Hop Skip Jump

• It was our sixth wedding anniversary on Sunday. We celebrated by taking a smallish vacation down to Santa Barbara and staying in a nice little bed and breakfast-style inn, having a nice dinner and wandering around the town. We took a handful of photos and did a very small amount of shopping, hung out and had a great time.
• The shopping was supposed to result in Nikki getting something nice. Somehow, instead, I ended up getting a new CD and a T-shirt. I’m still trying to sort out how that went so awry.
• The CD was Daft Punk’s Human After All. It’s rather excellent, if you dig the whole techno thing. Which I do.
• We drove a lot in the course of a few days. Which made me do a lot of pondering about the Honda. We never did get it together enough to calculate the actual miles per gallon we got, but my rough estimations put it at around 35/mpg. That’s not bad. Considering the Saturn gets about 22/mpg and holds four fewer gallons in the tank, that means that we saved about $35-40 in gas by taking the Honda. That’s pretty respectable, I’d say.
• Dinner was at a restaurant on the pier they have there, at a table overlooking the water. It was night so it was hard to truly appreciate the view, but it was nice anyway and a pleasant reminder of one of the dinners we had on our honeymoon in a place called Woody’s in Maui. We ate late there, too, and sat right out over the water. Of course in Hawaii it was balmy even at almost eleven o’clock so the windows were open and we could hear the surf. They had the windows closed in Santa Barbara to shield from the chilly October air.
• Nikki’s new master plan involves us finding jobs and an apartment down in Santa Barbara now. We’ve been talking around lately about how we continue to rent apartments instead of purchase houses and how our current jobs are Nothing Special. This leads to lines of thought such as, “Why are we bothering, then?” Et cetera. I have this whole theory of real estate motivation that goes something like this: There are three factors to choosing a place to live: Location, Accommodations and Opportunity. They’re intertwined, but there is usually a need for one factor to override the others in order to encourage a self-initiated change. For example, we may really love Santa Barbara (Location), but it’s crazy expensive there and as such we’d be forced to continue renting and probably have to get a smaller place (sacrificing Accommodations). If there were some really good jobs down there (and there may be, I haven’t researched thoroughly enough yet) it might tip the scales in favor of a move (the tandem of Opportunity and Location). On the other hand we might be able to afford a pretty nice place if we more or less stayed put (Accommodations) but neither of us are thrilled with the town (Location) and the jobs around here are okay but certainly not catapulting us to the top of the heap (Opportunity). Anyway, it helps me to think about this kind of proposition in these types of terms, the only problem being that Nikki and I put different weight on different factors and also weigh the possibilities on different relative scales. Look, all I said was that we had been married for six years, I didn’t even try to suggest that made us communication masters.
• We started watching the Veronica Mars season one DVDs whilst on vacation. It’s a good show, especially once you come to terms with the fact that, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it exists in its own realm of hyper-realized, supremely stylized reality. It’s easier to grasp that in a show where the heroine is kicking the crap out of monsters every week, but it really needs to be understood by watchers of Mars because otherwise the smart, funny and intriguing show seems less so and more like derivative crud such that I would refuse to watch (I am so not going to try and cover up saying something like The O.C. with a fake cough… seriously. I’m just not going to do it). My one complaint about six episodes in: The character of Duncan Kane is highly underdeveloped. We’re supposed to understand why Veronica is all conflicted about him and what it means for her future relationships, but mostly we just see Duncan act like a meatheaded tool, which doesn’t really fit with the image being portrayed of Veronica since he seems like the opposite of what we would expect her to be attracted to. Hopefully they clear it up (the last episode we watched seemed to be heading in the right direction). Otherwise, excellent show.
• After a rough start to the year, the Sharks are looking better: They never win in Detroit so pulling a point out from the tie-at-the-end-of-regulation should be counted a victory. The 7-6 win over St. Louis was brilliant (and a great game to watch) not to mention the perfect home stand. HB pointed out that with Rathje gone it’s hard to find a goat to pin any struggles on. My early candidate is Ryane Clowe, a rookie who irritates me because he always seems to be in the penalty box… and that’s pretty much it. I mean, the guy has two shots on goal so far this year. You know who has less SOG than that? One rookie defenseman and the two goalies. That’s it. Everyone else, including the rest of the defensive squad, has more attempts to score than the forward. That’s just wrong.
• Our cat, Dixie, and I were boxing yesterday morning. Put it this way, she won with a TKO and as a result I spent the rest of the day holding a bit of tissue to my face to sop up the blood. The lesson here, obviously, is that you can’t go inside on an opponent bearing claws. You have to stay out of range from that mess.

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