The Time Sink

I took today off to get a few things done and to maybe catch up on some rest. So far I've managed to take my email almost current and get a handle on some things around here...

Now as to the rest thing? Well... Yeah, it's only in the nineties today; I think I'll go blade and see about spending the rest of the evening inside under a fan...

Hmm... Do you think it's all sorts of 'cheesy' when someone comes back from vacation and then blogs the vacation in a daily fashion? If you think that's a 'wry' enough comment, then you'd better grab a slice of ham to finish off the 'deli special' I'm serving up for the next few days <g>!

We headed out last Wednesday hoping to beat the scheduled 109 stuff here in the valley. It turned out that pretty much the entire central state got hammered that day. We were just one row of hills inland from the Pacific Ocean, but even Gilroy was in the mid-nineties... Bonfante Gardens was as hot as the rest of the area, but by using the air conditioned restaurants and gift shops we were able to keep things a little under control. ...and the shade from the trees and the spray from the waterfalls really helped out.

We hit the shops and told the guys we'd make a pass through at the end of the day; then we headed out and took in the rides and the gardens and had some lunch. We all took a ton of pics; you'll be seeing some of them in the upcoming weeks, more likely on the blog than as a separate page.

We spent a bunch of time in with the newest exhibit, a parakeet and parrot aviary. We all took turns with the cameras as the guys coaxed the birds onto 'food sticks'. I'd say that had to be the highlight of the visit that day... We gradually wound down and had some dinner and then headed on back through the gift shops. By the time the park closed down at 1800 we were ready to head into town and check into our hotel...

(interlude) If you send me an email to the private account and you don't receive an answer in a timely fashion just give it a shot on the public account. Some swell person has hijacked a couple of machines (he seems to have a liking to PacBell dsl accounts) and is using this domain name to prepend spoofed email addresses for a couple of loads of spam.

The returns for bad addresses and such are filtered easily enough (as evidenced by the bounces by places with decent filters in place), but I'm betting the domain may end up blackholed at some point...

Well, the email deal has been taken care of with some filters and some changes to accounts. Things should be pretty much transparent to everyone, but if something isn't working give me a shout on the public account. ...then again, AT&T has some pretty aggressive filtering. Hmmm...

Vacation? Sure <g>! When we got back to the motel Wednesday evening the boys and I ended up in the pool and in the spa. Somewhere during that time frame we decided to spend another evening at the same hotel rather than hunting around in Monterey. That turned out to be a good decision just from not having to pack twice...

Thursday morning we took off for Monterey and spent most of the day at the Aquarium. Shelley loves the sea otters there; she spent a bunch of time watching them when we first got in and then spent several hours before closing time watching them play. In between otter watching sessions we toured the rest of the facility and spent a little time out on Cannery Row...

We figured we'd eat on the wharf, but before that Shelley wanted to take the boys by a local park and let them play for a bit. That worked out pretty well for them, but even better for me: one of the local cemeteries was just across the street so I had a chance to go crawl while they played.

One last comment (so far) on the email thing: what was interesting to me was the inclusion in the bounces from several places of messages to the effect, "I'm closing this account due to spam; please change my address to xzy@mymail.com (or some such)". Yeah, I know most of the spammers of the type that were working this place aren't monitoring the returns, but some certainly do. Whatever...

Back to the vacation: Since we'd spent the night again in Gilroy, that put us within a mile or so of the Outlet Malls there. Oh, yeah, a little something for everyone. I got my annual shoe shopping done (outlet prices plus a 'buy one pair, get another for half' deal), Shelley had fun in the kitchen stores, Brad and I crawled a book store and Daniel hit the Raiders' Store and even met Cliff Branch, who was there signing pictures...

...kind of a long day here today:

Meet Anya... She's here on a trial basis to see how things could work with a dog. Actually, she's not the one on trial; the two gentlemen you see crashed next to her in yesterday's picture are the ones who are going to have to prove themselves...

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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

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