Magnitude 5.3
Well, Today was interesting. I started a training class today. It's in another building at work, on main campus. Interesting, I've never been over there early in the morning before. Learned whole new traffic patterns and where to park, even tho it's only about a mile from where my building is. Kinda cool to be on main campus, I liked it.
And then right during class, about 3:30, an earthquake hit. I used to live next to the Gap factory in Gallatin, Tennessee. I've been thru about 50 times as many earthquakes as most Californians have. Let me explain...see, this Gap factory was huge. Something like a mile square was the rumor. And they were constantly building onto it. And so almost every day for 6 months, at 8am and 5pm, they would blast. An alarm would go off that was so far away yet still pretty damn loud. And then the ground would shake for about a second. Pretty voilent too. Sometimes it would just shake plates and glasses and stuff, once or twice it made my bed thump gently against the wall, and once it actually knocked stuff off the top of my TV. The school I worked at was nearby, we had a seismometor in one of the buildings to measure the quakes...to make sure it wasn't cracking any foundations. I was so suprized to come to California and sleep thru nearly all the earthquakes we had. I felt one once about 2am a few years ago. I just thought they'd be stronger.
Well, this one was definatly stronger. I was on the 2nd floor of a building. I watched the ceiling move independant of the floor. Tiny bits of ceiling and stuff landed in my hair. And aftershocks too, about 30 seconds long. Damn, that was kinda scary and neat at the same time. I felt the quick panic that came as everybody ducked under the desks. That pic above was while the aftershocks were still happening. I guess being on the 2nd floor exaggerated it. I snatched a few images off the web that show neat things. California Quake Map, Seismic Hazard map of So Cal, Shake Map and a detailed area map. It's neat to watch the sites because they keep upgrading the size. At first they thought it was a 4.7 East of LA. Then they scratched that completely and put it at 5.1 out in the water. Then they have been moving closer to SD and are up to 5.3 now. heh.
Tracy missed it, she was in the air, coming back from Ohio. Never picked anybody up at terminal 2 before. Cool plane!
tracy's gone
Been doing a lot of nuthin today. Tracy's out of town, headed back to
Ohio to visit a friend that's getting married soon. So I've been doing a
lot of car and computer stuff this week. One thing I've noticed about
her being gone...my eating schedules are terrible. She's not here so I
eat when I'm hungry. Which is at the wrong time of day and usually junk
food. Eating breakfast at lunch. Eating "lunch" about 8pm. Still working
on where dinner fits in. Jeez, I should really pull it together and try
to eat on time.
So, I went to IN-N-OUT tonight to get some lunch. As I'm getting in line
in the drive thru, I guess some girls made a comment about my car. They
were going in to get food. The guys with them were really drunk and
yelled in a highly slurred voice "these bitches want
you...(gurgle)...underage pussy!" To which one of the girls responded
"Hey! I'm legal, I'm 18!" How nice.
Then I go over to Autozone to drop off a container of oil and pick up some black paint and crazy glue. The dude runs my card, it's approved, but his screen says something else. So he doesn't know what to do. So there are like 3 people behind me, all of which are pissed. I'm trying to explain to him that I just got charged and it doesn't matter what his screen says when I realize that he's drunk too.
No point to either of those. I don't care if they're drunk, as long as they don't cost me money or piss me off. I just thought it was funny.
/me opens a beer
I miss my girlfriend.
Batiquitos Lagoon
Saturday, Tracy and I went for a little hike to Batiquitos Lagoon. Tracy's been keeping the hikes light so I could tolerate them. This one was 2.8 miles and mostly flat. Not too hard. But for some reason, I woke up that morning with a footache and I think that wearing running shoes aggrivated it because it hurt the rest of the weekend. Maybe a little tendonitis or something, it seems to never go away completely. Batiquitos Lagoon was neat, but I think that the only reason it exists is because you can't build houses there. Or at least the houses would have a fresh breeze of sewer gas type smells. (Actually, it's bacteria from the lagoon.) Later that night we went to a party downtown. Cool location, an outdoor pool on the 10th floor of a skyscraper in downtown San Diego. I felt all flashy. Tracy's feet got the pain this time, but due to her hot new shoes. D-oh.
Today, after Tracy left for work, I stopped by Home Depot to pick up some leather gloves and then went over to my new house to do yard work. Tyler and I mowed the lawn, groomed the shrubs, trimmed the hedges, ate weeds with the weedeater and cut down large parts of my neighbor's disgusting tree. The one that was hanging over into my yard and over the pool. That is one of the ugliest trees I've ever seen. It looks deformed or something, kinda scary. Like the kind of tree you'd be tied up to and eaten alive by rats. But since the neighbors are moving out, they didn't care how much I cut off. Tyler and I broke out the power saw and did some big cuts. This was my first time to use a hedger or a power saw. I've used chainsaws before, but these were different, cool. I definatly felt MANLY after mutilating a few trees and shrubberies. (A paath! A paath!) And it was good to do work on my house. Just the tip of the iceberg tho. I know it, I can feel it.
I guess I made Tracy sick.
non-gloomy june
Usually
May/June is a gloomy time of year in San Diego. But the last few days
have been beautiful. So this week, I've taken advantage of it and eaten
lunch in pretty places. Wednesday we hit up UTC mall. I sat in the sun
and actually got a sunburn on my arms and nose! Hah! Ran into Matt Webb.
He just got a job at Sangart. Guess they make
some type of synthetic blood. Pretty neato. Also ran into Eddy:
Thursday Eddy and I hit up Tech Center and on Friday I met up with some
friends at Pizza Port to celebrate Arne's last day at his crummy
job.
Interesting links this week:
12 Month Treasury Average (12 MTA)
Interesting Home Loan based on ^ this
You gotta see this: New Way to Fold Shirts.
Today is so pretty. I should go home.
Dave Chappelle
So I saw Dave Chappelle tonight. Dave was classic, hillarious. It was his new standup routine. Almost all the jokes were new, only a few old ones. No Rick James impressions, but lots of wannabe's in the crowd. It was kinda funny listening to 'hWHAT?' and 'Yeaaaaauuuuhh!' (Little John) coming from the seats. Greer Barnes was on before him, he is the first person to ever make me break a sweat laughing. It was SO funny, the stuff about the 'virginia' being all serious. "Flaps and shutters and a doorbell." ROFL!
No cameras allowed, so I didn't get a pic with Dave. And it was too dark at the RIMAC for my poor camera phone to take a decent shot:
The lines at the RIMAC were horrendously long. Tracy and I were running late but somehow beat every body there, we were in the first 500 or so, with a few thousand behind us. Geoff and Karen joined us in line a little later with a few grunts from the people behind us. Whatever, they had a crew of 20 join them! Keith, Houman and Herman showed up late and were near the back of the line, but made it in and got decent seats anyway. Zac and his friends missed the first guy, too bad, he was great. Jason, UCSD student and an intern in my group at work, scored us these tickets back in Feb for $20 a pop. I saw them on ebay for $150 for 2 'front row' seats (it was open seating). And they were going for $200 a seat at the show. Almost saw a fight break out but somebody slipped up and used good judgement. A few people were carted out for using cameras and one dude was escorted away with a video camera.
Tracy and I went out for drinks with Geoff and Karen afterwards. It was a good night.
Wow, the Astronomy Picture of the Day is rad today. And yesterday too.
blah! memorial day
This pic is me in the bed reading magazines this morning after the pager woke me up at 5am.
So this weekend has been kind of a wash. David couldn't come down. Bummer. 1) traffic from LA <-> SD sucks ass 2) We're both getting sick or getting over being sick 3) I am still on call and 4) gas is expensive. So he may have to wait a month till I move into the new house. That will be really fun, we need to initate the place anyhow with a few cannonballs off the roof into the pool. I just hope he doesn't find a job and move away before then. Hopefully not. I am trying to get him a job at Qualcomm, but it's a challenge because I don't have contacts in the right departments. But I'm gonna see what I can do this week. We talked about jobs and stuff a lot last night, I guess that it's just a hard job market right now, especially for people fresh out of school.
A pic of my (new) sandals as I was walking over to get a Rubios burrito for lunch.
Tracy and I went to the beach tonight to watch the sunset. But we screwed up and went to the wrong part of the beach at Del Mar, north, near the cliffs. The water was a lot closer to the top of the beach than what I'm used to, and since it was 6:45ish when we arrived, it was already at pretty high tide. And it smelled like seaweed and fish and featured lots of junk in the sand. As the sun was setting near 7:45, we were getting water lapping at our feet. We drove back home thru Del Mar and looked at all the houses we'd love to own. It's hard to believe that people live in such a beautiful place. I can't believe I'm only 7 miles and as many economic levels away from it. I sure hope the housing market continues to do well. Or bad, or whatever it's doing now.
Back to work after a long weekend and 3 days home sick. Hope it's not too much of a shock to my system. ;)
I see Dave Chappelle tomorrow. Woot!
My first photo-blog
(edited later)
Yes, yes, done entirely from the phone. But I wasn't at the beach, I was at home in front of the computer. Cool eh? Now, to put some good words in the T9 database...
attack of the sneaky cold
So I've been home sick for the last 2 days. Cough, sore throat, headache, sniffly, sneezy, sinus pressure, all that great I-feel-like-shit jazz. Usually you can tell when you're getting sick. Not this time, it was a total sneak-attack. 7pm on Tuesday I was still at work, feeling fine. 8pm I had stopped by IN-N-OUT and by the time I got home to eat my bounty, my nose was a spigot. I got out of the car just in time for it to drip on the garage floor. Seriously, I was freaked out. It was so bad that I would go get a tissue, blow nose, turn around, walk 10 feet and have to go back for another tissue. Burned thru a whole box of tissues the first night. I had to put my laptop away because I was afraid snot would just pour out my nose on it. I was even thinking about converting to a cloth snot-rag so I could wring it out and keep going, save the trees whatever. I got it on my clothes, the couch, magazines, the carpet. I even sneezed suddenly and shot a spray across the room. But don't tell Tracy that, she'd freak out, dang germophobe. ;) So I called in sick to work Wed. Then I went on-call Wednesday night. And wouldn't ya know it, pager hell from moment one. I'm pretty sure that Will jinx'd me with his talk of an easy on-call week. I've had a few hundred pages since then. I made a run over to Longs just to get Sudafed and came back with all this other junk.
Poopy.
Got a call today from my home insurance agent. Apparently there was still something left that I needed to sign. And if I didn't do it today, then they would cancel my policy. And they'd have to give notice to the bank that the property was no longer insured. And the bank would freak out and take my loan away. And I sure am glad that I wasn't out of town or something. Jeez. So I got all cleaned up, went over there, signed the papers and came home. He had laringitus so he was cool with me being sick too.
So I am 1 month away from moving into my new house. Yay. I'm so excited, I can't wait. The first thing I'm gonna do is a cannonball off the roof into the pool as initation. I can't wait.
David is supposed to come down this weekend, we'll go over to the new house, check it out. Tyler's gonna show us how he takes care of the yard and all that jazz. Should be a fun time. I haven't seen my brother in a while.
Easter Island
Is a really cool place. Apparently it has no trees because the natives cut them all down. After they cut down the last trees, war broke out, they turned to cannibalism and then vanished. Nobody knows how they moved the 10 ton stone moui's into place, nobody knows where they vanished to. NPR was doing a story on them today on the radio. They talked about at some point, some dude was asked to cut down the last tree on the island. And that action sparked the downfall. PBS is doing a special on it, sounds interesting.
*sure, people have theories