Wet. Very.
It appears the first storm of the year is making its way across Southern California over the next few days... Today it came down pretty good at times, causing havoc on the roadways and giving excited students a new reason to messy up their clothes. Of course it also became a universal ditch day as it always does when it rains, which unfortunately I couldn't partake in since I had to turn in a rough draft at the one class I did have. I leave later on this coming afternoon for L.A., then I'm off the following morning to Death Valley, so the site will be blogless for a few days until I'm back from the weekend sometime on Monday most likely.
Tonight we ended up doing one of my favorite activities ever, that being playing in the rain. It was really pouring when I had the original idea, but by the time we got out there it had become more of a drizzle, so we decided to head on down to the ocean to make sure we got our money's worth. After the usual splashing of puddles making every effort to get the other members of the group soaked, I eventually decided I wasn't gonna take no for an answer and was gonna go thrash up the waves, even though the Pacific ocean in November isn't exactly balmy. Temperature outside was a decent 57, although it was a bit windy. Had a blast running around showing the waves who's boss, and making our best efforts to get pneumonia. One of my friends got pretty hammered by one of the breakers, but she popped up giggly as ever so we knew no harm was done. Nothing like getting out there and forgetting about life and its worries for a while.
When was the last time you jumped into a puddle with both feet instead of looking for the safest way around it?
Thursday, November 07, 2002
Something New Happens Every Day...
And in yesterday's case, the new experience was a campus wide power outage. I have vague recollections of something like this happening a few years ago, but it seemed like this one was much more broad. I happened to be upstairs watching someone play Halo on their XBox, when everything in the room shut off. First thing I did was turn around and look out the window, and was greeted with total darkness from all directions and vague silhouette where the other two quads used to be. This at first caused mass panic and screaming and yelling, with exclamations such as "WHO FORGOT TO PAY THE ELECTRIC BILL" and "WTF IM IN THE SHOWER!" Luckily my indiglo served me well enough to get down to my room, open the door, and track down the high powered flashlight I had there. It's funny, I had it by my bed within arm's reach for the whole year til like two days ago, when it occurred to me that with the architectural lighting keeping my room somewhat bright 24/7 along with the sun, I'd probably never actually need it, so I moved it over onto a shelf. The outage ended up lasting only a few hours, as people had fun shining their lights into each other's rooms across the quad, and using various other methods to blind the passers by. Many a firecracker was set off, and there was talk of looting, but as far as I know most of the people either trooped off to friend's houses in IV or spent the whole time talking on their cell phones.
Luckily I wasn't working on the Market Analysis section of our Business Plan that I have to turn in today, or I woulda been peeved. Yeah Word autosaves every five minutes, but if you're a quick enough typer than can still be quite the pain in the butt. Took care of a bunch of stuff yesterday, including heading over to the bank to deposit a check and withdraw money inside thanks to my check card disappearing and a new one having not arrived yet... Then headed downtown to buy a pager where I was told I had to do it by phone, but at least they had the right number so that ended up pretty painless. It would be nice if both the card and new pager was there when I arrive home on Saturday morning, but I'm guessing they'll both have to be mailed. Guess I'll go get a haircut today at some point, probably after my group meeting with the professor at 4 to turn in our drafts. Then I'm off tomorrow to head towards the general direction of L.A., making various stops and visiting various people along the way before arriving home sometime early Saturday morning, ready to depart for Death Valley with various family members at apparently 5:30am. I'll definitely be sleepin on the way up. :)
And in yesterday's case, the new experience was a campus wide power outage. I have vague recollections of something like this happening a few years ago, but it seemed like this one was much more broad. I happened to be upstairs watching someone play Halo on their XBox, when everything in the room shut off. First thing I did was turn around and look out the window, and was greeted with total darkness from all directions and vague silhouette where the other two quads used to be. This at first caused mass panic and screaming and yelling, with exclamations such as "WHO FORGOT TO PAY THE ELECTRIC BILL" and "WTF IM IN THE SHOWER!" Luckily my indiglo served me well enough to get down to my room, open the door, and track down the high powered flashlight I had there. It's funny, I had it by my bed within arm's reach for the whole year til like two days ago, when it occurred to me that with the architectural lighting keeping my room somewhat bright 24/7 along with the sun, I'd probably never actually need it, so I moved it over onto a shelf. The outage ended up lasting only a few hours, as people had fun shining their lights into each other's rooms across the quad, and using various other methods to blind the passers by. Many a firecracker was set off, and there was talk of looting, but as far as I know most of the people either trooped off to friend's houses in IV or spent the whole time talking on their cell phones.
Luckily I wasn't working on the Market Analysis section of our Business Plan that I have to turn in today, or I woulda been peeved. Yeah Word autosaves every five minutes, but if you're a quick enough typer than can still be quite the pain in the butt. Took care of a bunch of stuff yesterday, including heading over to the bank to deposit a check and withdraw money inside thanks to my check card disappearing and a new one having not arrived yet... Then headed downtown to buy a pager where I was told I had to do it by phone, but at least they had the right number so that ended up pretty painless. It would be nice if both the card and new pager was there when I arrive home on Saturday morning, but I'm guessing they'll both have to be mailed. Guess I'll go get a haircut today at some point, probably after my group meeting with the professor at 4 to turn in our drafts. Then I'm off tomorrow to head towards the general direction of L.A., making various stops and visiting various people along the way before arriving home sometime early Saturday morning, ready to depart for Death Valley with various family members at apparently 5:30am. I'll definitely be sleepin on the way up. :)
Tuesday, November 05, 2002
Another World...
For those who have seriously thought about getting a SCUBA certification, I highly recommend taking the plunge. Ohmigawd I'm so funny I forgot to laugh. Ended up waking up at 4:30 yesterday morning after getting my solid eight hours of sleep, and just hanging around taking care of stuff until 8 when we left... I picked up a guy in the UCSB class at the dorm on the other side of campus then headed down to my friend's place downtown... I took the class originally with him two years ago so we've been diving buddies on multiple occasions... The group in the car ended up 5, myself, my friend, his girlfriend, her friend, and the other guy I picked up along the way. All those people along with five tanks, regulators, B.C.s, weight belts, let's just say the car was quite loaded down. Basically any bump of any size caused the car to scrape over something. We eventually made it down to Ventura in one piece, and onto the boat. It was a much smaller boat than we took two years ago, but it had a jacuzzi, so that was a huge plus. We ended up going out to Anacapa Island instead of the much larger Santa Cruz Island we went to on the prior trip. The conditions were pretty close to perfect, current was very minimal, visibility was great. My friend brought along one of those underwater camera things, so we took some great fish. At times you'd turn around and suddenly be in a huge school of fish, unable to see anything but swarms of them, as they all turned back and forth in unison. We also saw some of those cool animalish plants that dart into their holes when you get close to them, whole rocks full of them that would end up leaving tons of little craters before slowly inching their way back out. There were some bright bright totally orange fish that I chased around for a while trying to get a decent pic of, and there were various claims of seal spottings, although I some how managed to miss every single one. Overall it was just a blast, I'm really going to have to do that more often. Maybe not in the Pacific, where you have to wear 34 pounds of solid weight to go along with your double wetsuit and heavy as all heck tank and gear, maybe a jaunt to the Caribbean or Hawaii is in order. My friend and his girlfriend drove down and flew out of LAX to Hawaii for a week this morning, real rough life they're leading. :)
My favorite part was the sunset later on, as we were on the South side of the island so the mainland wasn't even visible, and it was just really beautiful colored clouds and the sun dipping into the sea. I snapped away some pictures, gettin on towards halfway through the roll I started in like June. What can I say, I'm stingy with film. After that I just relaxed for like an hour in the jacuzzi, as those who were certified for night diving (none of us) donned their very cool looking LEDs and flashlights and went for another dip. Looking down into the water and seeing all their beams of light darting around, bluish glows in the sea of blackness, was a very neat effect. That and you're sitting in the middle of the ocean in very comfortable 100 degree water with cliffs and waves all around you, looking up at an endless expanse of stars. I was really livin the good life.
Slept most of the way back, and then we made a quick sugar run to McDonalds for some ice cream cones before making the half hour drive back to SB. Then came the endless process of rinsing all the gear at my friends place, then loading it back into the car for me to take back the next day. I got that taken care of today with the help of a few friends, after attempting unsuccessfully to sleep most of the day, due to the incessant knocking of one friend in particular who disagreed with the idea of letting me recuperate. I'm quite sore especially my wrists and lower back, but it's lessening as the day goes on. More annoying are the ends of my fingers, I ended up cutting a few of the nails a little too close the day before, that combined with them being in gloves most of the day has them a bit puffy at the edges of the nail and quite sensitive. Making it hard to type, so I'm gonna lay off.
No class tomorrow since the one class I do hvae is cancelled since we turn in our Business Plan section drafts on Thursday. Hence, I won't be waking up any time soon.
For those who have seriously thought about getting a SCUBA certification, I highly recommend taking the plunge. Ohmigawd I'm so funny I forgot to laugh. Ended up waking up at 4:30 yesterday morning after getting my solid eight hours of sleep, and just hanging around taking care of stuff until 8 when we left... I picked up a guy in the UCSB class at the dorm on the other side of campus then headed down to my friend's place downtown... I took the class originally with him two years ago so we've been diving buddies on multiple occasions... The group in the car ended up 5, myself, my friend, his girlfriend, her friend, and the other guy I picked up along the way. All those people along with five tanks, regulators, B.C.s, weight belts, let's just say the car was quite loaded down. Basically any bump of any size caused the car to scrape over something. We eventually made it down to Ventura in one piece, and onto the boat. It was a much smaller boat than we took two years ago, but it had a jacuzzi, so that was a huge plus. We ended up going out to Anacapa Island instead of the much larger Santa Cruz Island we went to on the prior trip. The conditions were pretty close to perfect, current was very minimal, visibility was great. My friend brought along one of those underwater camera things, so we took some great fish. At times you'd turn around and suddenly be in a huge school of fish, unable to see anything but swarms of them, as they all turned back and forth in unison. We also saw some of those cool animalish plants that dart into their holes when you get close to them, whole rocks full of them that would end up leaving tons of little craters before slowly inching their way back out. There were some bright bright totally orange fish that I chased around for a while trying to get a decent pic of, and there were various claims of seal spottings, although I some how managed to miss every single one. Overall it was just a blast, I'm really going to have to do that more often. Maybe not in the Pacific, where you have to wear 34 pounds of solid weight to go along with your double wetsuit and heavy as all heck tank and gear, maybe a jaunt to the Caribbean or Hawaii is in order. My friend and his girlfriend drove down and flew out of LAX to Hawaii for a week this morning, real rough life they're leading. :)
My favorite part was the sunset later on, as we were on the South side of the island so the mainland wasn't even visible, and it was just really beautiful colored clouds and the sun dipping into the sea. I snapped away some pictures, gettin on towards halfway through the roll I started in like June. What can I say, I'm stingy with film. After that I just relaxed for like an hour in the jacuzzi, as those who were certified for night diving (none of us) donned their very cool looking LEDs and flashlights and went for another dip. Looking down into the water and seeing all their beams of light darting around, bluish glows in the sea of blackness, was a very neat effect. That and you're sitting in the middle of the ocean in very comfortable 100 degree water with cliffs and waves all around you, looking up at an endless expanse of stars. I was really livin the good life.
Slept most of the way back, and then we made a quick sugar run to McDonalds for some ice cream cones before making the half hour drive back to SB. Then came the endless process of rinsing all the gear at my friends place, then loading it back into the car for me to take back the next day. I got that taken care of today with the help of a few friends, after attempting unsuccessfully to sleep most of the day, due to the incessant knocking of one friend in particular who disagreed with the idea of letting me recuperate. I'm quite sore especially my wrists and lower back, but it's lessening as the day goes on. More annoying are the ends of my fingers, I ended up cutting a few of the nails a little too close the day before, that combined with them being in gloves most of the day has them a bit puffy at the edges of the nail and quite sensitive. Making it hard to type, so I'm gonna lay off.
No class tomorrow since the one class I do hvae is cancelled since we turn in our Business Plan section drafts on Thursday. Hence, I won't be waking up any time soon.
