Corey Goes To The Beach

One of my friend Mark's friends (Corey) is in California for the week so I've been coming up with stuff for him to see while he's here. I took him and Mark out to Tomales Bay to the Hog Island Oyster Company and then down to Stinson Beach a couple days ago. While we were there, Corey kept challenging me to footraces - claiming he could beat me running backwards while I run forwards. So, here's a mash-up of some of the stuff from that day.

Coming Soon

The Land Down Under

I have officially been offered a job at Rochford Winery in the Yarra Valley outside of Melbourne, Australia and tonight I bought my plane ticket so I'm going! Yay, new adventure time.

Videos!

Here are a couple recent videos. This is the bus of my coworkers from J on our way back from our drinking field trip at Anhueser Busch and a microbrewery in Fairfield (Brew Frog Grog and Grill).

This video is my mom playing balloon volleyball with Sadie. Note how transfixed they both are:

Cafe Dog

I've been taking Daisy with me to the local café every morning to accompany me while I read. I think we have this really adorable companionship going on and like to think that onlookers who see us are jealous of how cute my puppy is and how much spare time I seem to have based on how long I spend in the café on my kindle.

This morning, we were walking to the coffee shop and Daisy started to do this really cute rolling-over and I initially thought it was so adorable I was going to vomit, then I realized she was rolling in another dog's shit.

So, we went to the café and she was being really misbehaved and still had some poop remnants on her ear that I couldn't get off with napkins and after that we had to go home and she needed a bath (obviously) which she hates and so it's been a pretty rocky day.

Tomorrow will be better.

[F]un-employment

As of Friday, I am now unemployed and back in relax-mode for the first time since Spain. As part of my relax-mode, I have to come up with trivial activities for myself to fill up my day and avoid spending the whole day in bed eating donuts and watching reality television. If I give into the donuts to early on in relax-mode, I start to enter depressed-mode and then eventually stop getting out of bed all together.

So, as part of my new schedule, I go to Bikram Yoga every morning (for those of you unfamiliar with Bikram, it is yoga in a sauna with lots of hairy and unattractive people, but it takes a couple hours all together and is one of the least expensive hobbies I could come up with - oh, and I enjoy it). This morning at Bikram, the Yogi (I think that's what they are called) who was leading the class was telling us about how a friend of hers came up with switching around the phrase "Don't just sit there - Do something!" to "Don't just do something - Sit there!" Initially, I assumed that she had just smoked too much pot and there was nothing behind what she was saying, but she briefly explained herself and there's actually some wisdom to that statement.

The idea is that people tend to say harsh things they don't mean or make erroneous decisions when they impulsively react to a situation instead of taking the time to sit and think out what their approach to a given situation will be. I started thinking about how often I have made a neutral situation worse by doing something just for the sake of doing something and decided that my mantra for my unemployment spurt (this one, at least) will be to just sit there rather than doing something just for the sake of having something to do. So, even though I have all these trivial activities lined up, I am only really partaking in things I enjoy (e.g. wine tasting, Bikram, dog training classes with Daisy) rather than doing things just for the sake of filling my day. And I'm trying to perfect my art of not doing something and just sitting there.

Although this is the first week day I have free (and I had a job interview today so I don't know if that even counts as having a free day), it is going very well so far.