We have arrived.

The family has arrived at our abode on the banks. After a seemingly short trip filled with bad country and whiny pop bands, the car is unloaded and we are setting up the house. Mmm vacahome sweet vacahome.

I’ve got a picture of the house and a sweet picture of some dunes, but my blackberry doesn’t like javascript. So I can’t upload them yet. Oh well.

And Scott, you’d be surprised what a bored almost twenty year old will do when he’s trapped in the back of a Chevy Trailblazer for seven hours.

I read the majority of a book titled “Generation Kill”, which is now an HBO miniseries. The book is about the First Recon unit in the Marines and their role in the current Iraqi war. I’d recommend it for anyone who doesn’t mind the gutter mouths of my generation’s marines. It is actually a really good book in my opinion. A nice, easy beach read… that never actually lasted until I hit the sand. :-p

Time to vaca.
Take it easy,
_Tom.

Crazy.

Hey all. It’s about 3:30am right now and I am still awake. Why, you ask?  I’m goin to the beach in a few hours, AND I got a crackbe…  er, blackberry.  But it’s mostly the beach keeping me up.

So I fell asleep pretty much right after I wrote that sentence. It is now six fortyfive am and I’m in the back seat on the way to the Outer Banks. My sister has some odd country on the stereo and my “noise-cancelling” earbuds are not pumping out “Virginia Coalition” loudly enough, or securely enough I guess.

This blackberry thing. I kinda like it. It took me a few minutes to adapt to the size of the keys, but once I got used to it I was fine. I haven’t really had any problems since, have just been flying across the keyboard. The web browser, while sparse in the features department, gets the job done. The media player, another place that RIM (the creators of the Blackberry line of products) took a minimalist approach, could also use some attention. It does get the job done, nonetheless. Earpiece and speakerphone quality are actually two places that the unit exceeded my expectations. Word on the street is that with the new BB operating system, which comes out soonish, both the browser and media player, among other things, get some much needed attention. :-)

This year, my sister has decided to document our trip to NC. She has taken maybe five photos so far, and I am pretty sure she has missed her mark on the majority of her shots. At one point she took a random picture (with the flash on) and my mom asked her what it was of, thinking Anne had seen something neither of us had. Turns out she hadn’t: her response was an over-excited “TREES!”. I sometimes wonder about that twin of mine…

The presence of a camera this early in the trip gets me somewhat excited. If any of you remember my trip last year, you will remember that I returned home with some pretty sweet photographs. I did some research on the area we visit each year and read about some pretty cool-sounding places that aren’t too far away. Only real question is will I really want to sacrifice a day on the beach to go shoot some photographs? Guess that will just have to depend on how badly I burn this year.

In my diabetic life, nothing has really happened. I am due for an A1c drawing, but just haven’t been able to fit it in anywhere. Now that I’m done working the Villanova summer music program and will be home for a few weeks, though, I should be good to go. I did have an incident on Thursday that might be good to note. I had a thigh site on, a rare occurrence these days. Turns out my thigh sucks. The insulin wasn’t getting absorbed after day two, and I ended up around five eighty while I was at work. Woof. Needless to say, that was fixed. And then I somehow ended up going low a few hours later. It sure is nice to be on a see-saw again. :-p

Well my thumbs are actually getting a little tired, so I’m going to read for a bit. Maybe pass out for a bit in the process. Take it easy ya’ll, cause life’s just too short.

_Tom.

PS: My mother sometimes drives like a crazy person. And my twin is tone-deaf. I guess my mom’s driving is simply because she is following my dad, who is driving pretty erratically. As usual. But that doesn’t change the fact that Twin can’t sing. Shame.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind.

This past weekend was a great weekend.  My numbers were, well.  They were numbers at least.  I held my own.  I discovered that getting out of Villanova for a while and just relaxing is the best.  Nova reminds me of school (duh) and makes me miss the people that aren’t here for the summer.  It often makes things go down the drain, and makes me act like I’m six.  Getting out of here, however… out of sight, out of mind.  Sure, I missed people.  But I missed the right people.  I missed the people that don’t make me hate night time.  I missed the people that make me smile and don’t cause me grief.

I bought an Xbox 360 the other day.  Purchased two games with it, one roleplaying game (Lost Odyssey) and one semi-tactical shooter (Gears of War).  After Gears flat out did not work in my machine, I returned it and bought a legit tactical shooter (Rainbow Six: Vegas 2).  I went home Thursday night after work, and walked into a house of chaos.  My family from Texas visited for the fourth, and of course the kids came along too.  Let’s just say that having a five year old, a six year old, and a fifteen year old added into the mix was pretty interesting.  The Xbox kept the kids entertained for the most part, but the pool surely helped too.  Ended up starting the campaign in RS:V2 on Thursday night and completing it on Sunday afternoon.  It was somewhat difficult to find time to play since it is rated mature due to language (not to mention the fact that you do a lot of killing people….).  We tried to shield the youngins as much as possible, and ended up renting an offroad racing game to play while they were present in the room.  Turns out that I flatout suck at dirt bike games.

Had the best wine I’ve had in ages (hahaha ages….  let’s say a while, at least) on Thursday night as well.  Homemade wine is definitely the way to go.  It was Raspberry, which would normally turn me off, but this stuff was pretty good.  The alcohol content was absurdly high, so it was more like taking a flavored shot (drinking out of dixie cups — classy.)  No one else that was there really liked it, my sister couldn’t even stand the smell of it (which is very good, since she was the dd and I wouldn’t have wanted to make her miss out on something she wanted).  The night was going well until I thought it was a good idea to start sending texts to a certain someone…  and then the night got pretty quiet.  After that, though, it was completely out of sight and mind.  Which made for an awesome night.  =P

The actual fourth was spent wishing the rain would stop, and then sitting in the chilly pool making sure no children drowned, and then making sure no children ended up getting beaten to death by their brother.  Can you say aggressive?  Never seen a kid who takes a swing that fast and then thinks he did nothing wrong.  Excuse me, no.  If I can lift you out of the pool with one hand, you better not be throwing punches at me.  It doesn’t take much more effort to throw you over the fence and forget about you for a while. ;-p  The food was great, fireworks were loud, unsure if they were cool lookin; never made it there.  Saturday was pretty chill though.  Hung out with a friend, midnight swim, watched a movie, really fun night.  All in all, the weekend away from Nova was the best I’ve had in a really long time.

Anyways.  I’m reading Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes right now.  The further I read, the more I want to go to Europe and simply enjoy life.  Everything here seems so ‘do this, do that, do this faster, make this bigger, play that louder, get more of that’.  The concept of just relaxing and enjoying life seems to foreign to me, and I can’t figure out why.  I’m not stressed (much), I’m not really worried about much of anything (anymore, short of grades and graduation and pleasing others, I guess), so I don’t get why it seems like such a crazy idea to just slow down and enjoy it all.  The thought of sitting on a balcony in the German countryside, particularly, enjoying some fine locally brewed German beer in the evening…  it seems like such a dream.  But ah… it’s such a good dream. haha  Expensive, but… mmm.

Alright, I have work at 7.30 tomorrow morning. Time for some bedtime reading.  Be safe.

Peace,
Tom.