I’ve been working since 8:30 this morning, and things keep piling up. It’s 5.45 i’m still at work and have tons to do. Hope the dog’s not being too loud in the back garden, he gets well narky if he hasn’t dragged us on a walk. I’m going to have to finish this at home… Just had to vent somewhere.
Welcome To Love Chips!
National Chip Week seems to get earlier every year. Glad I stocked up on spuds and vegetable oil yesterday…
Mum says it was fine to celebrate last night since I was born at 2am ish and we’re 6 hours behind GMT.
Happy birthday to Keith Chegwin, James Earl Jones and Susanna Hoffs out of the Bangles, if they’re reading too…
via BoingBoing.net:
Stop whatever you’re doing and click on the flash video player thing above… Doesn’t lose its magic no matter how many times you play it.
Other news: Just removed Larsen B ice shelf from our fridgefreezer and what with the drizzle and half a metric ton of ice in the front garden, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
Let’s start by saying there are two roads to Barra de Navidad from Guadalajara. One is “la libre”, 80, which turns off from the toll road to Colima 10 minutes after the Plaza Outlet Mall thing. This is the one we took as the signs said “Barra de Navidad this way” and looked good to me, despite Sita shouting “don’t turn off here!”. Depending on the traffic and the competence of the driver this windy, twisty, convoluted, corkscrew route will take around 6 hours and you’ll see more topes than 
you should ever have to see in one day (see video in César’s blog). That said, it’s a stunning drive through the mountains. We set off late and arrived after dark, Sita and Monica checked out 5 hotels or so before settling on El Marquez de Santana which was perfect. Clean rooms, close to the beach, cable, secure parking, A/C, friendly staff and a pool for 60 bucks a night… bargain.
We wandered into town and had an outstanding meal at a restaurant whose name I forget, which overlooked the lake. Then continued on to Rocktavios where there was live music and a few tequilas on the beach. Next day was quiet, breakfast on the beach where the (short/long sighted/ blind?) waitress said I looked like Ricardo Arjona of “Pinguinos en la Cama” notoriety. Then shopping for trinkets. Then beers on the beach, pozole, nap, beers, DanceDanceRevolution, meal, wander, bed. Lovely day.
Yesterday we set off in search of Tenacatita to check out the mangrove swamps. It was a lot further along the coast than the bloke at the hotel said, so we had breakfast in Cuastecomate and watched pelicans doing their thing in a gorgeous natural harbour surrounding. We eventaully got to Tenacatita and had more food and then hired ourselves a lancha and lanchista (300 pesos, 16 quid an hour) who showed us round the manglares at high tide. A lovely refreshing ride, with none of the fauna we expected (no crocodiles nor snakes) but a fair few crabs and different coloured garzas (storks, i think)… High tide meant dodging the low hanging mangrove roots but was fun all the way…
After all that, back to Gwod. But not on the 80, we went to Colima on windyish roads, then pretty much 5 star roads from there on taking about 4 hrs all in all.
Monica’s got an alternative version of events over here. and there’s plenty of pix as usual at Flickr central.
Here’s a low res virtual tour of the Manglares de Tenacatita:
Siteground, who i´m well chuffed with have various advanced stats systems. That means I can see which sites out there are hotlinking or stealing images and using up agaveweb´s bandwidth. Turns out lots of young scamps have hotlinked to a picture of “American History X” as their favourite film. I couldn´t resist a bit of mischief and swapped the image for another movie. With amusing results….
Spot the odd film out on these people´s MySpace pages: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. There´s scrolling to be done. Looking forward to seeing how long it´ll take for them to notice.
That´s the thing with hotlinking pictures, the people serving them up at their expense can change them to whatever they like. I think I´ve been relatively benign with the swap. Word.