Today was 92 fahrenheit. I was in the aircon office all day but around about 5pm I walked 10 seconds across the corner of the quad to see he hardware guys and got lightly toasted on one side. Fortunately I got evened upwalking back the other way… after work at about 6:30 I headed down the beach and took a dip in the slightly cold and very sandy water. The wind had picked up and the low evening sun wasn’t providing nearly as much warmth as in the day, but a brisk swim to and fro got me warmeed up and invogorated. As I was treading water, thinking about leaving, a jogger on the beach shouted at me and pointed down the shoreline. I couldn’t figure out what he meant. I’d noticed quite a strong undertow and wondered if I was breaking the rules by swinmming at the turn of the tide or something. That made my mind up and I got out. I picked up my towel and turned to watch the sun on the waves, and saw 3 dorsal fins… then 2 more… there, what must have been only 10 or 20 metres further out frm where I’d been treading water, a small pod of dolphins was making their leisurely way up the beach at about 4 knots! I turned and ran 5 or 6 steps towards the car for my camera, then turned again and ran a few steps towards the sea, thinking to dive in and say hello, but in the end settled for standing there dumbstruck and watching them gracefully and silently breaking the surface and arcing back underwater. WOW.
Ironing my shirts I noticed my favourite comfy shirt had died. I think it will pass off as ‘distressed’ for a while now, but the life’s gone out of the fabric. Dang! I must’ve got less than 150 washes out of that shirt! Then this afternoon I found a hole had appeared in the crotch of my newest pair of jeans. I wonder whether this is related to the mix up I had when I first got here when I thought that “bleach” was the american word for “washing liquid” since I couldn’t seem to find washing powder or liquid anywhere. I must’ve gone 2 or 4 weeks with that stuff before finding “Tide” on a drugstore shelf and realising that no, the American word for detergent is detergent. These jeans I was never 100% happy with anyway, what with them being so long that I step on them, and so baggy that a drunken woman once accused me of having gone out in my pyjamas. I make a mental note to go shopping soon. In fact I’d been contemplating shopping for clothes but wanted instead to get some website stuff done. So I fold the jeans and make a mental scribble in the margin of the first note to wear modest underwear with that pair of jeans in future. I pack my bag and head into the office. As I vault the wall, I hear a soft report, like a 21-gun salute 20 miles away, and it feels like my arse has made a break for the mountains.
This is God’s way of saying “Steve, it’s your last weekend in the USA and clothes are CHEAP here.”
So now I’m one pair of jeans and two shirts better off, and a pair of sunglasses that… er… aren’t. Owing to my failing to check for the “100% UV protection” sticker, I have… er … glasses. I drove home wearing them and now have the same semi-migraine I spent my first two weeks battling until I got my cheapo shades. Still, they’ll look great with the shirt and jeans I got…
Last night after blogging ( that last entry was at 18:56 in merkin hours) I dressed up (as what? you ask) and wandered downtown to see just how out-of-date the interweb site was that said there was salsa dancing on state street at 9:30. I decided to give the California Pizza Kitchen the third try this week, and simply wait as long as it took to get a table. That place is POPular. I guess the reason Vishwanadha and I got in OK the first time was because it was 4:30 on a Sunday. First though I thought it wise to check out the venue, see whether there’s dancing there, then if there isn’t I can figure out what to do while munching my pizza. Parked a couple of blocks off state and wandered in. With half a block to go, I came upon “Fascinating Rhythm Dance Centre” which seemed to have a bunch of people salsa-ing in it. I stuck my head in the door and tried to figure out who was in charge around there, and sort of got invited to join in. Suddenly the class was off and running and I was in it. It was fairly elementary stuff (some of the people in the class were new) but it was interesting to see a couple of stylistic differences - one of which answered why a lot of santa barbara girls go scooting off into the sunset when I lead perfectly simple moves on them…
After class the lights were dimmed and the room set up for a party, to which we were all invited for a small cover charge. I had pizza to forage so went to CPK. The waiting line was bigger than ever and my plans had changed vis-a-vis waiting as long as it took, so I headed to chipotle, a great mexican grill, where you can get a lovely fresh burrito for $6 with rice, beans, peppers, onions, choice of chicken, shredded pork, beef, choice of 4 salsas, sour cream… Yum…
Though the meal was smaller than my head, I thought it wise to walk it off before heading back to the venue. Two blocks later and what’s this I hear? A cowbell? A conga? Some timbas? Trumpet? Round the back of the block was some latin bar’s last-weekend goodye party with a live salsa band! Cha-ching… so I got a beer (well, a corona anyway) and danced my dinner down! Gently. Met a nice hispanic girl who didn’t know how to salsa but did a great job of following,
“Do you know how to salsa?”
“Do jou?”
“Yeah”
… we dance …
“Have you done this before?”
“?”
“?”
“No ingl?s”
“Oh…. ah…. hablas espanol?”
“Si, ?y tu?”
“uh… un pocotino”
“Ah… #$%*#($%*@*@%(@#*@(#*%^#*#$($%*#$%”
“Uh… no comprende”
“… No …”
… we dance a bit …
“Es tu primera vez bailar salsa?”
“Si”
“Muy bien, bueno”
“Que tu llamas?”
“No comprende”
“You name?”
“A me llama Steve - ?steban!”
“Est?ban!”
I think that was pretty in-depth considering my 5 words of spanish and her 8 of english.
So when my food had gone down, it was back to the venue for the dancing. It was all a bit odd, a little bit ballroomy: ricky martin showed up a number of times and I think there was even some quickstepping going on in places. But I had a few pleasant conversations, and some fun dances where I could really let rip on the great floor there! Met a woman called Phoenix, which probably takes the prize, beating Tamarind, Skylar, Jordan, Kendra, Erin, and poor old Rebecca who must’ve thought her parents didn’t love her to give her a name so pedestrian.
So there it was, I had about three nights out and I was back home by 11pm!
I see a bus with a bike rack on the front, and a kid with a genuine home-made lemonade kiosk!
Actually, I have to dock half a mark from the DVLA for putting “Date: As Postmarked” on their letter. This is very bad form. Especially cos there was no postmark on the envelope, since it was a pre-paid business envelope that got half way to my home then had a huge airmail sticker plastered on it, then got to the USA and had a USPS barcode stuck on it too. I find myself wondering if they should’ve put on another stamp, the amount of extra bulk that gets added by the time it gets here. The upshot of this is that the DVLA’s cost-cutting move leaves me without ammunition to complain to the royal mail, since they can say “ah yeah, that was sent on the day before expiry and must have got delayed at the US end.”
The other thing, on a related note, is the laser-printed signature… the POINT of a signature is it’s proof of a person’s involvement in something. Sometimes I wish I was a little more arsey than I am, so I could just send back documents that arrive like that and write “Dear Sir, I thought you should be aware somebody appears to be forging your signature”.
Curmudgeonly? Moi?!
I’ve just given my blog a long-overdue overhaul. You’ll notice this (
) really appalling graphic cropping up in the blog and around the site. It lets you get a link directly to that location. When I have access to something other than paint I may improve it. Anyhow, it was a faff, but not an unpleasant one, getting blogger’s archiving tamed (note “blog archive” link to the right), but it’s done (I hope… let me know if stuff is borked) and while testing, I found that:
a) I’ve been blogging over two years! whut?!
b) I started my blog before I got my website
c) blogger DOES hold on to all your entries, which was somewhat of a relief
d) I was thinking about learning to scuba a WHOLE YEAR ago, before back trouble kicked in… and now I can!
oh, and it’s supposed to be an anchor.
Having had my stay extended at short notice, it emerged that I have a slight administrative conundrum: The “vehicle license” (fancy name for car tax) for the ford (the one car that is parked on the public highway) expires on the 30th April, and I get back to blighty on the 1st of May. Unfortunately, the post office shuts around midday on Saturdays and all day Sunday so I can’t put in the forms until the 3rd of May. I had intended to leave it for the weekend and pay on the Monday, if necessary picking the window with the middle-aged spinster and fluttering my eyelashes a bit. I’ve done this before (well, the being a little bit late on the car tax part anyway) and it’s never been a problem. I couldn’t quite remember the grace period, but knew you could certainly get away with a couple of weeks late.
In conversation with some fellow brits though, it seemed the rules had been tightened up and I could look forward to a ruthlessly efficient, cold, computerised fine on my doormat at the stroke of zero-oh-hundred hours and no minutes on the 1st. So I looked into it and indeed there are new rules as of the 1st of Jan: basically, the DVLA ahave pulled their databases together, and now are able to tell if you own a car but haven’t taxed it or declared it off road. So I reluctantly put the ever faithful and hard-working Sam on the case, to try and sort out the required documents from my home (I THINK I’d set them aside in anticipation of some such situation, but it was so long ago now…) and to watch out for the reminder that the DVLA very considerately send during the month leading up to the expiry.
This afternoon, I received the reminder. In Santa Barbara. The forwarding I set up is to expire on the 14th of April. Yes, that was 10 days ago. Did this single letter take 10 days to get here when others took only 5? Or is the condo going to continue to receive important documents long after I’ve gone? I wish I had the paperwork to hand right now for the forwarding “service”, which I’d requested (sometime around 15th March) to start “as soon as possible” and end on the 14th. Instead I got a card from the royal mail weeks later stating the forwarding service would run from something like the 9th April to the 14th… and now items are still showing up nearly two weeks after that date! Bleh!?
The really exasperating thing is that if I wrote to the royal mail, kicked up a stink, got on watchdog, and had the prime minister as a personal friend, the way they’d “fix” this is by sacking a middle manager and throwing a bunch of money at a consultant’s report, having hastily robbed some other needy and failing part of the service. What is really needed is an engineer to look at the system they have and fix it. Just a fairly bright regular joe with the time and the access to examine where the information and the pieces of paper go. But this option doesn’t tranform well into politician and shareholder-friendly rhetoric so will not be chosen.
On the bright side, the letter contains a leaflet from the DVLA explaining that “If you don’t renew your tax disc within a month of the previous one expiring…” so I reckon I DO have a couple of days’ grace.
Score:
Post Office: -1 for slackness and being closed nearly all the time I’m not in an office
Royal Mail: -2 for failing to start forwarding “as soon as possible” and failing to stop forwarding at their agreed date
DVLA: +1 for allowing and documenting a grace period, +1 for sending timely reminders
Ok. They have a new word here. They don’t know what it means.
It is “to wank” or “wanker”, to whit, this morning my clock radio woke me with the discussion
“he was wanking off about it all evening”
“yeah, he’s a wanker alright!”
I think it means to enthuse tediously about trivial matters. In any case, it can’t mean spanking the monkey, shaking hands with the bishop, polishing the pork sword, pulling a hand shandy… or they would’ve bleeped it, surely. The way they bleeped “b*tch” at 11:30 the other night…
Much better. Successfully drew cash last night which was a relief. “Plan B” meant eating a dinner of yoghurt and ice cream and going to bed with a screaming headache at 9:30. “Plan A” fortunately went ahead, taking in a meal of red snapper provincial, linguine alfredo and a caesar salad…. Most agreeable. Sat there in the post-prandial lull I was trying to get up the guts to take a bunch of photos of the locals to give a flavour of fashions and levels of fanciability… my lask of barefaced front in photography is the principal reason why you will never see my name and city at the bottom of a poster in athena.
Was most amused by a tricked-out pimped-up pickup that came cruising up state street past the restaurant, with waffer-thin tyres on huge chrome rims, tinted windows and some kind of airbrushed paintjob no doubt involving palominos or something… with the stereo pumped up blaring out mariachi music in waltz time… so THAT’s how to impress the local latinas huh?
A drive down the beach, up hot springs road, west mountain road, and mission ridge back home (this time in the daylight) followed by a long hot bath and half hour’s shuteye and I was set up for the evening’s dancing…
Last night, after a tortuous day of not being able to do much, I decided to take back what control of my life was available, and go shopping for groceries instead of going out for a meal. I had a hankering for cheese on toast so spent a few minutes drawing strange looks from the locals sniffing just about every loaf of bread in the supermarket. No dice, they all had that strange sharp / sweet smell that seems to be part of the definition of ‘bread’ round here. Came back with ice cream, yoghurt, tapioca pudding, chocolate chip cookies, milk, salmon roulade, crisps, a couple of salads for lunches and a pizza. Got home, at half the cookies and half the ice cream, put the pizza on and fired up command and conquer. Missed the beeper that told me the pizza was ready, and two hours later realised I had a cold, slightly carbonated lump in the oven (being an american oven it had switched itself off long before the smell of burning permeated the house). Went to bed.
Tonight, I will just go to a restaurant I think!