it's a sad day, not only for bay area sports, but for the entire NFL. having met the man, and attended super bowl XIX when i was just a tot, i can say that the sporting world was definitely a better place with his guidance. the 49ers in the 80s were bill walsh. (well, and montana, clark, rice, et al.)
RIP, bill walsh, the 49ers would not have been the team of the 80s without you.
i currently have several point-and-shoot cameras, only one of which is digital. i desperately want a dSLR and went and drooled at several the other day. i'm pretty sure i decided which one i want, with all kinds of bells and whistles and perhaps next year i will have saved enough money to purchase said camera.
until then, i have to make do with digital manipulations of photographs to get the results i want.
for example, a crappy (firt-time) try at a fisheye effect:
now how much is that lens?
in honor of the all-star game today, i'll share some pics from the giants versus yankees game i went to last month.
i wanted to wear this shirt, but it wouldn't have arrived in time for the game. funny because IT'S TRUE!
it was so strange having had a day off in the middle of the week. not bad, of course, just strange. i was telling a friend of mine on friday how i went swimming on wednesday, but instead said sunday. because, really? it felt like a weekend. in the middle of the week! doesn't get much better than that. i didn't do much but swim and watch movies on the 4th, and dinner was mediocre pizza. i discovered that i can see my city's fireworks displays from my backyard, which was cool. i think next year i'll do a bbq for the 4th and invite folks to see the fireworks from my backyard. that is, if i can manage to get it cleaned up before then. i've been procrastinating like no other on pulling weeds and trimming stuff, i just have no interest whatsoever in gardening. because it's been so hot, i've closed the shutters going into the backyard, and now the weeds/nastiness is out of sight. but not out of mind, obviously.
thankfully, today has been cooler than the past couple of days. although i've no right complaining when las vegas and phoenix, and even places in utah, are well into triple digits.
juan is recovering well. he had surgery on his hand on thursday and now has two pins in it, which will remain for about 6 weeks. we kid because we love, and my father has taken to calling juan "frankenstein," which my sister has shortened to simply "frank," because of all of his braces and bandages. i had dinner with my sister and juan last night, the first time i've seen him since the accident. most of his bruises have healed, but seeing him in his brace get-up is frightening, if only because i can't help but think "what if?" he's in good spirits though, and is anxious to return to work.
i'm stoked that the all-star game will be shown on fox, which is one of the three hi-def channels i get. since i'm too cheap to pay for the package through comcast, i receive the hi-def channels through the tv's built-in tuner over the air. my father had tickets to some special event for the all-star game but declined them , thinking i wouldn't want to attend. goes to show he really wasn't thinking, because OF COURSE i would want to attend!
happy independence day!
what's more american than reveling in someone else's misery?
from the genius folks at milkfat :
(click to enlarge, trust me!)
i don't watch "the simple life," thus the "sa na sa" reference was lost on me, until GOOGLE figgered it out for me. if you're like me and haven't seen that drivel, paris and nicole had this running little song they'd do, that goes "sa na sa! sa na sa. sa na sa! sa na saaaaa!" youtube'ing (yay for turning it into a verb!) it will produce this:
i switch my phone to silent at night, we've established that already.
so when i woke up at the ungodly hour of 5.30 this morning and had a few text messages and emails waiting, nothing was unusual.
until i saw one from my sister that said, simply: "juan was in a motorcycle accident." that's it. no further information, no missed calls, no voicemails, nothing.
juan is her boyfriend, and as they've been together for so long, part of our family.
i waited for an hour before calling her, scared of whatever news she'd give me about him. and her! was she on the motorcycle, too?
she answered groggily, as to be expected, at 6.30, and answered my barrage of questions. is he okay? is he in the hospital? what's broken? is he living?!
the answer to the last one, thankfully, was yes. but he is badly injured: a broken hand, a broken arm, a broken shoulder and two fractured vertebrae. he's home from the hospital, doped up on all kinds of pain medication.
i know i haven't mentioned it, but juan recently got an apartment sort-of with my sister. she lives there about half of the week, and spends the other half of the week at my parent's house. dog duties and all, her reason being. anyway, my parents weren't thrilled with her "moving in" with him, but at least she's there with him now -- the guy can't get himself out of bed to use the bathroom because of his neck/back brace. he'll be out of work for at least a week, which is huge because he works as a bartender. the good news is that he works for my company, so he'll obviously get all the time he needs to recover.
so the accident. this was his first time on a motorcycle and he was just cruising down the street in his neighborhood. my sister and juan's brother were waiting for him back at the house, when after several minutes juan didn't return. juan's brother went to go see what happened, and raced back and told my sister to get in the car. come to find out what happened was that someone ran a stop sign and plowed into juan and kept driving. that's right, it was a hit-and-run. juan was thrown from the bike, and into the fence of a church. that it was a church doesn't escape me.
the bike, of course, is totaled. it was juan's brother's, new and less than a month old. sounds painful, but not as painful as juan's injuries. thankfully, he was wearing a helmet.
