minutes away. So anyway, I had directions from Google Maps and they seemed to be panning out ok, until right in the end where it asked me to take this road called Tolley Hollow Road and claimed that 1 *** Drive would be at the end of it.

So I turn into Tolley Hollow Road and it's this tiny little single lane road which seems to snaking higher and higher into the mountains. All I see along the way are these little trailer homes right out of Blue Collar TV and I think to myself, "Something is wrong here but then again Google Maps seems to be saying I'm on the right track." After about 10 minutes of a road which just kept getting worse, I look ahead and see that it's not paved any more!! I stopped and after maybe 3 tries succeed in turning around. This old Southern gentleman had stepped out of his trailer home and was curiously watching this Indian guy driving a red Mitsubishi Galant struggling to turn around.

So I say to him, "Hi sir, I seem to be lost, I'm looking for the factory of *** corporation."

"*** Corporation, haven't heard of them."

"They make spark plugs"

"Ah! You mean the spark plug factory, yeah, just follow Tolley Hollow Road all the way back to CR21, go past the highway bridge and turn right on River Bend Road."

"Thanks so much, I had directions from a computer but this is where they got me!"

Anyway, it turns out that Google Maps was not just a little bit off but more than a mile off, in the wrong direction! Next time, I plan to use MapQuest. You should too!

The rest of the WV trip was boring. We had some snow/rain on Sunday which made driving a mess. Apparently there were a lot of wrecks but I missed all of them. I spent Sunday and Monday night at the bar of the hotel and explained to a couple of Australian dudes the finer points of American football while watching the Colts comeback and beat the Patriots!