Spoilers

WTF CBS. I don't mind spoilers for reality shows, but you put the entire map of all the Amazing Race pitstops for the season on your website? So anyone who wants to watch extended footage gets spoiled about the whole route? Seriously?

TAR 13.1

(Warning: Spoilers ahead!)

I'm not going to spoil who won or lost this first leg of TAR 13 (other than that they were both teams I like), but I'm so excited that the Amazing Race is back! It's been so long. The last season aired last fall and I forgot how much I missed this show. Yay!

Anyway, the teams were in Salvador, Brazil today. I haven't been to Brazil, but would like to go someday. Salvador looked like a nice city, and the tasks looked fun. I definitely would have preferred climbing down a net to crawling hands and knees up the stairs. Yikes.

But the real story is how there are always teams I don't like! Right now it's 2.5 I think... the frat boys, the woman who really wants to get married (right now she is being edited as one dimensional and he really doesn't look like he wants to get married) and especially Terrence and Sarah. He's supposedly a free spirit, but he's the most uptight and intense free spirit I've ever seen on TV. She has her own issues and isn't treating this like a race, getting upset with people running the race because she tried to talk to them in the street and be nice, and they probably didn't even hear her since they were racing! And the preview is no better where he complains that 2 teams are "like one" because they're in an alliance (has he even watched the show? does he know what an alliance is?), and she whines that they didn't even say hi to her. Seriously?!

I'm so glad the race is back! And I'm also really glad that after a month of having no real chairs in the living room, we have new Ikea chairs to sit and watch TV. Yay!

Inbox

Remember that resolution I made, way back in December, to get and keep my gmail inbox below 3,000 messages?

Yeah, me too.

Today I got my gmail inbox from about 7,800 messages to its current message count, 6,926.

It felt like such an accomplishment until I looked back at the resolutions and realized my goal had been 3,000, not some higher number like, say, 5,000.

What are all the messages and why are 4,758 of them unread?

I have no idea.

Maybe I'll delete a few more before I go to sleep. I'm so close to getting below 6,900 that I think I'll try to get there tonight.

Wheeee.

Burritos

I'm sad that Burritoville is gone (or at least that's what the blogs say).  We kept going to Chipotle instead (they are diagonally across from one another) because that Burritoville location had some fruit fly problem by the salsa that started to annoy me.  They looked cleaner recently, but we never got around to trying it.  I can't even remember the last time I ate there!  But I'm sad because they actually had healthy burrito/burrito bowl options.  Brown rice.  Tofu sour cream.  With this gone and Rocket Wrapps gone, there is no more healthy option for burrito bowls on that section of 9th Ave.  I like to think I'm being somewhat "healthy" by going to Chipotle, not by the numbers, but because of loading up on fruits & vegetables, but I know that it's not as healthy as either of the other 2 places.  Oh well.  As Alvin says, "lost opportunities."  I saw them closed when we went to Chipotle on Friday but thought it was just a DOH thing.  Never expected this (although I could have read about it before then if I looked at the sites I usually read).  Sigh.

21 Minutes

It's rush hour, yet somehow the driving directions to SF only account
for a traffic delay of 21 minutes. Interesting.

Delays

I was bored so I decided to see if Google Maps on my blackberry would
give me a route from here to Maui. It wouldn't.

So then I got driving directions to San Francisco for fun (which were
what I thought they would be - 80 all the way) and it told me it would
take 1 day and 19 hours. With a traffic delay of 8 minutes. Where did
they get that from?

Vacations

Hopefully the "bad financial market events" during vacations trend will now be broken because bad things come in threes.

 

When we went to Alaska last year, we returned to land in Seattle to find out about the subprime mess and collapse.

 

When we went to Florida in the spring, Bear Stearns got bought by Chase.

 

We just came back from Hawaii on Monday.  What happened this time? Oh, Lehman went under, Merrill Lynch got bought, and the country bought AIG.

 

This really has to stop or I won't be able to fly places on vacation anymore!  People said I can't go on vacation anymore because of this trend.  I think it must stop now.  That's 3 bad things.  Bad things come in threes.  Please let the worst be over.

 

Then again, I don't think we're flying anywhere on vacation until after November.  So maybe it will get better.  Hopefully.  Hopefully someone who knows that Spain is not in Latin America will be elected and the madness will stop.

Dessert

The Iao Valley Lime Tart at Lahaina Grill is one of the best desserts I have ever had in my entire life.

Aloha

Aloha from Maui!

I wish we were just here on vacation and didn't have to go location scouting. Sigh.

Salad

Interested in hearing from someone who has tried this...

Traffic

I'm watching the local news, and the Staten Island Expressway has this much traffic this early in the morning? It's 6:02 am! Why are all these people driving in to work at 6 in the morning? It's so early! I'm so glad you can get to JFK by train. Especially when they said the off-season rush hour has ended and the highways are all congested again.

Labor Day Weekend

Hope everyone had a nice Labor Day weekend!

Mine was kind of blah. I did work for a good part of it, and cleaned the apartment when I could, but other than that, not much happened. Unlike the last 3 day weekend for July 4th, this weekend wasn't very restful. Worked most of the time, my allergies are going crazy, my eye won't stop twitching, I haven't gotten nearly as much done as I needed to do. But in appreciation of the little things, here were the highlights of my Labor Day weekend:

Saturday
- Bringing our futon to my parents' house to get rid of it and doing a Wii Fit workout
- Delicious Chinese food for dinner at Spring Garden, especially the string beans
- Seeing a US immigration document from 1933 that my grandfather found when cleaning out his house

Sunday
- Potato salad and sushi at our neighborhood sushi place
- Delicious Mediterranean lunch at Gazala Place
- Getting through a few episodes on the DVR, including an especially entertaining episode of Psych that I have been meaning to watch

Monday
- Buying a dress
- Getting new flip flops
- Discovering a new neighborhood Indian restaurant with excellent food

(So... it's been a good eating weekend... I guess that sums it up...)

Hmm

Is it really a good idea to campaign for VP with a newborn baby (regardless of the Down syndrome) and a pregnant teenage daughter?

Dumplings

We're watching Throwdown and they're making dumplings. Sadly (or not), my first time making dumplings last Christmas looked better than Bobby Flay's first dumplings. Ha.