Bryce Canyon

 Brooke and I took a much needed vacation this week(well, quite a few weeks at this point) to Bryce Canyon. The last time we went on a vacation was August of last year. Although, at my current production schedule, this post will probably be out in August of next year!

 

I’ve been to quite a few national and state parks in Utah, but I don’t remember going to Bryce Canyon before. The main feature of Bryce is these interesting standing rock pillars called hoodoos, which are formed via water seeping into the ground and then freezing, causing gaps to expand between the rock. Eventually they form these stand alone pillars.

The park was fun, although, I will say, it is kind of just one thing. Like here are some hoodoos, travel a bit, now here at the same hoodoos from another view point. Then you hike through the hoodoos. This hoodoo looks like Queen Victoria. So the one experience is like a kind of one note. Granted there is a lot more variety than the St. Louis arch, which was truly one note (here is the arch, and that is it).

 

I thought the accommodations were kind of fun. We stayed at the “Ruby Inn”. For dinner, there was a buffet, the Cowboy Buffet and Steakroom. Which I thought was great. Granted, this wasn’t a fine dining establishment (think hometown buffet). But all the meat options were pretty good, there was meatloaf, smothered pork chops, ribs, pot roast, teriyaki chicken. There was also salmon, but I didn’t want to eat that at a buffet in Utah! The salad bar was good, something like you would have at a sizzler, or any other salad bar. I probably ate 4,000 calories.

 

I think the last time I went to a buffet was Hometown Buffet near Van Nuys after my grandfather’s funeral. It was fun to go to one again. I didn’t need to eat anything until breakfast the next day, and even then, I wasn’t starving. The breakfast buffet was also good, but it was mostly just the same fare any hotel breakfast place would offer, well, an upscale one at least. Eggs, potatoes, meat of the day, carb of the day (pancakes or french toast), yogurt, fruit, cereal, cottage cheese, oatmeat, toast, bagels, etc.  I guess one nice thing is the syrup and salsa were both in the hot food section and were warm, which was a nice touch.

All the Meat You Will Eat

 If case you haven't heard yet, I wrote a new book,  a children's picture book in fact! I had a little episode of my podcast Ricky Rambles where I talk about it.

Link to the book

San Fransico has a Beach

 As you probably know by now, Another Boring Life story Blog has some major content issues. Not that Brooke and I haven’t been doing fun stuff, we have, but we have some issues getting the content written and then published. This post was from our San Jose days, which seems like a lifetime ago. That said, I still remember this restaurant and now that I think about it I do want to go back. Ok, so let's travel back in time like 5 years to when I wrote this, maybe at little more.

Brooke’s Mom came to visit, so we went to San Francisco for the day.  We went to the Golden Gate State Park and that was fun. This time, blackberries were in season, so I picked a few. Some of them were really good! We heard a band playing in a tunnel and they had really interesting acoustics. Listening to the jazz music bound off the tunnel walls, it was pretty enjoyable. After playing a while, I noticed them backing up and splitting the tip money between them. It reminded me of my childhood playing music in front of my house at Christmas time and splitting up the tip money. We made a lot less money than them! We also went inside to split it up, not out in the open.

We also visited the botanical garden, it was pretty interesting. There was a section on nice smelling plants. We smelled some sage that smelled like pineapple.

Later in the day, we went to the beach in San Francisco. It was cold, so we didn’t go in the water or anything. We went to Cliff House, a restaurant overlooking the ocean. It was like 30 bucks an entree, so a little expensive, but it was really nice. I had a braised lamb shank with shiitake mushroom. And the star of the dish was the mushrooms, they were sooo good. They were perfect umami explosions. Brooke got a pork chop with broccolini, which was pretty good. I thought to myself, surely the broccoli was made by one of my audit clients in Salinas.

 

We stopped by the beach in Half Moon Bay. On the way we drove through Pacifica, which is where Democracy Now is recorded. It is a quaint little town, reminiscent of earlier times. There also is a huge tunnel to pass through on the way to Half Moon Bay. When we got to the bay, even though it was approaching dusk, it was hard to find a place to park.  Apparently the beaches there close promptly at dusk. There were a lot of people there for some sort of pumpkin festival.  After a little bit, we drove back.

It's Hot

Note: I wrote this post not just near labor day of this year, no no, this post is from near labor day a year prior to that. So enjoy this 1.5 year old post that Brooke only now got around to editing!

It has been a long time since I have posted here. Frankly, life just escapes me sometimes. I’ve signed myself up for a lot of differing activities, which I don’t want to bore you with at this time. However, I will tell you a bit about what I am doing this very second. I am at the public library because it is well over 90 degrees outside. My little house, which we moved into just a year ago, has no AC, and it is a furnace. So instead I am here. 

On one side, I don’t really have a way to play video games or other distractions here, so that is good. It gives me some time to actually write. You may or may not know it, but I’m working on my first novel (depending on when you read this it may be free to read on Wattpad). So I probably should be writing that instead. I’ve found the best way for me to get writing down is by postponing or procrastinating something else. So I am being productive while I procrastinate! It is a win-win.

The library is mostly quiet, although I just heard a man lightly swearing from a table over. He must be losing a game or a bet of some kind. Actually, perhaps it is Sonic The Hedgehog based on the sounds I have heard. The cool air is refreshing but the plastic backed chair is not so relaxing. Still, better than being hot. 

On the way to the library, Brooke told me, that “San Diegains need to just admit that San Diego isn’t perfect year round and that sometimes the weather is awful.”  Given the current weather, I guess she has a point. It is hot.  Maybe we do need to just “admit it and get air conditioning.” 

I will get Monday off, Labor day off. While I always mean to post these things soon after I write them, I generally don’t. So maybe it will be Christmas time before you read this (Note from Ricky in the present, I was really on the nose here). Maybe that will be the next time I read it as well. And I will say to myself, “Oh, it wasn’t really that hot was it.” To which I say to my future self, “yes, it was really that hot.” In any case, I will have to try to figure out how to stay cool, as staying home isn’t really an option. 

Wherever you are, I hope you are staying cool, unless it really is Christmas when I get around to releasing this, in which case, stay warm. Or maybe if you are in the southern hemisphere where summer is winter and winter is summer, then… Ok, I have digressed. But then again, I think this whole post is a digression.  The rambling of a hot person in a cold library trying to write and not entirely succeeding. At the very least though, I can say I did this.

My trip to Woodland a long time ago

 I have an archive of posts I intended to post but I guess didn’t. Here is one of them, a very short summary of my trip to Woodland CA. During my time at EY I would sometimes do inventory counts, so I would show up to a warehouse, watch people count things and count along with them. During this time I traveled all over the bay area and saw a bunch of towns in CA. Anyways, here is the original post. Maybe I will start publishing content on here again at some point, but not promises. 

So I had to make a trip to Woodland, California for work. Sometimes I go to the strangest little towns. Well, I guess this one might just be a suburb of Sacramento or something. 

I also passed through an interesting in little town that had like a vacation town/small town feel, like a cute little main street. I didn’t capture a picture, for what I hope are obvious reasons. Also, during the drive, I saw a beautiful sunset. There were some foothills in the distance, and some grasslands, and a picturesque multicolor sunset.

I also had to pay a toll (hear the story on the podcast).

And like every time I go to a hotel, I watch a little television - this time Food Network. I had a relaxing morning the next day, I didn’t have to go to work until 10, so I enjoyed breakfast and took my time getting ready. I finished my work really quick, then made the trek home almost without incident. As I got close to home but still on the freeway, I narrowly avoided an accident. Someone merged into my lane without checking their blind spot. I avoided them by moving into the other lane. It was close, but I fortunately avoided an accident.

Another Podcast?

Well, as you probably know, Brooke and I haven't been keeping up with this blog. I'm not sure that will change anytime soon, but in the meantime, I do have another project that might interest you, yes, another podcast.  It is just a bit of meandering and nonsense not too dissimilar from what this blog was like.

Our License Plate Saga

From the Archive

It looks like I have some posts I wrote a while ago that I didn't publish. Well here they are now:

It has taken us awhile to get new California license plates on our car. Read further to find out why. Hint: it involves 3 trips to the DMV, 2 smog tests, a trip to the hardware store, and a trip to the body shop. Hopefully you can learn something from our experience.

When we first moved here in September, we didn't know there would be a fee for not getting California plates within a certain amount of days. We didn't even look into it much when we got here because Ricky was busy with his new job, and I was busy trying to get a job. In November, we finally looked into getting our car registered here. We found out that there was going to be a $66 fee for not doing this within 20 days of taking up residency here. We made an appointment at the DMV for a date at the end of December, because that was the soonest available appointment date.  

In order to get our car registered here, we would have to have a smog test done. So Ricky went and had that completed mid-December. We went to the appointment at the DMV the day we got back from Christmas vacation in Utah. There was a long line out the door, and a lady was talking to people in the line one by one to see what each of us needed. Turns out, the computers were down that day, so they couldn't help us with what we needed done. So we scheduled another appointment for another day (which Ricky had to request work off for). 

When we went back to the DMV, there was thankfully no line out the door. However, there was literally nowhere to park, so I dropped Ricky off and was driving around looking for a place to park for like 15 minutes. In that time, Ricky had gotten most of the things taken care of at the desk. I finally came in and just signed a few things. The lady informed us that our smog test was done incorrectly and we would have to have it done again. Apparently, the people that did our smog test saw our Utah plates and did a smog test under their out-of-state requirements, and not California requirements. She said everything else was good, so we could just pay and have our plates mailed to us when our smog test was taken care of. However, they did not accept credit, only debit, cash or check, so we literally couldn't pay during that trip. We didn't know they wouldn't accept credit! The lady was really nice though, and got everything else in order for us. She said to just come back to her desk once we got the new smog test done.

Ricky went back to the place we had our smog test done and let them know what happened. They did another smog test for us, one that met California's standards this time. Then he went back to the DMV and finally got our California plates!

However, when we went to switch out our old plates for our new ones, we realized the screws holding in our back license plate were were stripped. So we went to Harbor Freight and bought vice grips. Ricky used those to try to turn the screw, but ended up breaking off the head of the screw! I then asked on a Facebook page and found someone in the ward who had screw extractors and a drill we could borrow. We tried those, but our screws would still not budge. 

So I ended up calling a nearby Auto Body Shop to see if they could help. It was an unusual request, but they said we could bring the car in. It was a struggle even for the worker there, and took a little while, but he was able to get our screws off. He used a blow torch to heat up the screws, and that's what did the trick.