Category: Travel

Amazing Spring Weather

Yellow Spring Flowers

The weather over the past five days has been unbelievable! Living in Northeast Pennsylvania all of my life, I’ve grown accustomed to overcast winters and hazy summers; rarely does the weather deliver bright, sunny, cloudless days. I honestly don’t remember the last time we’ve had blue skies for five days in a row. When I went to Spain in high school, the sky was a brilliant shade of blue every day, for ten days. I’ve never forgotten how nice that was and I’d love to go back for a longer stay.

I posted a few photos on Flickr that I took over the weekend of my dogs and flowers at my house and some I took today in Scranton.

Five Days in Baltimore

I’m not going to even try to relate every detail of the last two weeks. It’s not really worth it. However, I do want to say that last weekend (as in the one before this past weekend) was nice. I visited Annie and stayed down there from Friday to Tuesday morning; I even took her to work and picked her up on Monday. So for a few days, it was almost like I lived in Baltimore. That might not sound that exciting, but when we’ve been wishing we lived in the same city for almost five years and that event is only a few months away, it’s unbelievably exciting for us.

Long Overdue

I’m long overdue on updates here, again. I’ve sworn multiple times to update more often, but it seems that as soon as my life gets busy, I ignore any and all online presence I pretend to possess. In my last post, I completely left out a much bigger event—relative to my life, of course—than Gmail or Google Maps. The previous weekend (February 2, 3, and 4) the play I directed and Matt DeSciscio wrote, Point; Counterpoint, made its debut. Roughly four days before the show, I was about two phone calls away from a nervous breakdown—not really, hyperbole is fun—and legitimately worried that the show would bomb. Thankfully, we put in three days of long hours and tedious nitpicking of everything and the show came out a great success. The cast party later that night was quirky but fun; especially after the rest of the cast showed up, right Matt? And, to top it all off, Annie was able to come to Scranton (after a bit of confusion) and see the show on Sunday. She loved it, but she’s biased, right?

The week after the show was rough; too much to do, too little sleep, too many missed classes. I spent the weekend playing catch-up on work and sleep. The next week went better and I drove down to Baltimore to visit Annie for the weekend. I picked her up at work and we cooked a nice rotini dinner in her apartment. Considering that I wouldn’t see her before her birthday (which is tomorrow) and the order from Amazon came way early, I surprised her with an early gift: MacGyver Season One, her favorite show EVER! I’m so thoughtful (and narcissistic).

I made it from Baltimore to the Northumberland County Arts Center about ten minutes before Lourdes’ play began on Sunday to see my brother, Jason, in the show. It started snowing, so I decided to stay at home and come back to Scranton on Monday, but that turned out to not work so well; I missed work and class by the time I made it to the U.

Since then, I’ve been busy with class, work, job hunting, and web design projects. I want to keep this site up to date, but as I mentioned, my blog is always the first thing I drop when I’m busy. I don’t like it either, but I have to keep priorities alligned.

Spring Break Recap

Now that I’m back in Scranton and feeling the warmth of spring—and by warmth, I mean four-degree wind chill this morning—I figured that I’d recapitulate on the unbelievable events that took place over spring break. In actuality, break was a rather subdued affair that mostly consisted of sleeping in, catching up on some reading, and semi-motivated web design work. I did get some antibiotics to take care of a little case of pharyngitis, learned from a podiatrist that I had a “high foot strain,” and finally went for a haircut.

Over the weekend, a trip to Baltimore to visit Annie happened in spite of the snow that we received on Thursday night. By the time I left on Friday, the roads were dry in most areas. On Saturday, we met Michael, Katie, and Chris and some of their friends at the Coliseum, which looked a bit crazy on their website, but turned out to be a nice restaurant with good food. Midget wrestling did not happen while we were there, much to my relief.

Nice Weather for Annie’s Birthday!

The weather has been slowly warming up the past few days, but today was just wonderful. It was sunny with a slight breeze and the temperature was around 60 degrees. Baltimore was warmer, much to Annie’s delight; I happened to order a big helping of warm weather to celebrate her birthday today. Sorry, I don’t take requests from just anyone.

My day wasn’t so great, seeing as how it was more hectic than I expected. I had some lucky breaks throughout the course of the day—the greatest was getting out of my night class almost two hours early (it’s usually 6:30 — 9:10 PM). In the end, all the craziness of the day averaged itself out to something just past normal.

Wrapping Up 2003

I’m not going to go into any detail about what has happened since my last post. I actually finished all of my Christmas shopping on time; it was finished on Christmas Eve, just in time for the main event. Overall, Christmas was pleasant and quite relaxing. I received a good percentage of the items on my wish list, and several other unexpected, but nonetheless good gifts. Annie bought me a happy, little goldfish, which I promptly named Bethias—don’t ask, it’s a long and confusing story. I mention that gift because it’s my first official non-family pet, not because I have any grudges against any other gifts. It’s all good.

I suppose the next big event was New Year’s. As usual, Annie and I went up to Scranton for their First Night celebration, but instead of driving back, we stayed there overnight with some friends. It was a welcome relief, not having to drive home at 2 AM. New Year’s Day, Annie and I hit the stores in Wilkes-Barre on Kidder and Mundy Streets. I can’t believe all of the new stores that keep popping up there. While there, we happened by Circuit City where I used some of my Christmas money to buy SimCity 4: Deluxe. It was a bit of a splurge, considering I am very close to broke, but I just couldn’t resist any longer. The game actually rang up as thirty dollars, rather than the forty dollars that I expected. I love markdowns.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I’m not going to go into details about everything else that’s happened since the 18th. I will mention that I’m going to update later tonight and post a review of Medal of Honor: Rising Sun that I wrote for Amazon this morning. I plan to write reviews from time to time, and I’ll be sure to post them here for your reading enjoyment.

Like Pizza, Revolutions is Better the Next Day

I had a nice and balmy (by Scranton standards) weekend in Baltimore. Friday night, Annie and I just ordered some Domino’s from an angry Domino’s woman. Their hand-tossed pizza with extra cheese has just about the exact same consistency as Pizza Hut’s Cheese-Lover’s Pan Pizza, but Pizza Hut still edges them out in taste. Anywho, Annie and I went to see The Matrix Revolutions; my second viewing and Annie’s first. I definitely like it better than I did the first time, but there’s still some rather important questions that the film does not answer. Also, I really appreciated the large number of people who felt inclined to talk back to the movie. Really folks, I’m happy for you. I wish I could have maintained the innocence that allows you to believe that celluloid can hear your suggestions and modify itself accordingly.

Germans are Cool

I watched a show on the History Channel today about the Autobahn. It was originally dubbed Hitler’s Road because he commissioned the work as part of the “New Germany.” Like the roads of the Roman Empire, the Autobahn was intended to be the skeleton of the Nazi Empire. The stretch to the west would go to the Atlantic, while to the east it would run to Moscow. However, when the first stretch was opened, it carried only one car per kilometer stretch of roadway. During World War II, the Nazis blew up many of 1,000 bridges that had been built only a few years earlier. However, after the war, the Autobahn was rebuilt and extended throughout Germany.

Today, many sections of road boast no speed limit, while stretches around the cities become deadlocked with traffic. The coolest thing I learned was that on the unlimited portions of roadway, RUF, the Porsche tuning company, will test their cars before shipping them to customers in order to guarantee the top speed of the vehicle. The RUF CTR2 topped out at 212 mph on the Autobahn—and it’s all legal.

The Last Week of Summer Vacation

It’s been only a week since my last entry, but it’s been a busy week. Last Monday, Annie and I finally were able to head out to Rickett’s Glen State Park, a place that we had talked about visiting for at least a year. We headed out a bit later than planned, but we weren’t planning on hiking for 12 hours anyway. It was simple enough to get to the park, just drive 30 miles from Bloomsburg on Route 487; once we arrived at the park, it was a different story. We should have known it was a bad sign when there were road signs pointing us to the Falls Trail in two different directions. We finally found the trail that we wanted, a 2.8 mile trail that passed by the largest falls and was not too difficult. That trail should have connected to another trail that was 1.3 miles long. The park map lied. Repeatedly. The trail began smoothly enough, despite the fact that we accidentally went ten-minutes down a non-marked service trail. OK, minor setback. We saw the largest fall, the 94-foot-high Ganoga Falls which was a cool, stepped waterfall.

After that, the trail went downhill, and then uphill, and then downhill again. Turns out that the trail was barely blazed. We’re talking knee-high grass and mud that forced us to hike along the side of trail through thick forest for hundreds of feet. It also took us about five hours to go a supposedly five miles, so the path was definitely longer than the map said it was. Not fun. We were very happy to get back to the parking lot and have some dinner. There were about a dozen geese and ducks around the lake (about ten feet from our picnic table) and we fed them with croutons from our salad. Unlike the two little kids who were throwing sand at them, or the high school kids throwing Frisbee’s at the birds. I’m sure they’ll all turn out to be responsible members of society.

Tuesday was my last full day of work (I worked a few hours on Wednesday morning). After work, my dad and I tried to update my computer with more RAM and a new 30 GB 7200 RPM hard drive; it didn’t work after we were done. Thank you, HP, for your wonderful computers, lovingly crafted with easy updates out of sight and out of mind. As of this writing, I still don’t have my computer back up and running; hopefully it’ll be done by Friday.

On Thursday, Annie and I went back to King of Prussia, mostly so we could see The Matrix Reloaded on IMAX. We went there about two weeks earlier, but we missed the 7:00 PM show and we didn’t want to wait for the next show at 10 PM. Anyway, the movie rocked! Not that it surprised me, but it was just amazing to feel every kick, punch, and gunshot from the vibrations of 12,000 watts of surround sound. Oh, that and the fact that great action scenes deserve a five-story movie screen. The seats were also of the quite comfy, high-backed, rocking variety; I thought it was worth the $11.50 a ticket.

After the movie, we were hungry and craving Pizza Hut pan pizza so we drove around for a while, but King of Prussia only has an abandoned and boarded-up Pizza Hut. So we went to get on the Northeast Extension of the PA Turnpike and I accidentally pulled into the EZ-Pass Only lane (I don’t have one) to get a ticket. That may have something to do with the fact that the “EZ-Pass Only and Tickets” sign is the same color and style as the “EZ-Pass Only” sign. Stupid Penn-DOT. So I push the button to talk and then I realize that there’s nobody in the booth. After waiting a minute or two—to the annoyance of all the EZ-Passers behind me, I pull away quite pissed that I’m going to be forced to pay the highest toll because I don’t have a ticket. Thank God that the toll-booth guy at the next exit was extremely nice and let me go with only paying the normal toll for the exit. We found a Pizza Hut on the way home and had some delicious cheese-lover’s pan pizza and breadsticks.

Yesterday, our last day of summer vacation, Annie and I went to Beltsville State Park. We made a small mistake in going on one of the last Saturdays of summer in that the park was packed with people. The park is usually not that crowded, especially in early summer, but on Saturday the parking lot was nearly full. However, we still had a great time, just like we always do at the park. Annie and I both went back to school today; she went back to Baltimore and I’m in Scranton for the first time in nine months. It’s a little strange being back in school after such a long break, but hopefully everything will go well this year.

My Car is Feeling Old

However, it seems like the car is turning into a money pit this week. To start off the week, I didn’t get my vehicle registration in on time so I couldn’t get the car inspected. Then I noticed that a fog light was burned out. While I was waiting for my sticker, my car was just sitting in the rain that we have almost every day now. When I went to move it on Thursday, I noticed that there was some water sitting in a tiny puddle on the dashboard, which means that the windshield is still leaking a bit. The car also needs a new battery because the old one is just kicking around the grave at this point. Then, the garage where I took it to be inspected called to say that I need a new tie rod for the front end and a rear brake caliper. So a quick inspection that would have cost ten bucks will now be running close to two hundred. If anyone would like to own my piece of automobile history, I’m willing to trade for a late-model BMW or Nissan 350Z.