Big day for Miles – he’s been working at putting on his own shoes – today he succeeded in putting on and buckling his sandals without help! So proud of our children – Miles and Amelia playing so nicely together, both learning new tricks from each other. Miles seeming to be inspired by Amelia’s advanced language skills, Amelia seeming to be inspired by Miles’ physical precociousness. It’s empowering for us parents to know that we can pull this off – take a major vacation like this and the kids are troopers. It’s tough in a lot of ways, but we make it work, and I think the kids benefit immeasurably.
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China Reef
Big scuba day – China Reef w 4 other divers. No wetsuit. Water inTENse blue pounding blue sonic blue, fall backwards overboard 60 ft down to reef. Vibrant purple chalices of hard coral that looks like it was fluttering in waves and then frozen. Sting rays. No nurse sharks, as had hoped. Discovered a family of white lobsters, two adults two children under ledge. We stared at each other, they waved their foot-long feelers at me. Vast fields of drapery-like coral hanging from ledges. Fish and coral colors so vibrant it’s hard to believe nature could produce. Is this for real? One never gets used to it. I remember now why diving is so addictive. Surge lifted my bare back up into an outcropping of fire coral, stung like a string of bee stings, rash lasted for a week. Safety decompression stop at 20 feet for five minutes, hovering in the blue like babe in the womb, gazing out at creation. Maybe I should reconsider my belief in God?
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Rock House
Ackee and saltfish for breakfast. Played in water w babies. Rained and more rain. Taxi to patty shop — patties are Jamaican replacement for American hamburgers – beef or chicken or calallo wrapped in pastry dough and baked. Cheap and ubiquitous.
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Children’s Bread
8:30 a.m. snorkel trip with Amy on a glass-bottom boat named “Children’s Bread” with pilot shorty. Three miles out to coral reef. Angel fish, long skinny trumpet fish, sargent majors. Brain coral, fan coral, every kind of coral. Water like a bathtub. Amy was a champ, not afraid at all. Stunning in every way except that all the recent storms have left water a bit murkier than usual (which means “only” 40 feet rather than 150).
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Ants Inna Ya Milk
Early swim, breakfast at Seline’s: ackee and salt fish, calaloo (local leafy green, similar to spinach), dumplings, fried plantain, banana pancakes.
Walk to the west end of town to get cash. Enter “Jamaica time” — Jamaican banks are the slowest – four people in line could means one-hour wait. Snafu – my cards are refused. Why? Must go to “call center” to reach U.S. fraud dept. ($8 phone call) which reports that my cards are fine. Return to bank, wait again, cards go through fine. Took 90 mins to get money. We’d find this kind of thing all over Jamaica – seemingly simple things made frustratingly complex by polite but slow or confused employees. “Yeah mon, no problem.” Everything’s cool. No one has high blood pressure, but it’s tough for Americans to adjust, not have expectations that things will go as planned.
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Jinx Elegant
Amy’s and my fourth wedding anniversary. Landed in Mobay and traveled by van to Negril. Our driver is the gregarous Jinx Elegant, couldn’t ask for a better info source for first hour trip. Taking in the roadside shacks, hand-painted signs. Many shacks do double service as businesses and homes — people live and sleep in them, but also serve lunch from the front stoop. Passed one labeled “Rastarant.”
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Trenchtown Bound
Well, not quite, but we’re heading for Jamaica, mon! Two families, two babies, small volcanoes, big waterfalls, expansive coral reefs, endless beaches. Posting will be light for a bit.
Music: Pink Fairies :: Uncle Harry’s Last Freak-Out
Haw Hee
Miles is learning to talk backwards. The donkey says “Haw Hee. Haw Hee.” If you ask him to say “Doggie,” he reports back: “Geedaw.”
He also likes to do this ecstatic whirling dervish dance, head cocked back, eyes on the sky or branches above, smiling so huge you’d think his head would pop, until he falls backwards or sideways to the floor or lawn, laughing uproariously.
Words cannot describe how much we enjoy his company. Most. Fun. Ever.
Music: Robert Wyatt :: Red Flag
Global Terror Incidents at 20-Year Low
How did Bush manage to base the bulk of his presidency on a “war on terror” when his very own State Department reports that incidents of global terrorism are at a 20-year low?
Music: Leo Kottke :: Vaseline Machine Gun
AdSense
Finally starting to put energy into updates at kissthisguy.com again, and today signed up for Google’s AdSense. Replaced the mid-page graphical ads from Burst Media with context-sensitive text-based ads. Burst pays per impression; AdSense pays per click. Weirdly, Google won’t disclose exactly what they pay, though they make a vague reference to paying as much as or more than competitors. We’ll see.
I was most interested in using AdSense to see how well they could parse misheard lyric pages in real-time. If ads were targeted well enough that people could purchase the album from which the mondegreen originally comes, I figured things might go very well. What I’m seeing in the first couple of hours is that Google is succeeding at placing almost exclusively music-related ads (and no PSAs), but only a small percentage of ads are targeted specifically at the artist in question. Still, that’s a big improvement over Burst’s totally unfocused scattershot placement. I’ll be curious to see how things tally at the end of the month.
Another benefit: AdSense ads don’t blink, flash, or buzz.
Music: The Seeds :: Daisy Mae