Baron Davis is a god!

The Warriors beat the number 1 seeded Mavs at home! I cannot wait for Wednesday. http://www.nba.com/warriors/news/2007_Playoffs_R1G1.html

Yau-Man's victories

If you're a Yau-Man fan, then tonight's Survivor has to be one of the best ever. He follows up last week's hijinks with the immunity idol by winning the immunity challenge for his team. In spite of the jocks team boasting beforehand about how they were going to take the archery challenge, Yau-Man completely destroyed them with his technique on both bow and arrow and spear! It was awesome.

That was followed up by Lisi getting voted off, following a hilarious exchange between Lisi and Dreamz at tribal council. Lisi was really pretty disrespectful and condescending to him before, so it was good to see him push back. It was especially funny when he referred back to a comment she made indicating that he had delivered a soliloquy. Dreamz is probably the most entertaining survivor, and gets more and more likable as you watch him.

Bureaucratic fun

So we’re going to Mexico on Sunday. It’s a really good trip. Gordon actually left Wednesday morning, he’s going to drive to San Diego, meet up with his friend Sean, and then they’re going to drive on down into Baja, past a town called Loreto. We’re going to camp, kayak and so forth, so that’s why he’s driving, to take all the stuff in his truck. Aisling and I are going to fly down on Sunday, along with Sean’s wife, Jenny. Now when we planned this trip, we noted that Aisling’s passport had expired, so we applied for a new one in January, which is in plenty of time, based on their information, for this trip. Well what I didn’t know is that the travel laws have changed, requiring passports to Canada, Mexico, Aruba and other places, so the system is quite overloaded. Our trip was approaching, and the passport hadn’t arrived. I checked the status on line, it just said in process. So I began to panic last week, two weeks before our flight, and started calling their toll-free number. It took me about five days to get through. Now to be fair, I wasn’t being that persistent, probably only calling 15-20 times per day. I finally got through on Friday. The person I spoke to told me that the passport was in the San Francisco office, and that she would mark it “expedite” and “will call”. She told me that if I didn’t hear by Tuesday to call back. Well, guess what, I didn’t hear by Tuesday! By this time I had figured out how to get through on the toll free number, so Wednesday morning, I called, spoke to a person who told me he was making an appointment for me at the passport office for 9 on Thursday and that he would email me a confirmation. Of course, the email never arrived, I got up Thursday morning at 5:30, called them, and got a different story, that they don’t email appointment confirmations etc. etc. By this time, I had pretty much decided I was coming in to the passport office no matter what anyone said. So I gathered all my documents and headed in.

I arrived at the building at 8:30 to find three different lines, each about a block long. I finally figured out which line to get into – the “pending” line – and waited. I waited in line outside until 11:00. Everyone in the line had a similar story to mine. There were people who were leaving that evening, or the next day, people who had been there earlier in the week and were just coming back to pick up their passports. I was so happy to get in the building at 11:00, that I didn’t care that all they did was put me in another line to get a number. I was in that line for about 30 minutes. Then they gave me a number – 195. They were on number 120 when I got the number. But at least I could just sit on the floor and wait. So I did, until about 2. After all this hassle, when I got up there at two, the guy was great. He said, yes, here’s your application, it’s not processed yet, but we’ll do it today, and you can pick it up after 3:30. I could leave the building and come back at 3:30 if I wanted. By that time, I would have been terrified to leave the building, thinking I would have had to wait in line just to get back in. Instead, I hung around until 3:30, got in line again, in fact I was first in line, and actually got the passport at 3:45. That’s just over seven hours waiting in line for Aisling’s passport, after I had applied for it in plenty of time for the trip. But it was better than canceling the trip, or having to return the next day for pickup so I was happy enough with it. I just hope the trip is worth it!

The moral of the story is probably pretty obvious. Apply for your passport in plenty of time, way ahead what they tell you is needed! The other moral of the story is how people really bond when they're forced to go through something unpleasant together, for hours at a time. I made several new best friends in line! When I finally got Aisling's passport, I actually got applause!

The truth about cats & dogs

Yesterday (Wednesday) was a bad day. First, there was the whole passport thing (see previous blog entry) and then there’s the trouble with cats and dogs.

The day wasn’t getting off to a great start with the whole passport agency thing, when Gordon told me that on top of everything else, one of our cats, Sushi, was dead. He found her in the street, run over by a car. Now I must admit to being somewhat blasé about dead cats. I love cats, until Sushi’s demise we had three, now we’re down to two, but I have a really bad track record with them, killing six of them over the last two years. Well, to be honest, there’s only three confirmed fatalities, the other three are MIAs. In addition to Sushi, my first cat, Lizzie, was run over. Then another cat, Abby, got very sick and we had to have her put down. The other three – Willie, Pockets, and Bobo – all took off. I like to think that they went to nice new homes. Willie and Bobo just kind of wandered off, but Pockets’ escape was truly spectacular. I stupidly let Aisling bring her to school for show and tell when she was in elementary school. We got to the classroom and Aisling let her out of the cat carrier. Then the kids got all excited and Pockets sort of freaked out. When one of the kids accidentally opened the door, Pockets made her escape.

Anyhow, while I’m blasé about dead cats, Aisling isn’t. She was at school, so I planned to tell her when I got home from work. However, she came home at three, and couldn’t find Sushi and sort of freaked out. She pretty much became hysterical, and just started calling Gordon and bawling on the phone. Gordon was driving to San Diego, so there wasn’t much he could do. It just ended up with me leaving work early, abandoning an important meeting, and then getting home to her as soon as I could. By the time I got home, Dara had told her about Sushi, because none of us liked lying to her on the phone. She was really upset, of course, but eventually, she calmed down enough, and since Gordon was gone, and I can’t cook, I suggested that the three of us go out to dinner.

So we headed for the door, and as soon as we opened it, we saw a dead dog in the middle of the street. Actually, it wasn’t quite dead but very much dying. It was really shocking to see it right after what happened to Sushi. Aisling just turned and went back into the house, but Dara and I went out to see what was going on. Well it turns out that the dog was Max, the pet of Aisling’s friend, Alice. The woman who ran over the dog was talking to my neighbor, I went over to check it out, and then Alice came over from her house and, naturally, the poor child just lost it. When Aisling realized what was going on, she also got totally upset and the situation was really pretty intense and chaotic. Dara called Animal Control, the police came, we all generally complained about how fast people drive, and the dog got picked up and put into a bag, I took all the kids, including Alice, out to eat, but it was just very weird, two animals run over and killed on the same day in the same place.