New Gear

In preparation for hiking Mount San Jacinto tomorrow, I went out and purchased some much needed gear. The Camelbak Asymetrix 30 and Merrell Chameleon Stretch shoes. I based my product selection on recommendations and advice from friends. I went with the Asymetrix 30 because it has a 3 liter water reservoir (you can never have too much water) and 1800 cubic inches of storage space (Aaron Rapp and Jonathan recommended to get a backpack version of the Camelbak and the more storage the better). The Merrell hiking shoes come highly recommended by Aaron Matthews plus the high tech lacing system totally appealed to the geek in me, just pull the elastic loop to "lace up". How great is that?! And I must say, they are soooo comfortable, better than my day to day shoes, they're like a second skin.
Now normally for purchases over $50 I will go online and find the lowest price via PriceGrabber or Google Products (formerly Froogle) and purchase it from an online merchant. But there was a slight problem in this case, I found out about the hike on Friday and the hike itself was Sunday, with time of the essence I needed to make my purchase from a retail store. Therefore I decided to "take it to the limit" and visit Sport Chalet.


Since I knew I would end up paying retail I figured I would just ask to see if they did price matching. The girl at the register told me they did, so I pulled up the same Camelbak at Amazon.com on my phone. The manager came over to verify the price match but when he found out it was an online store he told me they don't do online stores because they can't compete. Luckily out of curiosity he asked what Amazon's price was, it was 97.95 vs 109.00, since the difference wasn't that big he gave me the discount anyways, awesome! The Merrells were on sale 79.99 vs 99.99. All together I saved about 15% off retail, not bad for the convenience and instant gratification of shopping a retail store.

Moral of the story, it's free to ask, so do it!

What a weekend!

And now for a brief summary of our weekend as told by pictures...

Some friends and I decided to go on a spur of the moment cruise aboard the M.S. Paradise for three days.

Here is some of what we experienced!

The Constant Eating of Food

Our Dorky Humor

Ensenada

Drinking in Ensenada

More Dorkiness

Dancing Girls

Lots of people at Papas & Beer

Random pictures I don't remember taking

More Drinking! (Aaron had 18 beers, he was going for 21 but Krissy "stole" 3 of his...shame on you Krissy)

Our lovely and very fun table mates (Chelsea & Bonnie, and Jessica is a little bit cut off on the left, sorry Jessica)

The amazing table magic of "The Great Cazini"

The dinner time conga line

*Ahem* More dorkiness!

A Bit More drinking (We came to the conclusion fosters provided the most bang for the buck, plus it allowed us to speak in Australian accents...Crikey!)

Geeks of the world unite! (It's quite the shame she's going to be off the market in a few months)

Jonathan has some true game (Notice the "message of the cruise" on his shirt)

More drinks???

Well I think that pretty much sums it up.

Oh and by the way, for those interested...I came back weighing 143.8 lbs (I gained a whole 1.6 pounds, woohoo!)

Bon Voyage

Well here's a short and sweet notice letting you know I'm leaving on the spur of the moment for a weekend cruise. Thanks to the travel hookups of my friend Mikael, my friends and I were able to book a 3 night cruise for only $159 each.

Here's the boat we're going to be on:

Everyone always says you gain weight on a cruise, let's hope they are correct! I'm going to try to eat 6+ meals a day!

Current weight as of 12:14AM 06/08/2007: 142.2 LBS

Stuff

Well it's been a little while since I posted on here. Been busy and haven't really felt like I've had anything significant to report. Plus it's harder to write when you know people from work are reading, yes, I know you're reading this right now, yeah you.

But anyways here's a few updates:

House sitting again while my parents vacation in Europe for another few weeks (hopefully they can bring back a bottle of absinthe)

We planted a garden next to the fort in our back yard. So far the plants that are still alive are the strawberries, bell peppers, onions, picante peppers, artichoke and a few others

My birthday was June 1st. I'm now over the quarter century hill.

Our roommate Steve returned from his teaching trip in Rwanda without getting "the HIV" (pronounced "hiv" as a word not acronym) and he brought us back some sweet knives

I'm going on a cruise this weekend and hopefully Yosemite the next

There's talk of going on hikes every Sunday among the roommates (but I guess I won't be able to start that until next weekend)

And last but not least I'm considering going on a Zero-G flight. I just found out about it in this month's Sharper Image.

That's all for now. I'll probably post about the cruise since that will be somewhat significant.