The Dark Knight

Today Michael came over in the afternoon and at 3:15 we went to see The Dark Knight with his dad. I thought it was very enjoyable and a lot better than Batman Begins. It was very long but well done and the joker was amazingly creepy. I hear he was nominated for an Academy Award for the performance.

Lord of the Rings meets Warhammer

Yesterday I went over to Michael's house and he gave me a very late birthday present, a set of Lord of the Rings Orc miniatures similar to Warhammer, along with a paint set. He also gave me a small bag of static grass to use for the base. This morning, I got up and painted three orcs: one spearman, one infantry, and one archer. I also super-glued the arms onto some of the miniatures that came in separate pieces. Later on, I will add fake landscaping to the bases.

After lunch I went to the Monterey Sports Center to finish up the Swimming Merit Badge that I had a partial on for a couple of years. I had to jump in the water with a shirt and pants on and inflate them. All I had to do for the shirt was blow in it to fill it with air. For the pants I had to take them off (with a bathing suit underneath, of course) and inflate them into a buoy.

When we left I went over to Michael's where Matthew and his brother were too and we played guitar hero. I got a 277-note streak on Rock You Like a Hurricane on Medium. Later today, we went to SaveMart and I ran into Mr. Bell, Riley's dad, and Yann all within 5 minutes. Weird.

Spanish Bay with Matthew

This morning around 9:00 I went over to Matthew's house. I helped him with some effects in Photoshop and played SSB Brawl and Mario Kart Wii. Then a couple hours later we went swimming at the pool at the Spanish Bay Inn located in Pebble Beach.

One of the best thing about the Spanish Bay pool is that the water is non-chlorinated (just heavily filtered), so you can open your eyes underwater for a long time without any stinging. We took a break around noon and got food. I got a cheese quesadilla with guacamole, and Matthew and Michael (his brother) got burgers. After we were done swimming we went into the hot tub and then left back to his house, where we jumped on his trampoline and I helped them set up blogs.

Matthew's Blog: http://midnightsun1994.blogspot.com/
Michael's Blog: http://michaeljohnson-blog.blogspot.com/

RE: Jesse's Visit

Last night after dinner, Jesse and Lara came back over and we had a ping-pong tournament for about two hours in the garage. We each got to play everyone else, and the winners turned out to be my mom and Jesse, who nearly tied every time. I left and went back with them around 9:00. Today, we went to have brunch with Gpop (grandfather) at the bagel bakery and I had a jalapeño cheddar with cream cheese, tomato, and smoked salmon lox. Afterwords, we decided to use his guest passes and go to the aquarium.

The last time I had gone to the aquarium was in the winter during the huge storm and blackout (the aquarium was the only place with power). Since then, they had redone the Splash Zone exhibit and moved the touch pools upstairs. We went around and saw all the regular exhibits, like the jellies, penguins, outer bay, and kelp forests. There was a presentation going on about how fish inflate their bladders to control buoyancy (a skill also present in armadillos that they use to float across rivers).

While we were looking at the various fishes, we were talking about many things and telling stories. Lara was telling me about how when she and her friends used to come to the aquarium, there would be a sign above the octopus tank reading Don't Flash the Octopus.

Sure enough, even though they moved and enlarged the tank and made about six new signs, they still said the same thing. Funny.



Another hilarious happening was how earlier today we were talking about Jesse's dog Sherlock's odd habits while going to the bathroom. While in the Wild About Otters exhibit, we learned that freshwater otters do practically the same thing. Here's the description on the sign...

Otters do the Darndest things.
Just before a freshwater otter poops, it does a "latrine dance." You might see it turning in a circle with its tail raised, stomping its feet up and down.

We left the aquarium around 1:30 and went back to the house, where I played Kirby Air Ride with Lara. They left back to Exeter at 3:30.

Church NERF

Finally, the long-awaited church NERF gun battle was today at Cypress Street Park. At the last minute at church, we managed to get a few people to come. Michael also invited Paul, his friend from San Jose who comes down to visit every couple months. The Bruemmers and the Lohs were the two families who came, and most of them brought NERF guns. We played two rounds of Capture the Flag and had popcorn and white grape juice boxes as a snack.

Squirrel!

On the walk back from church today, I passed by a squirrel near Hilltop Park. As I walked toward it, it wasn't running away as would be expected, but stayed where it was, eating seeds on the road. I got out my camera and took a couple of photos...

Jesse's Visit

On Friday my half brother Jesse and his wife Lara came over to visit from Exeter (near Visalia in California). We had dinner at the local Lebanese restaurant Tabouli and went to Marty's. Yesterday, he picked me up around noon and we ate lunch at the 17^th Street Grille in PG. After that, we went off to try out disc golfing.

Jesse had been telling me for a while that disc golf was a lot of fun, and I finally got to try it. We went to the Don Dahvee Park course near the Del Monte Shopping Center. It was an 18-hole course that wound up the side of Munras Avenue in Monterey. The game plays just like golf, but you use special Innova frisbees that come in different types, i.e. putter, mid-range, driver, etc. The object is to get the disc into a metal basket (the hole) in as few throws as possible.

Most of them were pretty straight-forward, par 3, with usually a small hill and a couple trees in the way. The hardest hole was under a highway overpass where the tee-box was on one side and the basket was on the other. In the middle was a large gorge with a small river running through. We decided to skip this one. Hole 12 was right next to Whole Foods, so we stopped and had Indian Chai Tea Lattes. Mmm...

Since my dad is out of town, Jesse and Lara were staying at the house, so I stayed the night last night and we watched Wild Hogs.

RE: An Odd Coincidence

Regarding Mr. Bell's new post as principal of PGHS, here's an article that I found in the Bulletin:

Pico Retrospective

Since we won't be going to Pico Blanco this year (see The News About Pico for more information on the cancellation and the switch to Camp Emerald Bay), I thought I'd post some photos and other stuff from last year's camp.

Even though Emerald Bay will be a blast, nothing can really replace our local council camp, and its a shame not to go. First, the famous "Scoutmaster Belly Flop" video of Mr. Randall in the traditional water carnival event.



Here's some photos I took at Pico 2007...

Birthday Celebrations

Today was my dad's birthday and I got him a rug that matches our decor and a brand-new metal grip hose nozzle with eight settings. For lunch, we went out to our favorite Mexican restaurant in Sand City, Papá Chano's. As usual, I got the Chile Rellenos plate, which is one of my favorite Mexican dishes. It comes with a large cheese-stuffed breaded poblano pepper, plus rice and beans. For about another two to three dollars, the Platillo de Chile Rellenos has two peppers, rice and beans, and a tostada-style salad.

Tonight we are going to have a fire in our fire pit outside after dinner.

The News About Pico

Due to the Basin Complex Fire in Big Sur, our traditional Camp Pico Blanco has been cancelled for this year. Scoutmaster Randall has been trying to get a replacement camp and finally found one: Camp Emerald Bay on Santa Catalina Island. The troop last went here in 2003, and was told it was pretty much impossible to get in again. However, due to our status as "fire refugees," they let us come in at last minute and also took almost $100 off the admission price for the week-long camp. The water is supposed to be much warmer than Pico and most of us will probably take entirely water-oriented merit merit badges.

The Antique Show

The past three days were the St. Mary's church antique show (this year's catchy wordplay title: "Baroque 'n' Eggs") so yesterday and today I volunteered with the church youth group in food service. Last year I was a food server who waited tables at lunch, but that was really stressful and not very enjoyable. Instead, this year I worked in the snack bar temporarily put up in the courtyard. Yesterday I arrived at 9:30, and the first 1 to 2 hours were spent selling donuts and coffee for $1 each.

After this, the people began sitting down for lunch and food servers began their jobs. My job was to fill lemonade and ice tea and set them out for waiters to pick up. They would sometimes come with orders for an Arnold Palmer (½ lemonade, ½ ice tea) or some custom order like "I want two thirds ice tea and one third lemonade with extra ice and a bit of water in it."



Around 1:30 today the lunch crowd left and went back to the antique show, or to the organ concert in the church, and we got sandwiches, pizza, and leftover lunch desserts.

After leaving, I went with my dad to the new Lighthouse Cinema and watched Get Smart starring Steve Carrell.

Moth Sightings

This morning while working in the garden I came across this moth on an orchid. I couldn't resist taking a macro, and it turned out quite good.

At first I thought it was an infamous Light Brown Apple Moth, but it turned out to be a very different species apparently.

Classic Wallpapers

I came across these old desktop backgrounds from my old site and since I am taking down the old one I moved them here.

Across the Dunes A desktop background made in Adobe Photoshop portraying the dunes around Monterey Bay in California. For more about this image, visit the page on the Digital Artwork Gallery. 1024 x 768

Apricots and Creamy Lemons This humorous wallpaper depicts, as the title suggests, apricots and creamy lemons. In the foreground is a spoon with "lemon cream" in it. A classic background to lift your spirits on a gloomy day! 1024 x 768

Blue Midnight A classic desktop background featuring a lake at midnight. This wallpaper was inspired by the rock ballad jazz song,Blue Midnight composed by Larry Neeck. 1024 x 768  1280 x 1024

Country Road A desktop background made in Adobe Photoshop portraying roads seen in areas such as Fort Ord, California. For more about this image, visit the page on the Digital Artwork Gallery. 1024 x 768

The Spider A close-up image of a spider on a web at night. This photo was taken with flash on a camera's Macro setting. This background is perfect for the current Halloween season. Show off your spirit! 1024 x 768

Pimpin' Batman

I finally got around to uploading Malcolm's Batman rap. He recorded it Friday and Saturday at Chawanakee and told me to put it up on YouTube. I strung the two clips together with some background music and titles that Malcolm told me to put on.

Enjoy the random video.

Eggplant Panini Sandwiches

These warm Italian sandwiches are great for lunch or dinner.

Ingredients
• 1 medium loaf of selected french bread
(we used an asagio cheese loaf)
• 1 small eggplant, sliced
• ½ cup egg whites (Egg-Beaters brand)
• 1 cup italian bread crumbs
• Shredded Italian cheese
(we used Trader Joe's Quattro Formaggio, a mixture of provolone, fontina, asagio, and parmesan.)
• 1 large tomato, sliced
• 1 bunch fresh basil
• Butter or cooking spray for broiling

Preparation
• Pour egg whites into a small bowl, and bread crumbs into a second small bowl.
• Bread the eggplant slices by dipping both sides in egg, then in bread crumbs.
• Broil on high on both sides until the bread crumbs are a golden brown.
• Slice the bread into 12 slices and place on a cookie sheet. Spray with cooking spray or spread on butter.
• Add a slice of breaded eggplant to each slice. Sprinkle cheese on top of the eggplant slices.
• Broil on high until bread is toasted but not burnt.
• Add a tomato slice and basil leaves to every other slice, and make the ones without these additions the lids of the sandwiches. Serve while still warm.

Makes 6 sandwiches.

Still More Smoke

For the past few days since the Big Sur fire started, there has been an eerie orange glow to everything, and the air has faintly smelled of smoke. Today, the Yahoo! forecast, instead of saying sun or clouds, it says smoke. Hopefully this will clear up soon, because the air quality is far from satisfactory right now.

An Odd Coincidence

When I was going from elementary to middle school, our principal Mr. Bell switched to working at the middle school at the same time. Now it seems the same thing has happened, because I have heard that the high school principal will be retiring and Mr. Bell will be taking his place. This seems to be a good thing, because people have said that the middle school has significantly improved since Mr. Bell has been there, and hopefully the same thing will happen to the high school.

A major remodeling of the high school over the summer is the placement of a new all-weather track, new football field, and new bleachers.

Hampsters and Spiders

Today I went over to Michael's house because tomorrow he is leaving for a family vacation, followed by ID Tech Camps ("Nerd Camp" as he calls it) at Stanford. I found out that Katie got a really adorable pet hampster named Butterscotch who really enjoyed eating watermelons. Michael and I also played Battle for Middle Earth for the first time in quite a while, and painted some Warhammer spider-riding goblins.

After this we went on a short walk/run near the Fishwife and then went over to my house to play ping-pong.

The Recieving of a Ping-Pong Table

Last night we got a ping-pong table on sale at Big 5, and it has turned out to be a lot of fun. It came with 4 paddles, one standard 40mm ball, one medium 44mm ball , and one 54mm practice ball. We also got a pack of six three-star quality ones for later on.

Rollin' Walker River

Soon after coming back from Chawanakee last week, I was off on another weeklong camp, the Sierra Service Project. The purpose of the trip was to help out Native Americans living on the Walker River Reservation in Schurz, Nevada. It is church-sponsored and I went with the El Camino Real Diocese of the Episcopal Church. We met on Saturday afternoon at St. Francis in San Jose, and did a few icebreakers to get to know the different people, including a large number who had come from (gasp!) Carmel, Pacific Grove's rival town (at least when school is concerned). After that we ate spaghetti and watched The Martian Child. The next day began a 7-hour car ride to Nevada. On the drive, we stopped to get subs at Port of Subs, a store oddly similar to Subway, with a special deal for a $10 2-foot-long (the tagline: "much better than those $5 footlong guys!"). We learned on the way that we would be staying in an old abandoned market in the town.

As we pulled up at the market, the whole group of staff ran out singing, dancing, and pounding on the car doors. We came in and they had music playing and everyone was talking. The other church groups there were: St. Mary's Episcopal from Napa, Cho Un Korean United Methodist Church from Sacramento, and the Borrego Springs UMC. We turned out to be somewhat at a disadvantage because all the other church groups already knew all the members, but we were from a variety of churches.

The weather was very unusual on Sunday: there was a huge wind storm lasting for quite a while, followed by a power outage. Dinner that night was PB&J, due to lack of power for the kitchen appliances. In the evening, our work groups were revealed, and mine was with Connie, a counselor from the Borrego Springs group. It also included Blake Foster from Carmel, who I had gotten to know a little the previous day. The others were Colleen and Sophia from the KUMC, Erica from Borrego Springs, Kevin from Napa Valley, and Nick, a 4-year veteran of SSP who was also from our El Camino Real group. Additionally on Tuesday, a second counselor named In arrived from the Berkeley KUMC and he helped lead our group as well.

The rest of the week proceeded pretty much the same way. Every morning we would get up at 7:00, woken by the staff singing some song involving Rise and Shine, and often including Noah's Arky-Arky. Ugh.... Also, one day they plugged in an iPod and played Cat Stephens' Morning Has Broken. For breakfast, we would drive down to the local Methodist Church and have a buffet-style breakfast with eggs or other common breakfast items. This would be followed by our work site.



My work team was chosen to repair the roof of a carport belonging to Evelyn Cook, an old Native American lady. Her house was quite nice, but the carport had water damage and the old roll-on roofing was not very satisfactory. The job was to tear off the roofing, the tar-paper, and the wood planks, replace one of the stringers, and put new OSB (oriented string-board) planks back on. The next group coming would have the job to put on new tar and shingles.

Work days were from 9 to 4, with a lunch break at noon, and the first two entire days were spent prying up the old roll-on asphalt roofing, which was probably the hardest. It seemed probably 10 degrees hotter up on the roof, and the nails were really hard to remove.



After this hard job, it got significantly easier. Originally, we were just going to pry up the old boards and then put on the new ones, but our construction coordinator Cass decided that it would be more efficient if we pulled up one and added a new OSB one, then pulled up another and continued that same way. Our group would split up and 3 or 4 of us would go up at a time. It worked fine until Friday, when we only had a half hour left to finish the project and then we discovered that a board we thought was rectangular was actually L-shaped. We had to rush down, measure it, cut it, bring it back up, and nail it in place.

At lunch at the worksites we would eat Peanut Butter and Jelly, and answer questions from a Spiritual Sandwich paper, including If you were a cookie, what kind would you be and Why? and What do you think of people who think the landing on the moon was staged in a studio? as well as many other very random questions designed to make us get to know each other. At breaks we would go into the A/C powered van and play cards, usually the ever-popular game BS, of which I had a lot of practice at from Chawanakee. After we finished working, we would make secret stops to a gas station mini-mart nicknamed "Site 3" and buy snacks.

When we would get back, we would take glacially cold showers in our bathing suits at the tribal gym, and then go to dinner at the Church. While waiting for dinner, we played Apples to Apples and listened to music. Dinner was in the same buffet-style, and included potatoes, spaghetti, pizza, and more.

Chore time was after dinner, and when we got Bathroom Patrol, it turned out to be quite hilarious. The staff had posted name signs on the four portapotties: Henrietta, Pablo, Millie, and Jasper. At the beginning of the week, Pablo had become the smelliest, so everyone started avoiding using and cleaning "him" for the next couple of days. On our BP day we all called other ones and Colleen and Sophia were stuck cleaning Pablo. To our surprise, Pablo was now the cleanest. It was very ironic. Another chore was to organize a spiritual moment for the evening, so when our turn came around we sang Amazing Grace in English and Korean, and Connie played an obscure instrument called a bode psaltery, which she also let us try out in free time.

The evening program after dinner was usually a big circle, where we would give site reports and sing songs. On Thursday night however, we drove down to Walker Lake and hiked up a hill where the staff told stories and we watched the sunset. It was a very neat experience. When evening program ended, we would go "jamify" and get ready for bed. We also played a Korean "frying-pan game" that the KUMC people taught us. On Wednesday a big treat was an afternoon trip to the Weber Reservoir, where we went swimming, ate chips, and listened to music for quite a few hours. I was expecting artic-cold water like Chawanakee, but it turned out to actually be warm.

On Saturday morning, we packed up all our gear and drove that same 7-hour trip back home. I was in the van with Joey, someone from our church group, and we counted that he farted 38 times on the way back to San Jose. I feel sorry for the people who had to ride with him all the way back to the Monterey Peninsula.