sha v 3.1

Monday night at climbing I increased my pull-up ability 250% by doing 2 1/2 pull-ups. Then, after Buddy didn't believe me (Marc witnessed them, though), I did another one. OMG.

Last night we had one of our famous Northern California marathon rains (~14+ hours straight of pouring rain). One of the joys of being a dog owner is that, rain or shine, you still gotta walk the dog. So on Enzo's walk, I decided to take him to the apartment complex across the street since the trees there afforded a bit of shelter from the rain. It was pretty dark outside, and I noticed that the sidewalk was littered with what looked like bits of plants. Until I looked closer and noticed that they were moving. And they were earthworms. Everywhere. Restrospectively, I wish I had taken a picture, but I was too busy trying not to (to steal a phrase from SNL) barf forever.

Virgin Galactic and New Mexico Announce Spaceport Agreement

At press conferences in London and New Mexico, officials from Virgin Galactic and from the State of New Mexico announced that they had reached an historic agreement which will see the building of a $200m spaceport in the southern part of the state on a 27 square mile area of state land.

Virgin Galactic has agreed to locate its world's headquarters and Mission Control in New Mexico and strongly believes that the new spaceport will offer fledgling astronauts an experience that will be truly out of this world.

"When Burt Rutan and SpaceShipOne won the X PRIZE in October 2004, we knew the new space industry had arrived," said Secretary Rick Homans. "And when Sir Richard Branson announced that Virgin would use that same technology to fly paying passengers into space, we realized that our most important job was to convince Virgin Galactic to come to New Mexico and launch the personal spaceflight industry. This announcement is a convergence of dreams and we are proud that Virgin will be New Mexico's anchor tenant at the world's most exciting space tourism location. "

"New Mexico has worked hard to bring us to their exciting new spaceport facility," stated Will Whitehorn, President of Virgin Galactic. "The State has several factors that make it an ideal operations base: climate, free airspace, low population density, high altitude, and stunning scenery. Our team was highly impressed by the professionalism and the competitive pitch the state and its advisors developed. We look forward to working together to make the "Final Frontier" a reality for tens of thousands of pioneering space tourists. Our activities will prove the commercial viability and excellent safety technology behind private personal spaceflight and give birth to a new industry in New Mexico."

As some of you may already know, a few years ago, Penny Arcade started a charity called Child's Play in response to the media backlash against video games and gamers. They send toys and cash donations to children's hospitals around the country to show that hey, gamers aren't bad people. Over the past two years, they've raised nearly $1 million dollars for various children's hospitals.

For the first time this year, they've added the UNM Children's Hospital. So if you can spare it, I encourage you to take a moment to check out the Child's Play website, and if you want to donate, just click on the map where Albuquerque is. This will take you to their Amazon wish list, and you can choose any number of toys, books, and games to have shipped to UNM. Or, see if there are any hospitals in your local area and give what you can.

I went to my second Ozomatli concert last Thursday at the Fillmore. Rahul and I slowly made our way towards the front while the opening band, State Radio was playing, and we were close, but not right at the front. But before Ozomatli came on, a couple high school kids let me get in front of them because I'm a shortie. And they say kids nowadays have no manners. Anyway, without falling into fangirly gibberish, I'll just say that the concert was super awesome and leave it at that. Best band ever.

Friday was dinner with Walter, Babs, and Florence, then we swapped Walter for Cheryl and saw Pride and Prejudice, which I liked a lot. I know a couple people who didn't like it, but those are both people who had already read and loved the book. Good thing I never learned to read.

Saturday I went up to the city to see Dave at his Decadance performance at Pier 39, which was fun. Afterwards, we headed to G.A.M.E., which was really closer to L.A.M.E. (Ooohhh, G.A.M.E. got served.) I gotta hand it to their marketing folks for making it sound a whole lot cooler than it really was. But we got in free courtesy of EA, so no harm done. For dinner we headed back to Pier 39 to consume a ridiculous amount of crab. We decided that if someone were to film us eating, it would get used as stock footage in those nightly news reports about why Americans are obese. Not to defy expectations, we headed over to Ghiradelli Square afterwards for dessert. I ordered a sundae, then remembered why I don't like sundaes, so that was kind of sad. Overall, though, a good day in the city.

Sunday only 5 of us showed up for sports, so we played some (bad) tennis until it got too cold to play, and went to IHOP for dinner. Mmmmpancakes.

On an unrelated note: one of the fun things about having a really cute dog is that people will say the weirdest things to you. This morning I was walking Enzo and a woman approached me:

Woman: Awww, what a cute dog! He looks like a Christmas dog you get at Costco!
Me: [Nervous chuckle].
Woman (to Enzo): Did you come from Costco?
Me: ...