My real birthday..

My real birthday was this week and most of my real friends forgot it. My x-friend called me last weekend and reminded me that the day was coming up so I went on facebook and removed my birthday details to see who the real friends were. Lets just say if my real friends called or wrote on my crackbook for my birthday I would have exactly 3 whole friends. Even the girl who reminded me that it was coming up forgot to call, well she did call on the day but she was complaining about something as usual then she called back the day after and apologized for forgetting.

Sad eh? my fake bday in January was 100 times better. wingman tried to hold another barbecue for my bday but I passed cause that is too much attention for little ole me. Last year I went to a friend's house for her birthday drink up.. now that was the definition of sad. I wish I could put to words what went wrong with her night but it all sounds so mean and depressing in my head.

So what am I doing with myself, this is the first weekend I have off in a long time.. I think I'll go to a beach with preggz and get some sun on my pale ass.. hopefully the place will be empty and I can skinny dip too lol. I think your comments have been alluding to the fact that you want to hear about preggerz? Well the bun is slowly baking in her oven, lol she's not doing too well with the morning sickness though.. lol and yeah the milk has arrived. There is no milk yet but she moved up a cup size or two.. no complaints here :D

The big bang

and so it came to be the physics alumni association at my university was launched last weekend, It was a weekend full of events but I only attended a mixer on Saturday night. I wouldn't really call it a big bang though more like a slow fizzle, most of the people there were double my age and the 'party' died a premature death around 9:30pm. As for people in my own age bracket there was only a hand full, maybe 10 of us then there were the old people.. did people stop graduating from physics for 20 years? why the big gap?

Anyway it was good talking to some of my old classmates, we got to talk about topics that would probably bore any other [physics]layman to death. One thing I noted was the majority of my classmates either completed their masters or was soon finished. The same applies to my coworkers in my dept. at work. Am I being left behind with my BSc. in physics only? I think it's time to start working on getting MSc. or MBA added to my singular list of accomplishments. Next year seems like a good time to apply for a programme, just need to pick something and find the time. *sigh* long roads ahead.

On an off topic note I also visited my friend in the hospital last weekend too. I'm not sure what was wrong with her but she had to have an emergency operation last week so I passed by the O&G ward to see her. I think this is the first time I've been in a hospital ward period. The place was hot, humid, lacked privacy, being the O&G ward was also teaming with ill women. My friend was so drugged up she didn't even realize I was there but in her high state she mentioned how she is awoken nightly by the sounds of women vomiting and crying.. how depressing. Come out soon!

I have seen the light!

and it was panty dropping sexy.

When wingman came back from navigating the seas in January he saw the end result of the renovations[read new layer of paint] the landlady did in previous months and deemed the place to be so sexy that "when the girls see the place dem pantie must fly now". I don't know what kind of girls he talks to but he needs to introduce me to some if a freshly painted place gets them to drop draws. lol on second thought maybe not.. disease free life is all that is cracked up to be. It's sad that he's going back to sea again soon, his view on things are hilariously warped.

Anyway on to the matter at hand, last week I went to view a row house that was drop dead sexy. It is being auctioned by the state because the owner** passed on and didn't leave a will. Now this man left behind a mostly finished 3 bedroom townhouse in the Long Mountain country club community that had an uninhibited view of the entire Liguanea plains. Now I say mostly finished because the deck in the backyard isn't complete, it needs some security grills on the doors/windows and most importantly it has water damage from a leaky roof. Being mindful of what repairs would I need to make I am sure what I can afford to bid will be lacking but it doesn't hurt to try.

** what was interesting was that my parents pointed out to me they sold their first townhouse to this man about 20 years ago. I never lived there but I remember following them to the place a few times while they were wrapping up the negotiations to get it sold. I wonder if I ever met the deceased man. It's a sign that this new place is in my destiny! lol wishful thinking.

On the matter of wishful thinking I was at my mechanic today and saw this car[+10 years] being serviced.

Yeah I know SUVs suck but I've found myself lately eyeing small TDIs. So the amended list of things I want but cant afford is:

1. Range Rover Sport Land Rover Defender 90 SVX
   
2. Townhouse from last week.

Care to spare some change?

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

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.

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.

Feeling the heat

Last week was undoubtedly the hottest week I can remember so far for this year and its only just the start of summer now. It makes sense though as last week also marked the summer solstice so hopefully things will get cooler in the following weeks. This(37C or 99F) is the highest I've seen my infrared thermometer go up to in this apartment and when I pointed at the ceiling it went up to 39c.. Is it worth it to buy an AC if I am planning on moving out within the next 12 months? This wouldn't be an issue at my old apartment, it had a pool and AC... I could be splashing around and beating the heat by the poolside everyday :(

Since there was none of the desired items at my place I went to Lime Cay on Saturday. I quickly noticed some people brought their little house dogs(are they really dogs?) I'm just imagining the dogs taking a whiz or a dump and burying it in the sand for us to find later.. how about they leave the mutts at home. Anyway the owner of this mutt to the right came in the middle of the afternoon and set down their stuff under our tree about 4 feet away from us and immediately the dog ran over and walked all over our blanket before the owner casually came over to get it back[evil thoughts flooded my brain]. We went for a walk and came back to find our blanket covered in sand and the dog sleeping in a hole he dug. Only upon our arrival back did the owner decide to look over and come to de-sand our property... is it wrong for me to want to hurt the dog and its owner at this point in time?

One thing that always amazes me at Lime Cay is the amount of container ships that always pass not too far away. Oddly enough my friend said Wingman is probably on that red ship leaving now and he called me later that day saying he was leaving on Sunday. This time his ship comes back to Jamaica so he wont get too home sick, see ya in 20 days wingman :p


The picture on the left there is one of the main reasons I don't like Lime Cay.. lots of garbage is left on the beach by the people who visit and lots of debris is washed up on the nether side of the isle. I am always amazed at what I find washed up on that side of the Cay. The picture on the right is of the beach on the way back from Port Royal just outside the airport, it was the first time I was stopping there. The picture doesn't do justice to how much debris that has washed up on shore... lol even the Pilar Del Caribe litters the beach.

The following day, Sunday, I went for lunch at the Pegasus. They have a buffet thing normally by the poolside. The pool looked good but the food was horrible, they never fail to disappoint me. I have never heard anybody say anything good about their food before and they are much more expensive than other places. They dinning area is covered and has lots of ceiling fans but the place was still blazing hot... I put them on par with Morgan's Harbour lunch buffet, don't go to either.

This week isn't as hot as last week though, I can't wait till I can sleep without the fan again.

Click here for a few more random images from Port Royal.

Island village beach trip

I have never really heard of Island village in Ocho Rios before but I found myself there last Saturday evening with bff and her fambily. It was nice, they have a long board walk lined with shops which leads to the beach at the west end of Ochi. The first thing you see as you enter their beach was a huge blow up water slide which you can get a glimpse of in this first picture and everyone(but me) had fun sliding down there.

The beach was nice and cute but that is only if you were wearing blinders and ignored everything outside of the immediate environment. Some people call it a water way, I call it a gully and there was one a few meters away to the right of the beach.. not cool.

To the left of the beach further up the bay is what I would consider an industrial docking bay, the ship that was there [un]loading stuff was just pumping out waste fluid nonstop, I think the crystal clear waters of Lime Cay outside of Kingston harbor is the lesser of these two evils.
Eventually everybody got up on the floating trampoline in the sea. That climb out of the water on to the trampoline was so hard, I helped most of the people I was with up but struggled to get up by myself. I bounced around a few times and boom flicked off into the water.. if I was 15 years younger I'd probably go back up and jump off a few more times, sigh old age.

They eventually closed the beach at 5pm an kicked us out as they were going to have some Father's day show at the amphitheater in the middle of the compound. I wanted to stay longer but the compound was closing for the show plus the party I was traveling with wanted to leave for town early.. lame. It has been a while since I have spent any time in Ochi, maybe next time I could stay a bit longer and be a tourist. Before we left though I wondered around the Island Village compound and paid my dues

TUI - truth under the influence?

I was looking at the empty bottles(mainly consumed by my guests) on top of the cupboards in the kitchen and started to remember some of the good and bad times this evil liquid has brought me. The main train of thought was around the drunken confession of love. I used to have a friend that would go out get drunk and somehow used to manage to find herself back at my place at 4am in the morning. I would let her in and try to get back to sleep but she had other plans which I never really mind losing some sleep over.

A few times during these early morning booty calls in her drunken state she proclaimed her love for me, right in the heat of things. This threw me off completely at first, it wasn't something I wanted so I ignored it and handled the business at hand. She was well aware I wasn't interested in her that way so whenever I confronted her about it after, when she was sober, she was a little embarrassed and said she couldn't help how she felt and things just come out when she is high. I think she also said it to me after she smoked some weed too lol. Now this girl(when sober) claims to be fully against love, to quote her: "I doh believe in dat shit", so I never knew what to make of her and just ignored the burbs that came out of her when she was high.

The fact that she had a boyfriend made it so much easier to write off what she said under the influence also. On the flip side I remember going to a bar early one morning as things were winding down around 4:00am. I met up with some friends standing in the parking lot as I walked in, said hi and turned around to talk to some other people I knew only to turn back around to see a guy aggressively hugging some (drunk)girl who I said hi to a minute before. I was well aware this girl wasn't fond of me before but I am civil but one of her friends came over later and explained to me the guy wasn't hugging her, he was more holding her back from fighting me. There was an angel watching over that girl that night, I:

1. was 100% sober
2. am a man
3. had 50lbs on her
4. would be acting in self defence and hence had no problem beating up a drunk girl who wants to pick a fight with me because she didn't like me for no good reason. (yay woman lib and equality)

I always figured she never liked me but our common friends made us cross paths often. I just figured she was smart enough to pick fights which she could manage, its a good thing the guy held her back. How about we all stay sober until we learn how to manage our emotions under the influence?

I was drunk is the lamest of excuses.

Money efficient

One of my once close friend's birthday is this weekend, so a few weeks ago I saw her online and asked her what she was doing and what she wanted for her birthday the reply was nothing and not sure respectively. I told her to give me an idea of what she wanted(I knew it should be entertaining) and of course the next day she sent me her wish list lol.

1. a camera
2. a new cell phone
3. shoes
4. a nice hand bag
5. DVDs
6. 2GB jump drive
7. a book (she said if I got the book I needed to supplement it with something else.. like item 5)

I was expecting the outcome to be funny but she out did herself, the list went to 10 but I had to cut it off there.. she even started pasted links such as what type of phone I should get. I had to point out to her that phone wouldn't even work with her current mobile provider which just goes to show her desiderative greed. I was initially going to get her a gift certificate for a day at a spa but her wish list has changed my mind and shes probably just going to get a card.

I'm not downgrading her gift cause I'm cheap money efficient, there is good logic and a background story to this chick. She lived in the lap of luxury when she was going to school spending her mother's money getting everything her little heart desired(also bankrupting her mother in the process). She finished university and got a job that didn't pay too well and her mother pulled out the teat from her mouth and life gave her one big slap out of the lap of luxury back to reality.

She couldn't go to the hair dresser every week, shop for clothes or whatever girls buy, etc.., she was broke as a joke. Being the prudential financial advisor I like to imagine myself to be I guided her throughout her hardships helping her manage her income/expenses/credit card debt and it was all good, her books were balanced and not in the negative. She eventually got a good job last year and claimed to be managing fine now that she had extra money, I stopped paying attention to her finances as she seemed to be getting by on her own with the better pay.

That was 1 year ago, she is now jobless as her 1 year contract ended Friday gone. My basic calculations of her take home salary tells me that she should have paid off her school fee(she was pursuing her MBA in finance.. the irony) and be in good financial standings over the last year, this is not the case though. Last month she called me asking for assistance in getting her DSL back up as it was disabled due to her outstanding bills. She asked me to log on to her bank account and pay the bills then contact the ISP to get the service reactivated, I obliged. Her bank's dashboard showed me a very empty savings account and two maxed out credit cards both of which had late payment fines with growing interest on the outstanding balances... wtf. I ignored and payed her bill and got the internet service reactivated and spared her the lecture on being responsible.

How is it possible that the girl dig herself into such a hole in such a short period of time? I washed my hands of her after her long distance BF came to visit her for three months and she refuses to see my points on how unhealthy there relationship is for her. She claimed she tried to break up with him 3 times in January after I spoke to her about it but he didn't accept it. He is now back in that other country probably with the other girl he lives with(just for sex and to assist him in getting citizenship according to him) over there and now she is here by herself engaged to get married to him next year... I kept my comments to myself.

In the weeks after looking at her bank accounts she called and I learned that not only did she have credit card debt but she also took out a loan and still have tuition outstanding. Not to point any fingers here but it is my assumption that her dilemma is also assisted by her bum of a fiance who is full of crackpot schemes. I am not being mean, I have never met the man, I am just repeating how I've heard her refer to him previously.

EDIT---
It seems I went off into a rant there for a bit.. all of the above was written on Friday, it's now Sunday and her birthday has passed lets just wrap up this post. I had to write about this because most of her list violated my gift giving policy for girls which clearly states not to buy something for a girl she can't afford herself, hence she got a birthday Hallmark card. Of course there are subclauses that allows for exceptions in cases where the girl is responsible but life deals them a bad hand and hence can get a nice expensive gift but this is not the case for my friend.