I can't blog today because I'm flying all the way to Florida for a visit with Hilly-Sue followed by random encounters with other bloggers and a big Halloween party.

There are definitely worse ways to spend a week.

The flight home from Los Angeles yesterday was awful.

I know I say that a lot, but usually I'm exaggerating. A little. This time I am not exaggerating at all. The sights. The sounds. THE SMELLS! Not to mention the crazy-ass bitch next to me who did not comprehend the concept of "personal space." It all added up to an epic disaster in travel history that I'm trying to forget.

Until I realize that things could always have been worse.

Which is why I simply MUST get my new airline started. It's the only way I can guarantee that all my flight experiences will be pleasant ones...

   
Except starting up an airline would require billions of dollars.

I don't have billions of dollars.

Which means I've had to go this route instead...

It's almost as good.

Assuming I only want to travel from one side of my living room to the other.

Which means I've had to come up with alternate travel plans for my flight to Florida tomorrow.

Darn it anyway.

So there I was, walking through Seattle-Tacoma International Airport feeling quite satisfied after a date with a Qdoba Veggie Burrito when I heard "DAVE!" being shouted out.

Now, I am not so vain as to immediately think that every time I hear my name it's somebody is calling for me. The odds, after all, are pretty remote given that "Dave" is a fairly popular name. Perhaps if my name were "Heinrich" or "Flavious" I'd be more confident but, alas, I almost never assume somebody is calling me when I'm away from places I'm known.

Like a big airport, for example.

But it turns out that I was the Dave in question this time because it was Brandon and Death? from Down With Pants! It was an almost surreal experience given that I've tried to meet up with Brandon for years and had a couple of near misses from past travels... twice in L.A. and another couple times in Seattle. But it was also a nice way to spend an airport layover.

Happy coincidences like this happen more often than you'd expect. Running into fellow blogger Timothy at the Apple Store in New York, for example, was pretty freaky-cool. And I've been recognized a couple of other times in airports too... mostly thanks to the Blogography T-Shirts I'm usually wearing. Such is the power of blogging, I guess.

Anyway, it has been a very long day and I have to get up early in the morning, so the remainder of tonight's entertainment will be provided by Ashton, a young kid who was a fellow passenger on my flight. Ashton likes to talk. A lot. And at very high volume, non-stop. Fortunately I had an iPhone full of videos to watch, but was privy to his antics as we landed in San Diego which went something like this...

ASHTON: I see lights outside there are a lot of lights outside and they are different colors and there are lights out there I have to go potty.

MOM: You can't go potty now, they've locked the doors while we land.

ASHTON: I have to go potty I have to go potty I HAVE TO GO POTTY REALLY BAD!

MOM: I'm sorry, but you'll just have to hold it.

ASHTON: I HAVE TO GO POTTY REALLY BAD I have to go potty and if I don't go I'm going to pee my pants I'M GOING TO PEE MY PANTS I'M GOING TO PEE MY PANTS!!

MOM: It's only a few minutes. You can hold it until we land.

ASHTON: I CAN'T HOLD IT I'M GOING TO PEE MY PANTS there are lights outside and they are getting brighter hey we're going down now and the plane is going down down down to the airport going down. [ INSERT MORE NONSENSICAL RAMBLING HERE UNTIL WE LAND AND THE SEATBELT LIGHT GOES OFF ]

[ ASHTON MAKES A BREAK FOR THE BACK OF THE PLANE ]

MOM: Ashton! Wait! Come back! You're not going to get into the potty!

DAVE2: Oh I think they'll be glad to let him in given the alternative.

[ ASHTON DOES HIS BUSINESS AND RETURNS ]

ASHTON: HAH! I found a potty that wasn't locked because you can tell they're locked when the handle was down but the handle wasn't down on one of them so I tried to open it and the door opened because they forgot to lock it and the handled was up so I got in and could use the potty and they forgot to lock it so I got in and I didn't have to pee my pants because I tried the one with the handle that wasn't down and it opened are we getting off the plane now people are moving and we're leaving the plane and I didn't even get to listen to all of my book but that's okay because I can listen to it later and... [ ASHTON FADES AWAY AS I RUN TOWARDS THE AIRPORT EXIT ]

Some children really should come with off-switches, and I have a profound respect for Ashton's parents that they manage to get through life without one. Hopefully he does sleep from time to time, though he never seems to run out of things to say, so maybe not.

And now it's time for sweet slumber so I can get up entirely too early in the morning.

I'm slowly getting all my negatives and paper photos scanned at ScanCafe, so I've started moving on to pictures from friends and relatives. It's been interesting to see how others view the same people and places when comparing their shots with my own. The last batch of scans I sent included images from my brother from some of the trips we've taken together.

The nice thing about traveling with my brother is that he's a professional photographer and takes some amazing photos. The bad thing about traveling with my brother is that all my photos look like crap by comparison.

Thailand...

The UK...

Nothing makes me want to hit the road again than looking at pictures from past trips!

It's Bullet Sunday from my last day in the Netherlands! And what a beautiful one it is... with blue skies everywhere you look. A nice change from the past three days. The weather came just in time, because tomorrow I'm back to Schiphol for my flight home.

• Beach. The Lady Penelope didn't have to fly out until late afternoon, so The DutchBitch was kind enough to take us to Noordwijk aan Zee so we could see the beach (and eat more potatoes with mayo). It was a nice day out, though the wind was blowing pretty fierce. This was great for the chute-surfers out on the water...

• Blue. After saying goodbye to Lady P. at the airport, we headed back into Amsterdam because I had forgotten my sunglasses at dinner last night. Thats when I saw something pretty amazing... blue sky behind the Hard Rock Cafe! In the half-dozen photos I have from previous visits, none of them have blue sky. But there it was...

• Big. In the USA, the restaurant portions are always massive, which means I can't ever eat it all and food goes to waste. Outside the USA, restaurant portions are usually of a more reasonable size, which is nice because I can actually finish everything on my plate without bursting. But when it comes to drinks, it's just the opposite. Order a Coke and they bring you a tiny bottle that costs at least double the price you'd pay in the States. Tonight Dutchy and I decided on Italian for dinner, and I was thrilled to see that they had both "regular" (i.e. tiny) glasses... AND "big" (i.e. "American regular") glasses on the menu. The down-side? I had to pay $7.88 (5,40€) for the privilege of ordering one...

• Parade. Just because I can't get enough of the painted elephants public arts project in Amsterdam...

• Funny. Last night, Dutchy treated us to some comedy DVDs featuring Irish comedian Dara Ó Briain. The guy is hysterically funny, and positively brilliant in his ability to interact with the audience. I had heard of the guy before because he hosts Mock of the Week from British television, but his stand-up was something entirely new to me. I pulled up Amazon so I could order his DVDs for myself... only to find out they aren't available for sale in Region 1. Nor could I buy them on iTunes. This is a load of bollocks. In the age of digital distribution, it's absolutely stupid that I can't buy a copy anywhere in the world. With DVDs I get it... they cost money to make. But a digital file on iTunes? It doesn't cost anything but a short time to convert the video (which has probably already been done for the UK store!). Like music, the concept of global digital distribution is completely lost on the video distributors. Oh well... until I can actually purchase a copy in my country, I guess there's always BitTorrent. How incredibly stupid that, for all our modern technology, idiotic stuff like this continues to happen.

YouTube has some funny bits and pieces from Dara's stand-up, and a good one is here.

And that's all she wrote for a fantastic visit to DutchyLand.

The day started off with an interesting twist... the hot water heater in Dutchy's house went kaput. The ladies managed to track down a hot shower for themselves (use your imagination here, heaven only knows I did), while I volunteered to stay behind and take a cold shower. So as to spend as little time as possible being chilled, I devised a plan whereas I would hose myself down, suds myself up, then rinse myself off.

It was a good plan. At first. Hosing myself down wasn't too bad, as it only involved a few seconds of contact with the icy water. Sudsing myself up was equally trivial. Where things went terribly wrong was in the last step.

Because it takes considerably longer to rinse soap off than to put it on.

And the entire time I was standing under that freezing stream of water... I could Not. Stop. Laughing.

Which probably made a terrific impression on Dutchy's neighbors, hearing a guy laughing hysterically while in the shower (let's hear her try to explain THAT one away!).

What finally made the laughter stop was when I looked down and saw the my once-magnificient pooferflargen had shrunk to the size of a peanut. There's just nothing funny about that.

Fortunately, Dutchy's cat was nonjudgmental on my plight...

But the morning's adventure in shrinkage was all made worthwhile when Dutchy made my wildest fantasty come true... her and Penelope took me to a snack bar so I could get some frites met mayo...

But the awesomeness did not stop with the fries and mayo.

It was taken to the Next. Level.

Because I was able to also have a cheese sandwich as well. A cheese sandwich made with "Old Cheese." Beautiful, sexy, tasty, aged Dutch cheese. On a roll. That looked like this...

While I looked like this...

Then, after a lunch so delicious I achieved orgasm, we went wandering in the local shops so I could make fun of the native products. I think this one speaks for itself...

Unless you're familiar with the French language, in which case it seems perfectly sane.

But if you are not familiar with the French language, you may be wondering how much more hilarious a product name could get than "Douche Creme."

I'm glad you asked...

I can't quite decide which one I like best. There is a case to be made for both Douche Oil and Douche Scrub. But there was no time to debate the merits of these douchey products because Bitchsterdam was at hand, and we had to head up to Amsterdam. Where we ran across a new batch of elephants! Including this beauty...

... on the way to the Hard Rock Cafe...

Where an amazing group of people consisting of Mr. Geeky Tai-Tai, Geeky Tai-Tai, Bra-Dutch, The Dutch Bitch, ME!, and The Lady Penelope got together for a wonderful night of food, drinks, and a lot of laughs...

Despite all that, there was still time for my Jägermeister habit to corrupt the innocence of Penelope's seasoned wine-loving palette...

All-in-all in was a wonderful evening at the Hard Rock Cafe...

Because I was the luckiest bastard on the planet this night, as I got to go back home with THIS...

All my thanks to The Dutch Bitch, for hosting such a fantastic event!

As the grand Bitchsterdam festivities are not until tomorrow, those of us in DutchyLand early had decided to goof off in the picturesque city of Delft in South Holland. It's a rather important city in the history of the Netherlands, and is famous for it's Chinese-style pottery and being the birthplace of the painter Vermeer.

After arriving in the city, The DutchBitch, Geeky Tai-Tai, her husband, and myself decided to take a speed-boat cruise on the Delft canals. Except the speed-boat never went over two miles an hour, which made for a relaxing start to our day...

The canals are smaller than those you'll find in Amsterdam, which makes them that much prettier...

The Central Square still has many old buildings, though apparently they're not quite as old as you'd expect because the city was razed by fire and then later destroyed again when a gunpowder factory exploded...

Geeky Tai-Tai and The Dutch Bitch outside of the Delf Cathedral...

Delftware hand-painted pottery is a big tourist attraction and incredibly expensive if you buy the "real" stuff. Fortunately, there's tons of imitation pottery around for the tourist trade...

Given that this is the Netherlands, one of my most favorite foods on earth is easily available... potatoes and mayo...

But the food for which Delf is made famous is Poffertjes, which are little pancake-type thingies that are served up with powdered sugar & butter and are totally delicious. Much to the annoyance of Dutchy, I kept mis-pronouncing them as "Pooferglarg" or "Poofterjarb" or "Pooferflargen"... which, if you follow any of us on Twitter, was responsible for terrorizing the Twitterverse last night...

Amazingly, there was a restaurant we found which proudly proclaims that "Bill Clinton Ate Poffertjes Here"... and has somehow survived the experience...

All in all, it was a perfect way to spend the afternoon...

After dropping off Geeky Tai-Tai back at Schophol so she could spend some quallity pooferflargen time with her husband (without annoying bloggers around), we goofed off for a while until the celebrated arrival of The Lady Penelope. From then on, it was Wine-O-Clock, pooferflargen, chips & dip, Wine-O-Clock, pooferflargen, Twittering, Wine-O-Clock, pooferflargen, laughing, Wine-O-Clock, and pooferflargen for the rest of the evening and into the early morning...

For everybody on Twitter who had to suffer through the experience with us, I apologize.

But not really.

Because we had an awesome time, and it's hard to make apologies for that.

And I'm off for a wild weekend in DutchyLand with the Bitch that is Dutch...

Also in attendence will be the Lady that is Penelope and the Tai-Tai that is Geeky.

With a roster like this, only time will tell if I manage to survive the event.

Here's hoping that if (by some miracle) I do survive, I'll not be permanently damaged...

Guinness celebrated their 250th anniversary today!

Deliciously wholesome and hearty Irish Guinness Draught.

I can't remember when I had my first pint of Guinness, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't here in the US. It was probably in London and I think it was purchased for me. But even though I don't remember where or when, I do remember most everything else. I remember it was a properly poured pint instead of out of a can or bottle or made by somebody who didn't know what they were doing. I remember it was different and delicious. I remember joking about having to eat it with a spoon because it was so thick. I also remember that I had another.

I still drink Guinness from time to time. Mostly at pubs when I see that they know how to serve it up right.

And, of course, I drop by the Guinness Brewery at St. James's Gate whenever I'm in Dublin...

Once when I was in Ireland, I had some time to kill and so I took the Wild Wicklow Tour where I saw something pretty amazing. The Guinness Estate (owned by the Guinness family) has its own lake... Lough Tay. It's a pretty lake in some very pretty countryside, but that's not what makes it amazing. What makes it amazing is that they imported some white sand for the beach there, which looks something like this...

But to really appreciate what this means, you kind of have to look at it from space. Like this image from Google Maps...

And then need to use your imagination...

And there you have it...

Pretty cool, huh?

Happy Anniversary, Guinness!

Today's port of call was the beautiful city of Victoria in British Columbia... except the ship didn't arrive until 6:00pm. So while you do technically get a five-hour visit in the city as advertised, it's at night time. This means you can't really go sightseeing, and many of the stores are closed. I have no frickin' clue why NCL even bothers to stop, except it looks good on the itinerary they sell you.

Fortunately, I've already been to Victoria three or four times, so it's not a big deal... except such a short visit at such wacky hours seems kind of pointless. If there wasn't berthing space to let us dock at a decent hour, why not stop in Sitka or some other port where you actually have time to see things in frickin' daylight?

Oh well.

There's a restaurant here in Victoria I have been trying to visit for years. It's a vegetarian place called "Re-Bar Modern Food" that comes highly recommended.

And deservedly so, because the food there was frickin' amazing...

After dinner, there really wasn't much to do but wander around the Inner Harbor. The tourist shops there are gearing up for the 2010 Winter Olympics, and their Quatchi mascot is everywhere...

He's cool and all, but personally, I prefer... FIDDLER DARTH VADER!

It's getting pretty cold out at night, but roses were still in bloom...

The world-famous Empress Hotel looks even nicer at night...

Victoria Legislative Building in Lights...

And that's the end of my cruise.

But not my vacation... at least not quite yet...