Lost my SUV in the Walmart parking lot

But then I found it again. Ok, to be fair, it's technically a Mini-SUV...

If Elephants had no Ears or Trunks...

Game of Thrones is Awesome!

This years must see TV miniseries at the Zartimus household (while we wait for the walking dead to start up again) was the 10 episode series Game of Thrones. How the hell did these books get by my reading list. That George R.R. Martin dude can really write a good yarn! It's like The Lord of the Rings meets The Sopranos (of course it helps to have the guy who played Boramir in LOTR actually have a lead part in this thing). Not only that, but if you find yourself getting attached to a character or two LOOK OUT because he'll kill them off faster than you can frickin' blink.

I LOVE THAT! It adds to the realism. Death is final and in this book/mini series if a bad person is in a position to screw you over for money, power or sex, they do! They stab you in the back, strip your clothes off before you're all the way dead and wipe the blood off on your clammy skin (because they already took your clothes remember?). It's loosely based on the War of the Roses and the 100 years war so you get a great feel for medieval times. There's magic in the series but it's not up-front. It really takes a back-seat and isn't used as a crutch ("A Wizard did it").

It has simply amazing characters and awesome subplots and layers and intrigue and mystery and gets you hooked even if you need a family tree book to keep everyone straight, who's related to who and why and how and whatnot. Even swords become major characters in this story. You catch on quick and pretty soon you know the Lannisters from the Starks. Every house has a sigil (the Starks have the Dire Wolf as theirs) and that helps keep them straight when they're about to clobber each other on the battlefield. When the series started I cracked open the book and I'll say that the adaptation is superb. It's faithful to the book but speeds the right things along for brevity. Nothing is missing that doesn't need to be there. The casting is excellent (although I saw the show first, read the book second so I'm already biased). One of my favorite characters is "The Imp", a high-born Dwarven lord. He really stirs up crap in this series (when your brother is the medieval Brad Pitt and your sister is a hot incestuous psychopath it tends to affect your personality).

In the novels the author titles each chapter after the name of a major character so you see the story through their eyes only for that whole chapter. The characters get scattered early so some very major plot points don't get spoon fed to you, they are picked up through hearsay or in passing from other characters. It's an awesome technique I've never seen used before and easily lends itself to film. If you haven't checked it out, do yourself a favor.

Another great touch is the intro credits sequence that depicts the Seven Kingdoms and other parts of the land, introducing them as a huge clockwork diorama. They seem to introduce the new lands as they are about to appear in the episodes of the show by adding them to the sequence. You see the Wall, Winterfell, Kings landing, etc.. A great touch.

Check it out!

Landslide - The Smashing Punpkins version guitar tab

My friend Bryce got married awhile ago, and he wanted this song for the father/daughter dance part. He had a twist though, he wanted to perform it and just needed a guitar bed track. I've always liked this song, the original Fleetwood Mac version, the one the Dixie Chicks did, and I'd heard the Smashing Pumpkins one at one time or another (check out this Brokeback Mountain video montage with it!). I've even performed it once or twice, accompanying a singer so I thought I knew how to play it. Sure Bryce, I can make you a guitar track with it!

Turns out I was wrong. The Billy Corrigan version differs quite a bit from what Lindsey Buckingham wrote. The original uses a Capo on the 3rd fret so I slapped it on, took a listen to the Smashing Pumpkins version and lo and behold.. That's not what's going on at all. It's in some sort of alternate tuning! WTF!

To save time I went to Ultimate Guitar Archive and tried the 3 or 4 versions they had there, and as usual. It was a BIG WASTE OF TIME! If the song is complicated or a cover that differs in any way from the standard way the tune is played you can bet the person who submitted the tab is an earless wonder Cro Mangon guitar player with no ability to differentiate notes and string types and intervals to speak of. You should see some of the absolute clueless shite people  slap up there. Surprise surprise, this thing had to be transcribed. So I set about slowing it down in some software and checking out the guts. The guy actually de-tunes the 1st and 2nd strings, 1 semitone down, 2nd a semitone up. I've never heard of a tune that does that. It's almost like Billy C didn't realize the Fleetwood Mac guy was using a capo when he started to lift the tune and just switched the tuning around to accommodate the mistake he made. 

But Ohhh what a great mistake. I now love this version more than the capoed travis picking original. The pull offs to the low open strings sound much better.  After awhile, I checked for live versions of them performing it on youtube and low and behold, Billy C has a capo on the 3rd fret. WTF? I listened to the notes, they are all wrong. He's playing the Fleetwood Mac version live on Yourtube.  Every vid I saw he has a capo and he's playing it the standard way, not his cool studio way.

I finally stumbled on a newsgroup where there was a story that Billy C met Stevie Nicks at a party and she told him she loved the version they did of their song but that her guitar player complained that he was playing it all wrong. Billy C meets Lindsey Buckingham. The CAPO gets slapped on the 3rd fret, a guitar lesson ensues and now he plays it the standard way. Many years later, I am confused for an evening but in the end, here is a tab of what Billy C is doing. As far as I know, it's the only right one out there that I couldn't find, so I did it myself. Woohoo!

Landslide - The Smashing Punpkins version guitar tab

And for you aspiring Karaoke artists, here's the instrumental track. 

P.S. in the course of looking for live pumpkins video I ran across this guy, who has the right of it as well. We only differ in one or two places (and I have proofs for mine so it's right, har har har). Still it's a nice video tut. Check it out!

Godzilla is still cool!

Although my wife had a hand in contributing to our kids DNA, I'm pretty sure they got their love of Godzilla movies from my side of the double helix. We're doing some Godzilla movie marathons this summer combined with heavy doses of good old XBOX Godzilla - Save the Earth monster fights. If you check on YouTube they show guys making their own suits out of foam and poured latex... Hmmm. Be the coolest kid on your block! If I wasn't so busy with half a dozen other hobbies....


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Canada Day 2011 - out with a bang!

This year we got to avoid the extra large crowds on Parliament Hill because of the prince and princesses in attendance. Royal watchers can be as rough as soccer hooligans if you get in their way, understandable considering they haven't been able to go to the bathroom since 2:00am lest they lose their spot).We spent this Canada Day at "Da Hung Monkey", a backyard cabana bar in Riverside South created by friends of ours. The kids had a great time in and out of the pool, snatching hotdogs from this neat steamer device they had going (I think I ate 4 of them). There was a pizza cook-off between some of the guys but I wasn't able to vote because I forgot who made what. It was all good! I voted for the Hawaiian pizza (of which there was none).

I brought the bullwhips and spend some time edjmumacatin' the folks on how to toss them and apart from the odd strap mark, everyone managed to leave with their eyeballs and skin unflayed. The snowbirds screamed by overhead twice in perfect formation as always. Forget all that talk of those new billion dollar fighter jets, we need to get these guys some new planes! They've been using those ones for ages! The bar-owner had some sort of AOOGA horn connected to a stuffed monkey in the cabana that he pulls when he serves shooters. The neighbors must LOVE that!

We ended the eats of with a Canada Day cake from Costco. The only way to get more Canadian than that would be to slather the top of the cake with poutine (it's been done).

When it got dark we decked out the kids with glow sticks and lights and headed off to the nearby ball field to launch some fireworks. We dug in a series of holes to hold them at about 2nd base line in the infield and things were going well until we noticed another group of people setting up some fireworks at home plate. In hindsight, the fact that they had no flashlight and were using their BBQ lighter to read the instructions on the back of the firecrackers should have been a dead giveaway. They were a bit close but it should be ok. We set ours up with the fuses all pointing to the same side and lit them 3 at a time.

We were lighting the 2nd or 3rd series when a Roman candle whizzed right by my head from the direction of home plate. We looked over and one from the other group had fallen over and firebombing us. We all scattered, looking for our kids and I felt a THWACK! as the next firecracker hit me square in the back of the head. I was wearing a Tilly Hat with a headlamp attached to it and it saved my hair from catching on fire. I took it off and shook off the burning firecracker and put it back on and ducked the next 3 or 4 that came our way and it was after they stopped that my wife told me my hat was still on fire.

I thought it was my headlamp light but no, there was a burning firecracker ember smoking away happily in my prized Tilly Hat I've had since 1991. I was putting it out with gravel from the infield when the 2nd roman candle from the same group at home plate fell over and showered us with burning embers. That's when it became a good time to go introduce myself with who was trying to set us on fire. It was either someone clueless or a group of mean spirited idiots doing it on purpose. Turns out it was option #1. I came up on two 10 year old something kids who immediately apologized for letting the firecrackers get away from them and their parents appeared out of the dark with three more firecrackers ready to go!

Turns out they were new to Canada Day celebrations (maybe they don't shoot off firecrackers in India?) and just setting the Roman candles on the ground, balancing them upright and lighting them up, thinking that they would just stay put as they belched forth gobs of Pyrotechnic stars. It being Canada day and all the diplomatic solution turned out to be to go get our shovel, dig three small holes beside home plate, show them how to bury at least 3 to 4 inches of it into the ground pointing upright and shining my light for them as they lit them up.

BOOYA! No more potential accidents.

I was thinking of getting a new hat....

Monkey HATE Clean!

Excellent Saturday Night Live skit, hard to find on the net. I like when they throw the old one out. My friend Paul was offered a Monkey at an airport in Indonesia once. Some guy shoved a monkey in his face and screamed:
"Monkey! YOU BUY! YOU BUY!" but he declined. Although there was no way he could have gotten back into Canada with it, he could have kept it in his hotel room for the week. He could have RENTED the monkey! (he said it looked ill though).

MONKEY HATE CLEAN!

UFC 101 - Remembering Forrest Griffen v.s. Anderson Silva

I came across this great bit with Forrest on a radio show talking about the infamous fight with Anderson Silva. It probably ranks as one of the most extreme examples of a one-sided fight you'll find. I watched that on PPV live and I was amazed at how bad Anderson made Forrest look. I was expecting a real slugfest. Man.. It was so one-sided at the time I thought it looked staged, until I watched it a pile of times. Forrest gets hit again and again and they just take their toll, although the backpedalling jab that finally does him in makes it look all the worse because it looks so harmless. I love Forrest's take on it in the Interview. Every fighter should handle a loss like that. Hillarious! Here's a video of the whole fight.

This photo pretty much says it all. Anderson is looking at him (like Forrest says) and it's like he's thinking "Did You really think you could punch me? What a stupid thing to think. Why would you think something stupid like that"?

Darth Vader Urinal gone viral

When I posted the pics of what someone did to a garbage bagged busted urinal at work back on April 20th (our urinal is still busted by the way, one month later!) it went viral very quickly, appearing in a bunch of popular joke websites, all stemming from the originals I posted on my Flickr account.One day it had 3 views and the next day it had 4000. Since then it's been copied and posted around all over the place.

Check it out where it's been by doing a "Darth Vader Urinal" search on Google.It's amazing how these things get around. What's even funnier is seeing all these posts by authors claiming they were responsible for it. At least some of them tagged my name on there. I wish they linked back to the original flickr photo so I could see the counts. A few days after Darth appeared in our can on the 3rd floor of the Main building, people started adding things and changing the captions. I had some pics of the Storm Trooper heads that I didn't post because they were blurry I was laughing so hard. What makes them extra funny is that they match the white porcelain urinals while Darth Vader's is black. Even Yoda was up there for awhile. I think the cleaners didn't get what was going on and took them down.
 
Thanks to D Dunbar for forwarding these clear shots, taken I suspect by M Savard, and speaking of the real credit, the person who actually taped the vader head and chest piece up on the wall, I think I know who it is but they are not owning up to it!

You Park like an asshole.com

There's a webpage for people like this. It's called http://youparklikeanasshole.com/ . Now I have never felt the need to "key" a car but if I was to suddenly start, it would be with this guy. Nothing says "I'm a presumptuous wanker" than parking like this. I don't even know what it's supposed to accomplish. Is it that the owner thinks people are morons who are going to open their car doors and give his side panel a ding? Is he saying that his car is more important than your crappy car and he is forced to park like this lest our inability to place a vehicle between two parallel lines somehow places his car in great peril? Tell you what. PARKING LIKE THIS WILL ENSURE THAT ONE DAY SOMEONE WILL %$&^#* with your ride.

I have friends (who shall remain nameless) who let the air out of tires of cars parked like this. Cheers to them I say..

The site also has this handy ticket you can leave.

Sheesh...

Nature in the Backyard part 13

I'm counting Freddy the neighbor's cat in this batch because he scared the crap out of me the day he did this. I though he was some hairy little person trying to break into the house. I've never met his owner but I don't think the cat likes him much as he is always at our house trying to get in. Maybe it's because we feed him bacon and stuff.. (no, it's because he loves us..)..

When I'm in the backyard I sometimes hear a weird SCREE sound and a large bird whips by overhead and I never get a good enough look at it. Well, this time it sat on that wooden thing the farmer has in the back yard. I'm not sure what kind of bird it is..

This was a neat one. When I was making breakfast for the kids one morning I caught a flash of orange across the creek in our backyard. Turns out it was the fox that sometimes hangs around out back. Today it was circling the wild turkeys that often waltz across the back field. I wanted to stick around to see if the fox would try for one but I had to go to work! I don't think he did, those turkeys can be mean!

And the deer are back..

The Bloody bloody Mary Mirror Monster

About a month ago, our six year old started to act weird. A few days later we realized she was afraid to go into the bathroom and after a few rounds of questions it came out that she had heard a scary story at her after school program. An eleven year old had been egged on by the other kids to tell a scary story so she trotted out a nasty variation on the legend of Bloody Mary. If you look it up on Wikipedia or snopes, it's hard to establish the exact history behind the story but the short version is if you go into a bathroom at midnight, light a candle and say Bloody Mary three times (you may or may not have to spin around three times before or after) Bloody Mary's ghost appears and eats your face off. Well that's enough to terrify a six year old. 


As I began to talk to people about it I found out that Bloody Mary is lurking in the mirrors at pretty much every school n the Ottawa area. She was even found in some kid's Jello pudding last week. Not only that but she is ingrained in the psyches of people in every age group. I grabbed the movie that came out in 2006 or 2008 and tried to watch it (It sucked pretty bad, I'm talkin' Major league II bad here...) and the funny thing was, my wife refused to watch it with me. These deviation type legends bite pretty deep!

One thing I don't understand is why my kid takes some eleven year old's word for this kind of crazy stuff but refuses to believe me when I tell her we've been living on planet earth for years and nothing's tried to rip my face off near a bathroom (well, there was that dog that one time.. and it was kind of beside the bathroom). I even tried to start a dirty rumor that bananas were about to take over the world by flying into our ears and hijacking our brains and we have to be on our guard but of course she doesn't believe ME! I'll bet if it came out the eleven year old's mouth it would be the gospel! R Gater had a great idea. He had the same thing happen to him and he got his daughter what he referred to as a "Hippy Crystal" which he told her gave protection from all mirror-based monsters. We tried it and it helped, but the fear is still there and it's real as hell and overrides common sense and parental pissed-offed-ness.

Her sister tried to help in her own way by posting a picture in the bathroom downstairs but that didn't work either. I went on youtube and found tons of videos by kids 9 to 12 (the Robinson age they call it) filming themselves saying Bloody Mary in mirrors hoping to show my daughter that nothing happens but OF COURSE half of these vids by the amateur PUNK'D crowd end with the kids slathered in ketchup and wailing when the lights come on. Thanks for nothing you jokers! I was playing L.A. Noire on the Xbox 360 last week and my character passed in front of a mirror and I got her and yelled "BLOODY MARY" at the TV and nothing happened. Not even in the digital world! So tonight when I tucked her in to sleep in her mirror-less room she buried herself under the covers once again and the thought occurred to me that she could use a snorkel to breathe.


My next step is to get some old rotting book and replace the pages inside with aged paper that depicts a medieval version of our family (our ancestors) and shows them doing battle with Evil Bloody Mary Mirror Monsters in such a way that alludes to us having built up a a family immunity..

We'll see if that cuts down on the "Oops I didn't make it to the bathroom because there's an evil witch in there waiting to rip my face off while I go pee" laundry, if you get my meaning.

Nice to be back amonst IT geeks. The Darth Vader Urinal

About 5 or 6 months ago I switched positions at my place of work., I went from Project Management/ Development/ Database Monkey stuff to our Server Support Infrastructure section. Basically from Software Dev to Hardware/OS Support of Windows Servers (years ago I did both at the same time but then they consolidated and siloed everything). It's been a  great move, the people on my team are very cool and although I worked here for over a year about 11 years ago, I'd forgotten what it was like to be surrounded by hard-core IT junkies. I went from being one of the only people in my old division voiding the warranties of all my electronic devices to a whole division full of people doing it. And it's obvious mostly through the humour that gets put on display.

Case in point. When our urinals are busted, the cleaning staff tapes garbage bags around them so people don't use them, flush them, and flood the place with unpleasant liquids. Now I had never made the connection that affixing said garbage bag to the urinal looks a bit like the Dark Lord of the Sith's cape, but someone on my floor did. They printed out a Darth Vader head shot and little electronic doohickey from the front of his armor and pasted it on the "black-bagged" urinal. Then a quote appeared. The quote gets changed almost every other day.

I love working here! (no jokes about us having too much time on our hands, we work hard., fast, and efficient, with tons of stress factors and you need to do stuff like this to laugh once and awhile).

Free HP Bladecenter training for gophers

I was on an HP course a few weeks ago, learning about their blade-center hardware and software. It was a pretty intense course, we got to rip apart the blade enclosures, physically and virtually, and try just about any weird thing we wanted to simulate failures (which, I might add, is pretty hard to do with the modular design of the HP's, since they bought out all that great Proliant technology from Compaq years ago). The course was held out in Kanada at a recently purchased big empty building surrounded by green space. I saw deer and geese and gophers all over the place. There was a huge window at the back of the class and looking through it I noticed a fairly big gopher hole right on the edge of the building.

 At one point, I was going through a lab and I heard a "kathunk" sound. I turned around and there was this gopher with his nose right up against the glass. I looked at him and he looked over at me and then turned his attention to the board at the front. he was looking at the instructor. This gopher was getting free training man! Usually rodents don't understand the "invisible force-field protecting me from the scary humans" concept of glass, but this guy was wise to it. He was not bothered in the least, (maybe it was like television for him). If he does this every day, he can come and work on my team man!

iPad2 Fedex World Tour

Some shippers love to send stuff away from you before eventually swinging it back in your direction. I ordered an iPad2 a few weeks back and was excited when I started getting Fedex emails. They shipped it to MISSISSAUGA, ON, CANADA, 5 hours away from my house just to tease me before carting it off to OAKLAND, CA, USA and then MEMPHIS, TN, USA. Probably the moon next. I found this great thread entitled "WTF is Fedex retarded?" that seems to do a good job explaining why. This guy's stuff also went to Alaska and he was pissed that it had been subjected to -40 temperatures and most likely manhandled by clumsy guys in parkas.

GelaSkin skins for Ipad2

I ordered an iPad 2 online a few weeks back, not wanting to stand in line at the Apple store at 5:00am. Oddly enough I know people who got their hands on some Saturday after the Friday 5:00pm launch, but their don't have "Say hello to my little friend" engraved on the back!! As it turns out I'm probably gonna cover that up as I stumbled across some very cool skins for iPad2 on a site by a company called Gelaskin that lets you do up your own! This is one I made from an existing Fractal.
What you get is a back skin and a front border frame skin and then you use wallpaper on your desktop to complete the image. The site is in Toronto and the iPad2 ones go for $29.95 CDN. Check some of the professional ones out!

 

Jamaica 2011 - Final Days

The family and I were getting to be experts at the buffet now and I was able to cobble together something approximating your typical breakfast meal in my work's cafeteria. The kids loved this whole "go get whatever you want whenever you want for free" concept of food procurement (it was quite the shock to the system when they came back to Canada and didn't have the Omelette guy serving them up whatever they wanted). The food at this place was awesome. A good tip the next time you;re at one of these resorts is to go to Canadian Tire and grab one of those Big Bubba Keg mugs so you can get them to fill it with whatever you want and save yourself a few trips to the bar. The drink glasses on the resort are pretty small and a large drink container comes in handy!

They had these neat birds at the resort who really liked scrambled eggs so they would clear out the last remnants and feed them all in the back so they wouldn't bother the patrons in the dining area. My wife managed to get a shot of a Heron-like bird in the bay as well. There were quite a few cats running around. These were wild cats, strays, who managed to survivine on whatevber the vacationers at the hotel fed them and my kids were all over that (they are cat crazy). I'm surprised we didn't have one living in our room. Something struck me as strange with some of the cats before I realized that I'm not used to seeing them with their junk intact.

Every day there would be different vendors in the Hotel set up so you could buy stuff. They were pretty nice and no one hounded you at all. At another hotel there was a guy who sold stuff offshore. He was not allowed to come on the beach so he had a kayak full of stuff and he would paddle in about 20 feet from shore (outside hotel property) and get to to come over and see what he had. An interesting way to circumvent the system! Apparently whatever they offer you you're supposed to go down 50% but we didn't haggle too hard. We figured they needed the money more than we needed to save any.

The gift shop on the resort was full of great stuff! You could get various Jamaican phallic symbols as well as a Beatles Yellow Submarine Jesus! I really wish I would have picked up one of those Jamaican hats with the Dreads on them. very cool. In the end I settled for a couple of t-shirts. Remember the Jamaican bobsled team? They had posters of those guys as well!

That afternoon I went out into the water again snorkling with Dan's camera this time set to widescreen 30 frames a second video. I headed over to the drop off and tried to measure how deep it was. I hung there in the water and figured that about 5 of me would fit one on top of the other so about 30 feet. That's my limit as far as going down deep, actually probably about 25 feet but that took me to the mouth of these Coral caves and wouldn't you know it, there was ZIP in there, nada. I was expecting some huge sea beast to be hunkered down in there just waiting to be videoed. That's when I noticed something was wrong with the underwater camera. I've used cameras underwater before and Ive experienced the situation with throwaway underwater cheapie cams where the pressure is wacked and you can't even press the button because the air is so compressed. I headed back up to breathe and see what was up and the camera was not doing so good. Hmm, it should be good to a certain number of meters. Oops. later i found out it was only good to 15 feet. It sprung a seal and salt water killed it good. I did the bag of rice trick but to no avail. I just killed my friend's camera. Oh well. (I bought him a better one, a Hi Def model three up from his and newer the next day I got back. OUCH!). This sucked because i was on the fence thinking about buying a Go Pro HD underwater Cam and now here I was replacing a cam I broke. I should have just bit the bullet and bought the Go PRO before my trip. Let this be a lesson to you gadget freaks. If you are thinking you should but something, GO WITH YOUR GUT AND BUY THAT THING! (hehehehehehe).



When I got back to the pool Dan informed me that he entered me and this guy Luigi from our group in a talent show at the resort that night. That's nice of you Dan! What am I supposed to do? "Do some of that guitar stuff!" I asked if they had an acoustic, because I do a version of "No Woman No cry"  slap funk fingerstyle that might go over well, but no.. They just had the house band and he had a Fender copy electric guitar. I met with him an hour before I was supposed to go on and I tried to get a high gain sound with a touch of delay like I like it but no deal man. That guitar was a reggae guitar, clean as a whistle and it did not dirty up very well through his setup. I fitzed around and went with the dirtiest sound I could get but it had absolutely NO sustain. ACK! And launched into RUSH's Limelight for the Canadian Contingent. After a few bars the drummer and bass player kicked in and I thought great! Rush, everyone knows Rush, Awesome! Until it hit that time signature switch from 4/4 to 4/ 3/4 and then it was like that scene in "Back to the Future" where they got lost, looked at each other and stopped playing... hehehehehehehe.

Still it was fun. If that ever happens again I'm bringing some Amp Models on my Iphone and plugging into that. Playing any guitar pyrotechnics when you don't have your sound (the brown sound or something like it) is like trying to make out with your head wrapped in cellophane. You can go through the motions but it's not gonna work and it gets you down just trying.

Luigi, the guy that sang the national anthem at our Jamaican hockey game turned out to be a wedding singer and he closed the show with a great rendition of "It's a wonderful world". It was definitely Canadian Entertainment night in Jamaica.

That night the "Girls Gone Wild" as we were calling the Spring Break students from Ithaca, spend part of the evening throwing up in back of our hotel room. By this point, it didn't phase us. That was one of the few weird things about the resort, the fact that they had mixed families with kids with "Girls Gone Wild" in the same area of the hotel. For the most part though, the hotel managed to keep them all on one side where the hot tub and swim up bar was.

Our kids liked to go to the hot tub, but the first few times I accompanied them there, it was to watch them sitting amongst a sea of 19 to 22 somethings. In a couple of instances, I moved the kids along because of what was going on. Now I'm not a prude, and I can take a 3 woman(girl) "Love train" chugging along poolside with the middle one grabbing the first one's boobs and the last one slapping the middle one's butt cheeks, I just don't want to explain it to my kids.When I arrived back at the waterslides some other ladies were getting ready to take their kids to the hot tub and I kind of said "Uhh, maybe not..". One of the Dad's asked "What's going on at the hot tub?" and I said: "uhh, maybe you shuld go check it out first" (grin). ZOOM! Now my kids know that it is possible for multiple people to drink booze underwater using a funnel and bong device (thank you Georgia University!).

Actually my kids enjoyed watching their antics. I myself was reminded of competing tribes of monkeys in documentaries on the Discovery channel I've seen  where male monkeys in the "Georgia" tribe would attempt to entice female monkeys from the "Ithaca" tribe over to their side. This action greatly upset the male monkeys in the "Ithaca" tribe who attempted to retaliate by trying to do the same with tribe "Georgia"'s females. This in turn had the effect of angering the females of tribe "Ithaca" who went out of their way to be receptive to the advances made by male "Georgians", and so on. Or sometimes the female "Ithaca" and female "Geogians" would turn to each other for comfort in this tense tribal situation causing all of tribe Ithaca and Tribe Georgia males to stop what they were doing and take photographs instead.

Only In Jamaica Mon!

All in  all it was a wonderful vacation and we would go back to the same resort given an opportunity. We actually had 8 days there due to our early flight and late departure. It's a great setup for kids and they had a great time. I think next time we go though we'll try and avoid the three overlapping weeks of US spring Break! Maybe the Pirate ship will be open!

Woohoo!

Jamaica 2011 - Day 2-3

On Sunday we played ball hockey with the Jamaican kids of the staff that worked at the resort. None of these kids had ever held a hockey stick before so it was kinda fun teaching them how shoot and not high stick each other and all of that. There were other Canadian families at the resort and we let some of the other kids play. We had one of our guys sing the Canadian anthem and someone in the Jamaican group sang theirs. We provided a goalie and one Canadian kid playing forward that was put on the Jamaican team was a real ringer. He scored all of their goals and it was great to see his team congratulate him! The kids from Jamaica learned quick by watching him where you go and what you do. Pretty soon we had cherry pickers all in front of the Canadian net but that left no defenceman at the Jamaican end (led to a few 7 on none breakaways). After the kids game and the handshake lineup and group photo the adults wanted to play us. Oh man, I was not expecting that. 


Us older Canucks got together and decided that we would show them the passing game, pass 5 or 6 times before we took a shot. There were two guys from Toronto who were not part of our group and they wanted to play on team Jamaica. We didn't have enough adult sized sticks so I took the big one I had and gave it to someone on the other side and ended up with a kid's stick that came up to my waist (grin). That passing game went out the window real quick. I was at the side of the net and someone centered and I grabbed it and had two whacks at it before getting it back and hopping a lob over the pad of the downed goalie. Oops... Then it was a shooting gallery. Sorry guys, It's a Canadian thing. I'm not sure what happens when hockey sticks come out but national pride takes over and suddenly your only focus is putting that puck or ball past that line into the net as many times and as fast as humanly possible. It was a lot of fun. At one point one of our defensemen cleared and two guys on the other team sort of did a jump shot with their sticks and just about tapped the ball down from 15 feet in the air. I guess we didn't go over that rule, but no one got hurt and everyone still has the teeth they started with.They beat the hell out of us at beach volleyball afterward!

Our kids hit the waterslides and lazy river and pools after lunch and our group grabbed a big chunk of real estate at the bottom of the water slides which happened to be right outside our rooms. You could keep a great eye on the kids as they ran up the towers because eventually, depending on the lineups (sometimes there were none) they would come popping out of one of the two chutes. Our youngest daughter mostly traversed the lazy river in a tube and at 6 years old she could touch in all of the places in the water except one.

That night at the stage they had a fire eater and a guy on stilts that made balloon animals. The Balloon guy had made a pile of swords and all the kids were running around whacking each other on the heads with balloon rapiers. The Fire guy set fire to himself (including his junk at one point) and it makes you wonder how he learned to do that to himself. Being from Canada, it's not something we seem to be interested in here. Our eldest daughter wanted a bit of a break so we let her stay back in the room and we gave her an FRS radio and took one of the others and kept in contact that way (Costco man, set of three with batteries and a charger! we used those things the whole trip!). Unfortunately when she turned on the TV it was set to a Japanese sci fi channel that scared her a bit and when she couldn't figure out how to switch to the Cartoon Network she called us because it was freaking her out.

Luckily Empire strikes back was on! It was like being back at home in our own house! 

The next day I borrowed a friend's underwater camera and went snorkeling in the coral reefs for a couple of hours. It was awesome! I saw tons of fish and crabs and brain coral and sea anemones and sea urchins and star fish. I was thinking of going on a dive while there but with this set or reefs just off our beach there was no need, I could get my underwater fix right here! I took some video but found out after that I had it set to low def 15 frames per second. I'll have to take it out again and ramp up the settings. As I was leaving I found a big 40 foot drop off on the far side which I wanted to come back and check out. There were some coral caves and there had to be interesting fish down in there at the mouth of those. At that point I looked out into the deep blue sea and felt a little like the clown fish in "Finding Nemo" in that anything big coming out that that open water would make me uncomfortable. Time to get back into the coral channels!

That afternoon the first of the "Spring Breakers" arrived from the US and spiced up our trip. At 5:00pm when the water park shut down they discovered the waterslide and spend some time running down it dry, drunk and screeching and yelling and then cannon balling into the shallow water at the bottom. Thinking they were going to kill themselves, or break the equipment and ruin part of my kids vacation, I called security. The line was busy. Apparently most people there were calling security. Before I got off the phone someone from the hotel was getting them all off the slides and shooing them all over to the other side. I found out later that the pirate ship play structure in the pool was closed just because of the Spring Breakers because they try to kill themselves on it doing drunken high-dive antics. As we went to dinner that day I saw nurse Ratchet again tending to some young ladies who had drank themselves silly a few hours into their arrival (I wonder how much that costs?). 
We had dinner in the Italian restaurant that night and the waiter made up a table for the kids who ended up behaving beautifully. In the end it was the adult table that got shushed because we were getting out of hand. At the kids table once they finished eating they whipped out the Apple Itouches and Nintendo DS's and kept themselves entertained. That night Dan got dragged up on stage to be the entertainment in some kind of dance off/ drinking game. I ran up to the side of the stage and snapped a picture of him and the next thing I knew I was dragged up on stage as well (for taking a picture). Three other guys were chosen including "Mr Bacon", a portly gentleman from from the US who I recognized from the Breakfast buffet who loaded his plate up with a foot high of bacon each morning. We had to do a five step dance and at the end of the dance we had to run and get a shot of vodka from any of the nearby bars. The last guy up on stage got to drink all the shots poured into one glass. Newsflash, I don't drink so I was not gonna lose this thing. The bartenders are watching the show so they give you a bit of grief when you bolt to the table and scream at him for a shot of vodka. They take their time so you have to win it in a footrace back through a maze of chairs and then back onto the stage. The stage was pretty big and had two stairways on either side but from my former life I know that if a stage is just over waist high to me I can jump it safely. Mr Bacon went down first, followed by everyone except me and Dan so even though I made it back ahead of everyone each time, i didn't win because when it was down to just two of us they declared Dan the winner and he had to drink the Vodka. Oh well! Worked out for the best! I love how they take us vacationers and make us the entertainment! Before I go down again I have to enroll in Hip Hop Dance lessons (or maybe erotic pole dancing, it aligns more with what they make you do there BAM BAM!).

As we made our way back to our room we saw the moon. It was directly overhead. I'm talking smack dab in the middle of the sky. very cool. That night we were woken up by Spring Breakers at 3:00am returning from the bars. They kind of forgot what room they were in and were banging on doors when the key would not open. I went out to introduce myself real polite like and asked them to take it down a notch and met some lovely ladies from Ithaca University. The least drunk in her group (she was just swaying slightly side to side while her other friends needed to lean on the wall and or each other) was trying to shut her friends up because when you're that drunk in Jamaica you have a need to speak at full volume for some reason. One of the leaners looked at me and asked her friend-post "IS HE REALLY THERE?". I made a face and shushed her explaining that I have two kids and I do not want to have to deal with them waking up at 3:00am and she turned back to her friend and said "HE MUST BE REAL HE JUST SHUSHED US!" Her leaning post asked "WHERE ARE YOU FROM? WE'RE FROM ITHACA!". 


They were polite and all, just drunk and loud. I'm going to get my kids to run up and down the terrace banging pots and pans at 7:00am tomorrow.