I'm going to England in a few wees time, just a whistle stop visit for 4 days. Really looking forward to seeing some old friends. Will be a blast.

Shall return with mucho twiglets.

Had it for a whole week now and LOVE it!

 

edit: Had to laugh after looking at these..if you look in the background on one of the pics you can see the neighbors' Lamborghini Gallardo convertible.....OK it isn't his, he just does the detailing...nice motor tho eh?

OK so after much deliberating yesterday I've decided to forget about a BMW....I just can't justify spending that kind of money when we have so many other bills to pay right now. Instead I've been looking at a VW GTI: lots of performance for half the price of a beemer. Sat in one this morning, will test drive tomorrow after I've returned the Z4.

At work all day again today.....................................ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

So my once venerable BMW 528i started giving me problems a few months ago...sunk 1000's of dollars into it, the last straw being a strut failing last week. New pair was quoted being 1700 bux so I told the dealer to keep the car, I'd use it as a trade for something "different".

I'd once owned a Z3 convertible, was a great little motor but I was tired of driving it on the freeways and upgraded (downgraded?) to a 4 door.

So now I am thinking  convertible again. Hell I live in Southern California, its almost Summer again...Enjoy life right? Saw a nice 2005 Z4 in the BMW lot, they gave me a good trade-in, Bob's your uncle, I drive home in a nice convertible............

 

So I have been very happy with the car, except I noticed that the hood is slightly misaligned..upon very close inspection it looks like it's had a paint job, so I returned it to the dealer...Things like this should be disclosed at ime of sale so the dealership was very accomodating, basically giving me carte blanche to do whatever I want: return the car or ask for some kind of compensation. I told them that I would use the weekend to figure it out........

 

335i methinks??

0-60 in 5.4

Top Speed 155 mph

Very understated.

Fastest auto under 50k

Yesterday was Valentines Day. It's funny here in the US we make a big deal about every holiday, especially V-day. every1 expects to get a little something. even just friends send each other cards and stuff. Alex went to school with a card for every kid in her class (20) and returned with, you guessed it, 20 cards and a bag full of candy. It was cute reading through them.

Before school we did a little gift exchange at home. I bought Anastasia a dozen roses and made a little collage of photo's of some of our family in a nice mat. Alex had made a card for her mum and picked out some chocolates too. Anastasia had bought me some of my favorites from the British store. Things I can't do without like twiglets and cadbury's flake!!!

I had to work in the evening so we went up toValley View for lunch. It rained the whole day which made an interesting drive up into the mountains.

 

I have a chest cold. Some way of spending my 3 days off. BLAH!

Have been taking loads of vitamins and drinking fruit shakes to get my defenses up but to no avail. Hopefully this'll be a short one.

I've been at work all day. It's very misty here, kinda eerie. Looking forward to being at home with a cup of tea.

I've been toying with going to the UK for a visit in March, just for a week. I'm just not sure I can justify it. I'd like to go to visit my friends, it's been so long since I have seen Mike, Lloyd, Rick and co, not to mention met their families! Since I left 12 years ago Mike has gotten married and had 2 children with his wife and Rick and his girlfriend have had 3 kids! Seems like an eternity ago that I was in college. 16 years have gone by in fact which is a lonnggg time.

So how to justify going to the UK instead of Hawaii?

Mmmmmm hard to say........................

Either way We'll be going to St.John in the Fall. My mother in law has a timeshare there. We're all heading out there for a week. Hooray!

I turned 37 on Tuesday (cue fanfare). Had a really nice day: Rode our horse Howie in the morning. It had rained all weekend so only the indorr arena was open. Was a decent ride even though Howie was a little high..thats the thoroughbred in him. Afterwards Anastasia and I drove up to Valley View casino for lunch. The buffet there is outstanding Such great food, always very fresh, beautifully prepared and displayed. I had salmon with a mango salsa, chinese ribs, spuds, carrots, beef stew, spanish rice..yes all piled on one plate!!!! bloody great. For dessert Tirimisu with fresh strawberries, raspberries caramelised banana's and whipped cream. Wonderful. Indian casino's are funny places. I swear we were the only couple there under 50 years of age. Amazing to see the obesity there too. I saw one woman with 2 plates piled high. She must have weighed in at over 350lbs (thats about 25 stone).

Afterwards we drove home, picked up Alex from school and vegged for most of the afternoon.

One thing I love to do is tinker with computers. I've built 3 in the last few yearsboth for myself and my brother. Anyway the other week I did a major upgrade to my gaming PC: a new motherboard and cpu/memory. The cpu is a Intel Core2Duo E6750. Pretty good upgrade from my old AMD 4000+. So I had time toi kill this afternoon and figured it would be a good idea to scavenge all the parts I had laying around to make a PC for Alex. I had purposely not touched the HDD from before my upgrade just in case something went wrong in my new build, and now used that for the scavenged system as it "should" boot right up with the original mobo/cpu combo. The only new parts were basically the DVD drive, Power supply, video card and Case, all of which Winblows could deal with, without me having to reinstall the OS.

Anyway to cut a long story short, after 20 mins of screwing things together it booted up perfectly.

Now Alex has a shit hot system (AMD 4000+, 2 gig RAM, 7800 GTOC video) just to play MS paint and online games at NickJr. SWEET!

Ate way too much at lunch so skipped dinner (okokk I did eat a whole lot of chocolate A. gave me for my bday very good stuff!)

I've not blogged in a few months. Have been way too busy and unmotivated to make any entries to be honest. I don't know how Mike manages to do this every day. I promise myself that I will do it but then months go by with no entries.

OK Buckle down to it Woody!!!

We arrived in Maui on Friday 19th. 5 hour flight, quick get for the rental car and then what should have been a 40 minute drive to the hotel in Lahaina ended up taking almost 3 hours! The ttraffic suddenly came to a halt and didn't move for over 2 hours...eventually it got going again and we could see what was the hold-up...brush fire!...more of that was to come.........

 

We spent the afternoon on the beach, and swimming in the 80 degree water. Paradise.

Saturday we found a really cool little beach the locals call "baby beach". It's very quiet, off of Front Street in Lahaina. The water is very shallow, maybe 4 feet going out for a few hundred yards. Theres loads of coral reef there so I spent ages and ages snorkelling. Really takes your mind off of everything being in that ocean environment. Just you and the fish! Was really knackered after that! In the Afternoon we went to another beach renowned for good snorkeling, a little further north. I was so bloody tired, could barely swim a stroke. Went out to check the reef and swam with a large turtle. Was very cool Not sure how I would have felt had I been in close quarters with a dolphin or BIG fish (i.e. shark). I'm not a good swimmer..prefer to just float.

 

Sunday we heard that there were small wildfires in the San Diego area, apparently nothing big (yet)....

 

Spent the day on another beach, got some bad sunburn on my back.

 

Monday morning was weird....We were woken by phone calls from home: the fires had spread to something really big with our town (Encinitas) basically in the line of fire (no pun intended), also our horses which are boarded in Del Mar were in danger. The whole area 5 miles east of us was burning up real good. It came to within 3 miles of our house and a little less to the horses. 4 years ago was the big Cedar fire in SD, where over 2000 homes were destroyed. The TV was predicting this fire to be even more destructive than that, and with our house in the direct line of the fire we were in a little quandry. Do we stay on vacation or go home to hell? It took about 30 seconds to decide that being in Maui was best. If we were at home we'd have to be evacuated to goodness knows where. Best to just keep apprised of the situation (I had my laptop with me, live streaming to local Channel10, and really good up to date forums of where the fire actually was, and who was getting the mandatory evac warnings), and get on with ouyr vacation.

 

I had booked a bike tour down the 10,000 foot volcano Haleakala, so we drove over to the town of Hula (no hoops here) to the bike shop. Anastasia and Alex followed behind the bike bus all the way to the top oof the volcano (10,023). We spend 20 minutes or so at the summit, took a few pictures and admired the amazing view on this p[erfectly clear day. Can only really be described as stunning. Back in the bus and down to the staging area at 6500 feet. Riders are not allowed to go down from 10,000 ft any more because of some fatalities in the last few months (bollocks). So off I went with 2 others in tow and the rest flailing behind. The descent was a lot of fun, 99% freewheeling, constant switchbacks. I rode as fast as I dared, not too crazy but at an excilarating speed nontheless. Time seemed irrelevant..I think it took maybe 2 hours to get down the 38 miles to the bike shop again...We stopped at a mexican restaurant for lunch, and were joined by Anastasia and Alex, not before 2 of our bikes were stolen by kids and then swiftly recovered by a passer by in an SUV!!!!!

 

 

Sooooooooo what a mess! Lewis had the F1 crown in his hands and somehow managed to drop the ball. In China his team totally froze when it was plainly obvious that he needed new tires desperately. I was screaming at the telly, and what does he do? beaches it in the ONLY gravel trap in the whole place...pitlane entry. How embarrassing.

than at the finale in Brazil, all he needed was a 4th place finish to win the Championship and what does he do? Fights Alonso on the first lap, comes off 2nd best then has a mechanical failure. All he can manage is 7th. Not good enough. McLaren and Hamilton gave it to Kimi.

GAH!

Horray! We arrived in Maui today for a 6 day vacation.Lots of stuff planned, the highlight probably being a bike ride from the 10,000 foot volcano summit...will hopefully do that on Monday. Have my video camera to blog it. Will upload that when we get home.

Lewis Hamilton won the Japanese GP today. Brilliant drive in terrible wet conditions. A day which saw his wanker team-mate Alonso lose control of his car and crash in Lewis' wake.

One thing which I had never seen on the podium was the winning driver, during his national anthem looking behind at his nations flag. I see that as a moment of pride from Lewis. Bloody great stuff. Fingers crossed he'll sew up the championship next week in China!!

GG

Nice start to the day. Rode my horse Carpe. Being a thoroughbred he can be difficult at the best of times but for some reason today he gave me a pretty good ride. In fact I kind of wanted to carry on riding but wigged out.

We hadn't been out for breakfast in ages so after getting done at the barn we headed over to OPH. Bacon, eggs, toast and blueberry pancakes..Perfect!

This afternoon I noticed my old friend in England Mark online via Steam (a gaming IM proggy). We played a little Half Life 2 deathmatch, then Halo 3 co-op on XBOX 360. It was great to talk with him and shoot aliens at the same time. We caught up on a lot of topics. Mark is the same bloke I left in Blighty 12 years ago, we had a great giggle.

 

Now I'm at work and kind of pissed off. Right away there was a disgruntled customer trying to return some merchandise, which just didnt add up to me. For one she didnt have a reciept, also she claimed she had been told by the sales person here that she could return merchandise if it wasn't liked (totally against our policy), also the merch was in my display packaging which we do not sell with the jewelry (also there was a cigarette burn on it!) To be honest I felt like she was trying to return stolen merchandise, then when I told her the return policy she kind of went banana's. She came back 5 mninutes later to tell me that I am an asshole and that she would tell as many people as possible not to shop here. I said "thanks".

GG

 
Video: Birthday girl 

 
Video: bouncy castle arrives 

 
Video: being silly again 

Here's M(andy) and her husband Eddie. They are rather silly..................... 
Video: eee