You may have noticed my slightly longer than usual absence last week, which is due to me being on vacation.  It’s also entirely possible that you didn’t notice, because you got your own thing going on and you don’t need to check up on me every ten minutes to see how I’m doing.  And, let’s face it, I’m not the world’s most prolific poster, so it’s not like Vegas was making odds about what had happened to me.  (Computer-related fire was going off at 6:1.)

I spent last week in sunny San Diego visiting my sister.  She lives in an area of town called Ocean Beach only a couple blocks from the beach itself.  This is a very…unique…part of town.  It has yet to go through the real-estate regrowth of most coast cities, so the houses are still from the 60′s and 70′s complete with their original inhabitants: aging hippies.  Old hippies seem to attract young hippies, and the number of white people with dreadlocks was just wrong.  However, it does make for some interesting people watching whilst drinking beers.

Case in point:

Our first night in town, right after our plane landed, we went down to this bar on the main street and got seats next to a big open window that allowed us to interact with the folks in front wandering about.  At a certain point we were observing a gentleman who looked like unwashed ZZ Top with a kilt talking to another guy who looked like he may have started Hell’s Angels.  A woman in her forties walked by using one of those walkers that old folks have with the built-in chair.  On the chair was a large bag.  On the large bag was a little dog.  She was also cleared loaded.

The lady saw these two gentlemen and decided that she wanted to hang out with them, so she pulls up her walked and spins it around to sit on the chair.  The dog leaps out of the way as she sits down hard, but she forgot to apply the parking brake, so the entire contraption goes backwards down off the curb and into the road.  The lady goes upside down and backwards, the dog runs under a parked car and hides, and kilted ZZ Top turns to us and says, “That’s some shit you don’t see every day!”

After a minute or so, the lady gets herself upright and back on her chair.  She digs in her bag and comes out with a beef jerky stick, a cigarette, and a hairbrush.  She then uses all of these items simultaneously, chewing her jerky, smoking her cigarette, and brushing her hair.  Apparently she decided she was antsy, hungry, and disheveled, and couldn’t prioritize very well.

After a start to the week like that, I knew it was going to be a good time.

I had the best fish taco ever.  Don’t even try to tell me you know of a place that has good ones, because you’re wrong; I had the best one ever.  Back away from this argument or I will destroy you.

Was in an earthquake for the first time.  It happened about 120 miles away, but it was a 7.1 so we felt it pretty good.  At the time, I was relaxing on the beach, and I wondered if it was an earthquake or they just put something extra in my margarita.  Unbeknownst to me, there were about 3,000 more aftershocks that I didn’t feel at all.  Currently Baja Mexico/California is doing it’s best to separate from the mainland.

There’s this special beach that San Diego built specially for children.  They made a large concrete and stone barrier so that big waves don’t come in and sweep your younglings out to sea, and it looks like they spent a fair amount of money making this protected little cove.  Apparently humans aren’t the only species to find this place appealing, because harbor seals moved in and squatted on it.  Officially, no people use this beach; the seals planted a flag and claimed the beach for Sealandia.  Little known fact: seals smell absolutely terrible.  You wouldn’t want to use this beach anyways, unless you Febreezed it first.

Since we wanted to see the seals better, we drove down a ways to La Jolla and rented one of those kayaks that you can take out on the ocean.  At the rental place, we noticed they had a chalkboard with “Number of Lost Sunglasses” on it, and the count is currently up to 69.  I asked the guy why people lose their sunglasses and he explained that when you’re coming back in, you have to go through the point where the waves break.  The only way to get through here easily is to pretend its a surfboard and surf it all the way to the beach.  However, if you have the kayak turned slightly sideways, the wave will just flip you over, and your sunglasses will be forever lost.

So we go out into the ocean in our little boat, and go along the coast and look at all the seals and birds and caves and such.  We see another kayaker get too close to the shore where the waves are breaking, and sure enough, it flips him right over.  The wife and I laugh at this and shake our heads.  Didn’t he listen to the guy at the kayak rental place?

After our time is up, we head back in.  By this point, it’s a little windy and the waves are picking up, and we have to head back directly into the wind.  My goal was to get to the point 90 degrees from where we needed to be on the beach, so that way we could come directly in on a straight line and then we’d be able to surf the waves.  Wife, on the other hand, is in the front of the kayak and now getting sprayed with windy, cold water.  She wants to head back on more of a “shortest distance between two points” method.  Compromise is the key to marriage, so we go on a curvy route that splits the difference.  The laws of physics care little for compromise.

Our kayak half rolls and half flips.  Wife in the front gets rolled out.  I in the back get flipped over the whole thing.  When I pop up out of the water, I’m holding onto the kayak in the waves and desperately trying to control it.  Wife is standing there, having just gotten bonked in the nose and face with the kayak on her journey out of it, somewhat stunned and looking for her sunglasses.  I’m yelling at her to move so she doesn’t get bashed again, since I have very little control over our boat, but she can’t hear me because her ears are full of water.

When we went back to the rental place, she had then change the sign from 69 to 70.

As far as adventure goes, that was about it.  The rest of the time was spent relaxing, drinking wine in Temecula, walking through the zoo, and doing what I call “not being at work.”

San Diego is an awesome place and I would love to live there, if I could somehow wrap my head around the ridiculously inflated real estate prices ($350k+ for a 1bed 1bath 1000 sq ft?!).  Maybe someday when I’m a millionaire and if California hasn’t fallen into the ocean yet, I’ll have my winter home there.

Anyone know surefire ways to win the lottery?