Andy and Darcy’s Blog

If you’re looking for information about the Clear Bottom Kayak tour in Cabo San Lucas, the Cactus Island kayaking trip in Mazatlan, or the Hideaway at Las Caletas trip in Puerta Vallarta, then I can tell you that we’ve done all that. And we liked them all.

Here are pictures from our most recent vacation. We went to three cities in Mexico.

Our first stop was Cabo San Lucas. We started our adventures off with some sea kayaking around the tip of Baja California. They call it Land’s End. It was beautiful, and my favorite kayaking location of our trip. We took my camera, and hoped it wouldn’t get wet. Our kayaks were huge blowup kayaks and they were very stable, but very slow. I like them. They were advertised as “clear bottom kayaks”, and they were. It’s just that there wasn’t much to see and the water was very choppy so it was hard to see anything through the bottom of the kayak. But the stability won me over. We could take out my camera and feel fairly secure doing so. I know my camera is going to fall in one of these days, but it didn’t happen during this trip. So we kayaked around the island that is the tip of peninsula and then we landed on a beach for a break.

Our guide took our picture in the kayaks you see above. We also snorkeled here as well, but there are no pictures there for obvious reasons. Cabo San Lucas was my favorite snorkeling spot of the trip. We saw a lot of colorful fish and a puffer fish around some rocks that were fairly sheltered. And on land there were pelicans everywhere. They are super cool. This one (in the picture above) posed for me, but he did start to look nervous the closer I got!

These activities were really fun, but the rest of Cabo San Lucas is shopping. They have military with big guns everywhere, so that is one thing. It must get rough there sometimes.

Our second stop was Mazatlan. Again, we sea kayaked out to an island called Cactus Island. It was full of massive tangled cactuses which were very cool. Our kayaks were the traditional plastic sea kayak, so we did get wet and we couldn’t use our camera very much. We ate a snack at this Mexican restaurant (pictured below). We had guacamole with queso fresco on top. We’re going to be making this at home some time! After that we went on an “extreme” hike to a look out point. There wasn’t much that was extreme about it. There were some hilarious signs though.

Our third stop was Puerta Vallarta. We went out to Las Caletas, a beach across the bay from Puerta Vallarta. Again, we kayaked and snorkeled, but the range is really limited on those two activities. They have animals, and you can see Andy holding a parrot below. I held a monkey. The beach was awesome, and we saw orchids as well.

Andy took all the pretty pictures, so if you want to see them go here.

The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington. I must have liked this book. I was extremely interested in it, and I found myself wanting to go back and continue reading it when I was not. It is about rich people in the 1920′s, and this book amused me just like Arrested Development and Dirty Sexy Money amused (or is amusing) me. But it is also a sad kind of love story as well, so it is not exactly the same.

The things that left the biggest impression on me are the story and the unique things that the characters said. I just want to mention a few of those things the characters said because they are probably even more noteworthy than the story itself since you can find a melancholy love story anywhere.

1) This story revolved around the introduction of automobiles in the United States. And according to the story, they were not all that reliable. So when they broke down people would yell “Git a hos!”. Yeah, I find that extremely amusing.

2) George, who is the rich dandy home from college, calls everyone a “duck”. Oh rich people, you are so entertaining.

3) George, the same one I just mentioned, says the same thing whenever he is introduced to someone. Someone says, “This is so and so.” George says, “Oh, that’s a funny name.”. He says it no matter what the name is. It’s rather annoying, and it is also rather funny as well.

Middlemarch by George Eliot. This book was long. I felt the relief of a runner after a marathon when I finished this book. It is like War and Peace with no historical chapters. It is all about marriages–good ones and bad ones. Lots of people marry for the wrong reason in this book, and we just read along and see how they play out. In the end there is peace, but you can kind of tell the peace is due to the people adjusting to their good or bad positions. It isn’t exactly a happy ending, in my opinion.

Last week, we went to the Greatest Christmas Party Ever (or something like that!). There was a Christmas tree, Christmas movies, and lots of festive people. And I watched people make cookies. Andy made snickerdoodles, Kristi made a dipped pretzel sort of cookie, and Katie and Mike made and frosted sugar cookies. We ate pizza, and then we had some hot chocolate that was kicked up a few notches (for some people). And to top it all off, it started snowing by the end of the night. I can’t say that Andy and I were very happy to see the snow, given that we were driving in the morning, but it turned out to be not bad at all. Well, here are some pictures that I took, and Merry Christmas!

Cookies…

And more cookies…

And one more thing…several of us tried sherry for the first time at this gathering. It was like drinking salad dressing. Yuck…at least I know what it tastes like now.

I take pictures; therefore, I blog. I know there are much more interesting weather stories out there especially for one of my target audiences, but I planned to write this blog when I took pictures on December 2, 2007, so here it is anyway. This is my weather update for those of you who like to hear such things.

It is cold. It has been both colder and warmer than when I took these pictures, but I can tell you now that there is still snow and everything looks pretty much the same. It was the first shoveling of the season, but not the first snow. The snow was topped off by a nice layer of ice so you had to crack it, then shovel. Fun, ya?

I have been held up by the untimely demise of my (former) harddrive, and there have been cooler things to blog about than books lately so I’m finally getting around to books. Over the past month there have been good ones and bad ones.

War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. Well, this one is no surprise, especially if you’ve seen the movie. Except that the story in the movie is completely different than the one in the book. But the main idea is the same. The Martians tried to take over the world (I mean Great Britain). And as we all know, they were defeated by the common cold. One thing that annoyed me was that the narrator is completely reckless with his life in this book, but I guess that makes it exciting. I think this one got no stars on my book rating scale. The movie was better, but I didn’t like that either.

Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones. I was just browsing through the library and picked this one up. It was spectacular! It is a book for probably…young adults? But it is a completely enjoyable story that is not too scary and has a pretty good plot. The plot is this: there is a boy named Cat who is an enchanter with nine lives. His has an evil sister, and there is a plot to unbalance the force of good. And one other thing: There is a magician who appears when they call him by name so they call him “You Know Who.” Sound familiar? I checked and this book was written in 1977. So its quite original. Five stars.

The Ill-Made Mute by Cecilia Dart-Thornton. This one was recommended to me by Ms. Kira Foken. And I must thank Ms. Kira Foken because I did indeed enjoy this book. The heroine’s face is poisoned (and extremely ugly), so this book follows her adventures, and they are pretty entertaining. It was a little scary, but most of it was “fantastical scary” which I would define as “couldn’t happen to me.” Someone else has the next book in this series checked out, but I’m so excited to read it when it comes in again. Five stars.

The Briar King and The Charnel Prince by Greg Keyes. These are the first two books in a series, and I have no idea how long that series is. I hope that it is a completed series! This book reminds me of George R. R. Martin, but without a lot of the morbidity. It is still morbid in some parts, but its not horrible. And I do want to find out how the battle between good and evil goes so I really want to read the next one. So the sad thing is that the library doesn’t own the next book in the series (this always happens to me). Five stars for both of these books.

The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones. I didn’t love this one immediately like I did Charmed Life, but in the end I really enjoyed it. Four stars.

Myst, The Book of Atrus by Rand Miller. I’ve read some very convincing reviews of this book, and it didn’t really live up to my expectations. It was kind of boring, which was possibly due to the lack of changing scenery. The plot is this: the main character and his father live in a city (whose inhabitants are dead) and they create worlds in the books those people left behind. People who played the video game seemed to understand what was going on, but it didn’t do much for me. Two stars.

Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier. Here’s the plot: The heroine discovers latent magical powers, and she was deceived by her parent. Nothing new there in the world of fantasy. The one unique thing was it was set in Austrailia and had a lot of Austrailian phrases which were interesting. But the story didn’t entertain me. Lots of other people like this book, or so I hear. No stars.

Smoky The Cow Horse by Will James. Forgive my generalizations, but I’m sure there is a 6 year old boy who loves cowboys and would love this book. I hated it. This book is written in the dialect of a cowboy (or that’s how it appeared to me). And the subject-verb disagreements in this book were an abomination. The book is about the life of Smoky the horse and a cowboy named Clint. Smoky goes from running free on the range, to becoming the best cow horse ever, then to becoming the best bucking bronco show pony ever, and then finally after many difficulties he goes home with Clint to spend his retirement on the range. Negative stars?

It’s always nice to be able to go home early on Friday, and now is the time of year when we must use up our vacation. So our stars were aligned, and we left work at noon.

When we got home, we found packages on our doorstep. One of those packages was my new harddrive. And the other was a styrofoam cooler full of steaks (and stuff). Yes, my grandparents had sent us the gift of steak. Our fridge is quite full now (and that is a good thing because it has been snowing this weekend). Thank you!!

And that is not all. After we had unpacked the meat, we got to the dry ice! Dry is sublime (hee hee).

Well, that was fun. And then we started working on installing my new harddrive. This is the reason I am a little backlogged on my blogging.

Actually, I mean Andy installed it. And he had his work cut out for him because Apple ensured that he had to take apart everything that could be unfastened from the computer. But two hours later, the harddrive was in and we were trying to figure out how to do a restore from a Time Machine backup. Again, it was Andy doing all the work. After 10 hours of restoring, it was finally back. Time machine even restored my settings and my background. Thank you, Andy.

Some people went shopping the day after Thanksgiving; other people slept in, ate a leisurely breakfast, and then decorated Grandma’s Christmas tree.

Look at that transformation! As you can see, more glitter is better.

And here are some ornaments. Our plan could be summed up as this: put every ornament you can find on the tree.

I really didn’t do my job documenting Thanksgiving Day this year, but here are a few pictures I took before the events started.

It snowed, as you can see.

I tried to take a picture of the happenings in the kitchen, but they were just a blur.

This was the stuffing mentioned earlier. The camera loved it.

And mince pie…mmm?

The pictures are a little late, but that’s another story in itself. Here are pictures of our pre-Thanksgiving Day dinner in Rochester.

The day started out with a light dusting of snow, our first of the year. And like all pre-Thanksgiving Day dinners, it was cold. This year we fried the turkey in the back yard.

Here are shots of meal time preparation. Andy is carving the 17 lb. turkey.

And here are shots of everyone eating. Our family room was more or less cleared out for this event. This was the first year we tried the “one long table” arrangement. It made me realize how important the passing part of Thanksgiving is.