I hurt my back earlier this week, and because of that, I’m on drugs. Nothing too severe. Just enough that my ability to concentrate is a bit skewed. Hence, this won’t be a long post.
We went to the California Mid State Fair a couple weeks ago. We walked around a bit and saw the Stone Temple Pilots play on the grandstand. Those pictures are here.
My sister gave us an aquarium she no longer needs (because she replaced it with one that’s big enough to hold small whales). Photos of our new aquarium can be found here.
Earlier this week, Jen asked me to print about 600 photos from my iPhoto. I printed out the first 100 here at home, before I realized how expensive the project would become. For example, 100 sheets of 4×6 photo paper cost about $12.00/package. Ink cartridges run about $40.00/each, and this many pictures would require several of them. Given these pricey conditions, I decided to find an online photo lab that could do the printing instead. A Google search brought me to Winkflash. The site’s pricing looked good, so I signed up. I made several attempts to upload my photos to the Winkflash site. Because I’m a Mac user, I was forced to use the site’s Java-based upload tools. These tools suck. They are slow and they do not work. I tried at least five times to upload my files using these Java-based services. Each time, the Winkflash site either timed out or gave me a “proxy error.” In Winkflash’s defense, I didn’t bother to contact the company’s tech support, and they do provide a toll-free support phone number right there on the upload page. But I don’t want to talk to anyone. I want to upload my photos. Winkflash touts the ease of use of its “Transporter” application. But Transporter is Windows-only. And yeah, I have a Windows box here. But I don’t want to transfer all these files to that machine, just to transfer them again to Winkflash. So I’m done with Winkflash. I’ve moved on to another site, and I’m in the process of uploading my images to that site now.
I will report on my experience with that site when I’m done with it.
Today is our four-year wedding anniversary. Remarkably, we’ve both managed to get this whole week off from work. So we were able to do whatever we liked today. We decided to head out to Pismo Beach in the early afternoon. The drive there was uneventful, but we were surprised to learn that the city is now charging people to park in municipal lots. It’s only $0.75/hour, and it’s only enforced from 10 AM to 6 PM. But it’s still annoying, especially when parking used to be free.
We walked out on the Pismo pier and sat for awhile, enjoying the scenery and sounds of the ocean. I didn’t take many photos, mainly because I’ve already got plenty of photos of Pismo Beach. Then we walked for a little while out on the beach. We saw this cool sandcastle:
We spent our Independence Day afternoon at my sister’s beautiful new home in Atascadero. We lounged in the pool for awhile, played with the dogs and enjoyed some fine outdoor cooking.
If you look really close at this photo, you can see an orange dragonfly sitting on one of the plants. Don’t see it? Click here for help.
Chela showed some patriotic flare with this red, white and blue bandana. Read on …
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few days, you’ve likely heard the news that comedian George Carlin has died. Sad news. I’ve been a fan of his since I was a kid. I can actually remember the first time I heard some of Carlin’s work. I was eleven, maybe twelve years old. I was just at that point in my life where my parents felt comfortable leaving me home alone. And during one of those times where I happened to be the only one in the house, the phone rang. I answered it. From the other end of the line, I heard this:
“I had an interesting morning. I got into an argument with my Rice Krispies. I distinctly heard, ‘Snap, crackle, Fuck you!’”
Keep in mind, this was before the days of Caller ID or *69. I figured it was a prank call, but I was only half right. It turned out to be my friend Ronnie from down the street. He was also home alone, and was having some fun with his parents’ record collection. Once the initial surprise of the phone call wore off, I realized that that bit about the Rice Krispies was pretty funny. Ronnie eventually managed to dub all of his parents’ Carlin records onto cassettes. He and I spent many hours listening to those tapes on my crappy Montgomery Ward stereo. I followed Carlin’s career ever since. I watched many of his cable specials, read one of his books, and I even tuned into the fairly mediocre TV show that was based around him. Jen and I got to see him live here in San Luis Obispo on his last tour. He was preparing for his latest special, which was to be taped in Santa Cruz. He pretty much had his set down, but he was still working from multiple pages of notes which he held while on stage. It was a great show. Here’s a couple really bad photos I took during the performance:
And here’s a fitting video tribute to the “Rice Krispies” bit mentioned above.
