High On A Happy Vibe

So wow… Running a bit of a blogger deficit here, hehe. I’ve got stuff from 4 days ago I wanted to post but hadn’t gotten a chance to. Hehe… so instead my usual style, I present to you….
—=== +++ The Whirlwind Tour! +++ ===—
So Thursday I went out to play ulti again! Wasn’t nearly as sore as I thought I’d be after playing for 3 hours just the night before. It was a good night. After the game, I met a guy named John (I think!). He asked me about the job market down here. He’s from Nova Scotia — Antigonish actually. Majored in CS. He’s a SmallTalk bigot; hates Java (“It’s hokey, I don’t like it at all”). SmallTalk is cool and all, I agree — but man, that’s a pretty narrow job market. Turned out he was Emily‘s brother. Her father had come to watch too. Had a little chat with him about the human patient simulators I work with. Him: “At that price, I bet it can simulate sex pretty well!” Me: “No comment.” (but see here).
Went home after that, but not before grossly violating the rules of my soymilk experiment. Mmmm.. grande vanilla steamer w/o whip!
Friday night! At ultimate, Emily and Thomas had mentioned the store that they worked at — Wine Warehouse — was having a tasting on Friday. I heard Eric J and Sonia were interested in going, so I gave them a call when I got home (I had no idea when it was set to start). Turned out it was already halfway through (it ran from 5-7pm). I managed to get there by quarter to seven — just in time to help finish the open bottles off, haha!
Here’s Thomas and Emily, sitting behind the counter at the Wine Warehouse. Thomas is part-owner of the store.

Some guy making sure the counter doesn’t go anywhere while Thomas is on the phone. (Photo by Emily.)

I ended up buying two bottles. I guess tastings really work! I think it’s especially helpful that Thomas can actually walk the walk. I could say “tell me about this one” and point, and Thomas could talk about it for five minutes. Haha.. Actually, Thomas put a cork in one of the unfinished bottles and gave it to me to take home. Membership has its privileges!
Afterwards, Eric, Sonia and I went out for a bite to eat out on Siesta Key.

It was anything but easy to speak! The band playing was super loud! But they were good, too, so between sips we made due by yelling at each other.

On the way home from Siesta Key, there was a beautiful skyline of downtown Sarasota — I just had to pull over and get a shot of it. This was taken using a 4-second exposure:

10:45pm, standing in the same spot, rotated counter-clockwise 90 degrees. See the car going across the bridge?

Saturday, Eric and Sonia and I went for lunch at this awesome little Carribean Jerk-sauce restaurant. You’d never have guessed it was anything special from the outside. It looked like a fast food place! And that’s the really weird thing about restaurants down here: you can’t predict the quality of food by the appearance of the building. This was a unique, one-of-a-kind, owner-operated place. Very different than in Victoria. Eric attributes it to the straight-forwardness of pacific northwesterners. “What you see is what you get in Portland. Here, it’s pretty different.”
And today (well, yesterday, technically, I guess), I was finally supposed to go kayaking!
But the guy who owned the kayaks — Chase, a friend of Eric and Sonias — turned out to not be home. But that didn’t keep us from hanging out at his place while we waited for him to get there.
I thought they were all hibernating for the winter, but I guess it must have been warm enough out today for some of the lizards to come out! This is a shot from Chase’s garden, from about 12 feet away:

Well, half an hour or so passed waiting for Chase, so Eric and I walked over to the beach — just a 2 minute walk away:

A few moments later, and we were at the beach!

In a way it was a good thing Chase didn’t show up — it was far too windy to go kayaking for the first time! Here’s a shot of some of the neat vegetation growing just on the beachline:

Hotels lined the beachfront of course. Some of the hotels had set up little chairs for people to sit on. Technically, those chairs were on the public beach, but I guess no-one minded, since they were helping out both beach goers and the hotel patrons. Here’s me sitting on one (all that’s missing is the Corona!):

A little further down the beach:

Getting a cone at a classic car museum/ice cream shop hybrid made the trip. And then it was back home! I capped off the day with another exhilarating two hours of Ultimate up at New College. A totally satisfying weekend, I hope all of them are this fun!
mp3 [5:16, 160kbps, 6.1 mb]