Twelve Days of Christmas

Why are people talking about Christmas being over? I'm sure we all know the 12 days of Christmas song and few years ago upon further investigation I found out the 12 days starts on December 25th and goes on to January 5. So for those of you (like my parents) who leave up your decorations until Easter need to start taking them down on the 6th of January. My boss called me one day and dropped a bomb on me, he had a gift for me.. lol I must be doing something right or maybe his new wife strongly suggested[nagged] that he do it. Either way it made my day, thanks!

It has been way more than 12 days since I made a post so I'll just summarize all the updates that would have probably been posts if I wasn't so lazy in bullet form... yet again.

• I took some time off work to relax before the holidays only to find out the contractors the landlady sent over to renovate my place was ready for me. I was pretty much stuck at home the whole time as they fixed up the place and laid a fresh layer of dust over everything I owned along with drops of paint. On the plus side the place looks a lot nicer now. My parents are convinced she plans to raise the rent after she is finished.. I'm keeping my fingers crossed but even if she does, how bad could it be?
• As per usual the eating has been non-stop.. time to unbuckle the belt :p
• I went to a party that had a haagen-dazs stand.. this was a first for me. What was funny was I mentioned it to my sister and she said "I can't tell when last I went to a party and they didn't have one". I guess we live in two different worlds even though she only lives a few minutes from me.
• My standby duty starts today and goes on until next week Monday. Somehow I forgot this and was previously looking for somewhere to go on old years night. Oh well change of plans.
• Anybody that flips through tv on Christmas day knows that channel that has the yuletide log burning with Christmas carols playing for hours.. this year I taped dvded it. Yup this is probably the first time I made use of that cheap dvd recorder I bought from radio shack and was proud. Now I can listen to endless hours of Christmas music throughout all my 12 days of Christmas.
• I fixed one of the contractor's computer. After working for one too many days in my apartment and seeing all the boxes of electronic junk he figured I must know something about this computer thing so he approached me and I told him I would look at it for him. I fixed it for him and he offered money or at least to buy me a drink for fixing it.. I couldn't take a cent from him. I have long forgotten that there are people who don't really get the chance to use or know much about computers. I am glad he bought one for his kids so they can stay current.
  

Oh yeah happy new year when it comes.

thats whats up

It has been a while since I've posted.. things got a bit hairy at work since my last post. Needless to say I have taken this week off so I now have a lot of time to do what I do best, a whole bunch of nothing. My landlady sent over some contractor to renovate the place so I pretty much have to stay home for the rest of the week so he can do his work.. great way to spend some time off work eh? To keep things short I will just summarize what I've been up to since my last post:

• crackbook: yup I signed up for facebook and was a junkie like everybody else. The novelty died down pretty quickly though. It's very nice, I found quite a bit of old school friends I thought dropped off the face of the earth.
• I went to the New Kingston stage of the annual local rally and took exactly one picture.I arrived late, the stage only lasts like 30 minutes and the place was packed with people.. I was lucky I could even see a car. What amazes me is that people will stand on the corner and watch the car race head on at them into the corner at ridiculous speeds and have the time not to crap their pants. I have seen where rallies go wrong and the spectators feel it.
  
• I went to Web 3.0 Banana Boy, Alex's, wedding. Congratulations Alex! I want it to be my turn next :p. Need to find a girlfriend first to get that ball rolling. I don't really get suited up often so you know I had to take pics I'm not really sure what I was doing in the second pic but the kids seem to be putting up all sorts of finger signs these days so I joined in with my own lol. For those of you who may ask, that's a Trinidadian flag on my wall(better than a plain wall), yes I'm half Trini too.
  
• Noodle came over on Saturday for the first time since we broke up. She was hungry so we walked over to Barbican to get something for dinner. On the way back home in the darkness we got held up.. that's Barbican for ya. Anyway the guy crept up behind us with what he would have liked us to believe was a gun and told us to give us our valuables. This was the first time I was being jacked so I stood there a bit stunned trying to figure out if it was a gun, knife or what in his hand. Hearing noodle struggling with him to keep her purse snapped me back to reality and I rushed him. Well I'm still alive so I guess he wasn't packing heat.. he ran off and jumped in a waiting car.
• The following day I visited my parents for the usual Sunday lunch and my pops said he had something to show me. He brought down a knife sheath he found in my old room and questioned me about it with great concern. My only answer didn't offer him much peace of mind though, "it's just something to remind me of high school" I said. It was a pretty big sheath and the knife that belonged to it was something of this nature with spikes in the knuckles. Looking back now I'm glad my teen years was less eventful.
  

To answer GC's question I haven't found anybody new yet.. it has just been tv, sleep and work for me. :(

For those of you looking for a sex scandal

Last week a local paper posted the latest scandal College girls gone wild and since then a barrage of people from all over the world has been hitting my blog looking for the photos. Upon further investigation I realize that I was ranked 2nd for the search of "naked uwi girls" on google thanks to my uwi carnival post earlier this year with a few scantily clad girls. Poor pervs they wouldn't find those pics online any time soon... well not until today at least :p

I went to the other side of town today to attend a 2 day workshop and I met a cute UWI girl during the lunch break. Apparently her mother was in the workshop and also works at that location so she often hangs out at that office and studies. She seemed like a really fun girl so we chatted for a bit then it hit me that since she was in the mix of things maybe she knows about this sex scandal. My word did this girl have the hook up, she brought up email and began to show me pretty much every recent local sex scandal. So for those curious onlookers I will post one of the cleaner pics of the UWI girls she sent to me.

I'm not sure how effective my censoring is but I'm sure these girls would appreciate it. Now when I went to UWI my friends and myself were mostly dirt poor.. where do these girls find such a nice boat to have their night sexcapades on? My next question is whats with all the girl on girl on girl action? There is no shortage of men out there (like me.. I'm single :p)

I'm sorry for those of y'all who were expecting more pictures but such is life, find a uwi person to send them to you. On that note I need to find some reason to go up to campus, this coworkers daughter reminded me how hot uwi girls are. Maybe if I see her around that office again I could try something :p the last time I checked the jury came back with the verdict that coworkers daughters were fair game lol.

on easy street

So I spent the last 4 days in Montego Bay "working". I have never really spent any time in Mobay before, I've only just driven through the town a few times before so I learnt a few things during my stay there.

• Not to diss anyone but the food there sucks(well the restaurant at my hotel at least and in the town as well). It wasn't just me, I heard someone else from Kingston complaining about the food as well.
• Traffic there is 10x worst than Kingston. The town is always in gridlock cars parked everywhere, a sea of people walking in the middle of the roads and everybody trying to fight their way through the stoplight/sign-less intersections(all 500 of them)
• The local girls there are to die for. I drooled over the girls at work, I drooled over the girls on the road and I drooled over the girls at the hotel. How can any man get any work done over there? I think a few of them were checking me out too, it's a shame I wasn't staying long over there.

I'm not really a big fan of going out by myself so I didn't really do much while I was there. Since I was in a tourist town on the coast I had to go to the beach, so one day I left work at 1pm and went over to the Aquasol park for a swim alone. The "Theme Park" theme must have been boring beach, I never saw what the hype was.

I also went for a stroll on the hip strip alone one night. Every last local there thought I was a tourist, put on their fake accent and tried to talk to me. One lady and her friend tried to stop me to talk(for what reason I don't know). She asked where I was from, I muttered Kingston, she wasn't convinced I was Jamaican, she went on to cuss me for not stopping to talk and shouted that she knows my type as I walked on "you don't talk to people darker than yourself". All I could do was turn around to look at her in amazement and shake my head no as I walked off. Some other things I was approached to buy were: cold beer(top of the list), taxi, souvenir stuff, weed and special "massages" from girls at some club. I need to invest in one of these hats so that they would know that I am Jamaican in my original article outfit.

The North coast highway made most of the 4 hour drive home safe and uneventful. After I passed through Ocho Rios the twisty wet roads along with the single lane than JPS created while cutting down trees ruined somebody's day. The flagmen told us to stop, the man in front, me, the two cars behind all stopped, I heard a loud crash and saw lots of smoke.. some fool crashed into the back of last person. While looking in the rear view mirror still I see this taxi blazing down around the corner in the wrong lane and almost caused a head on collision with vehicles coming up.. damned fool. The next thing about 20 minutes down the road was a first for me, I was issued a traffic survey by the police. At first I saw some bright orange signs saying "Slow down", "Traffic Survey" and laughed to myself thinking they really meant the po-po were timing on that road, then as I turned the corner the police waved me down out of like 6 cars to stop. If I knew that it was really just a survey and they wanted to ask me questions about my journey I would have waved back and just gas it some more.. bastards.

on looking for entertainment

I was talking to a friend the other day and she was trying to understand how/why/what would lead people to dating and getting married to people they meet online. She was totally lost as to how to even meet someone online. I then explained to her that earlier in my more idle days online I used to hang out at a few online communities and I went out once with one of the girls there.

It sounds sad but it was really just for kicks, I had no problems finding girls to go out with. Anyway I met her in Halfway Tree and she brought along a friend for security.. lol. I don't blame her, there are some strange people online. When they got in my car she exclaimed that I was nothing like what she was expecting. I had to bite my tongue not to say that she was everything I expected to get in an online girl.

Since as far as I was concerned I picked up the bad end of the stick in this date I decided that she would be buying me drinks at the bar despite my initial offer of me taking her out to the bar for drinks. She didn't really put up much of a fight when I informed her that she would be treating so we proceeded to the then happening place Escape in New Kingston.

It was cool at first, she bought me my favorite drinks, we hung out and played games. Eventually I noticed that my friends had started to come in and this was a situation that I didn't really see myself explaining anytime soon so I said bye to my date and neatly tucked out of there. I didn't mean to make such a hasty retreat but at that point in time no amount of gin and tonics was worth it.

That being said, I just watched you got mail.. lol she wishes life was like the movies.

Things have changed but we're still the same

My phone beeped and I saw "Strike on friday". Granted that the friend that sent it worked at the NWC the first thing that came to mind that there would be no water on Friday but then my mind flashed back to when used to play counter strike from dusk till dawn. A quick phone call cleared it all up, they were planning a game night on campus for all the old veterans. Those were the good ole' days where we had no worries in the world and would pile up at a friends house or at a lab on campus and play games till we had no sense left.

Eventually we people started to drop off one by one as jobs, girlfriends**, children... etc started taking precedence and we had greater responsibilities to worry about. We were no longer university students and everybody got busy all of a sudden and the only thing we had time/energy left for was a game of dominos every now and then. Of course even the dominos died out after a while so we now gather more then than now to relive life like we were young again.

On the matter of things being the same last Friday I got a call from my ex Mel to remind me to call her for her birthday on the weekend... lol kinda pointless. Anyway we were talking and she complained that I haven't invited over for a long time. So since it was her birthday weekend and I haven't let her stay over in well over a year I invited her over to have a movie night like we often used to have before. Aside from the fact that we didn't actually watch any movies it was just like old times, I guess she will be a friend for a long time to come.

On the Saturday she went to go celebrate her birthday with other friends and I linked up with Barbq and went to an art show in Manor Park. Barbq used to live right beside me at my previous apartment a few years ago and I used to admire her from far as she was always busy with her then ever present boyfriend. Anyway the event itself was pretty small and uninteresting but I still had fun liming with her there. We got a few compliments from people saying how cute and happy we looked together as people seemed to have us confused as a couple.. definitely food for thought :). I asked about the bf and she told me they broke up a while back.. the plot thickens.

** of course before I finished typing this post I got a call that it has been postponed due to the admin who was sponsoring us the lab on campus forgot that today was an anniversary for him.

The wingman is back.. the sequel

After many months at sea wingman called and informed me that he will be back in Jamaica before the end of the month. I can foresee the interesting times ahead as a few things have changed which he has no visibility of(yet). The first of which is that noodle and I aren't together anymore. He is very long winded and the last time I told him I broke up with someone that conversation almost lasted two hours(ignoring the fact that he was calling from 1000s of miles away on a long distance call). So I can only imagine the verbal onslaught that will follow when he is back here and notices someone is missing.

My problems are trivial compared to the other item which he is unaware of. At the barbecue I met and chatted with his biggest crush. He has had a thing for this girl for over 7 years now.. I dunno why they never moved from just friends. Anyway we became friends while he was gone and it turns out he didn't know she was pregnant and recently had a baby. She asked me not to tell him, she eventually will, but this blows my mind as to how he was oblivious to it. It will be a hard task not telling him this bit of information but he is very well aware that I will mostly honor peoples requests to keep information under wraps.

Hopefully this will close that chapter of his life as it has been loooong drawn out. Due to the wealth of free time I have now and the pending news of his crush's baby I think he will be more than willing to live up to the name bestowed upon him and a night of debauchery is in order. Hopefully things haven't changed but there was never a shortage of ladies when we are out looking for trouble so this should put our past where it belongs :-p

surviving

It has been a couple of weeks and I am still at square 1. It has been almost 4 weeks since I've slept in my bed, the last night I spent in my bed was the night before I broke up with her. Every night I drop asleep curled up in my futon by the large window, my favorite sleeping spot before she started staying over.

I haven't been back to the supermarket since things came to an end. It's a miracle I could survive so long on the food I had stored up but now there is nothing left.. if I don't go soon I'll probably starve to death.. lol or more realistically lose a few pounds :p. Much to the dismay of the other patrons we were very cozy and had lots of fun at the supermarket... so sad, going back will probably be hard.

Quite fitting the lady cranky posted on the topic the other day stating: Your supposed to bounce back, shinny and new. When they call your supposed to be able to pleasant and unhurt, say nice things, ask nice questions, your supposed to hang up with no regret, or at least hidden regret. I have such a long way to go, every time she calls(ignoring my requests for her to cease and desist) one or both of us ends up hurt.

Also not making things easier are the girls at work. The one who asked if I was gay when I told them I was single last valentines day brought up the topic of girlfriend again and of course to her the answer didn't change.. single. The expression on her face said a million words so I just explained to her I have yet to meet the right person for me and I wasn't going to pick up any slacker off the street to fill the void. Maybe it was how I looked.. you be the judge:
I am not normally too fussy with how I look but when I reached home one day this week I had to take a pic. I am not sure how I ended up with this shirt but I think it used to belong to my father at some point in time many years ago. The thing barely fits me and the wrist cuffs are a bit tight so they normally end up undone. This day I decided at work to just role them up to form this look I am unsure of. I felt like queer eye for the straight guy dressed me. I need to start dressing better and tear myself from my fortress of solitude and go back to my bachelor lifestyle (quite an over exaggeration by Renee)

waterlogged

I'm pretty sure that most of Jamaica is pretty tired of the rain by now. I normally stay high and dry at home during this kind of weather so I had no complaints. It was a sunny morning when I set off for my parents house to have the usual Sunday lunch with the fambily but that quickly changed to a heavy downpour as the afternoon progressed.

It was only natural that the conversation changed to the inclement weather at hand and my sister mentioned her very wet (inside and out) car. Apparently she tried to drive on Mona Rd. last week during one of the bouts of rain and ended up in water half way up her doors. She of all persons should know that you don't drive on that road when rain falls heavily as her husband lost the use of his car for a couple of months after shutting off in floods on that same road a few months ago. It's a miracle she didn't shut off but its a shame she got all that dirty water in her car.

After filling our gut my sister and I were ready to leave so after waiting for the rain to die down a bit I left and she should have left shortly after too. After coming off Red Hills it quickly became apparent that my journey across town to my home would be a long one. The roads, when I could actually see them under the brown water, were torrents that brought traffic to a crawl. At first I made a u-turn when I saw some deep water but the alternative route was just as bad.

I eventually gave up on trying to find alternate paths and wished I didn't leave yet
and tried to call my sister to tell her to stay at the parents or go back there if she had not gotten herself into more trouble yet. By this time I was in water over 12" deep slowly creeping on where I suspected the road to be and wondering what to do. Thinking ahead of the roads I would eventually have to take to reach home the outlook was dismal.

By the time I reached home the undercarriage of my car should have been clean granted the amount of water I was in. The car didn't shut off and no water seeped inside so I was mostly happy. I dropped in a deep pothole once as I crept through some murky water but at 5km/h no damage was done unlike the pothole on the main road outside of my house. Yes the same pothole that was fixed last year was now back with a vengeance claiming over 100 cars in the past month. The latest of which was a Range Rover HSE which some lady managed to blow out two tires in on Saturday. She was waiting for somebody to come change her tires for her and I noticed she called somebody to pack the hole with sand/dirt... lol lets see how long before I hear people tires being blown out again.

Broke ass friends

I'm sure everybody has friends who just can't seem to hold on to money but some of my friends take it to the next level. Now this same girl saw me online again recently and asked for a big favor. I instantly knew her request would be interesting but she surprised me by asking to borrow a couple hundred thousand dollars to fund a project she was trying to get off the ground. She claimed it was a sure thing and could provide me with documents stating that she would be paid upon delivery of her product so that in turn she could pay me back.

First problem with this situation is that my conservative nature makes me the furthest thing from a venture capitalist and she knew this. Problem number few was that I, along with anybody else who read that post on her was painfully aware of her financial standings which still haven't improved much since May. The third problem is that I tend to have to write off a portion of the money I have previously lent friends as there is normally no hope of getting it back.. no matter how small it is.

I asked her if she approached any financial institutions on a business loan and she explained that there was no way she could get one due to her bad financial standing. The answer was clear, no. She offered the title to her car to secure the loan, it made no difference.. what does she expect me to do repo her car when she defaults? lol that isn't risk I would take on but she didn't seem to be too understanding. What I found funny was that in her pitch to get capital from me she mentioned nothing of my return on investment. Reality is a bitch eh? Welcome to to adulthood.

back to the rat race

My word.. I have forgotten how horrible the traffic is. Ideally I would like to spend 1 hour in traffic daily, 30 mins to work and 30 mins from work and I would be happy but this week had me in traffic for up to 2 hours :(.

After spending the first few days back at work in hiding at the downtown office I decided to go to the main office building. As I walked up to the doors I noticed a group of familiar faces, it was the people from my floor. I thought it was odd that they were all outside at 8:30am but as I got closer their makeshift placards became obvious and one popped out of the group and pointed at me exclaiming it was my fault. I was on a call with senior management so I only paused to read their message and proceeded upstairs to my desk. They were complaining about the AC being too cold and much to my dismay they blamed it on me even though this was the first time I've been back to that office in two weeks.

After I finished my call I went back downstairs to them to try and address the issue yet again. I had previously explained to them that due to a fault in the design of the cooling on the floor I needed the central AC to operate at roughly 17C to ensure that I don't have hardware failures in a server room which is under my responsibility until we can find a permanent solution(which is in the pipelines). Asking them to adapt to this temperature isn't a ridiculous request but increasing the temperature a few degrees on their floor would result in a huge jump in temperature to my servers and have caused failure before. I was then accused of hiding out and being comfortable in my other offices but it is quite the opposite... I am no stranger to the cold as I think my other offices aim for 15c.

They waited until their vice president came and they all negotiated a middle ground. I hope no new enemies were made lol

Time heals all

I have a long way to go but I am on my way there. Before ending things with noodle on Tuesday I allowed her to explain the situation in case there was by some miracle a plausible explanation and it would have all been a big misunderstanding. After trying to deny deleting anything and accusing me of invading her privacy she started to give her reasons.

I already wrote an epistle here when I started this post a few days ago but that shall go unpublished and I will try to keep my comments on her reasons short.

• She referred to me as aunt because she was uncomfortable telling Joe she was out with her bf
• She kept her conversations with Joe a secret because I would misread it and make a big deal out of nothing. She further went on to explain that I was so jealous lately she didn't want to add fuel to that fire.
• She still maintained that nothing went on between them and she was just being foolish.

Noodle was under the impression that a storm on jealousy raged inside of me? This was news to me.. I always thought of myself as secure and nonchalant. I guess I will keep an eye out for it in future relationships, I don't believe I will find myself acting that way though. On a purely coincidental note on the Monday before any of her activities were exposed she showed me an email from one of her clean accounts from a friend that asked what were the top 3 things I valued in a relationship and asked me to answer. Loyalty, sincerity and happiness was my response... how heartless does one have to be to face me after that and lie?

Truth and time tells all

How does one say goodbye to a friend? Noodle and I were best friends for a long time before we got together, she knew everything about me and she (supposedly)told me about everything current in her life as well. Somewhere along the way during the beginnings of our friendship she met a guy, who we shall refer to as Joe, who she dated for a bit while he visited the island occasionally. This was the only guy I felt she never did give me the whole story on but it was okay though, she was in no way obligated to tell me anything at that point in time.

As the months passed he faded to the background and she started sharing some of her untold stories about her rendezvous with Joe which only served to grow my trust for her as she opted to fill in the remaining blanks without me asking about him. Our friendship grew to the point where she started to pursue me as a boyfriend but I was hesitant as I knew the nitty gritty of her past and what she was capable of but she swore her loyalty to me. After a few months passed I felt sure her intentions were pure she was invited to exclusively enjoy all that my simple forest life had to offer.

We all know how her life in the forest ended and she was free to do anything she pleased. She insisted I misjudged her, apologized for taking what she had for granted and still pursued a relationship with me. Her persistence payed off and my nos slowly changed to yeses and we ended up getting back together again in Negril. Now to rewind a bit back to Joe, even though he was faded to the background they still communicated via phone, email and im but I never payed much attention to it as I accepted him as just one of her friends. A few weeks ago she called saying Joe was going to send her a ticket to go visit him and she gave me an acceptable reason #1 for wanting to go, I told her if she wanted to go she should.

At some other point in time she brought back up her trip again asking several times if I was sure it was ok for her to go, the first red flag pops up in my head now as she seems to be feeling guilty of something, I still give her the go ahead. After questioning her motives again acceptable reason #1 has morphed to shady reason #2, I point out to her the change I noticed and she gets upset saying she told me this already and reason #1 was just the pill she fed her family so they wont hassle her for going to visit her friend. of course more red flags. It is obvious to me that there is more here than she lets on but I left it alone to give her time to come clean on her own as she got upset whenever I asked her about it and blamed me for not listening.

As far as I was concerned noodle was exhibiting textbook cheating behaviours so I kicked back and observed, there is no point to start an argument with nothing hard to back it. When we came back to Kingston after our trip over the weekend she went to the pc as usual to check her emails and other things online but I noticed she only flashed her inbox for a second then ignored it the entire time I was close. I said nothing to her as the last time I asked her to show me something in her inbox she said she would show me later but when later came around all conversations were mysteriously deleted without a trace and she had no idea where they went. I went back on Monday night after she left to find the following email trail in her trash.

From: noodle
To: joe
Subject: Hon!

honey you got my mail right? i sent you the dates. when you have the time please reply or call. hope you are good and things going in your favour. miss you!
take care, Love you.
God bless, noodle
---

From: noodle
To: joe
Subject: Re: Hon!

will you be coming to Jamaica this weekend?
---

From: joe
To: noodle

No, I was thinking you would come up ...
---

From: noodle
To: joe

i would love to come up this weekend except my aunt paid for our weekend already. what about the 2 november?

Aside from changing the names for anonymity and clipping the conversation for brevity the emails are untouched. Now this weekend she speaks of was the weekend she just spent with me. It's nice to know that she tells other men I am her aunt. Aside from those deleted messages her trash was empty, I guess I was too late to catch anything else but lucky enough to find those. I then glanced over her inbox to find this other gem

From: noodle
To: joe
Subject: hello

hi joe!

i know you are always busy, which is why i asked for a weekend thats convenient to you. but here is some available times for me starting 9-11.11.2007 im free, so you make a decision.

i really do miss you, its feels like forever since ive last seen you. i wont go in details how much i miss you and what i miss mostly, we will resolve that when we are together.

take care, love you

God bless

Noodle

wow.. I couldn't help but imagine what was said on the phone/in the messages she deleted and emptied from the trash and from the im chat which she explicitley turned off logging for Joe despite the fact she logs everybody elses conversations. I would love to see her explain this one, but I didn't say a word to her until I saw her online the following day. This post is already long and drawn out so I'll post her response later.

Hero's weekend '07

As being advised by the doctors of blogsphere I tried to book the weekend in Ocho Rios for noodle and I. It would have been the perfect setting to reconcile our defunct relationship but of course by that time the decent, yet still affordable, hotels were already booked out. So on to Negril then, we booked a room at the quaint fun holiday beach resort and kept our fingers crossed the weather would improve.

Friday showed promise for the weekend as there was sunshine for a bit during the day. My only other concern was how would I reach Negril granted that many of the routes were impassable due to flooding or landslides. It wasn't so bad though as the first flooded road I reached only had about 8" of water and was still usable with the aid of the locals who ran through the water telling us where to drive and the second flooded road had a bypass handy at the start. This first picture here was probably taken in Savanna-la-mar by the seawall where there was pretty much no signs of the previous 6 straight days of rain.

What can I say.. they are so postcard-esk, so: wish you were here!

There wasn't much going on in Negril since most of the parties were in Ocho Rios this weekend but I wanted to go to the FameFM Hedo property parties but noodle didn't carry clothes nor was too sure about having me around naked/scantily clad hedonism girls with my new found single status. I was cool with just chilling by the beach and pool all weekend though so it was all good.

We passed through Rick's Cafe and saw one seriously cocky cliff diver. He made his rounds and collected donations then proceeded to climb up a dead tree above the cliffs like he was the star monkey man from planet of the apes. Now about 60 feet above the water he began making poses and pointing at random points in the sky for a few minutes before starting to curse the people below who didn't contribute any money and was trying to take pictures of him diving. He then spent about 8 minutes in the tree top waiting for people to pay to film in before I jumped into the water, at that point all the tourists just left and went to the pool/bar as I am sure they were as disgusted with the man as I was. His whistles and calls to get them to come back didn't do much as they had seen enough.

I didn't really walk around with my camera much so I'll just comment on some of the more interesting(sadly) shots I found on my camera.
- dogs on the beach.. we all know how I feel, esp. mongrel dogs.. eww
- my 1-pac in full glory, maybe I should do something about it, maybe aim for 2 lol
- talk about all inclusive, I would love to stay there but I'm not willing to take out the mortgage for it.

By Monday morning the trip fulfilled all set objectives. Aside from a small spat over scoring after a game of scrabble, noodle and I were an item again and I was a well rested man. We decided to check out early and spend some time in Ocho Rios. The journey was long but the new north coast highway made it a lot easier. There wasn't much to do while we were there so we had lunch then toured the town a bit and found Turtle River Park. The place looked new, I haven't seen it before. Just like my last time off I bucked up on a duck. I should make them the mascot of my vacations.. lol.

1 from 10 leaves 0.

I am pooped, nothing is getting done.

• I dumped my clean laundry on the bed with all intentions to put it away over the weekend yet still I slept beside them last night.
• The pile of dirty dishes in my sink reached critical mass this morning where I ran out of cutlery for breakfast and was forced to do the dishes, I did all the cutlery but 3 dishes were left dirty.
• Work starts at 8:00am but you will probably find me at home at 8:30
• Work ends at 5pm but you will probably find me at home at 5pm as by the time 4pm come I am ready to leave. (the 5pm traffic doesn't help either)

To further complicate things it has been raining non stop for the past couple of days and I really shouldn't be at work now as I applied for this week off and got the go ahead. As usual something popped up and my boss needs to leave the island this week so he asked if I could postpone my time off. What was funny was that it would seem he wanted to send me to Costa Rica instead but I didn't have the requisite knowledge for that meeting.

It has been a long time since I last got some days off work and it is long overdue.

on the hunt again

So I am actively house hunting again.. I'm not sure if that one bid I put in for the apartment in January counts but I contacted a real estate agent and arranged to view a townhouse today. The price was nice and it was (perfectly) located in a quiet gated complex on the outskirts of New Kingston.

One thing I can say is that real estate agents seem to be shiesty individuals, before going I asked whats the size of the place and he couldn't give me an exact figure but said around 1000 square feet. Upon reaching the place I asked him again how large it was and it magically moved up to around 1600 sq ft. I had to laugh. I asked him how old it is and he claimed 12 years 16 at most, this man either knows nothing of the place he is selling or is trying to pull a fast one on me. Upon looking at the dated place my estimate was at least 30 years old, I then took out my tape measure and calculated the place to be 950 sq ft... the place was looking less attractive by the second.

The "young first time home buyer" paint must have still been wet on my forehead as he also told me to hurry up and put in my offer as the place will be gone before the end of the day... oh well my or his loss cause I would definitely not put in any offer or deposit based off the string of lies he tried to feed me. I hope it was really his loss as the last time I was hunting for an apartment to rent I found the perfect place and lost it cause I still had a couple more weeks left on my lease and figured I would find somewhere before it expired, oh well you live and you learn.

One thing of interest was that Usain Bolt and his brother was currently renting the place, I didn't recognise him downstairs but when I was looking at the bedrooms I noticed all of their trophies in their rooms. It's a good thing I'm not a fanatic cause I am sure all the people who passed through before harassed them to no end. My mother told me about a newish (< 5years) townhouse up on the auction block due to foreclosure.. at 1700 sq ft in Mona seems to be out of the reach of my pocket but lets see what the auction brings... lots of wishful thinking.

ps.. I think this is my 100th post, break out the bubbly!

coincidence?

A coworker of mine recently started selling apple iPhones for ridiculous sums of money. He sits about 10 feet away from me and is very vocal so most people in our general vicinity knows his business so when he came in last Friday we all knew he was quite cashy. Some of his friends in the office were troubling him that somebody might rob him and one guy even said it was too late, he already sent the guy to do it. Needless to say when he came in on Monday morning he told us he got robbed at gun point over the weekend.

He was in town on his way to the airport with 1/4 million in cash cool under his gym bag in his car and they held him up took the cash and two cell phones from him but left him, his car and his mac notebook to leave unharmed... that is a bit too coincidental for me to handle.

As I have grown more paranoid over the last few years this is how much they would have lifted off of me.. a cool $150. They would have been so pissed they would have probably taken my car to make up for the rest but insurance should cover that. I'm not sure what $150 would buy but I pretty much use my credit cards for everything. I know of a few friends and my sister use this no money approach and it is a pain to get them to pay me back monies owed to me as they always show me the moth flying out their wallet/purse when they say "I don't use cash". Bastards.

I am still amazed at how quickly he got over it though, the only time he seemed upset(understandably) about it was when a coworker was teasing him and laughing about it. Although I wasn't pissed for long either after they stole some stuff from my place last year. Thankfully in that incident my company only charged me about $25,000 for carelessly leaving the laptop in the car so my losses totalled maybe $40k at most. You live and you learn.

Jamaican CES minus the E

So I decided to pass through the 2007 Digicel consumer electronics show last Saturday and yet again I feel robbed that I paid them a $400 cover fee + $100 parking fee. I figured that since they changed their venue from the normally packed Hilton Hotel to the National arena they would have improved the booths they had. If I wanted to see standing fans, fridges, chairs and insurance companies I would have gone to the plazas and done it for free.

The show was so lame that this "silver man" was reportedly the main highlight of the event. He did his robot dance, tore up a newspaper and like magic it came back whole! His silver body suit did nothing to hide every unsightly feature of his aged body and I could barely look as he did a few other mildly entertaining magic tricks. After the silverman's show digicel had a competition where a phone was the prize. This lucky fellow with his arms in the air won and he was quite deserving as he was previously owned one of those nokia flashlight phones. I was tempted to enter but I don't think my company would have appreciated that.
The fame girl on the right came up to me and asked me to give the turntables a try and after explaining to her that my music hand/eye/ear coordination left a lot to be desired she turned to begging me to play. After explaining to her how firm I was on my decision not to play I strongly encouraged her with my hand(pushed her over to them) to get one of the other patrons to play where she spent a few second talking to them, they say now then she comes back over to me. Her pursuit seemed endless so I went to talk to some other booth people and left her by the fame booth and I returned when she seemed to be more occupied. She came back over to plea with me just to come behind the table with her and she will play, I didn't have to do anything but just look. Something was very fishy with this situation, somehow she is trying to con me but I couldn't figure out what she was getting out of it. I wasn't born yesterday and I had a good enough view of the turntables from the side I was supposed to be on so I made haste and retreated from her booth.

This is the first time I was seeing a chat booth and I must say this was probably the only thing that impressed me at the expo. I got a phone call and when I went in there the blasting music and noise almost went away, they needed a few more of these and it would be perfect cause the next time I got a call I looked inside and somebody was already using it. They need a couple of these at every party, club and event.

it's peanut butter jelly time

I'm not really a fan of jam but a couple weeks ago I spotted this grape jelly at the supermarket with noodle and decided to get it since she loved grape so much. It isn't like the other jams I've had before, it's not as sweet so I am loving it. It makes a good breakfast, many days I have some crackers with peanut butter, grape jelly and maybe a banana. The other day I decided to try it with some new Cinnamon crackers and it didn't end well, the crackers were so big, tough and dry that as far as I was concerned it was inedible.. I didn't know what I was going to do with the rest of the bag. They remind me of the same nasty water crackers a previous exs used to snack on without any toppings, it always blew my mind why she liked them so much.

Seeing it was a rather big bag and I wasn't going to eat it and I think throwing away food should be a crime punishable by death I took it with me on the way to work in hopes of finding someone more needy to give it to. I didn't have to drive far before I came across the I am HIV lady, who normally hangs around the Barbican area. She was very happy for it unlike the other supposedly hungry homeless people who have asked me for money before but when I offered them some of my breakfast rejected it and walked off. I guess they were only hungry for coke.

Click her picture for more from Ria on her.

The grass is greener on the other side

After a set of long drawn out discussions Noodle and I are officially dunzo. I am no relationship expert but as far as I'm concerned we were not compatible due to the DR. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde persona she took on in the few weeks preceding our demise. The complaints, resentment, disappointment and bitterness she directed towards me made it clear what needed to be done.

She is normally a very nice girl though so in trying to make sense of her changes into Mr. Hyde I imagined the following explanation so as to not get dirty with details: Maybe she expected a knight in shining armour riding a stallion to come and whisk her away to a pampered life of luxury and no worries but instead she got me, Shrek, an ogre in rags who throws her on his donkey's back and carries her to a life of hard work for her to earn her keep.

Now this ogre was as entertaining as a rock, he thoroughly enjoyed sitting back and watching the grass grow. Tired of life in the forest, working for her supper and watching grass grow his fair maiden longed to go to the royal balls in the town and be treated as a princess should. To further complicate things there was a line of prince charmings with promises to fill said void in her life. Infuriated that all of her grooming and kisses wasn't turning her stubborn ogre into a prince she started unleash Mr. Hyde upon the ogre's humble forest life.

The ogre realizing he was the cause of all the fair maiden's distress surrendered his hold on her and released her back to her village where she can pursue her dream life with the prince of her choice. It was a hard decision to make but the ogre realizes he will never be a prince nor expect his maiden to live the ogre lifestyle and be happy but she seems to be afraid of change forgetting all of her problems she had with the ogre and wants to come back to the forest. The water is always wetter when the well runs dry.

She will be missed.. This song Ralph Tresvant - do what I gotta do seems most appropriate

Landlady changing course

The roof guy called me last Friday afternoon and said he had the material/time/tools to fix the roof and was on his way there now. When I reached home I was pleasantly surprised(thanks to his many broken promises) that the roof was fixed.. finally! What is funny is that rain fell nearly every day before the roof was fixed and since then there hasn't been a single drop.

The next day the landlady came to renovate/garden around the other empty house on the lot and blocked my car in. When I found her we were talking about my roof and she said she had to get a new guy on Friday to fix the roof. Apparently the first roof guy who called me on Friday after wasting all that time lost the job by just a few hours.. oh well, you snooze you lose.

Before moving her car she then took me on a walk around the lot and she started pointing out all the wrong things the caretakers were doing with her garden. The caretakers being the guy who lived in the now empty house and the strip club owner who lives in another house on the lot. It would seem mr. strip club used some weed killer on some weeds about the place and she , to quote her, doesn't take too kindly to weed killer. She claimed she will be taking back responsibility of her garden then finally moved her car after moaning on about other problems she had with the people on the lot... one really has to wonder what she says about me to other people. When I came back the property was well manicured and well taken care of, I hope she keeps this up.

I also visited Barbq and my old apartment over the weekend.. the place is looking really nice. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that one of the two bedroom units are for sale when I am ready to buy a house, it would be perfect :p. My only problem with over there was the parking lot was a bit on the small side for the amount of units so it is a tight squeeze to fit all cars there when everybody is in. After my whole dilemma with the landlady and the roof after the hurricane I am ready to actively start looking for somewhere to buy but I have pumped a lot of my cash into the stock market since the start of the year. I guess when the market becomes right I can reap the benefits of those investments and build a larger deposit. The analysts predicted the JSE to boom this year due to the elections.. I haven't seen anything yet, not even a spark :p, still keeping my fingers crossed.

12 days later..

• There is still roof missing over my kitchen.
• Daily I am amazed at the amount of gallons of water my large buckets capture when I am at work.
• The Landlady sent a roof guy who came by himself with no ladder and no crew who only looked at the roof from the ground and saw exactly this. He promised to come back the following day while I was at work and fix it from the outside but alas it has been two days and everyday I come home to full buckets in my kitchen. I could have emailed him the picture and it would have saved him a trip.. at least I enjoyed that day when I worked from home.

11 days later election coverage still takes up 95% of the local news and I am tired of it. It could be something as insignificant as a cow missing and then it will turn it into a political issue with both sides accusing each other. Was there no other news before this whole mess? I wasn't planning on going to work on election day, next week Monday... hopefully things won't be too bloody.

Picking up the pieces

I decided that my apartment, the ghetto penthouse(zinc roof and all), is the tallest structure on my lot was not the place to be with a Category 4 hurricane predicted to directly hit Jamaica. By Saturday night I had moved, wrapped, covered and secured all my worldly possessions I deemed not water resistant and was ready to leave for somewhere more secure(concrete roof).
Noodle and I left early Sunday morning in the rain for her house where I sheltered from the storm. Apart from a big branch hitting and denting my car along with some water coming in through some of her windows we weathered the storm unscaved.

We awoke early Monday morning and went outside to see the damage done. There was an empty lot behind us that had about 8 tall trees, needless to say 0 remain, you can see piece of one of those trees on her neighbours house above, they all snapped like twigs. I didn't hang around long as I was curious as to the damage done to my property. I saw one of my neighbours outside and he said nothing much went on, so after chatting with him a bit I thought I was in the clear. I went upstairs to my place and took a tour, the only things I noticed was some water splashed in through the windows on the eastern side and pieces of ceiling on the tarpaulin I used to cover my bed.

While walking around my place trying to put things back in place I realized I haven't seen the kitchen yet. While preparing for the storm I realized the kitchen(made of board walls and a very sketchy roof) was the weakest link so I closed up everything tight, locked the kitchen door and barricaded it with the pool table. After pulling back the pool table and opening the door I saw sunlight. Keeping in mind the windows were all locked and the place should be dark I knew all was not well and my eye panned down from the hole in the ceiling exposing the sky to the dirty/flooded kitchen below.

I mopped the floor and started cleaning up with my limited water, only to have rain fall an hour later to soak the kitchen all over again. It's a good thing the kitchen is the step-child room of my apartment and it would take over a foot of water before it starts affecting anywhere else in my place. I called the landlady but she didn't seem like she would be in any rush to fix anything, so I moved on and hung out with noodle for the rest of the day.

When I got home later that day I started using as much of the perishable items in the fridge and freezer so they wouldn't go to waste as pictured here me enjoying(kingston 62?? not really) a brewskie by candle light lol. I started trying the clear the food I had in my fridge/freezer since last week Tuesday but it was a job too large for my pot belly. When I reached home yesterday and light still wasn't back yet I took my thermometer to the freezer and it clocked in at 60F so I filled a garbage bag with the x-denizens of my freezer, it broke my heart but the food needed to go. I made my self a sandwich from some of my hurricane tin food and fell asleep around 6pm. When I woke up around 8pm later that night power was back... yay!

I plugged back in everything and tried to watch the news, it had been so many days since I've seen whats going on in Jamaica since I had no tv or radio with this power outage. Of course there was no cable and no signal, I had to go dig up for an antenna so I could receive the local over the air stations. I turned on my desktop pc and tried to go online but the DSL modem wasn't having it. Luckily for me when I came home today there was cable tv and DSL service again, things are coming back to normal. The only thing outstanding is the roof and that's in my landlady's hands.

Bon voyage sun

The past couple of days have been rather wet here in Kingston and I am loving the rather cool weather the torrential rains have brought with it. I had plans to go to the north coast this weekend but of course that had to be scratched due to the inclement weather at hand.

All this rain has also highlighted the fact that water leaks in the trunk of my car. Water also drips from the roof in my kitchen but I have long accepted this problem will not go away due to the laziness of my landlady and I have just have a bucket under the leak all year round. Leaky roofs doesn't seem to bother me much as it would leak over my bed occasionally at my parents house. I would be sleeping and be awoken at 1am in the morning by some cold water dripping on my shoulder and would have to go for a container to catch the water them move over to the other side of the bed.

Aside from the rain flooding my trunk, turning the roads into a long parking lot in the evenings and squashing my North coast plans I spent a lot of cozy quality time with noodle at home. The artist Busy Signal also passed through the canteen one day for a signing session. I like some of his songs but I'm not really a fan of him as he beat up(wickedly) one of my friends who was one of the sweetest most harmless girl I knew. If you look at the pictures you might notice his knuckles are bruised.. I guess he gets into a lot of fights, one day he will get whats coming to him :p. Last week Beanie man also passed through too, my camera was in the car though so there were no Kodak moments captured by me then.

My father's birthday was last week as well so today we went out to lunch at the Terra Nova as usual to celebrate. I am usually rather tired of there food now but today their supposedly 80 item buffet was extra delicious. If I knew lunch was going to be that good I would have skipped out on the eggs, jerked sausage, bacon and hashed browns I had for breakfast this morning(thanks frozen food isle). Lets hope the food doesn't haunt me like the last time I went out with my father to lunch at Dragon Court(where I spotted a roach) three weeks ago which gave me the runs for the next few days. They claimed the food was that much more tastier and left with big smiles since it was my turn to treat and I footed the bill. I've had my eye on Ambrosia recently maybe we can go there next but it's so hard to leave the tested and proven Terra Nova.

One topic at lunch brought up by my sister was my apparently my ability to properly budget and manage money. Apparently she says she is getting old(late late 20's :p) and needs to settle down with this aspect of her life. She wanted a copy of my GnuCash to run on her mac laptop.. and she wonders why she has no money. Anyway GnuCash and its double entry book keeping system isnt for everyone so to spare her that pain and my pain of getting it installed on her OSX I recommended that she use one of the many free money management sites out there. Coincidentally recently I was helping Noodle set up and track her budget so all the following links were fresh in my browser.

• Buxfer - Good for keeping track of budgets and shared expenses such as shared rent/utility bills among room mates.
• ClearCheckbook - Haven't used it yet but it looks good from the tour.
• Expensr - also looks promising from the tour.
  

Also for y'all windows users I guess there is Quicken and MS Money if your willing to spend some cash on them. I also think the with the latest release of GnuCash they have ported it to windows.. I can't vouch for that one but I can say the unix branch is a stable solid piece of software.

Castleton.. finally.

So my first taste of freedom began on Monday morning at 8am after I came off my three weeks of standby work. It was the Independence weekend so all the young people (- me) found themselves at Negril as usual. A bunch of us decided to go to Castleton(finally after hearing so many people talking about it recently) after a Portland trip fell through.

We got there a little before noon and there were a few people there but slowly but surely people started to crowd the place as the day went on. The rocks were big and the water was low but enough for the kids to splash in and me to drown in



An interesting tidbit was that in the party of people that we(noodle[wifey] & I) went with was noodle's x-bf who seemingly still likes her. She advised to keep my distance so as to not cause any unnecessary jealousy, brilliant! push away the current to please the x. To mix things up even more, upon arrival a guy by the river called her over and she went over without saying a word. Feeling like chopped liver I stood for a minute looking at her waiting for her to look back for me or even(God forbid) call me over to introduce me to her friend but there was nothing. Eventually when she finished talking to him and I existed again I asked her who the mystery guy was:

me- who was that?
noodle- XXX
me- XXX who? (she knows many XXXs)
noodle- I'll tell you later
me- XXX your x-bf?
noodle- I'll tell you later(then she gets upsets and walks away)

I waited 5+ hours until we were in the car alone driving back to town to ask her again to hear what the big secret was. She then confirms "yes XXX my x-bf". Maybe I am slow but I am still lost as to why this information couldn't be shared before if there was the slightest possibility of somebody else hearing or why I was hidden away from him like a leper..

I just wrote it off to girl problems and moved on as you can see noodle and I throwing balls at each other. One final note, its not my baby.

stomping with the big dogs

Last week Friday I went to the bar with the rest of my new department.. it's the first time I'm meeting most of them in person. It was just a few of us there at first and I was talking to my boss' boss' boss' boss while drowning myself with some drink called an ocean blue. It is always strange whenever I go to these gatherings with the big wigs in my company but they are normally cool when you realize they are people just like me and you.

Drinking on the company's tab is the only way to drink, the exotic mixed drinks was flowing all night and we were all liquored up good. After leaving the bar I went up to Renee's house to drop off her very late birthday gift which has been bouncing about my back seat. I spent a while at her place catching up on old times when she reminded me how much of a lush I used to be. Ahh the good old days when I was a university student idling and drinking on the spine. Don't get me wrong it wasn't a habit but if I was to spend 12 hours at UWI and only have like 1 or 2 hours of class why not mix things up and make life interesting :D. Not much harm was done, after all I still managed to put in enough work to earn a distinction in my degree.

The rest of the weekend was uneventful as mentioned before I was on standby and of course the inevitable I will be on standby till next week(three weeks straight) Monday filling in for my boss who has fled the island. I passed through megamart(trying to blend in and not be spotted by Tami again) and the place was full to the brim.. I could barely find a parking spot and there was a long line of traffic going around the parking lot. Pay day end of month shoppers and people stocking up for the public holiday this week would be a good assumption for the ridiculous crowd. That reminds me, maybe I should have stocked up for the holiday too :(

Yesterday

I am showing signs of being burnt out, yesterday was Tuesday but when work called at 5:30am I was convinced it was Saturday. I looked at my phone it said Tuesday.. still not convinced I went to my PC it said Tuesday too... where did the weekend and Monday go? It was nice waking up so early in the morning though, it gave me time to relax, eat breakfast and watch some TV instead of the usual rush to get ready and leave for work.

I went to my office uptown and spent a couple hours there, it only take me 5 minutes to reach work up there and it is free flowing all the way against the traffic so I smiled to myself as I drive by people stuck in long lines of bumper to bumper hell. After traffic died down I left to go to corporate building and spent some time there before going downtown to my main office for lunch. I have to pass through some locations and make my presence felt or people might feel I don't need my shit anymore and steal things from my desks. I am still loving the freedom to choose where I want to work for the day.

Later on in the night I went to a launch party with wifey for some model search competition.. Talk about carrying sand to the beach, the place was packed with girls dressed to the bone and only a handful of men. I'm serious when I say the ratio was something of the order of 20+ girls for 1 man.. Too bad wingman wasn't there, I'm sure even he could have gotten a girl there last night. Anyway I had to call it a night early as I got a call from work and I was on standby.

Needless to say wifey wasn't too happy about us leaving early but hey work is work, it pays the bills. This is my second straight week of standby and I'm possibly in for a third if my boss flies out next week. The money is more than welcome as my car insurance is due in a few weeks and I'm sure after the last incident the premiums will be nothing short of fantastic.

How good does it have to be?

I watched the movie The Devil Wears Prada the other day and it got me wondering. In the movie the young star had to choose between success at work and personal relationships, eventually she quit her demanding job, kept her boyfriend and pursued her life long dream job. The question raised in my head was how good does a relationship have to be for someone to leave their job for it? In her case it was easy, she never liked the job and she had other careers on her mind but even then it was hard for her to leave the success behind.

An interesting way of looking at that same question is How good does work have to be for one to sacrifice their personal relationships for it? I'm guessing most people hate their jobs sufficiently to make these questions easy to answer but it is common for work to throw a wrench in the spokes of love. What would you do if you were offered your dream job but it was thousands of miles away from your significant other?

Bye Boston

Well I should say Burlington which was about 30minutes outside of Boston. I liked it up there, the weather was so much more comfortable than Jamaica, the temperature mainly stayed in the low 80s for the duration I was there. I am green with envy that its close to 100f here in the shade in Jamaica while I was up there running around in the sun and breaking a sweat.

It was the first time I was travelling that far up North. The people were nice and friendly, the town was clean. The area was generally well taken care of and looked like it was maintained by a professional landscaper. One thing that boggled my mind was that most of the buildings I saw had a propane or coal barbecue grill outside and they seemed to be used. I cant imagine going to work, feeling hungry then going outside to grill a steak or some franks for lunch.. but these people do it. They even had lots of picnic tables everywhere to compliment the grill. I can understand the hotel but pretty much every other business in the area had the same thing... The whole area reminded me of a nature getaway, if my workplace was like that I would love going to work.

Aside from the great weather and friendly people all was not dandy. Viral meningitis slapped me back to miserable reality on Wednesday night which I am still yet to fully recover from. It's a good thing I was a trooper and decided to fight on, I'm told if I went to a doctor they would have done a lumbar tap and I must say I have grown attached to my spinal fluid so that wouldn't be cool.

Also along the lines of not cool was my work's credit card being denied. As I was checking out of my hotel room yesterday morning the lady at the front desk informed me I needed to pay for the room. Let us ignore the fact that before I left I asked the people at work to book and pay for the room then I did my due diligence and called the hotel to verify that they did so before I left Jamaica. Now the reason I was being told I needed to pay for the room was due to the fact the bank was denying my companies card possibly due to limit restrictions. So the lady tried to bill most of what she could to there card and I gave her my card to pay for the rest. Lets keep our fingers crossed that my work doesn't give me much BS to get back what I paid.

I decided to save some bucks and skip the $60 taxi back to the airport. I took the shuttle to the mall and from there the public transport. I figured I would actually get to see a glimpse of the real Boston this way before I left since I was stuck up in Burlington all week. The shuttle came late so I missed the first bus. To make my flight at Boston Logan international airport I couldn't afford to miss anything else, I took a long bus ride to the subway station, took the redline subway to the silverline bus route and hopped on a bus to the airport just in time to check in.

Rocking chairs at the terminal? lol this was definetly weird at first, this was the last thing I'd expect to see at an international airport. The people seemed to be loving them though. One thing that was of concern the whole time I was there was the fact that I had only 35minutes in Miami to make my connecting flight back to Kingston. I tried to get it changed but that would have been $200 extra so I decided to take my chances of being stuck in Miami overnight since my flight was the last flight to Kingston yesterday. Things worked out fine and I'm back in this sweltering heat and humidity.

Kate you didn't even offer to buy me a beer for come visiting your city! lol I came across her blog randomly when I just started out blogging and loved it, her blog was the only one I visited for a few months before I decided to look for my Caribbean bloggers.