Next Year's Vacation

Well, next year's vacation has been booked. Laissez les bon temps rouler!

The Door

This is our door from our cruise. We did not even place in the finalist for voting which we took as a personal insult. Or maybe a challenge for next year. I do like my strat and my fish and Paula's great work on the background and the frame around the poster in the middle.

Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise - Day Seven - This is a Man's World

A bittersweet moment. This is the last song from the last performance by Trampled Under Foot on the Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise #23. So glad I got to see them before the end, but there was open hostility between the siblings during this show, with Danielle refusing to introduce Nick's solos songs and storming off the stage. I think she wanted them to do only TUF songs and not have Nick repeat his solo work for the fourth time during the cruise. I have to agree with Danielle, this performance should have been about TUF and not Nick. Still, what a voice on this woman. My god!

Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise - Fredericks Brown

Fredericks Brown opened for Taj Mahal on the Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise, the Fredericks half of the duo being Deva (Mahal) Fredericks, Taj's daughter. This is a really great song by them.

Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise - The Lowrider Band

One of the highlights of the cruise has been the Lowrider Band, or as we all remember them, War. There were seven original members of War. Two have died. Of the five still with us, one of them is touring as War, the other four (Harold Brown, Lee Oskar, B.B. Dickerson and Howard Scott) are in the Lowrider Band and they sound just as great today as they did in the 1970s..

Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise - Day Two - Ronnie Baker Brooks

A long snippet of Ronnie Baker Brooks from the Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise #23 that I took out on the Pool Deck of the Norwegian Sun.  We became Ronnie fans on this cruise.

Legendary Rythm and Blues Cruise - Day One - The Lowrider Band

This was the end of our first day on the cruise an the beginning of our second. Loved the Lowrider Band (AKA War)

Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise -- First Night

First night of the Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise out on the pool deck while the 44s blues band played in the background with my baby girl Paula and friend William Stout. Dancing away our first night at sea. Before we ran into Bill we had watched Bernard Allison and Trampled Under Foot play. Hot damn!

Daily Sketch -- Cabo

This was done in 2007, a sketch of some of the rocks at Cabo San Lucus.

This is a Man's World

So very jazzed that we will be seeing Trampled Under Foot in October on the Blues Cruise. This will be our first time taking the Blues Cruise and we can't wait.

Dive! Dive!

Us on the "deck" of the "submarine" on Catalina Island. I used the quotes as this thing never actually submerges. It was a beautiful day though.

Look! Up in the sky!

Yep, we are in Albuquerque. What did you expect to see?

Nobody's Inn

We checked in today at the Nobody's Inn in Durango, CO., so named because, well, nobody was in. We received a code in an email which got us in the door then upstairs we found the key to our room in the door. It was exhaustive carrying our luggage up the steep stairs to our room after spending the day at Mesa Verde. Had we known the door in the back of the hotel was on the upper floor that would have helped a lot. Anyway, very cute place and right downtown.

It Is Real!

We arrived at Monument Valley today and all that stuff you see in the movies, it's real! Not ashamed to admit it made me cry.

What's Behind it All?

We got back from San Francisco on Sunday. We stayed at a wonderful Worldmark Hotel there, in a colorful neighborhood full of cinematic history. Here is the view across the street from the hotel. I recognized it immediately

Dismal Nitch

We are back from our weeklong+ trip to Oregon and Washington. One of the fun aspects of it for me was trying out my new camera (a Sony DSC-H20), which is the best camera I have ever owned. Here is a picture of my wife, Dayle, taken at a place called Dismal Nitch. We found a lot of depressingly named places along the Columbia River. Dismal Nitch is just across the river from Astoria, Oregon, where we spent the first night of our vacation. We wondered about the names of these places and learned that they go all the way back to the Lewis and Clark expedition. According to the Fort Clatsop Bookstore:

Heavey (sic) storms confined the members of the Corps of Discovery near the mouth of the Columbia River. For six days in November 1805, they set up camp at an area Wm. Clark referred to as a "dismal nitich". (sic) Today, this place is still called "Dismal Nitch" and is located just east of the Washington end of the Astoria/Megler Bridge.

iGo Now

We are getting ready for a week+ long vacation and one of the things I am doing today is getting our cell phone chargers together. We use the iGo charger, which allows you to buy one charger and spend less than two dollars for the tip that fits your current phone. When you get a new phone, which requires a different charger you spend another buck+ on a new tip and you are good to go. We have three iGos, one for each car and one for the home. This all reminded me of what happened last year while I was traveling back and forth to Florida for work.

Yep, I left my iGo charger in my rental car, dumb-ass that I am. When I got home I called the rental car company (who shall remain nameless to protect the incompetent) and told them what had happened. They looked around, found my iGo in their lost-and-found box and said they would put it aside for me and I could pick it up the next time I was in Florida. I gave them the date of my next arrival (a week later) and said my "thank yous."

A week later I fly into Ft. Lauderdale and go by the nameless rental counter to pick up my iGo (my company had booked me this trip with a car from a different company). I tell them who I am and what I am there for and this woman takes my name and goes into the back room and is back there for about 15 minutes. She finally returns and says they don't have anything that looks like an iGo and I am just out of luck. I ask if I can look and so after a bit of huffing and puffing on the woman's part she retrieves the box of lost cell phone chargers from the back room.

"See, there is no charger like the one you described."

I said, "Did you look in the big envelope on the top of the box? The one with my name on it and today's date?"

The Bare Essentials of Safety

Last year I took approximately 20 airline flights. Actually, when you count the connecting flights, I took a lot more than that, and each one began with the safety spiel by the crew or a safety video by the airline, none of which I gave much attention. That is the problem airlines face, nobody pays attention to the safety instructions. Air New Zealand thinks they have that problem licked:

The Economy is Not the Cause of This One

This AP piece today entitled "Cruise lines slash prices" begins:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Alaska's tourism industry is taking a hit because of the downturn in the U.S. economy, as well as the slowdown in the economy globally.

It totally, and perhaps purposefully, misses the true cause of disinterest in the upper 1 by those of us in the lower 49: that nitwit Sarah Palin, and her like, live in Alaska. I'm not being facetious and I'm not trying to be funny. My wife and I have discussed this many times since the disaster from Alasker showed her dim-witted, lipstick-Spackled, winkin', blinkin' and noddin' mug on the national scene. My wife and I like to cruise and we have been talking for years about doing the Alaska trip, but by October 2008 neither of us any longer had the desire to go.

Not only is she, by her inane self a torrid turn-off, but the collection of illiterate, gun-toting, Jesus-loving, witch-fearing, meth-head white trash losers that constitute her family and friends are the kind of people I never want to have to deal with. By parading this long line of redneck retards onto the national stage the Republican party tarnished the appeal of Alaska for tens of millions of Americans. The AP really blew it on this story; the cruise industry and the Alaskan tourist industry has Sarah Palin to blame.

Science Fiction Becomes Fact!

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

McCoy: Where are we going?
Kirk: Where they went.
McCoy: Suppose they went *nowhere*?
Kirk: Then this will be your big chance to get away from it all.

Those Star Trek guys always were ahead of the curve!