It’s disturbing that the number one movie in America right now is Jackass: The Movie. I think humanity needs a thinning of the herd.

Well, I promised a story about the weekend adventure, and if I don’t post it now, I probably never will. There were supposed to be pictures to accompany it, but I haven’t loaded them onto the computer yet, so you’ll have to use your imagination for now.

Our story really begins on late Thursday afternoon. That was when I tried to turn on the heat, only to discover that the heat wasn’t working. On Friday morning, Ali got up early and called someone about the non-functioning heat, and by the time that was dealt with and we worked on getting ready to go, we ended up getting a later start than we had planned. Finally, by 1:30, we were on our way to New Paltz, New York for our weekend of hiking at the Mohonk Preserve. We were staying at the William’s Lake Resort Hotel. When we arrived, everything actually looked quite nice. There was a beautiful lake and nice foliage. We went inside the main building to check in, and the place looked sort of like an old hotel. There was the usual kinds of knick-knacks that you might imagine you would see in a bed and breakfast, and that didn’t throw me off too much. Then we went to the building where our lakefront view room was. We opened the door….

…and walked into the 70′s. From the green vinyl on the chair cusions to the bizzare, ancient speaker in the wall, this room was straight out of the 70′s. The mattress and pillows looked like they had been there since the 70′s, too. The lighting was all flourescent, complete with buzzing noises. The room wasn’t even very big. There was a view of the lake, but that’s the best thing I can say for the room.

Ali and I decided to check out the main building a bit. Being that this place is a “resort”, your reservation includes all of your meals, as well as the “entertainment” that they provide. We discovered that that particular evening there would be a psychic in the dining room after dinner, and then there would be music and dancing in the downstairs lounge. The more we looked around, the more we realized the age of the place. We also realized that we were probably younger than most everyone else staying there by at least 35 years. We headed into the town of New Paltz for dinner at a restaurant called The Loft, which we had eaten at the last time we were there and really enjoyed. We spent some time walking around the town and doing some shopping, and then returned to Williams Lake to check out the music and dancing. When we got back, we ran into the front desk woman, who asked where we had been. They had called us when we didn’t show up for dinner. That was…creepy. Anyway, the band was decent, but it wasn’t the kind of place Ali and I wanted to hang around at. We searched the building a bit more and found the “game room”. This was run down looking room with flourescent lighting, a few old arcade machines, a busted up pool table, a ping pong table with paddles lying all over the floor and only one ball, which was dented. We gave up and decided to head back to our room and call it an early night.

The next morning it was raining, which we had expected. We ventured over to the dining room for breakfast, and were not all that surprised to find that the dining room did not look so great, either. We were pointed in the direction of our assigned table, which we discovered was to be our table for the entire weekend, and that we were to have the same server for the weekend, as well. Breakfast was okay (it’s not too hard to make breakfast). During breakfast we overheard one of the other servers telling some people about dinner. She said she didn’t want to tell them what was for dinner, because it would ruin the surprise. Ali and I were skeptical.

We headed out in the rain and began our search for the “pottery trail.” Think of it like a webring, only for art galleries. There are a group of artists in that area who colectively form the pottery trail, and so following the brochure that Ali picked up, we visited several of them. Needless to say, this was not my favorite part of the trip, although one of the galleries had several cats, and there was one really friendly cat who I got to play with. Highlight of the morning, I must say. After that, we headed to a place called Crafts People, which consists of four buildings filled with…that’s right…crafts. Again, not too exciting for me, but Ali loved it. By this time we were fairly close to Woodstock, so we decided to drive there and see what was around. Woodstock is pretty cool. It’s a lot like New Hope, for those who are familiar with that. Again, we did some shopping, had some lunch, and then headed out in the direction of Saugerties, hoping to maybe see Yasgur’s Farm. We never did find it, and since it was getting later in the day and I was rather tired (mostly from being bored), we began the journy back to our hotel. We decided that we would have dinner there that night, and so I settled in for an hour or so to nap.

Needless to say, we were curious about what the “surprise” would be for dinner. It was shrouded in secrecy. The schedule said to arrive at 6:30 for dinner, and when we got there around 6:25, we had to wait to get into the dining room. When the finally opened the doors, we walked in to discover…

…it was Mardi Gras night. Now, given that it was “Halloween Weekend” at the resort, we didn’t understand why it was suddenly Mardi Gras night. But the room was decorated in Mardi Gras colors, there were beads on the tables, and then…the final touch…a parade by the servers, who were all in half-assed Mardi Gras costumes. It was pathetic. Then came dinner, which was, to put it mildly, disappointing. Ali barely ate. As soon as we were finished, we split out of there, decided that we would definitely not stick around for the pumpkin carving and masquerade ball. We weren’t really sure what to do, so we headed to Poughkeepsie to see if we could find a movie, but we didn’t find anything we wanted to see. We remembered, from the last time we were there, that there was some activity in the area around Vassar, so we worked out way out there. We found a nice little coffee shop, and so we stopped and had something to drink. I taught Ali how to play chess, and had it not been for a silly mistake, she would have beaten me. When we finished our game, we wandered down the street to a really nice pool hall/restaurant that was there. Since we had to wait for a pool table, we sat down and watched some other people play, and ordered something to eat, since dinner had let us down. We finally got a table and played a few games of pool. It was a nice time, and around 12:30 we started to make our way back to the hotel.

It was very dark and very foggy on the ride back. The hotel is pretty much in the middle of nowhere (it’s a mountain resort, after all). There is a road that you have to turn on that basically goes up a very sharp incline. Right after we turned up that road, I could tell something was right. I was somewhat fortunate that the fog was so thick that I had to drive so slow. I did not say anything to Ali, but I told myself that I was not pulling over and getting out of the van. I had seen too many movies with THAT scenario. It wasn’t far to the hotel, so I just gritted my teeth and drove into the parking lot. When I got out of the van, I confirmed my suspicions. I had a flat tire.

Ali and I were not very happy about this. Our whole intention in taking this trip was to go hiking. We had not arrived early enough on Friday to go hiking, and it rained all day on Saturday. Sunday was supposed to be our one day to go, and now we had to deal with the flat tire. We go up early on Sunday and called AAA, hoping to have them tow the van to wherever we could get a new tire (we decided on Sears). We figured this would be better than putting on the spare and trying to find the place ourselves, since we didn’t know where to go. Unfortunately, we had to call AAA on a cell phone in order to actually speak to anyone, and being in the middle of nowhere, cell reception was terrible. As long as we kept the phone exactly in one spot, we could usually hear the other person. We were kept on hold for long periods of time, talked to several people, and finally, many hours later, someone arrived. In a pickup truck. He was there to put the spare tire on. This was silly, since I could have easily done that myself. Anyway, he put the tire on, and told me that we were fine to drive as far as Poughkeepsie on that tire, and since I knew where the Sears was in Poughkeepsie, we decided to check out and get moving. By 10:30 we were at Sears, and fortunately they had the tire we needed. We hung around the mall for a while, and finally, at 12:30, we were ready to go hiking.

We got to the mountain around 1:30. Unfortunately, with daylight savings, it was scheduled to get dark around 5, so we didn’t have a lot of time to go hiking. Still, we went as far along the trails as we could, and there was some beautiful scenery to see. I’m glad we at least got that time.

As we started to come home, we suddenly ended up in terrible traffic before we even got to the town of New Paltz (which is basically at the base of the mountain). We decided to stop in town and do a bit more shopping and maybe have dinner. The shopping we did, but we decided not to have dinner and to just begin home. Around 6:00, we were on our way.

And then we hit constant traffic along the NY Thruway. I’ve never really seen anything like that. Just a constant line of cars for probably 30-40 miles. Sometimes it would move quickly, and more often it would move slowly, and sometimes it would stop altogether, always for seemingly no reason. But the line of cars was always constant.

So, right around 9:00 we got home, just in time to see Angel. It was an interesting trip, to say the least. I guess it gives us some stories to tell, and it certainly wasn’t all bad. I definitely enjoyed getting to spend so much time with my wife. We had some excellent talks (yes, the subject of the cross-country trip was discussed), and overall I’d say I enjoyed myself.

I’ll post some pictures whenever I finally pull them off of the camera.

Had an adventure this weekend. I’ll write more about it later. In the meantime, here is an article about the possible demise of Buffy.

“EA has announced today that The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers will be coming to Xbox, Gamecube, and GBA.”

Oh good. ANOTHER game that I’ll want to buy.

Listen, I’m just warning you all right now. My Christmas list? It’s going to be FULL of XBox games. Feel that I’m too old for that sort of thing? Well, too bad. I want games for Christmas, okay?

I think the word “diva” is way too overused these days.

I have this friend. He and I go back quite a bit. When I met my wife, during college, they did not really get along all that well. It got worse, and finally resulted in him not attending my wedding. I regret that. I really wish he had been there.

Recently, my wife and my friend began to speak to one another and have become friendly. I no longer feel like I have to divide my time between the two of them or carefully tiptoe around subjects regarding one of them when the other one is around. I’m glad to have those two parts of my life together. I’m glad to have this friend back in my life the way he should be.

I have a dilemma. Here’s the thing. I really want to drive across the country. I want to take three weeks or so, and just drive across the country with a VERY loose plan in place, stopping wherever I want to stop to see whatever interesting thing comes up, or whatever interesting thing we found out about before we left. I feel an intense NEED to do this. What’s the problem, you ask?

Ali does not want to do this.

The problem, however, is I feel that I must go this summer. I have a feeling that it won’t be long before Ali and I begin having children. Once this happens, it’ll be at least 18 years before I have an opportunity to do this again. I do not want to wait until I’m in my 40′s to drive across the country. So, I think I need to do it now (well, not RIGHT now, but this summer). But Ali doesn’t want to go, and I don’t know that it would be the same without her. And even if I did go without her, how could I do that? How could I leave her behind for three weeks and go on vacation? (Mind you, to me, this is less about vacation and more about a spiritual need to do this, but that’s beside the point…)

Penny Arcade has, once again, put wonderfully into words and comic form exactly the experience I go through after watching a scary movie. This, my friends, is why I simply do not bother watching such movies anymore.

Doesn’t it seem like the people who are most vocal about their passions tend to be the least sincere about them?

Bryan keeps giving me a hard time because I’m not posting anything. I just don’t really have anything to post. I assume that you all don’t want to hear about the mundane minutae of my everyday life, and that’s pretty much what my life is right now. However, to keep Bryan happy, I’ll post a few links that most of you will care nothing about.

There’s this. Yes, that is an actual picture of the controller that comes with the game. It also comes with foot pedals. Yes, it costs $200. Yes, that’s as much as a new XBox costs.

There’s these guys, whose comic I’ve found myself reading regularly now.

Um, that’s about it. Yep. *looks around* See ya.