Mild Amusement

I didn't grow up going to the beach very often, so I don't have warm and fuzzy memories of being near water. This was largely due to the fact that I learned to swim as a teenager, but the fact that the water  in the nearest beaches  is really cold didn't help matters any, either. Regardless, I can usually be talked in to hanging out at a pool or at the beach, but those aren't exactly at the top of my list of preferred activities. Even with this as a detractor, though, I discovered that I can still have quite a bit of fun while on or near the water. First of all, we ended up going whale watching on one afternoon. I didn't really think much of it before we left, but whale watching is one of those activities that sucks you in. One moment you're just sitting around on a boat talking, and the next you find yourself absorbed in the task of spotting brief flashes of whale tail. I think part of the fun was in trying to get a decent picture or video of the whales. It...

Since I was on a bus tour for this particular trip, I didn't really bother to pack much other than some jeans and t-shirts. Sure, I had a little bit of outerwear in case the weather got cold, but I wasn't super concerned about that turn of events. In fact, I wasn't even horribly concerned about rain because I figured that we'd be on a bus for good chunks of the trip. There were some advantages to traveling on one of those pre-packaged group tours, after all. Anyhow, since I was on this trip for a little over a week, this meant that I needed more than a week's worth of t-shirts. I did own that many t-shirts, but it's not like I the number I owned was orders of magnitude higher than that. This meant that I was bound to pack at least one shirt that I owned because I found it amusing (read: there was something smart aleck-y about it). As it turns out, I packed a few of them. For example, the current and former school teachers in our travel group chuckled heartily...

I was on a trip to Canada recently. Usually, I tend to to do road trips with a friend (with hilarious results ), but  this time, we both got a bit lazy about planning and driving. So, we hopped on a bus tour that took care of all of that for us. Sure, we had to sacrifice some independence in order to do this, but it seemed like a pretty good idea. And all in all, it wasn't that bad. Still, there were a few quirks. First off, I was the youngest person on the trip ... by far. I had never really stopped to consider what kind of people might be on the tour with us, but apparently the kind of people who have decent amounts of disposable income and prefer to be shuttled around tend to be closer to retirement age. Weird. We actually had an introductory meeting the first night of our trip, and we walked in to a room full of gray hairs. Don't get me wrong, the majority of the people were fun to talk to and I had no problem with them. Still, it was a little disconcerting at first. As...

A little while back, I was talking to the Mild Ex, and she commented that the air conditioning at her place was acting up. In it of itself, that was a bad thing. However, this conversation happened to take place right in the middle of a miniature heat wave. So the fact that the air conditioning was performing less than optimally was less of an annoyance and more of an actual problem. It wasn't going to kill her or anything, but it certainly didn't make her days any more pleasant. Worse yet, I wasn't in a position to remedy the situation in any discernible way. For one, I was sitting at home, she was sitting at home, and our two homes happened to be quite a few miles apart. Secondly, even if I had driven over there, I wasn't sure that I had the knowledge or the magical powers required to restore her air conditioning to satisfactory levels. Things were not looking good for our hero (that'd be me). Well, out of some combination of sheer curiosity, dogged determinat...