Katie, Ryan and I went down to Panama City/Seagrove for the Labor Day weekend to stay with my mom ('Mimi'), sister ('Antie') and her boyfriend, Nick. Got down there pretty late on Friday, since I had to work, but it gave us 2 whole days at the beach. It was really pretty nice, we stayed in a 3bed/3bath condo about 5-10 minutes walk from the beach that was really really nice - everyone pretty much had their own space, though Ryan pretty much needs his own room since he won't sleep in a room with anyone, so he got to sleep in the bunk beds in one room (with his new bedrails), and he seemed to really enjoy that. Mom and Amanda are beach bums, so Katie was in good company and got to do what she really likes when at the beach -- sitting on the beach all day. We went down in the morning on Saturday, stayed until Ryan's naptime, had lunch and then put him down. Ate at Boon Docks for dinner on Saturday. Bonn Docks is a local seafood hole in the wall, that happens to be on the water under the bridge into the PCB area. The food was really excellent, and not too expensive, compared to eating at Red Lobster or something...

Sunday we spent the morning at the pool, then went down to the beach for a few hours, and then came back for naptime. Went to Margaritaville for dinner, which we decided we needed to do, since we avoid the crows there like the plague when we go to Myrtle Beach (there's no restaurant I want to eat at bad enough to wait 2-3 hours to eat at), but the wait was only quoted at an hour on Sunday, so we waited it out by giving Jimmy some money in the gift shop. The food was actually really good, and not too expensive, which I was surprised about. Evidently before the playing of 'Margaritaville' or at the end of 'Jamaica Mistaka' , not sure which - they fire cannons, and have a pirate and his wenches (on stilts) come out to lead the diners in the singing of Margaritaville. Fun, sure. The cannons combined with really tall people scared the crap out of Ryan, and he required sitting in my lap for the duration of dinner. To make things better (before they got worse, then better again) the tall pirate-man came over making balloon animals. He talked to Ryan and made him a monkey. During dinner, the monkey spontaneously popped - which sent tears of distress/surprise ringing out across the restaurant, fortunately Pirate man came running back to make a new orange puppy dog for Ryan. He carried that puppy around ALL NIGHT, "Orange paa-paa". Even wanted to sleep with it... After dinner it started to storm, which killed our chances for a night walk on the beach, but we still had a good time; we just went home so Ryan could play with Mimi.

We all had an awesome weekend, Ryan really enjoyed having all the attention from Antie Amanda, Nick ('Nyuck') and his Mimi.

Though -- we didn't consider the commute home... It took ~7 hour to get down there, which is normal... But it took over 11 hours to get home!
Evidently, since checkout time is 11am everywhere, and tehre are really only 2 ways out of PCB, and neither of them are 11 lanes of expressway, traffic was retarded. It took us about 2 hours to get the 17 miles out of PCB out to Defuniak Springs and the highway. Then we got to hit bumper to bumper in every damn town we hit on the way home. We bailed from the expressway in Newnan and took backroads back to our house, and got home a little after 11 last night. Mom and Amanda left a couple of hours later, and got home around the same time as us. So the key is either to leave BEFORE 9am, or after 2pm, or you'll be in crazy retarded traffic...

Tags: family, ryan, vacation

I found a new gizmo for my Blackberry -- http://itookthisonmyphone.com -- basically it's a free app that installs on the Blackberry (don't know what else it supports) that gives you online webspace where you can upload your photos and videos on-the-fly or ad-hoc from the phone to online space, supposedly eliminating the need to store stuff locally on your phone.   Not sure yet if it preserves full resolution or not in photos, but it retains geotags and a few other things.  Videos get converted or scaled or something...   But the neatest thing to me is that it will automatically upload from itookthisonmyphone.com over to your facebook, photobucket, flickr, etc without manual intervention.  Which is neato to me.

Tags: geek, ryan

Took the wonky wind-guard off the sunroof on the Accord, and it left some light scratching where sand or dirt or whatever got under it, so spent the last weekend of August doing some cleaning up from that, trying to buff out the scratches.  Done a decent job, you can't really see them anymore, might need another scratch remover treatment.   Then since i couldn't find an Accord that I liked that already had a wing, I added one too.    Took a few pictures of the car, before and after - stuck them in my photobucket.

Tags: car