Expiration Dates? As If!!!

Truth be known, I grew up in a household where expiration dates on food were an irrelevant and useless reference point. Yogurt more than three months expired? Oh please... yogurt is already cultured... what does it matter? It's fine! Eat it! Butter left out all day on the kitchen counter? It will build your immune system! Cottage cheese that expired last week? Oh no... that's the "sell by" date... it's not expired. Just ignore the flavor if it's a bit sour...

My mother is the ultimate "perishable item" naysayer. If it's still in the fridge, or elsewhere in her kitchen, despite the manufacturer's recommended warnings, it's still fair game. To recount just a few short stories...

1. "The Meatloaf" -- My mother has always been in the habit of hanging onto left-overs. As the result of her upbringing by a "depression era baby" (AKA my grandmother, god rest her soul), my mom just can't throw anything away. The end result of this is at least 20 Tupperware containers, containing approximately one spoonful of old casserole each, lining every refrigerator shelf possible. When these leftover items built up to unusable quantities, my mother devised the ultimate disposal remedy (that of course did not involve throwing anything in the garbage)... this remedy was called "meatloaf"...

Take one pound of meat, some left-over corn, a touch of 'cream of onion soup' vegetable casserole, a sprinkling of broccoli spears chopped into bite-size portions, and some stale and likely moldy & dry bread, torn into small bits. Mix together with ketchup. Put in oven. Take out and serve for dinner to smiling and unsuspecting family members...


"I would do anything for love..." -- Oh wait, this is the wrong Meatloaf...

In fact, I recently spoke with one of my closest friends from junior high school, and she recounted in great detail the memory of being invited to my house for dinner on a night when my mother served her notorious meatloaf. So traumatized was poor Vicky that she still remembered the corn kernels and other "mystery items" in the very strange meatloaf given to her that evening...

2. Cheese -- My mom loves moldy cheese...


Ahhh, marbled cheddar... so reminiscent of my youth...

Not Stilton or Blue Cheese, but moldy cheddar (which all of us "normal" people realize should not be colored green). As a kid, my mom would try to camouflage moldy cheese on sandwiches, often cutting away the green and furry parts to leave the "good orange cheese" below. It never fooled me though, as I could taste old cheese a mile away. It greatly irritated me throughout my childhood lunchtimes, as I peeled the bread back to find a hardened chunk of two-month old cheddar lying dormant on a layer of Miracle Whip (while my school friends shrieked in laughter and recoiled in horror). My mom would defend herself with, "well, the French eat moldy cheese all the time," or "it won't hurt you... penicillin is actually made from mold." My mom still eats moldy cheese.

3. Crackers and Soup --- My mom has a penchant for holding onto old boxed goods well past their due dates. Take crackers, for instance --- my mom tried to serve crackers once to a small group of friends (and me) that had to have been sitting at least two years in her cupboard. We immediately spit them out, saying "Oooooo! These taste funny!" And my mother, ever the good sport and faithful 'holder-onto of food' just laughed it off and delved around for a fresher box of something (maybe one year old). She once did the same thing for soup, serving Lipton boxed soup to our neighbor, only to have him holler out in surprise, "Ahhhh! There's something in my soup!" Turns out that the soup had been sitting so long in the cabinet that mealworms had hatched, and they were floating around in the broth... like this...



Again, my mom laughed it off ("oh, it's just protein for you!"), although she did grab the bowl away from him.

4. The Cream Cheese Incident --- Once, in the summer between college years, my mom was out of town, and I invited some of my friends over to illicitly drink beer and go swimming at the golf course lake near our house. As we were pilfering through her fridge looking for snacks later in the evening, one of the guys decided to toast a bagel and slather it with cream cheese. Pulling out the tub of cream cheese, I heard him let out of a cry of terror --- the stuff was so old that green fuzz was nearly climbing out the sides of the plastic container.


Mmmm, cream cheese delight!

"Ohhh, sorry," I responded bashfully, "my mom loses track of her refrigerator items sometimes."

To be honest, I sometimes can't believe I made it through childhood without coming down with something, although I do credit a hearty immune system to my mom's food handling...

OK, so why the long weird story of my mom's perishable food history? I'm simply setting the scene for the real story that occurred this past weekend. You see, sadly, poor Miguel fell victim to this characteristic of my mother on Saturday...

As we were driving home from Baltimore late Saturday night, Miguel was yawning and fading behind the wheel of my mom's car. He was very thirsty and asked if there were any bottles of water that we'd brought with us in the car. Hunting around, my mom and I realized that we'd already drunk the two bottles we brought. However, about five minutes later, my mom pulled a bottle of water out from (this was not a good sign) underneath the driver's seat.

"Here, Miguel!!" she chirped. "I found some water!"


Sitting in the back of her Honda, this photo shows my mom preparing to pass the water to the front of the vehicle for consumption...

I should have known better than to hand the bottle blindly over to poor Miguel. Not knowing how long it might have been in the car, I simply wiped off the mouth of the bottle and passed it to him. I could tell he was hesitant about where the bottle might have been, but not totally familiar with the aforementioned information regarding my mom's food handling/expiration date history, Miguel (without putting his lips to the mouth of the bottle), innocently poured the water into his mouth, unaware of any serious repercussions.

Immediately, I saw his expression change into one of a person who has just drunk anti-freeze, or human urine, or pig's blood. Fearful, I snatched the bottle from his hand and put my nose to the opening. What greeted my olfactory system was something akin to a mildewed bath towel mixed with pond algae and poop. This is when I burst out laughing, knowing that only my mother would pass someone a water that was full of amoebic dyssentery bacteria from sitting in her car for so long.


There's nothing like a fresh glass of old bottled water...

Needless to say, Miguel was unamused and (according to him) threw up in his own mouth three times before we made it home. Luckily, he was better by morning, although he remained annoyed at me for finding his situation so amusing.

And honestly, I hate to say it, but I'm still laughing...

Video Killed The Radio Star

I'm on a roll with terrible high school photos. I have been browsing through my mom's photo albums and have found some photos that are positively classic (and have made me either suck in my breath in horror or burst out laughing). I think I'm going to have to establish a "bad high school photo of the week" post while I'm home this summer.

Although I shared that mega-hot pic of me at 10th grade homecoming on my last blog entry (less than a week ago), I just can resist sharing this next little gem, which was taken with my mom when I was in 9th grade (that would be 1988):


Oh my god, where do I begin with my commentary?

Regarding my mom:

1. The skinny tie and big glasses made Miguel remark that my mom looked just like Trevor Horn, of the 80s MTV music pioneers, "The Buggles"... check out the similarity:


Jesus, Miguel is right. My mother was Trevor Horn in drag!

2. I so love her tapered white pants and blue flats that match the crew neck sweater, appropriately accessorized with the aforementioned 80s fashion centerpiece... the skinny, square-bottomed tie.

As for me:

Sweet Mother Mary... what is going on with my white tapered pants, hideously pegged and tucked into turquoise scrunchy sport socks? I'm wearing my all-time favorite 80s high school gear... the Forenza sweatshirt purchased for me by my grandparents (since my parents remained resolutely anti-brand name despite the blatant consumerism of the 1980s). I also do believe my hair was in a side-pony tail, and I have some pretty big bangs. Finally, please note my mega-cool Tretorns, which did give me at least some street cred in 9th grade. Sadly, my cool factor ended there (I was so gawky, oh so gawky...).

Anyway, I have a lot of fun stories to report about my weekend, but I'll save them for later this week. The highlight of the weekend was going to Baltimore on Saturday to see the horse races at Pimlico with my mom and Miguel... while not funny in theory, there were a number of very amusing occurences that day, which still make me laugh out loud thinking about them... more on that later... must run now.

I'm at my mom's house, and Miguel is watching "ultimate fighting," and I must go tell him he's killing brain cells watching that trash...

Blast from the Past

You never know when you're going to run into some old friend when you live in the same place you grew up. Of course, if you're from a city as big as DC, your chances of seeing some long lost remnant of your past are relatively slim... however, it does happen, and it happened to me yesterday.

I got out of work around 5 pm and decided to go over to Miguel's apartment to work out at his gym (which is far superior to the gym in my mom's apartment building). I got on GW Parkway and was cruising to 395 when I ended up somehow, very bizarrely, in the Pentagon parking lot.


May I make a suggestion? Never end up driving around this warden of roads. They lead straight to hair-pulling frustration and near-death experiences.

After accidentally turning onto a one-way road, nearly colliding head-on with a fat lady in a mini-van, and then redirecting myself the other direction, I found myself mistakenly in the "slug" lane in which drivers can pick up waiting passengers going to various marked locations in order to take advantage of the HOV (high occupancy vehicle) highway lanes, which move much faster than the other lanes on the road. Of course, I was only going about a mile away so I had no interest in picking up a slug rider, and I embarrassingly and weirdly had to drive at 2 mph by all of the people on the curb, picking up no one.


Uhh, sorry, can't pick you up tonight!

By the time I finally made it to Miguel's, I was sweaty, exhausted, and ready to take a sledge hammer to every car in the local area. It was after I parked and started to walk to his building when I realized that his apartment keys were back in my mom's apartment in Arlington. On the verge of screaming aloud, I skulked back to my mom's car, furiously threw open the driver's side door, and plunked back in the driver's seat. The thought of driving anywhere at that point nearly made me nauseous. However, I proceeded to drive the 15 minutes back to Arlington (which I had passed on my way to Miguel's in the first place), found a parallel parking spot after 20 minutes, and then raced up to my mom's 14th floor place to fetch the keys. I was on the verge of suicide at this point.


A nice rendition of my mental state yesterday evening.

But finally... ahhh, finally, I made it back to Miguel's and headed straight to the gym. So here I was, burning off some extreme stress, trying to relax, reading my book, and I looked up to see my 10th grade high school homecoming date lifting weights across the room. I had to triple check to make sure it was him (hoping no one noticed me ogling strangely and crinkling my nose to get a better look), but lo and behold, it was none other than Chris G. He was never my boyfriend, and I never really talked much to him after homecoming, but I was happy that someone had asked me that year, especially since I wasn't much of a looker in high school...

Here we are in 1989...

Big hair, braces, and frosted lipstick = 80s hotness!
Also notice the very awkward body posture... hands in front and hands behind. There would be noooo touching between these two people!

Sorry the picture isn't clearer, but I had to take a digital photo from an old album. I have several other treasures to share in coming days...

Oh, and BTW, I did talk to Chris, and he lives right down the street from Miguel. He looks pretty much the same, just 17 years older and wearing wire-rimmed glasses now with thinner, spikier hair, plus he's married, has two dogs, and works for Deloitte and Touche. We're going out for a beer or coffee sometime in the next month just to catch up.

I suppose if I hadn't gone through hell getting to Miguel's, I never would have seen Chris. And as nice as it was to see a face from my past, wouldn't fate be kinder if it surreptiously led me to millions of dollars or a Porsche Carrera or a plane ticket to Bali... ?? I'll keep dreaming...

My life on the Starship Enterprise

OK, the jig is up... I really am living on the Starship Enterprise this summer. Laura and Kelly figured it out from my last blog entry...

Anyone else notice the similarities between this setting...

My boyfriend's amazingly white and clean living room (with red accents). I take full credit for the home sewn curtains and for strongly encouraging the purchase of the colored pillows and foot rest.

And this setting?...

The white-clean Enterprise "bridge" area with red accents.

Oh, and here's my new boyfriend...

I decided to start fresh this summer. Haha.

But really, it's more like this...

That's Miguel on the left, protecting his sparkling clean kitchen, and that's me on the right, getting ready to attack with my crumb-covered hands, while sprinkling food particles all over the floor and counters.

There is no doubt... it's going to be a great, if not at least an interesting summer!! More on the Star Trek Odd Couple later (plus a new update on the dorks in orientation... I'm still in hell all week long)... my mom is off to NYC tomorrow so I won't have access to a computer, but I'll be around in another day or two!

ps - Please do not let me forget to tell you about the Polish Eagle Scout in orientation class. It's worth a laugh...

Party Weekend (plus my first day at my summer job)

Hello... here I am after my first day of work at my new fellowship at an unnamed government office. No comment on that for the moment. However, I would love to share one bit --- just a short note on a horse-faced girl at my orientation this morning who I immediately loathed after she made some unnecessary comment to me about "being late" even though I was there five full minutes before the orientation started. She was wearing a cheap polyester short-sleeved suit from Kohl's or "Chadwick's of Boston" -- and even worse, the suit was grey, which totally did not enhance her already sallow coloring and limp greasy hair. Okay, I'll admit, I have had three glasses of wine, and I'm feeling a bit sinister at the moment, but this lame girl really rubbed me the wrong way (and I had no choice but to sit next to her throughout the day, as it was my "assigned" seat... noooooooo!) Alphabetical order seriously sucks, especially when your last name starts with "Ba..."... not only are you always at the front of the class, but it seriously seems that only total goobers have last names that start with the letter "A" through "Be". For example, today at my table of seven people, not only was there horse-face, but there was also a guy who blew his nose continuously on napkins, looked at the snot, and then placed the napkin facedown. There was also a guy with a bowl cut who has two ferrets, and a pasty-faced blonde female engineer with the personality of a sheet of white paper...

Moving on to people with personality... I thought I would share with you some photo highlights from my birthday weekend that I spent with Miguel and then with all of my friends here on Saturday night...

Here I am on my b-day last Friday...

At M's apartment getting ready to open my Wakeman tickets.

And then the party at Nichole & Luis's house on Saturday night...

Luis and I celebrate our big days...

Miguel and Luis...

My friend Marcia told Miguel that he looked like he was in a "boy band" that night!

Three of my girlfriends...

Julia (9 months pregnant), Nichole, and Sara O.

Roommates Melissa and Lisa... (both a bit drunk, esp. Lisa!)

Melissa is from Tucson and went to U. of A. and Lisa gives out university grants to study in Yemen! Strange coincidences...

The Gringa and her Latino...

Marcia & Ricardo cut a mean salsa.

Miguel played computer DJ...

And he took his job very seriously...

The fruits of his DJ efforts...

The ladies on the dancefloor (ie: L & N's patio) dancing to Funky Cold Medina.

Getting a little wilder...

Nichole and Amy were going crazy here to 80s tunes.

Meanwhile, I make it a habit to never dance until I've had at least 10 drinks.

Instead I try to entertain people with lame stories about random things... not many laughs here. In fact, Marni looks plain annoyed.

After dancing...

The NYC divas... Sonja & Amy. Tres cool...

Wrapping up the night...

Miguel and Meg took each other on in "Name That Tune." Miguel could name the band faster, but Meg named the song titles quicker. Definitely an even match, although Nichole got so bored that she ended up passing out on the couch, and Luis had to carry her off to bed.

Sonja played game show music host... (at 2 am --- drinking started at 3 pm)

Sonja drums like crazy while Amy head bangs nearby. I think they might have been playing the Scorpions' "Rock You Like a Hurricane."

That's it for now... more later. Must go to bed for another big day of work orientation. Blah...

I Got the BEST Birthday Gift!

For those of you not in the know, yesterday was my 32nd birthday, and what a great day it was!

First, I found out I got all As again this semester. I was a little nervous about Arabic because I'd been getting a lot of Bs on tests lately, but it turns out I got a 92% in the class! So this was a great start to my day...

Then, Miguel doesn't work on Fridays so we drove down to Old Town Alexandria, where we got coffee, muffins, and a newspaper, and we relaxed on a park bench by the river for a while. After lounging around town and poking in stores for several hours, he took me to my favorite Chinese restaurant to enjoy my favorite food... spicy peanut noodles. Later on, we rented a movie, took a long walk around the park in M's neighborhood, and went to a wonderful dinner at a place called Vermilion in Alexandria that evening, where I indulged in several glasses of wine and truly delectable filet mignon (which I never order, but figured I would totally spoil myself).

However, the true highlight of the night was one of my gifts from Miguel. Along with a new DVD player (mine broke in Tucson), a Lonely Planet "best places to travel" guidebook, and a grammar and English language handbook, I received... (are you ready for this?!?!?)... tickets to the Rick Wakeman "Grand Piano Tour" coming to DC next month. I about leaped off the couch and jumped onto the ceiling.



And this is another secret about myself I have just revealed to you... I am a huge Rick Wakeman fan, which pretty much puts me in the total dork category. If you're unfamiliar with this legend of the synthesizer, I will tell you that he was the British keyboardist from the band, "Yes," in the 1970s, and then he ventured off on his own with his first solo album, "The Six Wives of Henry the Eighth"...


This album was a childhood favorite... especially the song "Anne Boleyn." Coincidentally, she was beheaded on the same day as my birthday.

Rick Wakeman has a penchant for creating electronic/keyboard music that recreates the days of medieval life... ie: not only does he have an album about Henry VIII's wives, but he also wrote an entire album devoted to King Arthur and that book's characters. My personal favorite on that album is "Merlin the Magician."

Anyway, we are going to see Mr. Wakeman on June 18 at the Birchmere, which is a very small venue that only holds 300 people... so I might actually even get to meet Rick Wakeman! What a dream...

I called my brother last night to tell him the exciting news (as he also enjoy's RW's music although he publicly scoffs at it), and he has offered me $50 if I yell out during a quiet point in the concert, "Play Catherine Parr"!! I mean really, that is just freaking hilarious. I told him I would do it, and that Miguel could capture me doing it on my digital camera. I might also holler out for "Sir Galahad, Sir Galahad!"

On that note, I leave you for the day. But before I do, here is a clip of Rick Wakeman actually playing a portion of Catherine Parr with Merlin the Magician at the end in concert a couple of years ago... it rocks!!!!...


Nerds rule.

Back in DC!

Well, I made it back in one piece yesterday...

An interesting trip indeed. First, I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to make sure I didn't forget anything for my three month sojourn here in DC, and then my taxi didn't show up on time (hello, stress). Just as I was about to frantically dial the cab company, my taxi rolled up, and of course, his A/C was broken so I had a nice, hot, and windy ride to the airport. Frankly, it didn't really bother me... I was just so happy to be getting out of Tucson.


Note the brown rocks and old freight train... very Tucson-esque.

The first leg of my flight from Tucson to Dallas was lovely. I sat next to a very sweet and quiet 60-something year old woman named Linda from Chicago, who had been assisting her elderly mother in Tucson after a hip replacement. While I'm not much for talking to strangers on airplanes, Linda was pretty cool and didn't over-do it on the chit-chat (which generally makes me want to stick a barf bag over my own head)...


Please imagine me pulling this over my large noggin.

...although she did tell me all about her and her husband's visits to Pakistan and China, where he buys hotel furnishings in bulk to sell as a distributor, which I did find genuinely interesting. The rest of the time I listened to music and read the novel, "Prep."


Which, by the way, is really good.

The second leg of my flight, from Dallas to DC, was not nearly as relaxing. As I boarded the plane, I came to a quick and intensely disappointing realization that I was in a dreaded "center" seat. Nooooooo! Worse still, I was next to an abnormally thin old man, on the aisle, who appeared to be in his mid-80s. I was at least pleased to see that he wasn't a large person that might invade my space with body fat.



As I plopped myself down next to him and an empty seat, I wondered who might be on my other side. Holding my breath in anticipation, I watched as a middle-aged Chinese woman (not Asian-American, but seemingly very much from-China- Chinese) with a very bad perm came barreling down the aisle carrying what appeared to be the largest carry-on bag this side of the Yangtze River. I watched as she struggled to lift it over her head and then managed to jam, pack, push, cram, pull, and wiggle the enormous suitcase into position, crushing every other person's items in the overhead bin. At that moment, I just knew she was my other seatmate. And I was right.

She clomped over the old man and me to get into her window seat, where she immediately placed a bird flu mask over her face. Hmmm, strangely discomforting, I thought...


At least she didn't cough a lot or seem sickly.

As for the thin old geezer on my other side, he and I quickly became engaged in an armrest turf war. Although I didn't even attempt to put my elbows on the armrest we shared, he insisted upon dangling his bony old elbows over the armrest into my seat area, which made for constant rubbing on my own elbow, tucked neatly into my ribs. It really started to piss me off. I looked over at him silently trying to give him the subliminal message of "Get the hell out of my seat territory, old man," but then I caught a good look at his face. What I saw was quite horrifying...imagine at least 25 scabs like small pieces of carcinoma pepperoni covering his age spotted old cheeks and nose. I really wished I hadn't looked over at him...

Because it looked a lot like this...

I thought I might really need the barf bag.

While his elbows were covered by long sleeves, I kept thinking about what his old lesioned elbows must look like, and how only two thin layers of cloth (my shirt and his) were separating our skin from each other. I tried to push these thoughts into the back recesses of my mind, but the idea lingered around for the entire flight, especially when he didn't get my hints and kept smacking his elbow into my own.

We finally landed in DC around 9pm, and my sweet boyfriend was there waiting for me. It was sooo nice to be home!! I quickly forgot the traumatic center seat experience, and spent last night talking to him for hours and enjoyed today by sleeping in, hanging out with his brother, reading my book, and taking a walk in the green lushness of DC (where the streets are wet from rain!).

Time to go now... I'm at my mom's and she just got home from work. We're going speed walking in a few minutes... ahhhh, to be home!!!

DC and Puerto Penasco

I have so much to say tonight that I'm going to have to organize my thoughts into sections:

1. I am going back to DC tomorrow! My flight leaves at 11:44 am and arrives at 8:56 pm at Dulles (yuck...). However, I can't complain. My summer fellowship is paying for it. According to my mom, who arrived back in DC today, it's 64 degrees there and beautiful. And to think, I was just sweating my ass off here this afternoon, tooling around the parking lot of Fry's, miserably staring at a Mexican toddler wearing only diapers and sporting a six inch rat tail down his back. On the flipside, I did also take a final swim at the pool here today, and I think I swam my personal best, or at least I was faster than the four people on my side of the pool (including two guys), which was somewhat of a mental boost for the competitive freak that comes out in me from time to time.


Oh, my lovely UA pool, I will miss you so...

2. I must warn you that the blog action might slow down a bit while I'm back in DC. First of all, I have a life there and hopefully won't rely on my computer (and this blog) as my best friend. Second, I won't be able to blog at my place of summer employment. And third, my access to a computer during my "off" time may be spotty.

3. Speaking of having a life, I'm already booked for this coming Friday, Saturday, and Sunday! Miguel is taking me out for my b-day on Friday (holy crap, I will be 32... how scary is that?). Then we are going to Nichole & Luis's annual Mexican BBQ on Saturday. Around 50 people have already RSVPed to their evite, and I am friends with at least half of them (many of whom I haven't seen in almost a year) so it should be a fabulous time! They are promising a huge layout of food, plus a special tequila punch, and I have no doubt that beer and wine will be plentiful. Two years ago we were there dancing and hanging out until almost 4 am. If anybody can throw a great party, it's those two...


Some members of the "Nichole & Luis fan club" hanging out in Mexico in 2004. N & L are on the left both wearing green.

And then on Sunday, my friend Lizzy is hosting a party at her parents' house in Upper NW. It's actually a fundraiser for her non-profit, the St. Bernard Project, that she and her boyfriend started to help New Orleans victims re-build their homes.


Here are my supremely philanthropic friends, Liz & Zack.

4. And now, moving on to totally non-philanthropic issues... allow me to recount my recent foray into Mexico with my mother...

We left mid-morning on Sunday, heading SW on Ajo Way out of Tucson. We nearly baked on the four-hour drive out there, passing through mile upon mile of nothing but saguaro cacti, scrub brush, and sand. Although we drove through the Arizona "towns" of Sells, Why, and Lukeville, each of them consisted of nothing more than a gas station where one could purchase fuel, drinks, and Mexican car insurance (which I certainly did buy)...

Here was a view out my window right near the border of Mexico...

I kept trying to watch for coyote smugglers leading little clusters of illegal immigrants through the desert landscape, but I never spotted any, although I told my mom I thought I saw a few 'staging areas.'

And here is a Border Patrol checkpoint we had to drive through...

We were questioned by a stumpy little ex-football player (now Border Patrol guard) with lots of extra testosterone. Luckily, we passed muster. Can you even imagine having a job where you have to commute 40 miles to stand in 100 degree heat along a blistering roadside in the middle of nowhere? I'd prefer death.

Anyway, an hour over the border, we finally came to the sandy, dusty, and scrappy little town of Puerto Penasco (AKA Rocky Point), which is located on the Gulf of California...

Let me sum up the place for you in a nutshell:

a. It's RV Heaven

b. There's not a lot of pavement in this little town... it's mostly sand roads

c. Every U.S. state has rednecks, and they all love the beach. Arizona rednecks like Rocky Point.

d. Rednecks love four-wheeling, which is one of the main activities around town.

e. Richer people are starting to invest in an area called "Sandy Beach" near to where our hotel was situated, but it's still in the somewhat early development stages. Give it five years to become nicer.

f. Sonora has a little ways still to go in developing its tourism industry... (see below)

Here is our hotel, the Laos Mar, which was located on Playa Bonita, near Sandy Beach...

The pool was really very nice... and our room was very clean.

And here is the palapa hut where they served breakfast...

It was also very nice.

But then, when I was walking up to our room after breakfast, I spotted this in the central foyer...

That would be a black sock next to the plant, and an electrical socket with the front plug and wires totally pulled out of the wall. I don't even want to know what happened here, but this scene remained unchanged for the full two days we were there. Perhaps a memorial to an electrician lost on the job?

The big problem was that the beach in front of the hotel was pretty dirty with garbage washed up onto the sand. It resembled a less grotesque version of the below photo:


Really, it was not, I repeat... it was NOT this bad (this is a picture I pulled off the internet and is not of the beach where we were located), but it was very noticeably garbage-y. Lots of broken glass, plastic bags, and food remnants that made one not really want to dip in to the water for a swim, even in sizzling temperatures. It also didn't make for particularly pleasant beach sitting either, although we made do after clearing out a little spot.

The really bad part came on Monday morning, when we headed out onto the hotel beach in the morning after breakfast, only to come upon the corpse of some bloated stinking creature that had washed up with high tide. I suggested to my mother that perhaps it was Natalie Holloway.

Needless to say, we got in the car and drove a mile down the beach to a nicer, non-smelly spot near an RV camp. The beach and water was enough cleaner that we actually did take a mini-swim.

Lest I have been too negative (as I am sometimes apt to be), I will say that we had a very nice dinner at the hotel next to ours on Sunday night, where they had great seafood and live music with a balcony overlooking the water at enough of a distance (and in the dark) that one could not decipher the Wal-Mart bags floating around in the tide. We enjoyed that a lot... and truly had a delicious dinner with excellent service and to-die-for Mexican fried ice cream while reveling in the crisp sea breeze. As a sidenote, I also enjoyed watching NASCAR dads cavorting around on the dance floor doing the "white man's shuffle" to the Casiotone keyboard of the band.

We did a little shopping in town (and had a tasty lunch of chimichangas and fajitas) before returning to the U.S. on Monday.

I wanted to share a sample of the t-shirts available for sale in Puerto Penasco (just like the Hamptons!)...

Option One:


Option Two:


Option Three:

I like the artist's representation of pubic hairs on this one...

And finally, Option Four:


I want you all to know that a NASCAR dad with two teenage daughters (or at least, we thought they were his daughters) wore this last t-shirt option to breakfast at the hotel on Monday morning. My mom and I were pretty impressed with his candor, not to mention his clearly announced large package hidden in his jean shorts. However, I was even more impressed that one of his teen girls was wearing a Hustler magazine t-shirt. It made for quite the dynamic and polished duo.

Viva Puerto Penasco! Or should it be Puerto Penisco?

I have to go to bed now... I have a big day ahead of me. I'll be back in a day or two... KVB