Oh… you mean…. you didn’t notice that I’m not writing in a small while?  I do confess that blogging, working on projects, editing video, editing photos, driving from destination to destination, and more … takes a lot of time, so… blogging doesn’t always get the most of my time.  I’m sorry if you think that makes me lazy.  I promise you that my book willl have a lot of the juicy details.  For the record, I TWEET *really often* (remember, Twitter is a real-time, 140 characters at a time, form of communication, that I (or you) can update from their computer, cell phone, or by smoke signal (kidding about the smoke signal.. though, with 140 characters, you probably could pull it off). This makes it VERY easy to blast the web with what I’m doing, thinking, etc…).  The topic says I’m back in the USA… Where’d I go?  Keep reading… I’ll tell you.

My little bro graduated from University of Florida on May 2nd.  I flew down to Florida to  attend his graduation, and of course celebrate.  We celebrated by taking a cruise to Jamaica, Grand Cayman, and Cozumel Belize.  I ate ridiculous amounts of food, did some nice SCUBA diving in Belize, climbed up some waterfalls in Jamaica, and did I mention the insane amounts of food? I mean seriously… ask my family!  For dinner, I’d have about 4 appetizers, 4 entrees, 2 deserts,  And yes, I did work out very hard at the cruise’s gym.

The ship was the Carnival Triumph.  It’s ok.. I’m kind of jaded about Carnival’s ships. So… I’m not going to go into too much details (I was fairly tame on the cruise, as I have much more exciting travels in my CouchSurfing), but I did want to make observation… they had a giant LED-based outdoor theatre screen… so you can lay in a beach chair and watch the news (wtf?? I mean seriously.. what kind of sick a-hole plays the news on the giant screen, w/ massive speakers, so people in New York can hear…. while a few thousand people are on vacation?  Why ruin their vacation?  Forget the outside world, or watch it in your cabin), or a movie.  The movies were not posted well, I thought… so I only caught the tail end of Wall-E (a brilliant movie).  The Irony is that in Wall-E (if you haven’t seen it, skip to the next paragraph, as not to destroy this very clever movie) , all of humanity is living on a cruise ship, and is obese, unmotivated, and controlled by a PA system/tv.  On Carnival’s cruise, there was a smaller population, but a high percent seemed as obese as the ones in Wall-E… and they kept running to the buffets, and were controlled by the ship’s PA system.  Sad, or funny… I can’t decide.

We got back on Mother’s day- which was awesome, ’cause the entire family (Mom, Dad, Barak (Older bro), Itay (younger bro), Me (seriously… why even look in the ()’s… you know who I am!), and Massimo (Barak’s fiancee) was there to start Mother’s day with mom.  Then Barak and Massimo had to get on a flight, and go back to California.

I flew on Tuesday back to Oregon.  I was way more excited about returning to Coos Bay, Oregon, than I was about the entire cruise… as in Coos Bay I’ve got non-stop adventure (seriously.. just today (1st day after landing back), I got surfing lesons, and to go clamming (digging for clams), and got a surfing lesson… I’m camping out in a trailer next to the Dunes, and will be riding 4-wheelers tomorrow, deep sea fishing Friday, getting golf lessons by a pro, riding jet boats… and now the city of Bandon is trying to top Coos Bay by taking me Aerobatics flying, horseback riding, and maybe even riding ou with the coast guard…. will find out about that one soon.

On my 1st flight, I was seated, and this sweet frail old couple (88 & 89 years old – been married for 57 years, and even had a walking stick) asked if I’d mind getting up so they could get to their seats.  I oblidged, and noticed how frail they were, so offered them to lift their suitcases to the overhead bins for them.  They were so happy!  You’d think I was their long-lost son.  I felt pretty great about it, and we conversed  much of the flight.

On the next flight, I was reading, and keeping to myself.. but then, as soon as the plane started its descent… the girl across the aisle from me started drumming her hands nervously, and eyeballing the window, and looking very anxious.

“Do you dislike landings?”

She has not flown in 4 years, and landings definitely make her nervous!

“Excuse me… What do you call a line of bunnies jumping backwords? A receeding hareline!”  — she laughed… fingers stopped drumming..

“What do you call a cow with no legs?”  “Ground Beef” – success… she was totally distracted from the fact that the plane is descending in altitude, and technically, we could crash and die.  I kept going… joke after joke after joke, until we landed!  “See? That wasn’t so bad!  The worst thing about the landing was having to hear all my jokes!”  She was happy, calm, and I was happy as heck to have a practical use fo rmy massive arsenal of jokes.

It’s 4:!5am.  I have a few radio shows, a cold (thanks flying on a plane!  Is it Swine Flu?  Should I commit suicide now?), 4-wheeling, eating fresh-crab (the seafood here in Coos Bay is so fresh and amazing (hooray Coastal cities), so… I must climb to the top bunk now, and sleep!