I survived the first week after the holidays - yey! It was time to celebrate so on Friday we hit up Volume for Sehee’s birthday party. Then on Saturday I drove to Des Moines to visit Aleksey before he leaves for Florida (lucky bastard). Oh, and I dropped my phone once again and this time cracked the screen so I am getting a Samsung Intrepid. Nothing too exciting, but it works with my SERO plan so I did not have many choices. This coming week is going to be interesting, stay tuned!
This year I combined a few of my vacation days with our company holiday shutdown for a nice two week break. Dymka and I drove back to Ohio on the 19th and came back on January 3rd. Once back home, I mostly relaxed and caught up on some reading (C# and .Net Framework - fun stuff!). On the 23rd I went to a party at my buddy Andrew’s house - the guy I was hanging out in Newport Beach during my California trip just a week before. We also hung out with Justin and I drove down to Cincinnati one of the days. Most of the other time I spent with the family or shopping for a new coat. Good times! Happy New Year and Merry Christmas everyone!
Today was the annual Cedar Rapids Downtown Fire and Ice Festival. John, Melissa, and I first started at the Chili Challenge where we got to try a bunch of different chili from many of the local restaurants and vote for our favorites. Not a bad dinner deal for $5. Then it was time for the parade. We watched it from the corner of Second Avenue and Fifth street, right by the KCRG TV station building so there were cameramen running all over the place. The parade was pretty diverse including the appearances by tow trucks, local boat club, religious groups, and local car dealerships, neither of which I have seen included in the parades before. After an hour in the chilling cold it was over and we were so ready for some hot cocoa. Overall, I would say I probably won’t go to it again next year, but I will definitely be there for another Chili Challenge. And as the Ice portion of the festival, we did see some ice sculptures but there were only a handful of them and they were not very elaborate, so we did not spend much time there.
Princess Shayani demanded our presence at a toga party in honor of her birthday this weekend and so we obliged. I was making the rum drinks I enjoyed in Virgin Islands and soon we ran out of rum and bananas so we went on a quest to get more supplies from the evil empire of Wal-Mart. After the victorious return and a few more drinks, we whipped out the Twister and it became a very interesting game with (apparently incorrectly worn) togas further limiting our movement (yes, I blame toga!).
A couple weeks ago a friend of mine was getting a group of people together to go skydiving. I figured it was about time to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. I was going to do that after I would get my pilot license, but I got my ticket a day before I was moving to Florida so never got to do it (and it was a good excuse). This time I figured no excuses, as SAS moto goes, “Who Dares Wins!”
Since we had a group of people coming, we got a safety briefing and instruction on Friday so we just had to show up, strap in, and go on Sunday. Fortunately, that was not the case - it was a perfect day and there were plenty of people feeling suicidal. We watched a bunch of them jump before us so by the time it was our turn we kind of knew what to expect. I did a tandem jump strapped in front of the instructor. We took off in a Cessna Caravan with another dozen of skydivers, climbed up to about 13,000 feet and then limped out of the airplane. After free falling for about one minute, I pulled the chute at around 5,000 feet and it took us another minute or so to get back on the ground.
I will not even try to describe the feeling while we were free falling. It was a little scary on the climb out, but everyone was so cheerful that it put me more or less at ease. But once the door opened and half a dozen people disappeared, I was just starting to get nervous and the next thing I knew we were out as well. It is definitely a rush on the way down, although a different one from riding a roller coaster or flying a plane. It is “only” one G so after the first few seconds, you do not really feel the pull anymore, except for the overwhelming amount of air rushing into your face that makes you scream more in awe of that power rather than in fear.
