I think it’s pretty interesting that my eyes can see without seeing.  For example, when I’m walking through the hallways at work, my eyes often end up in collision-avoidance mode.  That is, I don’t see through my eyes because I’m busy seeing something else in my mind’s eye.  So my eyes become visible-spectrum sonar and keep me from bumping into people and things.  It’s often while in this mode that friends and coworkers will go out of their way to snap me out of my trance to bring to my attention the fact that I didn’t acknowledge their presence in the hallway.  They never believe me that I didn’t see them because they were the only person in the hallway.  In extreme cases I have literally manoeuvred around a person to get into a door or otherwise not crash, and still did not see the person.  I mean, my brain knows I went around a human, but it doesn’t bother to decode the face so I have no idea who I narrowly missed.  This makes them even more incredulous when I deny having seen them.  Sorry, but it’s true.  My brain decided that whatever it was picturing was more important than dedicating some neurons for facial recognition.

At the end of June I went to my grandfather’s 70th birthday party.  But, before that, we went on a small vacation to Naples, Fl.  My mom got us a very expensive hotel on the beach and we had a blast! I got another change to use the underwater housing I first used on my Hawaii Trip.

This is the view of the very expensive houses I could see from the balcony.

A while back in time (but only two posts ago) I wrote about my first bike ride on the BWI trail. A few days later I got an email on Facebook:

My name is Marty and I happened along your BLOG about biking at the BWI trail. My first time riding the trail was Saturday June 20th and I had the same incident with the bird. Not sure if we did the loop the same way but I was going pretty fast when the bird hit me. It was my first ride in about 10 years, no helmet and I was going pretty fast …………. THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO LOSE IT!!!

Been silent on the blog because I’ve been very busy with other things. Mostly I’ve been busy going through the 800+ pictures I took on my recent trip to Oahu, HI. Expect to see a fully illustrated blog post about my trip once I’m done uploading the pictures to flickr. And I’ve been doing this in Adobe Lightroom 2, which I recently gave my first impressions of. I’ve been doing a live blog which I’ll be publishing later. I’ve also been working on “I’m Not Mad”. I hope to have some more tech and political posts soon, but even sooner I’ll have an entertainment post.

Here are some pictures of the flood & damage:

The sewers backed up in my apartment flooding my bathroom via my bathtub and toilet and my living room via the front door with water full of excrement and urine.  However, even in these horrible and anoying times, you still have to look at it positively.  Our neighbors got flooded throughout their entire house.  For us it didn’t spread of out the bathroom or living room.  It was royally disgusting and smelly, but at least the cleaning crew worked through the night and morning to get our apartment to a usable state.

I’m glad the weekend is fast upon us…..

Their food may or may not be worth the price, I’ve never been there for dinner. However, I do know that their club is crap. I would have to say that tonight was definitely the worst experience I’ve ever had in terms of going out for a night of fun. First of all, I got to the Powerplant Live area and no one knew how to get into Babalu Grill. The people blocking the area told us to go down the block, the people at the end of the block told us to go back to the original people. When we finally get in, the bouncer said it was $5 per person, but the person taking the cash said it was $10 per person. It was so loud outside from a concert going on that it was impossible to reconcile. Perhaps I was just tired from a long day’s work, but had the concert not been going on a mere 20 feet away, I would have disputed this.

In case you might have been wondering why the posts have been lacking a bit of substance, it’s because I’ve been in England for the past month. I’ve been very busy (it was a business trip) and also did a lot of exploring for pictures.

I learned around the time I was in middle school that it takes 21 days to form new habits. I had been gone for nearly 30, so everything at home seems strange now. When I went to take a shower last night, it seemed as if Niagra Falls was coming out of my shower head. The water pressure was so much greater than the pressure in England, that I just couldn’t comprehend it. I was extremely happy to be home, but home was slightly foreign to me. Even being on my computer now is a little weird. It’s different than my laptop, and being on my Windows computer is even stranger.

I have come to see the most annoying thing in my known universe to be having to urinate as soon as I get out of the shower. It’s like dropping your clothes in the mud on the way back from the laundromat. This, for me, is second only to people chatting on their cell phones on busses and trains. I have no problem with people talking on their cell phones in these places. Perhaps they need to coordinate the night or let someone know that they are running late or running early. But chatting is quite annoying. It’s worse when all I hear is “really? wow” and other such utterances that let me know that I’m clearly listening to the wrong half of the conversation. I don’t think it would bother me at all if both halves of the conversation were there. If someone was going to talk loud enough for me to hear, I’d at least like to hear both sides.