Kitkowskiland!

So I’m going on vacation soon for a week, and decided a few weeks ago to pick up some books and CDs that had been sitting in my Amazon.com wishlist for a long time. My good, real vacations tend to be me getting out of the house for about a week and going somewhere relaxing to relax and read. Japan isn’t so much a vacation anymore as it’s usually filled with stuff I gotta do (family, friends, activities) so I’m almost as tired coming back as before I left.

This time, I’m going to the mountains, where I plan on doing a lot of hiking, swimming, reading and resting.

So I went to Amazon, and started sifting through the items: I only brought items out of my wishlist into my shopping cart if it said they could be shipped “within 24 hours” (passing on the “5-7 days” items and the like). I figure with that, plus the super saver shipping, will have most of the books at my house before I leave. Maybe one of the items will be split off from the rest to be shipped seperately.

So, thinking that my logic was perfect, I made my order. It said that it should arrive by August 1st-3rd: Rock.

…a few days pass, and I get an email saying there’s a delay. Sure enough, I look at the items I chose, and some of them (that were “will ship within 24 hours”) are pushed back to “5-7 days”. Crap. On top of that, it looks like the order will not be split: Only one item (a small book) was split from that order, and that arrived on Saturday. The rest are all lumped together in this tight, unbreakable ball. Estimated time of delivery is between a few days and up to one week after we get back.

Oh well. I planned pretty well, but that took me off-guard. No one’s fault but my own and all that, but it still kinda sucks: All these awesome books will arrive just after I get back from vacation, so I’ll have to sit on them for months until another “non-work related reading window” opens up.

I’ll be a little more wary of this next time: Maybe do two orders; one of CDs and one of Books. Or divide them into smaller sub-orders of 5 books each or something.

-Andy

So yeah, I’ve been googling more about my favorite dance/techno acts recently (LUOMO and DEEP DISH; btw, if you’re into dance you really must check out both: ANYTHING bu Luomo and, say, “Say Hello” by Deep Dish, their Grammy nom in 2005).

I read some article in Spin a few years ago where it said that Deep Dish was the most expensive London club act (as they spin there a lot), with shows averaging $80-120 where normally they go for $40-50 or so. So I just assumed from that point that they were from London.

Nope, those crazy middle-eastern geniuses of the beat mixing, who I’ve adored since I was a part time rave DJ back in 1996-1997 (and got all their vinyl, and worked it into all of my sets), are from Washington DC. 4 hours from where I have lived here for the past six years, and I’ve never went up to see them.

Hmmmm. Looking at their upcoming schedule, it looks like they might as well have been from London, as their tour schedule, like most excellent DJs, is Europe only. Poo.

-Andy

So the best vacation I’ve had since I’ve been Married and Back in the US was the only real “getaway”* vacation I took in the past six years or so, when we went to Florida for a week in 2003 (or was it 2002? I forget). That was when I was working back at Cisco, and someone on an internal mailing list was selling a week vacation off the left coast of Florida for some really low price, as it was a timeshare, they staked out the week and couldn’t go.

It was awesome. A week next to the beach and the ocean (though I went swimming in the ocean like once; truth be told I don’t like the beach, and am kinda freaked by the ocean and all its ‘can’t see the bottom’ and jellyfish), resting in an apartment-like cabin thingy. We spent most of the week swimming, relaxing, reading a LOT, waching Daily Show on cable (we don’t have cable), hitting the city once every two nights or so, going watersliding once, and just generally not doing much at all.

Part two is coming up soon! I’ve been working at Netapp for about a year and a half. The job is awesome, it plays well, but it is totally stressful (and I just got a kind of promotion to the most spotlighted, visible and thus stressful group). Recently some people have been leaving the company for stress and the like, so we’ve been kind of commanded to take some vacation days if we’ve been sitting on them. That push was enough to get me started looking for The Next Vacaion.

Since we had so much fun at that timeshare, I decided to look for other people giving up timeshares because they couldn’t go to it (this time in the Mountains, cause we did the Ocean last time), because after looking for rentals and the like for those sorts of hotels was pretty expensive; the good ones were $120-140 per night at the places we were looking at.

I poked around Asheville for a bit, because I love Asheville and was thinking of that area or the vicinity originally. Then, on a hunch, I poked into Gatlinburg, one of my other favorite mountain towns (on the other side of the Smokies from Asheville). Anyway, I headed to eBay and happen to come across a full week awesome timeshare vacation auction that was ending in four hours. I picked it up, and in a few weeks we will head to the mountains for one internet-free vacation of relaxing, reading, nature/hiking and the like in a relaxity resort town. Now I just have to find more info about the town to find cool things to do. I see a lot of hiking, and perhaps even some canoeing if possible.

I thought it was kinda funny, that I basically have found my niche in vacationing in the broken vacation dreams of others. Maybe next time I’ll find someone auctioning a week in California or Hawaii. In a few years, after saving up some scrilla, I want to take an extended walking tour of Japan’s islands, perhaps even taking off a month to make the Shikoku pilgrimage or just loiter around Sado-ga-shima.

The kinda weird thing is that, two weeks ago, I was thinking, “Yeah, I think I need a vacation sometime in the next few months”. Now that I’ve set one in stone, I’m literally counting down the days to departure, feeling listless at work and forlonging at home…

* Getaway = something more than taking off some days but staying at home. No Internet is a Plus. I’ve gone to Japan some three times since I got back, but each time I spent 50-70% of the time running around for the “must do/must meet/must see/home” stuff than the “relax” stuff. I’m taking another in the end of January when we go skiing in Breckenridge with my folks (though that may involve a lot of pain, as I haven’t skiied for 13 years, and haven’t snowboarded but once).

Here’s something I thought about recently, and if it wasn’t so time-consuming to learn how to build and set tracks in Stepmania, I’d totally do it.

Basically, there’s Stepmania, which is kinda like Dance Dance Revolution for the PC. Some songs that people posted have video accompanyments.

My idea is to maybe take a few 2-3 minute kung-fu videos from classic Shaw Brothers kung fu movies, like Ghostface Killer or Disciples, Executioners from Shaolin, etc. Then, instead of “dancing” with the “music”, the arrows come up and you take the role of one of the combatants, moving and stepping kung fu style. I was thinking of having the upleft and upright arrows in play, and stepping there (or forward) would accentuate attacks.

Maybe this year I’ll put a small clip together and see how it turns out…

So, not only was I able to quickly install Wordpress, it was a cinch to migrate all the old posts from the old MovableType weblog. Going forward, I’m gonna be using this new weblog service. Unfortunately, I can’t find the “perfect theme” yet, so you’ll see the themes flip around a bit as I settle in.

Anyway, I’m back, and hoping to update this thing more regularly!

So I’m going to move off of Movabletype and embrace Wordpress for my blogging.

At first, I was resistant, because if you trick out your Wordpress setup (with extensions, features, etc) you need to build a seperate database for every journal you make. But on the other hand, that’s fine with me, as I plan on making each journal I create different in little ways. Plus, for failover and backup purposes, if one DB gets corrupt it doesn’t mean that my whole journal system is gone.

So I’m going to move this week to Wordpress, and plan on doing it in a way that migrates data from this current blog.

Then, I plan on updating more regularly. :-)

-Andy