Gingerbread Man on 6/7/2006 at 21:59
So much to tell, I don't know exactly where to begin. Certainly one of the more interesting tales from the past few weeks involves a camping trip to lovely Sunset Beach in Santa Cruz which included a side-adventure to the absolutely astonishingly cool (
http://www.mbayaq.org/) aquarium in Monterey, so perhaps I should start there.
See, both Starr and I know how to summon bats to our aid in times of Great Peril. This is a minor skill (INT + CHAR / 2, plus any bonuses for Animal Handling), and it doesn't really get a lot of play during a regular week, but when you are beset by West Nile Carrying Mosquitos it is a fairly handy talent.
Maybe "beset" is too strong a word. To be fair there were only two occasions in which West Nile Carrying Mosquitos factored significantly, and in both instances there were only two of them and they were being fairly polite about things. I haven't actually been bitten / scratched / stung / otherwise molested by a flying or creeping or hopping or slithering thing in nearly four years, so I'm never really that concerned about it. I firmly believe it's one of my karma things, and I don't question it in case the act of questioning it uses up whatever magical protection I have been blessed with. You know how it is.
Starrfall, on the other hand, seems to get bitten with the frequency of a Normal Person. So she summoned the bats to come to her aid in this her time of peril.
I tried to be of vague assistance but a combination of two factors hindered things: 1) Not being in a time of peril, my heart wasn't really in it, and 2) my bat-summoning abilities really on work on the Bocephus brand chauve-souris and, this being America and all, they only have the less-impressive Wiggly Bat brand. This may or may not be true -- what's important is that the bat invasion was spectacular and hilarious and I missed a ridiculously cool part when a bat picked a large flying bug out of mid-air at roughly head height while I was off having a pee. I did however hear all about it when I returned, and I was chastised for missing a good bit due to my impossibly-small bladder. Bad luck.
Before I forget, here is a picture of our elaborately-constructed basecamp:
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http://www.uelekevu.com/pictars/basecamp1.jpgYou can plainly make out two pairs of flap-flaps (one is mine, you will never guess which one HINT: THEY ARE THE GIGANTIC ONES) and The Tree That Attacked Me FIVE TIMES With Its Viciously-Spiked Bark Right On Top Of My Head. :grr:
I threatened to pee on it in Retaliation, but I am easily distracted and completely forgot. Which is just as well for that sodding tree, because I would have peed on it a LOT. :mad:
There was lots of fog, so much so that you could feel it like rain. As it swept up over the dunes between our campsite and the ocean it looked like the smoke from a hundred barbeques. Very surreal, very cool, and very un-Sunset Beach in its demeanour.
An hour or so south of Sunset Beach, Monterey was blazing with glorious Pacific Sunshine. It took exactly fifteen minutes for my stupid head to crisp and shrivel up like some basketball-sized burnt apple. This was the only day during the adventure that I forgot my hat.
And we saw jellyfish. Scores of them. And we saw tuna and sharks and seals and otters and we touched Bat Rays and Skates and Sea Cucumbers (don't let the name fool you -- they are SHIT on cold salads) and crabs and a million other things that have names I cannot remember. I have loads of pictures, but they are gigantic and need touching up somewhat (low-light photography is hard when you don't yet understand the intricacies of apertures and shutter speeds, but I did okay) and so I will probably make them available at a later date. They are very cool, though.
I am still blown away by two exhibits in particular at the aquarium, and here are two inadequate photos that I took of each:
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http://www.uelekevu.com/pictars/kelpforest1.jpgKelp Forest Exhibit: 28 feet tall and 343,000 gallons
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http://www.uelekevu.com/pictars/outerbay1.jpgOuter Bay exhibit: no words can explain. 1.2 million gallons, tuna, sunfish, sea turtles, hammerhead sharks... this is only a small picture of the tiniest bit of the tank, and there is no way to convey the staggering awesomeness of it without actually grabbing you by the arm and dragging you over to stand agape in front of what is basically a slice of ocean that you can look at from the side.
Anyway, that's the short version of that tale. And here's a picture of me peeling little pearl onions for our delicious beef stew that we ate for dinner on the second day of camping:
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http://www.uelekevu.com/pictars/onion1.jpgIn other news, we have started brewing beer and mead in our wonderful new apartment. The Irish Red was our first foray -- we heard it was damned near impossible to mess up and we like red ales anyway -- and it currently lurks in bottles as it ages and becomes lovely to drink. We stub our toes on the case of bottles on a nightly basis, just to remind ourselves that it is still there and that pain makes you feel alive.
Tomorrow we will bottle the American Brown Ale if all goes according to plan. It's been squatting in the carboy for long enough now that the overt fermentation has ceased. The mead (just a fairly generic semi-dry affair) will not be ready until Christmasish but we have to rack and whatnot it in the meantime. We have already plotted our next brews: Starr intends to craft a nice whitbier and I have plans to replicate the national beer of Uelekevu: a rather potent dark ale with the sinister name of "Three Policemen"
This weekend we go on a heroic journey which ends in San Francisco. Here we are led to believe we shall find the elusive MsLedd at the end of some massive Walk for Breast Cancer Awareness or something. It all sounds rather grandiose and wonderful and we shall bring an inordinate amount of tequila with which to refresh our favourite Server Godess when she completes the trek. And then probably we'll all go back to San Jose. So the heroic journey won't actually end in San Francisco.
I guess technically it'll end right back here, but I'm not fond of technicallys and neither should you be. They are officious and callous and prone to pedantry, and we should arrange a posse to string them up by their horrible little feet from the telephone wires that I have seen near here.
Near here. Near here.
That reminds me.
You know what else is near here? The sun. The buggery sun. Oh God.
Near is an understatement. I have grown up and spent my life in places where the sun maintains a respectable and relatively benign distance of 93 million miles from the top of my head. Here in the Central Valley of California the sun hovers menacingly a mere seventeen feet off the ground. The top of my head is slightly higher than six feet off the ground, and some simple arithmetic will lead you to the unavoidable conclusion that I have decided never to leave the confines of the apartment during the Mid Day.
Ah, the apartment. What an awesome set of digs this is. Still mostly in the stages of getting furnished, but a few trips to Ikea later we had things called Agne and Stimma and Jokkmokk and Leskvik and Senior (lol it is a fondue set) and Billy. Still unsure how Billy got through the Faux-Swedish Naming Filter, but hey. We are currently awaiting the delivery of a fantastic new and not Ikea couch (next Thursday, they say) and so for the moment this is how the television sees the world:
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http://www.uelekevu.com/pictars/unfurnished1.jpgI have no idea where I'm going with this thread anymore. We just tasted the Irish Red again and I swear it's got an alcohol level that reaches into the triple digits. I'm tempted to attribute this sudden buzz to the ingestion of many beers and some mead last night, but I really don't think that's the case.
So, um. What?
tl;dr: It's 3 in the afternoon and GBM is getting his buzz on. There's a surprise for you.
Also here's a quick bulletin for anyone who will be in the San Francisco area on Sunday: Watch the fuck out, because we will have tequila.
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http://www.ttlg.com/forums/images/icons/icon15.gifAlso plus guess what my head is peeling like a GRAPE
