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You know, I never actually wrote up my Mystery Hunt post last year (I just gave myself a long list of notes and failed to turn it into text) and then after hunt this year I met someone who helped run the 2016 hunt who asked which things I liked and I completely couldn't remember and was glad I had an entry about it, so.

Spoiler Warning: I talk about actual things that happened solving puzzles here so if you see me mention a puzzle name you want to work on sometime, skip the next paragraph, because I will likely spoil you on it. This is your overall entry spoiler warning.

Also as a note: I'd usually include more photos, but their solutions pages are relatively good about having them when relevant for puzzles, so I'm only going to include a few of things I don't think are included there.

( Or I could just cut this I suppose. )

It's taken me 2 weeks since hunt to write this, which both feels REALLY long and simultaneously not actually that long since it's kind of a monster entry. But I think in the future I'm going to be happy to have this record of all the crazy stuff that happened?

I can't imagine anyone actually read all of this, but if you did, I hope at least some of it was enjoyable.

I feel like I should post something, but not sure what.

I went to CMU Carnival this year again, which isn't that weird a thing in itself. We were having the KGB 30th Anniversary party, which was pretty weird. I also brought Chris with me, which I guess is weird. I dunno.

I can't remember how long I spend in town for most Carnivals but this time was less than 48 hours, since Chris doesn't do redeyes. Normally I'd come in Thurs or Fri morning, but we got in Friday afternoon, just in time to get to campus for the Friday night event thing, which was in the weird Tartan pavilion thing that is growing off the back of Resnik dorm. There were a lot of people there and I talked to many of them. Just like last time, I didn't really talk to any of the younger current student crowd. I did realize, though, that several people who were at the 2008 one and were the younger people back then, are people I actually do bother talking to as alumni friend type people now. I guess we're all old or something. Welcome to Old Business.

There was an underground tour thing, and it kind of made me sad because all of the stories were basically assumed to either not be true or explicitly said to not be true. The dumb thing is, some of them I know to be true because they were about things that happened when I was actually at CMU and in KGB. So, WTF. I get the impression that sometime in the past 15 years, the stories we used to tell on the underground tour got so far removed from the current generations that they figured it was better to just make stuff up, but that sucks because we always thought the point was to tell the stories the administration didn't want you to tell, but that were actually true. The good part, though, was that we went to things I had never bothered going to before like the Kraus Campo, aka the number garden, up on top of whatever the fuck the thing is between CFA and GSIA.

Also silly: why is the Fence not a pokemon gym? It is a stop, sure, but it is the closest thing I can think of in real life to the embodiment of a gym: it is constantly changing hands, you have to take it over and defend it, and it changes colors all the time, and...

Anyway, after the tour we went to Mad Mex Shadyside (lol, shadyside) with Tim, and there were three other groups of younger KGB folks there as well. I stopped to talk to the circa-2011 group at the table next to ours, anyway.

Saturday I made Chris walk to campus and to Oakland for the other KGB event. The weather said 45 degrees out, but Kelli was like, it's sunny, you can do it -- and sure enough, it was sunny and felt downright balmy, despite being in the low 50's. (Oh yeah, we stayed with Roman and Kelli.) I stopped by the university store on the way, and then we walked to Oakland via the bridge behind Scaife, which means that I inadvertantly did kind of see buggy for a split second, and also, you can't just walk to scaife anymore because they have built so much crap down near Hamerschlag/Wean now.

The KGB lunch was good I guess. We got to sit with Mark Stehlik though and that was really great. And since I had donated a bunch of money to the reunion I got a fluffy hat, which I didn't keep, but did wear around all day, and I didn't know what better thing to do with it than to go around taking selfies with everyone else wearing hats. Also, they streamlined officer reports this time instead of having everyone say something. For the 2nd VP report I ended up talking regardless... and gave the report about this weekend's events. Faye or Ben or someone said I should end with "Thus ends the 2nd VP report... proving that after 30 years we're still doing way more work than the 1st VP." or something like that. I honestly have forgotten what I said.

It ended earlier than expected though, so we walked to campus and saw the new monstrosity in the Morewood parking lot, and walked down Craig on the way, and things like that. We met up with Jason on Midway and hung out in the number garden again for a bit, during which time we saw some guy from ASA celebrate his 21st birthday by popping a bottle of wine, among other things. Then we got a Lyft up to Squill and hung out at the cslounge BBQ; you know, it occurs to me I didn't set foot in Wean or Gates or any of the CS buildings this trip. Not sure if that's weird? We ended up going to dinner at Church Brew Works with Jason a bit later and that was good, and then chilled out for the rest of the evening.

Sunday was walking around Squill some, and then going to the pie party, and then getting to the airport and going home.

I dunno, I think in the end it would have been cheaper to rent a car, however, at least this way I didn't have to drive or park in Pittsburgh at all.

Lots of people have changed their names and/or genders since the last time I saw them. I'm cool with that and respect them and their identities, but I have always had a terrible time remapping people's names in my head (and some of you know I'm usually the only person who still refers to someone by their college nickname even if years later they totally don't use it anymore). I think I did a pretty good job this weekend of not screwing it up, but seriously, I was kind of worried about it.

I don't know if I'd rather have more time or less time of Carnival this year, it's kind of odd. I feel like I didn't really talk deeply with many people, but the weird thing is that due to Facebook and stuff like that, I don't even know if talking deeply with people even happens anymore since you sort of know what most people are up to? Though I guess there are plenty of people who don't post and I'm glad I did get to see them and all.

So many things I want to write about but as usual I just don't have the energy to do it.

I was kinda lazy in organizing Puzzle Boat 4 this year but I somehow ended up getting a decent team of 8 anyway (me, Chris, Eric M, Eric T aka Koi, Ken, Richard, Corey, Melinda). The only requirement I had was that people were able to attend in person on the first Saturday, and Richard attended via videochat because he was in Reno for an escape room crawl.

I can't write much about it without spoilers, obviously, but the structure of the hunt this time was similar to last time (100+ puzzles, lots of metas, gotta figure out which puzzles go with what meta) but had some extra twists. I'm looking at http://www.pandamagazine.com/island4/index.php?f=FM_About while not logged in to see what I think is fair game to mention. You can see that the theme is the Amazing Race, so we were going around the world. Most puzzles were "Route Info", and metas were Pit Stops, and then the two new things this time were Roadblocks and Detours. Detours, you would get at a special place and get a choice of two puzzles, and do one of them, to progress further. (And later on you'd get U-Turned and have to do the other one). Roadblocks were non-puzzley activities that you had to do, that would result in some letters and a photo; the catch was that each member of your team could only do N of them (where I'm assuming N was determined by team size, which is why you couldn't add team members after starting). N was 2 for our team, and I unfortunately took the first roadblock just to see what it was, which meant I had to bother people to do a lot of the other ones all the time because I didn't want to use up all my roadblock slots.

Pace-wise, like I said, everyone was around on Saturday, and we officially went from 10am to 8pm (this is mostly because Ken and I were going to contra dance, Richard was doing escape rooms in Reno, Eric was going to the Stanford football game, and Corey and Melinda had a babysitter until early evening) and we made pretty good progress, solving around 50-60 things on the first day? Though some of those were roadblocks/detours.

Sunday was slightly less attendance -- me, Chris, Koi, Eric until mid-afternoon and Ken from mid-afternoon onwards. But, we pushed through a lot in spreadsheets, and Richard did a bunch remotely too as stuff would just show up solved suddenly. By the time I went to sleep on Sunday -- and by the way *I* solved our first meta by guessing the right phrase with the letters given -- we had about 100 puzzles solved and 2 metas.

Monday night we got together in a conference room at Google, where "we" was really me, Koi, and Richard. Ken was there for a little while but we basically solved like one puzzle together and then he left. We attacked metas with a vengeance and got through almost all of them -- by the end of the evening we only had 3 metas left.

I spent a bunch of time taking bronze/silver hints on puzzles to try to get some more answers to fill in metas while others stared at metas.

We only had one meta left by Tuesday evening. Nobody got together in person that day but we all were on a spreadsheet (I didn't get home until 10pm or so from contra dance that evening even) when the final meta fell, and then we got the final final meta meta, and stared at it for a few hours, before Chris figured out what was going on, and we finished around 12:09am Wednesday morning, putting us at 10th place overall.

I can't say much about the puzzles themselves, of course, or even really about any specific solving, which is hard. But I wanted to remember that we did this event and people managed to come together surprisingly well even though a lot of it was remote solving in a spreadsheet (well, a lot for me). I also suspect we spent a lot more time together in person than a lot of teams did as well, and I really think that time together was a lot more valuable for solving, because bouncing ideas off people really works well (like, for one of the metas, no spoilers hopefully here, but say, one of the aspects was a kind of word, and one of the aspects was a pattern in the words, and another was how to fit those into the paper puzzle given with it, and literally, Richard noticed one part, Koi noticed another, and I noticed another. I think any of us could have figured it all out on our own but together it went really quickly.)

Next weekend we're doing the Hunt for Justice puzzle box (likely just me and Chris...) on Saturday and then the Palantir Hunt at Stanford on Sunday and then that might be it for puzzles until MIT Mystery Hunt? I guess we have some escape rooms in the area to look at sometime but I feel so lazy about it. It's sounding like Chris and I will be here over Thanksgiving so maybe I'll see if I can get a group of people together to do some rooms then or something, who knows.

I wanted to post about our socal trip but I just can't think of that much to say. Basically, Chris and I went down to LA and SD for the long 4th of July weekend.

Friday we drove down. Traffic was actually not bad at all and we hit Malibu at about 4pm (but due to PCH traffic didn't make it to our hotel until like 5pm, seriously). Went to Ari and Thuy's pre-wedding picnic on the Malibu Bluffs... but we really didn't know anyone so mostly we walked around the park and talked to a few people and ate food and whatever. Afterwards we went back to our hotel and watched an episode of OITNB on Chris's iPad.

Saturday the weather was totally overcast, so Jenny joined us and we went to Santa Monica for the afternoon. We got brunch at Blue Daisy and walked around the pier and other things in the area and did a Pokemon raid with a bazillion people and such. Then we went to Jenny's airbnb to get ready for the wedding with her and some of her bridge friends.

The wedding was at Ari's parents' house and unlike our wedding, they got the Final Fantasy music right (Ari's brother plays the harp so he played it, and Ari's sister played the cello). They also did responsive vows like we did :) The people at the wedding were a combination of bridge friends and tech friends and stuff, and we were seated at the Facebook table (with Jenny and with Mike and Michelle and others I didn't know). Food was kinda wacky -- they had people serving ramen in cardboard containers and salad in heart-shaped bowls, but everything else was small foods passed around by people carrying trays (but that wasn't clear until we asked some of the staff).

Chris and I left around 10pm because we were driving to San Diego (which was a largely uneventful drive); we got in around 12:30am.

Sunday we went to the Padres-Dodgers game with my friend Dani (since I wouldn't see her in MA for the Japan-US college tournament, we both decided to skip it this year). Petco Park is huge and nice, but enough Dodgers fans drive down that you seriously can't tell who the home team is most of the time. Kenta Maeda was starting for the Dodgers too, which was kinda lucky, but he pitched poorly and got taken out in like 3 innings. After the game Chris and I went to a fancy restaurant he'd booked a reservation at, Juniper & Ivy, and they gave us seats at the chef's counter so we got to watch them preparing food, which is always fun.

Monday we went to the San Diego Zoo with Chris's dad, who drove down to see us. The zoo is huge and has lots of animals, but it was hot outside and I was really sluggish after a few hours of that. In the evening we got dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant called Bice.

Tuesday we came home, stopping off in LA to have lunch with Chris's grandparents on the way. Oddly, traffic wasn't so bad on our way home either, aside from one incident where a car was ON FIRE and blocking traffic just as we were getting on I-5 past the Grapevine.

(this should probly be on Marinerds but I'm writing the braindump uncut version first)

So, back in 2013 we had this pitcher for the Fighters, Hiroshi Kisanuki. I became a huge fan of his for various reasons but the major upshot was that he was super nice to fans, funny as all hell in interviews and other things, and a proud train nerd. He pitched well for us in 2013 but then had down seasons in 2014 and retired at the end of the 2015 season (ironically, the day he retired, I spent the morning going on a train nerd mission and then went to his retirement game in the evening and cried buckets).

I was kind of sad that I never got to meet him again after 2013 -- he used to come out to the stands and give away signed baseball cards and stuff and I'd always say hi and talk to him a little -- but I missed him at Kamagaya and wherever. And when he retired, rather than working for the Fighters, he went back to the team that originally drafted him, the Giants (boo), as a scout.

Anyway, I'm in Japan! I just got here yesterday, which was a debacle in itself in some ways -- the last year or two I've been flying into Haneda on the SFO->HND redeye from JAL, which they just cut this past winter, and I didn't trust trying to fly to LAX first with a 2-hour connection time, so instead I flew from SJC to Narita, Saturday to Sunday. Got in Sunday afternoon at 3:30... just like pretty much every flight. The immigration line at Narita took over an hour and was stretched all the way outside of the immigration area, down the hallway towards the landing area. It was insane. Fortunately, once I got through the immigration, I was on a train towards Tokyo less than ten minutes later, because I didn't have checked baggage AND I know to take the Keisei Skyliner instead of waiting in the line of 200 people at the JR office getting rail passes and tickets for the Narita Express.

Unfortunately, jet lag, which didn't hit me much when I did the redeyes (I slept at least some on the plane, and they get in at 5am so I just have to power through a whole damn day), hit me pretty hard this time. I stayed up until 9pm, went to sleep, and then woke up at like... 3am. And couldn't get back to sleep. Bleh. So I decided around 6am to get up and go Pokemon hunting, because, why not, right? I wasn't going to be able to get my Google building badge until at least 9am anyway, so why go to work early? I looked around at the tracker map -- yes, we have working trackers in Japan, unlike the US -- and found a Hoppip nest in a park I'd never been to. Got up, got ready, and left the hotel around 7:45am or so to wander out there.

Well, uh, it actually turns out I had been to that park before... or at least that area... because it was the park just north of Ota Stadium :/

And worse, once I got there and realized that, I also realized that this was a day that Tohto League 2nd Rank would be playing there. The first game of the day was even Takushoku vs Rissho, both teams that in the past I knew some players on them, though I think that time is long gone and nobody on either team should recognize me. BUT, I realized that if any baseball fan friends were coming to the game and saw me lurking around Ota Stadium they would totally expect me to go in and watch the games! But I didn't have a scorecard or a camera or anything with me for watching baseball, AND I had told people I'd be at work today and all, so I really didn't want to skip out on all that.

So I did find and capture like 12 Hoppips in the park. And of course as I got near the stadium I could hear the players working out and could see the team managers wandering around and such. But I decided to stick to my original idea and leave.

I was walking towards the road outside the stadium area and suddenly I see this guy in a suit walking up towards the stadium and I'm looking at his face and I realize that HOLY FUCKING SHIT IT'S HIROSHI KISANUKI.

Fortunately my brain's astonishment did not override my natural ability to talk too fucking much, so I say in Japanese, "You're Kisanuki, right? I was such a big fan of yours when you were on the Fighters."

He's like "Yeah, I am. You were?"

I babble that I even met him a few times and got cards from him and made a sign board to cheer for him and all of this other crazy stuff, that I was even in Hokkaido for his retirement game and I went to Koboro station that day. He noticed somehow that I had a Fighters case on my cellphone and was like oh, yeah, you have Fighters stuff. And then was like "Uh, where are you from? Your Japanese is really good."

And I'm like "Oh, I'm American, but I used to live here and I went to baseball games all the time and..."

Also I asked what he was up to but I think it came out wrong because he said "I'm scouting for the Giants now, so I'm here to watch the Tohto league games."

Shrug.

Anyway I had the presence of mind to say "Can I take a picture with you?" and so took a two-person selfie with my phone. Good thing I did because I had something to post to the internet and also so ten minutes later I wouldn't be like "OMG DID THAT REALLY HAPPEN?"

(let's see if this works, I'm going to link to the Twitter image I posted)

]

It's funny because I always wanted to get a photo with him when he was a player but never ever did because I never got to meet him without an outfield fence in the way!

Funnier, still, the final thing I said to him was "Do you still like trains?"

"Of course! I ride them all the time."

"Oh. What's your favorite train in Tokyo?"

"Hmm... I used to ride the Chuo-Sobu line when I was in college a lot, so I like riding it now for the nostalgia."

"Oh! Cool. I like the Toden Arakawa, do you know it?"

"Yeah, I rode it once."

"The trains are so cute."

(omg I'm such a dork.)

Anyway I apologized a bazillion times for talking too much and told him it was super cool to meet him again, and he shook my hand and said it was nice to meet me too, and then he went off towards the stadium and I went off away from the stadium towards the station... though for at least 2-3 blocks I was walking along like "HOLY FUCKING SHIT DID THAT REALLY JUST HAPPEN DID I REALLY JUST MEET KISANUKI HOW AMAZING IS THAT HOLY CRAP HOLY CRAP I CAN'T BELIEVE THAT HAPPENED"

Seriously if this is what happens to me within my first 24 hours back in Japan I'm not sure whether that means the entire trip will be downhill from here or if it will just be even more insane! Think about the coincidence of this: there's no reason I should have been in that park, at that exact moment, except for that I woke up early and thought it'd be fun to find a Pokemon nest, and happened to pick that park despite that it totally was NOT on my way to work or anything, but it looked interesting and new, and I got vaguely lost at first in the park so that's why my timing was what it was, and... and I got to meet one of my former favorite baseball players. It's just so absolutely batshit crazy in some ways.

If you look at my LJ now, this is the only entry you should and will see. I'm not going to be crossposting from Dreamwidth anymore. The Russian TOS thing was the last straw.

I deleted all of the entries, but didn't delete the account yet -- I want to be able to still read friends and communities on LJ (to see where the few remaining folks end up), but I just don't trust my own stuff being there anymore. Plus I had some pictures in LJ entries that are only referenced on DW -- it didn't import them over, so I need to take care of that at some point.

If you are here because you were looking for one of my old MIT Mystery Hunt summaries or other puzzle hunts or whatever, you can still find all of those over on my Dreamwidth journal, under the puzzle hunt tag.

If you are curious about how I deleted my journal entries without deleting the journal, I wrote the following Perl script, which will delete the most recent 50 entries from your journal:

use LJ::Simple;

# Log into the server
my $lj = new LJ::Simple ({
          user    =>      "putyourusernamehere",
          pass    =>      "putyourpasswordhere",
          site    =>      undef,
			 });
 
 (defined $lj)
    || die "$0: Failed to log into LiveJournal: $LJ::Simple::error\n";
  
my %Entries;   # hash to hold retrieved entries

$lj->GetEntries(\%Entries,undef,lastn,(50,undef));

foreach $entry (values %Entries) {
    my $entry_id = $entry->{"__itemid"};
    print "Deleting entry $entry_id\n";
    $lj->DeleteEntry($entry_id) || die "$0: Failed to delete journal entry\n";
}

Only catch is that LJ doesn't like it when you try to "post" over 500 times in an hour, so it kept throttling me and it took me 10 hours to delete all 4800 entries in my journal. Oops. Also the GetEntries function maxes out at fetching 50. I guess I could have just written a loop around this to run it 10 times but I was even more lazy.

It was pretty funny to watch as I kept deleting 500ish entries and my journal's most recent kept getting sent back a few years. Fortunately it's all mirrored on DW so I don't have to figure out a better solution for what to do with it all yet.

So, yeah. What are you all doing with your LJ accounts? Those of you who still use these platforms, I mean?

Crossposts: http://dr4b.livejournal.com/1279857.html

Maybe my LJ/DW/whatever goal for the year should be to write at least something about all of the puzzle hunts I do this year.

So last week was the Galactic Puzzle Hunt, an all-remote week-long thing, "in the style of SUMS or mezzacotta", which are, of course, hunts I had heard of, but had never done. The idea is that there's some number of puzzles -- in GPH, there were 30 -- released over the course of some number of days -- in GPH, it was over 6 days, 5 puzzles a day -- and there are complicated scoring systems about when you solve the puzzles to determine a winner. GPH's rules were that you got full credit for puzzles no matter when you solved them, but if you took longer than 24 hours on them, you would get an "average adjusted solve time", which was the average time over 24 hours that you took divided by the number of puzzles you solved.

Only four teams solved the entire hunt in the appropriate 24-hour period chunks. We were 11th place since we didn't solve the very last two metas until Wednesday night.

I didn't really know what to expect for this hunt -- when I first heard about it, my inclination was to just plan to print out all 25-30 puzzles over the weekend and get together a bunch of people then to solve them, but I figured that maybe we could at least try the first day or two puzzles and see if it was going to be worth trying to solve them and go for a good score/time. As a result, my team was all people who work at Google MTV (me, Chris, Richard, Ken, Sean) or nearby (Glenn) or work at Google but decided not to actually meet up with us (Channing). I was originally going to recruit 2-3 more people but ended up not doing it. Team limit was 10 and we had 7, so. I figured that with a pool of 7 people we'd end up with an average of 4 who could make it on any given day, which is about what happened.

I reserved a conference room at Google that was close to a cafe and a printer and in a quiet side of the building where we wouldn't disturb anyone, and on Tuesday the 14th we got together to solve.

( Actually there are lots of puzzle spoilers within so I should probably cut this just in case, even though the hunt is over now, you could still go look at the puzzles if you wanted. )

Since this was my first time doing one of these hunts, I'm not sure what to think. I mean, I enjoyed having puzzles to do every day, and getting together with my friends to hang out and do puzzles is always fun. But I think we got pretty frustrated later on in the hunt when the slogs and leaps got harder, and I also think people got pretty burnt out after a while. (But only kind of. I mean, you could see us in the conference room later in the evening just like "aaaaaaaaaa what IS this stuff", but at the same time, people were always peeking in at the hunt spreadsheet during work hours and exchanging emails around the clock about solving ideas. So.)

Overall I'm glad we did it -- I'm always complaining there aren't enough puzzle hunts anymore and so I'd be a huge hypocrite for not taking advantage of the ones there are. I'd heard about SUMS/MUMS before but wasn't sure this format would really excite/motivate me (no physical component and not really interacting with other teams), though I think the leaderboard aspect here helped a lot because we kept looking at other teams like "argh, everyone else is solving this, it's clearly solveable, what's wrong with us?"

Ok, well, I've been writing this entry over a couple of days and I'm not sure it's entirely coherent or will even be interesting to anyone besides me. So.

Crossposts: http://dr4b.livejournal.com/1278918.html

I went down to LA for the WBC finals this week.

Back in January, my friends Dave and Dani were buying tickets to the WBC finals. Dave was flying in from the east coast and Dani lives south of LA anyway. But they also didn't mind watching WBC games that didn't involve the Japanese team. Me, I was pretty heartbroken in 2013 when Japan lost on the first semifinal, then I watched the second semifinal with my Dutch friend and the Orange Embassy, and then the final game was rainy and awful and we barely watched it and instead just hung out around AT&T Park with other grumpy Japanese fans.

This year I was worried even -- what if I made plans to come to LA and then Japan didn't even make the finals?

So while I bought a ticket in January, I didn't actually make travel plans until last Thursday, when their game order was confirmed. Chris said I could use our car and drive down, and I asked my friend Kevin if I could crash with him since I hadn't seen him in a while and he lives relatively close to the Google LA office, and so that's what I did.

Japan's game this time was on Tuesday, the second semifinal. So instead of driving down on Sunday, I spent all weekend solving puzzles (we finished 11th in the Galactic Puzzle Hunt -- maybe I should write about that sometime too) and drove down on Monday night.

Actually, even worse -- since rain was on the forecast on Tuesday I really wasn't even sure if I'd drive down until I was literally in the car and on the way south on 101. I decided that I wanted to go because of 1) adventure! 2) seeing my friends, not just D&D but others that would be there, and 3) Japan winning the WBC again would be awesome to be at!

I was kinda scared of making the drive to LA alone, but it turned out to be not so bad. I stopped halfway to get dinner and gas and I made it to Kevin's place shortly after midnight. Met his cat, sat up talking for a little while, went to sleep around 2am I guess.

I had a meeting at work at 10:30 and had reserved a room to call into it from in LA, so I got up early and drove down to the office and all. I was supposed to have lunch with Cort, too, but then he ended up not coming into work that day, so instead I spent the day by myself camping out in a minikitchen and at least did some work.

Left around 3pm, briefly stopped back at Kevin's to drop off my laptop, get my baseball stuff and an umbrella, and then drove to Dodger Stadium. You'd think that leaving at 3:45 for a 6pm game would be okay, except LA traffic is ridiculous, and so getting from Santa Monica to the stadium took me two hours. Seriously. LA drivers are terrifying. Google maps had me avoid the highway, too, so that took me through even more interesting but terrifying routes.

I got to Dodger Stadium at 5:30, parked, walked up, etc, and got to my seat at like 5:45. Of course it was good to see Dave again (we have been Japanese baseball blog friends for a decade, but I only first met him last year at Fighters training in Arizona) and even though I saw Dani last month in Arizona, it's good to see her too (she's my "Fighters sister" on Twitter).

We had somehow managed to get seats RIGHT under the overhang on the upper deck, so rain wasn't really falling on us, but I didn't keep score anyway because I didn't want my book to get wet. I tried to keep score on my phone and had to give up after like 2-3 innings.

Which is just as well because the 4th inning is when the US went up 1-0. Which made me grumpy but it was also about the time that my friends Jason (from the Japan Times) and Kevin (another Swallows fan) came over to hang out anyway, so instead of watching the game I stood in the concourse chatting with them (and Dani) for a while.

Kikuchi hit a homer to make it 1-1 but more sloppy wet fielding and ground rule doubles and things happened and the US got another point in the 8th and won the game 2-1 in the end.

Honestly, I don't really remember most of the game action. I remember singing the Yamada and Aoki songs and Sho Nakata, and I remember seeing Kodai Senga pitch well, and there were these really ridiculous USA fans a few sections over with drums and stuff singing really stupid songs and trying to drown out the Japan ouendan (I don't think they understand how that stuff works). And I had heartburn for a while so I had chest pain which was a little weird (and why I mostly sat there quietly for the last few innings). I was also excited to see a Puzzles and Dragons ad on the scoreboard (Gungho was a sponsor) and it was fun seeing Hideo Nomo (and Tommy Lasorda??) throwing out the first pitches.

But ugh, Japan losing kinda sucked, yeah.

We hung out after the game for a while -- I bought a WBC lanyard and we looked at stuff in the Dodgers/WBC store, and took some photos outside, and were talking trying to decide what to do, when I got approached by a guy with a media badge who saw my jersey/cap/etc and was like (in Japanese), "Hey, nice getup, do you speak Japanese?" and I'm like "Yeah, why?" "I'm with the Asahi Shinbun, can I please interview you for an article I'm doing about the fans here?" "Uhhhhhh sure?"

So we talked for about 5-10 minutes in Japanese -- he asked me questions like, my history as a Japanese baseball fan (I told him about seeing the Fighters 15 years ago, moving to Japan to watch baseball, living in Tokyo, etc, being a big college fan too), and like, who was I cheering for tonight (as a Fighters fan, Sho Nakata, and also as a Swallows fan, Yamada, of course) and what did I think the Japan team lacked -- why didn't they win? And I was like, "I don't think they lacked anything. I think that the problem was the weather. It was raining, which is a difficult condition to play in anyway, but also, the USA players have played in this kind of rain at Dodger Stadium and on grass fields before, but remember that the Japanese team played and won all their games up to now in the Tokyo Dome, on turf, indoors... and so because of the rain, they didn't get to practice on the field before the game, too, so I think they were at a huge defensive disadvantage." He also asked what I thought of the style played and I was like "I cannot believe they had Tetsuto Yamada bunt, but other than that, it wasn't that bad."

Well -- some part of that all made it into his article. Check it out:

http://www.asahi.com/articles/ASK3Q1W61K3QUEHF001.html

Unfortunately, while we were chatting about all that stuff, the two guys from another Japanese baseball blog, that I really don't particularly like very much (mostly because the one outspoken immature one keeps trying to pass themselves off as experts on the NPB, despite that neither of them speak Japanese or have even been to a goddamn game in Japan, and they steal translations and other things from people all the time) came up like "HEY it's you guys!!!" to Dani and Dave and me and the reporter and all. It was funny because the reporter said to me "Oh, I saw those guys yesterday... but I couldn't really talk to them... you seem to know them, what's their deal exactly?" and I was like "They're really not my friends. More like internet stalker wackos."

So it was super awkward but after finishing our interview he asked if he could take a photo of our group, so that's what you see in that article there. Whee.

Also he asked my age, which is always a thing they include when mentioning people in articles -- but he was like "yeah, I know women don't like to talk about their age but, how old are you?" I probably could/should have lied but I didn't, so now that is also a little embarrassing -- my Japanese friends who saw the article were even like "hahaha! he got you to admit your age! you're not so good at keeping a secret, huh?" but I countered that with "Come on you guys, you know I went to my first Fighters game after I graduated college, and it was in 2003, so surely you can do the math and figure out I have to be at least 36?"

But still! It's exciting when I make it into the media and actually find out about it. (I was interviewed a few times at Fighters spring training in Arizona this year -- and I was even used as an interpreter in an interview with Dan Evans!! but I didn't get to see any of the footage because I don't think it ended up on Youtube. Unlike last year where I got on camera in a Koibito Erabi thing going "What, no Kagiya??" which people back in Japan thought was absolutely hilarious)

Anyway. After that, the parking lot had cleared out enough that I drove back to Kevin's place. Even though I took the highways, it was terrifying in the rain.

So I decided to just take Wednesday off and drive home. Kevin and I went and got brunch at a fantastic place in Santa Monica that had croissant french toast, and I dropped him off, and then I hit the highway to go home.

It was raining really hard at some points during my drive, which was absolutely terrifying, but on the other hand, there were lots of rainbows, and I like rainbows. I stopped off at Tejon on the way out to get gas, and stopped off at Harris Ranch not to eat but to also refuel and to chill out for a while because I was beginning to get super nervous after being on the road in the rain so much. Harris Ranch turned out to be nice enough to just get a cookie from their bakery and sit on a couch and use the restrooms and whatever until I was feeling better, and then I didn't stop again until I hit Gilroy, where I got dinner at Famous Dave's BBQ, and then I got back home at about 9pm.

It's funny how I just don't remember the game details of games like this but it was still a very very memorable trip and I'm glad I made it.

Crossposts: http://dr4b.livejournal.com/1278660.html

You know, I thought I'd maybe start writing a journal again but it turns out that I'm just bad at it. Also that my life is boring and unlike when I was in my 20's, I'm never sure it makes sense to take notes about my day. I do keep a spreadsheet about some basic everyday things though recently it's just, where did I eat lunch and dinner and with who, and how did I get to/from work, and which meals had meat in them?

Oh yeah, so back in November I decided to go semi-vegetarian-like, in making a rule for myself that I only eat meat in one meal a day tops (with exceptions when travelling, so our Australia honeymoon was one large exception). I had wanted to cut down on meat for a while, but the only way I figured I could do so was to set an actual damn rule and follow it. What has mostly happened is that I eat a lot of vegetarian lunches. It's silly, but basically, even while food at Google is pretty good, if I eat meat at lunch that means my dinner options are more constrained, and then I have to work things out with Chris, and so if I eat a vegetarian lunch we can do whatever we want (either from a Google cafe or otherwise) for dinner.

It is kind of ridiculous, but we really don't cook food ourselves at all for the most part (we did make a point a weekend or two ago to buy stuff at a supermarket and cook, but). The problem is that since we eat free food at work so often, if we have food in the house, it just goes bad inbetween times that we'd want to prepare it. I guess we could be better about it but the other thing is that neither of us really enjoys cooking all that much anyway.

What was I here to talk about? I'm not sure. Since last time I wrote I spent a week in Arizona in February for Fighters spring training, and I wrote that up on Marinerds. I have a ticket to the WBC in LA next week, but I still don't know if I'll go (though I said I'd go if Japan makes it to the finals, and that looks pretty likely, so maybe I should go reserve a hotel and stuff, I'd just drive down).

We've seen a bunch of musicals in the past few weeks:

Finding Neverland was at the Orpheum in January. It's a pretty mediocre musical, in that the lyrics are very predictable. I thought it was funny how obvious the main role had been rewritten for Matthew Morrison, and without him it seemed kind of silly.

If La La Land counts as seeing a musical, it was... well, I'm glad it didn't win Best Picture. The director clearly went off and watched a ton of Astaire and Kelly and such movies and then tried to remake them all, but somewhere in the middle he got lost and forgot he wasn't just making an Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling rom-com. I think had he gone one way or the other (total remake of 1930's-50's Hollywood musicals, or rom-com with songs whee!) it would have been good, but instead it felt schizophrenic and dragged because it couldn't stay in one mode or the other. I did appreciate the shoutouts to those older musicals, but it just fell really flat for me.

Fun Home came to the newly remodelled Curran Theater and we went to see it. I'd seen Fun Home on broadway with the original cast that won all the Tonys, in the Circle in the Square theater, and I wondered how it would transition to a normal stage. Fortunately, it worked just fine. I'm really critical of musicals these days I think, and I had absolutely no qualms whatsoever with the SHN production -- it was a solid production of a solid show. If anything, the only thing I noticed on a second watch was some slight anachronisms with Alison Bechdel's actual life (ie, a scene that takes place in the bicentennial, or 1976, when she should have been 16, uses the "young Alison", who is supposed to be like 10 years old).

Same week we saw Fun Home we saw Rent, which is touring for its 20th anniversary (technically last year, but still, holy crap). Rent is still a solid show that holds up fairly well over time, although I wonder what it is like watching it if you're only 20 now and didn't live through the time when AIDS was really scary shit. Anyway, my only complaint about this performance was that the actor who played Roger was pretty bad. Other than that everyone was great. Even if you listen to the soundtrack a bazillion times there's still something about actually seeing the show performed live that makes a big difference. I did feel like the Benny plothole makes less and less sense over time though, but that might just be me though. (ie, Benny starts out as the bad guy and somehow ends up being the good guy but you have absolutely no idea where the hell the motivation comes from on his part OR on anyone else's part to re-accept him).

This past week we went to see Into the Woods. Rather than a typical broadway tour, this is put on by Fiasco Theater and they went for a hipster barebones version of the show where there are only 11 members in the cast and they almost all play instruments. There's no Narrator, and everyone doubles up in some way or another for the most part. Doubling up in ITW isn't rare, especially having the Wolf be played by Cinderella's Prince -- that's a standard casting decision and it's pretty much even written into the vocal range of the characters and into what that actor stands for in the show. However, this production went a ton further. Cinderella's Prince also plays the Wolf, and ALSO plays one of the Stepsisters. And Rapunzel's Prince is the other stepsister AND is also Milky White. Red and Rapunzel are played by the same actress (who also can't sing high notes nor play the trumpet). Jack's mother and the stepmother are the same actress too, and Jack even doubles up as the prince's steward. The only non-doubling roles are the Witch, Baker, and Baker's Wife (well, and technically the Mysterious Man, but that's because he's the cello player and has to be playing music in most scenes)

Before the show, the Pianist said how "Don't forget there are two acts to this show! So after your 20 minute intermission please come back and watch the second half."

After the opening number (which if you know the show is the 11-minute intro that tells you what all the story lines are), Chris and I were both staring at the stage with our mouths open like "WTF IS THIS CRAP". I thought how "I guess they are telling people to stay to the second act because so many people are walking out after the first because it's so terrible?"

Fortunately it got a lot better. Red/Rapunzel was awful, but at least everyone else could mostly act or sing or play their instruments. Into the Woods is a really funny show as written, so it doesn't take a lot of acting to pull off the funnier parts (unless you are this particular Red). I think the best thing they did was to have Milky White played by a human, which I know intuitively makes no sense whatsoever, but there was a lot of funny things they did with Jack's bromance with his cow, and since the cow is an actual human, in the scenes where the cow is just supposed to be sitting off to the side (like during "It Takes Two") the guy playing the cow was often doing funny things as if the cow was emoting, or dancing along, or whatever.

But the barebones aspect of the show hit hard in a lot of ways. Because there were too many people doubled up, they simply couldn't DO One Midnight Gone, Two Midnights Gone, or any of the songs that involve all the characters parading across the stage and saying their little catchphrases (like "The slotted spoon can catch the potato!" and all). They took out various parts of the other songs, which I realize 99% of the people in the audience wouldn't notice, but this is ME, and this is like the 10th? or so production of Into the Woods that I've seen, and I know the show backwards and forwards, so every time something got cut or botched or whatever I was wincing like "ow, you can't DO that". While the lack of a Narrator kinda sorta worked in the first act (other cast members just would step up and say the lines the Narrator would), I think it fundamentally cut out a huge turning point of the second act -- the fact is, when they throw the Narrator to the giantess, there is this big thing of "holy shit, who's telling the story now?" and when they realize there IS nobody telling the story and they have to tell it themselves and take their fate into their own hands, that's a big deal. I felt like the scene where they interact with the giantess was really awkward, and it was partially because they had to redo it so hard, plus they had three actors switching roles during it.

I tried to think how I would change the show if I was trying to make the minimal change to keep their hipster barebones vision intact but take out of some of the most painful parts, and I think I'd basically at a minimum hire two people to play the stepsisters and to play some of the instruments adequately that the cast members couldn't (probly get one to be trumpet/french horn and one to be clarinet/bassoon). I'd also ideally split Red/Rapunzel into two actresses, but maybe I just really hated this particular actress so much that I wanted to change it so badly.

Anyway, I guess this got my desire to rant out of my system. We're seeing Hamilton later this month, I'm sure I won't have any complaints there. (I mean, I saw it on Broadway a year and a half ago, having gotten a ticket when it was still in previews, so I already know it's a good show.) It is amusing how full the theaters are for most of the SHN shows this year because so many people subscribed just to get Hamilton tickets. (Chris has been a subscriber for years, though.)

Oh, another thing that happened recently. My old Nexus 5X phone -- the one I got as a holiday gift from Google at the end of 2015 -- bricked itself on Feb 14th (easy to remember because Chris and I went to Chez TJ for Valentine's Day and I had to take photos of the food with my old iPhone 5). I got a loaner Nexus 6 and was supposed to return it by March 10th. In the meantime, I went and tried out the new iPhone 7 and 7+ at Apple stores, and I tried out the new Pixel by asking friends at work if I could play with theirs (including having a lunch with a friend where I literally put a meeting on his calendar that said "show me your pokemans"). I had decided to get a Pixel, but the problem is that Pixels didn't seem to exist anywhere if I wanted one with 128GB of storage. The thing about the iPhones was that like, the 7+ has this amazing camera and all, BUT the damn thing will not fit in my pocket, and after carrying around the Nexus 6 for a month I figured out that fitting in my pocket was really important to me. And the iPhone 7 just wasn't worth it without the cool camera stuff. However, it really was looking like I might have to get an iPhone because I wasn't seeing Pixels in stock in the Google store...

...until this past Tuesday! So I ordered one and it got here on Friday, and I even ordered a case for it that I can attach all my little Japanese baseball strap things to and all. And so I've had the Pixel all weekend. So far I am mostly happy with it, and it fits in my pocket, but we'll see.

Crossposts: http://dr4b.livejournal.com/1278376.html

I have been futzing around with Dreamwidth on and off for the last week or two. It turns out I was using such an archaic LJ style that pretty much nothing really looks like that anymore. I found something relatively close, though.

I still don't quite understand how things work between the two (ie, do I need to still use LJ to read LJ friends? And, if I post this here on DW, will there also be a post on LJ, or will it just exist here? (And if the former, not the latter, then why bother moving at all?)

Right now my DW import gave friends access to basically everyone who had friends access on LJ, but I'm thinking that only 1/7 of you are still honestly out there, so trying to figure out whether to just unfriend anyone who hasn't posted to LJ since, say, 2013? Not sure what makes sense there. I also know that some people have LJ accounts just to read friends pages and don't post themselves, so that might also be hard to evaluate.

I need to look into LJ archiving tools too. This is such a weird project in some ways. Sometimes I wonder if organizing digital journals is actually any easier than organizing paper journals.

Crossposts: http://dr4b.livejournal.com/1277968.html

This is going to be a weird write-up because this was kind of a weird Mystery Hunt weekend. As most of you know already, Hunt "ended" at 4:30am Saturday when Death and Mayhem found the coin, making it the shortest hunt in history, and even the team I was playing on finished on Saturday evening, leaving us with an extra day in Boston to fill.

But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.

This year I decided to switch Hunt teams for a few reasons, and I think for the sake of everybody it would be better if I don't go into a discussion of it here. The upshot is that after the dust settled I ended up joining Metaphysical Plant, which I guess is a move most people expected to happen at some point anyway after I married Chris. Plus, half the team was involved in my wedding anyway (even some of whom weren't there in person, because we asked people not to give us gifts and instead to write us puzzles for our wedding, Iron Puzzler style, and had a board games and puzzle hunt party the night before the wedding, so that we could have pinball machines at the actual wedding, but that is another story and shall be told another time).

Many people on Plant this year greeted me like "So you finally decided to join us," and I'd reply, "Yeah, now that Chris and I are married, it seemed like I could finally make this kind of commitment..."

(It was funny the first few times, at least. I pointed out that he'd brought me home to meet his Mystery Hunt team waaaaay before I actually met his dad or any other relatives.)

( As always, this is going to be long. )

Also, I feel like this would be an appropriate time to put in a plug for Francis Heaney's Progress for Puzzlers, if you haven't seen it yet (make a donation to organizations like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU and such, and get puzzles)

And on a less political note, Palindrome's practice hunt that they wrote is available online as well, if you have a Panda Magazine account.

And on a non-puzzle note, I'm going to hopefully get my act in gear and move over to Dreamwidth one of these days. Maybe I'll even start writing more than once every 2-3 months again, who knows.

In mid-February we had a reorg at work, which had its own effects on my life. But in addition to that I had a bit of a glasses adventure that week. During our post-reorg all-hands that Thursday (Feb 18) I accidentally snapped my glasses frame -- one side was bent out of shape so I tried to bend it back and totally failed. (No, I wasn't just so stressed out that I snapped the frame, though someone thought that at the time.)

Of course I don't have backup glasses, because I'm a relatively new glasses-wearer and really the only things I distinctly need them for are staring at a screen or reading faraway scoreboards at stadiums. I have astigmatism. I'm even legal to drive without them, though I have to admit it's been nice having signs be less blurry at a distance.

I called the optometrist office and told them what happened, and they were super nice and said that since the glasses were still under warranty, even though I snapped them, they'd order new frames and tell the manufacturer that they broke under normal circumstances. Hooray! New frames would come in on Tuesday or Wednesday, and I'd just have to come by with the lenses and they'd put them in.

In the meantime, I kept using the glasses during work even though they were broken and only have one temple. I mean, it turns out they balanced pretty well on my face as long as I'm not moving around. If you didn't look closely you wouldn't even notice anything was weird about them; you might notice that yes, something is off. You'd probably extrapolate an extra temple in there just because that's what you think should be there.

The next Monday, I did an idiotic thing. I forgot that I had the glasses attached to my shirt (the collar, with just the one temple) and I went over to another nearby building. I was visiting a few places in the building, and on my way back to my desk I noticed that, uh, I didn't have my glasses. Huh. Well, maybe I had been smart and left them at my desk. No, I got back to my desk and they were gone. In a panic, I ran back to the other building and retraced my steps. Retraced them three times. Asked a few people around if they'd seen a pair of broken glasses. No dice. Totally freaked out about this for like an hour. Asked a friend in the other building to let me know if anything showed up on their building mailing list.

Finally having accepted that my optometrist was going to kill me for this, I planned to go to their office the next morning (Tuesday) to order two pairs -- a new one and a backup one, once and for all, so this silliness wouldn't happen again. Except, I decided to stop by work first, rather than going straight to the eye doctor. I thought that I hadn't actually checked the bathrooms in the other building, though I couldn't remember having stopped by -- also I thought there was a chance if someone found them, maybe they'd be around on the front desk or something.

Well, they weren't IN the building, but I found them on the ground outside the building on the grass! I'm pretty sure someone found them and put them in a more visible spot, because I'm damn sure I didn't see them there when looking there the day before. They were a bit more scratched up than before for sure, but still usable. (There is a tiny blurry scratch spot on one lens, so yeah, I'll probably have to replace them eventually regardless.)

And then eventually on late Wednesday afternoon I called the optometrist after getting all freaked out, and the frames had just come in, so I went over to get them. (It is convenient that my optometrist is really close to Google.) And I went and ordered a new pair too. Because duh. I was really happy I didn't have to go over like "I LOST MY LENSES" after they were nice enough to order me new frames and all.

It's actually a little weird because I'm still wearing the old glasses regardless. The new ones are shinier and have less dirt and scratches, but they don't feel quite right (they're a slightly different frame). Still, it's nice to have backups. And I'll be a lot more careful in the future.

ERMAHGERD! MERSTERY HERNT! MAH FRAVIT TERPIC!

Just kidding, I don't think that even factored into this year's hunt. But that said, I wonder if I'll outdo last year's entry on length. Probably not, since we didn't finish this year.

If I was going to sum up this year's hunt with a meme, it would be more like...

yunoanswer

( DOG DOG HUNT ENTRY DOG DOG DOG WARNED! )

I should probably edit this entry down, but it's already taken me bits and pieces of almost a week to write it, so I think I'll just post now and worry about coherency later.

(From arriving at Almonds and Corals.)

So after the hour of a boat from Laguna to the terminal, and 3 hours on a bus to Guapiles, and another 3 hours on a bus to Limon, our bus dropped us off at the very last stop at the hotel around 4:30pm. There seems to basically be one woman who works reception there, and she said she’s there from 7am to 7pm. Her English wasn’t awful but it wasn’t anywhere near good. She showed us to our room, which we had to get to by rolling our stuff along a series of boardwalk-like plank roads.

At first, we were actually kind of impressed by our room. I mean, the hotel consists of 24 cabins in the rainforest. Seriously in the rainforest. Like, you better be able to sleep through the sounds of crickets and frogs and monkeys and god knows what else, because there’s plants and stuff surrounding you everywhere, and there is no such thing as shutting the windows, the best you can do for privacy is to put down the curtains. The room had two beds with canopies on them, with mosquito netting hanging down from the canopies. A hammock was in one corner of the room and a jacuzzi was in another corner of the room, and a small bathroom with a toilet and a shower stall was another corner (which was also kind of weird since there was no real way to make the bathroom private either, just curtains, again). I think if I liked camping more, this place would have been great, since it basically was kind of like a luxury cabin. And at least there were outlets everywhere to plug our stuff into. And we had a fridge in the room, which also seemed pretty cool since we’d at least be able to have some cool drinks to help with the heat.

After a few minutes we had a bunch of questions, though, namely along the lines of…
- how would laundry work? we had seen on their website that it was possible, and we’d only brought 7 days of clothes with us.
- were there any tours we could do? otherwise this place was going to get pretty boring pretty quick.
- why didn’t the wifi have working internet?
- WHERE THE HECK WERE WE SUPPOSED TO GET DRINKING WATER FROM? All the signs in the room said that the water wasn’t drinkable, but unlike Tortuguero they hadn’t bothered to tell us where the water sources were.

Thus started our adventure of trying desperately not to hate this place too much.

As for laundry, they claimed to have laundry service, and gave us a paper to itemize what we wanted washed, with the caveat of: no laundry service on Sundays, and you have to have your stuff in by 9am to get it back same day. For internet, she was surprised it wasn’t working and said she’d reboot the router. For water, we could either fill up water bottles in the lobby or in the restaurant. For tours, well, they had a partnership with a company called “Se Ua” down the road, which was two Costa Rican guys who spoke English and would take you on various tours for various prices, she said “just tell me what you want to do, and I’ll call and book it with them”. And they had bicycles at the hotel that you could rent for a half or full day to go to any of the “nearby” cities or attractions.

Anyway, we explored a little bit and found the (actually) nearby beach (which of course you can’t actually go swimming in due to riptides), and the hotel restaurant, and things like that. We got dinner at the restaurant. They were very nice people but the menu was pretty limited, and worse… they didn’t even have half of the things on the menu. Like we wanted a tuna dish they had, but they didn’t have any tuna that night. And when we tried to order dessert after dinner, it turned out that they simply didn’t have any dessert (they made up for it by giving us fruit and ice cream, I guess).

And then… there pretty much wasn’t really much to do around the hotel itself -- seriously absolutely nothing -- no pool, no entertainment area, there was nobody at reception, and so on -- and keep in mind the location of this place, the nearest “town” was Manzanillo, about 2km away, and the nearest place that actually had anything for real was Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, about 11km away. It was pretty much impossible to go to either of them at night without a car because the roads were dark and these places are so small that getting a taxi would have been pretty complicated and possibly expensive (though I suppose we could have looked into it more; it's also not like there was really anywhere to GO at night anyway!).

So we filled the hot tub and sat in it for a while. It wasn’t REALLY comfortable for two people but whatever. Then we read books until it was time to sleep. By which I mean e-books; it’s a good thing we didn’t bring any real books as this room was so humid that our passports and all other papers we had were withery and damp by morning.

Sleeping through the night was an adventure in itself. Keep in mind it was hot and humid, and then by putting down the mosquito netting, that pretty much made it impossible for any air to really move around our bed. Another weird thing was that I thought the bed had memory foam, but it turns out it was just missing a plank and so there was a dip in the mattress under my hips that also made it uncomfortable to sleep.

The next day was Sunday. We were originally scheduled to do the “Crazy Monkey Canopy Tour” that morning, which is a zipline tour through the Almonds and Corals hotel grounds itself, and thought we’d go to Manzanillo for lunch after. However, after breakfast when we got to the front desk to report for our zip line adventure, the receptionist said,

“Oh, sorry guys. You are rescheduled for tomorrow morning at 9:30. Sorry I didn’t tell you until now. It’s Sunday you know, and the zip line guides didn’t show up today. Cause you know, it was Saturday last night and they were drinking. So, no tour today.”

Uh.

So we ask what we can do instead, like, can we do one of those tours listed on their poster?

“Oh, well, maybe, but you know, it’s Sunday, so a lot of things are closed, but, why don’t I call them and see if they can take you kayaking, how about that? Cause they can do that, it’s just a guy and his kayaks and a truck and all.”

So she calls and gets us scheduled for a kayak outing at 1pm.

We decide to go to Manzanillo for lunch. I’d looked at TripAdvisor a bit to see what was there and found a place called “Cool and Calm Cafe” that had decent ratings. Since it was just a mile or so away we decided to walk… which turned out to be sort of a mistake, it took 30 minutes to walk there in the heat, and it was a pretty boring walk at that (despite that this hotel claimed to be a great place to see monkeys and whatnot, the only animals we saw on our walk were ants and occasionally dogs). We walked around Manzanillo, but it’s pretty much a 2-blocks-by-1-block place. Seriously. I ducked into one of their “supermarkets” which is really more like a bodega, and got some root beer and ginger ale and a big bottle of water. It was 2200 colones. I gave them $5, they gave me 3 coins of 100 colones back each. Whee.

Lunch was pretty good, aside from the cafe having too loud reggae music blaring the entire time (the cook seems to be from the Afro-Caribbean descent part of the area). I got a casado with chicken, a casado basically being “rice, beans, plantains, and something”. Chris got fish tacos. They were decent. We were across the street from the beach so we could watch people playing. Lunch came to $26 (by which I mean it was 13200 colones and we offered $26 and they seemed happy with it).

We figured maybe we could walk back on the beach to save some time -- infact I’d read a review of Almonds and Corals which claimed that “Manzanillo is a 5-minute walk away on the beach”.

Except it turned out to be high tide. So. We got a little bit of the way in and then my waterproof hiking boots got completely doused in water. As a result of trying to avoid getting swept away in the waves, it took us 40 minutes to get back via the beach, even longer than it had taken to walk along the road. I was pretty miserable and wet and sandy and sweaty and all by the time we got back, and we had to meet the kayak group at 1.

I took a shower and Chris went to ask them what we should bring; he came back like “bring nothing, be ready to get wet”, so I took that to heart and brought literally nothing -- no phone, no wallet, no camera, no nothing, my feet in flipflops and no socks, my already-wet t-shirt, and my hiking pants.

The kayak guys came over in a truck, which of course had no seating, so we sat in the back of the truck with a girl from Norway who was also coming with us to kayak, and some guy I have no idea who he was, maybe he was just getting a ride somewhere.

We get to the beach/river at Punta Uva that we’re going kayaking from. Willie, the guide, says he’s going to unpack the kayaks, we should take a few minutes to look around the beach shops/etc. Chris wants to find a bathroom, so we do. I’m miserable because getting to the bathroom involves walking through some mud -- I already have bad balance and trying to do this in flipflops is super awkward and somewhat painful. And guess what happens when we do get to the bathrooms? We’re in Costa Rica, so people ask us for a dollar to use the bathroom. Except we have no money. So they say we can’t use the bathroom and that’s that.

Sigh.

Anyway, once we get on the kayaks it’s not so bad. Chris and I double up on a sitting kayak, and Norway takes a standing paddleboard. Willie has a seated kayak since he’s also bringing some snacks and stuff. There’s also a couple, I never caught their names either, and they’re doing the paddleboards too. So a group of 5 of us. We’re deliberately doing a slow easy kayak ride and stopping to look at wildlife and stuff. Infact, before we even get in we see a sloth in a tree across from where we start our ride. So that’s promising. Of course, I have no camera or anything else. Which was probably a good thing in some ways, but it’s a little sad to have no pictures of some parts of the ride.

Since I have no clue what time it was during the kayaking, I don’t know exactly how far we went. We pretty much rode until you couldn’t ride anymore -- there’s a point in the river where the boats basically are grounded in rocks because it’s too shallow, and that’s where we stopped to take a break. But before then we did have quite a wander along. We saw some bats under a bridge, and some birds and stuff, and we saw LOTS of turtles so I was happy about that (even one time, we came across a log that had a line of like 5 turtles all just sitting there; I really did miss a great photo op for “Turtles all the way down”).

The break consisted of eating some breadsticks and fruit and water and hanging out for a bit before setting back.

Of course, about 5 minutes into our return trip, the skies decide to open up and pour rain on us. Which doesn't let up for the rest of the trip. I was prepared to get wet so it wasn't that terrible, but it's sort of unfun to be kayaking out in the rain.

We get to the beach and Willie offers us all coconuts while he's getting stuff packed up. I don't like coconuts, but he doesn't seem to hear me say that and I get stuck drinking juice out of a coconut. (Spoiler: I don't like coconut juice either.) Then, his truck wouldn't start because of some battery issue so a bunch of people help him push it a bit to get it started. We get back to the hotel. I go to our room to change and lie down; Chris gets in a little bit later because it turns out that he had to pay for the tour separately in cash (he thought it was done through the hotel, but no, they are entirely unaffiliated). Whee.

We goof off some more by reading and whatever, and get dinner at the hotel restaurant again. This time the guy running the place tells us that they DO have tuna, so we have it (it's not bad, but definitely overcooked). AND they have desserts... well... they have one dessert, anyway, which is banana cake with ice cream. Fortunately for them it's pretty good. (And yes, when we came in that night they greeted us like "Tenemos postres!")

Again, the evening is a wash. All we did on any of the given evenings was play games on our devices and read and whatever, and usually go to sleep by 10pm. That night we also got our laundry together and tallied it all up on their laundry paper.

The next morning we get up, give our laundry bags to the front desk, have breakfast, and then go off for our CRAZY MONKEY CANOPY adventure!

Which turns out to be ziplining. And utterly terrifying. It was advertised as a "lovely and relaxing journey over the trees to see the monkeys and other animals of the rainforest" or something to that effect but in reality we were being guided around by two dudes who spoke about 10 words of English and we saw exactly one monkey (and that being, I saw it, not Chris, since the only reason I saw it was, while my guide was trying to calm me down at one point, he pointed out a monkey in a tree off in the distance).

The receptionist lady did a 2-minute explanation in English what was going on, and we got hooked up with all the ziplining gear, and then we were off. I wish someone had warned me in advance that the first part of it would be climbing up several flights of stairs up a tree in the heat because I hadn't brought any water and my throat/lungs were already unhappy with me before we started. And then I got totally freaked out when we got up to the top. I'm not even sure why anymore, it was just super scary, the platform we were on was shaking a bit since the tree was shaking, and we were high up, and I'd never been ziplining before, and it was just freaking me the hell out. Eventually I went down the first rope in taxi with one of the guides -- and ended up doing the first three ropes that way. I had my eyes closed for the first two. Finally on the fourth I decided to try going by myself -- and naturally I screwed up the braking and couldn't stop spinning and I got stuck about 10 feet away from the target platform and was TERRIFIED, dangling in the air over the forest, they told me to use my arms to climb up the rope to get to the platform. SO scary. The next rope I went by myself and kept spinning around again. Then the next rope I went with the guide again because he said "this one is really fast, you should go with me." The last few ropes weren't that bad -- I basically started doing them with my right arm to brake/steer instead of left (they had said use your strong arm, but I think these really were geared for right-handed people) and so I was able to get through all of the remaining ropes without any incidents. Still, I was really happy to get to the ground.

Soaked in sweat, we went back to our room for a bit. I don't even remember if I bothered showering again, I may have. (I showered a LOT during this trip.) And then we borrowed bicycles so we could go up to Puerto Viejo. The bicycles were one-speed with backpedal brakes, like Google bikes, and like Google bikes they had uncomfortable seats and underinflated tires. The road had two big hills at the beginning but after that it was pretty flat the rest of the way.

Puerto Viejo is about 11 km away from the hotel, so 7 miles or so. Chris and I ride bikes 3 miles each way to work so it's not that huge a deal to ride like this, except we usually ride much better bikes in much nicer climates. We stopped after 3 miles or so to drink some water, and then another few miles we stopped when we got to some roadside beach. The road was mostly just green, with occasionaly houses or shops along the way, or there was one field with horses in it, too. We saw some chocolate shops that had tours, and a wildlife rescue, but we didn't stop for any of that, just a few water breaks.

Eventually we got to PV, which is at least a bit bigger than Manzanillo -- the downtown is more like 5 by 3 blocks or so. Riding through the town we could at least see that it was big enough to have things like doctors, a veterinarian, pharmacies, various stores, even hardware stores and supermarkets and whatnot. Lots of churches and hostels and restaurants too, and of course a beach. We went to an art cafe for lunch since it was highly rated on TripAdvisor and that worked so well before. This one was called Como en mi Casa. They were rated highly for having vegan and organic food, and sure enough, they were full of choices for gluten-free, organic, etc food. They were at least laidback and spoke English and gave us their wifi password and had nice bathrooms so I could wash my hands and all. BUT, it took forever for us to get drinks, and it was HOT in there -- they had outdoor seating but it was full so we were indoors on the second floor and all. Also, we wanted passion fruit juice and they were out of it. Chris got a mango smoothie and I got a lemonade with ginger and mint, except it was WAY TOO STRONG with ginger and undrinkable to me. I had a tuna sandwich though and it was pretty good. The rolls were yellow, which they said was from using turmeric. Chris had a veggie sandwich, which he said would have been fine if it didn't have so much eggplant. I dunno.

We rode around town for a bit after that, and then since we really didn't have anything better to do... turned around and started biking back to the hotel. I mean, there weren't any obvious museums or other things in town to see, we rode along the different streets and saw the beach and whatever before turning around at least.

On the other hand, we had seen an ice cream stand on the road on our way up there and we decided to stop in there on the way back since it was about halfway between PV and the hotel. This was probably the best thing that happened all day, or maybe the entire trip to that part of the country. It was a place called "Alice", and had gourmet ice cream... I got chocolate and Chris got peanut butter. They were awesome. Apparently the chocolate came from some nearby region in Costa Rica, even. The guy running the place spoke perfect English and offered us the wifi password and all, and when we got to talking with him it turned out he had lived in the Bay Area for a long time and worked in software, even at SGI, at the buildings Google currently has in Crittenden. He said he was "taking a break" by running the ice cream shop, but that he'd been down there four years already. It was such good ice cream! I think it's kind of funny that we found the best ice cream in Costa Rica by pure random chance.

We got back to the hotel around 4:30pm and we asked the receptionist if we could schedule a tour for the next day -- the one for the chocolate farm, butterfly farm, and I forget what the third thing was on the list. (They were mostly just random things grouped together.) She called them up and said they'd be able to do a tour for us at 2pm. Great.

Also, where was our laundry? Oh, it'd get delivered to us. Or something.

We chilled out a bit in our room. The laundry still never showed up. At 7pm I was beginning to get annoyed since I knew that officially the front desk was closed from 7pm onward, so who would we ask? We went up there a little later and asked yet again, and some other woman was there and said she'd go figure it out, and so after a bunch of staff conferred, they did eventually come back with our laundry! (So much for "same day afternoon return".)

We got dinner. It sucked too. Chris ordered bruschetta which was... just awful. And again the only dessert they had was banana cake.

(I'm actually back in MTV now, it's taking me a while to brain dump everything. To be continued...)

Might be a short entry, I just figured I'd type some while waiting for my alarm to go off since I woke up ahead of it yet again because it's so stupid humid and uncomfortable here.

So I last left off on our second day in Tortuguero. We had just gotten out of the pool and cleaned up and met up with our tour group outside the botanical garden. This turned out to be pretty boring for me. For one, we had 20 people or so trying to fit through very small paths (the garden is more like a jungle, lots of plants and a walking path arranged through them, and so many tall trees, etc) and so most of the time people couldn't hear what Carlos was saying; and also, he would stop every 5 feet or so to talk about another plant or tree. Some of it was kind of interesting but largely I was just very much like "ok, plants". So we decided to give up on the botanical tour. Since I was in the front of the group -- half the time I was wandering off ahead rather than listening anyway -- we decided to try to press forward rather than turning back. This didn't turn out to be a mistake per se, but holy crap that garden is a big twisty passage all the way through -- it took us quite a while to get out of there.

Oh, I forgot a detail about the first day -- after dinner Chris and I grabbed a flashlight and tried to go back to the frog garden to find frogs, without hte big group of people around. We only found one though, and it was in the same spot it had been in when the whole group was there. We gave up and went back to our room when it started raining.

So anyway, after the botanical walk we went back to pack up and hang out until dinner, except that I was an idiot and fell asleep for 2 hours. This night dinner turned out to be... well, it was odd. There was still the normal buffet table at one side of the restaurant, but the side we came in on, they had some kind of Mongolian Grill style pasta setup. PASTA. So you'd get a bowl and fill it with things like veggies, spices, meats, olives, mushrooms, etc -- and take it up to a chef who'd throw your stuff in a pan and then add your choice of pasta, and then your choice of sauce, and sautee it all together for you. So we did that. We ended up sitting with an older couple from Spokane that night who had been in Costa Rica for 3 weeks at that point and were heading home shortly; they hadn't been on most of our tours and they were like "there's a point at which you get sick of doing another walking tour and seeing the same animals, so we've been sitting on our nice rocking chairs on the porch and relaxing a lot."

Oh yeah, something else that happened that day was that our toilet broke. Like, BROKE. The handle that controls the flush valve, the stick controlling it snapped off. We told the front desk about it and they said they'd send someone up at 5pm, so we were also there when they fixed the toilet.

I forget if I mentioned this already, but there was no wifi in the rooms there AFAICT, and only the bar area had a wifi, which only had internet half the time anyway. I also couldn't get a 3G signal from our rooms, only from the area near the reception and port. So we were off the internet for two days for the most part there. The thing is that for the most part I didn't really care about that since we were almost always busy doing stuff while we were there, or sleeping.

Speaking of sleeping, of course I couldn't get to sleep until like 1:30am that night due to my nap. And we had to be up and ready and packed and at the boats at 8:45 to go to our next destination. So it was a bit of a rough morning for me.

We had breakfast with the Germany duo, who had gotten up early to find more birds. Something stupid that happened was that we got surrounded by flies because I had a packet of jam and only had it half opened on the table -- the amount of flies surrounding food in general was kind of disturbing but this was even worse, so I took the jam packet and put it on a ledge instead so the flies would go over there. Yuck. Sort of ruined my appetite for the normal rice-and-beans breakfast.

On the way out I saw a smaller iguana in a tree just walking near the dock! That part was pretty cool, that I had first learned to spot them, and second that they were around.

There aren't really roads to the Laguna Lodge, anyway, you pretty much have to take a boat to get there. I don't think there are drivable roads in Tortuguero Town either. They are 100% ecological there and so the most polluting things as far as I could tell were people burning things, and maybe the motors from the motorboats.

On our boat ride to the buses, at one point they stopped the boat and told us to put on our life jackets. We had sort of wondered why in general, when sailing along, we had passed a lot of boats where everyone was wearing them, but we weren't. Well, a little while later we ran into a boat full of policemen! Apparently the drivers of the tourist boats will warn each other about things like that, since a bit further after we passed the policemen, our driver shouted out to the other boat to put on their jackets. I guess it's like telling people to buckle up -- something you should do, but that is less comfortable, and that you could get in trouble for not doing. The policemen in the boat mostly just looked in on us and waved hi though, I'm not sure what else they were supposed to do besides check on lifejackets and other regulations.

We saw a few birds on the ride back, and a few cows too, and at one point there was another boat where someone dropped his hat into the water so our guide (Giovanni, not Carlos) went and got the hat out of the water (and then wouldn't give it back to them but kept it until we hit shore), Also a huge moth found its way onto our boat and then wouldn't leave; it was attached to the seat next to me for the entire ride.

We got back to the way station around 10:15 and then it turned out there wouldn't be a bus until 10:30 at least anyway. We went to hang out in their restaurant, where they sold a few local snacks but mostly sold shit like Doritos, Skittles, etc. We didn't buy any, though I did pay a dollar to use their Delux Banos again just in case.

Eventually the bus showed up with its glorious airconditioning and we rode to Guapiles, having lunch at the same place we'd had breakfast two days earlier, though since it was raining we couldn't really go into the butterfly garden this time. Chris and I ended up eating alone because we technically sat at a table we shouldn't have been at, but whatever.

At 1:30 people started transferring luggage out and onto other transports. We were catching an Interbus shuttle out to Cahuita/Limon/Manzanillo/whatever for our next part of the stay; we were on the same shuttle as Sonja and her husband, though they were staying not as far out as we were, so we were infact the last stop of people to get off the bus. The trip here took about 3 hours and at least there was a bathroom break at one point; we were also on the shuttle with like 6 other people who at some point turned off the AC which was quite annoying since it was very stuffy in the back where I was sitting. Anyway. Another fun thing was stopping at the gas station for bathrooms, I noticed it was 536 colones per liter for gas, which after doing a bunch of math worked out to around $4 per gallon.

Eventually we got to the Almonds and Corals hotel. I had read some reviews of this place which almost all turned out to be false in one way or another, or more like, I think they were specific to the experiences that other travellers had here. Ours were pretty different and in most cases, worse. But anyway, I should now get up for real and prepare to leave here anyway, so hopefully my next entry will come to you from a luxury 5-star hotel in Arenal!

I think the last entry left off on that first day in Tortuguero, where after a bit of settling in and naps we went and got on a boat ride to Tortuguero town. The town has about 1500ish people although I have no clue where they all live as it basically has one main street that goes through it, which is mostly shops and eateries, although I guess there were some houses along it too. Carlos warned us not to buy coconuts and to be careful of getting ripped off by the locals, and to stay on the main street, so we did, and walked the entirety of it, which must have been about a mile. At the end you get to the gates to Tortuguero National Park. The weird thing is, most of the park isn't really accessible from there unless you have a boat. I still don't quite understand how it works; we had to stop in there and buy admissions to the park before going on our boating tours the next day, but it's not like anyone actually ever checked them.

I dunno, the main street had a ton of interesting-looking trash cans in the shapes of parrots, monkeys, owls, sloths, etc. And there was a church and there were some abandoned machinery things and whatnot. We stopped in at an ice cream place when it started raining and got some ice cream (one scoop for 500 colones which is basically a dollar). There were lots of dogs running around but very few cats, too. The dogs never seemed to be leashed or collared but also didn't seem like strays.

After buying a wildlife pamphlet in the gift shop, we got on the boat back to the Lodge. The next thing after that was going to be a sunset walk along the beach to look for turtles. Unfortunately, turtles are seasonal and we didn't find any; Carlos found us several turtle nests but they were all empty of actual turtles. Probably the most amusing animal thing we saw was... well, this dog had started following our group along at one point, and so we were walking along the beach and the dog started just barking at the sand and pawing. Eventually the dog unearthed a crab, all wriggly and full of claws, about 2 inches long. The dog barked, the crab wriggled. First the dog kinda jumped back like it was startled, but then when the crab wriggled again, the dog basically just ate it. CHOMP.

The other thing that happened on the beach walk was that the skies opened up on us. Chris and I hadn't brought our raincoats though I did bring an umbrella. He chose to stand outside it and get wet, so another woman stood under the umbrella with me. She was from Spain and her husband was from Belgium and they had just gotten married, this was their honeymoon. So when I mentioned I was from "San Francisco", this other group of ladies also turned out to be from SF -- well, east bay really -- but they were like "I figured, you had that SHN umbrella and all!" The other crazy thing was that the younger one, she had been studying abroad in Japan at the same time I was there, in 2010. Weird small world I guess.

After the beach walk there was a tour to go look for frogs, in the frog park. They come out at sundown, so we went in once it was dark, and Carlos got out a flashlight and people got out cellphone lights and we went and found a few of the frogs. It was pretty crowded though so it was hard to get pictures or really see them.

We had dinner with a bunch of random people again, which was Christmas dinner, with turkey and ham and stuffing and things. I remember they were playing Christmas music and I asked about it and was told it was a traditional children's song from Spain, so that was kind of interesting.

The next morning there was an optional 5:30am tour, so Chris and I went to sleep super early yet again and got up super early yet again.

The 5:30am optional tour and the 8:30am for-everyone tour were similar except for what part of the river we'd be going to, and obviously, the time of day. 5:30 was intended more for finding some rare birds that only come out super early. We got in a smaller boat -- it seated 18 and had no roof, though they brought ponchos for everyone. We stopped off at the Tortuguero park entrance, where Carlos explained that "this ranger hates me -- he asks for my ID when I come here. I've been doing this for 37 years. My ID number is 001. Come on." We got off and paid our admission fees and got back on the boat, which was a bit of an odd experience.

Since our entire boat was English-speaking, at least we didn't have to hear everything repeated in Spanish. There was a French group with a guy named Remy who had a really good zoom lens so he got shots of all the rare things we saw. We saw a Pudu bird, something like that, it looked like a stump on a branch. We saw a bunch of other birds, one called aninganinga, some other things too. We learned how to see Jesus lizards blending in on trees. At the end of the first run, we were in a narrow creek area with a bunch of tall sunny trees and pretty much every damn tree had at least one iguana in it, so we got really good at spotting them. Carlos said that people in Costa Rica call iguanas "chicken of the tree" kinda like tuna fish are "chicken of the sea". Note: we still haven't eaten iguana here as far as I know.

We went back and had a break for breakfast and to grab gear. Carlos said to be back at the dock at 8:40 prompt, and we'd keep the same 18 group on the same boat since it'd make the park tickets easier. He also said to grab a towel from our room to protect us from the sun, so Chris and I brought out our super badass hiking hats that have neck protection and all. And we were earlyish to get back, so we got on the boat first and stole the front seats! That part was exciting since we got a nice view of everything.

The 8:30 tour, we saw some more birds, and TWO sloths that had come down from the trees to poop (sort of funny since like, three boats all pulled up next to one of the sloths to take photos), and a super poisonous red frog that Primo the boat driver went up on shore to fetch to show us, and probably the most exciting part was when we were going down this one river and suddenly we saw some white-faced monkeys! There must have been around ten of them, and they were running up and down branches and jumping across the river, running up trees and hanging on each other and playing and doing all kinds of silly things. Carlos said it was very rare to see them at all, let alone see them just kinda playing and doing antics for us. They were practically posing for photos on the branches near our boat and just monkeying around.

Unfortunately at some point in the tour, around when we were finding crocodiles, my stomach felt really sick, which sucked, because we were kind of in the middle of the lake and I knew we weren't heading back to shore any time soon. I just had to sort of deal with it as best as I could, but it did make things kinda bad. Also it rained quite a bit and so we got out those ponchos and all, which also made it harder to see things and take photos of things and all.

We got back to shore and had lunch, which was at a table with yet another different group of people. Carlos was having a botanical walk at 4pm and until then was free, so a whole bunch of us got in the pool. Funny thing: while in the pool we spotted an iguana in a tree, and a toucan in another tree, and some other birds. Julie and Sebastian turn out to be super crazy bird watchers and they had binoculars and bird manuals and all and could tell us what all the things around us were.

After maybe an hour in the pool we got out to change and shower and do the botanical walk, but it turned out to be kind of boring.

(to be continued -- should sleep now again -- we're about to finally get the fuck out of Manzanillo, thank god)

I wonder how much of an entry I can get out given that we have spotty internet at best and I'm trying to type this on the attached case keyboard for a nexus 9 tablet as we decided not to bring laptops with us on this trip, only tablets.

But anyway, this entry is coming to you from Manzanillo, Limon, Costa Rica, more specifically from a cabin at the Almonds and Corals hotel, our second-really-third stop on this trip (we have one more after it). I have on this trip already seen countless monkeys, birds, iguanas, and ridden on many many boats. I also haven't slept in an air conditioned room since our first night here. And I think I've eaten rice and beans as part of almost every single meal.

For the first time in a long time I'm on a trip actually planned out by a travel agent. Chris wanted to go to Costa Rica for the holidays and I didn't really have any better ideas, so he talked to someone through Google's travel services and blam, they planned us this trip. I don't even know how much most of this cost. He told them he wanted to see wildlife and beaches and volcanoes, and that's pretty much what we've gotten.

Well, our first day was just arriving in the country, really. And before that we had a snafu with the flights here. We flew United since I get miles and all, and we did SFO->IAH->SJO. (San Jose CA is SJC; San Jose Costa Rica is SJO) I spent the flight to Houston not sleeping and instead watching Hero 2015 (yet another Kimutaku prosecutor movie; I saw the 2007 version in the theater when I lived there), though the plane entertainment wifi cut out 15 minutes before the end.

At the gate in IAH, after our flight was delayed a little anyway coming out of SFO in the first place, we get to the gate and sit down, and then the agents call Chris's name to come to the counter. I have no clue what's going on as I sit there and guard our bags, but basically they tell him he's been upgraded to first class. He apparently says that he's traveling with his fiancé and wants to sit with her so don't upgrade him. Doesn't tell them my name or my status with them or anything. So they don't check on whether I had one and they don't give him the upgrade.

In the meantime, I had already *been* upgraded but I didn't know that until I got to the boarding. I even went up to the desk after Chris came back and explained my status and was like "wtf how did he get an upgrade if I didn't?" But they seemed rather annoyed by my complaining and they made up some excuse about his being the booking name or whatever.

Anyway, we go to get on the plane and when I give them my pass for my normal economy seat they go "oh, you've been upgraded to first class..." and they see Chris and it's just like "holy shit WHAT" all around. At which point the first class ticket they offered Chris is long gone so I get the choice of abandoning him and sitting in first class or staying with him in economy. So I end up staying with him which means they have to get my econ seat BACK believe it or not.

The upshot is, always ask and give enough info. Had I not been guarding our bags and let him handle it himself this never would have happened. I did spend half the flight being mad at him for essentially talking us OUT of first class upgrades because WTF.

So, we get to Costa Rica at like 11am or so. Customs and whatnot were very easy. We get out of all the things and meet with Tammy, our representative from the Costa Rica Dream Travel that our stuff is booked through. She even has one of those signs that says "RUBIN/LUHRS" on it which was kinda exciting because I've never been met at the airport from someone with a sign, at least not that I remember. She spends about 5 minutes explaining all the stuff in our packet to us and gives us travel vouchers and whatnot, and we make sure I can call her cellphone just incase we have an emergency anywhere along the line of our itinerary. She calls us a transport van and we're off to the San Jose Doubletree, which was our first stop of the trip.

Our van driver, unlike Tammy, speaks almost zero English. So to try to talk to him I end up resorting to the 6 years of Spanish I studied back in JHS and HS. I've actually always been able to understand spoken Spanish fairly well but I haven't been able to speak it pretty much ever (even in Japan I had a close friend from Barcelona who would often hang out with other Spanish speakers, and I'd listen to them and reply in Japanese). I did at least manage to find out things like the names of the volcanoes we were driving by.

We check in at the hotel and get our requisite warm cookie and then... realize we have no idea what to do, but at least we're in a reasonable hotel that has a restaurant and pool and whatnot, so we go eat lunch by the pool, and then proceed to spend an hour or two lounging around in the pool, or more like, the hot tub. Then I went and bought a whole bunch of postcards for people, since I reply to Christmas cards by sending New Year's postcards, a habit I also picked up living in Japan.

Chris and I had seen a Hard Rock Cafe on the way to the hotel not too far up the road, so we walked there for dinner. It turned out there was a live band event at like 8, but we got there at 6:30 and they let us sit in the bar area, where there was this big soccer game going on between Alajuelense and Saprissa; the waiter explained to us that this was kinda like the World Series of Costa Rican soccer, as Saprissa is like the great team of San Jose but Alajuelense was this powerhouse team from the middle of nowhere that was dominating this year. (In the last few days I have seen a TON of Saprissa gear all over the damn place; they have a maroon S that looks an awful lot like Stanford sports gear actually.) Anyway, we watched about 40 minutes of the soccer game and ate totally American-like food and whatever, it was still kind of wacky to be there. I wanted to get a Hard Rock Cafe San Jose shirt for laughs but they just didn't have any that looked like something I'd wear.

We went back to the hotel and crashed around 9pm, having done the redeye to get in in the first place. We were getting picked up at 5:30 the next morning anyway, which was like 3:30 California time, so that was going to be kinda crazy.

So, 5:30am, we get on this small shuttle bus, which drives around to several other hotels in the area before dumping us off at this Radisson hotel closer to downtown, where we transfer ourselves and our luggage to a bigger bus. It is at this point that we meet Carlos, who is our tour guide for the next two days (our meaning us and the other 40 or so people on our particular tour). It also turns out that somehow my name has been miswritten as "Pianna" on his sheet and so every time for the rest of the weekend when he is doing roll call to make sure everyone is there for whatever thing, he says "Christopher and Pianna?" and I'm like "Deanna?" and it still never got fixed.

But anyway. We do a few stops in downtown San Jose which is kind of interesting at least; we go through Chinatown and a few other areas. It is about 7am before we actually leave San Jose (our last stop is a hotel where we fortunately get to use the bathroom before the bus heads out. Chris comments that if we knew we weren't actually leaving the city until then we could have slept in and taken a cab to this hotel, but eh.)

We stop off for breakfast at a place called Selva Tropical in Guapiles. They are a butterfly-themed restaurant with a real butterfly garden in back. Breakfast is buffet-style, and is basically rice-and-beans with a few other options to add to it like plantains and bread and sausages and whatever. We sit at a table with a British-Indian couple who live in Atlanta and talk about random stuff. This ends up being a running theme through the weekend, since all of the meals are buffet-style and all of the tables seat 6-8 people.

The butterfly garden was pretty cool, if small. Lots of cocoons too and we even got to see some butterflies coming out.

Back on the bus for another hour or two to get to Tortuguero, or more like, to get to the boats that will actually take us to Tortuguero. We have a stop off at a rest stop like place... which advertises "deluxe bathrooms", where we find out one of the universal rules of Costa Rican tourist locations: it costs $1, or 500 colones, to actually use said bathroom. But, we're about to get on a boat tour for an hour so I figure I might as well.

We haven't actually changed money from dollars at all during this trip, as an aside. Pretty much everywhere is perfectly willing to accept our US money. Tammy had told us that some places will rip us off, and that the technical exchange rate is about 540ish colones to the dollar, but as long as we get at least 500 to the dollar we're doing fine. I've only received change once and it was in a little convenience store today, where I got like 3 drinks, they cost 2200 colones, I gave the cashier $5, and she gave me back 300 colones. Most times people just quote us something in dollars or leave it in whole dollars. Lunch today was 13200 colones and we gave them $26 and I think people were happy all around with the transaction.

But back to Tortuguero. We load all of our luggage onto one boat and then all of us people onto another boat. It's only about 10 minutes into the ride where I vaguely kind of regret that our gear is all in our luggage which is all on the other boat. I had sunscreen in my backpack, at least -- but halfway there the rain starts pouring down. Fortunately the boat has canvas window/wall things that we put down. Before that, Carlos was at least pointing out various things and talking about them in English and Spanish (it was sort of funny because when we were in Japan I'd have to translate for Chris, but in this case when Carlos started going on about all the types of turtles in the area and I was like "oo! turtles!" and then realized he'd just repeat it in English so I didn't have to bother translating); but with the walls down I just sort of zoned out mostly.

We got to the Laguna Lodge and basically, he gave us our room numbers and told us to get situated and then come eat lunch at 1pm or so.

Our room there was basically a cabin. They had blocks of 4 cabins together, with porches and rocking chairs. The room itself had two double-size beds, and some sparse other furniture, a few outlets that were nearly impossible to find, some shelves... a bathroom with a shower stall in it, and a fan. No AC, of course -- and the rooms were all street level pretty much so you had to close all the shutters if you were going to disrobe to take a shower or anything. It actually wasn't too horribly hot if you were in there with the windows open and the fan running, at least.

Another thing about this place -- they told us explicitly not to drink the tap water, and to fill up our water bottles from the tanks in the restaurant. Even to brush our teeth.

Lunch was another buffet, again with rice and beans and some other stuff I don't remember off the top of my head. And it was again a "hey, come find random people to sit with" situation. I think at that meal we sat down with Julie from Germany and her husband, and Sonja from Spain and her husband, odd that I mostly remember all the women's names but not the men's names. In most cases the women had better English anyway; though Julie and her husband had lived in Livermore for a while so that was kind of funny when they found out we're from California.

After lunch we explored the area a little bit and walked out to the beach, and then at 3pm there was an excursion to Tortuguero Town.

(hm, going to continue this in another entry I think, since I don't trust the internet here to reload it if I try to pick it up tomorrow)

I miss having entries about puzzle hunts to look back on after hunts. It's funny, but in Seattle we never had the notion of something being rebroadcast, so there was no reason for me not to go home and do a braindump about the day. Now, it's like, if I do a hunt, usually we're not supposed to spoil people on anything because the hunt may be rebroadcast, or will be rebroadcast a week or two later.

But I mean, I'm feeling really good about how we've been doing at events lately. It's funny because I'd gotten used to being part of a team (Liboncatipu) known for being one of the top teams in Seattle, but down here I feel like people are still surprised when Ducky Charms does really well in things. (But we've been one of the top teams in pretty much every event we played in this year.) My team won Palantir's hunt in early November, and won the Iron Puzzler in late November as well, and there were plenty of the usual suspects around to beat out in those. We were 2nd or 3rd place in the final Shinteki Decathlon depending on how you count as well. I dunno. This past week Chris and I went to Puzzled Pint with just the two of us and finished all 7 puzzles in under an hour. I still certainly enjoy it, but there are times where I have to remind myself that "these only seem easy because you have been doing this for 12 years." and also to keep perspective when we're feeling like "we can't solve this, it must be broken" (though Iron Puzzler is, of course, the exception to that).

I still think it's a good stretch when we have puzzle events every 2 weeks for a while, though.

On Oct 17 we played in the Mastermind Hunt with Corey and Melinda. It's funny, I go into every Mastermind Hunt with an expectation of something being broken, and this was no exception. Worse, this time it wasn't the puzzle that was broken so much as it was the staff that was broken - they told us to leave a site when we didn't have all of the information necessary to solve a puzzle. Very frustrating. (It was a boat display in the window of a game store on Pier 39, and there were strings of nautical flags hanging which spelled out the instructions; the staff member handed us a sheet of paper with the positions of the boats and said "This is all you need, you don't need to stay here", which was patently not true, as there were also pluses and minuses on the boats which were integral to the puzzle.) Turns out we wouldn't have won anyway because we screwed up another answer, but the taste in my mouth from that hunt was unfortunately all about the one puzzle mishap, since that's pretty much how we spent the last hour -- trying to figure out what to do with this puzzle that seemed broken because we just hadn't gotten the information from the site, and we weren't about to go back a mile to get it at that point, though we did work out an info trade with Dan and Doug. It's a shame, because up to that point it was pretty fun; we were mostly just doing the wander-around-SF-looking-for-stuff thing, and I do think puzzles are always a great excuse to get out on a nice day with friends and be active.

So on Oct 24 we played in the Telegraph Hill BANG. Chris signed us up while I was in Japan and organized, which meant that it ended up being only me and Chris and Sean. I think we were 5th or 6th place. I can't even remember any particular things that slowed us down, puzzle-wise; everything was fairly solid and all involved Morse code in some way or another. Even though I have the Morse alphabet memorized, there were a few that tested my brain on that (one involved all sorts of operations to letters, like reversing or flipping or shifting (like L flipped is Y because .-.. becomes -.--) which turned out to be really hard for me to do mentally for some reason). We did have to climb up to the Coit Tower from the Embarcadero, which really sucked. I did that climb a few years ago with Takuma and Kosuge and was clearly in much better shape back then because I don't remember it being nearly as awful. One funny thing about the day was that the opening "activity" had asked teams to show up wearing either solids, stripes, or spots (for a Morse activity, being stripes as dashes and spots as dots). Our team got spots. But we weren't sure what to do about that since none of us own spotted clothing. So Chris and I put little Chrome stickers all over our Ducky Charms shirts to be spots.

The stickers kept falling off anyway, so halfway through the day I started "chroming" the GC staffers. Every start code had an O in it, so I'd take off one of my Chrome stickers and put them in the O.

At the end of the day we were hanging out at the final location. Richard had mentioned to me that Palantir was doing a hunt on nov 7th at Stanford, which he had discovered while looking at their Berkeley hunt. So, since we were standing there, and Bruce was talking to Sean, I was like "Well, we have 5 of us right here, why don't we be a Palantir team?"

So I went home that night and registered us. I also invited my friend Ken to come play since the team limit was 6 and Glenn was busy. Ken works at Google and we met in the ballroom dance club, but he's also into board games and puzzles and stuff, and I had him join our Berkeley Mystery Hunt team the past two years since he's a recent grad from there and ostensibly could help us get around campus (but in reality he is a pretty solid puzzler. I feel bad because he said that as an undergrad he'd try to do the hunt and his friends would flake out on him), and so I've been trying to invite him to puzzle events when I can; he also joined us when we did the Houdini escape room back in September.

Nov 7th was the Palantir Stanford hunt. They run it from noon to 6pm or so, with lunch beforehand and dinner afterwards since it's technically a recruiting event for college students so they have budget for all kinds of stuff (but they let some non-student teams play too, which is nice of them). I think in past years it's been in Octoberish, but this time it was in Novemberish, with sunset at 5pm or so. Anyway, the crazy nutso thing here was that we completely blasted this hunt. I mean, every single puzzle, we'd find some way to shortcut it. Like we'd have three letters and say "LAS? Must be LASERS!" and enter that. Some were even worse offenders of having like 3 out of 8 letters and nutrimaticking out an answer (I think we did that having D_C___P_ and figured out DUCKTAPE from that). Apparently we also just got lucky in some -- like there was a thing with transparencies and squares and words and stuff, and I immediately said "we're making a QR code", and I was also lucky in that my weirdo Japanese QR code reader app managed to read the thing on the first try -- afterwards a lot of teams said they had a lot of trouble getting it to read even after they had the whole thing done. We short-circuited a Lego-themed puzzle by basically knowing letter sets based on the position of some squares and coming up with valid words. We paralellized things really well too. Almost every puzzle had some moment where someone would finish up the part they were doing only to find out that we'd just solved the entire thing from letter-guessing. I dunno. The puzzles were actually totally decent puzzles, just that since they were meant for college students and not necessarily superpuzzlers, we were able to blaze through them like that.

Towards the end of the day, we were That Team that arrived at every site first and left before any other team got there, and pushed GC to arrive early for us. One of the sites was outside a gym, and we arrived at the same time as GC and basically said "well we'll go to the bathroom while you set up?" and did so. And then we finished the puzzle and were talking to the GC guy, who told us to wait until the next site opened -- he was asking about other puzzle events and I said "Oh, you should see puzzlehuntcalendar.com", and he's like "What's that?" and I said "It's a website that lists puzzle hunts like this but all over the place -- in about 2-3 minutes the Burninators will show up here and a guy in a Trogdor shirt, that's Dan, he runs the site. I think this hunt was on it too?" And sure enough, about 2 minutes later the Burninators showed up, and GC guy was like "How did you know that was going to happen?" and I said "Well, usually WE'RE 10 minutes behind THEM... this is a weird day."

We finished the final meta before 4pm.

Sean went off to hang out with some of his friends at Stanford for a little while, and in the meantime we weren't (well, Chris wasn't) sure if we wanted to hang out until the endgame. Dinner wasn't going to show up until 5:30pm and prizes weren't going to be until 6:30, which seemed like a long time to be there with nothing to do (and we hadn't brought games or anything). But then, like... the Burninators wandered over to our table, as did LXP, and so we compared notes about the day and then people started telling funny stories about other puzzle things going on (the SUMS puzzle hunt was going on at that time, which I think Wei-Hwa and Derek were both playing in). And so we hung out and talked puzzles. And it got dark. And so we got out our flashlights and put them out on the table like candles. And eventually food did show up, and we got sandwiches and continued nerding out about puzzles and other things. Bruce said it was like "puzzle hunt camp", kinda like space camp.

Sure enough, we won! (And LXP and Burninators were 2nd and 3rd place). Of course, this year the prizes were not towels but instead were water bottles. Not nearly as interesting. There were frisbees for getting the first place time on a puzzle, and we picked up a few of those for our team as well.

Afterwards, Dan invited us over to his house to play boardgames, so we (well, Chris and I) did that! We played a game of Alchemists with Wei-Hwa and Derek, although the main thing I enjoyed about it was having my cellphone check the chemicals, the rest of the game play wasn't as interesting to me. I might get it a little bit more on a second play now that I get the whole picture about how the game works, at least. And then we played a game of Codenames, where one team was Wei-Hwa giving clues to Thomas and Derek, and the other was Chris giving clues to me and Dan. That was pretty fun. It is often weird how things you think are "obvious" associations with words are not obvious at all.

Hm, I'll write about Iron Puzzler some other time.

I ate lunch at Backyard. They had BLT salad. Which meant basically salad with bacon and tomatoes and pasta. So good. I only had a small bowl of it though.

Anyway, I was being good today too, except we were supposed to go meet with a florist/decorator tonight for wedding arrangements, and then they cancelled on us (for the second time... I don't think we're going to use these guys) and so our wedding planner suggested that we meet up anyway so she could go over some stuff with us.

She had us meet up at a fancy chocolatier in Palo Alto!

A week ago I would have been totally psyched for a spontaneous "chocolate tasting" as it were -- and the proprietor was telling us about all these options for how to do gift boxes and whatnot with chocolate, or have a truffle arrangement, and so on... and the chocolates were delicious! We got to try a whole bunch of them and he even gave us a bunch to take home (and while we were sitting in the shop going over some stuff with our planner he came by like "Did I not have you guys try our caramels? Here, take some of those too" and dropped a pack of them into my bag). They were so good and all I could think was HOLY CRAP THIS IS NOT THE WAY TO LOWER MY TRIGLYCERIDES AARRRRRGHGHHH SO YUMMY

Well, anyway, we have some interesting possibilities for chocolate if we want to go that route. And we did have semi-healthy dinner at the Local 251 restaurant. But damn, the universe is conspiring against me, I swear.

So, I am trying to figure out how to lower triglycerides, which basically means I need to lose weight. This is really hard when working at Google because there's always yummy delicious fattening carbs and sugars around.

Anyway, yesterday I was pretty good (half a sandwich for lunch, some rice and chicken for dinner, and only one fun-size chocolate bar and a mini-cupcake because dammit they had cupcakes in the kitchen).

Today for lunch I was going to go over to Fishfood -- one of the newer and better cafes on campus -- because they had mac'n'cheese and fried chicken and cornbread and brisket and god knows what else. I was planning to just get half a serving of mac'n'cheese and limit to that.

But I showed up at 11:45am -- which normally would be empty -- and it was packed with the chicken/mac'n'cheese line going out the door!

So I decided I didn't feel like waiting in the long line and went to Backyard to get a salad. No eggs, no cheese, no avocado on it, and only a little bit of ranch dressing (I suck because the salad dressings I like are all creamy and bad for you, but I think maybe if I just use less, I'll be okay?). And half a fudge brownie instead of a whole one.

Funny to me is that part how my desire to wait in line was a lot less than my desire to eat things that aren't good for me to be eating.

I don't necessarily think that I should cut out all of the food that I enjoy eating here, but I'll have to figure out a way to limit it. Maybe even just taking half as much as I would have before, or trying to put everything in to-go boxes or some smaller container. I'm going to try this for a week or two and see how it goes...

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Deanna

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February 2019

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Every Day an Adventure

Recent Entries

Deanna's 2019 MIT Mystery Hunt Saga

Carnival

Puzzle Boat 4

south california trip log

Fate is weird

I deleted all my livejournal entries, though not the account.

Galactic Puzzle Hunt

My WBC 2017 adventure

Procrastinating so writing on this thing and apparently ranting about food and musicals

Is this thing on? (aka, Dreamwidth)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017

backdate: glasses adventure

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016

Costa Rica, Part 4

Costa Rica, Part 3

Costa Rica, Part 2

Costa Rica, Part 1

Puzzlehunts of the last few weeks

Today's not-really funny food story

Funny food story (not really)

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February 2019