Raving Amicks

I can’t believe I made the train today. My bus came a couple minutes early and I was pretty sure I was screwed. The only other bus I could possibly take was ten minutes up the hill and even then I doubted it could get me to the train on time.

So then I whooped out my tubephone and discovered that the ten-minutes-away bus was leaving in less than five. And since I had nothing to lose at this point, I huffed it up the hill with my overfilled backpack and suitcase.

Wouldn’t you know it? I just barely made it. Which is good too, cuz the train also left early (though, with me on it). Hooray for creative bussing!

And now, if you’ll direct your attention to the eastern sidebar… and assuming you have logged into your Raving Amicks account, you will notice that I have updated our stalker page for Mason. Please peruse it at your leisure.

Mom and dad came up on Wednesday to bring a fancy bed frame and dresser. We ended up painting my room in the house I’m moving into this month and moving quite a bit of larger items over as well.

Well, even though it’s been over a month—and even though I posted these pictures almost as long ago—I thought I should write about Tyler’s and my trip to Chicago. We went the last weekend of April to visit our friend who was there for law school. Incidentally, he already graduated and returned to Seattle just last weekend.

My highlight of the trip was definitely the turtle racing at Big Joe’s. We went with our friend, his fiancée, another friend who traveled with us, and some other random people from Chicago. Basically, the turtle racing is a lottery; for every drink you order, you get a number of raffle tickets based on what you ordered (and the bartender’s whims). The more you drink, the better chance you have of being drawn. If your raffle ticket is drawn, then you go up to a table and randomly pull out a ball with a number. That number corresponds to one of the six numbers taped on the racing turtles’ backs, which means the turtle with that number is “your” turtle for the race. The person with a winning turtle gets a free T-shirt, and the person with a losing turtle gets a free beer.

Despite having ordered an obscene number of pitchers of beer, none of our tickets were called. Oh well, I did muscle my way up and take lots of pictures of the scared turtles.

Meanwhile, Tyler’s favorite part of Chicago was definitely all the brownstone and brick buildings. He can write all about that if he wants, though.

Oh yeah, and we did other things like seeing two pairs of mating tortoises at the free public zoo, having drinks at the top of the Hancock tower, and getting alternately pummeled by rain and wind.

Spent 1 week plus a few days fishing for bonefish with 4 of my friends. This is my 5th time to X-mas Island and maybe the best. We stayed at a new place (Ikari House) with air conditioning and separate toilets and showers and great food! Definitely an upgrade from our other visits. Anyway, for years there has been one flight in a week from Hawaii via jet. There are about 8 simple fishing lodges on the island with a fishing capacity of maybe 90 fisherman at any one time. Well, it seems the Kirimati government and Air Pacific had this disagreement on subsidies paid to Air Pacific (tremendous “trickle down” economic value from visiting fisherman). Anyway, a small charter outfit took over the route (once a week) with an 18 person capacity turbo-prop. On our flight in there were only we five fisherman, so we had all the great fishing spots to ourselves for a week! To give you an idea of the isolation, X-mas Island was only inhabited during WWII with permanent residents starting then. Our head guide “English”’s grandfather was the first person to live permanently on X-mas Island. Give this a hard thought – “English” is married, has 3 children AND HAS NEVER BEEN OFF THIS ISLAND! Not even to the nearby island of Tarawa! Anyway, we fished nearly dawn to dusk everyday, got treated well and had a great time. Here are some pictures. X-mas Island is not for the faint-hearted, no bars, no restaurants, not much of anything except “stayin’ alive!” (for  all the locals) and fishin’ for us visitors. .

I just got back from a great week long trip to San Diego and Los Angeles. I went with 30 other students in Western’s ID program to visit various design firms and museums. I’ve made a flickr account to showcase all of our adventures on the trip: WWUindustrialdesign flicker.

UPDATED 2x at end…

I just wanted to let everyone know that Mindy and I have begun our trip without any problems. I found some free wifi at the airport, yay! BTW, Mindy and I give Korean Air all thumbs up!

UPDATE 1 (4:17 PM on Wednesday, December 3rd): Mindy and I have been hanging out in Mumbai for a bit now. Our flight to Hyderabad should be boarding soon. We’re safe, but tired. And could probably use a shower.

UPDATE 2 (1:57 AM on Friday, December 5th): We continued our trip to Hyderabad without issue, and boy is the Hyderabad airport nice. It’s only 1 or 2 years old and is way better than both the domestic and international Bombay airports. Parthu surprised us by being there when we arrived (I was just planning on calling him and waiting). Unfortunately, it looks like he got a little sick, but still was very helpful in getting us to our hotel, and the hotel was pretty much exactly what we had hoped for. I’ll update with a new post later.