My most viewed Youtube Video…with a paltry 1200 views…It’s a lobster in Qing Dao, China. They pull it from the tank, cut the head off, cut the tail off, remove the tail meat, plate it sashimi style, then plate the still kicking head, antennae and legs on a bed of ice. It is served quick as the dickens such that the lobster is still kicking when it arrives at your table. It’s unstomachable for 99% of the US population and a delicacy for 99% of the Chinese population.

So, while I was back in the Bay Area, waiting for my rocket to come, I found myself with an unnatural tendency to pimp my mom’s garage. I guess I’m a home repairs-garagey kinda guy. Or I will be when I get a garage of my own. I went through all of my old high school crap that was stored in boxed and threw away most of it, save for every scrap of high school work I ever did, including our quadrat project from AP bio. But then I replaced the dearth of my old stuff with paucity of new crap from college. I fixed the garage door, by loctiting (tite not tit) every bolt holding it together…nylock nuts were prohibitively expensive. I painted the entire garage, as the walls were all unfinished drywall. When my mom asked why I painted it, I said, “mom, not everyone is so foturnate to have a drywalled garage…many people just have studs and tarpaper, which would look silly. Let one hundred flowers blossom.” She said, “wtf greg, but ‘ok’ if your’e going to hook it up.” Last but not least, I pressure washed, alkali etched, and epoxy coated the garage floor, so now it’s like a race car garage. The whole garage is 200% brighter and a whole lot cleaner (looking). I can’t wait until I have my own garage.

Sky on the floor.

Finished product.

I thought the inflatable Chinese myopic testing mascot at the Food Expo was rofl. But apparently it’s serious business. This 3 year old kid has it pretty bad, but what really drove it home was that he got myopia with intercurrent astigmatism and amblyopia from marathon sessions of Counterstrike. On the other hand, since I’ve started playing first persons shooters again, mainly bf2, my visual acuity and hand-eye coordination has definitely bettered. His corrective glasses reminded me of those crazy oakleys that Michael Jordan promoted back in the crazy late 90′s.

In SD David, Jake and company like to play games. Speed scrabble is a variation of scrabble where you get 7 letters and you make your own arrangement. When you use a letter, you say “honk my horn!” and everyone takes another letter such that you always have 7 letters in your hand, plus your arrangement. Points don’t matter, only who ever finishes first. If you’re slow in the head, like me, you get overwhelmed by constantly having more and more letters to deal with. I tend to think outside the box (read: outside the rules of the game), so I just waited till I had tons of letters and aimed for high humor scores. (Sensia 400)

Carbonfund.org‘s slogan is “toward a zero carbon world.” I’m thinking about donating because I also despise methane, proteins, sugar, pencil lead, diamonds, explosives, wood, pvc pipes, plastic, macaroni and cheese, gatorade, pine trees and basically every living thing and earth as we know it. Yes, it’s a technicality, albeit a rather large one.

Shiba Inu at the dog show in SF. Yeah, I know, dog show. I went. But really, I’ve never had a legitimate pet in my life, no dogs, cats, birds, turtles. Being around so many dogs and people who are obsessed with their dogs was quite shock in terms of culture. I’m starting to get the feeeling that I missed out on something. My first faux pet was at UCSB. I stole/borrowed some gold fish from the Storke reflecting pool. Yeah there are some fish in there. No wonder I care so much about my bonsai. (Sensia 400)

Tanbark. Know what it is? You either most definitely know it, or you’ve never ever heard of it. I feel like it’s Bay Area thing. If you know of it, you know it because it’s the stuff that used to surround the play structure or jungle gym in elementary school to soften the blow when you fell from the ring bars or got thrown off the slide playing king of the mountain. It was the lava in 9 lives. It’s the stuff that you’d always get splinters from. It’s the stuff that would form mysterious quicksand-indeterminable-depth pools. When it rained–the wood chips would all float to the top and look like it was hard ground. It’s the stuff you could throw at other kids on the playground if you held the chips like you were going to skip a rock.
It seems like only a handful of people had this great stuff in their childhood, but it confounds me because when I think of Rheem Elementary, I think of tanbark (and toilet monsters and skinners and pink elephants). New federal regulations require that “surfaces under and around accessible play equipment and other play equipment in the play area shall be firm, stable and slip resistant” and that the “material shall minimize splintering, scraping, puncturing or abrading the skin when being crawled on.” Tanbark has since been replaced by more environmentally friendly materials such as chopped up old tires and recycled rubber matting. I guess skinning pine trees wasn’t very friendly.

Mother, just chillin. (Fuji Sensia 400)