As many of my friends know, I am an avid tea drinker. In fact, I don’t think there is a type of tea I don’t like. While waiting on the Apple store guys to put RAM in the Mac Mini I bought today, I went walking around the mall. Near the Apple store I was strangely drawn to this shop I had never seen before, a place called Teavana. It was the amazing aroma of teas coming from the store which was dragging me in like a tractor beam. (more…)

In some respects this year has flew by, in other respects it seems like it’s been a long year. It’s definitely been an eventful year, so I decided to do a recap of the year’s events. From jet-setting around the world (literally), to taking on new roles in the company, to diving off the deep end with new hobbies, to picking up a book deal this year has had it’s fair share of excitement. This list definitely isn’t all inclusive, but it should be offer good coverage of the highlights. (more…)

Well it’s been a long long day so far but I can’t say I am disappointed in the least in how things are shaping up. My travels started last night at 10:30pm when I boarded a plane for Charlotte, NC. The flight wasn’t terrible, but let’s just say US Airways sure didn’t go out of their way to earn my money or loyalty. If it wasn’t for the fact they were several hundred dollars cheaper than United and still let me put my miles on my United frequent flyer account I would probably have never used them in the first place, though, so to be honest I wasn’t surprised by their quality of service. I did end up getting about two hours of sleep though, so it wasn’t all bad. Arriving into Charlotte at 6am, the airport was virtually deserted. Unfortunately I had a 5 hour layover ahead and was extremely tired. I made it through it reading blog posts and other piddling activities and then flew to Grand Cayman.

Stepping off the plane in Grand Cayman I was immediately hit with a wave of very humid air. Ahhh… Island air… Been a while since I’ve experienced it. It’s not so bad once you get used to it, but man, living in California for the past two years (aka very dry air) spoiled me a bit. This is when things started getting a bit more “adventuresome”. From Grand Cayman I had a flight to Little Cayman. The plane was a small twin engine prop job and a storm was brewing. We took off into the storm and were greeted with a fair amount of turbulence (I’ve had worse, but one lady did in fact get sick) and pretty spectacular looking lightning. Unfortunately, Little Cayman doesn’t have any radio beacons or runway lights on it’s runway (heck, it was a grass strip just a year ago) so the pilot wasn’t able to successfully pull off a landing. We then went on to Cayman Brac and ended up spending a little over an hour there riding out the storm.

Finally getting to Little Cayman, the guy is unloading the plane and overloads the cart trying to get as many as possible off in the rain. As luck would have it, which bag falls off the mountainous stack? Mine! Luckily it was my dive bag and nothing was hurt, but it didn’t improve my mood. The bad got worse then when I realized they had _left_ my other bag behind without telling me. Of course this bag had all my camera gear (well over $5k in gear) as well as my dive regs. The indifferent mood of the lady at the counter pushed me over the top and I probably took a bit too much of my frustration out on her. Tis is life I guess. Luckily my stuff “should” arrive on the next flight in tomorrow morning, but that does mean I will have to do my first half of the day’s dives with rental regulators (yuck!). I’m just hoping at this point that everything makes it in one piece.

Anyway, things thankfully improved immensely once we got to the resort. The place has a flat out amazing view, the rooms are very comfortable (something which will be greatly appreciated after a long day diving), the food is good, and to top it off the receptionist and the bartender are knock outs. Still not sure if either is single, but I’ve had good chats with Jessica (the front desk receptionist) so who knows. This vacation could end up being fantastic yet!

Enjoy the few photos I have taken so far. Sadly, all I have available is the 50-500mm lens I borrowed (with no camera to use it on) and my iPhone at the moment, but hopefully tomorrow I will have better photos to post.

Day #1 Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremyjohnstone/sets/72157601916795196/
Collection from whole trip: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremyjohnstone/collections/72157601926492309/

More to come!

So today I set out to get my tires fixed. Trying my best to get work done too, I decided to work from home while I follow up on what it’s going to cost me. Little did I know at the time what that adventure would entail.

My first avenue was to check with AAA to see if it provided me road hazard coverage (after all, I do pay them $50 a year) on my tires. Unfortunately it seems I am not so lucky there (but “they will tow my car if that’s any consolation”).

I then decided to check on my automobile’s warranty. No go there too. Had I bought the extended warranty, it would be covered, but I hadn’t (didn’t plan to keep the car long enough to justify it).

Next I check on my road side service coverage (don’t ask me why I have this _and_ AAA). Doesn’t seem to cover it either (no surprise at this point).

Finally, I decide to check with my auto insurance. Yes, they would cover it, but then I would have to file a claim to do so. Because it’s apparently my fault the road was a piece of crap and unfinished, it would be charged as an “at fault” accident and I would have to pay my $500 deductible. Didn’t seem to be worth it (since it might cause a rate hike).

Feeling dejected and completely pissed at this point, I decided to take out my aggravation on the Michelin phone support people. Or at least that’s what I thought when I started to dial their number. Thankfully, though, I got through to a representative quickly (1-2 minute hold) and the pleasant voice on the other end of the line didn’t sound like she deserved my wrath, so I went easy on her. Quickly explaining the situation I learned I could file a claim and simply would need to take my car to one of their authorized dealers and after inspection I would either get 100% coverage or some pro-rated amount (which she though would be decent since I only had 10,000 miles on the tires).

I then proceeded to drive to the closest tire place (Big-O tires on El Camino) she offered to me. Getting there they tell me it’s obviously road hazard damage (duhhh) and that they think Michelin won’t cover it (f#@! f#@! f#@!, that lying b@#!@, I am thinking at this point). Well as it turns out, they did in fact cover it, only with a pro-rate and not free replacement. They offered me 35% off on the tires and I begrudgingly accepted it as it’s the best they would do.

As the tires are $199.95 a piece (+ tax and installation), my total still came out to just over $500 with the discount (oh, did I mention three needed to be replaced, not the previously thought two and that the inside of my rims got scrapped too). Needless to say, I am not in a pleasant mood this evening. Is $500 really gonna kill me? No, not at all, but it doesn’t change the fact it feels like I am pissing money down the drain simply because some road construction worker, his boss / employer, and / or the incompetent state of California couldn’t ensure it was safe to actually drive on the road without severe damage to one’s vehicle.

So I guess maybe I should start at the beginning. Beginnings are good and all, right? Well, this evening I was lucky enough to get luxury suite tickets to the San Francisco Giants baseball game. I also happened to get enough tickets for a couple of my friends/coworkers to go (and two of them got tickets of their own from the same source, so they brought more people). All is going well, Dan/Tenni/Addy are carpooling with me into the city in the YodelMobile with it’s recently retrofitted musical yodeling horn when…

BAM!!

I hit a large lip in the road (road construction caused uneven road height) near the 101/280 split in San Francisco. It was a loud hit, so being nervous I quickly find an exit and assess the damage. Checking everything out, almost everything seems ok but the tires (thankfully I guess, could have been worse). The driver side tire has a pronounced knot in the side wall, the passenger side has a less pronounced one, but still noticeable. So, now I have two tires with broken side walls. Not sure what to do at this point, I call my dear father who thankfully knows a bit more about cars than me. After discussing the situation with him, he suggests I put the spare tire on the driver side, but says I could probably drive on it as long as it didn’t get worse (being very cautious in doing so). Since we weren’t far from the stadium, I decided to go ahead and drive to the stadium and change it there if it got worse (maybe not the smartest choice, but it proved to be ok).

As it turns out, it made it there without any sign of worsening, so we went in to enjoy the game (photos to come). Coming back to the car after the game, the tire still seemed to be no worse off, so instead of changing the tire we decided to proceed ahead home and stop periodically to check on it. After pissing off almost every driver on the 101 doing 45mph, we decided to stop and check again. Unfortunately it had gotten worse at this point and the knot on the driver side had gotten a bit bigger than a fist. Fearing the worse, I said we should go ahead and put the spare tire on and everyone agreed with me. So, we then proceed to start unpacking everything from the trunk and pull out the spare. I start working on getting out the jack while Dan goes to loosen the lug nuts.

That’s when we learn of problem #2 of the night. Unfortunately in my infinite amounts of intelligence </sarcasm>, I didn’t leave the lug nut key inside the car (it was at home). So despite having a strong desire to get home (it was getting rather late), unfortunately it wasn’t possible to change the tire. Faced with two options at this point, one to drive slowly on surface roads and check more frequently, or two to wait on AAA (unknown how long that would be), we decided to take El Camino home at a blisteringly fast pace of 25mph. Thankfully we offended far less drivers that route and were able to get everyone to their destinations. I finally made it home about 30 minutes ago (aka 12:30am roughly).

Arriving home I found the knot had grown to cover the entire area from tread to the rim (and about 3-4 inches wide). The tire is starting to separate from the rim, so AAA will probably be hearing from me tomorrow to take my car somewhere. Depends how ambitious I feel about changing to the spare myself (I do pay them yearly for the benefit of towing among other things after all). I guess the bright side as one coworker fondly pointed out after hearing the story over IM, I can now see if anyone sells purple walled tires (as opposed to white walls). Surprisingly I had just enough humor left in me to let out a good chuckle to that. Thanks Mark!

So now I am off to sleep to have sweet dreams of tire blowouts I barely avoided (again, </sarcasm>) and how much I love the California Department of Transportation (DOT) / Division of Maintenance (DOM).